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What to do When Your good Deer Hunting Stand has Gone Bad
You very carefully approach and exit your deer hunting tree stand or ground blind. You give great attention to the wind direction and scent cover, making sure you enter your deer hunting location with the wind in your face.
Days and weeks after being pursued, no matter how careful you are, smart deer and big bucks will realize they are being hunted.
By late season, even reliable deer hunting tree stand locations can stop producing fresh signs. Here is the good news. Studies have proven that pressured deer often shift their behaviors and patterns but stay in their home ranges.
Deer stands that go cold are a great reason to pull out your aerial maps to locate your deer hunting land’s most remote and rugged area with good cover. Read your map and scout for spot that might be challenging to access because of thick cover, rough terrain or a stream.
If the terrain is a challenge to get into…this is a location that could produce deer. The deer in easier terrain may be already taken or have felt the pressure and retreated to safe cover to survive.
Identify one or two tough-to-access locations in your hunting area which may be holding these later season deer.
Watch the wind and go in pre-dawn with the wind blowing the perfect direction to move your scent away from the deer. Sit up against a blow-down or thick tree. Don’t put up a ground blind or tree stand, because the noise and motion could easily scare the already alert deer.
Make sure to enter and leave this area as quietly as possible after staying for as long as you can.
Good Luck and Great Hunting!
Marty Prokop
Posted by Marty Prokop
