Turn Up the Heat

Four heavily used trails dropped down off the bedding ridges on either side and met at a low spot in the ditch at the bottom of the ravine. When my friend Dan saw the spot, he instantly fell in love with it. The first time he hunted this awesome funnel, deer were everywhere. In fact, if he'd been looking in the right direction when the big eight-pointer slipped in behind him, Dan's season would have ended on the first morning, and he would have never learned a valuable lesson.

Excited by the close encounter with the big eight-pointer, Dan hunted the stand three out of the next five mornings. Each time he saw fewer deer until, by the fourth morning, he saw nothing at all. That's when Dan started hunting other locations nearby, but even they produced little activity. Halfway through his two-week hunting vacation my friend was quickly running out of options--and hope.

Dan made a common mistake: he hunted his best area first. Being in a ravine, the stand was in a sensitive spot to begin with--a spot where the winds always swirl. Then Dan compounded his mistake by repeating it several more times. Right from the start, Dan burned out the center of his hunting area.

It's easy to educate deer without even knowing it. Not only will deer react to seeing, smelling or hearing you in the woods, they can also smell your scent on the ground and on low brush. Once they know they're being hunted, deer become much more difficult targets.

It doesn't matter where the stand is located, if you hunt it repeatedly you're going to burn it out eventually. What is most important to consider is the affect this has on your overall hunting area. If the spot you excessively hunt is one that most of the local deer pass through (as are most hunters' favorite stands) you've essentially torched your entire hunting area. It is far better to save such areas until the last few days of your rut-hunting vacation.

The best strategy is to turn up the heat slowly. You can boil a frog in an open kettle if you slowly increase the heat--or so I've been told. The same goes for a big whitetail. By applying pressure slowly and in stages you fill your tag before the buck even realizes he's being hunted.

This approach is different from the one my friend Dan used. Dan learned that he should have started hunting stands located near the fringes of the high activity area, rather than right in the heart of it. He could have hunted several such locations for the first week (enjoying reasonable action at each of them) before edging in closer to the bedding and funnel areas.