Today is December 9, 2013 hunting season ended on November 24 and as you can probably tell we didn't get anything this year once again, my dad and I saw a few bucks one being a decent four by four but I really wanted a bigger deer for my first one, go big or go home is what we said. Lately the seasons have been shortened due to low numbers of deer in the Manitoba province. For the past 2 or 3 years the deer have been struggling to get through our cold winters. Deer have a very dense fur coat in the winter and they also develop an extra layer of fat, they also find heat by huddling together and laying down with their legs under them to help keep their legs warm, but that can't always help them.
   An interesting fact about the white-tailed deer is they can run up to 58 kilometres an hour (about 36 miles per hour), also deer can make a vertical leap of over two and a half metres and a horizontal jump of nine metres. And the scientific name for the White-tailed deer is Odocoileus virginianus.
   I am planning on putting up recipes on how to cook deer meat even though we didn't get anything,  I still want to help others have great deer meat.

Most people can't easily see the difference between mule deer and whitetail deer. In Manitoba it is illegal to hunt mule deer, and that is why it is so important to know the difference between those deer.

 
Mule deer and Whitetail deer don't have many differences. From a far distance you may not be able to see it. Mule deer habitat is in the western half of North America, they have very large ears which is how it gets the name mule. The most common and easiest way to determine the difference between the two is by their tails.
This picture is the tail of a mule

deer, as you can tell it has a black tip and it is
mall and the tail is much smaller. Most mule deer are large, and for

(female deer) the tail is the easiest way to spot the

difference. The next picture is a Whitetail deer. Whitetail deer have bigger tails then the mule deer and when they lift up their tail you can see it is white which is why they have the name white tail . 

 









 Another huge difference between the mule

 deer and whitetail deer are the antlers. This is

 only for male mule deer because the buck has

the antlers. It is confusing to explain, the whitetail deer have tines all coming off one main beam, while the mule deer have have 'forks' coming which then forms antlers. As you can also see in this picture mule deer have very dark and large ears. While whitetail deer have white and small ears. The face of a mule deer is much more rigid than the whitetail deer. Whitetail deer have sort of like baby faces because they are wider and softer looking.

It is November 18, I have gone hunting twice so far. Once on November 11, and also on November 12.  I took videos to record my process so far but it is not ready yet. Im planning on going to out this coming weekend.
      During my first hunt we had no luck, my dad and I didn't see anything, we did see a great grey owl but that was all we saw for four hours. The second day we went out, we got up at about 5:00 am to make our way out to our spot about 50 minutes east of the city, we got there at about 6:30 and started walking in at about 6:45 when the sun was close to being up. It took us about 15 minutes to walk to our shack, which was not a very nice walk. We stayed until about 10:30, it was freezing because the sun wasn't up yet but we did have a wind break to help keep us warmer. During the second day we saw about 5 or 6 deer, one doe and a couple small spikers.
      The full moon in November usually signals the start of the rut, the full moon this year was November 15th. That means the big bucks will really be moving, trying to find a hot doe. The deer move a lot right after a big storm, most people think they move during the storm to stay warm and that sounds very true but it is not. The deer will bed down during the storm and right when it ends they will start to move around to stay warm and find food. The last few years have been very bad for deer because of our long and cold winters. But we have been trying our best to wait it out so we can see the deer we want to kill.

Monday, October 21 was the day youth muzzleloader season started because youth hunters get an extra week to hunt. Muzzleloader is a type of gun that is manually loaded from the dangerous end of the gun. Youth hunting is people under the age of 18. I was going to go out to my hunting spot during the end of the week but unfortunately my dad got into a car accident on Tuesday, October 22 and had to get stitches on his forehead so that prevented us from going out. Hunting so early in the season though is not very good because none of the big bucks are moving. They usually stay bedded in a bushy area to get rest for the rut. The rut is when the big bucks really start moving because they are always following a hot doe around, a hot doe is a doe that is ready to breed. The rut usually starts in the beginning to the middle of November. So unless you get a really cold day where the bucks have to get up and move to stay warm then your not gonna see any good deer.

Hello, My name is Miranda. For my Passion Project I am going to attempt to shot a whitetail buck during this coming 2013 hunting season. Youth hunting starts on October 21, 2013, my dad and I are going to try a hunting spot that is a morning and afternoon spot. But also change to a evening hunting spot for after. We recently put up a trail camera, which is a camera you can hang on a tree along a deer trail and takes picture every 5 seconds if there is movement, at my hunting spot which is Northeast of Winnipeg about 45 minutes away. We got it back and discovered only small does and there fawns hanging around but did come across a small 3 by 3 buck who was probably 1 and a half years old, 3 by 3 means the deer has his browtines and 2 small tines coming off the main beam. We plan to head out this coming week, I will attempt to take a video of the hunts and show you the process but I may just take pictures.