Learn your bucks through the lens
The first two weeks of August are the first—and possibly the best—time to get a look at the deer in your area. This is when the hunting actually starts. By Bernie Barringer Late summer is an easy time for whitetail bucks. Food is everywhere, the hunting pressure is off, and the stress of growing antlers is winding down. Other than a few bugs and finding water every day, there’s not much for a buck to do. Green crops, such as soybeans, clover and alfalfa are the preferred foods at this time, although deer will nibble on corn if it’s in the milk stage. Bucks that would never be caught in the daylight during the hunting season will be leisurely browsing in the fields an hour before dark. There a many things a hunter can learn from watching the deer this time of the year. You can see some activity with binoculars, but to really get a good look at the deer and their surroundings, it’s a good idea to invest in a quality spotting scope with a window mount and a tripod. You can spend thousands on a spotting scope if you want, but a mid-priced scope such as the Nikon Prostaff series 20-60×80 will run $500-$600 and bring the deer up close for you. You will need to mount the scope solid, thus the need for the window mount when glassing a field from a high point on a road, or the tripod, when you have to walk to a vantage point and observe from a place you can conceal yourself. Let’s take a look at some important things you can learn from watching these late summer deer in the fields. Inventory The first advantage you have is the ability to inventory the bucks. All bucks will not be visible every evening, but if you watch their preferred feeding area for a few days, you are most likely to get a look at the majority of the bucks in the area. This helps you understand the potential for the upcoming season. Keep in mind that bucks will move quite a bit during September, and some of your bucks will leave while others may come in, but knowing some generalities of the deer available to you will help you choose what caliber of buck you will want to hold out for come early hunting season. Habits and entry points It’s surprising how much knowledge about deer behavior can be had just by observing where and when the bucks enter the fields. One year I watched as a mature buck entered the alfalfa through a ditch that bisected the field. He would just appear at the point of the ditch and move cautiously out into the field whenever the wind direction allowed him to feel safe. The following year, that buck was nowhere to be found, but a different mature buck was entering the field in exactly the same way. This pattern has been repeated through the years. Bucks have tendencies and comfort levels; they use the terrain in certain ways. Once you learn these tendencies and the points they prefer to enter the fields. You have a potential hunting spot for the opening days of the season. Staging areas Bigger bucks often enter the fields last. They will sometimes hang back where they can observe the deer already in the field, usually does and young bucks, through sight and smell. They will watch the body language of the deer in the open to determine the safety level of the field. The areas they hang out in I call Staging Areas. These are perfect places to hang a scouting camera. They are also excellent treestand locations for early season bowhunting. Wind directions and Stand set-ups Once you observe the deer for several evenings, you will notice that the bucks tend to enter the field in different places depending on wind direction and sky conditions. I have noticed that deer tend to avoid walking up a hill with the sun directly in their eyes. They will enter a field in a different location based on whether it’s overcast or sunny. Wind direction is a key to where the deer enter the field. This is not to say that they will only move into the wind, but they will take advantage of the wind on the side of their face when they can. Evening thermals carry scent downhill, and the bucks will take advantage of that. Having the knowledge of where the bucks tend to enter the field based on wind direction will be a huge advantage in choosing where to set your stands and which ones to hunt based on the prevailing wind directions of the day. Behavior and Interactions While most of the topics I have discussed to this point have the end goal of helping you shoot a buck you have spotted during August, there are advantages to glassing deer that just help us better understand the species. Watching deer and observing how they act, react and interact can be very educational. The ways in which does interact can be very interesting. Over time, you can figure out which does are the dominant ones. One matriarchal doe is usually a leader, and often looks around more than the others; a sentry so to speak. The other does look to her for guidance. Bucks will exhibit dominance tendencies as well. Often, when a mature buck enters the field, the other bucks will stare at him for a while. If he moves close to one of them, the subordinate buck will move off. Rarely do you see confrontations during this time, but the pecking order becomes clear if you are observant. You can learn a lot from watching deer; the information you gather can help you understand the deer in your area much better, and it can also lead to a greater chance of shooting a nice buck in the early days of the archery season.
