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We only have one hunt left on the schedule for this year, so I figured I'd take a bit of a recap of how things were by giving a bit of an inside peep into the behind the scenes magic workings on a deer ranch.
A little background first. We run just under 900 acres in Central Texas under high fence. I know I lost some of you right there because high fence hunting ain't real hunting or some such. Okay, got it thanks. The ranch is broken into roughly equal north and south sides with a creek running between the side. We split it because we got tired of the creek busting down our fencing during heavy rains, so now that portion through the middle is known as "No Mans Land" and is not part of the managed ranch. We started off running cattle, but when beef prices tanked about a decade ago in favor of dirt cheap South American beef (yeah, check out how "low" beef prices are now... geesh), we put up high fencing and sold the cows. The ranch is a family fun operation with my father-in-law living there full time and the rest of the family making trips from our various full time jobs to help him run it. During the off season, usually a family member a week keeps it running. During the hunting season, there's some pretty creative schedule management, vacation and sick leave usage going on in order to have enough people on hand. The operation is run to cater to a single hunting party at a time. We provide on site lodging, full meals and every hunter gets a personal guide. We don't mind if a hunter wants to bring his family to hang out at the lodge while they hunt. Our usual hunting package is three days and pricing is based on what animal you are looking for. We can't usually promise you a shot at any specific deer, but if you want a 170, we can promise you a shot at a 170. We have Whitetail Deer, Blackbuck Antelope and Corsican Rams on the ranch. We have had returning customers request an animal that we do not have on the ranch, and we will purchase that animal and let it free on the ranch, a year before you want to hunt it. Sorry, no letting one out of the cage for you to shoot. It will be wild by the time you hunt it. We actually have a pair of Scimitar Horned Oryx on the ranch because a hunter paid for us to buy them, then never came back to hunt them. We call them the ghosts since they only really get seen once or twice a month.
We operate under the TPWD MLDP 3 program. For the hunter, that means that you have to have a Texas hunting license, but you hunt on our tags not yours. So, the hunter gets to keep his tags to use somewhere else if they wish. For the ranch this means that we had to submit a formal wildlife management plan to the state and we work closely with a state biologist to make sure we aren't overpopulating or over harvesting the land. We have to provide the state with several things to keep the MLDP going, including deer population census. I don't know if you've ever tried to get deer to line up to be counted, but it's really not easy. Generally, there's more magic than science to it. We spend several days and nights over a weeks time counting all the deer we can find, then come up with a wibbly wobbly average. Of course there are deer we missed and ones we saw two or three times. It all comes out in the wash. Once we turn in our census, the biologist determines how many deer should be harvested to ensure a healthy population the next year and we get our tags issue for how many bucks and does we need to take that year. We also have to provide a list of vital data on every deer taken on the ranch under MLDP tags, so every deer taken gets weighed, aged and scored (bucks only obviously). Our deer don't jaw age right though so again there's a bit more magic than science here. Under this program, we can run hunts from pretty much the first of October right through the end of February. We really don't like booking any hunts that late though since some bucks are dropping their antlers and the last thing we want is someone thinking they are shooting at a doe and it's a buck without his antlers anymore.
Off season is all about keeping the deer fat happy and safe as well as getting the ranch back in working order for the next season. Usually once the season ends we will have a big pow wow to discuss what worked, what didn't work and what needs changing from top to bottom. Meals, accommodations, hunter scheduling transport, stand and feeder location... everything. One of the first things we will do is move any stands or feeders that we didn't like, so that the deer have the longest possible time to get used to the new locations. Once all the heavy equipment is moved around comes chainsaw time. There will be a couple of weeks while we cut back any brush that got out of control or cut new lanes that we want to make. We try to get that done before the snakes get too active. Nothing is quite as much fun as trying to cut out cedar branches and finding a rattler. After that, the rest of the off season is mostly keeping the feeders full and lots and lots of scouting. There are two methods we use to grow really big deer: 1) aggressively cull bad genetics from the herd. 2: Feed them until they pop. Deer that have food shortage when young will be stunted their whole life, which is partially responsible for the rumor that Texas deer are the size of greyhounds. We feed huge amounts of protein feed. About a ton a week. And that all has to go into the feeders one fifty pound bag at a time. There are all sorts of devices on the market that are supposed to make this job easier, and we've broken the vast majority of them at one time or another. We still haven't found anything that substantially improves on someone standing in the bed of a pickup truck and putting in one bag at a time. Corn is also a staple for our deer. We do it very similar, but without the bags. We tape up all the holes and gaps in the back of the pickup, drive it over to the mill and fill the entire bed with corn. Then the corn gets shoveled into the feeders. Special note, standing in a truck bed full of corn is like standing on a pile of ball bearings. You will bust you back end a couple of times until you figure out the secret ninja tricks.
