Buck Bed Hunting for crappy buck:doe ratios

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bulldawgfan007
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Buck Bed Hunting for crappy buck:doe ratios

Unread postby bulldawgfan007 » Tue Jul 29, 2014 4:58 pm

I love constantly learning how to hunt bucks based on bed position. I just started learning this, but Dan is such a thorough teacher, it is easier to wrap my head around and has me excited. Many people sit in funnels and geographic bottlenecks with success. On the land I hunt our buck/doe ratios are horrible. Is this even more of a reason to specifically target individual bucks and hunt them at their bed, rather than putting a stand up over trails in a geographic funnel? I see bucks chasing every year, but they are usually young bucks (except for last year when I was a little wiser), leading me to believe most of my stands have been in bad locations for these mature bucks. This year I decided to hunt smarter for the season and pinpoint individual bucks through tracking (as I get time off from my job) to try to put myself on these deer that I'm not seeing. Is this logical reasoning to almost exclusively try to hunt beds year round and not focus on bottlenecks and funnels to avoid these horrible buck:doe ratio numbers?


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Re: Buck Bed Hunting for crappy buck:doe ratios

Unread postby oldrank » Wed Jul 30, 2014 1:51 pm

Kinda sounds like my hunting area... I believe hunting Beast style will give me better odds of killing a mature buck.
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FRH
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Re: Buck Bed Hunting for crappy buck:doe ratios

Unread postby FRH » Wed Jul 30, 2014 2:13 pm

I think in the situation where the does far outweigh the buck numbers the beast tactic will be even more profound. If a mature buck doesn't have to go out looking for the girls then he will not have to travel far from his home base where he is comfortable. When doe numbers are limited he will have to fight with others to assert his dominance and travel farther distances to breed does.
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Re: Buck Bed Hunting for crappy buck:doe ratios

Unread postby oldrank » Wed Jul 30, 2014 2:25 pm

FRH wrote:I think in the situation where the does far outweigh the buck numbers the beast tactic will be even more profound. If a mature buck doesn't have to go out looking for the girls then he will not have to travel far from his home base where he is comfortable. When doe numbers are limited he will have to fight with others to assert his dominance and travel farther distances to breed does.
add a ton of pressure on top of that n it even wants to make him stay home more. Im not sure what our ratio is exactly but we can pretty much kill as many does as we want.. ill see 20 or so in just about every field.. very seldom do I see bucks

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Stanley
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Re: Buck Bed Hunting for crappy buck:doe ratios

Unread postby Stanley » Wed Jul 30, 2014 4:20 pm

The one thing I always tell people does are your buck producers. If you have very few bucks and are killing does your ratios can't get better.
You can fool some of the bucks, all of the time, and fool all of the bucks, some of the time, however you certainly can't fool all of the bucks, all of the time.
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bulldawgfan007
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Re: Buck Bed Hunting for crappy buck:doe ratios

Unread postby bulldawgfan007 » Wed Jul 30, 2014 6:52 pm

Good point Stanley, and I agree with you in most instances. However, I don't believe most people have numbers quite as out of whack as we do. I have permission to hunt another property in the same county, however this property has numbers closer to equal. I can tell you right off the bat that the buck sightings (young and mature) increase tremendously just from going across the county to this property and using simple hunting tactics. On the land with the bad ratio, we do not kill many does and I honestly believe that is our problem, because of the huge deer population we have. But as you said, you can't kill all the does and expect to have bucks either! Luckily we are not the time to just slaughter the does for fun, but we definitely need to kill a few. Besides, I like deer meat. But I'm going to try beast hunting this year. As yall said, this seems to be the best method for this situation and undoubtedly most lands.
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Re: Buck Bed Hunting for crappy buck:doe ratios

Unread postby FRH » Wed Jul 30, 2014 9:05 pm

Stanley wrote:The one thing I always tell people does are your buck producers. If you have very few bucks and are killing does your ratios can't get better.


That's a good point. And just because your not seeing bucks where you hunt doesn't mean there isn't an abundance on the next property over. I've gone through lulls where the deer just aren't using our farm that much but through cameras and scouting I still know there are plenty of deer on neighboring properties.

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Re: Buck Bed Hunting for crappy buck:doe ratios

Unread postby bulldawgfan007 » Thu Jul 31, 2014 4:21 am

Yall all make good points. I'm in the same boat, we need to kill a bunch of does off, just because of the vast number of them on that property. But I would never kill does just to be killing deer. I think beast hunting will prove the best strategy as yall said above. I've always just hunted deer and not buck. I only wish I had stumbled upon all this information sooner.


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