Every good management plan should include a designated "safe haven" on the property you own or lease. Without it, mature bucks will not stay on your land.
By Don Higgins
The author believes that with hunting pressure being what it is today most regions, designated sanctuaries are a must for serious trophy hunters. Big bucks feel safe in areas where hunters deliberately leave them alone, and undisturbed sanctuaries fill this need.
Photo by Curt Helmick
Back in the early 1980s I was an aspiring trophy whitetail hunter with few bucks to my credit. I longed to tag monster whitetails year after year. Being young, I was long on energy and desire but short on experience and knowledge. I was consumed with whitetails 365 days a year when most guys my age were running around as helter-skelter as a yearling buck in November. Effort was never an issue and my open mind was a blank canvas waiting for the master hunters of the day to slowly paint the recipe for consistent success.
I distinctly remember reading a particular article in North American Whitetail in which an experienced hunter had noted that his success from a stand was normally best the first time that he hunted it and that with each successive hunt his deer sightings decreased from that specific location. That was the first time I had heard of the "first time on stand" theory or the basic premise that the first time a stand is hunted is the best time to kill a buck from it. The whole idea made perfect sense to me. It stood to reason that the more a stand was hunted the more likely it would be that a mature buck would detect a hunter's presence.
THE "STAND" MAN
This new idea quickly proved its worth when, during one of those early seasons, I had shooting opportunities at bucks on 13 consecutive hunts from fresh stands. Today that record may not raise many eyebrows, but 25 years ago the whitetail population was a fraction of what it is today. I became a firm believer, and soon my whole approach to trophy whitetail hunting was based on always hunting fresh stands.
Besides nearly always having a couple of dozen stands in place, I often would head to a fresh hunting area during mid-day with a stand on my back for an evening hunt. I would remain mindful of the wind direction and other factors as I slipped into an area and quietly placed the stand that I immediately hunted. I have to admit that my success was above average for most deer hunters of that time. I figured that tagging nice bucks was almost guaranteed for the rest of my days as I learned the exact trees over a wide area in which to place my stand for a single hunt each season.
As the years rolled by I learned more and more areas. That made it a lot easier to slip in and hang a stand for a single hunt without the need for extensive scouting as I went. I became so obsessed with hunting fresh stands that I kept track not only of my buck sightings but also of the number of different trees that I hunted from during the course of a season.
Each year one of my goals was to hunt from more different trees than I had the year before. I actually thought that my success hinged on always hunting a new stand. It was a lot of work, but the rewards were worth it because a number of good bucks fell to my arrows during those days.
THE LESSON OF TIME
Well, time changes all things. I now have a strong grip on middle age, and while my passion for hunting big whitetails continues to grow, my desire to constantly hang tree stands has waned considerably. On top of that, a number of changes have also taken place within our sport. Primarily, the number of deer hunters has increased to the point where it would be nearly impossible for me to constantly find fresh properties to hunt.
While I can still access many of the properties that I hunted 20 years ago, if I did continue at my old pace I would be sharing most of those tracts with other hunters whose activities would either put mature bucks on red alert or completely push them off of the properties in question. This increase in hunting pressure has definitely caused the whitetail to evolve and adapt. So, as I have tried to stay on top of my game, I also have had to change my approach in order to remain successful.
One of the biggest changes that I have witnessed in our sport is the small army of hunters who now own and/or manage properties specifically for hunting whitetails. I see this as a welcome trend that benefits not only the hunter but also the local whitetail herd. I work directly with many of these hunters/landowners on several fronts. First, I own a business as a reforestation tree-planting contractor and I plant hundreds of acres of CRP tree seedlings every year. I also sell seedlings and other related products to customers who fall into this group.
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