After a fun couple of hours filling feeders, it's time for scouting work. We spend countless hours in stands watching deer through binoculars and spotting scopes, filming deer, taking pictures of deer and... reading kindles and books. By the time the season comes around we will pretty much know every deer on the ranch, where they like to be and what their habits are. Of course, right in the middle of the season we will see some buck that no one has ever seen on the ranch before. That's how it goes.
Once late August rolls around we start cleaning up the lodge and getting it ready for visitors again. Most people don't think of laundry, dusting and cleaning as staples of being a deer guide, but there it is. This is also when we start building our menu for the year. Well, there really isn't a menu as such since you get what we feed you, but there's shopping to be done. We build our meal plan off of things that we can cook quickly, feed a large group of people with and still fool you into thinking it's some fine dining. We serve two meals a day, breakfast and dinner. Lunch is self server from a well stocked assortment of sandwich makings and other things. We do lots of things like steaks, Cornish game hens, baked Mac N Cheese, stuffed baked potatoes and other "country" meals we can cook in large quantities on the grills. We also stock up on dozens of cases of bottle water, ice teams and sodas. Then we get out the chainsaw again and chop up enough wood to have a couple good Aggie bonfires.
Once hunting season starts, the crazy goes through the roof. The average day is 0430 to 2200. We have to be up earlier than the clients, usually slurp down a granola bar and energy drink then go wake up the clients. The goal is to be in the stands 45 minutes before light (not sunrise) so we do breakfast after the morning hunt. Coffee and snacks in the morning. We usually stay in the stands until about 0900 unless the client got his animal. One guide goes out with each hunter. Extra guides stay back and start prepping breakfast or hang out and wait for "The Call". If you get "The Call" the spare guides will hop in one of the mules to go recover the animal. Lot's of pictures get taken, lots of hands get shaken and backs thumped, then the spare guide loads the animal and takes it to the skinning shed while the guide that was with the hunter takes them to the lodge for breakfast. Breakfast usually consists of same variety of eggs to order, waffles, bacon or sausages. We make bacon that involves brown sugar and some other secret tasty elements that makes all the work worth it just for the bacon. The guide may also take the client back to hunting if that's what they wants. While they client and his guide are back hunting or eating breakfast the animal is being processed. There are some clients who prefer to come to the skinning shed and watch us process their animal. We're cool with that. We have clients who want to process their animal themselves. We're cool with that too. For most of our clients they want their animal caped and quartered, a process that for us involves a reciprocating saw and a couple cheap knives that are super shard but go dull after a handful of deer. We will also do just field dress and hang for clients that want that. Either way, when we are done everything gets hung in our cooler until the client is ready to depart. Usually there's a lul for the clients from about 12 to 3. Some nap, some watch football, some hunt right through the middle of the day. By about 3:30 we are getting loaded up to get back in the stands for round two, which goes pretty much like round 1, except with dinner and beer around the fire pit afterwards and the sun going down instead of up.
