Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting How do you hunt?

In Texas, because we were once a nation, we have very little public lands to hunt. Most of our hunting is on yearly 'leases' or paying a daily fee plus a fee for the animal killed. Prices can vary tremendously. Leases start around $1000-1500,with a good chance of killing several does and some kind of buck. The sky is the limit. I can usually get a couple of days hunting and a couple of does for $500-$600. This includes a couple of nights in a ranch house and supper It also includes one free pig. The price is the same for pig hunting in the off season. One place charges $1800 for a 3day hunt a 120 B&C buck including room and board.
Most of our hunting is done from stands, often called outhouse blinds. These can go from basic to elaborate. Most stands offer a two inch window still for a rest. Some offer an elbow rest. We generally hunt over corn feeders or spread corn. Some are shot from trucks, often called 'safari' style. In East Texas and The Hill Country, most feeders are around 100yds from the blind. Shots vary but are seldom over 200yds. In west and south Texas the distances are a little farther. Deer are shot farther, but most are under 300yds. My farthest shot to date is around 300yds. Most of my shots have been under 200yds. As I am now mainly a meet hunter, I try to keep my shots to 100yds or less.
This got a little more elaborate than I intended. I Would enjoy hearing how you hunt.

My deer hunting is quite different. I hunt a desert mulie called the Burro Deer ( O.H.eremicus !) in Kalifornia's SE deserts. This is all public land and there is alot of it, about 6600 sq. miles of it.
This is a low density population. The orignial population estimates were for some 2000-3000 deer. That means lots of country for the bucks to hide in. Today, many of us feel their numbers are significantly higher, but still quite low by most standards.
So why bother ? Because tradionally 50% of the kill are four year old animals. My odds of getting a tag, as long as I make this zone my first choice are very good. All the other throphy hunts I can apply for have much longer odds than that.
The key is to hunt tracks, not just the deer. Find the deer tacks, then find fresh tracks from a nice buck. Then you track down that buck. Anybody who thinks that is easy, ought to try tracking one after he leaves the wash bootom and crosses a malapais flat covered with rocks or some of the rock covered ridges found there.
I love the place. Probably because I really enjoy unspoiled desert country. I've probably been in 75% of the wilderness areas in northen and central Kalifornia. They are nothing like what they were before Kalifornia was settled in the 1840's. But the deserts are very much the way they were.
I guess I'm something of an odd ball, but I gave up the idea that a hunt is a success if I make a kill. To me, if I can find tacks of one of these old bucks, and track him, win or loose, that's a success. I've had years were I've seen a number of them. And years where I saw only some good tracks. Only to come back in the years that followed and finally put a tag on him. I've hunted alot of stuff in different places. But this is the best of the best. Not just the hunting, but the country, the climate and the quality of the animals.
I'm closing in on 73 yrs. old. I don't know how much longer I can do this. But I've decided this is what I'm going to do with the time I have left. E

I hunt both desert mule deer and Coues whitetail. It's all spot and stalk, whether on public land or private. Having lived and worked with ranchers in our small community for 25 years, I do have some options that allow me to hunt both public and private. I do spend a lot more time on pubic land because there is a lot more of it in this part of the world.

I'm fortunate in that I can roam for miles if need be. I spend in the neighborhood of 90% of my time still hunting or tracking. The remainder stand hunting. My furthest shot on a deer is 125 yards. Most are 50 yards or less. Certainly terrain varies but I absolutely love the green edge between a thick swamp and a ridge or an old cut.

This is often the junk I'm in.

Idaho is one of those states with a lot more public land than private. For elk, it's almost all spot and stalk. For deer, it depends. The north half of the state has mostly whitetails and the south half has mostly mulies. There's a lot crossover. Our forest land is almost all conifers so there's no mast crop. Deer feed on browse almost exclusively where they can't get onto farmland.

I hunt private land in NE and CO.

For me, a typical day of deer hunting in Nebraska consists of sitting in a tree stand or ground blind from before sunrise until around 10AM. From 10AM to 2PM I still hunt creek-bottom cover. From 2PM to 3PM I break for lunch. And from 3PM to 1/2 hour after legal sunset I'm back in the stand or blind. Eastern Nebraska is a patchwork of small grain farms, mostly corn and soybeans, with few farms larger than 1,000 contiguous acres and with most cover linear in nature and adjacent to creeks and Osage Orange fence rows that divide properties. Most farmers will let you hunt for free if you ask them in advance, but they may reserve the weekends for family and friends. For several years, Nebraska has had an antlerless whitetail season from late December thru mid-January. I have about a 98% success rate when asking for permission to trespass in the late season and have only been turned down when the landowner didn't allow any hunting or didn't allow the use of firearms.

