It’s that time of year again, where we hunters wage war on our woods, fields, and brush lots. Management of your hunting area has its time and place, and that’s now.
I love deer hunting, but dread this time of year. This is when all the hard work and planning gets done in preparation for the upcoming season. There are a plethora of tasks to complete that will up your odds of having a successful season. Managing your trail systems and placing stands and blinds are likely at the top of the list for most. Food plots for late season plantings should be winding down and the focus should be on setting up places of ambush. The weather, wind, time of season, and available food should direct you to the perfect stand site, but being able to adapt will make all the difference.
As stated before, this is the time of year when I get swamped. I had intended on writing my column on different topic all together, but ended up sidetracked by another. I’m in the middle of setting up nearly 1000 acres to be hunted this season. I thought it would be a good idea to explain what I do to set up a property that I have never hunted before. If you organize and plan properly, you can save yourself a lot of time and effort.
I would recommend starting with inside information and locating someone with a little knowledge of the property. Ask where they regularly see deer enter and leave an area, or try and find out where the most deer are seen on the property. You may be as lucky as I have been and have a landowner that can show you what tree to hang a stand in. This can save you a lot of leg work and help you familiarize yourself with the area. If you aren’t as lucky as I have been, I recommend looking at maps or photos that show the terrain from the air.
Once you have got an idea on the lay of the land, you should have been able to locate the typical high traffic areas. I focus on pinch points, where the land features cause the deer to be funneled into an exact location. These can be found in areas where hedge rows connect large adjoining parcels of land, on the border of streams, ponds, and lakes, or where high ridges or cliffs leave the animals no other choice than to pass there. It’s now time to hit the woods.
It’s important to enter the property with a game plan, and to shoot deer isn’t in-depth enough. You need to strategize where you would like to enter the property. This may mean cutting in trails or cleaning out a stream bed to grant you easy access into your stand sites. Remember to use a compass and choose routes that complement the most common prevailing wind in the area. If the deer smell you on your way in, the game’s already over, so careful planning as to where your trails go is of utmost importance. I like to take pieces of surveyors tape and mark where I think I would like trails to go. I make them easily removable, just in case I need to make a quick change. Once I have the trail marked, it’s time to break out the machete and chainsaw. Remember to save all the tree tops and pile them together to be used later as ground blind cover. Then run them down with the brush hog and get ready. The deer tend to use the trails you cut as early as the first night, so you can also cut them to pass by a prefect stand tree.
After establishing quick entry and perimeter trail systems, I like to connect as many of them as possible. This creates many ways into stand sites and helps you combat the wind. It’s now time to pick fixed and climber stand locations, along with brush, popup, and box blind sites. I have adopted a new stand site strategy that makes them more flexible. I pick a spot for a fixed position stand that has heavy trail systems close by. I then build ground blinds around the stand and finally, remove the unwanted limbs and mark all climber stand trees. Bombing out a property with stand sites will enable you to hunt the area under different wind directions and gives you a Plan B if it happens to change.
Well, back to work for me. Another half mile of briers to cut and it’s on to carpet bombing another woodlot with more blinds and stands. Get out now and be out of the woods by the first of September if you are a bow hunter. Sufficient time is needed for the deer to relax after all the human presence in their backyard.
Good wishes and get out now before it’s too late.