FOURTH AND 40 BUCKS
Continue to Push
Editor’s
Note: Some people perform their best under pressure.
When the last day of deer season and your last opportunity
to hunt a trophy buck arrives, you must have the same
dedication, poise and firm belief in your strategy as
a star football player does in fourth quarter to bag
your buck of a lifetime.
Dick Kirby of Orchard Park, New York, the creator of
Quaker Boy Game Calls, buddy hunts on the last day of
deer season when he must produce a trophy buck. “One
year in Ohio during the closing days of deer season,
eight friends and I put on man-drives on one farm we’d
hunted,” Kirby recalls.
“At the end of the season when you have nothing
to lose by spooking a big buck, man-drives often will
help you bag that end-of-the-season monster-sized buck.”
Kirby’s strategy, however, differs from most man-drive
tactics I’ve studied. Kirby wants to know where
the buck beds and where the buck will go when the hunters
drive the buck out of the thick cover.
”Most of the time if you unsuccessfully drive
a bedding area, you may not get an opportunity to see
that deer again that day,” Kirby explains. “But
we plan our drive by determining where a buck will go
after we drive a patch of thick cover. We set up each
drive to force the buck to move into the next patch
of thick cover we intend to drive, if either a driver
or one of the standers doesn’t take the buck.
By moving from bedding area to bedding area, even if
we don’t bag the buck holding in the bedding region
on the first drive, probably we will get another shot
at that same deer later.” In Ohio that year at
the end of the season, by lunch on the first day, none
of the man drives that Kirby and his team had put on
had yielded a big buck. Then one of the hunters suggested
they make the last
drive of the morning through a very dense patch of cover
next to the farmer’s house. Even if they didn’t
bag a buck, the hunters would be close to the dinner
table after the completion of the drive.
”We always change drivers and standers after
each drive to give every hunter a chance to bag a buck,”
Kirby explains. “On this particular drive, I stood
at the end of thick cover that emptied into a field.
We only had conducted the drive for about 15 minutes
when I heard a shot. One of the standers shouted, ‘I
got him.’ As the drivers continued to come toward
me, I heard one of the drivers say he thought he heard
a buck get up. In only a few seconds, I spotted one
of the biggest bucks I’d ever seen break from
the thick cover and run across the field where I had
taken a stand.
Using my 12-gauge 3-inch magnum shotgun with a scope,
I aimed for the back of the deer’s neck as he
ran away from me. I squeezed the trigger, and the buck
went down. The buck’s rack would have scored 140
to 150 points on the Boone and Crockett scale and field
dressed at 175 pounds. The other buck bagged on this
drive would have scored between 100 and 110 points on
the B & C scale.” Using this drive tactic,
Kirby and his team of hunters made little pushes moving
bucks from one bedding area to another until they finally
found the thick-cover hideout where the big bucks held.
At the end of the season when you have nothing to lose
by invading a bedding area, little pushes in thick cover
will yield monster bucks that have eluded you all season
long. When you’re in the fourth quarter, and you
have 40 yards to go for a touchdown in the final seconds
of the game, pull out all the stops. Go for the touchdown,
whether you play football or hunt trophy bucks.
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