As a Basic Hunter, I do not have private access to pristine hunting ground. What I do have, however, are multiple ways to access ground that can help me meet my goals year after year. The biggest key: remember that none of it is yours.
We have a historical anomaly in America. Our country’s founding and society is based on, among other things, the idea of common people owning private property. Counterbalancing that idea of private property is the fact that collectively, as a nation, we have prioritized access to lands for the general public to enjoy. Conservationists like Teddy Roosevelt and many others have ensure there are millions of acres of public land available to us. The ability and desire for us to all have access to the outdoors in this country is unique. Gaining access to both of these types of lands is one half of the Hunting Equation because wild country is where whitetail deer actually live.
The main ingredients of good whitetail habitat are food, cover and water. This is not new information. It is the tried and true formula of good deer hunting property. The more food, cover and water you have, the better the deer habitat will be. The Basic Hunter must understand these ingredients and how to maximize them. You will generally not have access to the highest quality of these ingredients unless you own large chunks of private land. The great news for The Basic Hunter: you don’t need the highest quality to be successful.
Cover: Pressure is NOT the Most Important Consideration
Cover describes the amount of habitat a deer has access to in order to feel safe. This could be habitat such as a southern-facing bench on a ridge, a thicket behind the barn, or an island in a swamp. The amount of habitat in which a deer can hide from predators and the elements is vitally important.
The first thing you will read from big-buck killers is to get away from other hunters. They scout hunting pressure as much, if not more, than they do the deer themselves. Hunting pressure implies that other hunters are ruining cover that exists in certain areas based on their mere presence. They are not wrong in this sentiment, but you must understand the context. Since a big-buck killer is seeking to kill big bucks, this is their frame of reference when discussing pressure. They’ll say that hunting a mature whitetail buck is like hunting a completely different animal (again, they’re correct). Hence, they’ll talk about how you need to get at least a half-mile from any public access or cross a hip-high river.
This is where the Basic Hunter deviates from the big-buck killers. I am not exclusively targeting big bucks. While less mature whitetails are certainly not stupid creatures (other than rutting one-year-olds, who make a lot of questionable life choices), they will put up with more pressure than a mature whitetail buck, who will basically put up with zero hunting pressure.
Please don’t misunderstand me – I am not saying you can throw caution to the wind when it comes to pressure. There are a number of spots I’ve ruled out because the pressure is too great. I’m saying that hunting pressure on the cover available to a deer is one of the top factors when assessing land, just as food and water are as well. It is not the TOP factor. As a Basic Hunter, you do not need to exclude all terrain less than a mile from a parking lot or rule out getting permission on an already-hunted piece of property. You need to understand how that property might fit into your hunting priorities. I’ll dive into the details of good quality cover in later content.
Food: Deer Survived Before Food Plots
The quality and quantity of that food available in a given area will generally determine the quality and quantity of deer in that area. You may have heard that a deer needs to eat between six and eight percent of their body weight every day. This translates to 12 pounds per day for a 150 pound deer.
A recent article from the National Deer Association provides eye-opening details on the source of a deer’s food. Most of that food comes from leafy browse in the woods. The article defines ‘browse’ as “The leaves, buds and ends of twigs of woody to semi-woody, broad-leaved plants.” Basically, this is can mean many different things available to deer.
Contrast that to what hunters focus on: mast crops (nuts and fruit), agricultural crops, and food plots. Depending on the time of the year and what is available, deer will shift their focus to or away from these different food sources. Understanding what food is popular to which deer during different timeframes is vital to understanding where, when and how to hunt. For a Basic Hunter, you don’t need a three acre clover plot or a 40 acre field of standing soybeans (although those things can be great if you can get them). You simply need some food source that is slightly better than the current browse available.
Put it this way – you could survive on plain rice and beans. These have the essential nutrients to survive and can be readily available. This also sounds like the most boring menu ever. Think of rice and beans to people as what browse is to a deer. They take it because it helps them stay alive and it’s readily available. Now, compare rice and beans to steak and potatoes. I know which one I’d rather have, but steak and potatoes are more expensive than rice and beans.
