Last fall I enjoyed my first island hunt. No, not tropical islands. These were islands in the Arkansas River. The Corp of Engineers owns property that consists of islands and penninsulas in and along the Arkansas River. I suspect this is also the case in other states. We found a good bit of sign on some of the islands last fall. My buddy and his son took a total of 3 deer off of a couple of these. I had the pleasure of being the "dog" on one of the hunts and pushed a deer towards a friend of my hunting buddy. He hunted with buckshot, which is about the only effective method when the deer is running. I bumped up 4 deer that morning. Only one ran his direction.
Since numerous other hunters hunt the islands we hunted on last year, we decided to put out trail cameras on some other places along the river on Corps of Engineers land this past weekend. We are going to give them a couple of weeks, since my buddy's boat is in the shop for some minor repairs. Of the 3 places we put out cameras, 2 were very dry (away from the river of course) and sign was hard to find other than old tracks. We did find some evidence of feral hogs rooting. The 3rd place, a penninsula with a gas line right of way running through it was a different story. We walked through the bottoms spotted with huge cottonwoods. I found some whopping buck scat that was still wet. This stuff was the kind that is about as big around as golf balls and made of compacted jelly-bean looking pieces. (Ahhh, the finer points of poo...) I called my buddy to let him know. He said he found some wet ground covered up with tracks, so I headed his way. The place he had found had a couple of hog wallows and tons of both deer and hog tracks. We walked a bit further and found some backwater from the river cutting into the penninsula. Standing in one place, I could see 5 seperate hog wallows within 15 yards of each other. There were buck tracks that were no shorter than 4" long from dew claw to point. There were hog tracks as big around as baseballs. NO KIDDING. We put the last trail camera out with the remaining pound or so of corn. It's going to be a long week and a half until we get to go back out and check the cameras. This last place had no boot tracks anywhere. No tossed water bottles or soda bottles. We're hoping we just found our honey-hole. I'll try to remember to take my camera to get a couple of pictures of the little slough/backwater area next time.
