The Whitetail Underground

A number of years ago, my wife and I had located several decent whitetail bucks that were routinely feeding in the oat crop on one of our neighbor's fields. We watched the deer through the summer and early fall, trying to figure out how to get a crack at them when rifle season opened.

Our biggest problem was that the quarter section was completely under cultivation and lacked any meaningful cover. The deer were bedding on an adjacent quarter section of land that featured heavy timber, but, unfortunately, the owners did not allow hunting. This left us with no place to put up a tree stand.

Our neighbor would have allowed us to erect an elevated blind, but he didn't want a permanent structure in his field, and I really couldn't see spending the money to build a portable elevated blind to hunt that one field. I also wanted to avoid attracting attention to the area. Erecting a tower blind is like posting a sign along the road that screams, "Someone has seen a good buck here!"

There were old burn piles at several spots in the field, places where the landowner had piled and burned the tree roots years ago when the land was originally cleared. These provided an ideal location for some kind of stand, and although our neighbor didn't hunt big game, he did like to hunt geese when he had finished the fall harvest. That gave me an idea.

Pit blinds are routinely used for geese, so why wouldn't they work for hunting deer in this situation? I approached the neighbor with the idea of digging a pit blind in the middle of one of the burn piles. It wouldn't interfere with his farming practices, and we could both use it to hunt during the fall.

The blind worked like a charm, and my wife used it to take her first whitetail buck on a cold evening in late November. She watched the buck saunter slowly out of the bush and work its way into the middle of the field, less than 100 yards from the pit blind. One well-placed shot and she was calling me on the cell phone to help drag her buck out of the field.

Since then I have used pit blinds on a number of occasions to hide in places that, for one reason or another, precluded the use of conventional tree stands, tower blinds or shooting boxes. While I don't particularly enjoy digging holes, I will do it if it is the only way I believe I can successfully hunt a certain area.

Big deer are where you find them, and it is often difficult to locate a tree that is large enough, stable enough and situated in the right spot for a tree stand. Tower blinds are always an option, but they are usually permanent fixtures, and not all landowners are going to be receptive to their use.

Commercially made portable tower blinds are an option, but most of us can't afford to have several of them lying around. You could also build such a contraption, but homemade versions tend to be heavy and cumbersome to move.

Elevated stands stick out like a sore thumb if you are hunting in really open country, and in hilly terrain this problem is compounded when the stand is positioned on high ground where it is silhouetted and visible from miles away. Most game will soon learn to ignore the presence of a permanent stand or shooting box, but I have seen big whitetail bucks that never fully accepted these structures and always detoured around them at a safe distance.

A pit blind, on the other hand, can be built on high ground, in the side of a steep hill or out in the middle of a field. There are few situations where a pit cannot be used as a viable alternative to a conventional stand.