are there any strategies you guys use when shed hunting i have been out for hours and walked a long ways and found no sheds.

Usually what we do here is find a main food source where they are herded up feeding and walk a few of the thousand trails going back towards a bedding area. Fields are usually picked clean here by people on sleds so we tend to keep walking the trails in the bush where people would have to get off the sled and heaven forbid walk. Alfalfa is usually pretty good but if you can find a chunk of land where the crop has been left out over winter you are laughing. Also look for fields with hay bales still in the field, the deer will pick at them all winter and try to bustem up often hookin their antlers on the twines.

I have good luck in bedding santuaries where i dont normaly go during the season, and trails leading from them to feeding areas. Look where they jump ditches and in them or fence crossings. I try and grid a woods in sections covering as much of it as possable. Ridges seem to produce alot of times. look in thickets as well. hope you find a monster!!

We have a lot of marshes with little bedding areas deep in the phragmites. It's like walking through a maze. My rule of thumb is to wear at least knee high rubber boots, and whenever I'm on a trail that leads to somewhere thick, or wet, or just a pain in general, push on.

You've got to go into the thickest, pain in the neck spots to really figure out what's goingon with the area, and find where the big boys are tearing it up.It's the only time of year you can do it without getting poision ivy, oak, sumac... andticks, chiggars, mosquitos...

I've found two skulls this year as well - the poor boys ran back to their bedding areas wounded and never woke up.

P.S. They were on state land - one was hit by a car and one was gut shot by someone else.