LoadedLimbs
Well-Known Member
@Nutterbuster - Thank you for the recommendations and thoughtful reply. Funny how "access to quality whitetail habitat" engenders a philosophical discussion on time, resource allocation, and social skills, but they are in fact essential to gaining that access....The first option people come to is public land. On public land, it's been my experience that you're paying in time instead of money to find the good property. You basically find the lowest-pressure spots on the best pieces of land, and accept that you're probably not going to have the success Dr. Sheppard has, but you'll impress the heck out of most of the other guys who are hunting public. This whole thread has mostly been about finding the best place to hunt on public. Once you find the best parcel, you find the lowest pressure spots, and then within those spots you find the right terrain/resource features, you figure out when they're being utilized the hardest, and then you hunt them at that time and hope nobody else is playing your game there. The more spots you devote time to finding, the better your chances of being successful.
...Knocking on doors to gain access to hunting property is, in my mind, for the birds. I sometimes wonder if Eberhart's advice on it isn't akin to my grandfather telling me I wasn't catching fish because I wasn't holding my mouth right, or telling me I could catch a bird if I put salt on its tail. Door-to-door is cold calling, and cold-call sales average a 1-3% success rate in the telemarketer world. People say they got turned down when they knocked on doors. No kidding! Did you knock on 33-100? Getting permission to hunt an area is easier when you're not going in cold. Have a social circle. Go to the family reunion. Go to church. Join a volunteer organization. Heck, go to one of the local saddle hunter getups! Cold calling has a 1-3% success rate, but a call after a referral or after the prospective customer sees and ad and requests a call has a 40% success rate. You tell me.
So, tldr, you need to either put in time, money, or societal value into one side of the equation before you can expect deer to pop out the other side. Figure out what you have the most of, and operate on that.
I agree with your sentiments on cold-call door-knocking for permission. Expect to get rejected ... ALOT. Decades ago, in my first few years of hunting with my father, I learned the importance of having an "in" with farmers and other property owners who could grant hunting access to their private property. Usually just getting a mutual acquaintance to do an introduction was a huge help. We would often just request permission for a day's hunt for small game, not for an entire season. After the landowner got to know us, gaining permission again, and for longer time periods, and for deer hunting, was a hundred times easier. My father also taught me the importance of thanking the landowner, offering them some of the harvest, offering to help with the chores (especially when the landowners were farmers), and remembering them at the holidays with a thoughtful card and gift to thank them for the privilege of hunting on their property.
Seems I'm going to have to put those lessons to use again in the present day if I want to gain access to prime, unpressured whitetail habitat.
It's been many, many years since I hunted PRIVATE property that wasn't part of a fish & game club. I'm a member of several local clubs. My clubs don't have too many hunting rules or regulations beyond the state regs and in my experience, they have hunting pressure just as high as public land. Land prices and property taxes in my area are prohibitive ... no way can I afford to buy a piece of land large enough to make a good deer management parcel ... not in my state!
That's why I'm noodling the idea of getting in on some existing deer hunting leases, or offering to start new leases with landowners in my area. I'm also thinking that branching out to hunt midwest whitetails would be a good use of my limited funds, but it's always a trade-off between time and money.
The focus of my time and resources needs to shift if I want to markedly improve my success as a whitetail hunter.