Southern Man wrote:harold wrote:brancher147 wrote:I scouted a ridge today with a bunch of windward bedding. Some of the buck beds were on the edge of thick cover, some were in the thick cover, and some were in open hardwoods. It just depends. But when you find a buck bed and sit down in it and look around, you will realize why he is bedding there.
Can you expand on this? How were you finding the beds in the thick cover? Were you walking the edge and saw sign leading you in there? Or were the beds elevation/terrain based, so you were keeping the same elevation while scouting but going in and out of the cover?
I found the same thing last weekend. It was by accident actually. We were driving down a gravel road after scouting a few places and almost to the highway I noticed a rub about 125 yards into the woods on the edge. I stopped and looked and there was another one about 10 yards away from the first. We walked over to them and found several more, new old, large and small. The top of the ridge was thick with small brush maybe 4-5 foot tall. As the ridge dropped off, the woods cleared. Where the ridge crested over the thick stuff stopped. Along this edge is where most of the rubs were or actually a few feet inside the thick. Walking that edge I found a bed next to a tree, wore to the dirt. It had been used repeatedly. The bed was on the downwind side of the ridge on normal winds. Squatting down in the bed you could see everything in front of him all the way to the road and the buck could smell from behind him where he couldn't see. Classic bedding.
There was no reason for me (or anyone actually) to even think anything about this particular spot. Just by chance I seen that one rub. In a month when things green up you won't be able to see it. One of the safest places for the buck to bed.
So the buck is bedding 150 yards or so off the road....or were the rubs you saw from the road not the ones that ran along the thick stuff?