Stand Placement
Now that you've established a few areas with promising deer sign,
it's time to decide where to place your tree stand or ground blind.
Photo taken from a great article by Mossy Oak on placing, setting up, securing and brushing in your ground blind.
Patterns
It's important to understand that no animal is one-dimensional, and deer are no exception. What do we mean by that? You'll hear a lot of well-meaning hunters tell you "Ya just gotta get to know him. Know his habits. Pattern him, that's all."
Sounds easy, right? The problem is, Bucky doesn't drop the kids off at school at seven and pick them up at three every day because he's not on a schedule. Deer are driven by needs, the first of which is always food except when mating. So for the sake of argument let's assume for a moment that Bucky is actually on some kind of regular schedule:
- On Monday and Wednesday early mornings before dawn he feeds in the bean field to satisfy his protein needs
- Tuesday and Thursdays he makes sure to visit every scrape he's made in the area
- Fridays and Saturdays he likes to chase does around the corn field because he can load up on carbs and, hey, it's the weekend
Monday there was a hunter sitting on the edge of the field and Bucky smelled him, so he couldn't get his protein. That pushed his protein fix to Tuesday just after midnight. He was behind on sleep because of it, so he tried hitting his scrapes Wednesday instead, but encountered another buck urinating in the first one so he had to challenge and run him off. By the time that ordeal was finished, Bucky was hungry again and wasn't far from a patch of oak trees with good acorns on the ground so he grabbed a bite there and slipped into bed.
See where I'm going with this? You can take educated guesses about where a deer is frequenting. You can even put trail cameras up to confirm your hypotheses. But just because you have a deer on camera at 6:52am on Thursday doesn't mean you'll ever see it there at that time on any other day ever again. It might - but it might not.
This ridiculous example illustrates the fluid nature of a deer's so-called "habits" and highlights the importance of not counting on anything to heavily. Yes, you should play your odds. No, they're not as good as we'd like them to be. That's why we often have to put a lot of time in. Just like predators in the wild, even the most prepared hunters fail a majority of the time.
We use the Accuweather app for iPhone and Andriod to monitor weather and wind conditions, which influence where we sit.
Wind
Have a look at the detailed forecast for your hunting location over the next seven days. Go hour by hour and get a feel for which direction the prevailing winds tend to come from. While we know for certain the deer will not always be moving in the direction they "should" on the path we expect, choosing to place our stand downwind of - that is, carrying our scent away from - the deer when they are moving when and where we expect them is ideal.
How to go about this. Let's drastically oversimplify for illustrative purposes.
- Due East is a big agriculture field where you see deer and know they feed (deer feed most at night)
- Due West is a huge patch of cane you've confirmed many deer use as bedding
- You have a patch of woods with fantastic deer sign right smack between them
- The prevailing wind most often comes out of the South or Southwest
Where do you hang your stand? Ideally, just north of the game path, rub, scrape, etc. If you're bowhunting, maybe 15-25 yards north. Shotgun or rifle hunters might like to push that number to 30-50 yards in the event a deer takes an unexpected path. Think of it as an added buffer to avoided getting winded.
Let's use this same scenario once more but change wind direction.
If your prevailing wind (or the wind on any particular day) is coming out of the West, you could still place your stand in a similar position. However, you would only want to hunt this stand in the afternoons/evenings when you could reasonably anticipate deer movement to be coming from bedding (to the west in this example) to food, allowing you to remain downwind until they pass you on their way to the field.
Watch the video below for added context in making an educated guess on where best to place your stand or blind.
Next Steps
You've already scouted your property once.
Those using tree stands would be wise to revisit their property.
Scout a bit more, confirm what you think you know, and climb up a few trees.
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