Time improves treasured deer-hunting stand

Some might think it’s boring to hunt deer from the same stand year after year, but to me it’s utterly fascinating.

It helps that I have killed a lot of deer from that stand, but it’s interesting how the surrounding woods change every year and how deer respond to the changes.

Since 2014, the stand has stood in the middle of a 120acre stand of mature pine trees in northern Grant County. Mike Romine, Zack Smith and I moved it to its new spot after loggers thinned what had been a thicket so dense that it was suitable only for a pop-up blind. The thin transformed it to a park setting. It was awash in sunlight, and I could see for 150 yards in places.

Curiously, the loggers only partially thinned the stand. They left several strips of pines untouched, including one about 70 yards north of the stand. It was the thickest cover around, and that remained the primary travel conduit for deer. They most frequently entered the clearing from that one long tuft of dense pines.

I killed my first buck in the Thin in November 2014. I rattled him up from a dense thicket on the other side of a road using a pair of deer antlers. I saw him coming from a long way off and was ready for him when he stepped into the open.

The next summer, loggers thinned the last of the pines, leaving no dense cover in the entire parcel except beside the little stream that flows in a small ravine in front of my stand. Deer no longer traversed the Thin during most of the day. My cameras showed that they came at night, but during daylight hours they visited very early in the morning or very late in the evening. They always approached from the far end of the ravine where it meets another dense thicket, or from the far dense thicket itself.

Humans appreciate things differently than deer. If I had the time and equipment, I would have been happy to keep the area clean and free of bushes, shrubs, brush and vines. The park setting was pretty and was a very pleasant place to visit. I don’t have the time and equipment for that, however, and every year the understory in the thin grew a little thicker and a little taller. Deer still approached the clearing only from the far end of the ravine or from the far thicket, but I started seeing them more often during the late morning and middle of the day.

I also started seeing more deer. Several maternal groups visited, usually coming from different directions. They consisted of a doe and twin fawns, which might be a doe and button buck, or a doe with a young-of-the-year fawn and an older doe born the previous year. The groups arrived separately, fed together and departed separately.

As the cover got thicker, I started seeing more classic rutting activity. Bucks chased does in the increasingly protective cover of the Thin, often in broad daylight. In 2018 it became a place where I rarely saw bucks at a place where I expected to see at least one.

By 2019, the vegetation was out of control. With his tractor, Romine kept my 200yard firebreak mowed, and he mowed a trail to my stand. Otherwise the place was rapidly becoming a jungle. Vegetation virtually eliminated sight lines into the woods. I didn’t like the appearance as much, but there was no question that deer liked it better than ever. I killed four in less than a week, including two bucks. One was an ancient 3x1 4-point that we nicknamed Emeritus.

Now, the place is a hopeless mess. Walking through it is a death sentence for clothing, but deer love it. It’s a good bet to see them any direction you look.

Here’s something else. With the return of protective vegetation, deer again enter the clearing from their old approach about 70 yards from the stand. It appears to be a longstanding preferred route, but it has taken five years for deer to feel comfortable using it again. They step confidently into the clearing and stroll leisurely down the firebreak to the feeder while other deer come from the ravine, from the thicket at the end of the firebreak and from the edge of the thicket to the northwest.

My beloved Thin is nasty, mean and virtually inaccessible. Deer think it’s heaven.