The Piled-High Club

[thedutchtouch]

If a given area has plenty of bedding/food/attractive habitat for deer, but it is is hunted heavily and a majority of the deer seen in a given year are killed, how long does it take for more/different deer to move in?wondering both about mature bucks and deer in general. And by "area" I mean a 1-2 square miles tops, surrounded by similar habitat with assumed similar/high deer densities, not wiping out deer in the entire wma/thousands of acres and expecting them to rebound quickly.

Somewhat related follow-up question- how often do you experienced hunters rotate areas/leave a property alone, is this more to decrease pressure on target bucks, or do you rotate hunting areas similarly to how farmers rotate crops? (And does this even matter on public if other hunters don't rotate/hammer it every year, I assume not?)

 

[Red Beard]

Time of day when you find hot sign is going to determine for me whether I go ahead and hunt or prep it for the next day. If it is late in the day then I will prolly drop a pin and get out of the area as quickly and quietly as I can and hopefully not booger it up for the next day. Otherwise, I am going to hang that day if it is fresh poop and the other boxes are checked. If you are hunting from the ground and have an hour of light left, I would make a hunt if there is cover to tuck into in range.

Oh now see... this info is pure gold. Thank you!

Do most others of the +100 club employ this same mindset?

 

[SNIPERBBB]

In the context of the same deer, I would advocate getting there earlier than an hour to give some margin of error. You wont know how long they've been at that spot before the dropped the deuces. Especially in feeding areas.

You can still hunt that spot regardless when the steamers were dropped as other deer could come through at a later time that day. Its a chess game that can drive you crazy.

 

[Horn]

Lot of context needed as to whether they are in feeding areas, bedding areas, or travel corridors.

Deer tend to circle. Fresher the sign, the longer it will be before they return obviously. So for that same deer, I would try to setup for that time of day tomorrow. Finding steamers in the morning, theres a good chance theyll come back in the evening. If you find droppings in ag areas, I would work back to cover unless you're using a long range gun because once they get into the open they tender to wander all over the place.

The circle starts and stops and bedding, right, loops out to food and comes back to the same bedding?

If undisturbed will the deer use that same bedding all year and just adjust the loops to suit food that's in season? I am thinking this is in vegetation that offers year round cover, a marsh or something.

Will they make a big multi-day loop with more than one bedding area?

How does wind change which loop they might take? Just a different route to the same food or go to different direction?

 

[SNIPERBBB]

Will they make a big multi-day loop with more than one bedding area?

Thats probably going to depend on your local area. Bedding areas here change throughout the year and with pressure and weather conditions.

 

[Red Beard]

So using the logic discussed in the last couple exchanges... the hottest sign for a hunter who got off work a little early and hit the woods at 1400 -but doesn't have an opportunity to hunt tomorrow or the rest of the week- might be a still wet-ish, but definitely not uber-fresh steaming pile of poop? Reason being deer will likely not return to the steaming fresh area for a given amount of time.

And I want to reiterate that I really appreciate yall weighing in on this topic as I think I've put a lot of faith in the "walk till the sign screams you have to climb a tree" mentality. And I've always taken that "hottest sign" as being you're-right-on-their-heels poop.

 

[Horn]

Yeah, thanks for your help everyone! You never know when one of these suggestions is the key piece that puts my next deer down

 

[BTaylor]

So using the logic discussed in the last couple exchanges... the hottest sign for a hunter who got off work a little early and hit the woods at 1400 -but doesn't have an opportunity to hunt tomorrow or the rest of the week- might be a still wet-ish, but definitely not uber-fresh steaming pile of poop? Reason being deer will likely not return to the steaming fresh area for a given amount of time.

And I want to reiterate that I really appreciate yall weighing in on this topic as I think I've put a lot of faith in the "walk till the sign screams you have to climb a tree" mentality. And I've always taken that "hottest sign" as being you're-right-on-their-heels poop.

I would say either are a good option for the exact scenario you presented there. For the spot with the still steaming, likely more than one deer coming to that tree anyway. So maybe one doesnt come back that afternoon, I'd still wait on the nutherins.

 

[dalton916]

Josh Driver, a guest on the southern outdoorsmen podcast phrased it the best way I have heard, eliminate the negative terrain. Think about it from the standpoint of what deer need and how they will get from one spot to another as well as when they might use an area. You might find a white oak with a lot of feed sign but if that tree is not close to cover, the odds start going down to see daylight activity there. Big areas of mature timber with little to no ground cover are the same. If there is not a mast tree dropping, there is no reason for a deer to be there in daylight, generally speaking. Then add to that looking at what terrain and/or vegetation features are going to influence where deer travel moving from bed to food and back and how bucks will move across the landscape checking does during pre-rut and rut. There are certainly spots in negative terrain where you can kill deer, the objective though is to focus on the highest odds spots of daylight movement that condense travel for the highest odds for a shot opportunity. If I am e-scouting, I am looking for hard edges, soft edges, and terrain features. Then when I am boots on the ground scouting, I am looking at all available food and deer level cover. The more features you can stack in a spot, the better it likely will be.

