Originally Posted by
younggun308
It's thick, and looking any distance at all is like piecing together a puzzle.
Might I ask, how do you move through areas like that? Seems the deer love to bed on the edge of that stuff, at least during the day. I always wonder if sound gets dampened or even louder under those canopies. Last deer I shot my dad and I had taken a breather under some laurel after scaling a ridge, and about 10-15 minutes later we got up to move along the edge and the deer just bolted downhill from the laurel, stopped, and offered a shoulder shot. I wonder whether I'd seen others had we moved a little deeper into the laurels.
Where I hunt there's a lot of bears that bed in the laurels at the highest elevations, but deer seem to favor the border area between laurels and deep woods, or even little islands of laurel.
I find the deer in my area travel and bed in the laurels, especially once the shooting starts with the season opener. I still hunt to the edge of the laurels, into the wind. I then put on some heavy wool socks over my boots to dampen my footfalls where I can walk upright. I believe I spend more time on my hands and knees in the thick laurels as attested by the worn out knees on my hunting pants. As I said in an earlier post, I have taken a good many shots from the prone position while in the laurels. Many times I can only see the legs of the deer unless I get low enough to see the body. More than once I have crept up on bedded deer to with in 25 feet. They seemed almost as surprised as me when we discovered each other. One other thing I noticed. Scent seems to hang in the laurels. I put on a cover scent even though I hunt into the wind, but many times I have actually smelled a deer before I have seen them. In those cases, it was a rutting buck that i could smell.