Why Hunting Whitetails From The Ground is a Good Idea

Most penitentiaries rely on metal bars and razor wire, but my personal prison has neither locks nor walls. It’s about 15 feet high and ratchet-strapped to the trunk of a handsome straight-grained tree. I’ve served years of involuntary custody in treestands over the course of a few days in October, and when confined to a climbing stand in the cold winds of December, I’ve endured multiple life sentences in a single numbing weekend.

My incarceration has nothing to do with the stand and everything to do with my disposition. I’m a wide-roamer, and in nearly every aspect of life, would prefer to make my own luck than wait for it to arrive. When stranded in a treestand, I’m distracted by the reality that it’s a tiny stationary point in an ocean of possibility, and I want nothing more than to sail that sea, to find the deer that aren’t moving past my island in the sky.

I hear the counter that treestanding is a more effective hunting tactic, but my evidence disputes that. Sure, in some places and situations, there’s no alternative. On small parcels of public land, where you don’t want to blunder into fellow hunters or blow deer out of the country, or over curated food plots, and in terrain where deer habitually use the same trail from bed to food, stands have their place.

Stands are wonderful when conditions are correct and unchanging. But when the wind switches, or the farmer cuts that cornfield or a coyote blows through the timber, stands leave hunters hanging, literally, and unable to adjust.

Higher Ground

Ground hunting lets you adapt to hyperlocal conditions and to move on deer that would otherwise drift out of consideration. Stalking allows you to select specific bucks, and when things go well, to make a more certain and ethical shot. Of course, the downside is that a blown stalk will alarm every deer in the township, and the reality is that stalking twitchy whitetails fails more often than it succeeds.

Lest you think I’m a closed-minded acrophobe, I’ve had my own flirtation with both treestands and ground blinds, enough to recognize that calculating all the variables of placement—prevailing winds, game trails, local hunting pressure, even angle of the setting sun—is more rewarding and pleasurable than actually sitting on and in one. I’ve even experimented with tree saddles—those flexible seats that hang precariously from ropes and carabiners—the way a college kid experiments with tattoos or piercings, enough to recognize they’re painful and trendy. And mainly ornamental. I’m convinced I’m a more deadly and successful hunter from the ground than hanging like a camouflaged piñata.

My aversion to sitting came early and naturally. I was a restless kid, strung a little tight for Sunday mornings on a pew. But my complaint with pastors has never been their message so much as their delivery. I’m less inclined to wait for the arrival of rapture—or tall-tined bucks—than I am to find them myself. Blame me, if you will, for a failure in belief, but for both godliness and whitetails, I’ve found that I learn more about myself, the deer I’m hunting and divine possibility when I hunt from the ground, with the freedom to respond to changing conditions.

But we’re talking about belief, among other things, and for nearly every other situation, I believe I can kill more and better whitetails from the ground than I can from the sky. In deer hunting, as in poker, belief collects a lot of bucks.

I further believe that over the past 40 years that we’ve been hunting from elevated stands, deer have come to associate trees with danger. They might not walk around with kinks in their necks from looking up, but they have learned to avoid sites with permanent stands.

Once, as the guest of an outfitter in celebrated Pike County, Illinois, I was told that if I came out of my treestand for any reason, even to jettison a portion of his magnum breakfast burrito, remote cameras would document my transgression and I’d be subject to both fine and ridicule. The only deer I saw were from a distance, and they were all staring right at my tree, conditioned to expect danger, and probably signs of intestinal distress, from that particular oak.

Ground School

Like our wide-eyed ape ancestors, you can’t come out of a tree and expect to make meat right away. If you are a confirmed sitter, you’ll have to learn to hunt all over again, to slow down, adjust to conditions, respond to cues and read whitetail behavior. But the high-stakes, heart-pounding approach to get into range of a hyper-aware whitetail, or moving unobserved so that a deer will walk right past you, is the pinnacle of big-game hunting in my book. It will awaken predatory instincts and teach you more about deer action and reaction than you can get in a lifetime aloft, watching the same acre of unchanging woods.

Here are four chapters of your ground-hunting tutorial. Expect to blow most of them, but each failed attempt will teach you something that will make you a better hunter, and hopefully more devout believer.

Read the Cover

Not every property lends itself to ground-hunting. A wide-open wheat field doesn’t have enough cover, just as a densely timbered hardwoods littered with crunchy leaves can make any movement futile. But whitetails love edges, and property that has a diversity of fences and fields, maybe a woodlot or some ratty cover, or a small brushy waterway, is perfect for ground-hunting.

