So bucks cruise Leeward side

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Tennhunter3
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Re: So bucks cruise Leeward side

Unread postby Tennhunter3 » Fri Oct 19, 2018 3:44 am

The woods can be broken down.

Create sections for yourself and scout each one don't go to next till that areas complete.

As far as breaking it down bucks bed on edge or very close to edgelines.


If the woods are open cross them off.
If that area doesn't have transition avoid it and scout transition until you have the time to return to walk it.

If your hunting a area that other hunters frequent take a map and began crossing off places you know hunters go what's left scout.

These are how I break areas down hopefully it helps. I hunt a 48000 acre forest and a 18000 acre forest.


If rut is what your interested in transition near buck bedding or doe bedding is a good place to start.

It sounds like your focusing on funnels hoping to get lucky. That might work for some young bucks but not for mature bucks on a regular basis. If the funnel is not near bucks preferred bedroom it doesn't matter how pretty it is or how far you can shoot.


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Re: So bucks cruise Leeward side

Unread postby rfickes87 » Fri Oct 19, 2018 4:25 am

A no fail for me has been spotting old clear cuts in aerial maps. Clear Cuts that have grown in real thick over the years on top of ridges. Where that thick edge meets a leeward military crest or point at the same elevation, oh man you're in a great bedding spot. Sitting adjacent to that has yielded some good opportunities for me. Its a very easy way to take huge areas of land and immediately start breaking it down. I can mark 3 or 4 of those spots and go scout it and 95% sure i'll get onto some good bedding that way.
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Re: So bucks cruise Leeward side

Unread postby JakeB » Fri Oct 19, 2018 7:32 am

timberwolf311 wrote:Let’s think deeper. We have 15000 acers of public, you could walk the leeward side from 7:00am to 7:00pm and not touch it all. The ridges snake back and forth and all around. They cover many more miles than the simple way a crow flies. How can we cut this down, how can we fractionalize where to focus. The following are my opinions. First thought everyone says go to doe bedding. That’s a great first step but in areas this large it will not produce repeated shots at bucks, only small widows of a few days that you better be in the stand. We gotta find corridors, we gotta find spots bucks will funnel through regardless of does being present, spots they must take to get to the spots where the does maybe. I search hard for rock ledges, laurel so think deer can’t even navigate it and must skirt around, creek crossings. I am giant fan of leeward side, thermals, 1/3 elevation. You gotta get outside of that sometimes when the rut hits and also on different style properties. I could hunt buck beds for months and never see a deer I wished to kill. The area is just to vast and there is so much great beddding and so few deer. Rubs are almost no exist, no competition. Think how a buck will travel from downwind of one bedding to another. He isn’t always gonna take that leeward ridge side if the next known for bedding isn’t on that ridge. He is gonna cut to the shortest route(imo). Find hubs, spots they can make a loop and hit 3-5 doe bedding areas and be right back where they started. You also must condense these areas to get a snap shot of what bucks you have. I can run cameras 8 months and never get the buck I get in November, it’s not bc he traveled there from somewhere else. It’s bc he doesn’t have to move the other 8 months. Now he is forced off his normal travel route that may only cover a 1/2 acre. So if he refused to move more than a 1/2 acre for 3/4 of year, what do we know...he is lazy. HE WILL TRAVEL LAZY IN THR RUT TOO. You have to find the spots most big bucks have to travel. At this time of year(rut) you don’t have to hunt his bed, you don’t have to sneak up on him, you don’t need the wind advantage, all need is a pinch point, a corridor, a place they will take to cut ridge to ridge!

This is a note to myself as I head out to scout. Please provide input on how you approach your rut spots.



Would you care to add some topo map examples? Not of your personal spots ofcoarse, just some random topos with similar features. I'm trying to up my topo game and marked up maps really help.

Anyone else willing to add examples would be great too.
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Re: So bucks cruise Leeward side

Unread postby justdirtyfun » Fri Oct 19, 2018 8:16 am

rfickes87 wrote:A no fail for me has been spotting old clear cuts in aerial maps. Clear Cuts that have grown in real thick over the years on top of ridges. Where that thick edge meets a leeward military crest or point at the same elevation, oh man you're in a great bedding spot. Sitting adjacent to that has yielded some good opportunities for me. Its a very easy way to take huge areas of land and immediately start breaking it down. I can mark 3 or 4 of those spots and go scout it and 95% sure i'll get onto some good bedding that way.


