Back in 1960 when I began hunting whitetails with a bow, few hunting aids were available to help keep archers from being identified by deer short distances away (within accurate no-sight bow range). Portable tree stands were unknown then, camo clothing could only be found in war surplus stores and about the only thing available for covering the bright skin of our faces was burnt cork—applied by rubbing the burnt end of a cork on our faces (yes, more than anyone back then, us archers knew we needed to do this). Being an avid brook trout angler, it finally occurred to me that the olive-colored mosquito net I was forced to wear while threading my way through the alders bordering my favorite trout stream would make a great head covering for deer hunting. Right from the outset I was astonished by how well it worked. Time after time, nearby whitetails (and black bears) as close as 10 feet away glanced directly at me without showing the least bit of recognition or alarm.

Today while hunting whitetails, fall or winter, I carry two camo head nets, one with a horizontal eye-hole and one with no eye-hole. I personally prefer them over camo face masks because they also cover my neck and on a frigid November morning with no wind, they seem to keep much of my body heat inside, eliminating the need for ear coverings. I wear the one with the eyehole most of the time, rolled up beneath my hat or cap brim while hiking and pulled down over my face and neck the moment I sit down to begin stand hunting. While my head net is down in cold weather, my breath sometimes steams up my glasses. To halt this, I pull the lower edge of my eye-hole down beneath the tip of my nose. This does not seem to change its effectiveness. Whenever I find myself facing bright sunlight (not having a dark shadow cast by a tree across my face), to keep my glasses from reflecting sunlight toward deer out in front of me, I wear my no eye-hole head net. The dark netting does not hamper my sighting with a rifle or bow.  Inside both head nets is an elastic band, which keeps them tight enough against my face to keep them from accidently tangling with my bowstring when releasing an arrow. That’s a comfort.

Like I said above, my head nets are pure magic. Because they cover the one part of my body most likely to be spotted and identified by a nearby deer (sticking up above the dense natural cover that normally hides the rest of my body while seated on my stool, they’ve improved my stand hunting success (and whitetail, bear and wolf studies) so much that I wouldn’t dream of heading afield without them.

Whether hunting deer (even clever old bucks) or black bears (even wise 300-600 pound boars), here’s a trick that works too often to not include in your hunt plans. It’s a reason beginning youngsters sometime take trophy-class bucks.

A feeding 10-pointer hears a far-off dad leading his son or daughter (or a hunting partner) to a tree stand that happens to be near the downwind or crosswind edge of the buck’s current favorite feeding area (Dad’s a lucky or knowledgeable preseason scouter). Since they are moving steadily, not sneaking and halting often as if hunting (not making sounds characteristic of hunting humans) and because they are noisy enough to be kept track of by hearing alone, the buck feels no great alarm, knowing it can easily sneak way from the area with no great haste and avoid being detected by the approaching hunters if and when needed. Always cautious, however, it steps into nearby cover to watch and wait to see what happens—hoping those hunters will soon simply pass, after which it can resume feeding.

Oh-oh, they stopped. They’re right over there by that big pine tree ten yards back in those thick spruces fifty yards away. The buck is becoming nervous, its tail slowly rising and spreading. The hunters then suddenly begin moving again. Sounds (soft footsteps and sticks breaking softly underfoot) indicate they’re now moving away, back in the direction from which they came. The buck’s tail relaxes, dropping back to its usual position. The sky is beginning to brighten in the east.

It’s full light. Having heard, seen or smelled nothing that indicates a hunter is near during the past half hour (big bucks commonly wait 15-30 minutes to be sure), the buck flicks it tail once from side to side, indicating it has finally decided what to do next. It steps out into the opening and resumes feeding.

Five minutes later, Dad hears a shot in the direction from which he had earlier led his son or daughter to a tree stand. He can’t wait to return to see what happened.

Note: This works best in dense forest cover. If a big buck (or bear) actually sees two hunters approach and only one depart, it won’t be fooled.