So, what do we do while guiding? It's not like wilderness guiding where I actually have to find the animals for you by tromping around miles and miles of no where. Heck you'll see plenty of deer and I'm going to drive you right up to the stand in my trusty mule. My job is to pick which stand on the ranch is most likely to give you a shot at the deer that you want to take. I'm also there to be your buddy 'ol pal, give you some helpful advice, shut the heck up or whatever it takes to make your hunting experience enjoyable.. Sneak a few cokes into the stand, give you some batteries, listen to you complain about your job.. I can do those. I'll tell you what the range is to all the likely spots you will see a deer. Heck, I'll tell you all the little nooks and crannies deer are likely to pop out of. Oh, and I am also there to make sure that you get the deer in the class you are paying for. Because, we are a business after all. We have all become experts at judging antler size on the hoof. If you want a 140, we will point out a 140 for you when he comes out. If a 150 comes out and you are giving him the hairy eyeball, I'll let you know he's a 150. I'll also let you know how much it costs to upgrade. Because I'm helpful like that. We don't do hog hunts, but if one walks out I will surely let you know that pigs and coyotes are free add-ons if you want to shoot them.
If everything goes to plan, the client gets their animal, gets some good grub and spends a couple nights living in our lodge. Of course, nature isn't that nice. We've had a real heavy windstorm at the very beginning of the year that blew every acorn out of the trees. The deer were so happy munching acorns they wouldn't come out of the woods for anything. Then there's ram hunting... Rams don't act like deer. Of the three animals types we have on the ranch, the rams are the least concerned with humans. If there is only one human on a mule, they just watch you drive around. Earlier this year, we had a television show that wanted to film a ram hunt, stalking... You pile up with two mules for of show host, cameraman, sound man, hunter, guide, etc etc and the rams vanish to the other side of the ranch saying "nope, nope, nope" the whole way across. Now that was a rough three days of hunting.
Various musings:
Predator control: One of the most vital things for running a successful game ranch is to keep predator pressure off the animals. We have been very successful using Conibear traps where we find digs under the fence line to keep our predator population very low. We run the traps every morning to clean anything out. Lesson #1 we learned, wait two days to reset a trap or you will catch a vulture. The smell of the dead animal seeps a bit into the dirt and will attract vultures if you don't give it a day or two to dissipate. We've tried predator calling but have only met with limited success mostly when they are in heat or just just had a pile of pups and are out looking for food.
A note on camouflage: We do almost all of hunting with clients out of box blinds. Camouflage really isn't necessary at all, but all the guides wear it. Why? Because the client expects it. We all have matching camouflage shirts with our names, the ranch name and logo embroidered on them. It's a business after all.
What guns do we use on the ranch? Ruger 10/22s and AR-15s of various stripes mostly. The 10/22s are for small varmints and animals in traps. The AR-15s usually ride on the front of the mule and are for coyotes, bobcats, feral dogs or cats and such things that don't belong on the ranch. For the end of the season doe cull I use a custom built AR-15 with a 26" barrel to head shot does. For normal deer hunting or hogs from a stand I use a Marlin .308 Express. When going after hogs in the heavy cedars I use a Marlin 1895G in .45-70. I almost always have a Blackhawk in .45 Colt with me, first chamber loaded with snake shot, everything else with Corbon.
What is in a guides bag: State secret. Just kidding. Since we are a relatively small ranch we don't carry some of the things you see in wilderness guides. I'm not worried about being stuck outside in a freak snow storm or some such. Mainly I pack my kit based on what the customer may need or have forgotten to bring. I have two or more of pretty much every battery type I've ever seen used in a flashlight, illuminated scope or rangefinder. No customer goes without because their battery died. I have a half dozen chem light in there. They are super handy for lots of things. I've got 50ft of 550 cord in there. I have 3 green caplights. One for me and two for forgetful customers. I've got a half dozen small zip cables like are used to bundle wires. Those are for attaching game tags and other things. I've got a Gopro and a small digital camcorder. An Outdoor Edge replaceable blade knife. A white flashlight. A pair of granola bars in case the customers tummy start rumbling in the field. A small trauma kit I put together from bits and peices. No one is allowed to die on me. There is a small self winding cloth tape measure for those guys who can't wait to get back to the skinning shed to know how big their buck was. Oh, the laser rangefinder and a water bottle. It all gets crammed in a sling pack. I hate standard backpacks. They are annoying to try to get anything out of when you really need it. This thing I can just spin around and dig around in. Much more handy.
