Long story ahead....anyway...
My daughter drew a youth rifle deer tag in southern Arizona this year. Having killed a good mule deer last fall, she decided she would try to get a Coues buck. I have bowhunted the area before and knew it held good bucks. I had several classic hill country bedding areas located and our focus was going to be on those specific spots. I was really excited to test this out on this hunt. Deer hunters here glass everywhere. I told my buddy(a diehard Coues Whitetail hunter) I was only going to focus on these certain features and hunt specific wind bedding for the hunt, he told me I was nuts and that I’d never see anything. I sat down with my daughter and hatched out the plans and looked over the maps together. She was excited. We hit the range multiple times before the hunt. I had her shooting 6” balloons at random distances out to 200 yards, all from actual hunting positions (off shooting sticks, a backpack, sitting, kneeling, and prone). The kid is deadly with a 308.
Fast forward to the night before the hunt. I drove out to the hunt area and glasses the closest spot we picked in hopes to see some deer. 30 minutes before dark, a forky gets up and feeds til dark. Even though it’s in the Arizona mountains, he never made it beyond 40 yards from his bed before dark. At least one spot has a buck. I get to the house, and tell her what I seen. She decided to look for him in the morning, rather than hiking to our number one spot.
Day 1: We get up early and drive out to look for the forky from the night before. As we get close to our turnoff, I see head lights. I figure someone else is driving down to that parking spot. As we get closer, a guy and his kid speed off, luckily the other way, in a side by side. They parked their rig at the intersection. I drove by their rig and parked at the end of the road in the only parking spot there.
We parked the truck about a half mile from where we seen the buck the night before. Below the hill he was on is a small water hole. My plan was to sit on that and glass the mountain above for the buck. We get to the water at first light and set up. My hope is for a close shot on the water. I was seeing the majority of the activity on the water hole between 8am and 10am. Hopes are high. 15 minutes after we sat down, I look up the hill to the spot I seen the forky last night. Twenty yards to the left, a nice buck stands up. About an 80” eight pointer!! Thermals are still dropping at this point. With no other option to kill him, we have to get it done from below. On borrowed time, we rush to close the gap from 500 yards to 200. We are skirting the base of the hill in a deep wash out. We are 300 yards from him and I look again. Still there?.... yup... wait... That’s a forky. I looked for the bigger one. And then it happened, a 100” buck walks out, following him is the 80” deer and a spike in the back. 4 bucks one spot. And one is a slob. I couldn’t believe it. Now the sun is on the hillside and the thermal is starting to rise. I know it’s gotta happen now, or they’ll wind us and take off. We get to a rock pile about 225 yards from em and begin to get lined up for the shot. As I’m giving her directions to get the right buck in the scope, a Border Patrol helicopter comes out of the mountain pass a mile north of us and makes a turn and flies right over us. The deer scatter and we are forced to back out to relocate them. So close to getting a chance at a bruiser buck. Without skipping a beat she says, “it’s ok, let’s go find another one.” We back out and look for them, but it’s so thick we couldn’t turn any of them up after that. We found two more bucks way up high, but she didn’t want to go after them. We hunted til noon on the water and nothing. We went to town for lunch. Normally I stay out all day, but I let her call the shots for this hunt. At the restaurant I found four pennies on the ground. I made a joke saying we have 4 lucky pennies, we should see 4 bucks. After lunch we went back to the same spot for the afternoon. We were gonna look for that big one again. No sense leaving deer to find deer. An hour before dark I see two bucks get up from the #3 bedding area I had picked out. One is a forky, the other is a little eight. She grabs her gun and says “let’s go get em.” Thermals are dropping now, a perfect setup. We sneak in to 250 yards from the last spot we seen em. And... gone. Nothing. I just seen em 5 minutes before. I’m glassing like a mad man to find them. All of a sudden, there he is. Bedded, broadside, 250 yards. Racing the clock, she’s prone on my backpack, and can’t locate the buck. The second one gets up and she finds him. But of course, when she gets ready to shoot he moved into the brush. After ping ponging between bucks, we lose light and now shot is taken. We decide to come back in the morning to relocate some of these bucks. Maybe even the bigger two.