As rightfully claimed by those who prefer to move constantly about on foot while hunting deer—still-hunters, sneakers and hunters making drives—whitetails are active all hours of the day, though abnormally. This is because such hunters force whitetails to frequently move about during midday hours when they normally rest. The trouble with these aggressive styles of hunting is, they soon force most or all surviving deer to abandon their ranges. Antlerless deer, especially if young, may attempt to return within 1-4 days, but most whitetails 2-1/2 years of age or older, especially older bucks, are then likely to remain off-range until the hunting season is over. Refuges, parks, posted lands, swamps, bogs and other lands where whitetails seek relief from such hunters can be as far as six miles away from their home ranges.

Where all hunters are stand hunters, hours whitetails are active (up and about feeding, watering and engaging in rut-related activities) are fairly normal—from about 4 AM to 10 AM and 4 PM to 10 PM, chewing their cuds and resting between these hours. There are a number of conditions that can change these hours.

Take winds. When winds are calm or light, whitetails are active longest. Hours they are active are progressively shorter as winds become stronger. When winds exceed 14 mph (except in west Texas), whitetails generally skip feeding (remain bedded).

Take precipitation. Whitetails are active longest when there is no precipitation or precipitation is light—foggy, drizzling or raining or snowing lightly. They generally remain bedded while noisy sleet in falling or while it is thundering. They are less active while rain or snow is moderate. Though I’ve seen some notable exceptions, they’ll generally remain bedded (skip feeding) while rain or snow is heavy. Following the first heavy snow of winter (six inches or more) they are likely to remain bedded until the second evening after the snow has quit falling.

Temperatures can have a dramatic effect. After our northern whitetails have grown their winter coats, generally complete by mid-October, they are unlikely to be active long during daylight hours while temperatures exceed 50 degrees. At least until they become acclimated to sub-zero temperature in December, they’ll be most active while temperatures range between 40 and 10 degrees F. As it becomes colder in November, their morning and evening feeding hours will become shorter. While temperatures are 10-below or colder in November, particularly if it is windy, whitetails are likely to remain bedded throughout feeding hours. When a thaw or near thaw occurs with the wind calm or light following a period of frigid temperatures in November or December, every deer in the woods will be on the move, feeding for 1-2 hours sometime between 11 AM and 3 PM. This is one of the most productive of periods to stand hunt adjacent to a current favorite whitetail feeding area in fall and early winter.

While whiling away your deer hunting time in the woods this fall, here’s some things to think about:

Though you have tried using every buck hunting gadget, potion, article of clothing, lure, bait, mineral block, portable tree stand and ground level blind now available in your favorite sporting goods store that is supposed to improve your odds of taking a big buck, why are those mature bucks you recently photographed with your trail cameras as elusive as ever? Could mature bucks be that smart?

Is your problem actually a low buck-to-doe ratio or is it simply bad luck, not being in the right place at the right time? If like you, 98% of other whitetail hunters seldom see trophy bucks (worthy of taxidermy) during a hunting season, much less take one, which is true, how in the world could there be a shortage of trophy class bucks?

Not being able to recognize a mature-buck-effective stand site or not knowing how long a stand site can remain mature-buck-effective might be your problem.

What about being unable to recognize a current favorite whitetail feeding area (the most productive of stand sites if properly hunted) in forest habitat, except of course, any food plot you created yourself? Is your food plot out in front of you right now a favorite whitetail feeding area today?  Why did your trail camera prove one or more mature bucks and other deer regularly visited your food plot before the hunting season began, but except for fawns and yearlings, not much now, at least not during daylight hours, if at all?

What about ensuring you are hunting within easy shooting range of a trail or site favored by a mature buck right now, today, every day you hunt? Yes, this can actually be done.

Maybe you’re goofing up somehow with airborne and trail scents. Can whitetails actually smell hunters high in tree stands? Did you know K-9 dogs can find a human using any scent killing product available for deer hunters today as quickly as a human not using them?

Do you hunt on the way to a stand site, sneaking and often halting (to scan ahead), believing this enables you to fool big bucks and other whitetails ahead into thinking you are a harmlessly feeding deer? This is a big one.

Do you believe breeding is in progress when bucks are most actively making ground scrapes and antler rubs? This is a big one too.

Your answers to such questions and their validity (whether they are long believed myths or not) has everything to do with how many mature bucks you see, if any, while hunting.

