I am probably not wrong with the assumption that most hunters in America and here in Canada hunt on public land. Here in North America we’re extremely lucky to have so much public land available to hunt. No matter where you live you never have to drive far to access public hunting land. The downside of public land hunting is that you have a lot of competition from other hunters, and that means hunting educated deer that are masters at humiliating hunters. Many hunters are of the opinion that public land does not hold big mature bucks, but looking at the Pope &Young or Boone & Crockett records will quickly reveal that every year a fair number of trophies are entered that have been taken on public land.
With that said, it is absolutely possible to take a big buck on public land. However, to do so you have to abandon everything that you have read or heard about buck hunting strategies. Most of the tactics discussed in the hunting media pertains to private land deer. Since I hunt most of the time public land deer I will reveal here what I have learned over the past 10 to 15 years.
Pay attention to the competition.
Humans are lazy and habitual. This means that hunters rarely venture far from the truck and almost always walk the same route and hunt the same spots season after season. Knowing this is important for the successful public land hunter. One of my preferred public land scouting times is right after the season closes. It is then that I am able to see the “sign” hunters have left behind and make notes of it. Just remember this, on public land hunters influence deer movement patterns.
Scout from home.
Google Earth has become for me a vital public land scouting tool. It is on Google Earth where I can clearly see the structure and layout of the land before I even set foot onto the land. When I look at Google Earth I look for spots that other hunters often overlook. Out of the way places and locations that don’t look like deer holding areas peak my interest. Often a small woodlot out in the open is overlooked by other hunters and so are small swampy areas and places that are not easily accessible. Most hunters head for the field edges and the big timber. These are the areas deer go to ones the pressure intensives knowing that no hunter will bother them there.
Check the boundaries.
Public land often borders onto private farmland. Walking the boundaries will reveal deer trails that lead from the public land onto private land. Often times these trails are used by the deer during hunting season as escape routes, hanging a stand near such trails can provide you with good hunting opportunities. Just be early in the stand and wait for the other hunters to enter the land and push deer your way.
Barriers.
Many public hunting lands have rivers and streams flowing through them. Most hunters wouldn’t think of crossing waterways or are not equipped to do so. Deer on the other hand have no hesitation whatsoever to get their feet wet crossing rivers and streams to escape from hunters onto small islands, into swampy or tall grass patches. Walking along such waterways after the hunting season closes will show where deer cross rivers and streams. I’ve made it many years ago a practice of mine to always carry a pair of hip and chest waders with me when I scout and hunt on public land.
Conclusion.
Hunting public land can be frustrating and almost always is hard work. But rather than letting hunting pressure get to you, do as the deer do. Avoid the hunting pressure and other hunters by finding the places that other hunters overlook or can’t be bothered to get to it. With a little effort and scouting right after hunting season closes you will find these deer refuge areas.
Here in British Columbia the hunting season started on the 1st of September but most everywhere else in North America it is still a few days of waiting and anticipating. To shorten the waiting period and to provide you with a few additional tips that might prove helpful I provide you here with a selection of great articles and information of all things deer hunting.
With the weather only getting colder each day as the hunting season goes on these “7 Rules for hunting cold fronts” provide valuable information that will benefit you ones the freeze is on.
Outdoor Life, 7 Rules for hunting cold fronts by Mark Kenyon
There are still a number of hunters who think that calling deer is a waste of time. The facts are, however, that under the right conditions and with the right set up deer calling can be just the ticket you need to lure that big elusive buck in. Alan Clemons tells you how in his article “Don’t be afraid of grunting for your bucks”.
Deer and Deer Hunting, Don’t be afraid of grunting for your bucks by Alan Clemons
For the hunters that do not fully understand how important scouting is and what knowledge can be gained from it in selecting the perfect deer ambush. Here is one of my own articles that was published in the Western Sportsman magazine last year. Mapping out deer hunting success
Hunting from a treestand is without question the best way to ambush whitetail deer. However, for safety, comfort and ease of set up it is important to choose the right treestand for you and the environment you hunt. My article “Treestand hunting essentials” explains how to choose the perfect treestand model that is right for you personally and the habitat you hunt. Treestand hunting essentials
I hope that these tips help you out and wish you the best of luck in the upcoming hunting season.
If you like you can share your 2014 hunting stories with the readers of Whitetail Deer Passion.
Does of you that read Whitetail Deer Passion regularly know that I hunt often on public land. Here in Canada we call it Crown Land. The general consensus among hunters is that hunting on public land is nothing short of a nightmare. Yes it can be though to compete with many other hunters and spooky deer but it is not all bad either.