The spot I hunted this weekend was an area I have never hunted before on a WMA I hunted for a long time. I applied exactly this approach. This is big "flat" river bottoms. There were 3 parallel ridges (1.5' high ish) running NE to SW that junctioned into a N/S ridge. The "high" ground is narrow high stem count thickets and at the junction was a few big nutall oaks, a couple over cups and a giant water oak. The water oak and one nutall were the 2 primary feed trees. So in this spot there was hard mast, lots of browse, multiple soft edges and multiple terrain features but the two primary feed trees were 15-20 yards apart in a 50-60 yard area. I hung on the downwind side of the nutall. Friday I had 2 different 8's come through one moving NE to SW and the other on the N/S line both passed by inside 20 yards. For the trip I had 5 different shot opps on deer inside 20 just not the type deer I was after.

This is what I’m talking about when thanking @Nutterbuster for starting this thread. I could never have put it as well as you did because I’ve never thought of it this way. But, this is exactly what I’m talking about when I mention scouting terrain and edges. All the stuff you mentioned is what I’m looking for, but it’s out of habit therefore hard to condense it like you did.

I’ve hunted the same areas you’re talking about above and I had eliminated everything below a certain elevation/contour within minutes of setting foot on the property. I wound up seeing deer off and on within the eliminated areas but it was such a low percentage intercept that I noted their presence and moved on. Didn’t take long to find higher ground with river cane, greenbrier, some kind of tallish grass and oaks. Found two water oaks dropping like crazy in a line with several other oaks. The presence of these oaks created their own buffer between two thick areas and I was in the deer the rest of the week.

 

[bowhunthard88]

Following up on my poop theme here... I've always been confused about poop as an indicator of where deer WILL BE in the future. Historically for me, this "hot sign" I've heard so much about, has only been an indicator that I'm probably 10-20 minutes BEHIND a deer. How does one use fresh poop as an indicator predicting where those deer will be in the future? Or to put it another way, how does one effectively mentally process the information/situations below to effect a high percentage encounter?

A. I just walked up on steaming raisonettes under an oak in an oak flat. It is 1700 and the sun sets in 1 hour. Do I setup here? Will they be back before dark?

B. I just walked up on steaming raisonettes under an oak in an oak flat. It is 1400 and the sun sets in 4 hours. Do I setup here or continue walking? Will they be back before dark?

C. I just walked up on steaming raisonettes in a turnip field completely surrounded by woods. It is 0930. Do I setup here or continue walking?

@BTaylor brought up a good point. I am only concerned with getting on any available deer right now and not just a mature buck.

So for me (to shoot a freezer deer) the "raisonettes" on a food source that I'm planning on hunting must be: "fresh enough" within right-now-to-2-days-old, they must be there in some quantity (i.e. repeated visits), and they must be accompanied by some sort of feeding sign (rooting/scraping/browsing/etc.). I'm not saying that deer don't feed all day long, but my initial premise will be for morning until about 10am, and evening from about 3/4pm until dark. Mid-day, I'm gonna mark it and maybe return; mid-to-late afternoon, with the "right" sign, I'll sit for the evening. In all cases, I'm not basing the odds off of the fact that was "'A' deer 'just' here?" I'm going to hunt "deer(s)" not "A deer" unless we start talking bucks... Finding a good grove of oaks isn't too hard, but selecting the preferred tree(s) out of that grove will take some attention to detail. Additionally, plant ID knowledge absolutely helps.

This term "hot sign" gets thrown around a lot, and I'm personally not looking for my sign to necessarily be just short of breathing... I need to see sign fresh enough to prove current use of the area, I need to see enough sign to prove that the use is repeated, and I need to see the sort of sign that can be reasonably construed to have been laid during huntable times.

 

[bowhunthard88]

Pavlovian Conditioning is real. Sometimes you just get a "feeling" of when and where to stop and hunt. Previous experiences with deer, conditions, habitat/topography/flora, areas, and situations all combine to help make us the hunters we are. I'm not dissing bait hunters, but there is something more to actively hunting vs. waiting, although both absolutely take knowledge to do properly and effectively.

 

[Red Beard]

I need to see sign fresh enough to prove current use of the area, I need to see enough sign to prove that the use is repeated, and I need to see the sort of sign that can be reasonably construed to have been laid during huntable times.

I like this last bit. Thank you.

 

[dalton916]

@Red Beard

The first thing I do when I find poop is determine if there’s more. Deer tend to wander a bit so a single pile may mean nothing to me. Several piles gets my interest.

The second thing I do once I become interested in the poop is answer the question of “why” it’s there. Not normally hard to determine, sometimes very hard to determine. Look for disturbed ground as well. If you find a lot of both it’s time to check the wind again and get in a tree because there’s something there they really like. It may be acorns, it may be greenbrier, it may be buds, who knows, but there’s something and you really don’t need to know what it is that day.

That leads to my next point. Don’t spook deer you don’t want to shoot. Watch them. See where and what they’re eating. If you can’t figure it out from the tree go find out what it was at the first opportunity then remember what it was and the time of year.

