“If you build it, they will come.” As true as this is in the movie “Field of Dreams”, it also applies to our pursuit of deer hunting. Certainly much of the challenge of chasing whitetails is in finding big bucks and chasing them down, but, there is also significant advantage in finding ways to bring bucks to you. In some cases these can be the best ways to stealthily lay ambush to a weary old whitetail. And while most of these strategies require hard work and lots of preparation – they undoubtedly can payoff big come hunting season. So with that in mind, here are 4 ways to start bringing the deer to you!

1. Limit The Options: While not easy, getting within sight of a big buck during hunting season is slightly more attainable a goal than having one actually come within bow range. Getting those bucks to actually come to you isn’t easy, but it doesn’t have to come down to luck. You can achieve this kind of outcome by limiting the options a buck has when traveling through your general area, and by forcing these options to funnel deer within range of your stand. For example, if you’re hunting a field edge – create brush piles along most of the woodline with a few strategic openings near your stand. Or try downing a tree across a popular out of range deer trail and clearing a new detour that comes towards your location. Most deer will take the option of least resistance, and if that option just so happens to be within 40 yards of you – it’s game on.

2. Set The Table: This one may be obvious, but deer love food. Their lives really revolve around eating and if you can provide a nutritious and attractive food source in the form of a food plot, you’ll have deer coming to you.  Now that being said, there are many details that go into creating and hunting a food plot successfully, but that all has been covered in other articles or will be down the road. For now keep this in mind, if you haven’t tried a food plot yet, give it a serious second thought. Even a super small, woodland food plot created by hand can help bring a deer into range. Food plots can help your deer reach their full potential AND increase your chances of harvesting one – I don’t see a lot of downside there.

3. Quench Their Thirst: In addition to eating, deer obviously need water and this is a great need to capatilize on when you want deer coming to you. Especially in areas of limited water or on extra hot days, hunting over a water source can be dynamite. Creating a man made watering hole, or even burying a kiddy pool and filling it occasionally with water can be easily done and is often enough to bring the bucks right to you on those tough hunting hot days.

4. Clear The Path: Not only can you bring deer to you by blocking their alternate routes, but you can also do this by opening up a pathway straight to you. As mentioned before, deer are naturally somewhat lazy – meaning they will take path of least resistance when possible (and safe). There are a number of ways you can create “paths of least resistance” that bring deer right to you. An example of this comes straight from my own experience a couple seasons ago. I was hunting an old pipeline overgrown with cat-tails that connected an open field to a deep swamp. Up to this point deer crossed this pipeline willy nilly or picked their way through the adjoining woods as they headed into the swamp. But I decided to clear a narrow path way through the cattails with a sickle, and within a couple months that small path through the cattails became a deer highway and a heavy rub line that led every deer within 20 yards of my stand.

Have any other good ways of bringing deer to you or do you have additional thoughts on these 4 ideas? Share what you think in the comments section!

As we all know, there are a million different strategies, tips and tricks that can help you bag the buck of your dreams. But on the other hand, there are just as many, if not more ways to screw it all up. Hunting mature whitetails is an exercise in walking the thin line between success and failure. You can use all the latest and greatest gear, spend months preparing and devising a fool proof strategy, yet still throw it all away with one careless mistake. So today, rather than looking at strategies to get that big ole buck you’ve got your eye on, lets take a minute to discuss four ways you can ruin your season right now. (Spoiler alert: These are things you DON’T want to do)

Hunt Your Best Spots Now: Early season success can be had, thats for sure. But you don’t want to sacrifice possible success during the rut  (AKA whitetail superbowl), if you’re just hunting blindly early in the year. Plan to hunt a couple of your good spots once or twice in the very beginning if you must, but then leave those spots alone til that rut period. Hot rut spots include funnels between bedding areas, bedding areas themselves and primary scrape areas. Although they may look enticing now, hold off and then hit them hard the when the gettin is good. If you over-hunt them early, you’ll most likely blow them out before you ever get to capitalize on that awesome early November timeframe.

