Fully agree with the baiting thing. Im also in NJ. It kills me when I find a great spot to then speed scout and find a bait pile. That spot is now useless for anything other than does and spikes.Great posts here.
Ive figured out how to consistently get close to legal deer but never have dialed in targeting mature bucks.
Sure I get hog bucks on camera. Hunter pressure, pheasant season, my own access- changes any pattern I find and I'm not good at finding/ hunting bedding areas.
Also after a certain point in the season I often am content with taking younger bucks that present a good shot.
Are you guys with trail cameras targeting a area after catching target bucks on camera? Or using mobile cams to find where to set up?
I use cameras to scout" flow areas" or primary feed trees/ areas that are consistently torn up. I Hunt the areas that show fresh and consistent sign.
I also most often hunt areas where 3 points on one side is pretty mature.
Most of my experience with larger deer has been on private in various states.
Hunts right where I have watched/ bumped deer after leaving the area be for a while are 50/50 with seing deer on public.
Mostly I watch the wind, play the terrain , rotate spots with sign and try to get in out quietly.
I ve tried to get away from getting too hung up or focused on camera pics as I fear I develop bad habits and need to move based on pressure.
Last, years of baiting public in NJ taught me bait is the #1 way to not see mature bucks consistently. Unless you have private.
Fully agree with the baiting thing. Im also in NJ. It kills me when I find a great spot to then speed scout and find a bait pile. That spot is now useless for anything other than does and spikes.
A'ight, for realzies.
You can't kill deer where deer don't live. First things first...are there deer on the property? If you can walk the property and not jump deer, it's a no for me, dog.
If there are deer there, and if you want to find bucks, you want to hunt that area during the rut. Numbers don't lie. Your odds of killing a buck during rut vs the rest of the season are positively peachy. If you can't hunt rut, hunt opening archery. Then...still hunt rut.
Deer eat and hide. Half of them want to breed for 1 month out of the year, but the other half are still just eatin' and hidin' during that timeframe. Eatin' and hidin', hidin' and eatin'. More hidin' than eatin', generally. They're ruminants which means they've figured out how to basically inhale browse, and chew it later at a nice, safe, hiding spot.
Where are they hiding? Where you just jumped them, statistically. Deer generally hide in the day and eat at night, at least down here. So if you're walking through the woods and jump a deer during daylight hours, you probably jumped it out of its bed or at least general bedding area. Walk over to where you first saw it and poke around for a bed. If everybody just walked til they bumped deer, and then just hunted right there, I think at least half of them would kill more deer than doing whatever it is they're doing now. Deer are social, and if one deer is bedded in an area, it's quite likely more are in the area. Or that another one will swing by for a chat later. And, deer bed where it is safe. Even if they're bumped, they'll come back home more often than not. Don't be scared to hunt a bumped deer.
If you like to make it hard, then you can figure out where they're a-eatin'. How do you do that? Absolute easiest way is to walk the woods at night with a light, at least down here. I have decades of trail camera pics that clearly demonstrate that private or public, prime or pits, deer feed more at night in Alabama. If you can't shine, look for big fields, mast trees with heavy sign, or heavy browse.
So now you know where the herd be doin' the eatin' and hidin'. Deer will absolutely do both in one area if they can. If they are, GREAT! Just post up in that area with a good wind and be patient. If they're travelling, then you need to know this. Deer are lazy, and they move like cockroaches and water. Path of least resistance and most cover. Ask yourself, "Self, if I had a busted leg and knew that somebody was combing the woods looking to shoot me, how would I get from this hidey spot to this eatin' spot?" 99 times out of 100, that's the way the deer are moving if they move during the day.
So now you know that there are huntable numbers on the property. You know where they're doing the hiding. You know where they're doing the eating. You know what they have to do to transition between the two. You know generally at what time they will be doing these things. You know that it is the rut, and that does will be trying to do their thing while bucks busily try to convince them to do something else.
All you need to do at this point is ask yourself what time of the day you want to get in and get out, and ask yourself where the deer will be before, during, and after. If you're hunting in the morning, deer will generally be feeding, then going to the hiding spot, and then hiding. If you're hunting in the evening, deer will generally be hiding, then getting up and moving back to feeding. Outliers will be feeding or beating about the bush throughout the day, but they're to deer what people who eat at Waffle House at 1am are to most adults who don't do drugs. Weirdos.
Your job is to not run into a deer when you're walking to your stand, but to have one run into you while you're fiddling with your ropeman up in a tree. And to trust that numbers are honest, flukes are flukes, and that on the whole they guy who invests in the index funds will match or beat the guys who insist they know the One Weird Trick but who aren't insider trading.
Easy.
