Key on scrapes and food plots and you’ll have the best of both worlds when it comes to having a chance at a big North Carolina buck in October.
Most people have heard the “location, location, location” mantra that describes what it takes for a profitable business venture that requires real estate.
Something of the same order is true for deer hunting, especially when considering blackpowder hunting in North Carolina. Location is about 95 percent of the success formula to put brown on the ground.
First, a location has to actually have a trophy deer and secondly, a hunter must put in the time and effort to know the best place to hang a stand or set up a ground blind.
Three great bucks taken with muzzleloaders last year proved the point that location is the prime factor in putting antlers on the wall and venison in the freezer.
Mountain jewel
If a hunter in North Carolina was asked to choose the best area to take a trophy whitetail buck, the answer probably would include the northern “Trophy Belt” of counties that stretch along the Virginia border from Northampton in the northeast to Ashe in the northwest.
But, if you cranked that question to 10 power and asked: “What’s the hot spot in the trophy belt?” an answer might require more than a little thought and perhaps some searching of records. However, even that narrowing of focus might not reveal the truest answer because some hunters don’t publicize where they bag their trophies.
A relatively small segment of hunters know that Stokes County is a trophy destination. But the county north of Winston-Salem has no public lands; landowners jealousy guard their wildlife; and its best deer habitat is in Hanging Rock State Park, where no hunting is allowed.
Besides that, it ain’t all that easy to meet the physical challenge of hunting the rocky crevasses and cliffs that make up the northern end of the county.
Nothing, however, bothered Norris Lankford of Westfield last Nov. 20 during Northwest North Carolina’s two-week blackpowder season. That was the day that Lankford, 50, a supervisor for a paper-products company, killed the best typical buck taken last season in North Carolina by a blackpowder hunter
Lankford was hunting at an 80-acre farm belonging to his father-in-law near Hanging Rock State Park — a de facto deer sanctuary.
“My step-son put a stand up the previous Saturday near a cliff overhang because I’d seen a lot of big scrapes under there,” he said.
The scrapes were a tip-off that a big whitetail was tending does nearby. Although the farm includes 35 acres of pasture, Lankford never hunts the open fields, instead choosing woods.
“I picked this stand this day because of the scrapes, and I also didn’t have another stand that day set up on the property for a northwest wind direction,” he said. “Being in the mountains, wind direction is important. But I also use CoverUp spray on my clothes. It seems to calm deer if they smell it.”
Lankford is so conscious of local breezes he watches the Weather Channel every day before he goes outside to hunt.
“With the Sauratown mountains, Hanging Rock, Moore’s Rock, Cook’s Wall and Pilot Mountain, the wind’s always swirling around up there, so I want to see what it’s saying,” he said.
He arrived in the neighborhood of his stand at 4:30, relatively late, and didn’t even get to put his foot on the first rung of the ladder.
“I’m going down this steep ravine, and I see a nice 8-pointer 15 yards from the stand,” Lankford said. “He’s 45 yards from me at a cattle mineral block I’d put on the ground. So I get down on one knee, and I’m trying to decide whether to shoot the eight or not.”
Then Lankford saw movement down the hill past the 8-pointer — a large-racked buck walking toward the other buck and the salt block.
“I had on camouflage clothing, and it’s solid woods and hill behind me, so they don’t see me,” he said. “The only thing that surprised me was a deer of that caliber moving around at 4:45 p.m.”
Lankford had yet another advantage that day — pure good luck.
“When we put up ladder stands, we cover the steps by tacking a piece of camouflage burlap from the stand to the ground, so we can climb up if deer are below us and they won’t see us,” he said. “So I’m looking through the burlap at both those bucks.”
Lankford was watching the deer through a Leupold scope atop his .50-caliber Knight Wolverine muzzleloader that was loaded with a 245-grain buffalo bullet and 90 grains of Triple 7 black powder.
The bigger buck, a 10-pointer, suddenly turned to the right as it walked up the hill and disappeared behind a boulder, but then it stepped into the open, and Lankford pulled the trigger when his scope’s crosshairs settled behind its left shoulder.
“I hit a tick farther back than I was aiming, but I got both lungs,” he said. “He ran 35 yards, stopped, then ran 65 more yards and started staggering. That’s when I got nervous, trying to reload the gun, and I’m spilling powder everywhere and trying to get a (percussion) cap on the nipple and having a hard time doing anything. Then he fell.”
Spent mentally, Lankford collapsed on a rock and watched the buck for 30 minutes, then walked to the giant deer and rejoiced.
The deer, which he estimated at 200 pounds, was officially scored at Dixie Deer Classic last March. Its near-perfect 5×5 rack grossed 164 5/8 inches and netted 155 2/8.
Green is mean
Seth Woodall, an Eden lawyer, closed the case on a huge Rockingham County buck on Nov. 4, 2013, ending a year-long quest.
“I missed him the year before at 110 yards with a rifle,” said Woodall, 32. “I was too enamored by his antlers and was looking at them more than what I should have.”
