Seriously - I've been out shed hunting 3 times, total, before yesterday. I feel like I've been damned by mother nature -every stinkin' day that I get to get out there, it snows. Shed hunting in the snow isn't so great around here . . . especially considering the "caliber" of sheds that I find. LOL They can be totally buried by a light dusting of snow. Maybe even a heavy frost. [&o]

So yesterday, like every other day off, it snowed. However, to my surprise, the snow didn't come in until around 2:00, so I got in 4 hours of unexpected shed hunting in the a.m.

It may have been the best shedhunting day of all time, cool dreary, wet - just hideous... I really felt confident that if there was a decent 4x shed or better laying around, I'd pick it up. I was tossing my practice antler around, and it was glowing like a beacon. Money.

So, I slogged around the mud mess all morning with mypain-in-the-ass ankle braced up tight - nothing.

Finally, at 10:00... I catch a piece of bone at the edge of a cut soybean field...

Bam! Spiker. First shed of '08. It's been laying out here fora fullyear - badly weathered and sliced up by the picker and the planter.




So, I pick it up and kinda reflect for a minute... Mixed feelings... Happy that I found something, but here again, it's just another dink. Same story. All the time. Dink after Dink after Dink.

Which brings me to the ultimate question: Why bother?

PA (at least the areas that I hunt in SW PA) has gotta have some of the worstwhitetail age structure in North America. Seriously. Everything dies here. The orange army shoots first, asks questions later. That's just how it goes.

But every spring, I invariably lace up the boots and take to the hills, knowing that it will take a small miracle to luck into a 2.5 year old-or-bettershed.

Seriously, why would any halfway-sane individual get up with the chickens just to get out and trudge around old bean and cornfields and stare at the ground until your eyes go buggy? Because you learn. You learn about your deer herd. You see how many deer are making it through... You see the caliber of bucks that you're working with. You temper your expectations accordingly.

Look at this. 3 years, maybe 12-15sheds. This is most of them. I have a few more laying in the garage, not pictured... All spikes and forks. The biggest one (a forkie)tapes out to about 35". A monster. LOL



So look at that... Is it realistic for me to go out there and camp out in my stand, waiting fora four-and-a-half year old whitetail? LMAO Sher.

Hell, just seeing a decent two-and-a-half year old around here in October is a major chore. Granted, the rules change and activity spikes in November. Either way, there are people in Pennsylvania who hunt their entire lives and never take a deer who's blew out his second birthday candle. A decenttwo year old goes straight to the taxidermist for the Average Joe.

I guess that's how you do it, not here, but everywhere... You scout. You glass. You pick sheds. You document your encounters. You know what makes a "good" deer for your area, and you temper your expectations accordingly.

That's why you bother. Not because you like finding half-rotten spikes in a mud wallow of a beanfield. You bother because you need to know. You need to know what survived the holocaust. You need to know what expectations are realistic. That's it. That's why I bother.