Ok I have a question. There is an old man that hunts with us that has been hunting whitetail for years. He never gets in a stand and he stalks all the time. He bags a decent sized buck every year. What is the secret to being able to have success while stalking? I jump deer that are bedded down without fail before I get close. Is it just patience and luck of the draw?
them old boys always have tricks, they have been hunting longer than we have! I would ask him to have coffee with you and work your way towards a conversation with him about stalking deer.
have to start stalking deer with failures and you learn from your mistakes to become the great deer stalker
walk slow scan ahead of you as much as you can and stop often. most peoples problem with not seing deer while stalking is they are constantly looking at where there feet is going to hit the ground. i'm not claiming to be good at this, i'm one of those people who can't stop looking at the ground in front of me. i pick my head up when i hear the deer running!
LOL, this is kind of a funny thread. My hunting buddies have a long running joke about me and "My Stand", which really isn't a stand. We hunted out at a freinds house and they have about 15-20 acres. 2 of us at a time. There are not that many trees and at the time I really didn't care if I got a deer or not. My buddy would always sit in his stand in a tree and one day I tried to be funny and grabbed a nice white and blue lawn chair and sat right on top of a bush in the middle of the field. I kid you not though, he NEVER had a deer walk by him (he is a big scent block guy to), yet every time we went out I would have deer walk within 10 feet of me and not even pay attention to me. I shot at an 8 point, and a giant 14 out of this lawn chair and probably saw a dozen others as well. To this day when I say I am putting up a deer stand they all think I am grabbing that lawn chair lol.
sound kinda like your trying to still hunt. for that. know your wind. its not a must but TRY to only move when the wind blows to cover your movement. move extremely slow. only go about 50 to 100 yards in an hour. every couple steps you stop to look around because with every step it changes angles (use binoculars if possible) you can also use a grunt here and there to mask sounds like twigs breaking. also try to get right along a bedding area and a staging area. mess around with these techniques with trial and error and make it into your own style
Read The Tracker by Tom Brown Jr. It's not a hunting book, but it'll certainly give you an idea of what it really takes to stalk an animal. He's an amazing dude!
First and foremost, I don't think there are many people that really STALK white-tailed deer, as they aren't a game animal that is really overly "stalk-able." Most guys who hunt from the ground as this guy in the OP is talking about are "still hunting." In much of the white-tail range around me, it's so thick, that you don't have the opportunity to stalk, but you CAN still hunt. As was said above, you have to move VERY slowly, and scan the woods VERY thoroughly, and be VERY patient. I've many times walked right up on deer when the conditions were right. That being said, the conditions MUST be "right" for it to even be an option. Get me a nice rainy night the soaks the woods, and I'm sneaking through the woods because that's one of the types of hunting I really enjoy. And I've killed almost as many from the ground as I have from above....
