In part one of what will be a series of three articles, I will tell you about the plans I made during and after the 2007-08 hunting season and how I applied them to set up what I call “situations” for the 2008-09 hunting season. Part two of this series will cover the plans made during the 2008-09 season and what I plan to accomplish in 2009. Part three will show the success or failure of the plans talked about in part two after the 2009-10 season is finished.

Going into this venture I expect to have more failures than successes, however I only need one success to have a great season. This is something I have done for a couple of years now. I’ve had some success with it while some plans just didn’t work. This is how I do it: I take the knowledge gained from one season’s deer sightings combined with what I have learned overall about that area to set up a “situation” for the following season. By this I mean that I manipulate the conditions around my stands so that when a deer shows up, he’ll have a good bit of predictability of what he will do. In some cases I will use trail cameras to determine the right time to hunt.

I understand each property is different and these situations may not work for every one, but they do have merit and may be of some help in getting your deer. I hunt private land, so much of what I do is not applicable to public land.

Setup #1:

The "T-Plot" is one of the author's most productive stands. It was at this location where he harvested a 141" 12 point during the 2007-2008 season.

In the 2008-09 deer season, I set up certain stands to take a doe and others were set up to favor getting a buck. One situation was on the T-Plot, where I had killed a 12 point during the 2007 season. I hunted the north side of the food plot in 2007. What I saw then was that the does came from any direction, but the bucks entered the plot either from the south end or the northwest corner. However, they would exit almost every time from the west side of the plot. That year I did not see many deer on that plot, but the bucks would show up now and then during shooting hours. The 2007 stand was well hidden in a good water oak tree that held it’s foliage until the end of December. There was one big problem though; the stand faced south and the sun was in my face all afternoon. It made for a very uncomfortable hunt.

There were only a few trees available on the plot to choose from and the one on the west side of the plot near the bucks’ exit is a red oak. These trees lose their leaves in late November, so if I moved the stand there I had to take my deer early. The red oak had good foliage at the correct height of 20 feet so the stand and direction of shot would work.

The next step was how to get the buck when he entered the plot to come to my stand prior to the loss of shooting light. I have to mention here that my eye sight is not the best late in the evening and shooting light ends much earlier for me than the average hunter. Bucks enter plots in my area either very early in the afternoon or at last light. I had to make them head my way as soon as they entered the plot.