I was thinking last night about where I wanted to concentrate the first few days of turkey season. I have a spot that's been REALLY good to me. I've shot 3 deer out of one tree (including my first) and my first bow bird was shot about 20 yds from that tree. Gotta love that spot.
I was wondering how much (if any) the intrusion would mean to my deer hunting. I suppose the answers would most likely lean towards "none". I agree.
Then I got to thinking about it further.......
We go into our woods: shed hunting; scouting; setting game cams; checking game cams; turkey hunting; small game hunting; checking game cams; Putting out minerals; setting stands; clearing lanes; hunting; checking game cams;moving stands.....and YET we still take mature deer off these lands.
If the ever elusive mature whitetail is SO finicky.......why does he seemingly tolerate these things.....yet continue to call this place "home"?
Other than turkey hunting, replenishing my mineral sites....and checking a game cam on the outskirts of my hunting land about 4 times a year........I don't go in there unless I'm hunting. I really don't think it makes a hill of beans difference, though. D&DH had a show a few months ago that outlined how difficult it would be to displace a matur ebuck from his home range.
Thats what sanctuary's are for I have an area of about 15 acres that I enter once per year, I will shed hunt it once in the next couple of weeks and then never enter it again until next spring.[:-]
Jeff, a couple years ago I cleared a new stand with a chainsaw, hunted it that same evening, and saw numerous deer (no mature bucks but a couple mature does)that had to be bedded within 100 yards of the stand the entire time. Would I recommend doing that? Probably not, but it did teach me a big lesson.
This year, after the season was over, I was shooting a few pistols in the late morning, and that evening 6 bucks strolled right through my shooting range.
However, I for some reason still get all finicky about entering the woods like it is going to screw my entire season or something. I'm sure there is a limit, but it doesn't seem to be as easy to run deer off as I would have thought.
Of course, then they cross your trail while in the stand and they run like their butt is on fire. Go figure.
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I have shot a bird while guys were logging the same property. Couple seasons ago.
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If the ever elusive mature whitetail is SO finicky.......why does he seemingly tolerate these things.....yet continue to call this place "home"?
Because, they have everything they need on that land and their safety area's work. They most likely saw/smelled you long before you knew they were there so how danger did the deer face? Where is a deer going to find where there is no human intrusion?
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If the ever elusive mature whitetail is SO finicky.......why does he seemingly tolerate these things.....yet continue to call this place "home"?
Because there are little to NO areas where they can avoid being pressured, and they have to live somewhere. The only place a deer is going to not be pressured around here would be at the bottom of a lake
And more specifically regarding my areas....the 4-5 times I venture into them during turkey are nothing compared to the quads, the landowner, tresspassers, & other hunters that go thru them about 4 thousand times over the course of a year.
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Just a regular guy who likes to hunt
If the ever elusive mature whitetail is SO finicky.......why does he seemingly tolerate these things.....yet continue to call this place "home"?
Because there are little to NO areas where they can avoid being pressured, and they have to live somewhere. The only place a deer is going to not be pressured around here would be at the bottom of a lake
And more specifically regarding my areas....the 4-5 times I venture into them during turkey are nothing compared to the quads, the landowner, tresspassers, & other hunters that go thru them about 4 thousand times over the course of a year.
EXACTLY
Ill be sitting in the same spot this Saturday AM that my buddy took his 8pt in this past Nov.
If a place has everything they need, they will stay there. They get pressure wherever they are.
I've said it before, and stand by it. With regards to MY property, I'm almost positive deer are not pressured out by human activity. I live on the land I hunt, and hunt on the land I live. We're mowing fields, planting food plots, putting cameras out, minerals out, turkey hunting, deer hunting, walking, sledding, atv riding, etc, and my deer sightings are only going up (mostly due to my scent control and hunting methods...it's obviously not correlated to the human activity). This may be different for different parcels of land and different areas of the country, but for mine, these are my observations.
i dont think its really that easy to scare off a mature buck from your hunting ground....i do believe that it IS easy to make them mostly nocturnal.
i relation to a few of the other posts, a couple years ago i shot a nice 135" buck with my muzzleloader, and then about 10 minutes later from the same spot another nice 3.5 yr old walks out like nothing ever happened....the shot did not bother it at all.
I have also rattled in a buck and shot it with my shotgun and then just for fun after i shot i rattled in another buck to 10 yards! he was a small one but still the shot did not bother him
GMMAT - I think a lot of people think way to hard on this subject. It's just outa your control, here's why...
Some people I talked to think "they" are the only one that walk through their hunting areas.
It really makes me laugh when someone thinks this!
Example... I hunted quite a few years up in "the great white north" on the border between NH & Canada with a guy who showed me this "secret" spot.
He was a local to this area and thought he was the only hunter out there. We wouldn't start hunting this area until we walked into the woods 2 plus miles,
past all the other hunters that generally hunted only 1/4-1 mile into the woods.
This spot is so deeeeep into the woods that you travel logging roads for 18 miles to park your truck and then walk 2 miles into the woods and hunt about 5 sq. miles between any logging roads.
Well I had to break the news to him that I bumped into one of the Benoit brothers, along with 2 or 3 others almost every year.
* This all equates to your "chance" meetings in the woods, inside this "secret" spot and what others do while your unaware of this. Meaning, maybe you don't bump into every Tom, Dick, or Harry while in the woods.
Deer are in their element when in the woods, as we all know, just as you or I are when we are inside our homes. If an intruder came into your house, would he know where you would hide inside your dwelling? I know this is a hunting site and can allready read your minds... "The intruder would never make it inside my home I would shoot him". So save me the posts about this (ha-ha).
What you do in your spot is one thing, but what about the next guy, especially in a well hunted area not counting the people that don't know land boundaries.
I believe that mature bucks are, of course, elussive and mainly, either nocturnal or will become nocturnal when there domain has changed.
I don't believe mature bucks leave their homes, they just become more reclusive or climb trees, as I never think to look up??!!??
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IF we all ARCHERY hunted with our QUIVERS loaded with Slim Jim's, WOULD the WORLD be a SAFER PLACE???
Turkey and deer hunt in the same place?
