Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting How long would you hunt an unproductive stand?

That could be hours, days, all season, years? I got nothing up north this last deer season along with a lot of guys from up there. I sat the same stand that I got a buck from the two previous years, so unproductive just the last gun season. National Forest land so low deer numbers, hard winters, wolves, bears, poachers, Indians that hunt rear round, low hunting pressure... Excuses maybe, but easy to get to from the cottage and I'm well past my prime. Do you guys move stand sites often, scout for better local deer sign, have a bunch of possible stand locations, go still hunting or tracking if you don't see anything from your deer stand or would you drive to a more productive area with better hunting?

Hard to find anywhere to go around here without dropping WAY more cash than I'm willing to part with on a lease for our 7 day gun season, so I hunted a fairly unproductive tract for about a decade. I was happy just to have somewhere to go that didn't break the bank. 🤷‍♂️

It was 65 acres, and between me, the owner who hunted it off and on, and my Dad who aged/health issued out a few seasons ago, we averaged about a deer every other year off it. It started off decent, but treelines connecting it to bigger wood and water got cleared out 5-6 years back and it really declined after that. I sat out there every day of the firearms and ML seasons most years and never even saw a deer a couple of them.

It got sold this year, so I'm currently scrounging around to try to get some feelers out on something for next season. If I don't get anything lined up by spring I'll be hopping the line to hunt some public acreage in IN. Odds of drawing a tag on any public in-state within reasonable driving distance are about as good as getting hit by lightning.

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If you just like getting out in the woods and have a spot that has been productive in the past, just sit tight.

If it is a must for you to take a deer perhaps you should move to another area or maybe "still hunt" rather than sit.

To some it is about the hunt. To me, if you get one that is the " creme de la creme ".

I don't have any unproductive stands. That's what scouting and trail cameras are for. I have had some cameras in unproductive areas. But then I don't put a stand up if they cams or the sign doesn't look good.

Leaving a stand in one spot for a long time rarely works. At least on public land that I hunt. Private, where you're having food plots and building bedding area for them to come to you and stay. That's different.

This is a perfect example of why I don't have a stand in a spot all the time. It rarely works. Things change year to year. I've shot nice 8pts 2 years in a row now in northern WI on public land. Highly pressured public land. We've never shot a buck in either spot before. But the sign was there this year and last. I also don't dick up my stands by sitting them in a schitty wind or even a an OK wind. Pressured deer won't go there in daylight if you hit it on a bad or iffy wind. They just won't. Plan on seeing them at night on your camera and that's it.

Believe it or not, there area spots on public where others won't go. Go there. But have 4 or 5 of them so you can hunt one from any wind direction.

This. The one exception might be a large geo barrier deer need to navigate - some of those make for semi-consistent success IF there continues to be some sort food for them in reasonable proximity. And that's getting harder and harder to find.

With the low deer densities in the big woods, things change on an annual basis. The compounding factor in all of this in northern WI is folks dropping bait piles a couple weeks before the season in areas that are convenient for them (hunter). A lot of the sign you might have been noticing suddenly goes dry because there's a new artificial food source two miles away.

IMO, Wisconsin's biggest challenge in the national forests isn't the wolves or the litany of other things that get mentioned - IMO, it's lack of forest regeneration. Deer are pretty resilient but no food for them in combination with prolonged cold and deep snow spells doom.

SKane and tzone hit on it.

Another thing I see people (some of them friends) make is the idea that because they're in the woods and deer are in the woods - they're in the right spot. Ask "why am I sitting here?" - trails between bedding/food? Deep cover? What? Why are the deer there? Answer that, see it's productive and if a stand isn't - chances are it's because some other change has happened to affect the deer.

Also don't hunt a good stand in bad wind. Quickest way to make it a bad stand. Even if I've seen deer the day before out of that stand - bad wind, I don't sit and push it.

Spot on sir. An argument I've been having with my father and brother the last 10 years. Woods are too mature, little to no undergrowth - it's why the small game numbers are down and deer as well. We needed to log off chunks of the property 10 years ago. Bud Worm finally made them agree to it this year. I suspect in 3-4 years, things will be much better.

Yep that's a good point. That's not WI specific either (as you know). Any national forest has this for the most part. I have notice this year while grouse hunting in far northern MN, there was some logging taking place in the Superior NF. That surprised me a bit.