Day two: A front is supposed to hit around noon with high winds and rain. We get up early again and make our way to the same area. These deer don’t know we are hunting them yet, so I figure we’ll try once more before moving to our number one spot for the weather change. Now, I’m expecting one rig in the area from yesterday. We get close and it’s a freakin light show. Trucks and atvs all over. 3 trucks with trailers, and atvs and side by sides are pulling out of there like they just robbed a bank. I’m thinking someone is parked in my spot for sure. We drive past the “parking lot” and by some miracle nobody is in our parking spot. We decided to glass the selected bedding spots from the truck to get a wider view on things. I was really hoping to find that big boy again. Ten minutes after first light I find the two bucks from the night before, 50 yards from where there were at sundown. Knowing the soon to be rising thermal will beat us if we approach from below, I try to find a good spot above them, but there isn’t anything. And it’s way too thick to get in there with them. I keep looking for the big one from the morning before. As soon as the sun lights up the mountain side, I looked down toward our #1 spot (about 3/4 mile away) and see two really big framed bucks moving around on the edge of the thick area they usually bed in. It was on! We got our gear and started hiking to them. We had to pass the water hole we sat on yesterday. We pass the water and start across this flat area and I catch movement on the hill above us to our left. I put my binos on them, three bucks, under 400 yards. One is a forky, one is a 6 pointer, and the other a 70-75” 8 point. Our wind is going up the hill but barely missing the deer. They are making their way to the water hole. As they get to the base of the hill they are on, they turn down a wash out that brings them to a natural edge between open grass and thick ocotillos. I’ve seen deer do this a lot in this area. Of course that’s where our scent is blowing. We rush over to the ocotillos in hopes of cutting them off and still maintaining a slightly off wind. We get setup and wait for them to walk by. After an hour, nothing showed up. We were only a few hundred yards from them. I’m assuming they got our wind, but I never seen them leave. Rather than assume they are gone, I decided to make a circle and move in on the last spot they were seen just in case they bedded there. With a favorable wind we stalked in. No deer. Gone. Rather than go look for the two big ones we were originally moving toward, she says she wants to go back to the truck and head to town for lunch(she was getting pretty tired by now). Knowing we should go after the big ones, but not wanting to burn her out on hunting, we start back to the truck. After all, there were two bucks close to the truck anyway. We walk out of the ocotillos and start across the open grass walking downhill to the water hole. We walked about 200 yards and I catch movement in the wash that goes from the water hole up to the area we seen the 3 bucks. There they are! 175 yards away. The bigger one of the 3 is in the open. I set up the shooting sticks for her and she gets ready for the shot. Just as she gets on him, he walks into a thick patch of brush. The second biggest one is walking around, in and out of the brush patch. The biggest and smallest buck bed down at 160 yards away but I can only see their heads. After 15 minutes of waiting for the 6 pointer to give her a shot he lays down, broadside to us but with a bunch of brush blocking his vitals. Can’t catch a break. We have a perfect cross wind, so there we wait. I tell her when he gets up, he’ll probably move toward the other deer, so pick a shooting lane on the right side of where he’s laying. I keep looking around for other deer in the area. Since we are out in the open, I don’t want another one to bust us and ruin the whole setup. I see two bucks making their way down the mountain to the water just south of the buck we are waiting on. I look back to the water hole, and I see 3 other bucks dropping into the tank to get a drink. Bucks everywhere!! Ten minutes later he stands up and starts walking toward the other deer he’s with. I tell her to shoot when she can make the shot. He passes her shooting lane before she was steady enough for the shot. He stops again, but has one ocotillo branch over his vitals. I grab the sticks and move 4 feet to the left. Clear shot to his shoulder. I range him at 175 yards. I tell her to take the shot when she is ready. Over a minute goes by, and when I’m least expecting it the gun goes off and the buck drops! I told her to watch him through the scope for a few minutes, just in case he gets up. I knew he was done. We gathered our gear and went to check him out. She made a solid high shoulder hit on the deer. We quartered him up and packed him back to the truck. On the way back to the truck we found a fresh lion kill from the night before. I thought it was cool, her not so much. Haha. It was a good hunt. She got to learn a lot about deer and why they do what they do, how the wind works in the hills, and some meat care and processing stuff. And she was able to get her first Coues Whitetail. I told my buddy how the hunt went. He said I got lucky and it was a fluke. I laughed. I know that’s not the case. In total we seen 19 bucks and one doe. And all of them were in textbook wind bedding spots. The biggest bucks were in bulletproof spots. There is no way a predator is getting close to them without him knowing it’s there. Either the wind based bedding thing works in the southern Arizona mountains or the four pennies I found were the luckiest pennies ever.
