Archery Hunting Strategies

How and why good stands go bad

Hunting Strategy Good Stands Go Bad

As you all know when archery hunting for big game, it is so important to get your intended trophy up close within your comfort zone of shooting. You’ve been scouting from a distance the entire pre-season and have a large buck in your area. You know by now most of his habits (where he is bedding down and his route to his feeding grounds). Hopefully, by now you have placed several stands at strategic points where your trophy is traveling. What do you do on opening day of the hunt?

First, you must know your best chance for success from your stand is the first time you hunt it, because every time after that your odds go down. This is just a simple fact of archery hunting for large game, especially whitetails. If you continue to hunt the same stand, eventually the deer will learn you’re hunting them and start to avoid the area. They learn they are being hunted by seeing you or by the scent you left behind. Every time you walk to your stand or come back from your stand, you are leaving a tell tale sign or scent that the deer will pick up on very quickly.

If you educate just one deer, you are actually educating many deer, maybe the prize trophy buck you are hunting. Deer communicate through body language. If a doe approaches your stand, knowing something that just isn’t right and starts walking stiffly or stamping her foot or maybe worse, blowing and snorting, she is shouting “Hey everyone, this place is dangerous.” This is how big bucks learn and it is why they will leave the area. In keeping the element of surprise by scouting smarter and hunting more carefully, it will ultimately lead to more and bigger bucks being bagged by you.

I was taught by my Dad and through my own mistakes that hunting the areas where the rut occurs before the rut occurs can dramatically change or even worse, ruin your chances of bagging your trophy. Remember that you only get one “first time” in each stand per season. Knowing which your best stand is during the rut should be the best and first time you use this stand. For me, in Michigan, the best time to archery hunt falls during the first week in November. While I am hunting in October, I treat this time almost like scouting. I try to hunt good stands where I might get a shot at a trophy, but I try to stay away from my favorite hunting spots until the rut goes into full swing.

By using several tree stands (portable tree stands), this will allow you to hunt many different areas without disturbing your trophy. By this, I mean rotating the area you hunt each time you go out. By using portable stands, you can change frequently or maybe just move the location of your stand by as little as 30 yards or so. Taking the time to enter or leave your stand in a different direction will also increase your chances of not disturbing your hunting spot. During October I like to hunt feeding fields, trying to stay out of my wooded areas until the rut hits. Then in November I sneak back into the woods where I know the mating will take place. These areas are usually closer to where the does are bedding down and where the does funnel into an area going to their food sources. Normally, you will see the buck scrapes and rubs in these areas. Finding these areas will increase your chances of bagging your trophy buck, especially if you have not disturbed the area all season long until now.

During your archery big game hunting season, you need to know why your good stand goes bad and how to avoid that from happening to you. I firmly believe that a good hunting strategy begins with managing your impact around the area you intend to hunt during the full rut. The 10 percent that bag bigger and more bucks have learned this lesson well. But then of course some are just “LUCKY” and stumble upon a big buck just out of chance.

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