Deer hunting BS thread

Congrats!!!

 

Congratulations on your first deer.

 

IDK.... the crossbow buck, congratulations on harvesting a great deer. The gun deer, I'm not sure I could take much pride in that, even if I put in an above expected effort to find that deer. A buck like that definitely deserves to be mounted, but to tell people you harvested that deer is a little misleading. In Indiana I'm not even sure how you would check in that deer as I think it needs to be done within 24 hours of the kill. As far as a roadkill type tag, I'm not sure how that would go either. I think it would depend on the CO you got. Heck given some of them I've run into here I could see them handing you a ticket for lack of effort to retrieve it.

 

Damn he's got some genetics going on around there.

 

In Ohio I doubt you would get to keep the one you found either.

 

I don’t follow.. he searched for the deer but due to a lack of a blood trail (indicating the deer might still be alive) and a tracking dog not being available, I’d say he did what he could in that moment. Sometimes there’s only so far you can go before you run out of opportunities to keep searching. I know that one of my land neighbors ain’t gonna give me free reign to grid his land for much more than a couple hours before he tells me to kick rocks so I don’t screw up his own deer hunting

it’s hunting, this shit happens. I’ve lost several deer that I knew were definitely dead but I couldn’t locate them despite my best efforts.

 

Are y’all’s laws that much different? Who would stop you from keeping it? What events would lead to game wardens knowing what you killed/found/etc

 

If mounted, a taxidermist would need a legal tag on it.

 

Ohhhhh duh. Sorry, it’s been a long day.

I imagine that salvaging the cape for taxidermy would be off the table after several days of it sitting somewhere decomposing.

 

We can only kill 1 buck a year in Ohio. If you wounded one and found it dead and wanted to keep the rack you would need to use your only buck tag to do so. Even if the meat was no good. Other wise they keep the rack.

 

It can be a touchy subject. Many places only have one tag. If you draw blood, you punch the tag regardless of finding it or not. Other places deer are like vermin and no one cares.

I’ve found two deer others shot that honestly weren’t that hard to find, so I’m biased toward them telling me how hard they looked. It can be tough though as I have spent days looking for one I know I hit.

 

It looks like they're in Illinois so that is a two buck state. It'd be interesting to hear the back story because that rack definitely has a tag on it. Like I said in Indiana a kill has to be registered within 24 hours. Obviously from the condition of that head it had been considerably more than 24 hours. I'm not looking to cast aspirations on the hunter in question, just not sure how that played out legally.

 

He made every effort possible to recover the gun buck, wouldn’t you, after all it is a 200 inch buck. Like me, after 8-10 days of looking and monitoring cameras he assumed that someone else found the deer or that it possibly survived. Illinois allows you to kill 2 bucks so even though he killed one with a crossbow before he found the gun buck he contacted the game warden and was allowed to tag and keep it. Everything he did was 100% legal and he has every right to be proud as hell.

 

What's a more interesting question is what would happen if you had killed another buck and tagged it in the meantime, and then found this one. Would they provide you with a roadkill type tag or give you any means with which you could keep the head, or just confiscate it for the state. Like I said, given my experience I really think it would depend on the CO you got.

 

Most of the taxidermist’s around here will buy buck capes from mature bucks that guys don’t want to get mounted.

 

The CO’S around here are pretty understanding, unless you have a reputation for being one of those shady hunters. In the scenario you mentioned, the CO would probably have given him a salvage tag. We find a lot of dead bucks when we shed hunt and if we find one we want to keep all we have to do is take a picture of it before we move it and then get salvage tags for them.

 

More than likely what I have seen happen is they would confiscated the head. If it's a big deer usually you don't get to keep it.

 

I wonder, does Illinois allow the use of drones with infrared on them? That might have been another option.

 

They do not.