The catalogs are out. The sales flyers are mailed. The new equipment issues of all the magazines are starting to arrive. The Fall stuff is on its way to the stores. Everyone will be out looking for the winning edge. Don’t.

I don’t mean that if you really need a new bow, or a new rifle or a new jacket don’t go out and buy one. What I mean is stop thinking that spending money will improve your game or give you a winning edge or make you a better hunter or make the deer more dead. I have been there. It does not work.

There is nothing on a store shelf that will make you a better hunter. I can remember a time when I would say: “I cannot get out all that much to hunt, so I am leveraging technology.” That was how I was thinking 20 years ago. That is not how I think now. Even earlier in my career, I was dumping a lot of bucks on magazine subscriptions and books with the idea that I could learn my way to successful deer hunting. That did not work either.

If you want to know what works, if you really want the shamanic method of deer hunting success, I will give it to you and I will give it to you for free. It comes in one simple word: scout.

The biggest lesson I learned in the first 10 years of deer hunting was that you cannot kill deer where there are no deer. Beyond just being inexperienced and not knowing what I was seeing or doing, the biggest impediment I had in that first decade was that I frequently found myself hunting property that did not have deer on it. It may have had deer on it in July and August when I had time to go out and scout, but by October and November they were gone. Usually it had something to do with crops being harvested or that sort of thing. Sometimes it was hunting pressure from poachers. In some cases it took years for me to figure out there were just not enough deer around or that something was causing them to leave the property when there was an open season. It took scouting to figure it out.

So on top of scouting your property, you also have to scout FOR property. That search should be constant unless you are like me and own your own plot. You should always be looking for new spots. You should always have something in the pipeline. Every year I see grown men whining about how their favorite place got sold. Do not be complacent.

The overriding strategy in deer hunting is very simple: Find the food. Find the beds. Draw a line between the two. Hunt somewhere along that line. Until you can simplify your hunting situation down to that, you have not scouted enough. There is nothing you can buy that will tell you that.

Trail cams? They make nice eye candy. However, unless you are putting them next to a feeder, you are not going to see much. If you put them over a known trail, you have already scouted enough to find that trail.

Feeders? Food plots? Look habitat improvement is great. Don’t get me wrong. However, there are two issues here. First, only you are going to be able to decide to what degree you want to change your environment to swing the odds in your way. That is an ethics thing. I put out salt every spring, but I have seldom seen deer come to a lick in the fall. Food plots are always welcome, but deer do not magically appear out of thin air. Before you go improving the habitat, you need to (you guessed it) scout.

What about faster bows? Better arrows? A new rifle? I spent 12 years with a used Martin Cougar Magnum and Bear Razorheads. I killed most of my bow-kill bucks with that rig. Of course it was slow and I needed six pins to shoot out to fifty yards, but it got the job done. Most of my deer were taken inside 15 yards, and that was due to . . .yep, scouting. Yes, I did buy a new scope for my Savage 99 last year, but the scope it replaced was 30 years old and I have taken over a dozen deer with it, including my first doe and two of my three largest bucks. My problem is not the equipment so much as my aging eyes. I bought a new 30-06 this year, but that was because I was giving my old one to #3 son. We shoot the same ammo, and all of it is slightly downloaded and they all have plain-Jane Corelokts or Hornady Interlocks on them.

If I am going to suggest spending money on anything, it would be for my own comfort. My other big mistake starting out was not understanding that I could not hunt when I was cold and I was not going to see many deer when I was sweating. I try every year to have a new pair of warm socks. I keep myself well shod and I am over-subscribed on poly-pro underwear.

Along with chasing the “Winning Edge” fantasy, the past few decades have been filled with folks telling you about invisible, unknowable forces at work that kill your chances. Beware. There is far less at work here than meets the eye, or the nose. If you find yourself thinking that invisible rays are influencing your deer hunting success, you have read far too many magazines. The truth is that UV suppression is a scam. So is this so-called scent reduction thing. Read the past ten years of posts on this weblog. You will catch on. Most of what gets passed off as science is anything but.

So what DO I recommend for purchase this fall? I have not given many recommendations over the years, but I guess I should. For now, put down the Cabelas catalog and think about making a trip out to the property, or going out driving to look for a new one, or (if nothing else) stopping out to the county park and watching the deer feed.

It is going to sound like a David Allen Coe tune, but I sprang my Mom from re-hab this week. She had been in all through July due to a wicked case of pneumonia back in June. As a result, my trips to camp have been few this summer. I finally had to go down Friday night, picking up an outboard motor I’d had in repair on the way. Saturday morning, I took my own advise and went out and scouted– only the second time since deer season ended. What did I find??

1) There is a doe hanging out around Midway. She busts me every time I go back that way.
2) The Garden of Stone is now a bedding area. Blackberry seeds from all the deer poop sprouted and the blackberries are taking over.
3) There are no fawns hitting the salt licks. There are also no big bucks
4) There is a small herd using Left Leg Hollow, and they are coming out of the head of that hollow and crossing Vine Street between Virginia and The Honey Hole
5) It will be an excellent year for acorns.

. . . all this for the investment of an hour. A lot can change from July to the Opener in Mid November, but overall this is what it means:

1) The deer are bouncing back from whatever went wrong in 2012. I think it was poaching and I think the neighbor doing it moved out.
2) Both Angus and Moose will have good luck staying where they are.
3) Although not a slam-dunk, deer hunting prospects are good for 2014.

This post has already been read 631 times!

Views: 2

Related posts:

More Poop on the Poop Madness A Newbies Plea for Help Our Little QDM Program Become Your Own Expert QDM, Shaman-style Kite String Resident Doe?