- Details
- Category: Antelope
- Published: Monday, 22 September 2014 20:09
- Written by Greg
Old Enough
Being just 4 years old, my grandson was definitely old enough to enjoy and participate in our Wyoming hunt this past weekend. With only one day to hunt, we had a full schedule since we had doe antelope tags and we'd be trying for our limit of sage grouse as well.
Hunting these antelope proved to be harder than we had hoped. The fact that the antelope hunt for this area had started two weeks prior to our arrival found the antelope to be extremely skittish. The interesting fact was that we had more shot opportunities at buck antelope than we did at does.
One of the several bucks we saw Some of the rabbits we had for dinner
The excitement of this hunt was non-stop! If you've never had the opportunity to hunt antelope, you may not know that they are a highly visible animal. And this particular trait happened to provide us with several opportunities to try to put the sneak on these high plains speed goats.
My son Dallas was the first to connect with a perfect shot from his .243 at a relatively close 150 yards. Knowing that we now had meat for our freezer, we were quite excited. But that excitement paled in comparison to the eagerness of my grandson's desire to be the first to put his hands on the antelope!
Later we came upon a watering hole where we noticed sage grouse tracks in the mud near the water's edge, a sure sign that birds were in the vicinity. Since Dallas had now punched his antelope tag, he decided to stay behind to watch the water hole in hopes of catching some thirsty sage grouse coming to water, while the rest of us went in search of antelope elsewhere.
Boys finally got their hands on one A couple of mature sage grouse
As luck would have it I connected on an antelope a couple of hours later, so we quickly headed back to the water hole. Upon arrival I was feeling somewhat guilty for having been gone so long and for having had success bagging an animal, until I noticed Dallas nonchalantly sitting next to two big male sage grouse lying at his feet! Unbelievably, a flock of sage grouse had come in to water about an hour before our return and Dallas connected on some game of his own!
And to top it off, Dallas alertly watched the remaining sage grouse fly away and land after shooting his limit of birds, so we knew in which general area to go hunt. Twenty minutes later the beating wings of two dozen flushing sage grouse about made us jump out of our skin! Surprisingly we only managed to dump 3 birds from that flock, never to see another grouse before returning back to the truck. Our time was up, our day of hunting was over, but boy had we made the most of our memorable hunt!
Must have walked a mile or more in a big loop Limits of sage grouse