I find that I am driving myself crazy because I can' t make up my mind on which stand to hunt. I have about 20 trees spiked for my lockon that I carry in and hang but never leave up. I do this so I can be more versitile and hunt different areas but I find myself always doughting my decision, especially when on the way out I see deer under another stand site. does anyone else experience this

Are you seeing deer when on stand?

Every hunter at one time or another doubts stand location when they do not see a deer after sitting on it, and dount it even more when they see deer under another stand location they are not in. If you know you have done your scouting right and you know you have, it will just be a matter of time before the stand will pay off. Deer in most places do not travel the same route every day at the exact same time or day. Several places I hunt the deer on on a 2-3 day cycle, as a result I may not see a deer for up to two days, other times I will see them but not where I am setup. It is frustrating, but if deer hunting were easy it would be called deer killing!

ya, probably 60% of the hunts, I am just having trouble W/ seeing bucks, they seem to be using different travel routes or something. Another problem is it has been hot here in oklahome until last week and there are no acorns where there were tons last year. They are eating alfalfa and they aren' t getting to it until well after dark. I feel like this will produce in the next couple of weeks but not as of yet.

caddo not sure how far along the rut is where you are at, but the bucks will normally use side trails off of the doe trails until the rut is on, then the bucks will be trailing the doe wherever they go.

thanks for the advice I feel like the next couple of weeks will be more productive. Some years are just harder to hunt and that is why we do it for the challenge of it. It is frustrating but that' t what makes it fun. Last year at this time I had seen 12 different buck and a couple of bruisers. Owe well never give up.

As we know, deer are unpredictable but, most often will have certain patterns during the season based around weather conditions. Keep a log of all your hunts paying close attention to wind speed and direction, temp, clouds, moon, barometer. If you can hunt a place for a few years, you' ll really get an idea of how the deer move relative to weather conditions, taking the guess work out of the decision of where to hunt (to a point obviously). I have two stands behind my house and have observed where the deer will more than likely be traveling. If the wind is S to SW, I know I won' t see deer at one stand for example. Again, deer drive us nuts trying to guess them out, but as Tazman put it, it' s called deer hunting, not deer killing. And one more quick thing - second guessing which stand to hunt sometimes can be a good thing. I hunted a woods with a 50 acre field in the middle of it - set the stand on the edge of the woods next to a well used deer trail. I watched the deer come out of the woods three days in a row 200 yards north of me. I moved my stand to where they were coming out. That night, they came out under the tree I just moved from! But, the good news here is that I was able to sit over and film a 6x6 elk with 19 cows/calfs for two hours - all within 15 yards at times. That was worth the hunt in itself.