 

[Horn]

@bowhunthard88 , can you tell me a little more about "rooting " seems self explanatory but this is the first I've heard of it. It sure does seem to fit with some sign I've seen, and just earlier today actually

 

[woodsdog2]

And I want to reiterate that I really appreciate yall weighing in on this topic as I think I've put a lot of faith in the "walk till the sign screams you have to climb a tree" mentality. And I've always taken that "hottest sign" as being you're-right-on-their-heels poop.

We have so much diversity of food and cover that trying to find the freshest sign around the dropping tree in a vast hardwoods full of mast can be daunting. Sure, I like to find fresh but I add another dimension to it, I like to see old, medium, fresh and super fresh and that tells me repeatability of use over time. You can tell an area where deer are using it constantly over time and areas where it’s occasional. Couple that with a terrain feature that forces movement and I’m prolly setting up.

 

[Red Beard]

Sure, I like to find fresh but I add another dimension to it, I like to see old, medium, fresh and super fresh and that tells me repeatability of use over time. You can tell an area where deer are using it constantly over time and areas where it’s occasional.

Ah yes. This is a good nugget also! Thank you.

 

[Red Beard]

This has turned into a REALLY informative conversation @Nutterbuster. Believe I've learned more here in a short amount of time than I have scanning many threads in the past. Thank you sir. I literally bookmarked it with the title "How to hunt"

 

[Nutterbuster]

Question for the PHC that came to me driving back from the store this evening.

I passed a field owned by a wing-shooting club. This field is maybe 2 miles from a WMA I hunt. They have a feeder on the field and burn their property, and I suspect plant a corner of the field with something tasty. Long and short, the place holds deer and the field is a feeding destination. It's cold and drizzly today. There were 7 deer out feeding in broad daylight. Usually, I use that location as a "barometer" of sorts. If I see deer out there, I'll make an extra effort to hit a stand. Couldn't sit tonight, but am tempted to make a quick sit tomorrow morning on the theory that the cold, wet front has deer stirring more than they were in 80 degree weather yesterday.

Do you or have you guys ever used a scenario like that to inform you that deer are moving and it's a good day for a sit?

 

[TreeCreep]

So for me (to shoot a freezer deer) the "raisonettes" on a food source that I'm planning on hunting must be: "fresh enough" within right-now-to-2-days-old, they must be there in some quantity (i.e. repeated visits), and they must be accompanied by some sort of feeding sign (rooting/scraping/browsing/etc.). I'm not saying that deer don't feed all day long, but my initial premise will be for morning until about 10am, and evening from about 3/4pm until dark. Mid-day, I'm gonna mark it and maybe return; mid-to-late afternoon, with the "right" sign, I'll sit for the evening. In all cases, I'm not basing the odds off of the fact that was "'A' deer 'just' here?" I'm going to hunt "deer(s)" not "A deer" unless we start talking bucks... Finding a good grove of oaks isn't too hard, but selecting the preferred tree(s) out of that grove will take some attention to detail. Additionally, plant ID knowledge absolutely helps.

This term "hot sign" gets thrown around a lot, and I'm personally not looking for my sign to necessarily be just short of breathing... I need to see sign fresh enough to prove current use of the area, I need to see enough sign to prove that the use is repeated, and I need to see the sort of sign that can be reasonably construed to have been laid during huntable times.

This thread has taken a topical turn as I am on a hell of a deer sighting drought, as fresher droppings coupled with other sign in an given area led me to choose a “higher probability” set up ( in a tree or on the ground.)
A . where there is condensed sign when would you back track to hunt it that day vs marking it for a future hunt with a favorable wind?
B. in wetter soil / swamp edges how are you aging tracks , with other sign as the whole picture, as the wet ground can make it look like a deer highway?
C. when post season scouting finds favorable sign for next year , how are you picking / timing your hunts or moving elsewhere after not seeing fresh enough sign to hunt it .
D.) first hunt best hunt and move on or revisit it ASAP and why

really great stuff . I love this site . good job @Red Beard nerding out on the poops.

 

[SNIPERBBB]

Question for the PHC that came to me driving back from the store this evening.

I passed a field owned by a wing-shooting club. This field is maybe 2 miles from a WMA I hunt. They have a feeder on the field and burn their property, and I suspect plant a corner of the field with something tasty. Long and short, the place holds deer and the field is a feeding destination. It's cold and drizzly today. There were 7 deer out feeding in broad daylight. Usually, I use that location as a "barometer" of sorts. If I see deer out there, I'll make an extra effort to hit a stand. Couldn't sit tonight, but am tempted to make a quick sit tomorrow morning on the theory that the cold, wet front has deer stirring more than they were in 80 degree weather yesterday.

Do you or have you guys ever used a scenario like that to inform you that deer are moving and it's a good day for a sit?

Got a lot of those spots .. unfortunately when I see them that means I'm working or doing something else lol. If I'm hunting that I wouldnt have a clue what those spots are doing.