4 Bow Stands To Avoid
By Mark Melotik
The desire to hunt your best morning and evening stands as soon as the season opens is a temptation few can resist. Unfortunately, it’s typically a mistake. The truth is, the sooner you educate deer to the fact they’re being hunted, the tougher the hunting becomes later on when the rut kicks in and the odds swing back in our favor.
I’d much rather hunt my best stands when mature bucks are running around a bit loose-minded — or at least displaying less of their typical caution and wariness.
As a youngster I lived in the moment and generally hunted hard and aggressively — regardless of rut timing. Typically, I paid the price. My favorite mantra these days? Patience. But some stands are simply bad ideas from the start. Here are four stand setups you should avoid this season.
EARLY SEASON BEDDING
There are few really good spots for a morning hunt during the early season outside of bedding areas. And these areas are fraught with peril. Even if you don’t bump deer as you exit your stand late-morning, your mere presence in these sensitive areas can result in leaving behind too much human scent. And that can cause deer to alter their patterns.
One of the smartest moves at this time of year is to avoid morning hunts altogether, in favor of hunting deer in the afternoons/evenings at a primary food source.
THE EVENING RIDGE AMBUSH
Thickly overgrown ridgetop bedding areas holding doe groups can be mighty tempting places for an evening sit. However, don’t let your exciting morning hunts in these spots skew your better judgment. During the evening, it’s far smarter to hunt the places where deer are moving toward (ag fields), instead of the places deer are coming from.
Why?
Once the deer are past you, your hunt is essentially over. And it’s likely deer in these carefully chosen bedding areas will be able to see or smell you as you approach. If that happens, you’ve just tipped off more deer to the fact they’re being hunted.
SCRAPES DURING PEAK RUT
Plenty has been written about the value of scrape hunting during all phases of the rut, but to recap, peak rut is simply not the time to be hanging over scrapes. Although the scrapes might look relatively fresh, bucks during peak rut are not using scrapes with any consistency. Once the rut peaks, bucks are bird-dogging and otherwise hounding does, making obvious terrain funnels connecting doe concentrations a far more productive place to be.
THE EASY STAND
Few things about bowhunting mature bucks come easy, and that should be your first tip-off to avoid stands you can access with little or no effort. All of us know buddies who favor the easy stand. There’s probably an easy stand in most everyone’s past, and I can recall several of my own. It might be the ladder “right behind (camp or cabin)” versus the well-hidden, compact hang-on that requires a solid 40-minute hike in predawn darkness. Far too many bowhunters settle for the former — and wonder where all the deer have gone.
And let’s not forget too-easy stand access routes. Examples include taking a game-alerting shortcut across a wide-open harvested crop field in the early morning darkness versus hiking the long way around and carefully hiding your approach. The long way takes increased physical effort but also smart planning and attention to detail.
In the end, the pursuit of mature whitetails rarely equates to easy, and those of us obsessed with this game would have it no other way.