How to Choose Good Stand Set Placement
This advice will help you find the best spots for your stands this hunting season based on bedding and wind direction.
In a previous article, I talked about having found a couple of spots that I believe will make excellent stand locations this season. For me there are a couple of things that I look for when choosing where I want to set up. These include being near bedding areas, good big buck sign around and thick cover. The biggest factor however is more of a gut and experience feeling and that is whether I think I have a good chance of killing a big deer.
I am a “weekend warrior” so I need to be absolutely certain that I am in the best spots that give me the best opportunities at harvest a mature deer. If I could, I’d hunt every day, but you know that thing called life gets in the way. When I first started out hunting I focused mostly on food, but after a couple of years I noticed that most of the mature bucks were not coming in until after shooting hours. Sure, I saw and killed bucks, but this was only due to the rut where anything can happen. After a few unsuccessful years I began to focus on getting into the thick stuff and key in on bedding areas.
My new strategy of hunting beds and bedding areas has resulted in more mature buck sightings during legal hunting hours. After watching a video that was posted on Wired to Hunt (above) from mature buck hunter Todd Pringnitz, founder of White Knuckle Productions, I realized the importance of hunting the wind. This taught me that my stand placements had to be adjusted if I wanted to catch a big buck on his feet and so far it as worked.
Hunting around bedding areas and using the wind and stand placement to my advantage really helps me focus on areas where bucks are going to be traveling. The map above shows how I use some of these features to my advantage. I use the funnel because it is a main meeting point for deer coming out of their bedding areas to head to where they feed. I put my stand , the red dot, right where I could catch the most action. A buck will travel on the orange routes on a south wind, so he can scent check all of the bedding areas without having to stop at each individual one.
The best place to find these types of areas is to first find the bedding areas, walk the area to find key travel routes and finally, use maps to help make sure your stand is in the best possible place.
What is the best advice that you can give hunters on killing big bucks in highly pressured areas? Let us know by emailing PJ@MorningMoss.com or by telling us on our Facebook Page. We’d love to hear from you.