I'll be back later with more random musings and maybe some pictures.
A little background first. We run just under 900 acres in Central Texas under high fence. I know I lost some of you right there because high fence hunting ain't real hunting or some such. Okay, got it thanks. The ranch is broken into roughly equal north and south sides with a creek running between the side. We split it because we got tired of the creek busting down our fencing during heavy rains, so now that portion through the middle is known as "No Mans Land" and is not part of the managed ranch. We started off running cattle, but when beef prices tanked about a decade ago in favor of dirt cheap South American beef (yeah, check out how "low" beef prices are now... geesh), we put up high fencing and sold the cows. The ranch is a family fun operation with my father-in-law living there full time and the rest of the family making trips from our various full time jobs to help him run it. During the off season, usually a family member a week keeps it running. During the hunting season, there's some pretty creative schedule management, vacation and sick leave usage going on in order to have enough people on hand. The operation is run to cater to a single hunting party at a time. We provide on site lodging, full meals and every hunter gets a personal guide. We don't mind if a hunter wants to bring his family to hang out at the lodge while they hunt. Our usual hunting package is three days and pricing is based on what animal you are looking for. We can't usually promise you a shot at any specific deer, but if you want a 170, we can promise you a shot at a 170. We have Whitetail Deer, Blackbuck Antelope and Corsican Rams on the ranch. We have had returning customers request an animal that we do not have on the ranch, and we will purchase that animal and let it free on the ranch, a year before you want to hunt it. Sorry, no letting one out of the cage for you to shoot. It will be wild by the time you hunt it. We actually have a pair of Scimitar Horned Oryx on the ranch because a hunter paid for us to buy them, then never came back to hunt them. We call them the ghosts since they only really get seen once or twice a month.
We operate under the TPWD MLDP 3 program. For the hunter, that means that you have to have a Texas hunting license, but you hunt on our tags not yours. So, the hunter gets to keep his tags to use somewhere else if they wish. For the ranch this means that we had to submit a formal wildlife management plan to the state and we work closely with a state biologist to make sure we aren't overpopulating or over harvesting the land. We have to provide the state with several things to keep the MLDP going, including deer population census. I don't know if you've ever tried to get deer to line up to be counted, but it's really not easy. Generally, there's more magic than science to it. We spend several days and nights over a weeks time counting all the deer we can find, then come up with a wibbly wobbly average. Of course there are deer we missed and ones we saw two or three times. It all comes out in the wash. Once we turn in our census, the biologist determines how many deer should be harvested to ensure a healthy population the next year and we get our tags issue for how many bucks and does we need to take that year. We also have to provide a list of vital data on every deer taken on the ranch under MLDP tags, so every deer taken gets weighed, aged and scored (bucks only obviously). Our deer don't jaw age right though so again there's a bit more magic than science here. Under this program, we can run hunts from pretty much the first of October right through the end of February. We really don't like booking any hunts that late though since some bucks are dropping their antlers and the last thing we want is someone thinking they are shooting at a doe and it's a buck without his antlers anymore.
Off season is all about keeping the deer fat happy and safe as well as getting the ranch back in working order for the next season. Usually once the season ends we will have a big pow wow to discuss what worked, what didn't work and what needs changing from top to bottom. Meals, accommodations, hunter scheduling transport, stand and feeder location... everything. One of the first things we will do is move any stands or feeders that we didn't like, so that the deer have the longest possible time to get used to the new locations. Once all the heavy equipment is moved around comes chainsaw time. There will be a couple of weeks while we cut back any brush that got out of control or cut new lanes that we want to make. We try to get that done before the snakes get too active. Nothing is quite as much fun as trying to cut out cedar branches and finding a rattler. After that, the rest of the off season is mostly keeping the feeders full and lots and lots of scouting. There are two methods we use to grow really big deer: 1) aggressively cull bad genetics from the herd. 2: Feed them until they pop. Deer that have food shortage when young will be stunted their whole life, which is partially responsible for the rumor that Texas deer are the size of greyhounds. We feed huge amounts of protein feed. About a ton a week. And that all has to go into the feeders one fifty pound bag at a time. There are all sorts of devices on the market that are supposed to make this job easier, and we've broken the vast majority of them at one time or another. We still haven't found anything that substantially improves on someone standing in the bed of a pickup truck and putting in one bag at a time. Corn is also a staple for our deer. We do it very similar, but without the bags. We tape up all the holes and gaps in the back of the pickup, drive it over to the mill and fill the entire bed with corn. Then the corn gets shoveled into the feeders. Special note, standing in a truck bed full of corn is like standing on a pile of ball bearings. You will bust you back end a couple of times until you figure out the secret ninja tricks.
