Over my three decades of hunting I have had some truly close and cool encounters with whitetails. I've had deer walk right under my tripod, bucks trot right past me following a doe while I was standing in the open , young does come in while I was hand corning, and even had a yearling brush against me in a brush blind but this experience was a first for me.
I was topping off some of our feeders and had to refill our smallest feeder which is a 10 gallon hanger. It's a rather unassuming feeder in a corner of the property which attracts more deer that the area would suggest. So I pull up in my big noisy stinky diesel truck, set up the bright aluminum 7ft step ladder and dump a bag of corn in. I then do my standard OP and check the feeder time and do a test spin. While I'm buttoning the timer box back up I hear something coming and look up in shock as a 10pt come trotting in. Now I have seen this same buck earlier in the year and he was showing quite a bit more caution then than he is now.
So I'm standing on the 3rd rung of the step ladder with my hands still in the feeder's varmint cage with my truck a scant 20 yards away and this buck starts eating the perimeter corn. Naturally I freeze in place to see how close he will get. There is a light wind and it's causing the empty plastic corn sack at the ladders base to flutter so he's concentrating on it and stops at 3 feet. Well he doesn't like the corn sack so he circles me several times including just a few feet downwind and I figure the game is up. Nope, he resumes eating all the corn but what's close to the corn sack and then tends two nearby scrapes before moseying off. Total time was about 10 to 15 minutes and the feeder cam which is set at 5 min intervals got two pics. Unfortunately they weren't when he was right by me but about 6-7 feet away.
I was topping off some of our feeders and had to refill our smallest feeder which is a 10 gallon hanger. It's a rather unassuming feeder in a corner of the property which attracts more deer that the area would suggest. So I pull up in my big noisy stinky diesel truck, set up the bright aluminum 7ft step ladder and dump a bag of corn in. I then do my standard OP and check the feeder time and do a test spin. While I'm buttoning the timer box back up I hear something coming and look up in shock as a 10pt come trotting in. Now I have seen this same buck earlier in the year and he was showing quite a bit more caution then than he is now.
So I'm standing on the 3rd rung of the step ladder with my hands still in the feeder's varmint cage with my truck a scant 20 yards away and this buck starts eating the perimeter corn. Naturally I freeze in place to see how close he will get. There is a light wind and it's causing the empty plastic corn sack at the ladders base to flutter so he's concentrating on it and stops at 3 feet. Well he doesn't like the corn sack so he circles me several times including just a few feet downwind and I figure the game is up. Nope, he resumes eating all the corn but what's close to the corn sack and then tends two nearby scrapes before moseying off. Total time was about 10 to 15 minutes and the feeder cam which is set at 5 min intervals got two pics. Unfortunately they weren't when he was right by me but about 6-7 feet away.
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