From BSK:

A concept I find intreaging and I keep playing around with is the idea that computer technology should be able to isolate the factors that make good stand locations good. So over the years I've been using Geographic Information System (GIS) technology to evaluate a huge range of factors in association with success/failure of each stand location in sightings and harvests. I'm looking at factors such as past hunting pressure, weather conditions, moon conditions, habitat types, topography, etc. and looking for combinations of factors that are consistantly linked to the most successful stand locations.

I had always known that past hunting pressure was a major player in successful stands, in that stands hunted too frequently experience reduced sightings and harvests of older bucks. But my experiences with my failure and my brother-in-law's successes last year finally prompted me to start looking at the situation numerically. After analyzing every stand every hunter had hunted out of for the last 5 years, I realize their was a powerful correlation between how many hours a stand had been hunted the previous year and 3 1/2+ year-old buck sightings from that stand. Eventually the numbers came out to show that the best stands are stands that are new for that location (there has never been a stand in that location before). However, there wasn't much drop off in 3 1/2+ year-old buck sightings from a particular stand that had been in place the previous year until that stand had received at least 15 hours of hunting time the previous year. In fact, that cut-off point was very powerful. In the last 5 years on my research area, not a single 3 1/2+ year-old buck had been seen or harvested from a stand that had received more than 15 hours of hunting time the previous year.

Now I don't think 15 hours is any magic number. It is just the magic number for that property. Every property will be different. But on the monitored property, 15 hours of hunting time appears to be the point at which older bucks catch on to the fact that human predators are after them in that location, and they learn to avoid that particular location, even into future years. Deer are not smart creatures by any means, but they do have very good memories for "danger."

And that was the mistake I made last year. I was hunting stands that had all the other "right conditions" and had produced well for me the previous year. And although I hadn't over-hunted them the previous year, the accumulation of several hunters occassionally hunting them was just enough pressure to drive the oldest bucks away from those stand locations. On the other hand, not intentionally, my brother-in-law was sytematically working his way through hunting all of the stands in "new" locations as well as stands no one had hunted out of much in the previous few years. That was the reason for his great success. In fact, he said he was hunting all these "new" and infrequently hunted stands because "he liked seeing new sights and liked hunting from places he had never hunted before", basically, to fight boredom. And that chance desire played right into his success.