Props to Mark Kenyon over at Wired to Hunt for writing this article... He hits the nail on the head with this one.
No matter what you do --- You can kill'um if they don't exist in your hunting area.... But he is right.. It take hard work to consistently knock down a big boy every year even when you know they are there!
Spot on. I constantly hear people complaining about Michigan not having big bucks cause every one shoots anything with horns, this is true to a extent but there's much more to it. I work harder for my hunting then any one I know around me and each year it has proven it self. Its been a few years since I have had everything come together completly but I have been very fortunate to hunt great deer each year because of the work I put in.
"You don’t need the big expensive gun. You don’t need the 1,000 acre farm. You don’t need the newest doe pee, buck grunt or scent eliminating invisibility cloak." I really like this line. I know this will probably piss a lot of people off, but it seems that a lot of the folks on BH.com are more interested in how their bow looks or what kind of name brand camoflage they are wearing than actually killing mature bucks. It would be nice to have more discussions about tactics and less 'post a pic of your bow' threads.
I think swampthing is spot on. Not to get anyone all riled up because I want my bow to look good and work even better but putting in the time is what a lot of people lack in my personal opinion. And for those that do put in the time and haven't gotten the results, keep on doing it! It will eventually pay off!
It's really simple... You have to hunt where they are and you have to put in the stand time in order to finally get a daytime sighting within bow range. Hunting where they are may mean scouting your *** off to find where the biggest bucks roam the public land you hunt. It may mean leasing up some private land w a few buddies. It may mean improving the habitat of your land to draw the deer off your neighbors... It may mean taking an out of state trip somewhere to hunt. But you can't kill what isn't there.
Read the article earlier and I definitely agree. Takes a year round commitment and a lot of hard work.
One thing that is blatantly obvious, but I think needs saying, is that you can do EVERYTHING 100% right and still not get a big buck. It's the nature of the beast. The secret is to keep plugging away, it'll pay off.
This right here is #1. My father and I are a part of a few leased properties, but over the last few years our top bucks have come off of smaller 30-150 acre farms where a simple knock on the door got us in exclusively. No money involved, just a friendly talk and a little help given to the land owner when they need it. Once the season ends the work begins for the following fall.
That is the number one secret to killing big deer. You cant kill them if they aint there. It doesn't matter how much you scout, how much time you spend in a tree, how many food plots you have, how much ground you can hunt or how much you practice...if there isn't any big deer on your ground, you aint killing a big deer. End of discussion.
Hunt places where other hunters don't hunt. Not as easy as it sounds, finding these places, and getting permission to hunt them, takes effort. It also takes thinking outside the box, and not discounting weird places that seem unlikely.
We used to have good tactics discussions here. They have been MIA for the last couple years now. This is a good reply. The old you can't shoot whats not there mantra drives me nuts when I hear it. I have said it for years... If "you" do no have big bucks on the land you hunt, if "you" really want to hunt big bucks than go find them somewhere else. "Your" only limitations is how hard "you" are willing to work.
Agree with Buckeye....I read it as thought the author assumes people can figure out if they don't have mature bucks on their land then go knock on doors until you get hunting permission where there are big bucks. The author said as much... Bagging the mature bucks takes time and experience, no matter how many you have on your land...anyone nuanced or just untalented at hunting is going to have a rough time bagging them no matter how dedicated they are. Mature deer are smart and don't tolerate *uck-ups. Boot them a bit too much, leave too much scent too often, get wreckless shooting deer in their area and even if you had mature bucks to start with you won't have them long through season. Some people can learn quickly and gain the experience needed though trial and error and others are just clumsy and will never learn or need someone to hold their hand and train them. Hunting mature bucks isn't for the faint of heart. I get the feeling the author may be giving the wrong impression in a sense by indicating that anyone can kill mature deer if they try hard enough. They can certainly increase their odds but the reality is there are many hunters who can hunt 1000 acre plot for 100 years and never get within shot of a mature deer and others that can hunt a hundred yards away from that guy and kill a mature deer every year. Everything in life is that way. For one thing no two mature bucks are the same and if a hunter isn't keyed in to the way deer think or able to recognize why a particular buck is patterning the way he is then there just may not be enough adaptive skills in their toolbox to take mature deer very often.
Like the others say,if you don't have em you can't kill them period. If deer never reach a age to become mature that's another hurdle. Deer have legs you can't stop them from getting hammered across the fence no matter how much ground you have.during the rut who knows how far a deer can travel. So unless your property's around you are on board with letting a buck mature and you have good genetics it may never happen. Around my ground we have so much pressure that the truly big deer don't show themselves during daylight unless they get pushed out of a brush pile somehow. So you got to have them,got to let them mature,got to get them before they know they are being hunting and go underground and stop moving during daylight hours. No problem
The point I am making is if someone is not content with what the land they hunt offers, the only thing stopping them from finding a better situation is themselves.
Well hell...if it were easy then there'd be no sense of accomplishment. Thats the reason rich guys pay 30K to shoot a booner on fenced in deer farms...bragging rights (to people they can fool into thinking they actually shot a wild booner.)
