How I Hit the Shed Hunting Lottery
Every time I go shed hunting, I have the expectation of seeing a massive crown sticking out of the snow from 30 yards away and almost every time, I’m let down when that doesn’t happen. On a recent card pull, however, the stars aligned and my luck changed. I was walking around the edge of a small patch of trees within one of my food plots and when I came around the corner, BAM! I see big tines sticking out well above the snow and I knew it was one of the shooter bucks I had on trail cam all fall. This is where the story gets interesting. When I had set out that day to pull camera cards, I wanted to get a gauge for how many bucks were still holding antlers. I figured the biggest buck using the property was still holding, because I had a cellular trail cam picture of him just 20 hours prior to being out there.
When I see this massive hunk of bone in the field I’m thinking, “Who could this be from?!?”
Well as it turns out, it was from the biggest buck on the property, and I had found one of the freshest sheds I have ever encountered!
It was from the buck I call “Curly” and he is also the same buck I had at 9 yards back in late October. Check out a video of that encounter here. I waited until “Cabela”, my trusty shed dog, came over and I let her “find it” too. Here is the video of her bringing it to me.
After finding that first side I was on cloud nine, but I was hoping the other side would be nearby. I made a few quick circles, but didn’t have any luck, so I continued my trail camera pulling mission. I was walking along the edge of a field 250 yards away from the first side and for the second time in 30 minutes I see a glorious stack of tines sticking up from the snow. I knew right away on the second one which buck it was. I had hit the shed hunting lottery and matched him up. The only bummer was that when I pulled my phone out to take a picture, it had gotten so cold that it wouldn’t work.
After I got home and thawed out my phone, my amazing wife was able to get some great pictures of the set back together again.
Sometimes, it’s hard to grasp how massive antlers are in pictures, so just to give you an idea, the H3 measurement on both sides was over 5 inches. His G2s are 10 inches and beams are 22”, so with a conservative 17 inch spread, he would be close to 140 inches which is a dandy 8 point.
My strategy that day was really to hit the easy spots before we got dumped on with a major snowstorm and I got extremely lucky. I can’t go shed hunting all the time, so I try to time my trips when there has been a long duration between snow events to let the deer sign (and sheds) stack up. When you hit it just right, you can have just as good of luck as I did! If you happen to hit the lottery and find some glorious white gold, post the picture to our social media pages. Good luck out there everyone!
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