It looks like no more rain will fall after 4 PM, and this will be the first outi…
It looks like no more rain will fall after 4 PM, and this will be the first occasion at this promising new spot.
This morning, still in pouring rain, I went out to the feeder once more to find a suitable tree and placement for the remotely controlled glow-light illumination of the feeder that can be operated from the stand.
Besides that, for now I removed the “push-type feeder container,” because I don’t want anything new in the area to raise the suspicion of the game arriving here.
I’m paying particular attention to keeping everything as natural as possible at this stage.
During hunts, at the feeder I “serve” extra treats, as a kind of “last supper”:
– “magic potion,” a good bucketful of fermented corn.
Its “aroma,” with a good wind, can be smelled from a hundred meters away, and
it would be nothing short of a miracle if a pig could remain indifferent to it.
– A large bucket of acorns,
– besides the corn dispensed by the automatic feeder, another half a bucket of corn,
– as well as the aforementioned smaller bucket of whole walnuts.
If anything, this “menu” is sure to make whoever wanders by want to stay…
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Well, meteorology’s “science,” with its massive computing-power server farms and its many weather models, failed miserably this evening.
At 4 PM all the weather stations in the area
( GFS – 22km, ECMWF – 9km, METEOBLUE, ICON02 – 2.2km, ALADIN – 2.3km, )
unanimously showed no precipitation whatsoever.
Then at 8 PM the sky opened up.
Only METEOBLUE had refined its earlier dry, slightly cloudy forecast into an uncertain but clear chance of rain lasting until 3 AM.
So, a quick pack-up and a panicked escape, because if the dirt track leading out of the area – the kind of meadow soil typical of lowland forests around here (formed under the influence of a high water table, medium humus content, seasonally waterlogged soil) – got any wetter, getting stuck in the mud was a real risk.
Luckily, on the slippery, muddy stretches, with a bit of momentum and sliding around, I made it out of the area.
Lacking a photo of the harvest, I’ll have to make do with a few pictures taken from the stand and of the feeder.
Day 2.
In the morning I had a meeting with old archery friends, then as soon as I could, I rushed back to the hunting ground, but this time I headed first to the stand set up at the big green wallow.
It was around 1 PM, so I was already a bit late.
I’d barely climbed up to the stand, backpack on, bow in hand, when I saw a young stag arrive at the water and stop to watch.
We stared at each other for a while, then I decided to shoo it off, because I couldn’t stay like that…
After wrapping a sock around a branch stub to make a makeshift bow hanger, and hanging up my backpack, I waited patiently.
In a modest 3 hours, I saw deer arriving from 3 different directions.
Then one of them splashed around a bit and moved on.
Meanwhile I pulled in the leafy branches providing cover in front of the stand and tied them together, to get the best possible concealment from which I could rise up and shoot toward the wallow.
I posted a few pictures of this as illustration.
At 4 PM I relocated to the stand by the feeder.
Where around 5 PM, a sow came in (locally called “göbe”), but it seemed to catch a scent, because it grumbled and moved on.
