Property Size

[headgear]

Another issue I have on public land is it "can" get used by good bucks but not very often. If they spend on majority of the hunting season off that public land or are only there at night or just once or twice during the rut you are going to have a hard time finding them. Other times a good sized property will only hold a mature buck once in a while, say 1 out of 4 years a buck will call that land home. That might be because one buck slips through the cracks or maybe other bedding areas nearby are getting filled by other bucks or pressures a lot and they have to move. Hunting under these conditions is hard and I think I spent a lot of my early beast days hunting bucks that weren't around all that often.

[keb]

All the places I hunt are small, pretty simple as stated hunt where nobody is hunting, is there is no such place find a differnt property.

[Wlog]

There are definitely some public lands that just don't have the right set of circumstances for you to kill a big buck. I think part of being successful is figuring out which spots you can rule out.
Sometimes there are just too many hunters. Other times it may just be poor habitat. The key IMO is knowing when to give up on a property and when to disect it further

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[fishlips]

When hunting bucks on public land I only try and focus on the best of the best spots. Anything marginal or maybe just doesn't get used enough to be worth hunting for me. If a bedding area doesn't blow me away with sign I'm simply not hunting it. I've walked away from plenty of 500 to 2000+ acre areas because the sign was just not there, or the sign was there but in such limited amounts that it wasn't worth hunting.[/quote]

Never really thought this way, but it makes a lot of sense. I think I have to give this place one decent scouting trip and decide whether or not it is worth it to continue to hunt it. It's close to home, so I have been trying to figure out how to hunt it so I can have a convenient spot to sneak to when I only have a limited amount of time to hunt.

It does get pounded during the rut, but from the Monday after opening weekend to the end of October, you might see a truck or two on it on the weekends.

[headgear]

From the sounds of things it still might be worth a shot in the early season or pre-rut. Scout it out good and see what you can find. You might also want to scout it more than once. I have found that scouting the same areas more than one off season really gives me a better idea of what is happening. Some areas have surprised me and turned into my better spots and other places which I had near the top of my list went cold that next year. I still keep them in mind and hunt them now and then but they are on a level below my prime spots which hold good to great sign year after year.

[keb]

The best spots I have found contain little buck sign, just the big tracks and beds. I have had to fight myself to hunt some of them but had great hunts.

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[keb]

Sounds like I would get more if familiar with how the terrain and access points are so when season comes around you will already know what's over that ridge, other side of the cedar thicket type stuff and base your hunt on where nobody is hunting.

I pretty much no longer do scouting for sign per say, just get more in tune with the way the area lays and feels, because I have learned come prime time when others start hunting they will someway or some how have an impact on the places with all the sign, I can gauge where nobody is going and hunt there regardless of sign, because I really have no other option, it's hunt there or go home. If you pick places where big deer are know to be produced it makes it easier to hunt that away.

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