Today, there are cures for rarely successful buck hunting—provided by a yet avid 84-year-old deer hunter and long-time MidWest Outdoors Magazine writer, Dr. Ken Nordberg, who happens to be well educated for doing hunting-related whitetail research. He’s been at it since the early 1960s, scientifically since 1970, full time since 1980. In the process he has discovered major differences in habits and behavior between bucks and does and whitetails of six age classes, discovered annually recurring activities of antlered bucks related to the whitetail rut between September 1st and the end of first week in January (knowledge vital to successful buck hunting) and created six new fair chase hunting methods, made productive by thirty-some precautions, that make it possible to be regularly successful at hunting mature bucks.

A visit to Doc’s website, www.drnordbergondeerhunting.com, and clicking on “store” for a review of his latest, biggest and most comprehensive book on buck hunting, Whitetail Hunters Almanac, 10th Edition, will get you started on the right track to great buck hunting. If you are a beginner or you became a whitetail hunter during the past two decades and therefore do not yet know as much about Dr. Nordberg like hundreds of thousands of serious North American whitetail hunters got to know him at nationwide hunting seminars before the year 2000, take time to click on “YouTube” at the top of his home page and prepare to be amazed.

Every now and then I receive an email from a deer hunter who is troubled by my recommendation of using deer trails to get around the woods during hunting seasons. Back in the 1960s when I first began my hunting-related studies of wild whitetails, I also felt it was wrong, especially within 100-200 yards of stand sites. I therefore made lots of 30-inch-wide trails for my kids and I back then.

By the time it became illegal for hunters to make trails on public lands in Minnesota, I wasn’t terribly troubled by being forced to use the only other available trails that could provide the silence needed (most important) to get our stand sites, namely, established deer trails. The reason was, as I discovered over and over again earlier, many older bucks with antlers wider than their bodies (and other deer) didn’t hesitate to adopt my trails (man-tall and 30-inch-wide tunnels through cover), often beginning within a few hours after making them. The probable reason was, my trails enabled them to travel from place to place with much greater silence than their own deer trails. Via repeated passages, mature does and their young make most well-tracked deer trails (tunnels through cover) seen in the woods. Mature bucks, being much larger animals and often having antlers wider than their bodies, can find it very difficult to travel far with stlence on less-tall, less-wide tunnels through cover made by smaller does and their young—one of the reasons older bucks often travel off-trail. Older bucks therefore readily adopted my trails, despite being initially laced with my fresh trail scents, though with caution. Thus I knew most older bucks wouldn’t react with hunt-ruining alarm upon discovering I had adopted portions of some of their own favorite trails.

Nonetheless, I felt using deer trails should be kept to a minimum during a hunting season. What we needed, I decided, was a single looping series of connecting deer trails to be used often, even daily, as a main trunk route to get to our stand site approach trails in each square-mile we hunted. From this looping trail would branch our stand site approach trails, each of which would only be used once or twice per hunting season. These are the only trails we now use during a hunting season. This provides our deer with enormous areas in which they will not be alerted or alarmed by us or our fresh trail scents. This, plus stand hunting only, keeps our deer from abandoning their ranges and/or becoming nocturnal. We thus we gain the silence we need to get to our stand sites (dead branches tossed aside from selected trails while scouting two weeks or more before opening day) and the looping trail provides us with a means of finding fresh tracks and/or droppings made by mature bucks (vicinities of next stand sites) daily beginning on day three of a hunting season until we take our usual four mature bucks. By being predictable to whitetails in this regard—only using certain trails—our deer continue to do predictable things at predictable places (near stand sites) during predictable hours right up to the last day we hunt. What could be better? We therefore no longer have qualms about adopting limited deer trails for our own use during hunting seasons.

Most whitetail stand hunters can’t wait to return to a stand site where they glimpsed or tagged a big buck last year or the year before or where they photographed a big buck with a trail cam this year, last year or the year before. Nothing unusual about that. I regularly returned to previously used stands myself for about twenty years. Beginning in 1991, however, because my hunting partners and I began to wonder why some of our stand sites provided one or more opportunities to take big bucks and most others did not, I began searching for reasons for it. The first two of the eight reasons I eventually ended up with impressed us so much that they forever changed the way we hunt mature bucks.