My MIL doesn't allow hunting on her farms and I have become, not out of choice, the game warden for those farms. I usually don't get to hunt much on the weekends, as I find myself dealing with trespassing hunters.

In Colorado I only hunt on private land owned by my Wife's family and that is all spot and stalk in semi-arid broken canyon and short grass prairie country in southeastern Colorado near the New Mexico border.

So, shooting fenced deer over bait from an occupied structure is hunting?
Never knew.
I have no problem with that, but I would call it shooting.

Wow, I feel rather fortunate to live where I do after reading some of these posts! I live in Southeastern Alaska. This area of the world is thick with trees/vegetation (Tongass National Forest) and the terrain definitely favors the animal being hunted rather than the hunter in most cases. Tree stand hunting is virtually non-existent here. Deer hunting (Sitka blacktails) mostly consists of walking through/canvassing muskegs/marshes or hiking up into the alpine, glassing, blowing a call, and waiting. These deer are much smaller than whitetail/mule deer, but their meat is very mild and extremely good eating.

Since this area of the world consists of mostly islands, you have to to travel by boat to reach most of the good hunting areas. I tend to stay out of brown bear territory, but that is another factor you have to plan for if you want to hunt on certain islands. The terrain is so thick that you can sometimes have a lot of difficulty tracking and finding the animal you shot, and you pretty much never get a second shot. It is constantly rainy and wet up here, so you need to put a lot of thought into your gear and prepare accordingly. The weather up here can be quite harsh and extremely unforgiving if you bring the wrong gear.

Black bear hunting is a very different affair of course and mostly consists of tracking/shooting them off the beaches during the spring. This area of the world also offers very excellent waterfowl hunting and there are many wetlands/marshes that a wide variety of birds inhabit. I have never hunted brown bear, moose, or mountain goat, but you can do that up here as well. Further up in the interior offers caribou, dall sheep, and muskox hunting as well.

One hunts where one can. I assume you mean high fences. Yes, two of the places are under high fences. Both are over 3500 acres. That's five square miles. I don't think they think they are fenced in. The rest of the places I hunt are low fenced. Land owners require one to stay in the blind due to liability issues. Again one hunts where one can and, in most places in Texas, this is it. Captdavid

Here in British Columbia, and similarly when I lived in Washington State, I hunt coastal blacktails, inland whitetails and mule deer. Still hunting, that is walking slowly and quietly through forest and looking for a buck, are a staple for all three, though less so for whitetails. A key part is selecting which patch of woods, at what time of Fall to still hunt. I like to time such hunts to coincide with migration and rut.

Spot and stalk is the main way we hunt at or above timberline and a major way in big clear cuts. Glassing may be from a vehicle or from a backpack ridge. Our bear hunting is almost all spot and stalk with some calling.

As I age and learn, a majority of my deer hunting for all three species is now by calling.

Stand hunting is effective, but I have done very little of it.

My son hunts big bull elk by tracking them, sometimes for days, in rain forest with no snow. I ain't that good.

I hunt eastern WV and mainly western VA with an occasional trip to private land in eastern Va. Some friends and I have a camp in Randolph County WV. That spot is some private land with some large tracts ( by eastern standards) of National Forest. I hunt with crossbow, muzzle loader, rifle, handgun and occasionally where required with a shotgun. I have taken deer from a few feet to 620 yds. No baiting, we go out and scout before season looking for food sources. The eastern Va areas are either with dogs and buckshot or stand hunting with muzzle loader or slug gun.

trout, that sounds cool.. One thing I always thought would be a kick is dogs and buckshot.. I am not a bow hunter, don't own one.. But I have always read of the southern dog and buckshot hunts and thought it would be a special hunt..

Since most of the land around here is small parcels of private and very thick pine plantations, we hunt from stands/blinds on established shooting lanes/ROWs or from the ground or climbers over deer trails in very thick areas. As nice as it is to hunt from the blinds with long shooting lanes, most bucks are killed in the thick stuff at close range. I have my best luck scouting for rub lines and ground hunting the trails in the appropriate weather as well as wind. My two bucks here at home this year were killed from the ground near rub lines.

I am very lucky to belong to a large (>1000 acres) hunting club in upstate NY. We mostly hunt the ledges either by still hunting or drives. The first couple days of the season most guys sit. I'm not patient enough for sitting so I spend a lot of time sneaking along the ledges. I go for a ways and then sit for maybe 1/2 hour or so, then repeat. You can usually see ahead of you a ways as well as the ledge below you.
We also have a lot of state land and NYCDEP land in our area for the guys and gals who don't belong to a private club.

