MountainHunter

I’m hoping I can get some Monday morning quarterbacking advice from you with more experience.

Season opens Oct 7 here in Virginia, so this past Saturday I was in the woods, hiking with my wife and scouting some new land and clearing lanes in my favorite spot on some land I hunted last year, where I almost always see deer. Well, I had been tromping about, clearing 5 strategically located shooting lanes, when I noticed the biggest buck pile I had ever seen! Great news! Then I saw another huge pile, and another…you get the idea. There were 5 big piles within 20 yards of my stand site. That’s the good news.

Here’s the (maybe) bad news: Just as I and my wife were getting ready to leave, I noticed a deer bed under a bush. My guess, with all the buck piles, is that the bed belonged to the buck. The layout of this area was more open than where I would expect to find beds, so I wasn’t particularly careful about not leaving my scent, etc., and I walked around for a good 15 or 20 minutes, explaining my strategy, showing my wife the deer piles, etc. (she’s a great sport for this kind of thing). I always thought of this little area as a transit point (more or less a funnel) between the CRP fields below our land and bedding areas in the national forest just above and behind our land.

My question is: Did I just ruin the bed of a huge buck who won’t come back to it?[&o]

monster10rackstack

its could go either way. i wouldnt be suprise if the deer returns. The issue is that when you go back to hunt that area the first couple of times in maybe all you get to try getting a shot at this buck.

farmcntry

Don't get excited over "buck" poop. But do get excited. The large clumps of poop can come from either doe or buck, but if clumped together usually means they have just got out of 'bed' and deficated.

You are VERY close to a good bedding area. I believe he will be back.

Anthony T.

+1. he'll be back.

ShadowAce

Not sure how you're going to effectively hunt 20 yards from a bedding area though?

dirtpounder

I also think he'll be back, and if he's not he won't be far away...if this is a buck. I guess it kinda depends on how pressured the deer are and if they'll spook easy.I personally don't believe in a buck getting spooked and running 5 miles away and never coming back. Maybe some people have had this happen but my bet is 9 outta 10 times they stay where they are...just very cautously.

MountainHunter

It's not really a bedding "area". It's a lone bed, which is why it surprised me. I hunted this spot probablya dozentimes last year and saw multiple deer all but one time. The deer generally bed further back up the mountain. There is some pressure here, as we have a neighbor who kills (illegally) 20 to 30 deer a year, sometime on our land, sothey move back a bit to bed, for the most part. Thereare a few bedding areas nearby in some piney areas, but (I believe) this is the only bed really close by.

One of the other nice things about this spot is that the wind is almost always uphill in the mornings (when the deer come up from feeding in the fields at night) and almost always downhill in the evenings (when they go down to the fields to feed). So, hopefully, I can get him coming back to his bed in the morning, after feeding his belly!