Steak and potatoes are the agriculture crops, mast crops and food plots of the whitetail diet. When the time is right they will absolutely choose these over browse. So the question is – on the properties you hunt, which food is slightly better than twigs and leaves? That can be your ticket to understanding deer movement on a property.
I don’t have much to say about water because it’s so readily available to deer where I hunt. In your situation, if water is a more scarce commodity, it may be a good resource to focus on when considering a property. It’s just not something I look at because the terrain in which I hunt has streams, creeks, ponds, and generally damp conditions that make water readily available to deer.
Look at the Big Picture
Deer will generally spend their day in and around cover, move to food as evening comes on, and then move back to cover as daylight approaches. This activity makes it rather difficult for hunters to kill these creatures since hunters are only allowed to hunt during daylight hours. Understanding how deer use a potential area is vital to maximizing your property. Remember, the more cover, food and water the landscape has, the more deer it will hold.
Finding property that has these qualities starts with understanding the bigger picture of an area. This means zooming out on your aerial map and looking at a broader picture of the landscape. I generally try to zoom out at least to a square mile. By doing this, I can see where much of the food, cover, and water will potentially be before I determine if it’s worth pursuing. It’s important to understand that the piece of property you’re trying to access may only have one piece of the food-cover-water pie. That’s fine, as long as you understand what your goals are and how the property might fulfill them.
Here’s an example – I have access to a 50 acre farm. This farm is 90% agriculture land, 8% horse pasture, and 2% wooded. The agriculture usually is picked by the first or second week of the season. By itself, this property only meets the ‘food’ criteria of quality land for the first two weeks of a season. Many hunters would write off this property.
Not the Basic Hunter. Since one of my goals every year is to fill the freezer, I have killed multiple does in the first two weeks of the season over the past years. This property generally has little hunting pressure, and there is a fantastic piece of huge bedding coverage adjacent to this farm that gets zero hunting pressure. I cannot hunt the adjacent property, but I can reap the benefits of that cover because I understand how the deer use it and (more importantly) I understand my priorities.
Let’s look at another example of one of my ‘buck’ spots. Since I generally hunt bucks only in the pre-rut and rut timeframes, I look for spots that are classic rut spots. These can be downwind of doe bedding, in a pinched down area of a travel corridor, in a ridge system, etc. One of my public land spots where I killed a nice (relative to my definition) buck is in a swampy area downwind of doe bedding. This public land parcel is 125 acres with approximately 30 acres of accessible ground.
No, that’s not a typo. The remaining 95 acres is nearly impassable wetland. It is a bedding (read:cover) haven, and while it does get some rifle hunters on it, I basically have it to myself in archery. There are multiple farms on the other side of the swamp to which I do not have access, but I don’t need it. I understand that I am after a buck during the rut and this tiny public parcel gets me prime access to doe bedding and cruising areas during the time I need it most.
Both of these properties are almost exclusively overlooked by other hunters. I have killed multiple deer on these ‘mediocre’ properties because I see how they fit into the bigger picture for deer. I simply understand my goals, identify the properties that provide me with opportunities to achieve those goals, and get laser-focused on executing on my chances.
Gaining Access to Land
Once you understand what you’re looking for, you have one of two options to gain access as a Basic Hunter: find it or create it.
Find it
The evolution of aerial map scouting has been a complete game changer for me as a Basic Hunter. I can now waste minutes scanning OnX and ruling out properties instead of wasting hours and days driving/walking these places. That’s not to say I don’t do boot scouting (I do), but 75% of the properties I rule out are done through OnX.
The first thing I look at on OnX is not food-cover-water. I look for access, which comes in two forms: public ground and permission ground. Public ground is easily identifiable on OnX. If I can zoom out and identify possible spots on public land, I mark those and make a note to investigate them further in the future. Given my life situation, I look at places that are close to where I am most frequently going to be in the fall. This includes my home, my job, and my other commitments. If I can create an opportunity before/after one of my commitments because I have a spot close, I prioritize those areas, even if they don’t look like dynamite spots to other hunters.