Walk Through Food Sources Before Your Morning Hunt or After Your Evening: Want a sure fire way to alert your local deer herd that you’d like to stick an arrow in em? Go ahead and walk across that alfalfa field the first morning when you go into your stand. Then when you leave at night, climb on out and hike back across to your truck. Those snorts, stomps and flagging white tails? Don’t worry about em. Thats just your 2011 hunting dreams flitting away. No big deal, right? Wrong. When you’re heading to or leaving your stand, you MUST have an access route that avoids deer activity. If you consistently blow out food sources, these deer will become more nocturnal or avoid the area altogether. Don’t let that happen. In the mornings, access your stand in a way that keeps you downwind of food sources and out of eyesight. In the evenings, try to have a easy access route that you can get to without walking the edge of any nearby fields. If you have to  hunt a field edge, at least try busting the deer out of there before you climb down and say “Hey, I’m a human! Been sitting here all night!”. One option is to have a buddy drive a truck or four wheeler near the field to clear it after dark, so that you can then sneak out with them gone.

Hunt The Same Stand Over and Over Again: You found a good spot, right? And I’m assuming you’d want to be there as often as possible, because it’s so good, correct? Well unfortunately this line of thinking is popular, but as they say, too much of a good thing isn’t very good. I’m very guilty of doing this in the past, as I’d sometimes get stuck on a certain area or spot. But you really need to space out your hunts in certain stands. The most succesful sits in a given stand are almost always within the first three. After that, you’ve left enough scent and caused enough commotion that any nearby mature buck is probably on to you. Plan as many different stand locations as possible, and rotate so that you don’t over hunt one spot too early and too often.

Don’t Worry About The Wind Because Of Your Carbon Clothing Or Scent Eliminators: A popular hunting clothing company once used a slogan of “Forget the wind, just hunt” to promote their clothes and boy did that backfire. Not only is that a bunch of bull, but they also got sued. Unfortunately the real travesty was the fact that lots of hunters believed it. And if you’d like to blow your chances on Mr Mossy Horns this fall, go ahead and do the same. But if you’re like me, and you’d rather eat venison than a tag, I’d recommend you keep wind top of mind. I use every scent eliminating tool in the book, but wind is still a key factor. No matter how much scent you eliminate, it can never takes care of 100% and even that little itty bit of human scent blowing down the draw can ruin your season. So practice all the scent control you can, but at the end of the day, make sure you’re playing the wind right too.

So please, if you’re looking to let your bucks grow another year older, follow these four tips to the “T”. I don’t think I’ve ever been more confident with a recommendation, so if you’d like to ruin your season, this is the recipe for success.

But if not. If you’d rather follow a few drops of blood on a frosty November morning with a tall tined rack at the end of the trail, I’d say you ought to avoid these four mistakes like the plague!

Today while perusing the local grocery store, I made my weekly pilgrimage to the magazine rack. I’m always on the prowl for the newest issue of Deer & Deer Hunting, North American Whitetail or one of the other great hunting publications that grace the shelves. Well I came upon an interesting article on hunting early season whitetails by Bill Winke in Petersen’s Bowhunting (if my memory serves me correctly). And in this article, Bill made an interesting point that I wanted to share with you. Here’s what he said, in regards to how he uses his trailcams in the early season.

“You need to know what bucks are nocturnal, which ones are mostly nocturnal and which ones often travel by day. Obviously, the daytime travelers are the ones we want to see. Don’t be duped into thinking you can hunt an area where a strictly nocturnal buck is living and somehow he will move during daylight just to oblige you. I have fallen for that temptation too many times. I won’t let it happen again. All I did in those cases was needlessly over-hunt the buck’s core area at a time when he was not vulnerable. The risk of educating him was much higher than the possible reward of shooting him.

