36B Son's first buck

[catclaw]

Excellent 

[Rudebob]

Very nice deer.  He should be very proud.  Congratulations!

[Ingo]

Thank you everyone. As pretty as he was he tastes even better! 

[AZbowhntr]

Awesome! Congrats to you and your son.  Would love to hear the story.

[Viper]

Congrats! Hunting with kids is fun and very rewarding. Good job! I'll be heading down to 36b tomorrow for the after Thanksgiving hunt. The reports are not very encouraging. Sure beats working though. 

[Ingo]

1 hour ago, Viper said:

Congrats! Hunting with kids is fun and very rewarding. Good job! I'll be heading down to 36b tomorrow for the after Thanksgiving hunt. The reports are not very encouraging. Sure beats working though. 

It was shocking not to see a bunch of animals, for us. I literally didn't see a single doe. I scouted all day on Thursday before the hunt opened and Friday we hunted 2/3 of the day before we found the buck my son shot and another (likely bigger) buck and that's all the deer we saw. We were hunting near Pena Blanca/Rio Rico. I will say, the bucks were certainly not up high where I expected them to be. 

[Ingo]

4 hours ago, AZbowhntr said:

Awesome! Congrats to you and your son.  Would love to hear the story.

This was our first time hunting 36B but we had decent intel as we have friends in Rio Rico/Nogales and talked to a bunch of guys who were successful from elsewhere. I scouted all day Thursday before the hunt and found the areas I wanted to focus on. My son was pretty discouraged after not seeing anything Thursday and all of Friday until we found his buck in late afternoon. There were two bucks and they may have just briefly hit water and were walking back to bed down. My dad caught them up and then lost them but I found the one my son shot bedded and then my dad found the other. According to my dad the buck we didn't shoot was bigger. He was watching from about 700 yards away. My son and I snuck into 300 yards and he anchored the buck with the first shot but had to finish it off. I have him shooting my push-feed Winchester M70 in 7mag with 150gr Sierra Gamechangers at around 3100fps. It's a nice, light recoil load and they actually performed excellent and both exited. This buck was just a tough customer and still tried to crawl away after taking that second bullet through both lungs. The fat on him was like nothing I've ever seen and we had to shave off an inch just to pull the backstraps. Definitely eating good and living the relaxed life in a hidey-hole. 

I really love the area and have been waiting for an opportunity to hunt there. Hopefully many more hunts down there in the future. 

[My Rights As An American]

Great job, we saw over 80 does in 2.5 days before we saw a single spike buck on the last morning. Could not believe how many does we were seeing without seeing any bucks. Statistically speaking, should have seen way more bucks than we did! Also 36b.