This is what’s been working for me. Basically, I run about a dozen cameras, mostly cell cams. I start in mid summer, but earlier is probably better, or even year around. My goal is to simply get pictures of good bucks.
every couple weeks I’ll move the cameras around. As the season comes closer, hopefully I’ll know the whereabouts of 3-5 “shooters”. From there, I’ll start developing a plan on which deer are more favorable to hunt and bounce cameras around them, to see where they’re moving.
setting cameras is a thinking game and it’s a part that’s very easy to get wrong. If a deer smells where you’ve been you should be okay, if in an area that’s not security related, but if he smells you then spots your camera, he will not return, making patterning him impossible It’s important to hide cameras usually high up, if low they need to have very good breakup. also, low glow flash. I believe they can pick up IR at times.
Once I know where a deer lives, taking all things into consideration. I’ll set cameras in areas I expect him to show during the season, while avoiding the area I know he is living at the time. Here’s where you’d use your local knowledge of area and best guess of where he’ll show.
As an example. the buck i shot this past season was summering on public, in an area that I knew would receive some pressure. Expecting that, I put a couple cameras in areas, I thought he’d shift to. After awhile, he eventually showed up routinely on one of them. He was using the same bedding area as earlier, but hunters coming from public access, had him exiting and entering from the unpressured side of his living area, about a half mile deeper than anyone was venturing. It’s important to add, that the area he shifted to had no buck sign, but the area that became pressured, had rubs and scrapes that he had previously left. Leading to the point that sign is only reliable if smoking fresh and that others are not also keying in on it.
Effects of pressure is the wild card, because you can take all the precautions, but if someone else crashes through their living area, mature bucks will adapt, by moving off and becoming ten times harder to kill. Which will obviously squash your plans, if you had them. Hence, Its good to have backup plans and expect the competition.
This is a basic rundown of what I’ve been doing, but I believe it’s important to have the subject to change attitude in hunting.
How exactly did you pinpoint his alternative travel pattern with no clear sign? How did you know where to move in and set up specifically? Observation sits? Cams? I would love to hear more about this scenario
I left a lot out of the first post, because there was a lot of small details and luck with that deer, but I’ll try to add more to it
from hunting and scouting that area previously, I had a good idea where the deer liked to bed, the year before I jumped deer the second week of gun in an area, and also in 2019 killed a 4.5 y/o opening day of rifle, nearby. I figured that area was a place to key in on once pressure hits
I looked the area over, and found a perfect pinch point, where edges and downed trees created a natural fence, that funneled movement through a 20 yd gap. The spot was about 125 yds from the area I suspected pressured deer to bed.
before the season I went back to that area and picked out a tree and a low impact route that led me to to it. I also left a cell cam guarding the opening in the gap. The luck aspect occurred, because we had a really spotty acorn crop in this section, but that one particular area turned out to be thee spot.
there were about ten trees dumping acorns.
once the pressure hit the deer disappeared from the areas I was originally picking them up, soon after they started to appear in that area, then eventually the bucks moved in.
then it was just a matter of waiting for good daylight activity. It still took three evening sits to connect, but the camera let me know, that I was getting in and out without moving the deer off.
I hunt only public land. During the off season, I try my hardest to get into thick spots with lost of cover and search for bedding. I try to find previous sign like rubs and scrapes. Im thinking this year as Im scouting that I will post up in the saddle once a jump a deer just to see if it comes back. Im new to hunting so I tend to follow some advice I was given on here. Check transition lines, points, funnels, ridges and saddles. Find food and water. Look for sign. Locate travel trails, Find pinch points. Been hunting for about five years now and the first 2 - 3 years I wasn't even seeing deer. The past 2 years I always seen to jump deer going in the the mornings That was all ground hunting, either still hunt or try and stalk. Seems like I'm learning more every time I go out. Must be doing something right, since I'm seeing deer now. Hopefully, I can drop something this year. This will be my first season in a saddle so I hope that with being more mobile and not having to fumble with setting up a hang on stand and not having so much movement on my part. That I'll be able to set up quieter and faster. Being in South Carolina and having so much forest and wma land to hunt. I always start with e-scouting and then block off sections I want to scout with boots on the ground.
Exactly! That's how ghost stories happen. Figure out where the deer are going to be, not where they are early season. People get pics in random spots and then chase ghosts all season because they rely on cameras too much. Ask me how I know....I've made that mistake when I first got cams.Yes, but after finding him before the season, I knew he was around, so I was monitoring the cameras that I moved into his area to see where he’d show up.
So yes, good area , but If during preseason camera work/scouting I wasn’t able to locate a good deer there, I would have X’d that area off.
Find the deer first, then set up cameras in areas nearby, that that deer will likely use, before he moves into them.
big mistake IMO is people chase pics.. once you know he’s in that area, start developing plans for in season and different scenarios. Use cameras to validate.
I enjoy it either wayYou're learning things rapidly and having fun at the same time. That's a good place to be.