So like I said. Very interesting thought, and one that I hadn’t really considered myself. I think it makes plenty of sense, but it also makes me ask a few questions as well. For instance, if I only get trailcam pics of a buck at night, could this possibly be more because of my camera placement and not really his tendency of moving in day or night? The average Joe probably can only afford to put out a few cameras on a property, so does this limit your ability to make a quality judgement of whether this buck is nocturnal or not? I definitely think Bill brings up a good point, but I imagine you need to take it with a grain of salt and not make a rash judgement call on a buck’s nocturnalness or not, based on one trailcam pic or location. But that being said, I’m definitely going to keep this in mind come October.

What are your guys’ thoughts on this? Do you think you should wait to move in on a buck until he shows daytime movement on trailcam? Or are you missing out on a chance to fill your tag by waiting?

Todd Pringnitz of White Knuckle Productions shared with us his answer this past weekend and luckily we had the video camera to capture it. I honestly believe that playing the wind in this fashion is one of the single most important strategies to understand when taking the plunge into chasing mature whitetails. Be sure to check out Todd’s tips and if you leverage this strategy this fall, I can promise you’ll begin seeing results. Here at Wired To Hunt we are all about trying to help you become better deer hunters, and the strategies discussed in this video will do just that. Don’t miss this.

Do you have any more tips or insights into hunting bucks with the wind in their favor? Please share it with us in the comments! Have questions about this strategy? Leave those in the comments too and Todd, me or another member of the Nation will help you out!

I’m already counting down the days til next season and my mind is swimming with new ideas, changes in my strategies and big expectations. But the truth of it is, we’ve all got a long time to wait til we get another chance to hunt whitetails! But as many of us know, the season isn’t really over, it’s just beginning. So if you’re starting to get that cabin fever, try one of the activities below to get out of the house and get your 2011 season started on the right foot!

1. Get out to your hunting land and scout. Now is one of the absolute best times to scout because you can see tracks and beds easily in the snow, you can hike into those sanctuaries and bedding areas and you can still easily see much of last year’s rut sign. Explore your hunting areas, takes notes and use this data next year to better understand your deer herd.

2. Bundle up and shoot your bow or gun. It’s always a good idea to practice with your bow in hunting conditions and now is a great time to practice for next fall/winter in your hunting clothes. A little physical activity and target practice will do your mind and body good.

3. Start shed hunting. Most bucks shed their antlers between the end of January and March, so get outside and start hiking. Search popular late season food sources and then slowly work trails back to their bedding areas. Take an extra look in areas like fence or creek crossings, lone evergreens and south facing slopes.

4. Go to a deer hunting convention. Show season is kicking off across the country and it marks an exciting time of year for many of us. Google “deer hunting convention Michigan” for example, and get information on the show nearest you. These conventions are a great place to meet new hunting friends, see the newest gear, book trips and get expert hunting advice.

5. Join an archery league. This won’t get you outside, but it will get you out of the house. Joining a winter archery league is a great way to continue your practice, while also making you improve your high pressure shooting!

6. Go coyote hunting! A fun reason to go outdoors, these winter months can be great for calling in coyotes and this is a great opportunity to take out a few predators and help out your upcoming fawn crop.

7. Do some chores for your significant other! After three months or more of non-stop hunting, this might be a good time to make up for lost time and earn some brownie points with your lady (or man, parents, etc)!

Have any other suggested tips for dealing with cabin fever? Share them in the comments!

