With no good target buck in any of my hunting areas, I resigned myself to taking out an older buck with poor antler genetics and allowing the younger bucks on my hunting properties to hopefully live another year and grow older and bigger. It is one of those tough decisions I have found myself facing more and more in the last several years as I have raised the bar in regards to the caliber of bucks I wish to harvest. Some seasons there just aren’t any bucks that qualify within my hunting areas. I am not about to sit out a season so I look for ways to improve the deer herd on the properties that I hunt. Often this means hunting an older buck that has demonstrated that his antlers will never be larger than “average”.

That is exactly the situation I found myself in back during the 2014 season. I knew of a handful of really good up-and-comer bucks including a pair of bucks that would have topped 170” but they were all at least a year away from being old enough for me to consider targeting them.

With two Illinois buck tags in my pocket, I made a management decision to hunt for a four-year-old 9-point buck that would maybe nudge 150” at best. His rack was identical to what it was the year before when the buck was a 3 year old and I just didn’t feel he would ever grow a rack much bigger than the one he now wore.

This buck spent a lot of time on a small property that I had permission to hunt and what really made me decide to target him was the fact that there was a better but younger buck on the farm that I had high hopes for. The younger buck was a 3 ½ year old that was well into the 160s, maybe even nudging 170”. My thinking was that as the rut heated up both bucks would likely not still be hanging together on this small property. I concluded that if I could kill the older buck, the younger one would have the place to himself and be more likely to spend more time on the property and hopefully survive the hunting season.

I waited for the perfect early November morning with overcast skies and a light northwesterly wind to slip in for my first hunt. As I quietly slipped into the stand in the pre-dawn darkness I felt really good about my chances of seeing my target buck. The stand was on the downwind edge of heavy bedding cover so any buck looking for does or planning to bed in the thicket for the day would likely cruise this edge of the cover. A fallen tree and a steep-banked creek pinched down the travel corridor I was covering to just a few feet. If a deer passed by, the odds were very good that it would pass through this narrow corridor.

Making the set-up even better was a food plot about 200 yards away where a local doe family group often fed. My thinking was that any bucks in the area would likely be around the food plot before daylight checking for hot does. When the bucks left the plot, wind direction and terrain would likely lead them right past my stand.

The sun was just starting to peak over the eastern horizon when the first buck of the morning walked past. The 2 ½ year old 8-pointer never knew I was secretly watching his every move from just a few yards away. Soon the sun was revealing the glistening frost of a calm November morning when deer movement is almost guaranteed. It was the kind of morning that we deer hunters live for but only get to experience a few times each season.

Movement down the trail again caught my attention and through the tree branches I could see that it was a nice buck. Now that the light was adequate for filming, I grabbed the video camera and recorded the awesome 3 ½ year old buck that I hoped would survive a couple of more years. I had numerous trail camera photos of this buck but this was the first time I had layed eyes on him that fall. For several minutes the video camera captured the bucks every move. With some luck I would one day use the footage to tell the story of this buck after slipping an arrow through him.

As the buck slipped into the cover I shut off the camera and looked back to see the buck I wanted to shoot quickly heading my way. As fast as I could, I put the camera back on the arm, focused it on the area I hoped the buck would stop for a shot, hit the “record” button, grabbed my bow, slipped the release onto the string and came to full draw. I literally did all of this within a few seconds and without any time to spare.

The buck stopped right behind a double-trunked tree but the slight opening between the trunks was right where I needed to send an arrow. I quickly picked a spot and sent an arrow on its way. BINGO! The buck crashed away into the heavy cover and I sat down to enjoy the moment. The hunt went off exactly as planned. 

This buck and the one I killed the following year were both killed the very first time I hunted for each of them. Admittedly, luck played a role but as the old saying goes, the harder I work, the luckier I get.

Over the past 47 hunting seasons I have learned to set the table for success and make my own luck. A big part of this is making each of my stand locations the very best that it can be to increase my odds of getting my target buck right where I want him.

I like to say that I turn “good stands” into “great stands”. The ways that I do this are many but it involves using both positive and negative influences to alter and predict deer travel patterns. When you can combine both a positive influence and a negative influence at the same stand site, the results can be dramatic. The buck I described shooting at the beginning of this article is a perfect example of how I used both negative and positive influences to put the buck right in my lap for a slam-dunk shot.

The positive influence on this hunt was the food plot. Even though I was not hunting close to the plot, the fact that it was there helped define the travel patterns of deer on the property. On that morning hunt I expected the deer to be coming from the plot and that is exactly what they were doing as they passed by my stand.

The negative influences on this hunt were the steep creek bank and the fallen tree. Both of these factors narrowed down the travel corridor and pushed the deer right in front of my stand.

