These will be in decending order from date published
When walking into your stand whether it be early morning or evening, depending how you approach it can sometimes make or break your hunt before it even starts. Let’s start with the morning hunt, I say start in early slow and quiet. When I say start early I mean give yourself enough time so you’re not rushing, I like to be in my stand ready roughly 30 minutes until daylight so it gives time for the woods to calm down. “Slow and quiet” means exactly what you think, don’t be thrashing around or making unnatural woods noises like crumpling wrappers, water bottles or anything of that sort. Walking slowly will help reduce noise, also you don’t want to overwork yourself and get sweaty thus scenting up your area. Evening hunts is basic, your hunt begins as soon as you hit the woods. What I mean by this is you want to be spot and stalking to your stand. I always have an arrow knocked or a bullet in chamber so I’m ready if I come across an animal, with that said you will have to walk slow and keep your eyes and ears open.
Other Tips and Tricks:
1. Use the wind, you want to approach the stand downwind from where you feel the deer are coming from.
2. Know your hunting area and know your game, you don’t want to be walking through a bedding area and push out all your animals.
3. Walk on edge of crick bottoms or even deer trails that are beaten down areas that produce little noise when you walking.
4. (I’ve never used this trick) But I have heard of people raking a path to their stand to avoid majority of the leaves and sticks.
I honestly don’t feel there is a proper way to call during the rut, deer overall are vocal especially during the rut. I carry the 3 main calls when deer hunting, Doe bleat, Grunt, Rattle Bag. When calling I tend to wait 45 minutes to an hour between each call sequence. I personally use 3 different sequences and I’m going to explain them and my opinion on what they represent. 1. Three doe bleats, I will do these with about 5-10 seconds between each bleat to represent a lonely doe in estrus. 2. Two doe bleats followed by a tending grunt, I will do these back to back and give the allusion that a buck is chasing an estrus doe to maybe attract a curious buck. 3. Two doe bleats followed by six spaced regular grunts, then hit the rattle bag. I start with the bleats and wait about 15 seconds and then do my grunts in intervals of three with 10 seconds in between, lastly I hit my rattle bag about 1- 1½ Minutes after the grunts. I hope this will represent a buck with that doe being challenged and may draw a dominant buck to me. Overall the best way to eventually find your own combo is to be in the woods and witness the vocalization yourself. I hope these calling techniques help you in your future hunts, I will do a how to video on the calls I use to help you hear what these sound like.
This blog is going to focus mostly on Archery trailing since 75% of the time you see the animal fall when gun hunting.
Their are 2 vital things I feel you must do right from the get go after making your shot.
First, pinpoint where you made the shot and the last place you seen the animal. You can easliy do this by picking a tree or marking you can easily identify on the ground, because we all know what you see from the tree is completely different on the ground.
Secondly one of the hardest things to do as a avid hunter is to find blood and back out for an hour or 2. This is very important because if you jump that animal wounded there is a chance he will either clot up or not bed again for a long while, this could severly effect your chances of recovering your animal.
Once you have gave the animal time you and your ready to track, I do look for blood but somtimes its slim so here are tell-tell signs to look for.
"always mark your last spot of blood"
1. Deer trails obviously if you loose blood follow a few nearby trails and see if you can get back on track.
2. No trails? Look for tore up leaves or kicked up mud and broken twigs.
3. A wounded animal is more than likley going to heavy cover or a water source.
I hope these tips help on your next trailing experience! Remember to always take your time when bloodtrailing.
