O.D. On the Subject of Stand Selection

I walked into a conversation down at Mister Browning’s Store the other day. O.D. was in the process of egging on a guy he calls “Bigtime.” The truth is, I don’t remember Bigtime’s real name. I’ve taken to calling him Bigtime as well. He seems to like it. The reason we call him Bigtime is that on his first visit to the store a few years ago, he introduced himself as a bigtime deer hunter. O.D likes to spar with him when he shows up. Bigtime watches way too many hunting shows.

The conversation was about stand choices. Bigtime ask the question of O.D. what his thoughts were on picking a stand for a morning hunt, and then proceeded to hog the conversation and give us a whole lot of details on his thoughts– morning vs. evening, moonphase, and so on. O.D. could hardly get a word in edge-wise. He got bored and left.

I have to say that most of what Bigtime said barely had any relationship to my reality. However, I will say that our camp have a preponderance of shots taken in open pastures in the afternoon. I’ll also say that some venues seem to have morning-only or afternoon-only reputations. None of this is all that scientific, in that once a given venue gets a reputation, it tends to stick. I’ll also say that we have a great many biases at our camp that have little to do with the deer themselves. I normally pick an afternoon venue that makes it easy to get home after dark. I don’t visit stands in the PM that are a hard slog. The other reason is that if I shoot something at one of those venues, I want the whole day ahead of me to get it out. I much prefer shooting a deer at last light that’s going to go down in the middle of the pasture where I can just roll up with the truck.

Shamanic Stand Selection

With O.D. gone, Bigtime decided I was the next in line. My answer was that I could only empirically tell him which stands have produced the best in the morning or evening, and most of that is based on reinforcing old biases. If our camp shot a deer there in the morning, it’s a morning stand.

The one exception to this is my luxury box at Midway. It looks out over 200 yards of pasture in each direction. The south view is almost a guarantee of doe in the last half hour of legal hunting. Beyond that, both the north and south views have generated bucks and doe passing through at nearly all hours.

In complete contradiction, the Jagende Hutte overlooks another open pasture with the added benefit of a saddle located at the extremity. My buddy, SuperCore, sits in there morning and evening all through season and fills both his tags. It’s funny though, I can’t remember when he pulled a deer out of there in the PM.

The deep woods stands have been mostly morning affairs. However, most of this comes from the fact that we tend to shy away from them in the afternoon. I shot a buck 2 years ago from one at last light, and we ended up not retrieving the carcass until the next morning.

Picking a New Stand Site

When selecting a new site, I have generally gone for the view and the ease of access over anything else. There is deer sign all over the farm, and so it is hard to say what trail is best. I figure that I’ll spend some time each fall, inspecting a site from the ground or from a portable stand. If I see promise, I’ll develop it more. In one instance, I spent a decade sitting in a treeline before choosing to build the tower blind at Hollywood. I kept seeing deer, but finding a suitable tree for a stand that could see more than a few yards eluded me. I finally built a tower that has a 200-yard view in two directions.

The one other trick I’ve found is the Beer Bottle Method. This allies closely to the Rotten 2X4 Method. Over the years, I discovered numerous piles of old beer bottles in the woods and figured out this was where the previous owners had sat with their 30-30’s draped over the armrests of their lawn chairs. In other instances, I found rotten 2X4’s nailed to trees with and without beer bottles. At one of these sites, I put up a ladder stand and was visited by 2 of the camp’s record bucks in a few short years.

I covered this years ago in my missive about Briar Archeology.

Briar Archeology

This all sounds lazy. It is. Lazy goes a long way in deer hunting. If you have a stand that is an easy walk, you’re less likely to alert the deer. Not breaking a sweat, means you’ll stay warmer and you’ll stink less. By emphasizing your view from the stand or blind, you’ll see more deer, or at least be able to scratch off a larger swath of non-productive area.

Where Bigtime and the Shaman Agree

There were two aspects of the goo that came from Bigtime’s brain dump that came out clear and cogent. One was that, if you want a surefire suggestion on stand sites, it’s a finding a staging area that allows the deer to hang out and watch an open field before exposing themselves. I would agree with Bigtime that this is a better place for an afternoon hunt, just because my deer do tend to feed in the fields late in the day. The other place that he mentioned was the forgotten corners and narrow ends of pastures. If a deer can make a quick move across a stretch of open ground and get from one side to the other in a short time, they’ll take that as a shortcut instead of moving around in dense cover.

The other thing that Bigtime harped on goes along with the basic maxim of finding where the deer bed, find where they eat, draw a line between the two and hunt along that line. Bigtime seemed to think of all sorts of complicated scenarios. I look at it in the simplest sense. I will add that deer will cover that intervening ground in the laziest way possible. If they bed in the creek bottoms and come out to feed on the ridge tops, the line they take will never be the steepest one. Most often around our camp, the deer follow the sides of the ridges, angling upwards on the easiest way possible. Once they get in sight of the open field at the top, they parallel the fence line for a ways before breaking cover. This is a walking version of the staging area concept.

But Shaman! I sit on one stand all day!

I’m not going to say that sitting all day on the same stand is wrong. I don’t think in 40 years I have done it more than a handful of times. Early on, it was all about only being able to afford a half-day away from home at a time. I was raising a family. Now? I’m well past 60. Sitting in one place all day is a ticket to blood clots. Besides, I am now the patriarch of deer camp. I have responsibilities back at camp that keep me from trying to put together an all-day sit.

I would also suggest that a half-day at one place is plenty. I like to change it up. I may be back to a stand in a day or two. YMMV.

Don’t Get Me Started

By the time I got through my bloviation to Bigtime and the rest, it was time to head over to pick up Blacksmith for brunch at Donna’s place in Brooksville. She’s got an awesome 3-meat omelet. I’m not sure, but I think I might have been able to shut Bigtime up. That’s a first that even O.D. has not been able to achieve. I would have never tried it with O.D. around. O.D. considers himself the county’s foremost authority on deer hunting, and I would never want to step on that man’s cape.

What Bigtime reminded me of was one of those Outdoor Life articles with the fancy map that showed all the places you needed to put your stand to bag the big one. Back in the day, I used to sit there and study those things and reread the article over and over, and I could never make heads or tails of it. I thought I was dense. This guy seemed to be able to spit that stuff out with aplomb. Remember those maps? They came with articles like “Fifteen Surefire Secret Places to Bag Your Buck.” Of course, about 30 years or so ago, I figured out Outdoor Life was basically full of beans on most everything else, so why shouldn’t it be over stand selection?

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