Adapting to Change – How my 2017 Season Changed on a Dime
We like to feature stories from hunters across the Midwest as we make our way into the 2017 season. Today, we have Alex Comstock from North Dakota sharing his story on how all his plans for this season were thrown up in the air with a big life change. Take a read below and stay tuned for more stories from Alex and his hunt for Kobe.
The 2017 deer season started with one thing on my mind. Kobe. Kobe’s a giant North Dakota buck roaming public lands, and he’s the only buck I was after. He’s a buck I hunted last season and I had multiple encounters with him, but wasn’t able to get it done. That brought me to this season, and during the summer, I found Kobe back again. I’m guessing that he’s at least 5 ½ years old this year, and he was the only buck I was going to hunt.
September came and went, and I wasn’t able to have any encounters with him. Even though Kobe never made an appearance while I was in the treestand, I had trail camera photos of him nearly every single night. He even showed up in daylight on the evening of September 25th during a major cold front, but of course I couldn’t be in the stand that night.
October came, and that’s when things changed on a dime. I received a job offer out of nowhere which would require me to move from North Dakota back to Minnesota, which is where I’m from. I decided to take the job, and had two weeks before I’d be moving. In those two weeks, I continued to hunt Kobe to no avail, but I knew he was still alive based on all the trail camera photos I was still getting of him.
Now that I’ve moved four hours east, my hunting plans have drastically changed. I’ve more or less had to start over. I’m part of a city hunt, which is night and day different from my public land hunting out in North Dakota, and I’ve also started scouting some northern big woods, which is also a major challenge in itself. Between the three very different types of hunting, I’m still confident I can send an arrow through a mature buck before this season is all said and done.
At the end of the day, being able to adapt to change is what can drive success. It’d be easy to dwell on the fact that I won’t be chasing a booner every time I go hunting, but the challenges are what drive me. My goal is still to wrap my tag around Kobe. I’ll be making trips out to North Dakota when I can, and will hunt him as much as possible. But in the time I can’t get out there, I’ll be trying to tag a mature buck in Minnesota. Personally, I’d really like to find a few spots in the northern big woods and spend time out there. It’d be very rewarding if I could find a mature buck somewhere within all of the thousands of acres of public land that is vast timber. Time will tell, but one things for sure – I’ll be giving it my all.
-Alex Comstock is the founder of the blog WhitetailDNA. You can follow him on social media on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.