Metro Public Land Buck Year 2

I was lucky/good enough to get in tight on another mature metro public land buck this weekend to close the deal, and think I have a pretty good system down that I thought I’d share. I have 2 little boys so sitting in the woods for days on end is just not feasible for me right now. However, I have been attempting to get into a little better shape, and have done so walking public WMA units close to home, additionally our route to daycare takes us by a lot of public land during prime movement times as well. So my first point is similar to fishing, go where they are! Spend more time scouting and looking for bedding, food and water sources than you do in stand. You need to get into their “home” and an ideal looking _____(ridge, funnel etc.) area on a map doesn’t tell you that, boots on the ground and looking for sign does. I have friends who sit the same stands or areas over and over without seeing anything or only does/yearlings/fawns, let alone a mature buck, that’s a great way to relax in the woods and maybe see a stray buck randomly, but that is not a recipe for success imo. Finding their home area is step one, just like fishing where the fish are is step one.

Once you locate a target buck’s home, either by seeing the deer or seeing sufficient sign, make a game plan with one thing in mind, disturbing it’s home as little as possible. This means playing the wind (#1 most important imo), and getting into it’s home without blowing everything out. Things I do to try and minimize my impact is hunting from the ground, getting in super early (45 minutes to an hour before shooting hours), minimize using your headlight, stepping down the area where you are standing so you can move as close to silently as possible, keeping some cover around me, but also hunting from an area where I can shoot/see out a ways. No sense getting into it’s bedroom, only to not be able to take a shot, so finding an opening near/in it’s home is important. Finally once I’m settled in and confident I don’t have anything on top of me in the dark, I will scrape the ground w/ my boots and hit the grunt call a few times right as first light, nothing ticks a mature buck off more than another buck having the audacity to come into his home and try and establish himself. Get ready as the buck’s home you are in will be over VERY quickly, so I generally will do this first once it’s legal shooting hours and then space it out a half an hour or so in between.

Things I don’t find matter much at all, all the Scent Free 3000 stuff, you stink, you will always stink, if you want to stink like you plus some expensive scent free stuff, go ahead but the deer treat it all the same. My wife washed my sweatshirt and pants in the pics with dryer sheets the day before. And this buck was between 10-40 yards for 15 minutes before I got a shot on him, but he was never downwind, and it was a mild wind Saturday morning (5-7 mph, maybe). Camo systems, these are all the rage now, and I’m sure they are very comfortable and quality materials etc. but again the deer don’t care. This faded Gander hoodie was $20 about 15 years ago and has killed pretty much every deer I’ve shot with a bow. Rattling is another thing that works well in the right situation, but I wouldn’t use if I were heading into what I thought was a bucks home. In my experience usually smaller bucks respond best, and you run the risk of giving yourself up by rattling in their home.

Hopefully some of you gained something from this write up, let me know if you have any questions and good luck hunting!

Let’s try this again

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nice deer!!!👍

nice job Kory and great write up

Really shows that nice bucks can and do get harvested on public land near a metro area with a bit of scouting and persistence.

Nice deer!
Sounds like you took a chapter right from the “the Hunting Public” boys down in Iowa. very cool way to hunt. For sure takes some breaking of old habits on style but opens up a ton of new opportunity on ground that is often overlooked.

BigWerm, the buck whisperer.

the_hat wrote:

Nice deer!
Sounds like you took a chapter right from the “the Hunting Public” boys down in Iowa. very cool way to hunt. For sure takes some breaking of old habits on style but opens up a ton of new opportunity on ground that is often overlooked.

100% The Hunting Public has totally changed my approach, and in some ways made me much more aggressive, and realize how close you can get as long as you have a decent cover wind and decent way to approach the area.

Page 6 of last years “Live from the Tree” post has my post on the 8 pointer I got last year on a different piece of public land.

http://www.in-depthoutdoors.com/community/forums/topic/2020-live-from-the-tree/page/6/

Nice work buddy!

Great buck werm and write up. I do have one question on this though to help understand a little better. Are you figuring this out and sitting this area over and over again? Or more finding the hot sign and setting up as a one and done kind of deal? What sign did you find that told you hes in this area in daylight?

I was just gonna ask if it was the same spot as last year but you just answered that question.

Youbetcha wrote:

Are you figuring this out and sitting this area over and over again? Or more finding the hot sign and setting up as a one and done kind of deal? What sign did you find that told you hes in this area in daylight?

Both of these bucks were one and done, and I waited for the right wind to get in on them. If I hadn’t been able to close the deal, I would sit the area again, wind dependent, since I am doing my best to get in and out without much impact on his territory. There is a line somewhere that you are oversaturating an area, and that is too dependent on each situations scenario to draw a definitive line at X number of sits. In both cases the buck was spotted up and running during the daylight in the days prior, which obviously helps a ton, but if I found an active rub line and bedding areas I’d approach it the same. Jeremy tipped me off on the general vicinity of last years buck, and I did my best to triangulate it off of that info, OnX and my familiarity with the area from hiking it in the weeks and months prior. This years buck I actually saw running back into the public land while bringing my boys to daycare on Wednesday, and shot it Saturday. I actually didn’t think I was too close to where he’d be since the wind direction had me setting up about a half mile from where I saw him. My plan was to get some more intel if I didn’t see him that morning, and slowly work my way more toward where I had seen him.