Here are a few examples of the good and bad based on the personal experience I gathered over the years.
Let’s start with the good points first.
You can sleep a few hours longer. Every other hunter is in the woods before first light until about 8:00am to 9:00am then they go home and don’t come back until late afternoon. Deer know about this human habit and adjust their movement patterns accordingly. If you get an hour before the other hunters go home to your stand you catch deer moving about.
Rather than scouting for deer sign scout for human sign. Figure out what the other hunters do and where they set up their stands and then look for the escape routes the deer use. The escape routes are where you want to set up and wait until the other hunters start pushing deer your way. Also look for the places other hunters avoid. Things like flooded timber, marshes, small woodlots, tickets and other “unlikely” places, because that is where the deer go when the pressure starts to build.
Talk to the farmers in the area because they have pretty good grasp on what the deer are doing and where they go once the hunter invasion begins.
No matter where you live in North America there is public hunting land within one hour drive of your home and you don’t have to pay an access fee or take out a second mortgage to pay for the lease.
Despite what you hear to the contrary, there are mature bucks on public land. I've shot quite a few nice bucks where nobody expected to see big bucks. They are there you just have to hunt them very different then you would on private land.
Now let’s examine a few of the not so good points.
You will have to compete with lots of other hunters and that can make a little uncomfortable as far as safety is concerned. On public land I wear a hunter orange vest and hat on my way to and from the stand during bowhunting season. During the firearm season I wear even more hunter orange for the duration of the hunt and regardless if it is the law or not. Having been shot at ones I can assure it is not a nice feeling.
If you hunt from a treestand don’t leave it on the tree. Even if the stand is chained and bolted to the tree is can, and often will be, stolen. Over the years I had two stands stolen that I thought were adequately secured to the tree with chains and padlocks. It seems treestand thieves arrive equipped with bolt-cutters and ladders. I thought just taking the climbing stick down would be sufficient to secure the stand in addition to chain and padlock. I was sadly mistaken.
There is always the chance that your “hotspot” is also the “hotspot” of five other hunters. It happened a few times to me that I climbed into my stand and not much later heard hunters climbing into trees to either side of me.
Common belief has it that outdoor writers are the lucky ones because they can spend all their time in the great outdoors. While I admit that I call myself “lucky” I do not spend all my time outdoors. A good part of my time as an outdoor writer is used up in my office writing about the outdoors. Proof of that are my new articles published this fall in the BC Outdoors and western Sportsman magazine, available on the newsstands now.
Western Sportsman magazine. September/October 2012: Beat Them To It. On page 69 I reveal seven of my favourite early season deer hunting tactics that may help you too to get an early season buck this year. Here is a teaser.
Hunt Escape Routes.
For most hunters there is nothing worse than having to share the same area with hordes of other hunters. In fact, dealing with all the other hunters used to be the reason why I rarely went out in the early season. Not anymore! I learned how to use the other hunters as my involuntary deer drivers. When hunting highly pressured areas I forget about scouting for deer sign. Instead, I scout for other hunters and the sign they leave behind. Given the habitual human nature the hunters will do the same things again this season. Try to find trail markers hunters have left behind (they always do), stand locations and easy walking and driving access routes to the area.
“There are no bucks on public land worth hunting.” This is an expression that I hear many times when the talk is about hunting on public land. Others have said: “You can’t have a quality hunt on public land, there are to many hunters.”
Yes, hunting on public land can be tough, frustrating or downright humiliating. You also have to share the woods with other hunters and at times it seems that there are more hunters in the woods than deer especially on opening day. But make no mistake about it, there are bucks on public land, even big bucks. Compared to public land hunting deer on your own private honey hole is like shooting fish in a barrel.
All hope is not lost. With a little thinking and a change of hunting strategy you too can drag out a good buck to your truck from public land. To become successful we have to forget every advice on hunting strategies we have read in magazines or seen on TV because public land deer are a very different breed from the deer on private land- as in ‘smarter’. These critters have seen it all, especially the mature bucks that survived two or three years of intense hunting pressure.
The key to success is scouting. Scouting on public land is also different from scouting on private land. When I scout on public land I don’t worry about finding deer sign such as rubs and scrapes. I am scouting for hunter activity. I want to know what the other hunters did and where they went. The best and most productive time to scout is right after the hunting season closes. You may ask “why scout after the hunting season and what good will that do me for the fall/winter season next year?” Well, the post-season scouting has four advantages over any other times.