Here he is... all 65” of him.
Hill country tactics for Coues Whitetail...
- AfootTrack56
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- Jackson Marsh
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Re: Hill country tactics for Coues Whitetail...
Congrats to your daughter!
Heck of a shot and a great story!
Heck of a shot and a great story!
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Re: Hill country tactics for Coues Whitetail...
Sounds like an awsome hunt thanks for sharing. Was that in the unit I'm heading to this Dec?
That wind bedding works for Mature Mule deer too. Some of the best bucks I saw in CO last year were bedded wind to back in spots that would basically be impossible to sneak up on them and the mule deer bucks I saw in AZ last year on my Coues hunt would only bed on one hillside when they had the wind to back. When that hillside had the right wind about 30 mule deer where using it mix of bucks and does and when it was wrong only a few does would be using it.
That wind bedding works for Mature Mule deer too. Some of the best bucks I saw in CO last year were bedded wind to back in spots that would basically be impossible to sneak up on them and the mule deer bucks I saw in AZ last year on my Coues hunt would only bed on one hillside when they had the wind to back. When that hillside had the right wind about 30 mule deer where using it mix of bucks and does and when it was wrong only a few does would be using it.
- Aaron Jones
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Re: Hill country tactics for Coues Whitetail...
What a read! Loved it! Congrats to your daughter. I hope this can be me one day if I have a daughter. Great stuff!
Loving the Public Land pursuit!
- stash59
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Re: Hill country tactics for Coues Whitetail...
Cool to hear bedding tactics work out west on other species. Great 1st coues buck!
Happiness is a large gutpile!!!!!!!
- AfootTrack56
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Re: Hill country tactics for Coues Whitetail...
First Sit wrote:Sounds like an awsome hunt thanks for sharing. Was that in the unit I'm heading to this Dec?
That wind bedding works for Mature Mule deer too. Some of the best bucks I saw in CO last year were bedded wind to back in spots that would basically be impossible to sneak up on them and the mule deer bucks I saw in AZ last year on my Coues hunt would only bed on one hillside when they had the wind to back. When that hillside had the right wind about 30 mule deer where using it mix of bucks and does and when it was wrong only a few does would be using it.
It was blast! If she was more comfortable shooting farther we would’ve had some more lead down range on those big ones. But they’ll still be there in January when I can chase em. We were in a neighboring unit to the one you’re gonna be in. I’ve got some good info for your unit though. I’ll message you with the details. I have also noticed mule deer doing the same thing down here. Like you said, one day they’re there, then the wind changes and it’s a ghost town.
- JakeB
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Re: Hill country tactics for Coues Whitetail...
Awesome stuff man! Congrats to both of you! I imagine neither of you will forget that hunt anytime soon!
- Matt6506
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Re: Hill country tactics for Coues Whitetail...
Awesome, congrats
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