Thanks guys!
I've got Woodswalker's email address. I ought to see if he'll come over for a visit. JPH was another. He said he'd tried the 'Campfire and didn't like it. Oh well. Sigh.
To me, the time to stillhunt is when you don't know the property and don't know where the deer are going to be. Now if you asked me this same question twenty years ago, I'd have said something completely different. However, there's only so many places the deer will be on a given day, and only so many places a hunter can exploit them. After a few seasons, you should be able to pick up on that. It's like fishing your favourite lake. Sure you can fan cast every inch of shoreline, but the fish will have preferences for the places they want to be. You end up learning them.
All this changes when you get thrown into new circumstances. If I were to hunt a brand new spot, I'd probably do pretty much what I did back in 2001 when we got our 200 acres. Pre-season, I would analyse the topos and the photos, and then conduct
speed scouting to get as much intel on the deer as I could. When season came in, I would do a combination of armed scouting and still hunting and then gradually work into what Dr Ken Norberg called "portable stump" hunting.
Nordberg's Portable Stump Portable stumps are a crossover between stillhunting and set blinds. I carry the makings for a quick blind setup with me. When things look right, I throw up the burlap blind between two trees and sit on the "stump." In my case, I've substituted a 5 gallon bucket with a lid for Nordberg's wooden stool. I especially like the portable stump method as a way to begin and end my hunting day. I'll go somewhere well before first light and set up the blind and sit there for the first hour or so of legal hunting and then stillhunt over to a place I want to explore, leave the stump, do some scouting, wash, rinse, repeat, until I finally set up the portable stump and hunt the last two hours of legal hunting overlooking a likely spot.
When Angus, now 18, started hunting on his own a few seasons ago, I gave him his own portable stump and set him off to discover the farm on his own. In a couple of seasons, he had the place figured out to his own satisfaction and started placing permanent stands in new spots. He's been filling his tags ever since.
The Shamanic Portable Stump Back in 2001, I had a bunch of black 5 gallon buckets, so I took them out and left them at promising spots. A good part of my first two seasons were spent still hunting between the buckets. When I finally got around to setting up blinds, I was already fairly certain of a payoff. I filled both tags out of the first treestand I set.
The second stand never did pay off. However, I knew the spot was good. While stillhunting in that general area, I found the remnants of 3 treestands further up the hill. Some had rotted to where it was just nails sticking out of the tree. I relocated the stand 100 yards up the hill and this became our #1 producing stand on the farm.