1.) In the winter you can see the structure of the land very clearly before you. Where you couldn’t see 20 yards in the fall now you can see for a long way. It is easy to distinguish the different terrain structures, edges and travel routes of the deer from the landscape. 2.) Right after the hunting season you still can see the sign other hunters left behind, such as tree stands, trails and the red flagging tape with which they marked the way from the truck to the stand sites. 3.) The deer still will have the movement patterns they had during the hunting season. It takes deer about two to four weeks before they go back to normal (un-pressured) behavior. 4.) At this time of year you do not have to worry about spooking deer as you walk the trails to map out deer travel patterns and find the woodland food sources. The deer will not remember your intrusion come next hunting season.
What the scouting will reveal is that even on relatively small public land places there are what I call islands. These are places that hunters don’t go too. The reason for this is that either such islands are places where it is difficult to get too, (such as a steep ravine, flooded timber, dense undergrowth and so on) or it is simply to far away from the truck. Studies have shown that the average hunter never ventures much further than a quarter to a half a mile away from the vehicle. There is something else the average hunter avoids like the plague and this is the proximity of houses, streets and open areas. For some strange reason many hunters think that deer live in the timber or they set up along agricultural crop fields that border onto timer.
Deer know about the habits of hunters and react to it by going to places that hunters overlook or find uncomfortable. Would you sit in a wide-open field behind a lonely apple tree watching a patch of tall grass not larger than a pick-up-truck? Or how about crawling on your hands and knees through a thorn-spiked thicket right next to the parking lot? One of these, the thicket, is where I shot my first public land deer, a big 8-point buck. Sitting behind the apple tree in the open field overlooking a tall grass patch I have seen a true monster buck that surely would have made the book but he never presented me with a perfect shot opportunity and so I had to let him walk.
Ever since then I am an advocate for public land hunting. I like the special challenge in outwitting other hunters and pursuing ‘hunter smart’ deer. But just as important, if not more so, is the fact that public land is easily accessible and affordable for all income brackets. The most important factor is that the upkeep and managing of public land is mainly financed by hunter’s dollars. Once this money dries up the government would have to sell off most of the land to developers. Loosing these lands would not only be a great loss for hunters but for everybody else too.
To that end I leave you with a video from Jadon Duncan, a young hunter who hunts and videotapes mainly on public land. It is worth a visit to his website where you will see many more videos of big bucks that he hunted and filmed on public land.
Pay particular attention to one segment in the video where it gets very noisy in the background. As the camera swings over to the direction where the sound is coming from Jadon explains that he is right next to an auction lot. This proximity to human activity does not seem to bother the huge buck he shoots a few minutes later but it sure would bother the average hunter to set up at a place like that. The more videos I watched of Jadon Duncan the more I felt proud of him and his achievements on public land. He is a smart guy and that is not only because he uses a TreeLounge climbing stand, the safest tree stand in the world. He is one heck of a young hunter too.
Marc from the Nybowhunter.com is another smart public land bowhunter that regularly scores on nice bucks. In a recent article Scouting Public Land he explains how he found a deer sanctuary: here is a quote from the article that explains perfectly what I have been talking about regarding the hunter-free islands on public land:
“…I found a few deer trails and one that led into a swamp. However, for me, these were spots that although they could hold deer, I'm sure everyone would hunt. The saddle was up a steep mountain and was covered in huckleberry and mountain laurel. It was a lot thicker than I imagined a saddle to be, but nonetheless there were more deer trails and a few more buck rubs. Another promising aspect of the area was the abundance of acorns, giving the deer yet another reason to travel through this area.”
* * *
Here is a Smart Hunting Strategies tip that will work every time on public land and puts you well ahead of every other hunter. Find the agricultural fields or other main food sources. From there find the trails (escape routes) that the deer use to evade the hunters that will lead to the sanctuary. Once you figured that out all you have to do is set up a stand in a location that gives the best opportunity to get a good shot at the deer and stay undetected. It is not wise to set up right in the sanctuary as this could cause the deer to vacate to another place and you would have to scout from scratch. Once the already paranoid deer are aware of your invasion into their sanctuary it could be next to impossible to find the deer again.
So there you have it. Public land is not as bad as the reputation it has. Next time you go out to your favorite public land spot look for these hunter unfriendly places and check there for deer sign and I bet you will be pleasantly surprised. The name of the game on public land is to outsmart the other hunters. Do that and you too will shoot a buck that nobody knew even existed in that place. It can be done!
