For many years my family celebrated my birthday the day after the deer season ended; this year they did it the day before, and insisted I attend. No matter, I’d get up early enough the next day to be out West before legal shooting light the last day, Nov. 30.
But when I woke at 5 a.m., a blizzard was howling and the Internet weather sites were all red alerts, including roads, so I spent the morning of the last day sleeping in. Just before I dozed off I remember that best wishes are in order for the 90th birthday of Alberta’s conservation guru, Elmer Kure.
Had I been at the Stump Ranch cabin as usual, I’d probably have slept in, too, then puttered around and ventured out if and when the storm broke to see if the deer were out of their beds.
But the storm kept on and the winds blew the snow around for several days, so I stayed home, savouring the email reports coming in on the 2011 Alberta deer season. In my favourite haunts there were far fewer deer than I can recall in many years, probably because of a very hard winter.
Mule deer were especially scarce, and particularly bucks of any heft, and I have to believe that the rampant drilling activity has driven them to remote havens of peace and quiet. If I have to go without a mule deer tag, this was a good year for it.
Up the creek a few miles, the annual deer camp did well, all hands taking white tails, three bucks and one doe and reporting narrow escapes by the very odd and so-so mule deer buck. British Columbian George Landry took what appears from the pictures to be a very nice 10-point white tail buck with very long brow tines. I’ll be able to get the steel tape on those antlers if and when we Stump Ranchers along the creek are able to get in to our cabins and sheds.
The group I call the University of Calgary Light Infantry that used to hunt the same huge public land tract of boreal forest-aspen parkland I still love, has moved on, south and west, near Caroline. They report nothing to show for a week of hard hunting, and mention two wolf packs howling up the area and owly grazing leaseholders acting as if our land belonged only to them.
Hard times and empty freezers booming like bass drums are consistently being reported by hunters from around Edmonton and north. Wolves are being blamed for the scarcity of deer in these areas, and some hunters are getting more of the big carnivores than they are of anything they can use to fill those freezers and eat.
Down in the deep south, good friend Don Hayden, who turned down easy shots at four white tail bucks while hunting with me early in November, finally got hungry and took a doe on his own land down there.
Less south, but far out east, there is a hard-working rancher friend who loves to serve as avocational outfitter on his own land for the friends who hunt there on the Wednesday to Saturday deer seasons in November. He and his hunters saw more deer this season than in a number of years, but says they took 25 or 26, six or seven down from seasons past. He is particularly happy that a teenager took a , 160-165 mule buck his first deer, and that a young lady took her first Alberta deer, a small white tail buck.
As I review the reports, it was obviously a back door season. Score for within 500 yards of stump ranchers’ back doors: one each, very good white tailed and mule deer bucks and two bull elk.
Finally, on a sunny Dec. 5 morning, I head West to see what is going on. In most of the usual places, not much has been moving, including the County snow plows. Fortunately, on one of my favourite trails, there’s a big blow down aspen just inside the gate, thus saving me from getting blocked farther in and having to back a quarter mile out.
Second growth alfalfa was poor this fall. All season I watched the best stand of frozen alfalfa I knew of on a ridge-top field just across the road from my favourite tract of forested public land. Absolutely nothing while the season lasted.
But the first burst of hard winter led to the field’s discovery by every deer in those woods. Countless trails in and out were heavy and the field was tracked like a feedlot. On this sunny noon, only a mule deer doe and her fawn were still out there. On nearby Strubel Lake the Monday ice fishermen are out.
On a lesser alfalfa field on the drive home, this year’s best mule deer buck — a puny fork horn — was tending three does. The species is in trouble . . .
Bob Scammell is an award-winning outdoors writer living in Red Deer.