After a fun couple of hours filling feeders, it's time for scouting work. We spend countless hours in stands watching deer through binoculars and spotting scopes, filming deer, taking pictures of deer and... reading kindles and books. By the time the season comes around we will pretty much know every deer on the ranch, where they like to be and what their habits are. Of course, right in the middle of the season we will see some buck that no one has ever seen on the ranch before. That's how it goes.
Once late August rolls around we start cleaning up the lodge and getting it ready for visitors again. Most people don't think of laundry, dusting and cleaning as staples of being a deer guide, but there it is. This is also when we start building our menu for the year. Well, there really isn't a menu as such since you get what we feed you, but there's shopping to be done. We build our meal plan off of things that we can cook quickly, feed a large group of people with and still fool you into thinking it's some fine dining. We serve two meals a day, breakfast and dinner. Lunch is self server from a well stocked assortment of sandwich makings and other things. We do lots of things like steaks, Cornish game hens, baked Mac N Cheese, stuffed baked potatoes and other "country" meals we can cook in large quantities on the grills. We also stock up on dozens of cases of bottle water, ice teams and sodas. Then we get out the chainsaw again and chop up enough wood to have a couple good Aggie bonfires.
Once hunting season starts, the crazy goes through the roof. The average day is 0430 to 2200. We have to be up earlier than the clients, usually slurp down a granola bar and energy drink then go wake up the clients. The goal is to be in the stands 45 minutes before light (not sunrise) so we do breakfast after the morning hunt. Coffee and snacks in the morning. We usually stay in the stands until about 0900 unless the client got his animal. One guide goes out with each hunter. Extra guides stay back and start prepping breakfast or hang out and wait for "The Call". If you get "The Call" the spare guides will hop in one of the mules to go recover the animal. Lot's of pictures get taken, lots of hands get shaken and backs thumped, then the spare guide loads the animal and takes it to the skinning shed while the guide that was with the hunter takes them to the lodge for breakfast. Breakfast usually consists of same variety of eggs to order, waffles, bacon or sausages. We make bacon that involves brown sugar and some other secret tasty elements that makes all the work worth it just for the bacon. The guide may also take the client back to hunting if that's what they wants. While they client and his guide are back hunting or eating breakfast the animal is being processed. There are some clients who prefer to come to the skinning shed and watch us process their animal. We're cool with that. We have clients who want to process their animal themselves. We're cool with that too. For most of our clients they want their animal caped and quartered, a process that for us involves a reciprocating saw and a couple cheap knives that are super shard but go dull after a handful of deer. We will also do just field dress and hang for clients that want that. Either way, when we are done everything gets hung in our cooler until the client is ready to depart. Usually there's a lul for the clients from about 12 to 3. Some nap, some watch football, some hunt right through the middle of the day. By about 3:30 we are getting loaded up to get back in the stands for round two, which goes pretty much like round 1, except with dinner and beer around the fire pit afterwards and the sun going down instead of up.
