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How
To Find Bucks On Public Land
(Originally
published in Hunt Only.com)
©
By Othmar Vohringer
“There are no bucks on public land worth hunting.”
This is an expression that I hear many times when the talk is about
hunting on public land. Others have said: “You
can’t have a quality hunt on public land, there are to many
hunters.”
Yes, hunting on public land can be tough, frustrating and downright
humiliating. You also have to share the woods with other hunters and at
times it seems that there are more hunters in the woods than deer
especially on opening day. But make no mistake about it. There are
bucks on public land, even big bucks.
All hope is not lost. With a little thinking and a change of hunting
strategy you too can drag a good buck from public land. To become
successful we have to forget every advice on hunting strategies we have
read in magazines or seen on TV because public land deer are a very
different breed from the deer on private land. These critters have seen
it all, especially the mature bucks that survived two or three years of
intense hunting pressure.
The key to success public land hunting is scouting. Scouting on public
land is different from scouting on private land. When I scout on public
land I don’t worry about finding deer sign such as rubs and
scrapes. I am scouting for hunter activity. I want to know what the
other hunters did and where they went. The best and most productive
time to scout is right after the hunting season closes. You may ask
“why scout after the hunting season and what good will that
do me for the fall/winter season next year?” Well, the
post-season scouting has four advantages over any other times.
- In
the winter you can see the structure of the land very clearly laid out
before you. Where you couldn’t see 20 yards in the fall now
you can see for a long way. It is easy to distinguish the different
terrain structures, edges and travel corridors.
- Right
after the hunting season you still can see the sign other hunters left
behind, such as tree stands, trails and the red flagging tape with
which they marked the way from the truck to the stand sites.
- The
deer still will have the same movement patterns they had during the
hunting season. It takes deer about two to four weeks before they go
back to normal (un-pressured) behavior.
- At
this time of year you do not have to worry about spooking deer as you
walk the trails to map out deer travel patterns and find the woodland
food sources. The deer will not remember your intrusion come next
hunting season.
What the scouting will reveal is that even on relatively small public
land parcels there are what I call islands. These are places that
hunters don’t go too. The reason for this is that either such
islands are places where it is difficult to get too, steep ravine,
flooded timber, dense undergrowth and so on, or it is simply to far
away from the truck. The average hunter never ventures much further
than a quarter to a half a mile away from the vehicle. There is
something else the average hunter avoids like the plague and this is
the proximity of houses, streets and open areas. For some strange
reason many hunters think that deer live in the timber.
Deer know about the habits of hunters and react to it by going to
places that hunters overlook or find uncomfortable. To get to these
islands deer use escape routes. Find these escape routes and then be
there bright and early. As the other hunters arrive they will push the
deer to you. Would you sit in a wide-open field behind a lonely apple
tree watching a patch of tall grass not larger than a pick-up-truck? Or
how about crawling on your hands and knees through a thorn-spiked
thicket right next to the parking lot? One of these, the thicket, is
where I shot my first public land deer, a big 8-point buck. Another
time sitting
behind the apple tree in an open field overlooking a tall grass patch I
have seen a true monster buck that surely would have made the book but
he never presented me with a perfect shot opportunity and so I had to
let him walk.
Over the years I've taken many good public land bucks in places where
nobody thought they would exist. You can do the same, you just have to
work a bit harder and think outsode of the box. The bucks are there the
rest is up to you.
###
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