Blackwater Sika hunt

Mike was kind enough to coordinate this hunt down to Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge for Maryland’s “little elk”. We arrived Friday afternoon in time to meet Mike’s friend Paul. Paul is a serious and seasoned sika chaser, and was kind enough to guide us into some promising areas and give us some tips. The area we were in was one that borders a private lease and the deer like to come from the marsh toward the feeders in the evening. This was also prime sika rut time, so there was always a chance a chasing stag would run a hind by us as well. Entering into the edge of the marsh we spotted a couple persimmon trees. The fruit was just starting to drop, and there was only 1 fruit on the ground I saw. The area was totally tracked up. No whitetails were in this area so they had to be sika sign. We crossed a ditch, and entered the edge of the marsh area. Paul set us up along another perpendicular ditch where we spotted a rub and a small wallow on the hardwoods side. Mike and I found some trails leading across the ditch and set up about 60 yards from each other covering the corner of the ditch.

As the afternoon turned to evening, the wind picked up. Those narrow pine trees had us and our climbers swaying and fearful. I think I was almost seasick by the time we left! Since this was public land and the blackwater sika season is very short, we soon had much company in the woods. We were not set up deep in the marsh and soon we began to see a parade of hunters march by on their way in, unfortunately upwind of us. Mike alerted one of the hunters who came by, and the man stated he just shot a hind, not far from the lot. He thought he may have gut shot it, and was thinking about coming back for it in the morning. We could hear bugling as evening progressed. The wind made things very chilly, and as darkness came upon us we jittered our way down the trees and headed for some warmth of the trucks. Mike, Paul, and I hit the Holiday inn express and plotted the plan for the next morning over a couple Papa John pizzas. We bumped into a couple TBM guys in the lobby. Huh, we thought their Blackwater hunt was the previous weekend and they were camping? We chatted a bit and they said, “the area we were headed to the next morning was “pounded hard”. Oh well, we were planning on going deep to avoid the crowds. Brent would have loved the next morning! We got up at 4am and headed to the parking area by 4:30. We passed 2 truck loads of guys parked along the road unloading hunters. When we approached the parking lot and trail head, we saw about 5 other guys heading in. Then, in the lot were another 5 or 6 guys getting ready to start out. We donned our waders and started the hour long march through knee high water and 10 foot tall frag grass. Paul toted a small sled/boat he used to pack in some of his gear, and we would use to pull and animals out should we get lucky. Paul had us in a spot he saw a nice stag chasing the morning before. We checked the gps and spread out on a line covering the area. The wind from the previous evening was down, but the temps were cold now. We were steaming and sweating by the time I got to the base of my tree and had to strip off the chest waders and don my wool longjohns and warm clothes quickly. It is always tough to find a tree and set up when you have never been to an area before dark. I ended up right in front of a Y trail in the frag grass….no way to shoot if they came from that direction.

As it turned out, all the other 15 guys marched, like us, to the same area. Paul got bumped twice by headlamps in the trees he was planning to get into. I could hear obvious hunter bugling coming from behind me as soon as the first light began to glow. We were surrounded! It was a cold morning even with the dry wool I had carried in. There was not too much back cover in those skinny pines in the swamp.

A few hours after sun up, I heard a compound shoot followed by splashing in Paul’s direction. I glanced up at Paul, but he had not shot. As it turns out, another hunter had a hind come in range and missed (compound). That hunter did not know a stag was following the hind, but Paul did. They both approached and he focused on the stag, but the hind looked up and spotted him. Both deer bounded away and all three of us got to see the nice tall antlered stag. As they left the area we could hear the other hunters trying to bugle him back in.

We left the tree after the guy that missed walked out under our stands, then after lunch we hunted the evening back in the area we hunted the previous day. We were pooped from that 1.5 mile walk in and out of that marsh. We set up that evening near the parking area, covering the trail out of the marsh where the deer would cross into the private lease and feeders. There were also a couple of white oaks dropping acorns there. About a half hour before dark another hunter came under Mike again (getting to be a habit for him), and he was dragging a nice 3x3 stag out of the deep marsh. We stayed until dark and chatted with him in the parking lot as the stags that got away bugled into the darkness.

We drove back to Frederick at about 1130pm completely bushed, but it was a fun time chasing those cool little elk.