I guess I'm on Team 4 now.
Last weekend I was able to get out and do some hunting on my property here in Texas. A cold front was coming in and I thought I would get out there and stick it out and see if there was some movement during the day.
It is amazing the difference between sitting in a blind all day and being out hiking and moving and looking and being active all day like you would on a normal hunt out west. The temperature was in the mid to upper 20's with a 20 - 30 mph wind and I about froze my tail off sitting in the blind. I had 6 layers of clothes on my upper body and 3 layers on my lower body, 2 pairs of wool socks and 3 pairs of gloves, a hat and a hood. In the same temperatures if I had been active I would have been fine with 1 layer on my lower body and 2 layers maybe 3 on my upper body. Or maybe I'm just a pansy.
Anyway, it ended up being unproductive. I spent one evening and 2 full days in the blind, had one good shot opportunity at a pretty nice 8 point that I passed on.
Of course about 30 minutes after I passed on him and he wandered over onto one of the neighboring properties I heard a shot from the direction he was headed and about the time he would have got there based on the way he was traveling. Not positive, but more than likely the neighbor didn't end up passing on this deer.
Other than that I could have shot one doe that I also passed on and that was about it. I saw a few other bucks that didn't really offer any shot opportunities, but they weren't my target bucks. I'm really trying to hold out for one of the 10 point bucks that I have trail camera pictures of. That's what I did last year though and ended up not shooting anything.
Here's a landscape picture from my hunting blind. The 8 point that I passed on was in the food plot / shooting lane that you can see in the middle of the picture. You can see my place is still recovering from the fire a couple years ago. The brush is getting thick again, just lots of burned up tree tops still showing.
Saw a few coyotes and will try to make a dent in their population next spring, I would have shot any if they came in close enough, I made a few jackrabbit distress calls but didn't get any to come to the call.
I did shoot about a 60 pound pig one morning. I didn't ever get around to taking any pictures of it though. I ended up giving it to my neighbor who happened to be out there hunting. I thought I would shoot several more, but with the cold weather it seemed that they all must have hunkered down. I'm getting a bunch of them on my trail cameras so I expect to shoot a few before the end of the year.
Of course checking my trail cameras over Thanksgiving I had this picture of my #1 target buck walking in broad daylight less than 100 yards from my blind 2 days after I was down there.
Hopefully we can get our schedules to line up better sometime in the near future!