DAN KIBLER COLUMN: Preparing for the hunt – The Stanly News & Press

For about 15 years, beginning in around 1995, I made an annual November trek to the farm in central Georgia where my father was raised.

The reason? To hunt white-tailed deer. I had killed the first one ever taken on that 640-acre farm, a 4-point buck, on Thanksgiving afternoon in 1976, my junior year in college. Deer were a fairly new item back then; my father doesn’t remember ever seeing one from the time the family moved to the farm in 1941 until the early 1970s. There were plenty of quail and rabbits, but no deer and turkeys — my, have the times changed.

About 1970, my physician uncle bought the place, which the family had farmed as tenants until around 1960, and in the first year or two, he cut 400 acres of timber and replanted it mostly in pines. Later in life, I would understand that young pine plantations were essentially cutovers, which were essentially deer nurseries — and having tremendous habitat in which to thrive, the deer population exploded there in the 1980s.

My dad started hunting the place in the late 1980s with some of his friends, and they quickly decided to try and manage it for bigger bucks, so they put an 8-point minimum in place. Nobody killed any bucks smaller than 8-pointers unless there’s some kind of cull buck that needs to be removed from the herd.

By the time we had to quit hunting around 2010 — reasons are unimportant — we had at least four-dozen 8-point racks tacked to the walls of the “trophy room,” with a fox squirrel being stalked by a bobcat, both mounted on a limb from a pecan tree just outside the…