Think of it this way, negatives repel and positives attract. An example is a hole in a fence where deer like to cross. The standing fence is a negative that deters or discourages deer travel. The opening in the fence is a positive that encourages deer travel at a specific location. This scenario is another perfect example of how combining both positives and negatives at the same stand site can turn a good stand into a great stand.

The list of negatives that influence deer travel is lengthy and many are simply natural terrain features such as bluffs, steep banks, bodies of water, etc. Negatives can also be man-made obstacles such as fences, roads or downed trees.

Positive influences are often related to food. It can be a food plot specifically planted for deer or just as easily be a farm field, oak grove or a random persimmon tree. Secure bedding cover is another positive influence that will dictate how deer traverse a property.

A good food plot system should make every stand on a property better no matter how far that stand is from the plot. Recently I was on a consulting job touring a property with the landowner. It became apparent that this clients whole approach to deer hunting was planting plots and sitting over them. There were numerous other good stand sites on the property which I flagged but I could tell the client wasn’t “buying in” to the degree I would have preferred. I had to come up with a good explanation to get this guy to change his way of thinking. Then it hit me.

I asked the landowner to help me with some math. He looked at me a bit puzzled as I started explaining. I noted that the 3 month archery season in his state was approximately 90 days long. If on average there was 12 hours of daylight during each of those 90 days, an entire hunting season consists of about 1080 daylight hours. I then asked him if he would agree with me that during the course of an entire hunting season an individual mature buck would probably spend less than 5 total daylight hours in a food plot. He agreed. I then made my point; a mature buck will spend less than 1% of all daylight hours in a food plot so why are you spending 100% of your hunting time there? … hmmm

Food plots are an important piece of the puzzle when it comes to whitetail land management but most hunters do not utilize them to their full potential. Again, they have the potential to be a positive influence on every stand on the property. If a mature buck spends 99% of his daylight hours in cover, that is where I am going to hunt him but just like the buck I described at the beginning of this article, a food plot can influence and alter deer travel even back in the cover.

Many good stand sites already have both positive and negative influences without any work on behalf of the hunter to create them. For example if deer are naturally drawn to an ag field but to get to it from their preferred bedding area they must pass through a narrow funnel created by terrain, there is already both a negative and positive influence to the deer travel pattern.

Even when a stand site already has both positive and negative influences occurring naturally, I still try to enhance the situation. For example, in the afore-mentioned scenario over-seeding a small section of the ag field with a brassica blend can further encourage deer to utilize that particular part of the field and concentrate their movements. Maybe dropping a tree in the natural funnel over a trail can push the deer just a bit closer to your stand.

Recently I knocked on a farmers door to request hunting permission. This old boy was overly friendly which resulted in a two hour conversation, which is a small price to pay for hunting permission. As the talk rolled on it became clear to me that this guy granted hunting permission to anyone that asked. Eventually the good-natured farmer started voicing concerns about the hunting situation on his land. People were coming and going at all hours of the day and night, many he didn’t even recognize. Then he said that he was going to have to do something about it but wasn’t yet sure just what to do.

When opportunity knocks this old veteran buck seizes it. I asked the farmer if anyone hunting his land ever offered to help him around the farm or brought him anything at Christmas time. He looked at me with bugged out eyes like I must be out of my mind. Then I asked him what I really wanted to know; would he ever consider leasing his land? To make a long story short I walked away from that meeting with a handshake sealing the deal and returned shortly with a check to finalize it.

As I walked the property I noticed tree stands everywhere which did not surprise me given the farmers description of what hunting seasons past had been like on his farm. The last thing I wanted was dozens of people tromping over the land I had just leased to “gather their stands” so the farmer told me I could take them all down and put them in his barn. When the other hunters showed up again he would give them their stands.

I set out one early spring day to gather in all of the tree stands I could find on this property. Many of the stands were in pretty good locations but soon it struck me that with just a little bit of effort, every stand location could have been made even better. Essentially all of these hunters were just “taking advantage of what was there” (in more ways than one) and did nothing at all to improve the stand sites (or their relationship with the landowner). I think this is a very common approach to stand site selection. Sometimes it even seems like deer hunters are hunting for a good tree as much as for a good buck and once they find that tree they do nothing to make the set-up any better than what it currently is.

I take a much different approach because I not only want to maximize the number of deer that I see while hunting, I also want those deer to be within easy shooting range. Every time I hang a stand I do everything I possibly can to make this happen. By combining positive influences that draw deer past my stand with negative influences that push them the same way, I often turn good stands into great stands. There is no reason why you can’t do the same.

Don Higgins is a whitetail consultant, editor of Whitetail Life magazine and host of the Chasing Giants podcast. To learn more visit his website www.higginsoutdoors.com