1. Break A Property Down: Trying to hunt for the first time on a 1,000 + acre farm can be a daunting task and it’s easy to just float around from spot to spot. It wasn’t til day three that we really narrowed down our focus to one section of the farm, figured out how the deer were moving there and put a game plan into action. Not surprisingly, the last three days were our best. We ended up seeing a shooter buck on each of our last four sits.
2. Rethink the Wind: Most would say that you should always hunt with the wind in your favor, but you also need to consider how deer move to put the wind in their favor. A mature buck almost always likes to move with the wind in his face, so keep this in mind when trying to determine how a buck might move and where he might be heading. Very often a buck will choose one food source or destination over another, purely because the wind will be blowing from his destination to him.
3. Hunt The Limiting Factor: When deciding on where to hunt, think about what deer need from the land, where these factors are located and which is the most limited. If food and water are abundant in most areas, but cover is not, you know that a majority of deer will congregate near the area of best cover. In our case, cover and water were present everywhere, but food was not! Almost all of the crop fields in the area surrounding our property were plowed under. But we found that the north end of the farm still had corn fields not plowed and this ended up being where the majority of the deer had been spending time.
4. You’ll Never Kill One on the Couch: I’ve always preached this, but it proved itself to be true again on this trip. We had two awful days of weather, that almost kept me in the cabin. Day one we had severe thunderstorms and a tornado warning, but we decided to head out anyway, and we ended up seeing nine deer. On day three we had 20 mph winds and pouring rain, but at the last minute I decided I had to be in the woods, and I ended up seeing three bucks.
5. No Such Thing as a Sure Thing: This is obvious, but it’s been a lesson engrained in me the hard way this year. I came into the 2010 season with sky high expectations, especially with out of state hunts planned in monster buck states like Illinois and Nebraska. I never imagined I would make it to December without a single buck on the ground. But here I am. So at this point all we can do is to keep on trucking and working hard. Hopefully by the end of the month, we’ll have something to show for it.

For the full recap of my hunt in Illinois, check out this post – “No Big Buck, But Came Back From Illinois With Plenty”

And for more information about Oak Tree Outfitters, visit their website here.

For those of you that aren’t familiar, Archery Talk is one of the most popular and highly visited bow hunting forums on all of the internet. There are thousands and thousands of hunters that hit this site every day to share their stories and ask new questions. With deer hunting season upon us, I thought we could all use a general refresher on some good deer hunting tips, so I posed a question to the masses on Archery Talk. I asked them for their #1 deer hunting tip. From that question we had 90 people share their best deer hunting advice and from that I was able to pick the Top 10 to share with the Wired To Hunt Nation. So read on for 10 great deer hunting tips that any hunter, new or expert, should keep in mind this season…

• Pick your battles, it’s better to hunt once with the correct wind than to hunt 10 times with the wind not in your favor. – Maximus
• Doesn’t matter how good your stand location is, if you can’t get in and out undetected. – FlinginCarbon
• Hunt 10-2 and during rain/snow. And remember,  the morning you want to sleep in, is the morning the biggest buck in the county walks by your stand. - Weegee
• Your best chance at taking a mature whitetail is the first time you hunt a location. – sgspencer
• In order to kill a deer you have to be hunting where deer are. Doesn’t matter the size of the deer, you have to be where they live.  - Jellio
• Look for areas to hunt which other people overlook or simply will not go. Some of my best stands are in places where people wouldn’t even think to look. If its big enough for a buck to lay down and feel secure, thats where one will be. – jlh42581
• Be determined-I’ll take will over skill anyday. – Timber Hawk
• Aim small, miss small. – scissorhands
• Early season find the FOOD, WATER, and COVER and you’ll find the deer. -mdnabors
• A Positive attitude and/or belief in yourself and your hunting abilities….even when the going gets tough…..is the best ally a hunter can have. – Split G3

To see the rest of the tips shared on Archery Talk, view the entire thread here.

Editor’s Note: I am absolutely thrilled to bring you our most recent guest post, from one of today’s leading whitetail deer hunting experts, Scott Bestul. Scott is an esteemed outdoor writer, being featured in publications such as Field & Stream, Deer & Deer Hunting and his own hunting books. More recently Scott has been the main writer for Field & Stream’s whitetail hunting blog, Whitetail 365, quite possibly the finest of its kind on the internet. Scott has also been a great help to me personally as I’ve been working to put Wired To Hunt together, he has offered his insight and advice from the very beginning of W2H, so once again thanks to Scott! Enjoy Scott’s great post and be sure to check out his blog, Whitetail 365.

