Huntgus: I agree with you to a point. Yes a seasoned hunter with years of experience on his home grounds is a step ahead. BUT, where I differ with you is that the guy/gal isn't necessarily equiped to handle new terrain and creatures. As I stated earlier, deer in some locations react and are entirely different critters often. Their home ranges vary greatly in size and vegetation. Their habits and feeding patterns are completely different. If a Southern boy goes to the heart of the Adirondacks for the first time he'll look for acorns, persimmons, honeysuckle, crop fields whatever..... NONE of which he'll find there. Hunting pressure and predators in some locals has changed the deers habits totally from say a food plot in Kentucky. They'll travel further, move at different times of day and the population is dismal by West Virginia standards. Go to the outback of Maine and Canada and it's different still. GO out West it can be still different. You spook a deer in WVa, he's not going far. Spook one in Wyoming and he stops when he's over the next mountain. A truly experienced hunter will figure it out. He's learned to try something different. He's also learned what won't work moreso than the guy hunting the back 40 and the local herd. A variety ofsituations gained over years of trial and error in differentenvironments can give a person who sees them for what they are the experience to succeed again. It comes with time. Take for example any of our TV/Video experts today that pretty much have themselves Hunter Heaven, private land, food plots with equipment to maintain them and an under hunted herd. They continually take monster bucks for our viewing pleasure. Send them all to big woods on their own and the true cream will float to the top. I suspect it would not be the ones who necessarily take all the big deer every year. It would more than likely be the Primos, Knight and Hale boy types. Why, they started a long time ago without food plots, onpublic land competing with others orin heavily hunted Southern woods with small herds. They started before the days of "leases" that now lock up the best land for the people with the money. Conversely, take the deep woods boy from Maine and send him to Georgia. It would just torture him to sit on a bean field watching deer 200 yards away. He'd want to go back in the deep swamps while all the deer piled into the fields at night while we all know his best chances in this scenerio are probably learning from the sightings in the fields for a day or two. Experiences comes from a variety of situations over time.