The second type of access in the ‘find it’ category is gaining permission to hunt a private piece of property. You’ve probably heard that you need to go knock on a bunch of doors, get told ‘no’ a bunch of times, and keep grinding until you find one property. As a Basic Hunter, I simply do not have time for that strategy.
So, I’ve adjusted my strategy to the point where I (almost) always get a ‘yes’ when asking for permission (more on that in the next article). In any given season, I have permission to anywhere between ten and twenty private properties, and I am always adding a few every year. I did not knock on 200 doors to get 20 properties. I probably knocked on 22 doors to get 20 properties. This is not an exaggeration. More on that in a future letter.
Create It
The second factor to gaining access to hunting ground is creating the habitat you’re looking for. I’m fortunate to have access to a ten acre parcel in which the landowner has given me free reign to manipulate as I see fit. This property has been my proving ground for foot plots and land management. I’ve been able to practice hinge cutting, allowing areas to go fallow, spraying, soil management, mowing, and just about anything you can do with tools one might expect from a Basic Hunter. One day I hope to own my own ground and this experience has been invaluable. There will be much more content on this topic in the future.
Scouting and Woodsmanship
Once I’ve identified a potential property that I’d like to investigate, it’s time to strap on the boots and see if my theory about the property is correct. At the end of the day, that is what scouting is all about. I have a theory that the food-cover-water of a particular property will create opportunities to fulfill one of my hunting goals. Now it’s time to see if that theory holds true.
Scouting is all about determining how recently a deer has been in the area you want to hunt. I emphasize the term recently because it’s the most important factor to killing deer. In order to get more opportunities at killing deer, Captain Obvious says that you must physically be within the necessary proximity to shoot a deer. In that moment (as most recent as you can get), you must have a target deer within shooting range of your weapon.
Different types of scouting will help you determine how recently a deer has been in an area. This is the difference between in-season scouting and out-of-season scouting. In-season scouting serves the purpose of potentially killing a deer soon. Out-of-season scouting will help you narrow down if spots are worth in-season scouting. Map scouting will help weed out spots that are worth out-of-season scouting.
There are many more things I will say in a future article about the tactics of scouting and woodsmanship as I believe they are immensely valuable.
Property Pipeline
This is all in service of hunting the Absolute Best Spot (ABS). Most of my ABSs have taken multiple years to identify. I started this message by saying that the most important key to maximizing your access to property is to remember that none of it is yours. You can lose access to a property. The habitat of a property can change drastically. The pressure on a property can increase. You do not have control over any of that. The property does not belong to you.
What you can do is ensure you have access to enough pieces of property that losing one does not mean a death knell to your season. I have a process that I go through every year to ensure I continuously gain access to new properties. If you’ve had any exposure to a sales career, you may have heard of the concept of a sales pipeline. I’ve adapted the concept of a sales pipeline to hunting into what I call the Property Pipeline.
Step 1: Broad Scouting
This will mainly come through aerial map scouting as I peruse OnX for new potential properties. I will also say this has expanded to being intentional when I am driving around places. I may not take time out of my day to drive to certain areas to scout (that comes in a later process), but maybe I pay attention to a certain field more to see if there are deer that come out. During the rut, are there bucks I see chasing out in a field or crossing the road? Are there a lot of vehicle-killed deer in a certain spot? My goal is to identify 6-10 potential spring scouting spots.
Step 2: Spring Scouting.
Every spring, I make sure I go out and prove or disprove my theory on my 6-10 potential spots. If I thought the spot could be a good late season spot, I look for historical sign that proves or disproves that theory. Same thing if I suspect it to be a good early-season doe spot, or a hot buck spot during the rut. My goal is to have 1-3 new spots that move onto the next round.
Step 3: Camera Soaker Spots
If I think a property has potential, I want to find the ABS. I do not, however, want to waste time on observation sits to see if my guess was correct. Therefore, I use non-cellular game cameras on the best couple of locations within that spot to see if my theory is correct. I generally put these cameras out prior to the hunting season and let them ‘soak’ all season. I do not hunt these spots because I do not know which is the ABS.