This is my game plan at the moment. I would normally have more to go on but moved to a new state. Those clear cuts touching the military crest should have me in the game. I also would not be overwhelmed by the property size. Best of the best when going off map scouting.
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Re: So bucks cruise Leeward side

Unread postby DaveT1963 » Fri Oct 19, 2018 8:48 am

The best way to kill a buck is to hunt him where he is at, or will be shortly.
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Re: So bucks cruise Leeward side

Unread postby brancher147 » Fri Oct 19, 2018 10:53 pm

Leeward cruising is an observation and a common occurrence in hill country, nothing more than that. I hunt the windward side just as much and see just as much action. Depends on how they bed, wind, thermals, and where they are cruising to. I have seen the windward side behave identically to the leeward side under certain wind, thermal conditions.

But what I look for most during rut cruising is hard terrain funnels (cliffs, boulders) that connect bedding on the upper 1/3 or where they cross the top. Laurel is also a good funnel. I also like to hunt high thermal hubs with a consistent wind. But 15000 acres is not a big area IMO. And you are not hunting it all, you are hunting certain areas. I hunt much larger areas but break it down to about a square mile or so for my actual hunting spots so it is not overwhelming.
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Re: So bucks cruise Leeward side

Unread postby Steelhead125 » Sat Oct 20, 2018 4:50 am

Thanks for the responses. I ended up shooting a 9 point on the 16th while I was hunting the windward side. The sign was just too good for me not to hunt it.
Sorry thought this was from a similar post I started the other day.
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Re: So bucks cruise Leeward side

Unread postby Crazinamatese » Sat Oct 20, 2018 7:24 am

I been after a big mature buck the last 2 seasons who likes to cruise the non-leeward side of the ridge. Im confused as to why he is cruising the non-leeward side but he is doing it for a certain reason and I yet to figure it out. I will be after him again in a few weeks. God willing he is still alive this season.

Hunting this buck has taught me to never look beyond the thought that a buck will do things that contradict the popular beliefs and theories of what bucks are "supposed" to do.

I hope my two cents might bring some ideas to your plan.
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Re: So bucks cruise Leeward side

Unread postby pewpewpew » Tue Oct 23, 2018 9:26 pm

Your hunting situation sounds a lot like mine. In my case, 9/10 of those hubs are on a field top and not huntable.

Low deer density is tough because you just don’t get to observe deer patterns. Most guys see more deer movement in a week than I do all season.
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Re: So bucks cruise Leeward side

Unread postby pewpewpew » Tue Oct 23, 2018 9:35 pm

Crazinamatese wrote:I been after a big mature buck the last 2 seasons who likes to cruise the non-leeward side of the ridge. Im confused as to why he is cruising the non-leeward side but he is doing it for a certain reason and I yet to figure it out. I will be after him again in a few weeks. God willing he is still alive this season.

Hunting this buck has taught me to never look beyond the thought that a buck will do things that contradict the popular beliefs and theories of what bucks are "supposed" to do.

I hope my two cents might bring some ideas to your plan.


Here is my question to you:

Are you accessing from the top or bottom? Are you hunting points, or some other terrain feature? My access is from the top, which means if I am going to hunt a leeward point, my wind will probably be blowing down hill, into my shooting lane. With top access it seems to me that hunting leeward is a roll of the dice. I suppose you could hunt a crosswind, but then you risk blowing out the next point.

I’m probably missing something, but windward just seems a lot easier to hunt, especially in shifty winds.
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Re: So bucks cruise Leeward side

Unread postby HuntingInWI » Wed Oct 24, 2018 12:06 pm

timberwolf311 wrote: Think how a buck will travel from downwind of one bedding to another. He isn’t always gonna take that leeward ridge side if the next known for bedding isn’t on that ridge. He is gonna cut to the shortest route(imo). Find hubs, spots they can make a loop and hit 3-5 doe bedding areas and be right back where they started.


Great info in this post. I just can't visualize how bucks short cut to hit multi doe bedding areas. Could someone post a topo of how bucks do this in hill country?
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Re: So bucks cruise Leeward side

Unread postby bowhunter15 » Thu Oct 25, 2018 12:20 am

I think some of it depends on what the hills look like. Do you have long narrow ridges or condensed hubs with points going in all directions? In the latter, the wind is only truly "leeward" in a few spots. A deer could cross from one bedding to another in a few minutes, so if he's doing a lot of cruising it stands to reason that he's not always going to travel on the leeward side. Most of the areas I hunt are like that. We don't really have long, narrow ridges. We have more networks of shorter points going in many directions.

