 FORCE
THE BUCK TO COME TO YOU
Make a Brush Funnel
EDITOR’S NOTE: Often deer will walk along the
edge of a hardwood point that juts out into flooded
timber, agricultural fields, thick-cover bedding sites
or pine plantations. You’ll find funneling deer
easy in any place where two different types of terrain
like these converge. Usually  hardwood
peninsulas will be too wide to bring the buck in for
a close shot. But you can shrink the size of these peninsulas
and force deer to come to you.
“I search for a fallen tree on one edge that
lies toward the middle of a peninsula,” Dr. Bob
Sheppard of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, an avid deer hunter
who spends about 50-60 days each season in the woods,
explains. “Although the deer easily can hop over
the tree, they’ll generally walk around it. Often
I place my tree stand close to the top of the fallen
tree. Then when deer walk up the edge the tree has fallen
on, they’ll funnel around the tree. To increase
my odds for taking a buck, I walk to the outer edge
on the other side of the peninsula and cut brush to
build a small brush fence 2-½- feet high. I  pile-up
limbs and saplings from the edge toward the fallen tree
to create this brush fence. If you spot the brush fence,
it may not look like a fence to you. Although deer easily
can hop over the brush fence, they usually don’t
because of their laziness. Rather than going over it,
the deer simply walk around it and come into my range.”
Sheppard will visit the sites he wants to hunt before
deer season arrives. He checks to see if the peninsulas
have deer trails running through them. He builds his
brush fences and sets up his tree stands. By the time
the season  comes
in, all his human odor will have dissipated. The deer
will have adapted to funneling through the 30-yard wide
or so opening between the fallen tree and the brush
fence. When Sheppard hunts one of these regions, the
deer will walk on both sides of the hardwood peninsula
from both directions to funnel under his tree stand.
You can use this same principle if you pinpoint a natural
bottleneck and want to funnel the deer closer to your
tree stand,” Sheppard reports. “You don’t
have to spend a lot of time building a brush fence.
In a few minutes, you can pick up limbs and sticks and
build a 5- to 10-yard-long brush fence. Always build
a meandering fence rather than a straight one. Then
other hunters will walk by without noticing the funnel
you’ve created.”
TOMORROW: CAUSE A BUCK
TO COME OUT OF THICK COVER
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