I have kept a hunting diary since I moved back to MT five years ago. The other day I got out my laminated aerial photos of my whitetail hunting zone, and started playing around with magic markers. I marked down every deer sighting in hunting season for five years, blue for sightings that included a buck and red for sightings that didn't. Then I sat around in my spare time for a couple days just staring at those dots trying to see a pattern, a sort of hunting Rohrschacht (how the blazes do you spell that word?) test.

Finally, it hit me like a lightning bolt, or a 130 grain Sierra Boattail, and I started marking out gridlines from the edge of the nearest open field. I put on line 1/4 mile from the nearest field edges, another at 1/2 mile, and so on. When I was done I tallied it all up and came up with the following:

Within 1/4 mile of an open field, I had 1 buck sighting and 25 doe sightings;

From 1/4 to 1/2 mile, I had 5 buck sightings and 21 doe sightings;

More than 1/2 mile, I had 7 buck sightings and 12 doe sightings.

All this may not be rocket science, but it highlights a fact that I had not identified before, and wouldn't have without the hunting diary. For five years I have poured a large chunk of my hunting time down the drain by hunting too close to field edges. In the future I'm going to stay at least a quarter mile back from those fields. (This land is USFS land in western MT, with the field edges defining the private property line.)