It’s happened to everyone at one point or another.  You get to your stand but something has happened and you can?t hunt it.  It could be wasps, broken steps, or just about anything.  While some people would just move to a different stand, that wasn’t going to happen to Bob Burgess of Anacoco Louisiana. On Tuesday, November 1, 2011, he knew where he wanted to be, and it wasn’t in another stand

Bob went to his QDMA managed private property in Vernon Parish that afternoon, but things didn’t quiet go as planned for him.  “I had gone in to hunt this ladder stand, but the way it was, I couldn’t hunt it, so I just sat on the ground not too far from it,” Burgess said.  After trying to fix the stand, Bob gave up and found a comfortable spot on the ground close to some white oaks trees that were dropping acorns.  It was a beautiful sunny afternoon, but to Bob, the sun was a little too bright. “The sun was shining right on me and I felt like I sort of stood out, so I waited until the sun went down before I started to grunt,” he explained.

And when the sun did indeed go down, Ole Bob went to work on his Flextone grunt call. “I grunted a little bit and waited, but nothing ever showed up.  About 30 minutes later, I grunted again, a little bit louder, and that’s when he walked out,” Burgess explained.  Bob watched as the buck went from his left to his right, a path that took him close to the ladder stand that Bob was going to hunt originally.  When the deer presented him with a good shot, Bob made a good 100 yard shot through the swamp bottom with his 300 Winn Mag and the rest, as they say, is history.

Now there is a reason Bob wanted to hunt this area so badly, and that was because this may have been the second time he’d seen this deer.  “I was in that ladder stand just about a week before and I saw a good deer, and it may have been this one, but I couldn’t get a shot because the canopy is low and I didn’t have a clear shot.  I’m kind of glad that I was sitting on the ground because I can see a lot more on the ground, than I can in that stand!” Burgess laughed.

With 16 points and estimated to be close to 160 inches, this deer is a testament that if you have a hot spot and your plans for hunting it fall through, lay with it. If nothing else, simply sit on the ground and hunt. Improvising like that certainly made Bob and his taxidermist two happy campers!