Hunting The Adirondacks

Discuss deer hunting tactics, Deer behavior. Post your Hunting Stories, Pictures, and Questions/Answers.
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northeast beast
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Re: Hunting The Adirondacks

Unread postby northeast beast » Sat Feb 17, 2018 4:40 pm

:think: this thread has got me thinking about hunting up there. I went bear hunting when I was in college during early season...no bears but I was amazed by the amount of wilderness and some of the back roads up there. I give you guys a lot of credit who say your packing in and then hunting from base camp. I've spent enough time up there camping to know how cold it can be sleeping in a tent. That time of year really proves how mentally tuff and prepared you must be....great stories guys! Congrats to all those bucks posted


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ghoasthunter
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Re: Hunting The Adirondacks

Unread postby ghoasthunter » Mon Feb 19, 2018 3:37 am

northeast beast wrote::think: this thread has got me thinking about hunting up there. I went bear hunting when I was in college during early season...no bears but I was amazed by the amount of wilderness and some of the back roads up there. I give you guys a lot of credit who say your packing in and then hunting from base camp. I've spent enough time up there camping to know how cold it can be sleeping in a tent. That time of year really proves how mentally tuff and prepared you must be....great stories guys! Congrats to all those bucks posted

from what I see over the years with new guys joining camp is you have to be mentally positive if you are positive you will succeed just like the deer when it snows your covered in snow when its raining your wet your legs are shot your uncomfortable and mentally drained but you just push threw it and keep going. one negative person in the group can turn the whole hunt upside down. being creative helps last time I was up there we had hundreds of mice at camp what can you do well... take a small sapling bend it over then create a trigger mechanism with a stick and rope lash a piece of birch bark on the sapling and put some bait on it when that mouse comes into camp and takes the bait you launch him back down the hill :lol: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noA9HPg ... 78Ra-&t=0s hear is a good podcast on wilderness hunting partners that cracks me up.
THE MOST IMPORTANT TOOL A HUNTER HAS IS BETWEEN HIS SHOULDERS
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Ognennyy
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Re: Hunting The Adirondacks

Unread postby Ognennyy » Thu Jun 07, 2018 12:38 am

Jcol6268 wrote:<snip>What I’ve picked up from my groups two generations of successfully hunting the dacks is pretty simple. There are miles of untouched land that’s almost void of deer sign. It seems the deer sign is scattered in pockets. Find pockets of deer sign to help your success. No sign move on. The deer sign however will be around hill country and water. Water is the biggest thing, find a hill with a creek at the base or a beaver pond and you have something good!<snip>


I dug up this thread to link to another member and wow, there are many good posts here that I never saw. This post in combination with viewtopic.php?f=3&t=44778 - a wealth of information on ground hunting - are really getting me fired up. Season is around the corner. 12 weeks or so and I leave for CO elk hunt, and I'll return just in time for the NY northern zone bear opener, and then it's deer time baby!!

Anyway, that tip about looking near water is interesting. Until now when I read it I had never put much thought into it, but my experience in the Adirondacks confirms this. I frequently find tracks crossing small streams. I suppose they like to get a drink on their way out for the evening, or on their way back to bed in the morning. If you wanted to draw a parallel from agg country hunting to Dacks hunting, for as much as that's possible, beaver meadows and marshes seem to function like farm fields. Because of the increased exposure of sunlight at ground level in these areas they are like destination food sources. I guess the edges of a lake could be the same, though I have never hunted or scouted near any.

And speaking of keys to unlocking hunting bucks in the big Adirondack woods; mast producing trees. If you can find isolated mature beeches in a sea of birch / cherry / conifers, those beeches will be a draw to deer and bear alike. Whether these isolated patches are themselves the destination, or just enough of a draw for the animals to stop on their where elsewhere, I don't yet have enough experience to say.

If isolated patches of beech are good for hunting albeit rare, then oak trees are like unicorns. The foresters of the NY state department of conservation do not require logging contractors to replant the species of tree they have just cut down. Beeches are far more suited for growth in the acidic, heavy clay soil of the Adirondacks than oaks are, and handily outcompete any oak saplings that might be growing in the new sunlight of a recently logged area. The result; Oaks are like unicorns anywhere in the Adirondacks that has been logged in the last 100 years (probably 90% of the land that is accessible within a 2 mile walk), and in general oaks are being extirpated from the Adirondacks. But I'll save that soap box rant for another thread ;)

I have never, ever seen a white or chestnut oak. I do see occasional immature or semi-mature red oaks that must have been only saplings when the loggers came through. I haven't spent enough time observing yet to know if they are mature enough to produce acorns. If they do that would be another food source that could be hunted for what it is.

Obviously these are not the only food sources up in the woods, even if they're the major ones. Something else I want to check out are freshly (read; within the last 4 years) logged areas. I'll bet those hold a lot of deer. But for the areas where there hasn't been recent logging, I like to walk along tracks that I find and look around at the plants on either side of the track. Sometimes the deer walk where they do for reasons of security and cover, but I think sometimes they walk where they do because there are plants they like to eat in the area. My woodsmanship is nowhere near where it needs to be in order to be an efficient hunter in the Adirondack environment. But one plant I know they like to nibble is wintergreen. I wonder if there are patches of small deciduous plant growth concentrated in one area significant enough to be destination food sources up there?

What have you guys observed?


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