If you want to see more wildlife on your hunting property
forget the ATV or MULE. What you really
need is a golf cart. Slow and quiet
beats fast and loud if you want to fit into the surroundings and not announce
your approach. We recently invested in a
vintage golf cart that rolls along at a slow but steady pace and is so quiet
that we can’t even hear ourselves coming.
We got it to help get around the property while nursing a healing knee
but were surprised at an unexpected result.
We actually started seeing wildlife again!
When we first bought our property we often would get glances
of wildlife, but after a few years we noticed that we hardly ever jumped a deer
or spotted a rabbit or turkey, even though the cameras around the property
proved that the wildlife was still around.
The first day that we used the cart to get close to a favorite spot for
hunting turkeys, we saw a deer browsing in an open field. It looked up at us and just stared, not sure about
this odd creature. We stopped, it
stopped, and for a few minutes we enjoyed a beautiful sight of a deer at
sunrise enjoying fresh greens. Later that morning we called in a turkey, and,
although it was a hen, it was a thrilling duet of fake and real turkey
chatter. Later we even called in a
turkey hunter, whose face I am sure was very red beneath his camouflage mask.
But the most amazing experience happened later that same
morning when we moved, stealthily, in our cart along a fire trail and then
slowly started walking toward a new hunting spot. We spotted two deer in the open field next to
us, they spotted us, we froze, they froze, and then they slowly walked toward
us to check us out. To them we must have
seemed like ghosts, just materializing out of thin air. The encounter didn’t last long, but it will
last in my memory for a long time.
No comments:
Post a Comment