Opening Day 2011

Here is a video about some of what I've been up to lately. It's 16 minutes long so put it in full screen mode and grab a coke and some popcorn.

Opening Day 2011 Video from Dan Felix

It was one of the best opening mornings I've ever had. Two days later while sneaking into my stand I ran right into the bigger buck at only 15 yards away. He and I had a short staring contest before he blew his nose at me and took off. I was worried that I scared him out of the county, but I checked my trail camera yesterday and found him again. He's a small buck, but I take what I can get on public land, and he's the biggest I've found.

And he wasn't alone in the woods that night:

An Update

Yeah it's been awhile since I've posted. Trying to complete a master's degree and a PhD in four and a half years hasn't left me a lot of free time. But just because I've felt too busy to post on the ol' blog doesn't mean I've felt too busy to get out and play. Here are a few quick pics of some happenings from the last few months.

My buddy and I found this deer in December on some private land the last day of muzzleloader season. He is a 10-point (five points on each side), and scores 161 B&C. I think the temperature was in the single digits that day. It was awesome but I'm still waiting to get a big guy like this with my bow.

In January I bought a hunting dog.

A ten week old Brittany from a breeder in northern Nebraska. Her official name is something like "NE Cornhusker's Lil' Miss Macilou" but we just call her Maci. Here she is on the long ride to her new home:

Puppies sure have a lot of energy, and she always wants all the attention.

She has a really instinctive point. Hopefully I'll be able to train her well enough that she'll be able to match up to her potential. I think she and I are going to shoot a lot of birds in the coming years.

Even after I've moved away from Nebraska I'm planning on bringing Maci back each year to point me a few ringnecks.

I also hunted ducks in Utah over Christmas break again. I only shot one this time but I had a lot of fun, which is the reason I go.

And finally, for those who care, here's 80ish seconds of footage of some good bucks I saw in 2010 but never got close enough for a shot.

Images

I grew up captivated by images in Field and Stream, Outdoor Life, Cabela's catalogs and a hundred other publications that are made specifically for the outdoors-lover like me.

Paintings and pictures like these blended together into one mental image of an ideal: Cold loaded steel in hand, well-trained dogs working fields full of pheasants flushing out of the early morning frost-covered grass. Followed, of course, by an afternoon gathering of family and friends with food, football, sore legs and stories of the morning's hunt. I imagined myself like these lucky hunters:

As a young hunting teenager growing up in a non-hunting family, I had somehow been lucky enough to shoot a pheasant or two here or there after school, whether at nearby railroad tracks or a local irrigation canal. Those times were much enjoyed, but I had yet to go on a real pheasant hunt, and I knew that as soon as I had that chance I would take it. The images I had collected in my head had already made me nostalgic for hunts yet to be had, dogs yet to be trained, trips yet to be taken, and future memories yet to be made.

Sadly, as I grew, I discovered that endless fields of flushing birds existed only in my mind. For a guy like me in the state where I lived, the best pheasant hunting I was going to get was at one of the places we called pheasant farms...

...places where pheasants were raised like chickens, but rather than slaughtered, packaged, and sent to the grocery store, you could pay to have the owner release a few into his fields the morning before your hunt. Whatever birds you couldn't shoot or couldn't find eventually fell prey to foxes, coyotes, cars, or the cold of winter.

Pheasant hunting clubs and ranches exist because without them pheasants wouldn't, at least not where I grew up. The truth of it is there just wasn't enough habitat to support a healthy, huntable, publicly accessible population of birds. Reality set in, and somehow the thought of paying for pen-raised birds to be planted in front of me destroyed the idealistic images from my youth.

However, this Fall I found something worth daydreaming about, and now I can't stop doing just that. Nebraska has no shortage of wild pheasants, and two months ago I was invited by some friends to come experience Nebraska's best, first-hand.

I used to think that publicly accessible fields like this didn't exist...

...but they do in Nebraska, and inside them live hundreds of pheasants as wild as can be.

We hunted for four days, and only saw the sun once. The rest of the time we were hunting in the remains of ice storms and frozen fog

On the last morning I stopped to fill up with gas and realized how cold it actually was:

All the dogs' noses were bloody from the ice and cold, as demonstrated by Rudy:

Without the dogs there would have been no birds. They hunted their hearts out, even little Rudy who really is more of a pet than a hunting dog. A time or two he flushed a hen all by himself, but mostly he couldn't even keep up with me in the thick grass, yet alone the other dogs. He's just too small. A bird would flush, guns would go off, and by the time he'd get to where the bird fell one of the other dogs already had it back to its owner. He struggles to fit birds that big in his mouth anyway, even if he could get to them first, but he never quit trying. As much as I love him I'm excited to get a bigger dog like my buddy's Springer Spaniel Lily:

Or another friend's four-year-old female Brittany, complete with safety vest:

That little gal put up three roosters for me one morning a few weeks ago and I missed all three. It was in the middle of a 25 mph blizzard, but I admit, I sucked it up.

