Just as I thought, you guys have been working at it harder than I have been these last few years. I've got to realize that a woods isn't a museum and that things change. Lots of mature soft maple up there and anything over about four feet high is pretty worthless to a deer. Given that, I generally look for cut over regenerating poplar sections because the browse is lower to the ground, but those trees all grow about two feet a year. I never found a single rub or scrape in there last fall and when I take a buck out of there, he isn't there the next year. There is still isn't tracking snow up north to help find some new areas, but that's on the agenda when it happens. We do take all the public paper mill, state and federal land for granted up here in the north.
The only time that I've seen baiting work real well was when dad and his friend were selling off a bunch of land that they owned up north. A buddy from work told me about a picked squash field that still had a lot of squash left over and we were welcome to get some. I took a pick up truck load up there and dumped it on that land and a week later it looked like every deer in Marinette County was living there. Sold the property real quickly after that. Baiting isn't legal in Forest County, but that doesn't seem to apply to or stop the locals from doing it from what I've seen. It sure turns deer nocturnal here. I throw half a dozen apples out in the yard every night here at home and about 2 am nine of the resident deer show up on the trail cam.
