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

Western WA is extremely dense, often steep, and always wet. Still hunting and ambush style hunting seem to work.

Easter WA is typically high mountain desert, wheat field, and mountains with Doug fir, hemlock and cedars. Spot and stalk typifies the hunting on that side.

Lots of opportunities for different tactics on both sides like float hunting or calling.

And that's okay.

We can't (and wouldn't) bait here, but sitting over crops or natural food is the same thing to a lesser degree. It's all good, while maybe not quite the challenge of still hunting in big woods. The meat tastes just fine, and sitting in a stand, rifle in hand watching the world go by ain't a bad way to spend one's time. Even Daniel Boone sat over a salt lick when he wanted to make meat.

Any luck?

Just for that, I'm going to start another. Check it out. Captdavid

I'm a dog hunter. I hunt Public land in Florida. The WMA I hunt is 58,000 acres. It is mostly surrounded by another 120,000 acres of still hunt WMAs.

A normal day starts with me getting up around 4:30 and looking for tracks and checking cameras. If I can find a good bucky looking track or get a picture of a buck I'm lucky (almost all of Fl public land is bucks only). I get to camp around 6:30 for breakfast and then load up the hounds. I'm feeding 8 right now and usually run 4 at a time. We start the dogs on the track and spread out in likely crossings and let the dogs do their thing. You can tell how hot the track is by the way they sound. If you know your dogs well, you can tell whats going on. When they jump him, you hope someone in your group is in the right spot. If not, you may have to adjust a little or a lot to get in front of the deer. If it's a legal buck, we try to kill it. If it's not, we catch the dogs and do it again. On a good day, we can get in 4 races or so. Some days, we don't jump a deer. For a houndsman, hearing a good race, especially if it's your dogs, is almost as exiting as killing the deer. As a group, we killed 4 bucks this year. We could have killed a lot more sitting in a tree stand, but where's the fun in that?

I Deer hunt in a Marsh on Maryland's Eastern Shore.. This is thick stuff.. I have killed deer at 10 yards.. If the temp is unusually warm we get killed with Mosquitos, eaten alive..

Years ago I hunted corn fields.. Longest shot was 247yd on a range finder..

I hunt public land. Generally speaking I stand hunt which for me means scouting an area that looks good, marking a few spots that seem good to sit, and making the call where to sit based upon wind direction and hunting pressure when the time comes.

I find spots by looking for the crap no one would want to hunt. Depending upon the area it could be due to distance from a parking lot, thick cover, tough topography, or (preferably) some combination thereof.

Sometimes my stand is me in a folding chair or stool. Sometimes it's as simple as standing next to a tree. Depends upon distance and difficulty and how much crap I want to carry with me.

Often times while gunhunting I'm hunting people more than deer. That is, I'm hunting based upon the way I anticipate deer moving in response to other hunters. That isn't the case with bow hunting, but by and large that's the situation during gun season.

I've spot and stalk hunted out west and LOVE that. The West is like a whole other world from big woods eastern hunting. See FAR more deer, cover a lot more distance.

I've stand hunted over bait too but don't like it. No problem whatsoever with it and if it was all I had I'd do it just not a favorite method. I can sit all day (and usually do) but like to be free to move or at least to pick my own spot. Being told where to sit isn't my thing.

Love to hunt wherever whenever...

That's what I do.

That is pretty much how I elk hunt, antelope hunting I use the truck, as it is about a 130 mile loop through the area I usually hunt ,hitting all the public land spots.....Hard to walk that in a day.

With my rifle!!

What kind of dogs do you run?? Sounds like a ball...

For WT I hunt ladder stands over green fields, hay fields or elevated box blinds over same. Shots can be out to 325 yds. For Montana MD it spot and stalk. Always been able to get to 200 yds or less.

Beautiful thing about being an American is you can get a tag anywhere allowed and hunt just like anybody else if want. Don't let the trolls get you down.

We mainly hunt the east side of the state for deer. The areas we hunt are mainly open farm lands with steep canyons and finger ridges. We have 10,000 acres of private access that we typically try to scout from a distance as to pattern the deer and not push them. If a likely candidate is spotted we will try to set up in front of their normal path and see what works our way. When doing this we are continually on the binoculars and spotting scopes to see what else is moving. If nothing trips our fancy we hunt the fringes of the property to see what gets pushed on to our land. There are only 11 of us in our group so we do exceedingly well and don't feel a need to push the area and thus the deer.

Walkers. We've been keeping up this line for a while. About 1/4 to 1/2 tree stock crossed with running walker. We don't have piles of room like running walkers require and like more nose than most of them have. Water gets too deep here at times for beagles. When everything goes right, it is a blast!

We used to hunt with Walker Hounds here in South Louisiana back in the 80's. I had 6 Walkers and puppies at times.

That was hard hunting. We hunted in the Atchafalaya basin, had to get to the camp by boat, so you loaded up the boat with food, gear, clothes and Dogs.

There were about 30 hunters and we would cast about 50 dogs. you would hunt deer in the morning and then hunt Dogs all afternoon... it was a job and everything smelled like a dog.

I've done a variety over the years. Now I have a 25 acre spot close to town that I bow hunt on.
I have a camp on family land in Northeast Louisiana that we stopped farming and put into trees. Tripods and shoot houses are the setup there. We hunt roads and field edges. Shots can be long. My last three bucks on the place have been 300+ yards. I have a 300 WBY Accumark and I have sandbags at my stands. We are just now starting to hold good deer numbers.

With GPS tracking collars, It's a lot easier to get them caught up and keep them where they are supposed to be then it was back then. The money saved in gas alone has more than payed for the system.

Yeah back then there were no GPS collars. I enjoyed running in the fox pens during the off season. Love the sound of a good pack.

I go with my buddies running bear and Coon with hounds. Running walkers and plots. Good fun. He's going to breed his walker bitch with one of his top end plots for bear dogs. Love to hear hounds run.