Shoot for Reality
There are a lot of hard truths to life. Your kid isn’t as cute as you think, your Sean Connery impression is horrible, and you probably won’t kill the next world record buck. I know it’s hard to hear but the main point here as far as deer go is, you can’t kill what isn’t there. It’s so simple yet so many hunters ignore the simple fact that some properties do not and may not ever contain big record book whitetail bucks. Coming to this realization and developing a realistic hit list can turn what you may have considered a disappointing season into a very rewarding one.
The first part of preparing your goals for the season is doing your homework in the preseason, which it’s a little late for now. There is still a little time to get it done during the early season but it’s definitely not optimal. Trail cameras and scouting and glassing fields will help you take inventory of the deer in your area. If you are after big bucks you need to find big bucks, not deer in general. Finding deer in most places is somewhat simple, but finding big bucks takes a lot more work. Finding good deer sign doesn’t mean you will have big bucks running around when the rut kicks in. This is where reality is your friend; there is always a chance that a monster will walk up out of no where, but having concrete goals based on reality will make your season that much more rewarding.
Now that you have an inventory, we need to define your trophy. With the recent commercialization of hunting over the last decade or so, a lot of us have a warped and incredibly unrealistic view of what we should be after in the woods. A trophy deer is a personal thing and can even be different for different properties. I know I have very different goals for different properties where each trophy represents a different challenge rather than a sum of inches of antler. Don’t get me wrong, now. "The bigger the better", but the goals that have been set for my properties are challenging but attainable. I learned this lesson when I started bow hunting and set one goal: Kill a deer, any deer, with a bow. I defined my trophy as simply any deer that was in range. My first bow kill was a very small 6 point buck. That was all I killed that season, but if I hadn’t prepared mentally and set that goal I probably would have been disappointed. However, by setting that goal and attaining it when that season ended, I of course wished I had made a few more kills, but overall I was very content with my season.