Hard Work Pays Off

We have put in a summer of hard work and as you can see above, it is paying off!  We went back to our northern MN property to check on our trail cameras, hang our last two stands and cut our trails one more time.  Even though we have been working on a strict budget, with no large machinery or equipment, the payoff is huge!  Our trail cams produced an abundance of eye candy, including two nice bucks.  Both of the bucks were found on our Evolved Harvest No Till Easy Plot food plots.

The first one is probably a 2 year old 8 pointer that I've named Crabby.  He is not a shooter if you are hunting for mature large bucks, but he may end up a shooter for us.  The last few years we have not had a lot of luck waiting for larger bucks and have only taken does.  The guys are itching to shoot something with some bone sticking out of its head.  Here are a few pictures of Crabby:

We also have a nice 8 pointer that is definitely a shooter for us named Booker T.  He is a large bodied deer that seems to love the camera.  We have plenty of pictures of him during the day and night at this stand.  He came past quite a few times over the time we had the cam out.  Here is our main attraction for this summer so far:

One thing we have seen consistently is the presence of does on this property.  We have some that are distinguishable and quite a few more that are present all the time.  One of the groups that was at our camera almost every day, was 2 Baby Momma and her fawns:

We also have 1Baby Momma who has appeared on our other cam as well:

Last but not least, we have Rosie and Ellen who appear a ton of times and always together:

All of these pictures are from the one camera over looking Eric's stand and the first food plot we planted.  Needless to say, he is extremely excited to get out and hunt these deer.  We also put a camera out over our second food plot to start patterning the deer on the other side of the property.  We didn't get anything as nice as Crabby or BookerT, but we did get a full compliment of does yet again, and a couple of younger bucks that will easily be passed up this year.  First off we have the Broken Y buck:

This was the only picture of him for sure.  When we put out this cam it was for scouting purposes, not for great picture taking.  It is facing into the sun, but we wanted to see what time of day deer were coming out this trail and through this area.  A lot of our pictures ended up getting washed out by the sun because of this.  Another young buck we got a couple of pictures of is a small just starting to get a Y called the Rookie:

Finally we had just one pic of this guy that may be the broken Y buck, but I cant tell based on the angle.  

We have quite a few does again on this camera including a single fawn and doe that might be 1Baby Momma.  This camera was only about 20 acres away from the one by Eric's stand, so I expected more crossover.  Here is what could possibly be 1Baby Momma and her fawn:

Pretty sure Rosie and Ellen make an appearance over here based on the multiple pics I have of these two:

Overall I am extremely happy with the work we have done over the course of this summer.  As you can see it is panning out and it should make for an exciting year.  If I get time I am going to talk about our strategy for hunting these bucks in the coming week.