4 tips to Quickly Evaluate the Quality of Hunting on Public Land
Heading off to a new area to hunt can be challenging and the amount of work to learn a new piece of property can be a daunting task, particularly when it’s public land and other hunters are a factor. Here’s a system for figuring it out in a hurry. By Bernie Barringer I first discovered this particular spot on Google Earth a couple years previously. I had been sitting at my computer in Minnesota, several hundred miles away from where I was now in a treestand. The spot interested me because it was a classic funnel with a river on one side and a large area of tall grass CRP on the other. Two woodlots necked down along the river at this point and in my mind I could visualize a big Kansas buck running the banks of the river while cruising for does on a cold November day. Kansas is too far away to allow a scouting trip, so I had to do my homework long distance. I phoned a game warden, a county conservation biologist and even made an inquiry on a bowhunting forum. All of these conversations gave me some nuggets of information. I decided I was going to spend my Kansas tag on that large tract of public hunting land. Before I left home, I had a half dozen good looking areas to check out, headlined by the funnel along the river. In the area along the river, I got several photos of shooter bucks, headlined by a ten-pointer with a kicker point and a big eight with chocolate antlers. My stand was hung and the wind was right when I made the long walk to the stand early on the afternoon of November 6. When a big buck appeared at 28 yards, everything went into automatic. It was a heavy, mature buck; I grunted him to a stop and shot immediately. The shot was perfect and he ran 80 yards before piling up. Sure enough it was the big 8-pointer. He was a mature specimen with beautiful heavy, dark antlers. A buck anyone would be proud to take on public land a long way from home. Even the longest deer hunting road trip has to start with the first step. The first step on the road to success, of course, is choosing the right place to go. Once you decide which state you are going to hunt, from there your next step is to choose a piece of public hunting land and evaluate it. Most of that can be done from your home, but the final pieces of the puzzle need to be done with your boots in the dirt. Allow me to walk you through the process and answer the question, How to Hunt Public Land. 1) Technology topics Never before has it been so easy to choose and eliminate properties from the comfort of your home. Aerial photos are stunning in their ability to reveal things that would take hours to learn by scouting. Terrain features jump right off the page at you. Once you learn to read cover and have a basic understanding of how deer use terrain, the things you can learn from Google Earth are priceless. Focus your attention on edges primarily. Anywhere you see a piece of timber that necks down and then opens back up, you have a funnel. Look for long-running features such as rivers, bluffs and open fields that will funnel deer travel. These spots are all potential hotspots during the rut. Look for potential feeding areas. Are there nearby crop fields? Oak ridges? Where might the deer be bedding? These are all questions to ask yourself. At first, the photos might just look like trees and fields and streams, but as you learn how deer use these features, you soon learn to predict areas with high potential. Pay special attention to what surrounds the area. It’s no secret that public hunting areas get quite a bit of hunting pressure. I wish I had a dollar for every time I read that you need to get more than a half-mile from the road to get away from the pressure. While this is good advice in general, there is the common misconception that getting back off the road means just to penetrate the largest block of timber you can find. That’s rarely going to be the best option unless there are food plots planted back in that timber. One of the best overlooked places I have found to hunt is where the public land meets a crop field. The father it is from a public access point the better I like it. Penetrate the large timber if you want, but if I am going to carry all my gear a mile or more, I want to carry it to a place where the movement patterns are more predictable than they would be in a large unbroken forest. If the does are feeding in these crop fields, the bucks will know it and they will be checking it out during the rut. Another often overlooked way to gather information about an area is to ask about it on an internet forum. A simple question on a state-based hunting site or a national hunting forum can yield surprisingly detailed information. The worst that can happen is you get nothing; but normally, you will at least a basic response with some information you can use. At that point a private message to the person might get them to open up more. I once met a guy on a forum that offered to drive me around and show me some spots when I arrived. You bet I took him up on that. 2) Pick up the phone Calling up a local biologist is always a good idea. County conservation board directors, game wardens and even local sporting goods stores can yield good information. I suggest having a list of questions written out ahead of time so you can get good
