Who still does them? The majority of us practice QDMA, management, scouting, trail camera use, feeding, food plots, creating cover...the works. We spend hour spreparing for a single shot opportunity. But this can all be pushed aside for 1 deer drive a year that will yield you all the buck sightings and shot opportunities you can ask for with little effort Thoughts? (Keep it clean...)
Love them, we generally don't do them til late in the season and after endless hours sitting in stands it can be an exciting change of pace. Hunting from trees, decoys, drives...indians taught us everything.
Up north in the big woods that's how we hunt. It's a very different picture though than what people in agricultural areas would think of, we don't have any farms or cropland for 20+ miles.......up north they laugh and call sitting down and farm hunting down south the "easy way" to do it. We have 12 members in our camp up in the Adirondacks. We average around 10 drives a weekend. Our season is 6 weeks long. We had a record year in 2011 and managed to kill 5 bucks, usually it's 2-3 bucks a year for us. Not sure I'd consider it little effort.......season ended for me last Sunday and YTD I did 71 miles on foot up there and didn't see a single horn. Not a terribly effective way or place to hunt deer, but I really love the comraderie and team culture, and the camp life at night is fantastic. I still prefer playing a chess match with a mature whitetail with a bow in my hand, but hunting up north with a rifle in a gang is a close second.
Another thing that influences our drives is the amount of tags we get. Between VA and NC I get 6 buck tags and 6 doe tags with my licenses. Not to mention I purchase all the extra antlerless tags I want in VA and almost every farm I hunt has DMAP tags for antlerless deer. These farms are always smaller blocks and strips of woods bordering large crop fields which sets up perfect for small drives. If my buddy and I go hunt in December these deer have been hunted pretty hard at this point so their daytime movement is way down. We still sit on our stands and hunt all morning until about 10 or 11 then we do a couple of drives (usually in a different block) then we go and still hunt again the last 3 or 4hours of the day. It's fun and a good way to break up the day and fill a couple of doe tags, rarely do we jump up a big boy(that we see anyway). We are pretty die hard when it comes to bowhunting and still hunting so we tend to have a good idea where the deer are bedding so I feel like why not take advantage of that info and make them move a little. I'm probably in the minority but to me it's pretty exciting and a fun way to kill a couple hours and deer. We turn our meat into burger, breakfast sausage, and summer sausage and I'm not exaggerating when I say I rarely buy meat at the store.
Been doing drives since I started hunting back in the late 70's. Now days... I will push for the boss and one of his landlords every year. We tried to ween them off drive hunting but the boss is a die hard. The landlord we finally convinced a few years back. He put up a tower stand on mutiply properties of his and enjoys that more now. The boss on the other hand wants to kill his deer fast to get it over with. We will push for him a couple times during the 2.5 week season. he is happy and we go about our hunting. The last deer I shot on a drive was in 1989. I got invited to hunt with a group by one of the guys I was working with. He failed to tell me there would be 15 guys in this group. It was one of the scarest days of hunting I have ever experienced. One guy almost shot himself in the foot. That guy and 3 others shouldn't be allowed to hunt with a rifle. I shot my doe and came up with a good reason to not come back the next day. Never again will I ever hunt with a group of more then 4 or 5 !!!! They will all know how to hunt safe. Drive hunting is starting to fade although this year more people were doing it with the few deer sightings of other methods. I still would perfer seeing other's drive deer then seeing the increase of road hunters the last few years. Usually they don't start drive hunting until 10 in the morning and are usually done by 3 PM. The deer would still move the first and last hour of day light. Now the road hunters are getting horrid and thicker then flies !! It really kill deer movement much more then drive hunting. They drive around all day long. They start a half hour before first light and go until a half hour after last light. We have too many roads around here. Sucks when you get to your spot an hour before light and the deer have already bedded. Then they come out right at dark. Makes for a long boring day. Least with drive hunting... there is a chance they might push one your way. Course first the deer has to make it across the road and not get shot by a road hunter. If you think driving deer is unsafe... the road hunters are unsafer by far. It is fairly flat and very open here. Tough to get a mile away from any road. You will see pickup after pickup driving up and down the roads all day long. It will be 10X worse the first hour and last hour of shooting time. Geeze with the price of gas... you would think you would see less road hunters. Not the case here !! Tim
Rifle hunting is how I started out and that's a big part of how my family does things. I used to love them just because you'd see so many deer and have so many opportunities for a shot, but since I started bowhunting I feel like it throws everything I do out the window. At the end of it all thought, all the groups around us do them too and push all the deer into new territories which can lead to some surprise encounters with deer you have no idea existed. I shot my fair share of deer on drives, but I'm not really a fan since I bowhunt the same woods as my family rifle hunts. To each their own. Letting the woods cool down for a while after the drives gives me some time to put the dog to work on some pheasants though!
Grew up making drives and hunting with dogs. only still hunt now, we will make a drive normally at the end of the season if we are not seeing alot of deer. it is fun to do the stuff you grew up doing every now and again.
We stand hunt mostly, but still do drives, and they are very effective. We do it a little different than alot of folks. We basically set some standers in escape routes, and the drivers do a VERY slow still hunt. Often times the drivers are the ones that kill the deer. We shoot alot of does each season, so its a good way to stack em up! I was a stander on a drive this year....had over 40 deer come down on me within 30-50yds. Saw 6 bucks, one was a big one .... and of course it didn't come down where the rest did...he followed a doe back into the drive! LOL, my typical luck
