Burnin’ Rubber

With my last shed hunt resulting in the two biggest sheds of my life, I couldn’t wait to get back out in the woods. While it has been a mild winter here in NW PA, we have had a few late snows as of recent. With some good weather finally in the forecast, I decided to take Monday 3/20 off of work to head to camp.

I hit the road at 5:20 AM and made it to camp to shed hunt around 7:30 AM. I had a full day planned out and hit the big woods. After hiking down and across the meadow onto the Second Finger, I came across…a headlamp. Not exactly what I was looking for, but a shed nonetheless.

I made my way out the Second Finger and down the back side where I walked back and forth for some time. There was still some snow on the ground, so I headed on top of the Third Finger where I had hoped the snow had melted. To my delight, it had, so I thoroughly searched the area for sheds. Unfortunately, while there was plenty of good fresh sign there were no sheds to be found (by me anyway). I headed over to the Jeep Trail Valley and did a bit of a grid search before heading for the truck.

I ended up putting in 10.3 miles that day with no sheds to show for it. While I remained positive all day, it did get me thinking. In my opinion, you would be hard pressed to find a harder area of the country to shed hunt. With the low deer densities and abundant food sources, there isn’t one place you can pinpoint that would be great for sheds. To me, that is half of the fun. While you certainly increase your odds searching agriculture fields, I enjoy stomping around the big woods where I are up, counting and looking for sheds in the springtime.

I took one more trip up to camp to open it up for the Spring and hiked a good 3 miles behind camp on Sunday 4/2 and again came out empty handed. I ran into Trenton from “Pursuing PA Outdoors” and had a good time talking about all things whitetails and shed hunting. I would highly suggest checking out his page as he has found over 50(!) sheds this season.

In the end, I think it is the time spent a field that is unsuccessful that makes the successes all the more rewarding. And let’s be honest, us hunters know there are plenty of more failures than successes when it comes to our passion.

I am hoping to get out maybe one more time in search of antlers this year, but with leaves budding my eyes are turning toward Spring Turkey, in hopes that I can fill a tag that I haven’t since I was just 10 years old. Good luck to all this Spring!