Wind is everything in this game, and you’re going to want to keep the wind in your face or on either cheek. Get a good satellite map of the property and plan an approach remotely, considering prevailing winds. But when you get on the ground, understand that you’ll have to adjust your strategy to local wind conditions. A scentless wind-checker is an invaluable aid in ground stalking.

Damp conditions will muffle the sounds of your movement but, when accompanied by low atmospheric pressure, will also drive your scent into the ground. The worst conditions for stalking are swirling winds.

When you get on the ground, tuck into cover. Stay in cover, and consider cover for every move you’ll make. You’ll develop an expansive definition of cover, from tall grass to a stout corner post to a shallow depression in the ground from long-gone oak or homestead. Sometimes it’s a dense tangle of thorny raspberry or the rattling branches of willows or honeysuckle. Your specific property will reveal these little shreds of obscuring cover, and you’ll be surprised at how little you need once you get good at stalking.

Watch the Deer

You can go in blind to a property and kill a deer, but by far the better approach is to sit (in a stand, if you must) and watch how deer use the place. Do they move inside cover before coming into the open to feed? Are they marching through your property on their way somewhere else? Is there some key feature, like a rub or a licking branch or a particularly succulent plant, that attracts them? The best ground hunters anticipate deer behavior, so having an idea where they’re headed will put more bucks in range.

Seasonality drives everything. Deer movement will be vastly different in early September, when trees are leafed and fields are cropped, than in mid-November, when groceries are limited and the rut changes deer behavior.

Try not to look close-quarters deer in the eye. This probably sounds like witchcraft, but I believe that most prey species have a sixth sense about when they’re being observed by a predator, and I’ve found that by looking at a nearby deer’s feet, or the ground in front of it, that after a tense standoff, that deer will calm down and go about his or her business.

Use your optics. Especially in tight cover, a binocular that can focus to infinity is actually less useful than one that sharply focuses at middle distances, enabling you to parse antler beams from branches. And watch deer behavior. I’ve been alerted to a buck within spitting range because I realized that a hard-eyed doe wasn’t watching me, but rather the buck just beyond me.

Learn to Move Undetected

You’re going to get dirty if you’re stalking correctly. You’ll be on your hands and knees most of the time, and on your belly with your face planted in the mud at least some of the time. You want to become as small and insignificant as possible, using every shred of cover to hide your presence. Second to scent, movement blows most stalks, so you’ll learn to read deer, understanding when you can move, when you must freeze and how to sink out of sight.

This is a minimalist game. You don’t need a backpack to poke up when you’re crawling. Put everything you need in your pockets, and invest in a tight-fitting binocular harness that won’t flop around. Camouflage is useful to break up your outline. Handwarmers and clothes that will keep you comfortable when you’re sitting in the open will make you less fidgety. Cinch down all your wind-flapping straps and make yourself small. Calls—either grunt tubes or bleat cans—can work to bring deer to your location, so carry them in a handy pocket.

In my homeland, eastern Montana’s Milk River, crops are flood-irrigated, which means water is delivered by a series of ditches. I’ve learned to drop into these dry ditches, stay low and move right into bow-range of deer feeding on irrigated alfalfa. Use brushy fencelines the same way, or banks of streams and rivers, or even human developments like grain bins or parked equipment.

This game isn’t always played before an audience of hyper-aware deer. If you know where deer are headed from your scouting, and you can tuck yourself in a clump of cover hours before they move, then you win. Sure, it’s a lot like stand hunting from a tree, but using natural cover for a blind has been effective as long as humans have hunted from the ground.

Make the Shot

There’s a world of difference between getting in range undetected and making a shot on deer from the ground. Shooting requires some movement, whether drawing a bow or raising a rifle, and that final act often unravels your hours of tedious and careful approach. For rifle hunters, a bipod or shooting support is critical and deploying your crutch long before deer are in range is key to making meat. Bowhunters are doubly cursed by their in-your-face range and the physical act of drawing a bow. Take whatever range readings you need well before the shot, then wait until deer are distracted, moving or have their tails pointed your direction, which means their eyes are not pointed at you.

Bowhunters sometimes have to wait at full draw for several minutes for a whitetail to turn broadside or move into range. Easy-drawing compounds with big let-offs will kill more deer on the ground than those bows with monster draw weights that require contortions to pull and seasons of powerlifting to hold at draw.

When it works, when you can kill a whitetail from the ground at close range, then you’ll have done something that ties you back to our ancestors, long before we had lock-on ladders, full-body harnesses and climbing stands. The experience will liberate you from your 4-square-foot arboreal prison. But mainly, it will restore your belief in hunting as a fully participatory activity, accomplished under the sharp eyes and keen noses of trip-wire whitetails.

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