I grew up hunting in Texas. First hunts were on a friend's ranch of some 14,000 acres divided into 12 pastures. High fences weren't the thing back then. Most of our hunting was either from the bed of a pick-up or still hunting, very little was taking a stand and we never used/had feeders or box blinds.
Later in life, we leased the hunting rights (hence the term 'deer lease') to 1060 acres. The country was covered in boulders and most of the plant life would stick, sting, stab, bite or gore you.
Thuring ere, we hunted mostly off of the boulders and a few tri-pods and a couple of box blinds. ost all had feeders on them. We also worked a few drives as well as some guys would still-hunt (including myself). After 22 years on the same lease I took a job that moved me out of Texas and into the mid-west.
In the mid-west, none of the states that I lived in allowed feeders and you seldom saw any box blinds when I first got there. In fact, one of my dealers was the first to see the benefit of selling box blinds and started carrying them. Most of the hunting was either from the ground or from ladder stands overlooking known trails or fields where the deer traveled and/or fed. You played the wind and all of the stages of the rut.
During all of that time I also took a number of hunting trips 'out west'. Mostly to New Mexico and Idaho. New Mexico hunting was down in the SE part of the state in the sand hill country and around the caprock. This was for mule deer (not the writer, the game animal ). Here we'd hunt by glassing from the higher dunes, spot and stalk, making 'pushes ' (drives) and by just driving the oil field roads.
The Idaho hunts (as well as those in Wyoming, Utah, Oregon, Montana and Colorado)were 'typical' mountain hunts - lots of hiking and glassing with about 10% being on a 'stand' or location game might cross.

I've hunted high fenced areas but nothing smaller than 500 acres of heavy brush and trees as well as low fence and quite a bit of public land full of stunning views and dust storms. No matter the method, a kill isn't guaranteed. The only 'guaranteed' hunts that I know of is the 20 acre high fence where a pen-raised animal is placed for someone to shoot (either the 'hunter' or the 'guide') or the grocery store where you're hunting for the choicest cut of meat.

Tens of thousands of acres of National Forest here to roam. We also have 100-1200 acre tracts of timber company land all over that is open to the public. It's still fairly easy to get permission for private lands also. Lots more posted signs every year though.

Scouting, scouting, scouting. Proper stand placement. Started teaching my boys still hunting last year. Man is that fun!

Many complain about PA.. I feel we are blessed. I know of many decent bucks 85-110" that made it through hunting season, and with a relativley mild winter and a bumper mast crop the deer will get through the winter healthy.

We have 200 acres in SW Bracken County KY. 40 acres is mown pasture. The rest is a combination of cedar thickets and Oak/Hickory savanah. Deer outnumber the humans by a considerable margin. It's a Zone 1 county, so that means 1 buck and an unlimited number of doe.

We put no more than 4 of us out. we have a combination of treestands, ground blinds and shooting houses. After 16 seasons, schlepping around the woods is kind of pointless. You know where the deer are and they know where you are. In fact, I had a doe for several years that would find me every time I came out. She learned to drag pesky bucks past my stand.

I was making a description of this the other day over Big Game Hunting, and I realized how alien this may be to some. I'm out there scouting and watching and interacting with the deer and turkeys every chance I get. We hold off actually hunting the deer until Mid-November, and then it's strictly business. In two weeks we fill the freezers and then it's over.

Hunting pressure is intense in our neighborhood. There's probably 3000 hunters within earshot of our guns. Opening Weekend can sound like a war zone. The best way to deal with that is to put as little hunting pressure beforehand, keep the doe groups happy, and make our 200 acres a haven for deer. Big bucks roam a lot. There may be only one mature buck on the property at any given time. The trick is to let the surrounding hunting pressure drive these big fellows onto the property. I have to say that the Orange Army does a pretty good job of it for us. For a first time, we had 3 mature bucks on the pole in the first two days.

I've never hunted out west, and never been in a position where I "had" to join a club to access good hunting. I hunt from my camp in Pennsylvania. We are very fortunate to have a huge tract of State Forest literally right out the door of our cabin. The scenery is spectacular, and the hunting's very good.

Here in Minnesota, we hunt a mix of State Forest, paper company land that's open to the public, and County owned land in the northern third of the state. Minnesota's got a very diverse set of hunting opportunities. From farm land and prairie land to river bluffs along the Mississippi River basin, to the mid-state transition zone, to the big woods and swamps of northern Minnesota. If you can't find a way to scratch your hunting itch up here, I'd say go west.

The only downside is, with public land, comes other hunters. We don't have exclusive access to these areas, and you will see other hunters.

Not always.

I mostly wonder around until the Deer and I stumble into each other.