Deer Hunting Spot

Posted by John Stallone on 03/18/2010 in archery, hunting, shooting and outdoors | Leave a comment

So I get asked on a daily basis. how do i pick my deer hunting spots when I travel to a differnt state? Unfortunately it is not a simple answer, but I will give you some tips to help you develop a focus or a path that will lead you to deveolping your own system.

Its all about research and “scouting”! You have to start broad and work your way down to a more narrow selection that you will eventally have to scout.

I start with the obvisous: Gathering all the areas that are availble for me to hunt. A good source of these are WMA wildlife management areas, national forests, conservation land, and state land. Eliminate those parcels that are maybe not convient to get to, or that are too far. Group lnad areas together that close within an 1hr drive. Then Look at those parcels of land closely, see what you can find online. Often game and fish or the managing entity will have some type of summery report that lists habbitat, waterways, trails, burns, and even some of them will have animal populatins and herd desities, ratioss and concetrations.

Look for those areas that present good deer hunting characteristics, ( see my book the whitetail hunter’s blueprint for a more in dept look at what good dear habitat is) keep notes, or spread sheets. Choose a few differnt parameters that will help you judge if you have good deer habitat, like burns, habitat edges, deer ratios, densities etc. and rate those areas 1-10 in each parameter.
Then you should narrow it down based on your finding to 2 maybe 3 areas. Now you can begin looking at arial photos and topo maps to look for good deer traveling cooridoors, bedding areas, feeding etc.

Choose possible stand sites, points of interest potential congration areas for you to investigate. Mark them on a map or your GPS if you have one. Now you have the building blocks to devise a game plan that will save you time once you start scouting.

Scouting should be geared to the time of year you will be hunting, that way you can asess the sign you find properly. Distiguishing “good” sign from “bad” is very important. I cant tell you how many times i have seen or heard about a hunter sitting on a “hot” scrape for a week and not seeing anything. If you Would like to find out more about distiguishing sign Check out http://www.thehuntingblueprint.com/