Tips & Tactics

When you are an invited guest on someone’s hunting property and they put you in a spot, DO NOT leave early or go roaming around, even if you aren’t seeing anything.

Wait until your host comes to get you, because you could get lost or put yourself in a dangerous situation with other hunters.

This happened to someone hunting with me; they left the stand early and got lost. It worried the heck out of me until we found him!

I won’t go through that again. Now, we all carry cell phones to communicate and require our guests to stay put.

Another Scary Incident
— By Tip Editor Tim H. Martin

Rich Williams’ suggestion to stay put is good for numerous reasons. Let’s start with safety.

The perils of getting down from your stand early to roam can be illustrated though a scary incident that happened on my hunting property in the 1990s.

There were eight other members on my Alabama lease, including a pair of brothers from Florida who liked to arrive at their stands at sunrise, then get down about 8:30 a.m. to stalk, or go slipping, as they called it.

Their slipping around at prime hunting time created an awful lot of problems for the other club members. Deer would scatter as the brothers wandered through the property disrupting the patterns of rutting bucks the other hunters had spent months scouting.

On a particularly cold, quiet morning during the rut, one of the brothers got down from his stand not long after daylight. Later he claimed he got cold, but I think the truth was he just got bored and impatient.

The man wandered slowly into a patch of unexplored woods, and right into the gunsights of another club member sitting quietly in a climbing stand.

The sitting hunter heard footsteps approaching, held his crosshairs on an opening, put his finger on the trigger, his thumb on the safety, and waited for a deer to appear.

Imagine his shock and horror as a human stepped into his sights!

I thank God the man in the stand was an experienced hunter who always checked and double-checked his target to make sure it was a deer that fit the bill for harvest.

That incident was enough to remove the Florida brothers from the club, and it generated the need for a no-stalking rule.

From a tactical standpoint, I had a wise wildlife professor at Auburn University who once said, “A whitetail hunter’s success rate decreases by 90% the moment his feet touch the ground.”

Those words have kept me in many a frigid treestand, even on days when the wind was howling and I could barely feel my feet.

Of course, there are scenarios where stalking is a good option, but I believe the stick-to-your-stand philosophy is generally best. It’s helped me send a lot of venison to the processor on days when there was a great temptation to go on the offensive.

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