Freshly made deer signs made by an unalarmed mature buck within fifty yards (in dense forest cover) was one of these two reasons. As most veteran deer hunters know well, big bucks are not seen everywhere on any one day, if at all, within their 1–2 square-mile home or breeding ranges during a hunting season. Even while such bucks are making or renewing ground scrapes (breeding range markers) during the latter half of October and the first days of November or while they are searching for does in heat or accompanying does in heat in November, they are only likely to be seen in a narrow and winding strip of land comprising about 10% of their ranges for quite a number of reasons. Logically, trails and sites within these strips are the best places to hunt older bucks. Unfortunately, during hunting seasons these 10% areas change in location often, daily while does are in heat. The good part is, trails and sites currently frequented by mature bucks are always clearly marked with freshly made, mature-buck-sized tracks and droppings.

To take advantage of these signs and their locations, we had to learn to do it within hours, not only because older bucks so quickly find and begin avoiding stand hunters (usually without abandoning their ranges), but because in early to mid-November, individual does are only in heat 24–26 hours. Upon discovering such signs, we stand hunt within 25–50 yards (10–20 yards if bowhunting) beginning immediately, later the same day or early the next morning. Seemingly impossible to carry and install a portable tree stand in a tree in a new area currently frequented by a mature buck without alerting or alarming that buck and other nearby deer during a hunting season, beginning on day 3 or 4 or earlier, we abandon our tree stands (selected and prepared well before opening day) and begin using backpacked stools to sit at newly selected stand sites at ground level. The reason for this is, our folding stools can be carried and set up silently at any time downwind or crosswind of any fresh signs made by a mature buck (preferably adjacent to a current favorite feeding area) whatever the current wind direction.  

To keep track of where mature bucks are active each day, we learned to scout midday (when deer are normally bedded) daily for fresh signs made by mature bucks, but only along specific series of deer trails that loop through each square-mile we hunt.  The gray wolves of our hunting/study area taught us how to do this without seriously alarming deer. 

The second most common early reason we took older bucks at certain stand sites and not at others was, they had never been used before and were 100 yards or more from any previously used stand site. We became aware of this upon realizing 15 of the 20 mature bucks my three sons and I tagged between1991 and 1995 were taken at stand sites never used before. By 2018 we had tagged 101 mature bucks, about 80% of which were taken during the first half-day we used stand sites never used before. We were successful at nearly one of four stand sites selected during hunting seasons, all of which were selected because they had multiple characteristics that make stand sites mature-buck-effective, including the two explained here. What this means is, it takes a lot of stand sites used once (sometimes twice) per hunting season to be regularly successful at taking mature bucks, or to put it another way, to achieve odds as great as 1-in-4 when hunting mature bucks. Rather than sit at one mature-buck-effective stand site four consecutive half-days or full days, your odds will be much improved if you sit at a different mature-buck-effective stand site 100 yards or more away from any previously used stand site during each of those four periods. Over the long run, numbers of big bucks you see will be greatest if you restrict your stand site use to one half-day each. For a comprehensive explanation about all the characteristics that make stand sites mature-buck-effective, be sure to read my 10th Edition of Whitetail Hunters Almanac.

 To learn how my sons and I manage to find, prepare and use so many stand sites, see my next blog.

One evening two weeks ago, while working late on a writing assignment at my kitchen table, I finally caught the long-tailed house mouse that had been living in the works of my refrigerator with a plastic trap baited with peanut butter.  The trouble was, though it’s head was inside the trap, it didn’t die. After annoyingly pushing the trap around my kitchen floor for about ten minutes, I decided to get up and end its life by stepping down on the trap to apply fatal pressure to its neck. Instead, I inadvertently released the mouse and quick as a wink, it ducked under my refrigerator. Now it won’t touch a mousetrap, proving even a mouse knows better than make the same mistake twice.

The trouble with using baits to attract whitetails to stand sites is, whitetails are smarter than mice. Once a mature whitetail (2-1/2 years of age or older) discovers a potentially dangerous human via sight, hearing or smell guarding a site baited with doe-in-heat pheromone, tarsal musk, clover, turnips, corn, apples, something with protein in it, mineral blocks, salt blocks or sounds that attempt to imitate doe bleats, buck grunts or battling bucks and survives the discovery, it will thereafter avoid that site while a readily recognized hunting season is in progress, at least during daylight hours when hunters are normally afoot.