By John E. Phillips
A buck that has survived three seasons has a blueprint of where, when and how muzzleloading deer hunters hunt. He knows where they enter the woods, how deep in the woods they go, the areas they hunt most of the time, and most importantly the regions the hunters don’t hunt. Therefore, to try and take this older-age-class buck, you first need to identify where the hunters hunt.
Get an aerial photo of the property you hunt. Mark all the places where most people park their trucks, and go into the woods with a yellow highlighter. Now, mark all the spots where you and your hunting buddies generally hunt with a pink highlighter. Next, mark the most-open woods you have to hunt with a green highlighter.
A friend of mine, Dr. Robert Sheppard of Carrollton, Alabama, who always does a great deal of scouting after the season, explains, “I look for cigarette butts, candy wrappers, snuff cans, marks on trees that indicate that climbing tree stands have been used on the trees and anything else I can find that lets me know that someone has been hunting in that area during the season. I mark these spots with my hand-held GPS receiver with the name, PLACES TO AVOID. On my aerial photo, I mark those sites with a highlighter as areas not to hunt. Once you understand where everyone else is hunting, then you know the deer won’t be there. So, my philosophy is, why go to those spots to look for a big buck?”
If you’ll mark a map the way I’ve described, you’ll have a hunter flow chart and have identified where hunters enter the woods, where they travel, and where they hunt. Then you’ll have as much information as the buck you’re trying to take has. Although that buck doesn’t have a map on paper like you do with these areas marked, that buck has a map in his mind of where he’ll most likely encounter hunters. He’ll avoid those regions.
To get a better perspective, to prove scientifically that deer do have hunter-flow charts in their heads and to help all of us who hunt with black powder, I talked with Dr. Grant Woods of Reedsville, Missouri, one of the nation’s leading deer researchers. Woods said, “The older-age-class buck will be in what I call a secure area where he doesn’t believe he’ll see a hunter or thinks he can escape from before a hunter sees or takes him. A secure area may be only a small trash pile out in the middle of a 40-acre field where the buck can stay and smell and see in all directions. Because we’ve been able to put GPS collars on some deer, we’ve learned where deer stay.” In one of the research projects that Wood’s company conducted, the biologists studied an area that had several large food plots. The scientists drew concentric circles that radiated at 10-yard intervals out from the food plot. These scientists learned that most of the deer stayed within 150 to 200 yards of the food plot for much of the day. The deer even would lay down in the food plots and spend most of their time there at night.
After hearing what Dr. Grant Woods has learned, I now prefer to hunt a trophy buck that’s had very-little hunter contact, rather than attempting to bag a trophy buck in an area where the deer have experienced intense hunting pressure. To take a trophy buck this season with your CVA muzzleloader, hunt the places with fewer deer and fewer hunters, instead of the sections of land with more deer and more hunters. The places with fewer hunters will home bucks that move more during daylight hours.