I was actually just messaging Jeff G not too long ago about access. He prefers to always access from the top. In some areas, bottom access is the only option, but you can turn a low access into a high access. Walking up to the spine of a ridge or hub allows you to travel to a leeward bowl and then drop down to hunt between two leeward bedding points, often with doe bedding either up top or down in the bottoms. So in those scenarios a buck might not be traveling far. He may just Hop from one point to the next but use a certain elevation to do it. I've been using the slope-angle shading on Caltopo or Gaia to get a better idea for where the military crest is when cyber scouting. It's often much clearer than just looking at topo lines. And then you can predict where that cruising elevation might be.

Image

In that image above that I pulled from a random spot, you can see how the slope angle shading makes it really easy to predict where a cruising elevation might be. And even though there isn't much for a lee-ward ridge in terms of total distance, those point would correspond with lee-ward buck bedding. And you might expect does to be higher up on those points if there's enough cover or down in that drainage. But what you see between those two points is that ravine, where likely there will be some sort of natural pinch point that the bucks will cross around. So I would drop into the region of that red circle and look for the sign indicating that trail. Now imagine an entire hub:

Image

There can still be that leeward movement from one area to the next, but if a buck really wants to check that entire area, there will have to be times when he's not on the leeward side. He could travel that elevation along multiple points, he could shortcut from low spot to low spot or through a saddle, or maybe he would even drop down the spine of a ridge and move to the next hub over. But either way, the hard terrain funnels become the spots to focus on because they're funneling the movement. And the more bedding on either side of one of those pinch points, the better.
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Re: So bucks cruise Leeward side

Unread postby pewpewpew » Thu Oct 25, 2018 12:50 pm

bowhunter15 wrote:I think some of it depends on what the hills look like. Do you have long narrow ridges or condensed hubs with points going in all directions? In the latter, the wind is only truly "leeward" in a few spots. A deer could cross from one bedding to another in a few minutes, so if he's doing a lot of cruising it stands to reason that he's not always going to travel on the leeward side. Most of the areas I hunt are like that. We don't really have long, narrow ridges. We have more networks of shorter points going in many directions.

I was actually just messaging Jeff G not too long ago about access. He prefers to always access from the top. In some areas, bottom access is the only option, but you can turn a low access into a high access. Walking up to the spine of a ridge or hub allows you to travel to a leeward bowl and then drop down to hunt between two leeward bedding points, often with doe bedding either up top or down in the bottoms. So in those scenarios a buck might not be traveling far. He may just Hop from one point to the next but use a certain elevation to do it. I've been using the slope-angle shading on Caltopo or Gaia to get a better idea for where the military crest is when cyber scouting. It's often much clearer than just looking at topo lines. And then you can predict where that cruising elevation might be.

Image

In that image above that I pulled from a random spot, you can see how the slope angle shading makes it really easy to predict where a cruising elevation might be. And even though there isn't much for a lee-ward ridge in terms of total distance, those point would correspond with lee-ward buck bedding. And you might expect does to be higher up on those points if there's enough cover or down in that drainage. But what you see between those two points is that ravine, where likely there will be some sort of natural pinch point that the bucks will cross around. So I would drop into the region of that red circle and look for the sign indicating that trail. Now imagine an entire hub:

Image

There can still be that leeward movement from one area to the next, but if a buck really wants to check that entire area, there will have to be times when he's not on the leeward side. He could travel that elevation along multiple points, he could shortcut from low spot to low spot or through a saddle, or maybe he would even drop down the spine of a ridge and move to the next hub over. But either way, the hard terrain funnels become the spots to focus on because they're funneling the movement. And the more bedding on either side of one of those pinch points, the better.



Your images are pretty much exactly the terrain I’m working with.

If accessing from the top, I really like the fact that you are really only penetrating the timber a short distance. Depending on the undergrowth, access might be quiet and quick. The challenge I face is bumping feeding deer in the fields in the AM. My other challenge is a draw that is just not steep enough to really funnel deer hard. In my area, I find very few that a deer can’t jump across or climb if they really wanted to avoid being funneled.

In Brad Herndon’s “Mapping Trophy Bucks” he illustrates this exact set up, except with wind blowing up the draw, into the hunters face, and into the field behind the hunter. That seems like a bulletproof setup, but is hunting windward to much of a sacrifice?

Would you hunt a setup like this outside of the rut? Or would this be strictly a cruising time thing?
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Re: So bucks cruise Leeward side

Unread postby HuntingInWI » Thu Oct 25, 2018 3:32 pm

bowhunter15 wrote:I've been using the slope-angle shading on Caltopo or Gaia to get a better idea for where the military crest is when cyber scouting. It's often much clearer than just looking at topo lines. And then you can predict where that cruising elevation might be.