The DIY Whitetail Hunt for Weekend Warriors
Can’t afford the time or the money to take an extended hunting trip out of state? Consider the pros and cons of a weekend DIY hunt. By Bernie Barringer When most hunters think about a road trip to hunt big whitetail bucks, they are usually thinking about a week-long adventure. Their tactics involve going to an area, scouting it out, hanging stands and hoping to shoot a big buck by the end of the weeklong trip. There are certainly some advantages to this approach, and for some hunters it is the only option. But there’s another option to consider. How about the weekend DIY getaway? A weekend trip has some significant positives if you have a good hunting area within 4-6 hours from home. This can be a great alternative for the person who doesn’t have large blocks of time to hunt. Let’s explore this option. Timing is Important If you are planning a week-long hunt, you must choose the best time to go. Early season? Rut? Late season? With a weekend adventure, you can go multiple times. Go during the early season when the deer are more patternable, then go back during the rut when the bucks are on their feet during the day. Go back once more in the late season when the deer are focused on the food sources and once again fall into predictable daily patterns. Take off on a Friday, say at noon, hunt that evening, then Saturday and Sunday. Head home Sunday night. Weather Influences I have been on several week-long bowhunting road trips only to spend a week in horrible weather for hunting. One trip to Kansas a few years ago presented me with daily highs in the 80’s during November, and nearly all the deer movement was after dark. With a weekend trip, you can schedule your hunts by watching the forecast and planning your trip to coincide with the best hunting weather. Today’s technology allows us to have amazingly accurate forecasts including cold fronts, wind directions and wind speed, precipitation, rising or falling temperatures, even moon phases. Decisions can be made at the last minute based on accurate prediction data. This allows you to be in control of the weather when you hunt instead of the other way around. If you are lucky enough to have a fairly flexible schedule, add a Monday to your trip or leave on a Thursday night when the conditions are good. The ability to use the weather to your advantage is one of the most important features of these short-duration trips to your whitetail heaven. Scouting Advantages The advantages of scouting are huge when it comes to the weekend road trip. It’s not a stretch to make a trip to the area to put out a few trail cameras and then check them a couple times before hunting season. That’s not going to be a possibility if you live in Michigan and you have an Iowa bow tag. This is a real advantage in shortening the learning curve to hunting a new area. Last fall I put out three trail cameras in my hunting area in North Dakota on August 31 while travelling to an early season Montana whitetail hunt. By the time I got back to North Dakota on Halloween, the thousands of photos chronicled the transition from late summer to early rut, and the information I gained from going through all those pictures was very valuable in two areas: 1) Taking inventory of the bucks in the area and 2) determining their movement patterns. I have found that leaving scouting cameras on public land can be a dicey endeavor and I have had a couple stolen. I am never as heartbroken about the loss of the camera as I am over the loss of valuable information it contained. I now use bear safes bolted to the tree with lag bolts and padlocks; and rarely have a camera stolen when using these. I have had the displeasure of having one exception to this rule. Someone went home to retrieve a hacksaw blade. From the markings on the tree they must have spent a long, long time sawing with a blade to cut the bolts behind the camera case. Then of course they had the issue of getting the padlock off. When they finally got it open, they found my name and cell phone number tattooed all over the camera so it probably doesn’t have much value to them for all their effort. These trail camera reconnaissance trips can also be used for preseason scouting and preparing treestand locations. The earlier you cut shooting lanes the better, and the same is true with getting the treestands up. Having the stands in place well in advance of the hunt is an advantage over the “hang-and-hunt” tactics more typical of a week-long hunt with regard to the amount of scent left in the area. Whitetail bucks, especially the mature ones, don’t miss much. Freshly cut tree stubs and new appearances of climbing sticks are a dead giveaway. Cost Efficiency Weekend Road Trips are more cost effective because you only have one or two nights of lodging as opposed to a week or more. You can carry easily-prepared food with you or just eat snacks for a couple days to keep your energy up. Food on long trips can be a large expense. Depending on how far you are travelling, fuel can be an issue. It is usually offset by the fact that you are taking multiple short trips rather than one cross-country trip. Weekend excursions have some significant advantages as you can see, and you may very well have a good hunting area nearer than you think. A long hunting trip may seem overwhelming so consider starting small. If you look at a map, you very well may find a great hunting area within a half-day’s drive of home. Consider the option of a weekend road trip rather than a long undertaking for your next whitetail
