AlwaysWhitetail wrote:Head hunting,
I feel really confident going into this season. Taking the beast tactics to SC, GA and Florida. Have some real good bucks on camera
Lets talk about going beast style and being mobile on a lease when all other members are not like minded individuals. Anybody else encounter this? Seems to me like i am hunting pressured public land sometimes. Thoughts?
This is the scenario for me as well. I know that most people on here are public land hunters. The "hunting club/lease" style of hunting does not seem to be as prevalent in the North as it is in the South. Most members on here are from Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, etc., at least by the counts I saw on a voting thread on here. Now that said, there is still a ton of information on here that can be used, however there are some tactics that I find that may only be applicable to southern style hunting. A5Blaster and Tennhunter3 I feel have posted some good information about hunting in the south.
Specific to your question, I am in a club that has about 34 members. Its me and maybe 1 other guy that is a mobile hunter. I wouldn't call myself a beast hunter yet, this is my first year really diving into the forum and tactics discussed here. I went "mobile" about 3 years ago and I frame that in quotes because up to this point it has only meant that I would scout and find a new location to pre-hang a setup each year but would leave it there all year. I have had some success in just doing that so I am encouraged by the move this year to truly go mobile and setup and tear down in a hunt and add a lot more scouting to my tactics as opposed to to hunting an "area" that I thought looked good. The toughest thing that I have to encounter is the fact that I am limited within our lease because members have a 200 yard buffer zone around their assigned locations. With 34 members and the possibility of 4 locations each, this really shrinks the property. I have found some good sign so far this year though and plan to do a lot more in season scouting. I think the bedding tactics are a little different for us in the south. What we tend to find on our property, is that they bed in the thickets. Being timber management company there is new thickets every 4-5 years or so. I have focused my scouting on finding sign outside of known thickets to see if I can find anything that suggests deer movement. Tracks are near impossible to find in heavy pine needle beds. I have found cameras to have lots of negative reaction, especially with bucks because I agree with you in that even though it is labeled "private" my area hunts like heavily pressured public with all the atv's running around between hunting and going check cameras. I know for a fact I walk the most at our lease. I try to stay 1/2 mile out from any location I am hunting with an atv, depending on the location. I am usually only closer on the perimter locations and a lot of time I use a vehicle at those to cut out the atv noise. I have been researching on here trail camera tactics to pick up on tips to be much less intrusive with camera setups and hopefully be able to use it as a scouting tool as opposed to just getting pictures. There are some things I am definitely looking to try. Almost all other members save the one guy that I mentioned is a box stand/blind rotational hunter. Archery numbers have increased a good bit when the state I hunt added crossbows to the legal weapons for archery. In being honest it is what got me more involved as well. Even with that, it only meant most guys adding a ladder stand at one end of their food plots for most and a few other guys adding lock-on's that they don’t ever move. Most guys offseason preparation is solely planting food plots. Yes I am doing these things as well but with scouting I feel I am learning more about how to hunt these locations. I have found at one of my locations that I added a box blind in a large travel corridor right between two bedding areas. That box blind will be removed here shortly. Thinking back, the first year I had hunted the area with just lock-on's and harvested a 9-point buck and a doe, with a shot at another nice buck but had forgotten that my gun dropped off my atv when loading the doe up and after missing on the second buck, found my gun to be off by 7" high and left. The next year I had a bad hit (archery) on a 7-point that bled good but could never recover, even had a tracking dog come out. After that the location has gone pretty much dry and I have realized through scouting that this seems to be because of the addition of the box blind and my previous access point which was to walk up through the food plot. With the box blind out of there I have found another access route and will be able to keep my scent out of the food plot and crossing trails of deer. I lose about 30 yards of hunting the plot because it is boomerang shaped and I wont be able to see that end but that will just have to be the trade off.
This is some of the adaptation of "beast" style tactics that I am adding to my toolbox if you will. How has your experience been so far?