The area I hunted this afternoon is fairly open. I am set up in a shelter belt that runs perpendicular to thick cover and bedding area. It is a major travel corridor to adjacent wheat fields. Been hunting this spot for 15 years plus. Travel route very predictable. But this guy had his own ideas. Left the safety of the shelter belt and veered off across open country for several hundred yards to go to a windmill for a drink. Never seen this from a mature or semi mature deer do this with a good 30 minutes of shooting light left. ( I am guessing this a 3 1/2 year old). My first two photos were taken about 75 yards away, and the grainy one at the windmill is probably 250 yards away. He drank his water and worked his way back to the shelter belt but never close to me. I think I would have taken a shot had the opportunity presented itself. Fun hunt just the same.
Cattails. We are in an area that only gets around 20 inches of rainfall per year, so not quite sure how they got there other than birds bringing them in, but that tank is a large livestock tank fed by a windmill and always has water it in it. We have few natural water sources that are reliable year round, so this is very beneficial for wildlife. From a livestock perspective, they should probably be cleaned out and the sediment removed from the bottom of the tank that allows them to root, but there are several other water tanks fed by submersible pumps that the livestock use.
If you also notice, that is a high fence at the water tank. That is currently planted in cotton in the other side. This particular farmer/rancher (this isn’t my place but a neighbor’s), high fenced his 300 acre irrigated crop field to keep deer out rather than using the fence to keep them them in. This place is overpopulated with deer so much, we can get to as many as 100 special Doe tags just for this one farm for overpopulation concerns. The problem for farmers is that even though he has fenced off several fields, that only further concentrates the deer on the the neighboring fields that aren’t fenced.
