FIVE MOST CRITICAL INGREDIENTS TO BAGGING A DEER WITH A BOW

Hank Hearn

Editor's Note: Almost every bowhunter I know considers one of these five ingredients-the wind, the availability of food, the rut, the weather and hunting pressure-as the most-critical element of successful bow hunting. However, you really must take into account all five factors if you plan to back a buck with your bow. Here, five of the nation's most successful bowhunters pick the ingredient they consider most important to their success and explain the reasons for their selection. Hank Hearn, the former lodge manager of Willow Point South, a part of Tara Wildlife located on the Mississippi-Louisiana border near Vicksburg, Mississippi, avidly hunted deer and scouted for deer on public lands before he began to manage the lodge. He learned how to use hunting pressure to put deer in the places where he could take them.

Where I hunted in the Delta National Forest had several clear-cuts. My buddies and I couldn't hunt in those clear-cuts because of the extremely-thick brush. Instead, we hunted some soybean fields on the backside of the forest. We could find deer coming to these fields during daylight hours almost every day for the first week or two of deer season. Then the deer appeared to become nocturnal and only feed on the beans at night. After hunting these bean fields for two or three years, I realized the deer didn't bed close to the bean fields where they fed. As I began to follow the deer trails, I found the deer were actually bedding two or three miles away from the bean fields. I started noticing the large amount of deer sign as I walked through on my way to the bean fields. I decided instead of going all the way to the back end of the property and hunting the bean fields, I would hunt the trails closest to where I parked my car and farthest away from the bean fields.

For several years, I consistently took more and bigger bucks than any of the hunters who made the long hike back to the soybean fields. My friends who went to the fields to hunt often walked past the deer they wanted to take. The deer had learned where hunters entered the woods and where they traveled to get back to the bean fields. They also knew if they stayed in thick cover when the hunters entered the woods, the hunters would walk away from them and back toward the bean fields. When I started hunting the land everybody else walked away from, I began taking the bucks no one else ever saw. The more pressure people put on a hunting area, the further away from that hunting area the deer will bed and travel during daylight hours.

When I realized what effect hunting pressure had on deer and how I could use hunting pressure to put deer where I wanted to hunt them, I applied this strategy to public lands to move deer toward my hunters at Willow Point when I was there. For this method to work, you have to study the land you hunt for several years. I had to learn where deer moved to once hunting pressure forced them out of a particular area. By knowing where deer moved when forced out of an region by hunting pressure, I could put my tree stands in the sites where deer would go before they actually starting using those places. While at Tara, I even would build up hunting pressure in one site to force bucks to move where I already had tree stands set up for the next time that I wanted to hunt. A smart bowhunter will learn how to use hunting pressure to put bucks in front of his stand.

To learn more about master deer hunters, click here for John Phillip's deer-hunting books.