Unread postby KLEMZ » Wed Mar 16, 2016 12:30 pm
My experience with marsh/swamp in river flood plains is that most of the fall bedding sign is erased by high water in spring thaw time, so they are challenging areas to figure out!
A few thoughts come to mind that might help...
-learn to find buck beds in a terrain that is easy to read (cattail marshes were the best learning tool for me). This will give you confidence in areas that are harder to read.
-If you can find an aerial picture of your swamp in flood stage, look for dry land points extending out into the high water, these will OFTEN turn out to be buck bedding areas even in low water level times. I know of three different mature buck bedding areas that follow this exact pattern. I would like to say that I found them because I was looking for this pattern, but the truth is, I found the beds and then later noticed the flood stage correlation. You can bet I will be seeking out flood stage aerials from now on!
One more comment. I was scouting with a fellow Beast a couple years ago and we found this area that was scarred up with multiple old huge rubs. It was a wide open mature tree area in an otherwise thick under story (near a river). We then found well used beds with huge tracks in this same wide open wooded area. It was obvious that a big buck spent a lot of time here, but it was not a typical bedding site. Back at home I put the way points on google earth, and every other mapping site I could think of. My county GIS website had a picture taken during high water and the beds were exactly on the end of the dry point sticking out into the flood! This was not obvious when walking in the field.
In flood plain bedding, it seems that as long as the bucks aren't pressured, they will bed in unconventional areas that are convenient for them (no flooding issues) as long as they are not harrassed. Kind of like hill bedding, where they will bed on open points until harrassed, and then move to high security thicker cover.