Last year, he planted a food plot of winter wheat with a section in Whitetail Institute Tall Tine Tubers, a mixture of kale and turnips. That provided a green ground crop during winter when most other forage has lost its color.
“I always plant wheat, and the year before I’d put out a mixture of wheat and (kale), plus some turnips. I really think the does look for it, and the bucks follow them. I’ve had tremendous luck for several years,” said Woodall. who had killed several decent whitetails around the food plot — including one 20-inch trophy — before the 2013 season.
“That afternoon, I was in a Loc-On stand maybe 5 or 10 yards from the edge of the field and 22 to 25 feet up the tree,” he said. “I had a good line of sight.”
The 7-acre field, which he plants in September after the close of the first segment of dove season, had attracted several does previously, but only two that afternoon. Woodall hoped he’d see a buck whose image he’d captured on trail cameras during 2012 and 2013.
“I actually hunted that stand because I pulled the chip (from a trail camera) the day before and he was on it,” he said.
The field was “good and green” by November when the buck appeared across from Woodall’s stand, approximately 175 yards away.
“When he came out of his bedding area, he didn’t pay any attention to the two does,” he said. “It was like he was cruising.
Woodall almost took a shot at 150 yards but decided the distance was too far for his front-loader and let the deer walk off.
“Three minutes later I wished I’d tried … then he came back,” he said.
When the buck closed the distance to 50 yards, Woodall steadied his .50-caliber Savage muzzleloader, which carried a 3×9 Nikon scope, and pulled the trigger.
“I aimed behind his right shoulder,” Woodall said. “He took a couple of steps and folded up right in front of me.”
The deer’s headgear taped 150 inches gross and 147 net at the 2014 Dixie Deer Classic. A 1 1/2-inch sticker point in front of the right brow tine was the symmetrical 5×5 rack’s only blemish.
Perseverance pays
Donna Shaver’s son, Jeremy, is a sergeant in the Marine Corps. That makes Nov. 11, Veterans Day, a special occasion for Shaver and her family, which takes pride in filling whitetail tags every season.
Veterans Day 2013 turned out to be an especially good day to celebrate, as was sitting next to her father in a two-person tripod stand when she used a .50-caliber Savage muzzleloader to drop a huge Stanly County 10-pointer that was one of the highest-scoring deer ever killed in North Carolina by a female hunter. The buck grossed 155 7/8 and netted 150 4/8 inches.
And Shaver did it the old-fashioned way — she earned it.
“I hadn’t seen this deer,” Shaver said, “and it wasn’t the one I really was after. The one I wanted we’d gotten pictures of with a trail camera; it was a bigger non-typical.”
So how did she get a shot at this trophy?
“I took two weeks off from work and hunted every day, morning, noon and evening,” she said. “Sometimes I’d take a break with Lynn (her husband) to eat lunch; sometimes I’d take a sandwich and stay on my stand all day.”
Her stand was at one end of a field that’s 126 yards long and a few hundred yards from the western shore of the Yadkin River near the town of Norwood. However, the only sightings of the deer Shaver killed had been on the eastern side of the river.
“I think a guy over there who was hunting this deer spooked it across the river at some point,” she said. “After I killed it, he showed me a trail-camera photo, and it was the same 10-pointer.”
Shaver and her father, James, climbed into the stand long before daylight.
“It was kind of a tight fit; we were cheek to cheek, but it was all right,” she giggled.
At the opposite end of the field was an automated corn feeder. Just before 7 a.m., her father saw white antlers moving through the woods several hundred yards to their right. Once he pointed out the buck to her, Shaver found the deer with her binoculars.
“I wanted to make sure he was the one I wanted, so I asked my father if it would go 150, and he said yes,” she said. “Then I asked him if I should shoot. He was really shaking by then, and (he) said, ‘I’d have shot him a long time ago.’”
When the buck turned broadside at the feeder, she squeezed the trigger. The deer donkey-kicked, then reversed course and bolted out of the field, taking the same path it had used to walk out of the woods and toward the feeder.
“I texted my husband and told him what had happened, then he texted (that) I should wait 45 minutes before we got out of the stand,” she said. “I said, ‘Is he crazy?’ and Daddy was laughing.”
Meanwhile an 8-pointer, a 10-pointer and a doe walked to the feeder. The larger deer made a scrape, but Shaver was beside herself in anticipation of finding her buck. After 40 minutes, they climbed down and walked to the feeder and found nothing — not a single drop of blood.
Totally shredded emotionally, Shaver asked her father if she’d screwed up.
“He said not to worry,” she said.
After walking to the field’s edge, Shaver saw her buck on its side a few yards inside the woods.
“I said, ‘Dadgum, there it is,” she said. “Then I started yelling.”
So three hunters discovered by setting up stands at scrapes, noting wind direction, planting food plots that will be green in winter, and by being outside every possible moment, a season can end in shouts of joy.
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