Story by Jeff Stewart
Another successful tactic that I have used to take many deer is to not hunt when I was expected to hunt. Just as your faithful dog will set himself up in front of your front door an hour before you get home anticipating your arrival so can a deer pattern you. If you frequent the same stand too often then the deer may not have disappeared totally but they may have just gotten you pegged and instead of waiting on you like your family dog they may be watching for you to climb down and drive away. I love to show up at odd hours. Maybe I will walk in on a different trail. I have even went so far as to spend the night in a box blind in order to not disturb anything during a walk in. use cover scents but only those natural to the area you are hunting in. Don’t use Fox scent if your area doesn’t hold a population of Fox’s or don’t use pine scent if there are no pines in your area. I am sure you get the point. I try to use Rabbit and Raccoon scents as much as possible. Just about every place in Texas has a Rabbit of one kind or another and Racoons as well.
Your deer playing Houdini with you may have as much to do with you as anything. If you wash your hunting clothes in with the family laundry then I assure you, you smell highly offensive to a deer. I wash all my hunting gear in a 5 gallon bucket with scent free detergents and dry them on a clothes line. I then pack them away in paper bags with packets of baking soda. This may seem extreme and yes I know lots of people who kill deer without doing any of these things. But we are not talking about those people in this article. We are talking about what to do when you are in a slump and the deer are avoiding you like the plague.
Basically I guess what I am telling you is that if all the things you have been doing are not working then it’s time to stop doing those things and thing outside of the box. Maybe it’s time to climb out of the box totally and employ some good old fashioned hunting techniques. Go hunt places on your property you would never hunt or the places you have to crawl on all fours to get into or whatever. Just do something. The key is you can’t kill them if you are not in the woods or on a stand.
Click here to read part 1 and here to read part 2.
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