The Hunting Beast

Good stuff! Thanks!!

I enjoyed this video. Some of those bucks had some serious inches. Good video Dan !!

Great video Dan!!

I learned a few things and got some ideas from this one. It's crazy, its July 1 tomorrow. The countdown is on.

I worked really hard to locate bucks last summer. I found a few, but I wasnt able to locate anything that I could for sure say was older than 2. Moat of the area around me is big woods, so not a lot of agriculture fields to glass and shining isnt very effective when you cant see 50yds off the road. Plus, I am certain deer duck and cover a lot of the time when they hear cars coming or see lights coming at night. I still plan to try to use these tactics to locate bucks this summer, but only where they make sense to use.

Two new tactics I plan to try this summer are trail cams on mock scrapes- aggressively rotating a half dozen cameras to new areas every two weeks till mid-September, with the goal of inventorying 30 spots, then let them soak on the best spots fir the season.

The other tactic I planned to do more of but am having second thoughts after seeing deer negatively react to it is using my drone and doing fly bys of remote clearings/meadows in the big woods, cattails marshes, etc., just before dusk. The drone I have basically sounds like a cloud of bees. You can hear it from 100yds away or more, to get close enough to deer to see what they are, you have to blow them out of the area.

Good video!

Great video! I love hearing those stories!

Great video. I had to laugh on the covert car. I used to take a canoe into a common duck hunting area. There were tree stand surrounding thIs marsh but I was slipping in to the small islands within the center of the marsh. The point where I went in at was right along a travelled road and This was a very busy are ducks, deer, pheasant.. I pulled the decoy maneuver and pasted my back window with duck hunting stickers, also had a bag of decoy in the bow of the canoe. Bow buried underneath. Didn’t want those guys hunting the edge to Figure out what I was doing. Of course eventually someone else got the same idea and the area was blown. But not before I shot the buck I was after. It was a pretty good one for me.

Great video, can't ever get lazy. Basically the mantra is scout 24/7 365.

great video.
Man that's alot of nice bucks in that video.

I’m kinda confused ... I understand summer scouting for taking inventory but don’t deer change bedding locations so how can you determine where they’re gana bed if apple and acorns start dropping and food source change? And if you spotlight bucks late at night how do you know where they are bedding when they could be 1 mile away from their bed by then?

Seeker529 wrote:I’m kinda confused ... I understand summer scouting for taking inventory but don’t deer change bedding locations so how can you determine where they’re gana bed if apple and acorns start dropping and food source change? And if you spotlight bucks late at night how do you know where they are bedding when they could be 1 mile away from their bed by then?

O kind of addressed that in the video, but its a good point for discussion as well. Depending on when your season opens, a lot of the busks I shoot right where I ended up glassing them right before the season. But some disappear and have to be relocated. Like I said in the video, once I find a shooter I narrow my focus on that area... I watch for him at different times, glass, shine, add trail cams, etc.... Often I dont know exactly where they are bedded... Thats where your skill as a hunter comes in and you hunt the animal down. The main point is you would have a very hard time killing giant bucks when your not hunt where one lives... Of my top bucks, almost all of them I was hunting that buck when I shot it. Yes, some were shot right where I was observing them, but many others it got me into the right woods and then I hunted and scouted him down...

Forgot about another tactic people could use to locate mature deer, bear drags. In michigan, bear dog training season starts in mid July. Those guys are dragging the sides of dirt roads almost daily until late September to locate bear tracks crossing the road. Well, they also show where big deer are crossing roads. I just started doing this last year and like I said in my earlier post, wasnt able to locate older deer, BUT, I learned a lot about doe travel routes and preferred road crossings from it. Every time I run across a deer track crossing, I mark it on onx then get out and brush the track clean. Eventually this is going to pay off from either coming across a big buck track and back tracking or from locating doe traffic areas and backtracking to their bedding areas. Even if you dont have bear hunters, you can drive dirt roads and do the same thing, it's just a little tougher to see the tracks sometimes without the drag.

Trout wrote:Forgot about another tactic people could use to locate mature deer, bear drags. In michigan, bear dog training season starts in mid July. Those guys are dragging the sides of dirt roads almost daily until late September to locate bear tracks crossing the road. Well, they also show where big deer are crossing roads. I just started doing this last year and like I said in my earlier post, wasnt able to locate older deer, BUT, I learned a lot about doe travel routes and preferred road crossings from it. Every time I run across a deer track crossing, I mark it on onx then get out and brush the track clean. Eventually this is going to pay off from either coming across a big buck track and back tracking or from locating doe traffic areas and backtracking to their bedding areas. Even if you dont have bear hunters, you can drive dirt roads and do the same thing, it's just a little tougher to see the tracks sometimes without the drag.

Good point... I located a few good bucks looking for bear tracks crossing sand roads in the north woods.