So, what do we do while guiding? It's not like wilderness guiding where I actually have to find the animals for you by tromping around miles and miles of no where. Heck you'll see plenty of deer and I'm going to drive you right up to the stand in my trusty mule. My job is to pick which stand on the ranch is most likely to give you a shot at the deer that you want to take. I'm also there to be your buddy 'ol pal, give you some helpful advice, shut the heck up or whatever it takes to make your hunting experience enjoyable.. Sneak a few cokes into the stand, give you some batteries, listen to you complain about your job.. I can do those. I'll tell you what the range is to all the likely spots you will see a deer. Heck, I'll tell you all the little nooks and crannies deer are likely to pop out of. Oh, and I am also there to make sure that you get the deer in the class you are paying for. Because, we are a business after all. We have all become experts at judging antler size on the hoof. If you want a 140, we will point out a 140 for you when he comes out. If a 150 comes out and you are giving him the hairy eyeball, I'll let you know he's a 150. I'll also let you know how much it costs to upgrade. Because I'm helpful like that. We don't do hog hunts, but if one walks out I will surely let you know that pigs and coyotes are free add-ons if you want to shoot them.
If everything goes to plan, the client gets their animal, gets some good grub and spends a couple nights living in our lodge. Of course, nature isn't that nice. We've had a real heavy windstorm at the very beginning of the year that blew every acorn out of the trees. The deer were so happy munching acorns they wouldn't come out of the woods for anything. Then there's ram hunting... Rams don't act like deer. Of the three animals types we have on the ranch, the rams are the least concerned with humans. If there is only one human on a mule, they just watch you drive around. Earlier this year, we had a television show that wanted to film a ram hunt, stalking... You pile up with two mules for of show host, cameraman, sound man, hunter, guide, etc etc and the rams vanish to the other side of the ranch saying "nope, nope, nope" the whole way across. Now that was a rough three days of hunting.
Various musings:
Predator control: One of the most vital things for running a successful game ranch is to keep predator pressure off the animals. We have been very successful using Conibear traps where we find digs under the fence line to keep our predator population very low. We run the traps every morning to clean anything out. Lesson #1 we learned, wait two days to reset a trap or you will catch a vulture. The smell of the dead animal seeps a bit into the dirt and will attract vultures if you don't give it a day or two to dissipate. We've tried predator calling but have only met with limited success mostly when they are in heat or just just had a pile of pups and are out looking for food.
A note on camouflage: We do almost all of hunting with clients out of box blinds. Camouflage really isn't necessary at all, but all the guides wear it. Why? Because the client expects it. We all have matching camouflage shirts with our names, the ranch name and logo embroidered on them. It's a business after all.
What guns do we use on the ranch? Ruger 10/22s and AR-15s of various stripes mostly. The 10/22s are for small varmints and animals in traps. The AR-15s usually ride on the front of the mule and are for coyotes, bobcats, feral dogs or cats and such things that don't belong on the ranch. For the end of the season doe cull I use a custom built AR-15 with a 26" barrel to head shot does. For normal deer hunting or hogs from a stand I use a Marlin .308 Express. When going after hogs in the heavy cedars I use a Marlin 1895G in .45-70. I almost always have a Blackhawk in .45 Colt with me, first chamber loaded with snake shot, everything else with Corbon.
What is in a guides bag: State secret. Just kidding. Since we are a relatively small ranch we don't carry some of the things you see in wilderness guides. I'm not worried about being stuck outside in a freak snow storm or some such. Mainly I pack my kit based on what the customer may need or have forgotten to bring. I have two or more of pretty much every battery type I've ever seen used in a flashlight, illuminated scope or rangefinder. No customer goes without because their battery died. I have a half dozen chem light in there. They are super handy for lots of things. I've got 50ft of 550 cord in there. I have 3 green caplights. One for me and two for forgetful customers. I've got a half dozen small zip cables like are used to bundle wires. Those are for attaching game tags and other things. I've got a Gopro and a small digital camcorder. An Outdoor Edge replaceable blade knife. A white flashlight. A pair of granola bars in case the customers tummy start rumbling in the field. A small trauma kit I put together from bits and peices. No one is allowed to die on me. There is a small self winding cloth tape measure for those guys who can't wait to get back to the skinning shed to know how big their buck was. Oh, the laser rangefinder and a water bottle. It all gets crammed in a sling pack. I hate standard backpacks. They are annoying to try to get anything out of when you really need it. This thing I can just spin around and dig around in. Much more handy.
I'll be back later with more random musings and maybe some pictures.
