BigWoodsME6 wrote:Ognennyy wrote:BigWoodsME6 wrote:I have been reading back through some of your linked posts and posts in this thread because it seems you hunt areas most similar to the ones I hunt when I get into the bigger woods around my area. I have read a lot about still hunting because I like staying on my feet and seeing different country so what you have written about is right up my alley. With that I have not had any success still hunting so far other than the random tail/flag bounding away or hearing some crashing on the other side of a thicket. I'm curious to hear more about how you travel around in the woods and how much mileage you cover in a typical day of still hunting. I'm sure this varies depending on the piece of woods but I'm having trouble figuring out when to move through certain sections and when to slow to a crawl. I'm guessing you have spots in areas picked out and you don't waste any time getting to those particular "hard edges" or terrain types to slow down unless you see something worth slowing down for?
I don't just still-hunt random areas anymore because I now have enough experience in several areas that I can take a moderately educated guess at where deer might be on a given day. Personally when I still-hunt I have two gears. 1) Suspicion confirmation gear (aka "finding the deer"), and 2) Suspicion confirmed gear (aka "hunting the deer"), usually in that order.
An easy example would be a beech ridge that back in July I scouted and saw a lot of nuts growing on the trees. Maybe I also had identified and scouted several small, flatter bench-type areas on that ridge that I feel would be suitable for bedding for does and bucks alike. Fast forward to September 28th, bow season opener. It's a little breezy so I decide I'll still hunt that day.
Suspicion confirmation gear (aka "finding the deer"): At this point I'm just not mentally committed enough yet to slow down and play Rambo. I'm working on a suspicion and until I confirm that suspicion there's not enough payoff potential for me to put that kind of effort into pretending like I'm a panther. I will leave my car and walk as fast as I can while being relatively stealthy and not sweating too much. If there are any terrain funnels around that I think deer would have to use to get in and out of the ridge I'll quickly check them for potentially easy confirmation of animals using the area. If there are no funnels that I know of then I'll just go straight to the beeches and start looking for deer sign. I'm really covering ground quick while I'm doing this, and yes I have spooked deer doing this but that's just how it goes. If I don't find any reason to believe there might be deer there, then clearly slowing down to hunting speed is pointless. As a side note, that would never be the case with loaded beech trees in NY's Adirondacks. If you have beech nuts, there
will be deer and bear there. So probably we should pretend like I'm talking a red oak ridge instead.
But sometimes turns out my scouting panned out and I find recent sign of deer, a reason to believe
there are deer right here, right now, somewhere nearby. Now my suspicions have been confirmed and it's time to slow way down to hunting speed and move toward those areas that I think might be good bedding. And I don't move toward them quickly, I'm slowed down at this point because bedding in the big woods is so random anyway.
How slow is slow enough? I won't launch into an explanation of how to still-hunt. There are a number of youtube videos that do a good job of demonstrating. But experience will definitely show you how to move when still-hunting close to bedded deer.
Really the point to take away here though is that you could be so stealthy that not a single creature in the woods knew you were there. And know what? That level of stealth does you no good if there isn't a deer within a mile.
All of this makes perfect sense to me. The hardest part of hunting the big woods where I have been hunting this fall is finding the likely bedding for the deer. They obviously have plenty of options in big woods settings to lay down. That's not to say that they won't have preferred areas for bedding but I think the bedding theories that are shared here at the beast are a good start. Going to have to try them out more seriously in coming seasons and see what I can find.
Next week it looks like we are getting some snow so I will probably be out that weekend putting some miles on if it doesn't get too deep. Hoping to get some ideas on bedding tendencies or finding some good travel corridors to work through and focus on. Bought a couple more cameras to try out as well.
I feel maybe I owe a little clarity on why I chose to guess at and go to as goals / destinations for my still hunts the bedding areas in and around the beech ridge in my example above. That example I provided was something I actually did earlier this fall. The reality is that the deer were not on that ridge, at least not the part that I went to. The beech nuts I thought I saw growing turned out to be the fake nuts that the trees sometimes produce, like empty husks, and using my binoculars from the ground in July I was fooled. To be fair I didn't even know that beeches drop fake nuts until this year when I was perplexed by the absence of deer and bear sign on that particular hunt.
