I think having more hunting land is like playing alot of other sports and the problem of stepping out of your personal limitations....for example, a pitcher has a good fast ball and slider.....that is his bread and butter. Then he tries to get cute during the most critical times of the game with other pitches he knows so so and gets creamed. He doesn't know all the little fine details of those other pitches, although he does "know" them in average practice/theory. Same with hunting, you get too fancy and try to overanalyze/overplay/only look at the big picture and hunt too many spots and not focus on the fine details of the places you hunt, you get burned by wasting your time on the dead spots.

In myexperiences once you start hitting new spots, it get's into your blood and moving around will become part of you. [/align][/align]Learning new ground will help you learnimmensely as deer on different tracks utilize their cover differently. Things you learned to be truewhere you currently hunt..... Some will hold true whileother things will surprise you.Nothing like taking a nice whitetail on land that is new to you. [/align][/align]Good luck.[/align]

i would much rather have one very big farm to hunt, not a lot of smaller farms

same here, it is a lot easier to manage than a bunch of small farms

I have 21 spots I hunt, some I hunt about 5 times a season others only once. I try to keep each spot fresh like its the first time I've been there.

Don't overlook the fact that hunting spots come and go.

We used to have access to a second farm in WV that still brings misty tears to my eyes when I daydream about the acorn littered ridges and sagging meatpole. I would keep friendly access to all of the land I could for the previosuly posted reasons - bearing in my mind that I will eventually lose one of the spots to development, greed, other hunters etc..

Ten years ago I gave up on the private land game. I never knew how long I would be able to hunt an area or who I would be sharing it with. Now I drive 170 miles to where I hunt. It's public land. Lots of it. There are problems with that as well but at least I know I can hunt and there isenough land so I can get away from other people. I don't think I could go back to huntng those small pieces of property. My hat is off to all of you that put up with it.

Magic I am doing both worlds with small private and thousands of public and you know the challanges im sure.

Agreed.

The land on which we hunt is one large lump area. It makes it much easier to manage especially considering one of the keys to any successgul management area is to create a santuary into which hunters nEvER are to enter during hunting season.

More is always better for me. It really depends on your situation. Since I have no control over the land I hunt from other hunters,poachers and slobs,bucks being pushed out of an area from being pressured,crop rotation,losing hunting spots,landowners/their relativesdeciding when you can hunt it, amount oftime to hunt, time of year and wind directionall dictate where I will hunt on a given day. I want a lot of land so Tyler andI can hunt on any given day and not botch an area up morethen it already has been. We need to be able to go where the bucks are on that given day which a week earlier might have found them using adifferent area.

Spread ourselves thin?? It isn't even a concern when dealing with all the other things while hunting mature bucks for us. Plus it is suppose to be fun which it is even when flustration is a part of it.

Tim