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Mike Hawkridge – Cowboy up for bucks, bulls & wolves
All right. Well, currently right now, we actually have two territories. We’ve got one territory right down here where we ranch. Cornell is just about center, kind of south-central in British Columbia and it’s a small town of about 20,000 people. And out west of that, where we currently ranch, we’ve got one of our territories.
We have another one that’s probably about three hours northwest of here and both areas, in fact, the one northwest of here probably carries a stronger whitetail population than what we’ve got currently down here at the ranch.
That said, probably five years ago, if you’d seen a doe running across the road or a little two-point buck, or something that looked like he was lost, which we all assumed that he must have just been lost, those are really about the only whitetail that you’ve seen. And now here at the ranch over the past, say, two to three years, we have seen some cranker bucks like for our area if you’re looking for something in that 170 class and up, that’s a pretty decent buck around here anyway.
So I’ve got some trail cam pictures that I set out just to get an idea of what was here and I was blown away. As your audience is well aware, whitetails, they’re a little bit different than mule deer. They can really sneak and skulk around so setting up cameras is the best way to catch them, and I was excited. I’d go and check my trail cam pictures and I was just…I expected these things to be in northern Saskatchewan and not in my backyard so we’re really happy about that.
And this past Christmas morning, which for me was a bit of a gift, just mother nature’s gift, I guess, I was walking by the window and I looked up the ridge in front of the house, probably about 250 yards, something like that and we had a small little, oh I guess he was a little 3 by 3 feeding and he made his way up the ridge and towards the tree line and then followed by a spike and I thought, “Wow, that’s pretty neat.” Then I thought I’d seen something coming up from behind and there was a pretty respectable buck that came up from behind, a nice typical basket rack came up from behind and I thought, “Man, I’m just going to stand here for a few more minutes.”
Wolf special featuring Whitetail Rendezvous host Bruce Hutcheon
And then, sure enough, the granddaddy of them all started walking, this was a big old back swayed back. It would be hard for me to [inaudible 00:05:41] him perfectly except for the fact that he was very wide. And he was massive. He wasn’t real tall and his gees [SP] they weren’t as tall as some of them I’m seeing here but he was going their direction but he was a big, old, old, man of a buck so it was pretty exciting for me to see Christmas morning. But every year we’re seeing more and more whitetail here. The winters are getting easier. Literally this past, oh it’s been the past three weeks, I think, we’ve had warmer than freezing temperatures during the day. And the snow is starting to go and we’ve just seen that do real well for our deer population. And without getting too long winded here, I will just say that up in our northern territory, it’s an egg belt up there and we’ve got some incredible whitetail hunting up there.
we’ve got some incredible whitetail hunting up there.
The population’s just due to the fact that the ground is really well set up for agriculture so the whitetails, as far as it goes to the hunts that we offer, most of the hunts we will do out of there. And although I didn’t harvest this deer through the outfit, I ran into Rick Bareth [SP] and he’s a local author here and he’s written two books on trophy deer of British Columbia and I just asked him, I said, “Off the top of your head, what was the last big buck that you know that came out of that area?” and he showed me a picture of a 230 whitetail. It wasn’t the prettiest looking thing and it definitely wasn’t a typical rack but it was, yeah, he scored 230. So that was pretty impressive and we’ve seen some really solid 150s, 160s and better but we’ve seen a few solid whitetail come out of that area as well.
Bruce: So, Mike, in your Big Country Outfitter, what do you focus on, what game animals do you focus on most of the time and how has whitetail hunting changed that or has it not changed that?