Tags
Choosing the Right set up- Reading Sign
Here is a little article my friend Dave Cianni from High Prairie lodge and Outfitters sent me
Choosing the right set is just as important as scouting. We here at High Prairie lodge find that set up is key to not only seeing big deer but taking big deer.
Whitetail, Mule deer, Elk and Antelope are all patternable and they all leave behind sign.
This will allow you to get in the right place and maybe even the right time. But will reading game sign help you chose the right spot? Yes, but its not the only tool you need to use while choosing a place to hang your treestand. Lets start with reading sign, and looking at whats important and whats not.
Scat: Presence of scat or droppings is not as important as concentration of scat, age of dropping is more important then abundance and scat in conjuction with other sign like beds etc. holds even more weight. Depending on time of year highly concertated droppings near beds or food sources probably means doe famillies and durring the rutt that means bucks will be trolling thos areas.
Tracks: paterning firection of deer tracks can give you insight of where the majority of game is traveling from. Following tracks from where they came more times then not can be more productive in locating a good stand sight then following to where they lead.
Wind: Wind is one of the most important things you need to figure out before you hang your stand. I like to hang two trail cameras in a potential stand site. I set one on the trail leading into the area. Then I hang another perpendicular to the trail. I then tie a feather to some fishing line and attach it so that it hangs in front of the camera in video mode with the sensor set on high, so that everytime the wind blows I get a 5 sec video of the feather and i can tell which way the wind is blowing. I can then correlate the wind with deer sighting. Plus I can even pattern the wind most trail camera have time date and temp stamps think about how much info you can get from this… I now know the direction the buck like to travel with, the wind direction, time of day, temp etc. You would be surprised on how very precise that big buck is when he uses that trail.
Now I know what tree to hunt for the wind and i know when, where and how the deer are using the area. good luck happy hunting
More tactics like this can be found at The Whitetail Hunter’s Blueprint