Few would think 100 square miles of South Louisiana swamp would hold monster deer, but this veteran hunter has the kills to prove otherwise.
Ricky Hano was sneaking through his all-time favorite hunting area back in January 2004 when he spooked a buck. As the mature deer made its escape, the hunter could see the huge set of antlers bobbing up and down.
That’s all he needed to see. Hano eased out of the area, but soon returned to begin what turned into a nearly weeklong pursuit of the buck.
“I hunted it five days in a row,” Hano said. “It would be dark when I went in and dark when I went out.”
He had been sitting the stand for more than six hours on that fifth day, and was munching on an orange when he heard the telltale sound of a deer walking through the water surrounding the tree in which he was hidden.
“I heard, ‘caplosh,’ ‘caplosh,’ ‘caplosh,’ ‘mahhhh!’” Hano said.
If the watery steps didn’t get the hunter’s attention, that grunt certainly did; adrenaline spiked in Hano’s bloodstream, and he could hardly get himself ready as he caught glimpses of the big deer.
“I don’t know how he didn’t hear my shaking,” Hano laughed.
The buck continued to grunt as it moved closer to the excited hunter.
When the buck finally stepped into an opening, Hano’s rifle belched, and the animal never took another step.
The massive calcium growth atop the deer’s head was sticking up, and that did nothing to calm down Hano.
“When I shot him and he fell, I just sat there,” Hano said. “I didn’t want to fall out of my stand getting down.”
When he finally calmed himself and ratcheted down the tree, Hano hurried to the buck. He couldn’t stop smiling.
The buck was a clean 8-point, but the rack was massive.
“The bases measured 7 3/4 and 8 inches,” Hano said.
The deer eventually taped out at 150 inches Boone & Crockett.
That would be a great deer anywhere in the state, but Hano wasn’t hunting Tensas, Avoyelles or any of the nutrition-rich parishes along the Mississippi Delta.
Nope, he was deep in one of the wettest wildlife management areas in the state.
Joyce WMA is about 100 square miles of nothing but cypress trees, swamp grass, salvinia and water interspersed with a few small humps of dry ground — and there’s no other place Hano wants to be starting in late December.
“I love it in there,” he said. “I’ve got family who hunt in Missississippi, and they ask me to go hunting with them, but I’d rather go to the swamp.”
His enjoyment certainly doesn’t come from the fact that it’s easy hunting. No, Joyce WMA is a tough place, with almost no dry ground in the entire complex.
But Hano knows something that only a handful of people understand — that his 150-inch buck was no fluke.
The WMA holds a lot of deer, and it holds numbers of big deer.
“There have been a lot of big deer killed on that place,” Hano said. “I kill two or three bucks every year.
“Since I’ve been hunting in there I’ve probably killed 20 to 30 deer in there.”
The reason is pretty basic: Because there are few people who hunt it, deer have the opportunity to mature and exhibit their potential.
“My 150 (inch deer) was 8 years old,” Hano explained. “There aren’t very many people who hunt it, so the deer can grow old.
“It’s like hunting your own private hunting lease; some of it you hunt all year and only see your buddy.”
There also has been a nearly 170-inch monster killed by Ponchatoula’s Charles Cercy.
“There have been some 160s and 170s come out of there,” Hano said.
That’s amazing, simply in terms of available groceries: It’s a swamp, and at first blush would seem to be fairly lacking in suitable deer food.
However, Hano said the deer know what to eat.
“There are those dollar lilies in there, and (the deer will) stick their heads under water and pull the roots up and there are little nuts on them like peanuts,” Hano said. “They’ll eat that.”
Deer also make use of the green moss on cypress trees.
“You can watch them, and they’ll eat all the way down the tree, eating that moss,” Hano said. “Then they’ll go back up and start down again.
“All of that’s protein.”
Hano said he rarely shoots any does, instead focusing on the bucks roaming the watery area.
And December begins the absolute best period of the season for the WMA.
“You can go in early (in the season) and not see a deer,” he said. “But when the rut starts, you can kill some really good deer.”
Of course, it’s not just as easy as walking onto the WMA and picking a tree. In fact, walking onto Joyce is the least-effective way to access the area.
Instead, pirogues are the preferred mode of travel.
Hano said the property is crisscrossed with logging runs formed decades ago when the swamp was timbered. These runs are overgrown now, but Hano works to clear paths through this tangle and reach his preferred areas.
“I like to get a long way back,” he said. “One deer I killed was four miles back.”
It routinely takes Hano upwards of two hours to reach his hunting areas.
“During the rut, I get up at 2 o’clock in the morning and get (to the WMA) about 3 or 4 (a.m.) just to get in my stand for daylight,” he said.
And he doesn’t leave the stand all day.
“It’s dark when I get in my stand, and it’s dark when I leave,” Hano said.
However, it’s not necessary to push so far back into the heart of the swamp — Cercy’s buck was killed fairly close to the western access points.
“You can kill good deer anywhere,” Hano said.
The key to ambushing these bucks is understanding how deer travel on the WMA.
“Deer walk along those ditches,” Hano said. “If you find an intersection, that’s a great place to set up.”
That’s why this hunter sets up right on the edges of these ditches, literally stepping out of his pirogue and onto his climbing stand.
“Those deer know where every log, every high spot is,” Hano said. “If you’re in an area that you see deer all the time, you can get down and find it’s pretty easy for them to walk.”
While he spends a lot of time sitting stands, Hano also sees many deer while pushing his pirogues along the logging runs looking for signs of deer.
“Half of my deer I killed in my pirogue just easing through the swamp,” he said.
Even if he doesn’t get a shot at a deer, seeing one fleeing is a victory for the hunter.
“If you see a deer run or something, that’s pretty much a (deer) trail, so they’ll be in there,” Hano said. “I can go back there and set up because I know deer will be using it.”
Finding other deer sign is a real challenge when there are no dry or even muddy ridges. Water makes finding trails impossible.
So Hano spends the early season pushing his pirogue around the WMA looking for old hookings.
“I look for big hookings and high hookings,” he explained. “When a hooking is high, you know it was made by a good deer.”
Those are the signs that prove to Hano bucks frequent a specific area.
Hano has kept a series of ditches open, but he said it would be easy to think that there aren’t any other options because of the thick intertwined bushes.
However, the ditches are still there.
“If you look up at the trees, you can see the ditch,” Hano said.
The trees form lines along the edges of the ditches that can easily be seen above the bushes.
Between the trees is where Hano will form trails through which he can push his pirogue.
Any small, isolated mounds of dirt also can be magical finds.
“You’ll find those mounds and they’ll be covered with (deer) hair and droppings,” Hano said. “That’s when you know there are deer using it to bed up.”
Once the rut starts, the water works in favor of hunters.
“You can hear the deer running through that water,” Hano said.
That is a big help, since vision is normally obscured by the thick “black mangroves” growing throughout the swamp.
Shooting a deer doesn’t end the challenges of the hunt, since tracking a wounded deer can be a real problem.
“Before the salvinia, you could follow the bubble trail,” Hano said. “I don’t know why, but those bubbles would stay on the water for hours.”
However, now that a thick blanket of salvinia covers the swamp’s water, there is no way to effectively track a deer.
“When it takes a step, that salvinia just closes up and you can’t see anything,” Hano said.
So the best bet is to put a deer down where it stands.
“I’ve gotten to where I shoot them in the shoulder so it drops right there,” Hano said. “People say I’m wasting meat, but if he runs off and you can’t find him you waste it all.”
And then the real work begins — getting the buck out of the swamp.
“That’s when you think, ‘It ain’t worth this,’” Hano laughed.