The Business of Bear Bait
Thousands of bear hunters go to the woods each year in an attempt to attract a wary black bear to a bait site. Where do they get all those goodies? Here’s how one entrepreneur took the bear bait business to a whole new level. By Bernie Barringer Cory Carlson was a part of a group of eight bear hunters who hunted together each year near Aitkin, Minnesota. It was always a struggle to get enough bait, and Cory seemed to be the guy who was able to get the most bait. The other hunters often used up what he brought. He decided to buy a bunch of licorice and see if it would sell to bear hunters. “I bought a trailer load of 10,000 pounds of licorice and parked it in my garage,” he remembers. I ran an ad in the local shopper and sold it all.” At that point he knew he was onto something. It was clear he could sell even larger quantities of bait if he could get it. He spent hours on the phone trying to find sources of items that would be good bear baits. “It took a lot of phone calls and a lot of internet surfing to find enough bait. There were a lot of dead ends.” But his hard work and diligence paid off. Before long he had to put up a new building to hold all the bait he was selling. Bear hunters came from across Wisconsin and Minnesota to buy bait, outfitters from across the US and Canada started ordering it by the semi load and Cory went full time into the bear bait business. Today his wife Jen is also heavily involved in the business side of the endeavor. There’s a lot of work, red tape and headaches involved in shipping semi loads of food products across international borders. Cory and Jen work hard at what they do and it allows them to be around hunting and other hunters most every day, something they love. Cory’s company, Lucky 7 Bear Bait, ships dozens of semi loads of bait across North America during the spring and summer. On any given day, hunters back their pickups up to his building near Cambridge, Minnesota and load up the goodies for the bears. He sells about 3,000,000 pounds per year. Trail mix is his best seller. It has all the things a bear loves: high carbohydrate nuts, dried fruits and berries and bits of candy. It’s very close to what the bears would naturally eat if they could find enough of it in the wild. The bears love trail mix and he has access to tons of it. You can buy it by the bucket, by the barrel or by the pallet. Other top sellers are granola, cookie dough, gummie bears, fruit snacks, licorice, frostings, caramel and fruit fillings. He avoids anything with pure, unprocessed dark chocolate because it can make the bears sick if they eat too much of it, but anything with milk chocolate mixed in is fine. Bears are individuals and each bear seems to prefer certain things. Savvy bear hunters use a wide variety of baits to keep them coming back. The bear hunters are individuals too, says Cory, “One guy will come in and say the bears don’t like anything but black licorice while the next guy will come in and he only wants red licorice. Still another guy will tell me to give him a bunch of licorice and he doesn’t care what flavor it is. Then another guy will say that licorice doesn’t work at all.” Cory just sells them what they want. Where does a guy get three million pounds per year of these goodies? He gets it from several factories all across the US. Which factories and where they are located, is understandably a closely-guarded secret. Cory spent years developing his sources and he isn’t giving out any information other than to explain why it is available to his company. He buys the products direct from the factories that produce them. Surprisingly, the products are not outdated or flawed in any way that would affect its taste or safety. There are factory closeouts which provide quantities. Much of it may be off-color or misshapen, other times someone may have added a little too much or too little of an ingredient and it all has to be disposed of. There are end-of-run and beginning-of-run products that need to be thrown out. At times an equipment breakdown can mean someone has to shovel several barrels of sweets out of a huge processing machine. Rather than throw it out, they ship it to Cory at Lucky 7 and the hunters turn it into bear meat and bear rugs. One of the advantages of the hard work that goes into being at the top of the bear bait heap is the added opportunity to hunt. Cory and Jen have found that the connections they make with bear hunting outfitters have led them onto some really fun hunts. Cory also enjoys whitetail hunting in the fall as a way to relax when the business slows down as the bear seasons close. Next time you pay the high price for a small package of trail mix, granola or nuts, think about Cory Carlson; he would be happy to sell you a 55-gallon drum of it for a fraction of the price. For information on successful bear baiting strategies check out this book and DVD.