The 10 Worst Mistakes Bucks Won't Forgive You For

Backcountry bucks live in rough landscapes, in difficult terrain and in situations that pose significant challenges to deer hunters. One wrong step, and it can ruin an entire hunt, or even a season. Avoid making these mistakes. Bucks aren’t likely to overlook them.

1. Misunderstanding the Relationship Between Terrain, Topography and Deer Movement

Most backcountry whitetails live in areas with rolling, hilly or mountainous topography. In these places, the terrain impacts deer movement, and hunters must understand the relationship between these important variables. Fail to do that, and hunters make any number of blunders, including overlooking bedding areas, missing food sources, trudging through areas you shouldn’t, taking poor entry and exit routes and more.

2. Taking Poor Access Routes and Executing Subpar Entry and Exit Strategies

Regardless of terrain and topography, taking a bad access route is a problem. Entry and exit routes that allow deer to see, smell or hear approaching or departing hunters negatively impact current and future hunts.

Additionally, even when the access route itself is good, executing the approach or departure improperly can botch the entire effort. Hunters must make every effort to remain unseen, walk quietly, time the arrival and departure correctly and watch out for rogue deer that are uncharacteristically moving along your access path. If you encounter deer, hunker down and allow them to pass. Or think for a moment and take an alternate route to avoid alerting the deer.

3. Getting Too Close to or Too Far from Bedding Areas

Deer are crepuscular animals, meaning they move most at dawn and dusk. Oftentimes, outside of the rut, this means minimal daylight movement. Because of that, hunters who set up too far from daytime deer bedding areas risk not seeing deer, especially mature bucks. However, getting too close to bedding areas runs high risks of deer detecting you, which will certainly impact the hunt, and likely future hunts.

It’s crucial to strike a good balance between being too aggressive and not aggressive enough. Find the X, which is the spot most likely to produce a daylight encounter without spooking the deer you’re after.

Maybe that’s a staging area on the edge of a bedding area. Perhaps it’s a trail emergence that leads out of a bedding area but that offers a wall of visual cover in the form of cedar trees, allowing for an approach or departure without being seen. Whatever the case, good spots like these allow hunters to reach stand locations that produce good odds of daytime movement without high odds of alerting deer to human intrusion.

4. Poorly Executing Hang-and-Hunt Missions

One of the most popular mobile hunting tactics is the hang-and-hunt. Hunters who carry in their treestand or tree saddle gear and hang it the day of the hunt are improving their odds of success by making their first trip into an area the day they hunt. This contrasts with those who go in and hang treestands days or weeks before hunting.

While some anecdotal experiences suggest this is a good way to target mature bucks, it’s not for everyone. Hang-and-hunt missions require hunters to carry extensive gear, and oftentimes long distances. Furthermore, it demands silent operation. Hunters must be very knowledgeable of their treestand and other gear. They must hang these stands and settle their gear for the hunt, without clanking metal or making other unnatural sounds foreign to the forest. One poor move and it 
can send deer near and far packing.

5. Being Too Predictable in Your Plans

Oftentimes, deer are better at patterning hunters than hunters are at patterning deer. This occurs when hunters are too predictable in their hunt plans. Hunting the same spots too frequently and taking the same access routes can educate deer.

Instead, switch things up. Deer aren’t all-knowing, but they are very reactionary. One, two and especially a few missteps can alter how deer use the landscape. Some big deer are more forgiving than others, but it doesn’t take much to impact their use of the landscape.

6. Missing the Important but Small Details

Hunters who consistently kill big bucks focus on the details. The direction of travel in the last frame of a trail camera photo. The body language of a buck around other deer. The typical wind direction a deer prefers when bedding or the use of certain trails and food sources. These and many more 
are important.

7. Ignoring the Wind, and Not Benefitting from It

Ignoring the wind and just hunting can be detrimental to a hunt. This can lead to deer smelling you, whether it be non-target deer early in the hunt, or that big buck that’s last in line right at sunset. Always check forecasts and keep an eye on changing winds.

However, don’t go overboard and make it a hard-and-fast rule that you can only hunt with the wind in your face. That can be equally damaging to success. Mature deer oftentimes use the wind to their advantage. Meaning, they might travel with the wind in their nose, or with a crosswind, that allows them to smell danger along a certain area or tree line.

Knowing this, hunters can set up with a just-off wind direction. This is where the wind is mostly in the favor of deer, but it’s just off enough that deer shouldn’t smell the hunter. Maybe a lone tree offers a position to capitalize on the just-off wind, when deer are mostly focused on an area adjacent to it. Or, maybe something blocks the deer from getting directly downwind, such as a bluff, brush pile, sharp bend in the river, etc. Whatever the case, identify these opportunities and the odds of encountering (and killing) big deer increase significantly.

8. Waiting Too Long to Act on a Pattern

Whitetails live by long-, mid-, and short-term patterns. Certain elements of a buck’s life live within these three categories. Learning these is important.

Long-term patterns might be loose inhabitations of a general area, such as a large bedding area, food source, etc. Deer are in the general area for weeks or months, but their intricate, drilled-down movements might vary by day.

Mid-term patterns oftentimes last weeks, or slightly longer. It might be a seasonal bedding area, food source or water source. Furthermore, from a hunting perspective, these are more predictable movements that hunters can implement in a game plan. Whitetails follow these patterns with more regularity.

Lastly, short-term patterns tend to change daily, or every few days. Oftentimes, whitetails exact movements change day over day. From a zoomed-out (long-term or mid-term) perspective, it might not seem this way. But zoomed in, deer bed in slightly different spots, use slightly different trails, hit different food sources, etc. The minute details of deer movements change daily and it’s usually based on food sources, such as a white oak that’s dropping, high-protein plant that’s limited in volume but just peaked in attractiveness, wet-weather spring that opened more bedding cover and more.

Overall, hunters use long-term patterns to get in the game. They use short- and mid-term patterns to craft game plans and strike. Not operating from this mindset tends to lead to fewer opportunities.

9. Failing to Make Situationally Minded Decisions

Deer hunting is situational. Every hunt usually demands a slightly different approach. Each target buck requires a different set of tactics. The best deer hunters assess each situation independently, pull from their bank of knowledge and hunt accordingly. Not making situationally minded decisions usually hinders hunters.

10. Passing a Reasonable Shot Opportunity

Mature bucks don’t offer many shot opportunities. These sage, old deer have been playing the game for years, and they mess up infrequently. Quit waiting for the perfect shot opportunity, which isn’t likely to come. Instead, stay at the ready, take the first reasonable (but ethical) shot opportunity, and you’ll fill more deer tags.

Get Back Out There

As a hunter who’s made each of these mistakes and many more, success is still possible, even after a blunder. Get back out there and try again. There’s still time to get it right.

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