clawj said:
I think depending how loud you are walking through the bush and wind direction, you may not actually see a deer. Doesn't mean they aren't there. I think he means you may see fresh tracks, crap, piss(when snow is on the ground), rubs, scrapes, established trails, areas of food sources eaten away, etc. There are lots of ways to figure out the deer without physically seeing them. But you could sit in a stand and watch or in your car and watch a couple nights from a distance then set up based on what you saw. It may actually save you time in the end. Just remember to play the wind, the odds of you beating a Deers nose are pretty slim.
Agreed!!!! 100%
In there area that I hunt I do allot of work before the season starts clearing brush on established trails (It's on provate property) and just generally scouting around to see where the deer are moveing around, feeding, bedding, checking along old scrape lines and looking ofr new ones. Rarely do I actually see a deer when scouting. But once the season starts I have a god idea of where on the property the deer are moveing and when. More often than not this preseason scouting leads to a successful hunt.
For proof that sometimes you don't even have to do allot of scouting to get rewarded I'll tell you about a hunt I had last year.
My Uncle and a buddy of mine were already the property I had mentioned above but were not haveing alot of luck. They were seeing plenty of deer sign but because the deer were moveing mostly at night they were no seeing many deer during the day.
I wan't able to get out until the second weekend of the season and I didn't want to go hunt the property because they were already there and had set up stands and I basicaly didn't want to screw up there hiunt on them .
So I went to hunt near our cabin near Bird Lake. My first day out there I was mostly walking trails (I had the rifle with me because the season was open). This was primarily a scouting day for me to see where the deer were moveing so I could figure out a area to set up on the next day.
Anyways as it turned out I found a decent scrape line to hunt but when the next day rolled around around so did my Uncle and buddy. They were no luck at the other property so they decided to join us at the cabin. Thanks to my scouting the previous day I was able to get the 3 of us set up in a good area and in the end my buddy ended up harvesting a nice 5x5 buck along an area of the trail I told him to go sit.