Common Threads

By Scott Bestul

There are perks in every job, and one of the bennie’s of my career as an outdoor writer is this; I get to meet a lot of very good deer hunters. I’ve been a deer geek for as long as I can remember, so gabbing with other whitetail nuts is a true labor of love. I listen to their tales of success (and failure) and write their stories for a magazine or my own blog. I learn a lot in the process, not only about how to hunt deer, but how to do it right, both tactically and ethically.

With that in mind, here are some common traits of the successful deer hunters I’ve met in my 20 years of writing about them.

* They learn from mistakes: Even experts get beat by deer most of the time. Some of those failures can be blamed on bad luck. Many snafu’s occur just because deer are so good at survival. But a fair portion of botched encounters are just flat-out failures on our part. Good deer hunters recognize when they screw up, and they find ways to correct their mistakes.

* They are students of deer: Anyone who kills big deer consistently is not a casual hunter. He (or she) is someone who studies whitetails year-round, looking for reasons that explain why deer do what they do. Most important, these people recognize that this is a school from which there is no graduation ceremony.

* They burn boot leather: Here’s deer hunting’s Big Lie: Most whitetails are killed from stands or blinds. In reality, only the shot is made from there. The deer was actually killed by the person willing to put in the miles of scouting required to know why the stand has to be placed Right Here…rather than in any one of dozens of possible locations.

* They respect the animal: Of course you are right and justified to feel proud when you kill a nice buck, especially if it’s an animal you have targeted. But humility and reverence should be part of the package, too. I’ve met very few true experts who were braggarts.

* They can shoot: Accuracy with a bow or gun is a highly relative term. Sure, punching the bull at 300 yards on the target range is impressive…But can you make a lethal hit on a monster deer standing 30 yards off when every major muscle group in your body is turning to Jell-O? Learning to shoot well under high-pressure field situations is tough stuff, but good deer hunters learn how.

* They share: I used to get pretty intimidated by really good deer hunters. I figured they weren’t going to share any of their knowledge with a “little guy” like me. But over the years—and almost to a man—I’ve found them to be just the opposite. If you ask them questions, they’ll tell you what they know, or at least what they’ve observed. Rather than hoard their information, they want to discuss their experience. Humble to a fault, these guys almost seem to need to check out their observations. I’ll never forget talking to a local guru a couple years back. Five minutes into our conversation he turned to me and said “Here’s something I think this buck is doing. Does that make sense to you?” It seems ironic to me, but virtually every hard-core deer guy I’ve talked to or interviewed has been an open book of knowledge and experience that I’ve learned from.

* They never quit looking for ground: Another interesting fact; only about 20% of the really good deer hunters I know own property. Some hunt on a permission-basis. Some hunt public ground. Others lease a small chunk of property. But regardless of their situation, they never rest in the search for good deer hunting.

For more from Scott Bestul, check out Whitetail 365.

1. Try not to hunt right on top of a food source. This is a good idea for several reasons. First, the big bucks typically won’t head into a field until the very end of shooting light or even after dark. If you’re right on the field, you’ll have very few chances at one of these deer. To catch these deer earlier, set your stand back 40-100 yards off the food, in a staging area. This will allow you to intercept these deer on their way to the food and with light and time to spare. This also will help you because you will be able to sneak out of your stand after dark without spooking the deer that are now in the field.

2. If you do have to hunt right on a food source, take every precaution not to spook deer off of it. If you do have a handy way of sneaking out without alarming deer, thats great. But in most circumstances that’s not going to be an available option, so you need to provide a distraction for the deer while you leave your stand. This can be a car or four wheeler coming through to pick you up, or even another hunter creating a brief distraction on the other end of the field. As long as the deer aren’t keyed into your location, you can at least preserve the quality of that stand.

What would be your one game changing tip?