I’ve found four ingredients to be key in my success this season:
Cover, Intrusion, Timing & Trail Cameras
If you implement these four key elements into your hunting strategies you will improve your success in the whitetail woods.
The Whitetail Woods
Late winter whitetail woods are very transparent revealing much of the whitetails world. You are easily able to identify where and what they have been feeding on during the course of the season and what travel corridors were heavily used and why they may have used them. Finding a slam dunk set-up this time of year is much easier as there is no fall foliage to obscure views. Another advantage is snow which allows you to see exactly where whitetails had beaten you this past fall.
I can still remember the first hunt that had turned the corner for me as far as hunting mature bucks. I had found a brand new set up during the previous winter where a huge corridor was overlooked during the Fall. After careful planning and finding the right tree in this corridor I was determined not to set foot in the area until the time was right. Fast forward to the following Fall as giant bodied bucks started making appearances on trail cameras during daylight I was certain this was the time frame i was looking for to hunt this set-up.
After fifteen minutes of checking weather channels and wind directions I carefully planned my route in and out of my stand. I decided to head to my stand around 1400 hours in hopes of getting a crack at one of the shooter bucks that had been playing cat and mouse on other stand sites across the farm. I settled in for the hunt wondering where the bucks I had on trail camera the previous week had quickly disappeared too. When to my surprise the unmistakable sound of a deer walking had caught my attention immediately. A mature whitetail stepped into my shooting lane offering a 25 yard shot, the arrow had found its mark and a great whitetail lay at the end of a short blood trail.
“I settled in for the hunt wondering where the bucks I had on trail camera the previous week had quickly disappeared too. When to my surprise the unmistakable sound of a deer walking had caught my attention”
The INGREDIENTS TO WHITETAIL PARADISE
This hunt showed me that to be a successful in the whitetail woods you will need four key elements to be successful on your next hunt. COVER trumps food every day of the week in the world of whitetails, in which you have to get close or in bedrooms to have a crack at a monster. INTRUSION should be eliminated as much as possible on your hunting ground to promote daylight movement and prime rutting activity. TIMING should be one of the most important factors when deciding when and where to have a face to face encounter with the buck you are after. TRAIL CAMERAS are by far the best tool in the whitetail hunters arsenal if used correctly to expose and pattern a mature buck on your hunting grounds.
