Monday, March 15, 2010

Chasin' Trail



My buddy Ted and I took advantage of a nice day last week to make a quick run to southern Illinois for some post-season scouting around a large agricultural field that he leases. We knew the deer were hammering the field right now and had been for several months.  A major ice storm in early 2009 had stripped off most of the larger tree limbs, completely wiping out last season's entire mast crop. Anticipating more of the same next season, we wanted to follow the major deer trails back into the woods looking for good ambush sites for next year.

As you can see from the photo above (click on it to get a closer view), we weren't disappointed by the amount of deer activity. The area in that photo shows just one of at least a dozen heavily used trails entering the field. We located a couple promising looking stand locations and shot some video showing how we did the scouting and how we marked the spots we found using the field navigation system that I talked about in the videos of this article where I reviewed the GPS and topo mapping system that I use.

We had to leave before dark, but we were able to stay around long enough to get some video of about forty deer literally piling into the field along the trails we had just scouted.  Maybe we're on to something...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I really enjoyed the video aspect of this post and it's nice to see the deer enjoying the fact that spring has sprung!

I also think that you've found yourself a good spot there and am looking forward to the play by play account of how you dropped a big ol' buck from that very tree. Happy hunting!

Pursuit Hunter said...

The deer weren't the only ones enjoying the fine springlike day. I could have included some footage of Ted and me running around too, but that wouldn't have been a pretty sight.

plinker22 said...

Great video. It is good to see how others scout. Please post more of this style video.