I'm not saying that hunting clubs and ranches don't have their place. They do, and I plan on hunting them in the future, especially when I have kids or can't make it to places like these. I'm just saying that I'll always prefer wild birds in wild places with dogs that wont quit till you force them to. It's an ideal that lives in my head pieced together by a thousand images.

Here's one of those images that I'm glad to have stuck in my mind:

Sweet onion catalina pheasant breast glazed with cranberry honey sauce, wild rice, steamed vegetables, toasted focaccia parmesan bread, and sparkling pink catawba grape juice to wash it down.

Latest Pics From My October Woods

A couple of weeks ago I found another scrape near a corn field where the deer gather, so I put up a trail cam.

In my last post I concluded that there weren't any bigger bucks around because neither me nor my trail camera had spotted any all Summer and Fall. Well it turns out I was wrong. There are bigger bucks hanging out in the woods where I hunt.

Now that the rut is getting closer the bigger bucks are coming out of hiding, and as a result I've changed my mind about shooting the first little buck that comes near. They aren't monster bucks, but they're plenty good enough for first-timer Dan.

I have dozens of pictures of little bucks like these:

Here's one that's interesting. I have no idea what's wrong with his chest. Some cancerous growth or something.

I could have flung an arrow at him a few mornings ago, but he's too young. Plus, I don't want whatever disease he's got.

I did shoot at this doe a couple of weeks ago. She has bright white eye spots, and has lighting fast reflexes. She ducked my arrow at thirty five yards, and my bow shoots at least 280 feet per second.

I suppose I might cave in and shoot a smaller buck if I don't get a chance at a bigger one, but I'm still holding out for a few more weeks...at least till my buddy Jake comes to visit/hunt during Thanksgiving break. The truth is I don't actually have that much time to hunt each week, so I may cave sooner than later.

And finally, here are a couple of non-deer pics that are kinda cool:

Whitetail Tales

I grew up in Utah hunting mule deer the way you're supposed to hunt mule deer, and I assumed, in my ignorance, that the way you hunt mule deer is the way you hunt all deer. Unlike the rest of the country, we don't have whitetail deer back home.


The idea of shooting a whitetail deer with my bow was something I always dreamed of...something exotic...and I hoped some day I'd have the chance to try it.

Well I do, now that I live in Nebraska, and I feel bad that I've let school and other obligations limit my time in the woods so severely. I'll only be here a couple more years, so I've recommitted myself to "use it while I got it"; and I gotta admit, hunting whitetails is almost more fun than hunting mule deer.

All summer I've had a trail camera up snapping pictures of the various deer that live on the land that I hunt, and have been reading magazines, talking to locals, and exploring, trying to figure out this whole world of whitetail hunting. Apparently whitetails often make territorial scrapes this time of year, which are just spots of ground they scrape up and pee on, usually under tree limbs which they also lick and rub to leave their scent on. This year I found one...

...so I put up a trail camera near it to discover its owner.


I think it's the same small buck I got pics of this summer that I posted about two posts ago. Here he is on video:

It's good because it means he is hanging around, but it's bad because usually only dominant bucks make and return to scrapes; which means he's probably the biggest buck in the area, and he's not big. I'm not surprised since the land I hunt is public. I'm sure if I don't shoot him before the general season next month some rifle hunter will, and I'm sure that's the reason why his daddy isn't still around to be the big buck on the block.

But what do I care? I'll be happy with a doe at this point, as long as she's a whitetail. Later in life when I have time, land, and experience then I can fuss about finding a big one. I'm just happy to be out hunting. I've set my tree stand over a frequently used trail that deer take between where they eat and where they sleep. I've had my trail camera in it recently, and even though it has offered proof that I'm not the only one in the woods...

...it has also given proof that the deer still walk under my stand at least every other morning:

Yesterday morning I was in my stand at first light and saw that little buck come through before it was light enough to shoot or video, but later when the sun came up I pulled out the video camera.

Just after I put it away a doe came in on the red line and stopped where it meets the yellow. I drew my bow and held aim on her, but thankfully I had no shot because her vitals were covered up by that small tree. I say thankfully because as she took the yellow path toward me I realized that she in fact was not a doe, but a very young buck with almost invisible, half-inch button antlers.

Though I legally could have shot him, and I have a tag for both a doe and a buck, I just couldn't bring myself to arrow a baby deer. Call me a softie. Don't get me wrong...I'm not trophy hunting and I'm not going to be picky when it comes to my first whitetail, but this time I hung the bow back up and watched him bed down under my tree.

I'm having so much fun and there's always next weekend.