The Season that Wasn’t by Dr. Paul Bambara

It’s hard to call a season where I put 4 deer’s worth of venison in my freezer a failure, but somehow, looking back over this past fall, I don’t really feel successful. Let me start at the beginning and recap my 2011 deer season here in New York. Several factors contributed to the overall lack of success on large deer experienced across my small group of hunting partners. This is a group of about 10 that regularly put several deer over 170″ gross on the ground each and every year. None of us came close this year. The first factor was a total lack of mast crop this year. Not a single acorn fell in our county this year. The second was an outbreak of “blue Tongue” disease which wiped out a significant number of deer in May thru August. The third I will get to soon.

As the October 15 opener approached, no one really had an eye on a big deer. I had one 8 point buck in the 140 class in an industrial park I have sole access to and another 140 class 8 in spot that several of us hunt. We decided to cluster 3 of us on two side of a steep rock cliff that the later buck was crossing each day. As luck would have it, Dave put him down with a great shot that opening afternoon. Little did we know, he would wind up as our largest buck of the entire season, scoring a respectable 144, yet nowhere near the potential of our area.

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