Trash Trails and Meandering Trails

EDITOR'S NOTE: Simply finding a deer trail won't provide enough information to make you hang a tree stand and plan to hunt that trail. Many ingredients make some deer trails better than others. To effectively hunt trails, you need to know ..
* why and when the deer use the trail,
* where the deer will go and
* what time of day or night the deer will move down the trail.

With this information, you can hunt trails and take deer more productively than a hunter who simply finds a trail and hangs a tree stand. Let's take a closer look at some different types of deer trails and what you can learn from these trails to help you hunt more effectively.

Besides historical ones (see Day 1), Larry Norton of Pennington, Alabama, finds and hunts other invisible trails -- trash trails -- in pine plantations. Usually with clear-cut property, the stumps, limbs and logs get left piled-up in a long windrow and burned. Windrows still remain after the landowner plants the area in pines. As the young pines grow taller than the windrows, you can no longer spot these old trash piles.

"The trash piles create a natural barrier on what would otherwise be flat ground," Norton explained. "These trails are primarily travel and feeding trails and usually have very fertile earth that produces high-quality deer food like honeysuckle, blackberry bushes and greenbrier. The deer can feed on the trash piles and stay in thick cover during daylight hours. Most often you'll have to hunt these trash piles from ground blinds because a young pine can't hold a tree stand. The understory may only be clear for 5 to 6 feet above the ground."

Sometimes deer take routes through the woods without leaving trails. Even when deer frequent a particular area, they may not walk down a certain path as they move through this region but instead will meander through the woods. Often meandering trails occur where two types of habitat pinch down a woodlot and create a funnel. Most of the time, deer will meander through that funnel rather than taking a specific route. Falling leaves will keep you from seeing little if any sign on the ground.

Wildlife biologists and longtime deer hunters have found that hunting a funnel that narrows down to one specific area improves the odds of the deer coming by you, instead of their walking past you out of range. For example, a dead tree that's down in a funnel area that the deer must walk around is a good place to set up your stand. Any break in the funnel where deer must pause to go under a fence or to cross a stream also will be productive spots for taking deer, because the deer must stop and think about how to traverse the obstacle rather than looking for danger. Too, they're not spending as much time looking up in the trees if they're negotiating obstacles in the funnel.

Tomorrow: Terrain Trails and Mating trails