Besides The Hunting Public, the other thing that taught me a lot was a big 9 pointer I got during shotgun season a few years ago. In that case we were hunting 80 acres of private land by Wabasha, and weren’t seeing much for deer. I spent an afternoon hiking the bluffs until I found an active rub line at the top of a bluff, and sat it from the ground the whole next day and he came thru early afternoon. The main lessons again being to hunt where you know they are, and to get into the area with as little impact as possible.

Awesome job Werm and lots of great insight in your post.
I was targeting what I believed to be a big buck last rifle season on public land. Never laid eyes on him, but after following his scrape and rub line and seeing about a dozen active scrapes that were all larger than the hood of my truck and some of the trees he rubbed up were over a foot across I figured he had to be big.
Never saw a deer during the time I sat there. My buddy said I probably had my truck parked in a bad place because they believe he crossed the road near where I parked. I could never see a trail there, but there is a small lake over there an no one hunts over there. I need to do more exploring but I am not the best at determining what the sign is telling my ie trails, etc.
I was walking an area with my son over the early youth rifle season and we found an area with tremendous sign. It was clearcut probably 15 years ago and is mostly grassy with now pockets of 7 foot tall buck brush. There are trails zig zagging all over it and intersecting everywhere. I am unsure as to WHEN the deer would be using this area. Is this a bedding area? Feeding area? Or travel corridor? I didnt see beds that I could tell, but there were trails absolutely everywhere. I did see two does come out of it around 10 AM and cross the road. We were at a disadvantage because we were sitting on the ground and it makes for difficult sight lines with the brush. Cannot see real far. Its very flat land.

Awesome stuff BigWerm! Beast Style! I’ve been doing the same the last few years in the big woods up here. I can no longer just pop up a stand in a random “good looking spot” and sit and wait. I need to find where the deer are before I hunt them. Problem up here is they are very few and far between and I’ve been struggling this season. Need some snow to help narrow my search! GOt one more bow hunt planned tomorrow before the gun season begins. Hope to stick one, but if not I’ll be chasing them hard with the boom stick.

@CaptainMusky it’s tough to say based off of your description, and as a disclaimer I’m far from The Beast Dan Infalt or other pro’s that I’ve learned from. In general though you want to have as little impact on their heavy use area as possible, so that can mean parking a ways away, hunting the side most favorable based off the wind, and just general surveillance from a distance if possible. But if you have a heavy line of active scrapes/rubs, there is at least one buck working it over, and it will be back so pick your spots carefully and be patient and ready.

@Derangedfishinguy I’ve learned a lot from the Beast too! And I agree, I have never been very patient to sit in a stand and wait, so this style of hunting is VASTLY preferable for me. Also, you bring up a great point about snow, for one it is a blessing when it happens during the season. But also I do a ton of scouting in the winter offseason when it’s a lot easier to read the sign, and I’m also not worried about busting a buck out of it’s home since I won’t be back to hunt for months. It’s my opinion that these buck homes are pretty dependable year to year, so some of the best intel can be collected during the easiest time to get it.

Congrats again Bigwerm! Very nice job.

Nice deer, Kor.

Congrats!!
That is an excellent buck and an excellent write up. Your system seems to be perfect for your situation. WTG.

Congrats Werm and thanks for passing on the info, very good reads. It does sound very Hunting Public-esque.

Congrats!
DT

Thanks, I still consider any deer a trophy, especially with a bow (or crossbow). However, it is very satisfying when a plan comes together. I realize I had thousands of failures and hours spent learning to get to this point, and will have many more in the future. I don’t want to come off as a self anointed expert (because I’m definitely not) or anything egotistical, but really just wanted to share for others to learn and hopefully me to learn a little in the process as well. I hunted most of my life without shooting a mature buck hunting bambi lands, and realize there will very likely be stretches like that again in the future. Heck even the Hunting Public guys are on the struggle bus this year, but failure is the best way to learn imo.

BigWerm wrote:

but failure is the best way to learn imo.

This is the absolute truth. You should learn more by mistakes or failures than by successes. Now that you have had success you definitely realize what you may have done wrong in the past. Sometimes luck comes into play, but people who consistently shoot big deer are not lucky.
My buddy has hunted the same area for 35 years and has some absolute studs to show for it. You have to hunt where they are in order for that to happen. My son says he is lucky. I told him you arent lucky if you continue to shoot big bucks. It may have been luck that he shot the big 12 when my son and I were with him because he was just strolling around and decided to stand next to a tree and he popped out. You have to put yourself in the best position to succeed.

BigWerm, were you in my back yard again? Great buck and congrats.

JoJo wrote:

BigWerm, were you in my back yard again? Great buck and congrats.

Haha one of my friends/clients asked the same thing, and NO this deer was not taken by my work in EP nor by my house in Carver. And to quote Forest Gump, that’s all I really have to say about that.