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Like many of you, I hope that more and more young people choose to hunt so that this wonderful lifestyle that we enjoy continues through the generations.
What I am concerned about is that many of the young people who are getting into hunting are not really learning how to hunt.
Hunting has changed.
When I was a kid hunter — and that is a dated reality — nobody I knew baited. We hunted.
Mostly we hunted for squirrels, because there were not many deer around. What we did not know at the time was that the technique of still-hunting for squirrels, that is slowly and quietly moving through the woods, would serve us well when the deer populations of the Appalachians exploded somewhere down the winding country roads of our hunting careers.
Baiting for deer has become very popular. Southern States ka-chings a lot of 100-pound bags of shelled corn starting about now. I buy a few myself.
I’ll be upfront with you. Baiting is not my favorite way to hunt deer, though I do some of it. If my days in treestands and ground blinds were restricted, perhaps I would become a bigger fan of baiting. My sense of accomplishment comes from intercepting and tagging a deer in such a natural situation that it never sees it coming. Sometimes I am successful at that. More times I am not.
You young hunters out there in readership land, go ahead and bait, but learn how to hunt too.
Learn how to feel the wind and use it to your advantage.
Learn how to choose clothing that won’t make any noise when you ease through the woods.
Practice taking a full hour to walk 100 yards through the forest.
Learn what a deer looks like when you can see only its ear, or part of its tail, or one leg or the horizontal line of its back.
Understand what deer do when the wind is blowing like crazy. Where do they bed? How can you slip up on them?
Practice off-hand shots of up to 100 yards with your deer rifle. When you are still-hunting and see a buck you often can’t move to a tree for a shooting rest.
Scout. Find game trails in the woodlands and discover how to set up to best get a shot when a buck walks down one of them.
You can’t find out about these things while sitting in a heated blind watching golden kernels on the forest floor and waiting for deer to hear your motorized feeder and come to it like Pavlov’s dog to a dinner bell.
Challenge yourself to take a deer, buck or doe, on its own terms on its home playing field. You will find that the deer move more naturally as they feed from one oak tree to the next. Are they alert? Sure. But not wired like a junky needing a fix the way a doe is when her fawns are feeding on shelled corn. Deer know the corn is not a natural food item.
I believe that big bucks are difficult to take over bait.
Big bucks are actually difficult to take over any food source destination. They most often arrive after dark.
The best way to whack-n-stack a wallhanger if you are baiting is to set up a treestand or groundblind some distance from the corn, but on the route you expect the buck to walk to get there. Otherwise you are probably going to see mostly skinheads and small bucks slurping up your cornfield buffet line.
If you have read my column on a regular basis, you know that I am not opposed to any legal hunting or fishing method, and baiting is legal in some situations.
Just saying, give the real hunting method a try. I am guessing that 20 or 30 or 40 years down the line, the bucks you remember the most are the ones that you killed as you pitted your hunting skills against their survival techniques in natural settings.
Contact Outdoor Editor Mike Sawyers at msawyers@times-news.com.
Michael A Sawyers - Outdoors
Learn how to hunt!!
- Michael A Sawyers - Outdoors
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