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The area breaks down
like this.
The hillside has hardwood trees and thick brush. A flat area at the bottom of the hill is thick woods and more trees, except for the clearing where the December Tree is. An old road that is no longer passable because of downed trees cuts through the middle of the clearing. Then there is a Briar Thicket that runs all the way to the farm fields some 50 yards away. Just looking at it you know it is "deery." First, I put a tripod in the Briars where I had good visibility of the clearing and some of the Hillside and watched the approach routes and activity of bucks and does. I learned that they came from the hillside, down the old road, and through two trails spiking out from the the network of trails in the briars. I put a ladder stand inside a stand of trees by the old road (see picture), 10 yards from the Clearing and 15 from the scrape area at December Tree. Because this position has great cover the deer never see me, even though they frequently are very close. |
Part
4: Setting Up to Hunt
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From my tripod in the
Briars I noticed that several bucks waited on the hillside, watching the
scrape site. Once a Bomber bedded down on the hill, 40 yards uphill
from me, and waited for two hours. But no does showed up and the buck finally
left.
The hillside was too wooded to tell which of the many trails are the right ones to set up on. So I moved to the hillside, 80 yards from the scrape, a third of the way down the hill, so I could watch the hill better. It was a great vantage point and soon I had a tree picked out that was in the thick of the action, between two trails and uphill 15 yards from the clearing. I hung the treestand (in the picture to the right) in the tree and cut two shooting lanes. The woods was so thick that from the stand I could not tell which tree was the December Tree so I hung a Pink flagging ribbon on it. No luck there, either, still couldn't see it. So I trimmed some limbs until I COULD see the scrape area. After all, I wanted to know if deer were hanging around it. NEXT: Setting Up To Hunt, Part 2 . . . . . . . . Feedback |