That was a hunt I went on opening weekend of archery season, September 27. And I'll caveat this with saying that I've never filled my early season bow tag hunting up in the big woods. My strategy has always revolved around getting close to where the deer are bedded because I know at that time of year neither bucks nor the does are moving far from their beds in the daylight. This thread seems to revolve a bit more around gun hunting during the rut so probably I could've chosen a better example than an early season still hunting experience.
Exo I think we're several thousand miles apart but oddly enough I've seen the same thing as you with respect to where I find bedded deer. A few weeks ago I went up to a friend's hunting camp and we hunted this general area in the picture for a few days in a row. We had a few inches of snow so it was very easy to see what the deer were up to. I drew blue lines in to represent streams that for whatever reason didn't show up on the topo map. I found a lot of deer sign, and bedded deer, in the red circles. So both the ones on the left are what you've described, bedding along the sides of the drainage ditch leading up and out of the stream bed. The one up top on the right is just classic bedding on a bench, and I do also commonly find that in the Adirondacks.
I found the bedding on the sides of drainages a very strange one, and I can't understand why the deer do it. The reason I was there and found the sign and beds was because it was easy to still hunt. The stream covers a lot of your noise. In spite of the disadvantage of not being able to hear approaching predators the deer seem to gravitate there. I mean sure there's a thermal advantage but it just seems to me like they're still very vulnerable to a sneaky predator.
I've found that the advice SingingBridge gave me (stop thinking about "primary beds" or specific beds all together and instead think about general areas where deer like to bed down) was spot on. And as several people have pointed out in this thread, it's a big plus for still hunting the big woods.
"Along the sides of ditches leading up out of drainages" is one of those types of areas.
- Another general area is any area of elevation that faces South, or mostly South, on brisk, cold, high pressure blue sky sunny mornings. The deer like hanging out there to warm up in the sun, and man it's amazing how good that sun feels on a cold morning like that.
- As mentioned above benches, or any area that is flatter relative to the surrounding terrain. This seems to not be favored during bad weather.
- Speaking of bad weather and especially late season snow, as certain as death and taxes I find deer in predominantly conifer covered areas when it's snowing. Usually in cold weather in general I find bedding in evergreen areas, but from what I've observed it's better if they're young, thick conifer stands (like spruce) for extreme cold weather. Any evergreens seem to pull deer in during snow, or any major precipitation event in the late season.
- The downwind side of high stem count areas, areas with thicker brush. Bridge mentioned this one for locating bedded bucks. I mentioned earlier I found two buck beds in such an area years ago. Since then I haven't looked for or found any more buck beds, but I have observed does also bedding in areas like this several times since.
I killed a buck a few seasons ago in the second week of November up in the 'Dacks. Technically, this is part of a state forest that borders the Adirondack preserve. It had snowed about 6-8" the day before, and then warmed up a bit the following morning and turned to driving sleet and hail. Knowing there was an isolated patch of conifers located right in a hybrid drainage / saddle / low-lying bench feature, with an old logging cut directly to the East, I decided to go check it out. I approached from the South, immediately caught tracks in and around the conifers, and started still-hunting along them. Figured they would take me straight to deer. Fifteen minutes into that hunt a doe came down from the ridge to the West with a buck in tow. I shot at and missed the buck, but connected on another buck that came through five minutes after that.
I'm not sure where they were coming from. I never did backtrack to verify that, but I do know there is more recent logging further to the West just out of my screenshot. Also you can see in the screenshot there are more conifers over that way. A third mention is that they were coming down off that ridge that rises up out of the drainage in the middle / North of the picture. Obviously logging will draw deer, the conifers will draw them during bad weather, and Exo's pointed out the bedding on the sides of drainages. They were clearly headed to the conifers, or the cut further to the East, but it's a safe bet either way they would've bedded in the conifers eventually. The conifers I did scout before packing my deer out, and did find several beds both in the conifers and also on South (downwind) edge of them.
Red star is where I the first buck and doe came through. I never moved from that spot and killed my buck five minutes later. He was scent trailing the obviously hot doe.
Purple line is deer travel. They came down off the ridge but beyond that is just my guess. Purple line to the East of the kill sight is also a guess beyond where I saw the doe and buck run when I missed my first shot.
