You don’t necessarily need a mentor to become a better hunter. Level yourself up by building the following seven skills into your hunt. Take advantage of specific online resources to hone these essentials.
Become a better hunter through your firearm
Deer hunting is a miserable experience if you miss or wound an animal that escapes. Successful shot and recovery, however, is a worthy goal, and provided a significant quantity of lean, healthy protein. So do the work to sight in your tool. Be absolutely confident that it will hit your point of aim before you go hunting. Rifles, shotguns, and bows are never bang-on accurate out-of-the-box. They have to be dialled in for you in particular — and the same goes for any optics mounted on them.
Get tips for setting up your rifle here.
Figure out what optics you need and how to use them here.
Practise mounting your firearm, pushing off the safety, and dry firing it so that you know automatically what to do when you have a buck in front of you. You don’t want to forget the safety or fumble for it. Practise finding a target in the scope or sights by focusing your vision hard on the target, keeping your head still, and bringing the scope or sights up to your eye. If you don’t move your head or eye the target will appear in the scope or near the sights. If you look away at the gun or anything else, you will have to search for the target again. Many a buck has figured out something’s not right and vanished while a hunter searched for it in the scope.
Centrefire ammunition is expensive, so practise shooting dry fire drills once you are sighted in. You can practise live fire shooting with a .22 rifle for a few dollars of ammo.
Practise how you will hunt as described here.
Learn deer anatomy
Sadly, many hunters head out before understanding where to put the sights on a deer, resulting in wounded deer walking around sporting arrows, or unrecovered deer spoiling the memory of a first hunt. Avoid these horrors. Learn where to put the sights on a deer from various angles ensuring a quick, humane kill, and when not to pull the trigger or fling an arrow at a deer.
The surest and most humane shot is a heart or double-lung shot, so learn where these organs are in the chest cavity and how to put your shot through them from broadside, quartering away, and quartering toward you. Learn also when shooting from above (as from a tree stand) to aim a little higher to put the shot through the centre of the chest. In the simplest terms, learn to aim through deer midway between top and bottom of the chest, at an exit point near the front leg on the other side of the deer. From that aim point you will have a four-inch margin of error in any direction and still make a lethal shot.
Learn to scout
You will never succeed by hunting where there are no bucks. So, spend time in the woods year-round, looking for buck sign. Look for traditional rubs, (old rubs on trees or poles that are used year after year by different bucks), community scrapes (large scrapes used by many different deer annually), new and old tracks together (meaning the area is used consistently), lots of rubs together (usually near a buck bedding area or doe feeding area), and a feeding area that does use in the month you will be hunting.
Start scouting in transition areas, like where crop fields meet forest or hardwoods meet evergreens or forest meets swamp, because bucks are edge creatures. If you find tracks or trails, follow them to learn deer routes and identify feeding and bedding areas. You want to find at least two of the aforementioned buck signs to be confident in an area. If you don’t find any buck sign, that means you need to look somewhere else.
For some ideas on where to look, go here.
Right after the season closes is the best time to scout. Deer will be in the same pattern as the open season when fresh sign is abundant. Just stay out of your planned hunting area a couple of weeks before the season so you don’t tip off a buck to your intentions. Set up tree stands and clear shooting lanes in August.
More tips on where to scout here.
Become scent and wind conscious
A whitetail buck is a little curious about noise, and goes on low alert. Seeing obscure movement bumps him up to medium alert. Catching a whiff of human scent triggers full alarm and rapid-escape mode. So, become scent-conscious if you want to see more deer. You might be able to ignore scent and harvest a buck close to human habitations where they expect human scent. Or, if you are lucky enough to hunt an area with more deer, there is a greater chance that an unlucky buck will appear upwind of you.
Remember, when you walk through the woods, you leave a wake of human scent spreading out like the waves behind a motorboat. Take advantage of the billion-dollar scent control industry to reduce your human scent and you will see more deer. You can’t eliminate your scent totally, but you can reduce it to the point that a deer has to come in range of your firearm to scent bust you, giving you more time to shoot. The more obsessive about scent control, the greater odds of success.
Obsessive scent control measures, however, can become burdensome and expensive and take the fun out of the hunt, so find a level of control that you can maintain. There are successful hunters that use no scent control products, but they have another obsession — wind consciousness. They take measure to never let their scent drift into the area they expect a buck to be.
More on wind-savvy scent control here.
Clothe yourself properly
To succeed in deer hunting you need to get out and stay out. The longer you can stay out, the greater the chance of seeing a buck. But you can’t stay out if you are not comfortable. So, dress for success by keeping these things in mind. Feet and hands get cold first, so spend the most on warm, waterproof boots and well-insulated gloves or mitts. Wear a moisture-wicking base layer of polyester if you will be generating your own heat by hiking or walking in to your stand. Your mid and outer layers will depend on how you hunt.
Are you a dogger, a tracker, or a sitter. The less you move, the more layering and insulation you will need. Your outer layer should be a soft fabric that moves silently through brush without scraping sounds. Scent-control technology in the outer layer is a worthy investment. Be aware that many camo patterns are designed to look cool on the rack to appeal to hunters with realistic images of leaves and branches printed on them. From a distance in the woods, however, they become a conspicuous dark blob. Your camo should have an open pattern of light and dark shapes that break up your human outline. They really look like nothing, because that is what you want to look like to a deer — nothing.
Your best camouflage, though, is simply staying still. If you can do that you don’t need to agonize over what camo pattern you need.
Go deeper into staying comfortable here.
Hunter orange is a legal requirement for safety in any big game firearm season.
You can get the scoop on that here.
Have realistic expectations
A steady diet of social media hunts create the perception that big bucks will pop up shortly after you climb into a tree stand. These videos compress days of scouting, travel, and long boring hours of waiting into a few seconds and dwell on the exciting seconds of the actual shot. They create the impression that hunting is all seeing and shooting game.
Be prepared for the reality that deer hunting is most often a grind, not a gimme.
We are all eager to have our first success but having an impatient, rush mentality is the surest way to delay that. Be patient and methodical in all aspects of the hunt, from getting dressed, to moving through the woods, to triggering the shot. Let patience and perseverance join hands to keep you in the woods and ensure success. Your time in the woods should be recharging and renewing, but not because you are doing nothing, because you are totally engaged and focused finding deer rather than daily life concerns.
Take it slowly but stay fully focussed as described here.
Learn how to handle and cook venison
When you handle and cook venison properly, you will look forward to every meal as much or more than the antlers. Venison is lean, organic free range, local, healthy protein and delicious table fare when properly prepared. I perform every step from pulling the trigger to flipping the steaks on the barbecue and there are never leftovers.
The basic steps are field dress as soon as possible to begin cooling the carcass, as seen here.
Keep it clean from debris and wipe out any contamination from the guts with a cup of bleach in a gallon of water and dry thoroughly with clean towels. Age the meat by hanging for 10 to 14 days at 1 to 4˚C. Proper aging makes even large bucks tender and enhances flavour as moisture leaves the meat. Don’t skip the aging if you want tender meat. Cut and wrap the meat yourself or take it a butcher.
Here’s some more info on butchering your own deer.
Most venison is ruined at the cooking stage by overcooking, which dries it out and makes it tough. Use a meat thermometer and remove steaks, chops, and roasts from heat as soon as they reach 135˚F internal temperature for moist, tender meat. Doing it yourself from forest to fork ensures that every step will be done right, providing meat you can serve with confidence.
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