That can be said about northern Michigan as well. This frustrated me to no end in the northern UP where winters are (were) severe, no agriculture and low deer density. I loved roaming the woods in the 70s until baiting was allowed and became an accepted hunting method.

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.

I generally don't give up on a stand location until I've gone a few seasons without sighting anything. If a given venue is unproductive, I'll just let it go for the year and come back the next. Most of the venues we've given up on were ones that we tried early on, but turned out to be zilches. The majority of the venues have been in place for a decade or two.

What makes them unproductive? Generally speaking, two mature bucks are on the property at any given time. They move off and go somewhere else during the rut and what we see during season are several other bucks that have gone roaming themselves. What's stable are the doe herds. We make them happy and they stick around and act as bait. If the matriarch of one of those herds gets a bone up her butt about a stand, the other deer will avoid it like it was poison. This behavior will last multiple seasons. In the worst case, the curse was permanent. We set up a stand within sight of the old site, and could see deer avoiding the cursed tree for a decade. My sons are now using the new site, and our new guy, Foxtrot Charlie got a doe out of it this past season.

On the other hand, I've seen two instances where solitary doe have ID'd a stand and come every time I was out. They learned to bring pesky bucks by the stand. This behavior lasted a couple of seasons each time.

What makes me bail for a season? If I've had a few sits at a venue when I knew it should have been productive and wasn't, I'll bail for the year and hunt somewhere else. If that goes on for a few seasons, I'll seriously start to question the sense of maintaining the venue.

Not long, no patience

If you want to kill a deer, you’re wasting your time hunting where they ain’t, unless you just happen to be there on the lucky day one happens by. By all means, go someplace else, even if you have to stay in a motel for a few nights or camp, if that’s something you’re equipped for. Now is a great time to scout, leaves down and maybe even some shedding going on. If you’re going to do that, don’t put it off. Get an app like On-X and the maps for your state so you can narrow down the good places before you go. Works best on a tablet for pre-scouting as the details are easier to see. The spots you mark will transfer to your phone.

You didn’t mention (or I missed!) what your stand consists of. I, with the “help” of the state land-management folks, gave up hunting from trees this past season and acquired a good tripod stool with a seat 21” high. Weighs two pounds, less than my safety harness, I think. Straps to my pack or goes over my shoulder. Lets me adapt to the wind or other factors instead of being trapped by a fixed location. Really paid off for me, and no worries about falling out of a tree far from help. Wish I’d done that years ago instead of limiting myself to fixed locations. There are limited options for still-hunting on the small WMA I hunt, and I’m nursing a bad knee, so sitting is what works best. Fortunately, that WMA is only 20 minutes away from home.

You can't kill deer if your hunting where there's not any. It's very easy to change a deer's pattern and turn them nocturnal. Deer have more common sense than man and the ability to smell humans hours later. Most hunters do their best to educate the deer and don't even realize what they're doing. Wearing camo and walking the woods with a gun doesn't make one a hunter.

The OP is talking about big woods hunting - not moving 75 yards to a new "venue" where you can still see the old "venue" on the same patch of ground.

One of the problems around here is you can move a few miles and still usually see the old venue most of the time. Trees aren't particularly abundant (and becoming even less so rapidly as more keep get cleared for city folks' retirement McMansions and ag acreage consolidation), and the terrain is a pancake 😜

Absolutely.

Now take that same area and fill it with mixtures of mature popple stands, soft maple, swamp and no agriculture - and, likely about 2-3 deer per square mile (some areas actually void of deer) – that's the OP's dilemma. And it's a sucky one without a lot of time and effort - OTOH, killing a big woods buck is about as cool and rewarding as it gets.

tzone made it work this year and I swear every time I talked to him this fall, he was boots-on-the-ground in northern WI, preparing for the upcoming season.

The one other note about hunting the gun season in northern WI is unlike many gun seasons in other states, it's pretty well post-rut – maybe a little lingering but that's it. Taint for the faint of heart or those used to seeing deer on each sit.

Yeah, I cut my teeth hunting a lot of pine swamp/popple/willow in northern MN. It was whole different ballgame than hunting here.

Access has become the real killer down here, it has become almost entirely pay to play over the past couple decades.

I have 2 very productive locations, but I only get to hunt either of them a handful of times a year. Not because of time, but wind. I didn't hunt either the 1st 2 weeks of the season because the wind wasn't right. In my youth I would have spent all day, regardless of wind. Now I pick and choose my days and am so much more productive.