Sorry this is probably the longest post I've ever made. But the setup is my favorite parts of the game.
This could turn into an interesting topic. Obviously not all strategies will work everywhere. Lots of differences in heard pressure and landscape.
I'm sure the way I do it won't work for everyone or everywhere, but I can share what has put at least 1 good buck on the ground every year by one of our guys for the past 7 years. No, I don't kill one every year. At my place there are no assigned or claimed stands. We hunt them based on wind direction, camera Intel and gut feeling. But if a buck goes down at my place I take a bit of the credit.
Here is the disclaimer: many of the rules go out the window during rifle season. MO allows rifle hunting right smack dab in the middle of the rut. Between rutting activity and neighbor pressure any buck could come from any direction at any time.....so the hunting methods I describe apply to bow season.
I love hunting food plots and we do hunt them. For us, when and how you hunt is as important as where you hunt.
If you're one of those guys that loves to hunt and be in a stand this strategy won't be preferred.
No hunting until October 31. If mature bucks aren't pre rut and moving we won't stink up the stands.
No morning hunting. The way the farm lays makes it very difficult to not get busted by deer feeding in the dark.
The one exception is if a target buck is in a Summer pattern when early bow season comes in. In that case if the cameras tell us to go and the wind is right we hunt. Usually, its my brother and I. One of us hunts and the other is the driver. Very hard to get off a food plot at dark without blowing deer. The drivers job is to bring the side by side right out in the plot at dark and spook the deer. It turns out to be way less detrimental than a person getting out of tree with deer around.
We're fortunate that neighboring hunting pressure is very light on most of the surrounding lands during archery season. We do see mature buck cruising plots during the rut in daylight.
I'm in favor of picking at the edges until rifle season or the chase phase. (If that happens). The edge isn't necessarily the boundary of your property. I have set ups that blow scent onto my place were deer can smell us. We don't hunt theses spots and don't care if the deer avoid them.
I'd love to see examples of set ups and why you think they work. Here is one I posted recently in another thread. It is the edge of what we hunt but not the edge of the property.
Let see if I can explain the set up without being able to draw on the picture.
The green field that turns to a narrow trail through the timber heading west is clover. The tilled field in the east portion is beans and Rye.
The stand and camera are located in the group of cedars on the south side of the transition between both fields. If you look close you can see a fence on the north side of the transition. Fence goes into the woods a bit. The timber that comes to a point N of fence is edge feathered with trees piled up to discourage deer travel.
The round part of the clover field is also edge feathered so deer can only enter two spots or walk down the clover strip. It's basically set up so the deer moving from the clover to the beans leisurely stroll right by the camera/stand or they crawl through downed trees and blackberries. Most of the time they take the leisurely walk.
I don't know how old this pic is but what it doesn't show is on the south side of narrow clover strip in the timber is a large hinge cut area on a south slope. That's deer bedding. There's also smaller hinged pockets and areas left open for bucks to use. Deer typically move from west to east in the PM to feed or bump does. Hunting a W to NW wind puts them within 25 yards of the stand 90% of the time. Both my brother and I have taken our best bucks from this perch. One in early Sept and one mid November.
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