I pull these cameras after the season and determine which of the camera locations, if any, is clearly the ABS. If I identify any potential ABSs for the next season, they go onto my list of ABS for the next season. This concludes the part of the pipeline that I would consider out-of-season scouting because while the cameras soak during the season, I’m not actually hunting them during that particular season.
Step 4: ABS Recent Intel
Now we move into in-season scouting. I’ll go into the depths of my in-season scouting in another article, but suffice it say I am trying to obtain the most recent intel as possible to ensure I know there are target deer in an area I’m going to hunt. This can come through observations, on the ground scouting, and cell camera pictures. My general rule is if I do not know that a target deer has been in the area in the last 24 hours, I do not hunt that area.
As I have laid it out here, this process takes at least two years to establish if a spot is worth hunting. Many properties have taken me three or four years to truly figure out. This may seem like a long time, and in reality it is compared to some. If you are diligent in doing this pipeline process every year, however, you will be amazed at how many quality properties you’ll have on your list within five years. That’s ultimately my goal – have as many possibilities as you can because your opportunities to get out are limited.
You are also not devastated if, for whatever reason, a property is no longer a viable option. The broader your opportunities, the less impact one hit will have. The old cliché that comes to mind about investing is true – a diverse portfolio over time will beat any day-trader trying to play a market he can’t control.
Let me end with an example of how this has worked out for me in the past. There is a small farm near my house to which I got permission to hunt a 10 acre portion across the road from the main farm. This ten acres was solely an agriculture field. I had identified the property in Step 1 because I had seen deer out in the much larger field across the road numerous times. I had hoped to get access to the larger field, but no such luck, as the landowner only gave my permission to the 10 acres across the road. Most hunters would rule this out as a waste of time, but not a Basic Hunter.
I went into Step 2 that spring to understand where the deer were coming from. Lo and behold, they were coming from an adjacent property where there is a small ditch with bedding beyond it. The bedding was probably no more than 75 yards of open timber away from the open field, and I could clearly see a heavily worn trail coming into the 10 acre field at various points from that direction.
I barely moved the spot onto Step 3. I set up a Soaker Camera that fall. The property had been planted into soy beans. When I pulled the camera at the end of the season, as you can imagine, the deer made regular trips into the beans all season until the few days after the farmer had picked it and plowed it under. The activity became much less consistent after it was picked, but I knew that it checked the food box for at least until the field was picked.
I had another problem. Even if I wanted to hunt the deer, there were no trees I could get into. There was one large patch of overgrown brush about halfway down the field edge. With the deer bedding so close and no trees, they would also easily see me if I just walked through the field. I would be majorly violating their cover.
I devised a theory that basically came down to when the farmer planted the field into corn, I might be able to sneak through the corn to the overgrown brush and hide myself in there. I ultimately decided to push the spot to Step 4, but only when the farmer planted the field in corn.
When the farmer did plant the field into corn, I would drive past the spot on my way home in the evenings from various commitments. It became clear that the deer were following the same program (recent intel). So, during my next opportunity when the wind was right, I slowly crept my way through the corn a few rows deep to hide my movement. I then got on my hands and knees, crawled to the overgrown brush, and tucked myself in. I ended up shooting a doe that night at 30 yards.
That spot took me over two years to cultivate. I’ve also been excited about that spot in other years that the farmer had planted corn, only to have him cut it for silage before the season started. Here’s the main point – I have other early-season doe spots that I can go to in which I have just as much confidence in as that one. I ‘lose’ that property the years it is planted in soy beans or cut for silage, but the time I invested was minimal compared to my reward.
The total amount of time I spent with boots on the ground of the property is the time it took to boot-scout 10 acres, hang a camera, pull a camera, and hunt it one time. I’m not saying they all work out the first time, but understanding how to maximize your access to hunting ground will make you a more efficient hunter.