Image

In that image above that I pulled from a random spot, you can see how the slope angle shading makes it really easy to predict where a cruising elevation might be. And even though there isn't much for a lee-ward ridge in terms of total distance, those point would correspond with lee-ward buck bedding. And you might expect does to be higher up on those points if there's enough cover or down in that drainage. But what you see between those two points is that ravine, where likely there will be some sort of natural pinch point that the bucks will cross around. So I would drop into the region of that red circle and look for the sign indicating that trail. Now imagine an entire hub:

Image

There can still be that leeward movement from one area to the next, but if a buck really wants to check that entire area, there will have to be times when he's not on the leeward side. He could travel that elevation along multiple points, he could shortcut from low spot to low spot or through a saddle, or maybe he would even drop down the spine of a ridge and move to the next hub over. But either way, the hard terrain funnels become the spots to focus on because they're funneling the movement. And the more bedding on either side of one of those pinch points, the better.


Great info! Thanks for taking the time to post this!
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Re: So bucks cruise Leeward side

Unread postby bowhunter15 » Sat Oct 27, 2018 1:02 am

pewpewpew wrote:
bowhunter15 wrote:I think some of it depends on what the hills look like. Do you have long narrow ridges or condensed hubs with points going in all directions? In the latter, the wind is only truly "leeward" in a few spots. A deer could cross from one bedding to another in a few minutes, so if he's doing a lot of cruising it stands to reason that he's not always going to travel on the leeward side. Most of the areas I hunt are like that. We don't really have long, narrow ridges. We have more networks of shorter points going in many directions.

I was actually just messaging Jeff G not too long ago about access. He prefers to always access from the top. In some areas, bottom access is the only option, but you can turn a low access into a high access. Walking up to the spine of a ridge or hub allows you to travel to a leeward bowl and then drop down to hunt between two leeward bedding points, often with doe bedding either up top or down in the bottoms. So in those scenarios a buck might not be traveling far. He may just Hop from one point to the next but use a certain elevation to do it. I've been using the slope-angle shading on Caltopo or Gaia to get a better idea for where the military crest is when cyber scouting. It's often much clearer than just looking at topo lines. And then you can predict where that cruising elevation might be.

Image

In that image above that I pulled from a random spot, you can see how the slope angle shading makes it really easy to predict where a cruising elevation might be. And even though there isn't much for a lee-ward ridge in terms of total distance, those point would correspond with lee-ward buck bedding. And you might expect does to be higher up on those points if there's enough cover or down in that drainage. But what you see between those two points is that ravine, where likely there will be some sort of natural pinch point that the bucks will cross around. So I would drop into the region of that red circle and look for the sign indicating that trail. Now imagine an entire hub:

Image

There can still be that leeward movement from one area to the next, but if a buck really wants to check that entire area, there will have to be times when he's not on the leeward side. He could travel that elevation along multiple points, he could shortcut from low spot to low spot or through a saddle, or maybe he would even drop down the spine of a ridge and move to the next hub over. But either way, the hard terrain funnels become the spots to focus on because they're funneling the movement. And the more bedding on either side of one of those pinch points, the better.



Your images are pretty much exactly the terrain I’m working with.

If accessing from the top, I really like the fact that you are really only penetrating the timber a short distance. Depending on the undergrowth, access might be quiet and quick. The challenge I face is bumping feeding deer in the fields in the AM. My other challenge is a draw that is just not steep enough to really funnel deer hard. In my area, I find very few that a deer can’t jump across or climb if they really wanted to avoid being funneled.

In Brad Herndon’s “Mapping Trophy Bucks” he illustrates this exact set up, except with wind blowing up the draw, into the hunters face, and into the field behind the hunter. That seems like a bulletproof setup, but is hunting windward to much of a sacrifice?

Would you hunt a setup like this outside of the rut? Or would this be strictly a cruising time thing?


Outside of the rut I would work from those pinch points and try to sneak closer to the points in an attempt to get close enough for daylight activity.

I haven't put enough sits in windward vs leeward drainages to be able to really speak to the total difference. I would assume that during the rut it doesn't matter as much, but outside of the rut you might not have a buck bedding on the windward point. One thing to keep in mind though is that late evening, the thermals will start dropping, and your scent will start sinking down the valley even if you're on the windward side (unless you happen to have a strong consistent wind through the evening like if a front is moving through).


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