Ok the recap from yesterday. I found FRESH buck sign in every single area circled. Over all I found 47 rubs, 5 scrapes as all the funnels were being used (fresh tracks). I jumped a ton of deer so I know the doe bedding areas as well. I also saw ZERO sign of other hunters in these areas.
Why is this important? Because gun season just got over and these are the areas the deer move towards during the hunting season. So many people go out and scout in pick areas based upon summertime patterns and then when the pressure starts with dove season and other things that bring people into the woods, the deer move to more secure areas.
I hung one camera over the best scrape to see if I can get some inventory before the horns drop. I selected two trees so far to prep.
In truth there was so much cover and so many great spots it would take several thorough scouting trips to cover this entire area. So my plan for this is the hang a couple cameras over those major creek crossings and set up 2 mineral licks to take inventory. I will focus tree prep on funnels. If I get something on film this year that I want to pursue then I will target them during the cruising phase in these tight funnels. Otherwise my plan is to take inventory for what I may be after the following year. I just do not know what's in the area so I'm not going to invest too much time until inventory tells me there's one there I want to hunt.
I put in over 8 miles waking through some really tough brush, crossed that creek to many times...... but as I suspected, I got away from other hunters and now have a pretty good idea of the bedding areas and travel routes. I could hunt this property effectively this year. The one thing I will say is there were so many smaller trees and it was so thick that I don't believe it would be easy to hunt going in blind. There's going to have to be prep work done in order to have shooting lanes in this kind of country.
I will make other videos when I go back in and set up the additional cameras, check the one over the scrape, put in the fake scrape and prep trees. I'll probably go back one more time to rescout some areas I had to cruise through to quickly where I found more sign but my phone was dead.