The Top Tips for Successful Deer Hunting
Day 5: Learning to Navigate in the Woods and Using Trail Cameras to Be Where the Deer Are
Editor’s Note: There’s more to taking deer than just walking through the woods with a gun slung over your shoulder. Here are my rules to hunting deer the right way.
 To hunt right, go to and away from your hunting area before first light and after dark. Navigate through the woods with your GPS (global positioning system) receiver to find those remote places where other sportsmen aren’t hunting. Always take a compass with you too. When you bag a buck, leave the woods the shortest way you possibly can. If the wind changes and you have to leave one hunting area to go to another, take the shortest route possible. Then you don’t waste any hunting time traveling from one site to the other. The reason I was unsuccessful in taking deer when I purchased my new deer rifle was not only because of my inability to shoot accurately with the new weapon, but also because I wanted to be in an area where I could see great distances. However, the deer preferred thick cover to avoid hunting pressure and to find food. If you plan to hunt right, you’ve first got to try to decide where the deer want to be and then be at that place when the deer want to be there. In areas where there’s a lot of hunting pressure, the deer may prefer thick cover. To hunt right, you have to get into thick cover with the animals, which may mean you only have 10 or 20 yards of visibility.
 During the rut, you may prefer to hunt over green fields. But perhaps you’ve found a scrape line across a creek 2-miles away where you want to hunt. If you plan to hunt right, you’ll leave that green field and the comforts of a shooting house, cross the creek and hunt the scrape line. Maybe you’ve located a feeding area and have been hunting this area from 9:00 am until dark, because you’re not an early-morning person. To bag a deer, you may have to get-up before daylight and be in that tree stand – where legal. If you’re hunting a swamp region filled with waist-deep water and hope to bag a deer, you must determine a method of hunting that swamp. If you spot deer crossing a mountain that’s too high to climb, then you’ve got to devise a system of either climbing the mountain or getting to that region from another direction.
One of the big advantages that hunters have today using trail cameras in conjunction with deer lure. Because of the invention of trail cameras and effective deer lures, you can:
• know how-many bucks and how-many does are on your property, every year after the season;
• watch the buck’s antlers grow in the spring and summer and pick-out the shooter bucks that you want to take the following season.
• use trail cameras to let you know when deer are coming to feeding sites, going to bedding sites and when they are traveling; and
• use deer lures like C’Mere Deer and Hunter’s Specialties Gorge, to draw deer into a special stand site during daylight hours.
 For this reason, if you don’t have enough time to scout all year long or you don’t want to scout all year long, your trail cameras can do your scouting for you. With the creation of products like C’Mere Deer and Gorge, you can pull older-age class bucks that normally will be nocturnal, out of their bedding sites and into areas where you can get shots at them. One secret to using these products, even in states that don’t permit baiting, is that you can put-out Gorge or C’Mere Deer to lure deer into native food sites where they can feed during the fall and winter months. Then even though you may not be able to use these products legally during hunting season, the bucks will develop a pattern of coming to these natural feeding sites, because the Gorge or C’Mere Deer has been there.  They’ll often continue to come to these sites, once you stop putting these deer attractants out. Taking an older-age class buck now is much easier than it once was before the invention of trail cameras and deer lure. New technology and new products have enabled us all to manage our deer herds better and to find and take bigger bucks on the property that we now hunt.
Too-many sportsmen want deer hunting to be easy and aren’t willing to pay the price to hunt right. But if you follow these keys to successful hunting, you’ll be hunting right and greatly will increase your odds of bagging a buck this season.
|
