gri22ly

If you hunt swamps or wetlands, what do you look for? How do you hunt them?

Bowman4440

Swamps i look for their exits into the oaks and feeding or i put bait out. Wetlands i looki for the trails in the fragmites and they bed in them for safety. Have seen some big bukcs come out into the middle of the marsh from no where.

Rory/MO

in swamps i look for funnels. why would a deer swim when it doesnt have to?

Bukmastr

Transition lines where two types of cover meet. Like cattails and trees, redbrush ( dogwood) and timber... Also points of higher elevation that jut out into the marsh / swamp. Islands of dry land within the wet areas.. And most of all I cling tight to bedding areas.

gri22ly

Good point and sound logic Rory. By the way if you come to Pennyrile this fall, I can show you some good spots and save you some leg work.

bloodcrick

Josh, here is a place i used to hunt for many years but since has been reclaimed by the coal company and some of it bought out. It was my very favorite place to hunt back then, and Me and buddys killed alot of deer out of there. It was not so much the swamp but how it tied in with everything else. It has bottle necks, thick bedding areas flat ground and rolling hills from the old minning process. you can see the long rolling hills to the south. you can see the patoka river to the north that floods out and keeps the swamp wet all year. It has many finger ditches connecting the swamp to the river. It was/is a waterfowlers dream. Im not sure why but i had this place all to myself for deer hunting other than bringing buddys along who had sucess there to. THE PINK=STANDS and the WHITE=BEDING AREAS. The two stands to the east were bears to find in the dark, and it was a very long hoof in. trail tacks played a big part here but it was worth the effort as many deer fell from the very western stand between me andfriends in that bottle neck between the hills and the swamp. The two stands to the east were killer also, they were located where a thicket and hard woods came together and just west of the crop fields. Like i said it was just how things came together here. The stand Due North only got hunted a little but was good also. As you can see there were alot of good looking areas North West of the swamps with fingers and bottle necks everywhere but they were just way difficult to acess.

Bukmastr

I would agree with you for the majority of deer. But most of the mature swamp / marsh bucks I have shot have come from back in some nasty wet crap.

gri22ly

Kind of like this. The mound is an ancient burial ground and you better have hip-waders or a boat to get to it. The mound is covered with huge rubs.

Germ

I hunt in the swamp, most times there is a high spot that is tough to get too. If this high spot has some oak trees in it, that is where I hunt. MI has a pile of swamps. In most cases there is a lot of sign on the outside edges of a swamp. This is where most hunters stop and hunt, I look to go beyond that and hunt the inside of a samp and find that patch of high ground.

gri22ly

Thanks Blood, I need all the help I can get. Inormally hunt hard woods and spoils, I have access to some swampland this year and It looks like your pic. upside down.