Knowing only what I have experienced in my quest for mature deer, I think less pressure is the highest of roles in developing mature deer.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
So, I kinda touched on pressure a bit in the post. I think there are two ways to look at pressure. Sheppard lays it out this way:
Access to quality whitetail habitat
Hunting where pressure is light
Hunting in the right spot
Those 3 ideas kinda overlap, right? I've tried to meditate and reflect on them and really understand what each simple little phrase means. This is my interpretation.
Access to quality whitetail habitat mainly revolves around being able to hunt where nutrition is readily available (satisfies a deer desire to eat and procreate successfully) and where hunting pressure (predation) is not (satisfies their desire to not be eaten). The general absence of human predators is one type of pressure.
But, with any area, and especially with a public one, there is never a complete absence of the human predator. Every property has "hot spots" of human activity. This is in my mind the type of pressure that falls into Dr. Sheppard's number two spot on the list.
My lease, for example, does not get much hunting pressure at all compared to some local public. Just me and my dad. He hunts it maybe two or 3 times a month during season, and I try not to hunt it except for opening weekend of archery and during the rut. So it's unpressured in the macro sense. But, my dad rotates basically between 2 stand locations 99% of the time. He sees deer, because he is in quality whitetail habitat. But, I have killed 4 rack bucks on the property to his 2, despite hunting less. That's not a large sample size, and it could very well be a chance situation. But I generally make a point out of never hunting the same area more than once or maybe twice per season, and I frequently choose my spots in areas just out of sight of where he is hunting. I have witnessed the deer avoiding his stands and looking at them even when empty as people like Eberhart describe, despite the fact that they do not get pounded every weekend. I try to hunt around those hotspots of activity, and am therefore hunting where the pressure is light.
Another tract I've had success on is the 500 acres with the 40 that are worth hunting. That general area, looking at the several square miles total in the block of timber that is surrounded by development of communities on one side and river on the other, is quality whitetail habitat on the whole. The 500 acres of public is largely high pressure. Not just deer hunters, but fishermen, small game hunters, and kids with stolen condoms and bud lite. The 40 acres worth hunting is split into 2 general areas, both slight high ground covered in palmettos and surrounded entirely by the kinda swamp you usually need chest waders to get through. If I am on that island, I am hunting where the pressure is light.
And finally, last year I hunted a WMA with a rifle every 40 acres. I was still hunting a small SMZ that required access by wading along a small creek. I heard more deer and hogs than I saw because it was so thick, but I had encounters every day. Up on the treeline across the clearcut I was in the middle of, there were orange hats every few hundred yards. I shot 2 hogs, and played cat and mouse with a nice-looking buck I only got glimpses of. I was hunting where the pressure was light.
Eberhart and Infalt both say that there are generally mature deer on every piece of property, and that you can find them if you hunt the way they do. The cynic in me thinks there's a bit of salesmanship going on there, but it's probably mostly true. Maybe not bedded on the property and using it as a core area, but at least passing through during the rut or some other seasonal occurrence. Deer are present almost everywhere in the eastern half of the US. Golf courses, flower beds, behind shopping centers, you name it. But they have a knack for "filling the holes" and squeezing in and living in areas where we don't notice them as much. I'm a firm believer that deer learn acceptable travel routes and bedding locales from first their mother and sometimes grandmother as part of the maternal herds, and then a buck gets some "college" experience running with the older bucks in bachelor groups.
TLDR, quality whitetail habitat has relatively little hunting pressure. But even on that habitat, deer will avoid areas with comparatively high hunting pressure and slink around in the low pressure areas. High and low pressure is relative.
I think we talk a bit more about finding low pressure spots than we do about quality whitetail habitat. Most of us try to stay away from other stands, ribbons, etc. But I would encourage people to look at pressure at the "next level." Don't think, "Oh, most of THOSE hunters would never go there. But ME, I am a REAL hunter and I can access it." Look at the map and ask yourself where have YOU not been? Where do you not want to go? Where is it "impossible" to get to? Or maybe it's not that it's inaccessible, maybe it's just you've been hunting there for years and had luck elsewhere and just never been there. Maybe it's where the game warden parks, or it's a clearcut in plain view of the interstate. Maybe you scouted it during the summer and it was a ghost town, but did you see what it looked like the day after season ended?
Just avoiding the Fudds is smooth-brain tactics. There are capable hunters hunting your area who do not leave sign of their activities. There's a retired old man who hunts it every Wednesday and knows it like his garage shed. Or, quite possibly, another member of this forum who reads the same books and threads and watches the same podcasts. THAT's the guy's you're competing with. They're the ones putting meaningful pressure on the herd. If you can learn to "hide from yourself" on public land, that's wrinkle-brain stuff.
In my mind, once you've found the best habitat you have access to, and you've located the low-pressure islands inside it, you then seal the deal with items 3 and 4 on the list. "Hunting in the right place," and "hunting when the conditions are good."
Again, this is all really simple stuff, and a lot of us I suspect have internalized it. But I think there's value in hammering home the basics and really understanding them. If you understand ground truths and first principles, you can handle other information more intelligently, weed out the BS, and adapt your technique to different circumstances. You don't need someone to tell you how to hunt piney woods vs hardwoods vs marsh vs agriculture if you really grasp the basics and are capable of covering ground and making sits with your eyes wide open.
