mainebowhunter wrote:I see a lot of these guys are no longer around...
AN pops up here and there still I think. He never was an every day guy anywhere. Some of the greatest info is buried back there in 2010, 11 threads. Good to see others reading them
Nicholas buck wrote:This thread seems to have a ton of great information from AN, but almost all of the pictures do not show up anymore. Is it possible to add the missing pictures??
Great to see some of these old threads get bumped, this is an awesome one. In regard to the photos, don't know for sure but AN probably deleted them on purpose after a short time like many folks do, just cuts down on the likelihood of them getting misappropriated and floating around the internet. I delete some after awhile too, wish I had gotten rid of some sooner here and there but oh well its not the end of the world. I know it makes old threads harder to read, sorry for that. Its a balance between privacy and sharing something at least for a short time.
I remember reading this in about 2012 and starting to think. I realized this thermal hub concept explained a lot of buck staging behavior I was seeing in the pre-rut. Its not just something mountain deer do. It was something I had been observing, just wasn't sure why. Since then I have been able to capitalize on bucks staging around thermal hub locations several times....the original example AN posted is about as good of an example as a person can have. The set up is definitely tricky in terms of air currents and entry/exit. I would add, big bucks are only going to drop down to those low areas in daylight if the area seems secure. If there is much human intrusion down there at all, mature bucks won't expose themselves to the risk but if the thermal hub is an area that sees very little hunter activity, you can see daylight movement.