This well-known trophy hunter from Ohio shares over 30 years of accumulated wisdom and lessons learned in the whitetail woods.
By Mike Rex
The author poses with a wall full of impressive Buckeye bow bucks taken over the years, including his 2005 megabuck (also on next page) that scored 218 6/8 non-typical and graced the January cover of North American Whitetail.
When I first took an interest in deer hunting, if I learned about a veteran hunter's technique for harvesting big deer, I would usually take it to heart. After all, he was the expert and if it worked for him, then why not me? After I had a few seasons under my belt, the realization began to sink in that there's never a "never" and never an "always" in the whitetail woods. If I was going to increase my luck, I knew that I would have to adopt some basic principles that applied to my particular situation.
Over the last 30 years, I've developed a strategy through trial and error that, combined with a little luck, has helped to keep my taxidermist busy. These are a few of the things I've learned that have helped me get close to a handful of mature whitetails in the area I hunt. Not everything I do is necessarily in line with "conventional wisdom," and some of my techniques may not apply to every area that whitetails roam, but these strategies certainly have helped me on occasion.
THE MORNING HUNT -- WHEN TO GO TO THE WOODS
Most stand-hunters I know try to be situated in their perch long before the first light of a morning hunt. The common belief is that you want be on stand in the dark so the woods have a chance to settle down before legal shooting light. There is no doubt that listening to the woods come to life on a crisp fall morning is a special event, but it can also be a special thing to listen to deer snort and run off as you stumble in to your stand in the predawn darkness.
It has been my experience that the majority of deer movement I'll observe on a morning hunt will be one to three hours after first light. This is especially true as the rut kicks into full swing. I like to approach my stand site just as the sun begins to glow on the horizon while it's still fairly dark but I can pick my way along without a flashlight. Sometimes I'll spot deer before they spot me. These are deer that would have otherwise spooked as I tried to maneuver through the woods in the dark.
WIND DIRECTION AND THERMAL CURRENTS
How many times have you heard a hunter say, "I didn't hunt that stand today because the wind was wrong"? This statement carries a lot more weight in a flat-land situation, where the wind is less likely to swirl. This is a complex topic and I won't try to cover all aspects other than to say this: It is important to remember that warm air rises and cool air sinks, and these phenomena can and will change over the course of a day's hunt. As a matter of fact, this is one of the few variables you can count on when hunting the swirling winds of rolling hill country where many whitetails live and it usually applies only to calm days.
As the sun rises and warms the forest floor, thermal currents tend to carry scent upward or uphill. As the sun sets and temperatures cool in the afternoon, just the opposite takes place. Since thermals are subject to change 180 degrees over the course of a day, chances are your stand site will probably be wrong sometime during the day's hunt. To prove this to yourself, grab a tuft of fuzz off the top of a cattail and carry it in to the stand with you. Over the course of the hunt, periodically pull off individual floaters and watch them fly off. This can greatly help your understanding of changing wind currents.
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