I've got an off-season topic for y'all that's been on my mind since season's end. I'd like y'alls' thoughts on whether deer stands have a life cycle and why that might be so. I'm now 18 seasons into my present deer camp, and nearly all of our current stand locations are different from what we had initially. Most of them just stopped producing after a while.
Let me give you the PRO and CON as I see it.
PRO:
1) The habitat changes
2) The neighbors' hunting habits change
3) The deer get wary
4) Local agriculture changes
CON:
1) After putting up a new stand, I've found remnants of deer stands from the 60's close by.
2) I can show you deer trails that have been where they are for almost 2 decades
3) Deer do not have language. One generation has a hard time passing on knowledge to the next.
Discussion:
In support of the proposition that deer stands seem to stop working after a while, I can tell you that my experience has been that magic stands, stands that produce year-after-year seem to have a limited shelf life. The best one I've had has now gone several years without connecting with a big buck. In another location, we put up a stand in an oak grove and hit paydirt several years running, and then all of a sudden things shut down. We got a smart doe that I called Madge. I believe we managed to kill her mother and the next year her son out of the same stand, and for the next three seasons Madge would make sure she busted us on every trip out. After Madge disappeared in 2007, we had zero traffic at that stand and finally removed it in 2017. There are still deer in the vicinity. My son has a stand about 100 yards away, but the deer seem to stay out of that oak grove like it's poison.
On the other hand, I've got a spot that has produced 1-3 deer a season since 2008. You can shoot one there Opening Week and still be able to take another on the last weekend. I've shot back-to-back 170+lb mature doe less than 3 days apart standing in about the same place. On another part of the property my buddy has a honey hole that normally produces a big buck every year, usually bedding in the same patch of weeds in the same corner of a pasture next to a cedar thicket.
Go figure.
I'm just wondering what y'all have noticed.
