8 Mistakes I’ve Made Bowhunting for Deer
1) Waking up late or not at all
One of my favorite hunting expressions is “you can’t kill ‘em from bed”. I can’t tell you how many morning hunts I’ve skipped because I stayed up too late nor how many different excuses I’ve invented for rolling over and going back to bed when the alarm clock went off. I can assure you both numbers are embarrassingly high. The problem isn’t motivation: its lack of discipline and the fact that no matter how hard I try, I suck at being a morning person. That’s too bad because most deer and ducks are morning persons. I’ve learned that if you want to take your chances of success from 0% to a much higher number, simply make it to the woods. Showing up late beats not showing up every time. But if you really want to start enjoying more success in your outdoor pursuits, do whatever it takes to get to the woods AND GET SET UP long before the animals start moving.
2) Hunting good spots too early, too often
Since I haven’t been seriously bow hunting very long (less than 2 years), I’m happy to say this is a new problem and one that I welcomed. Last year, without a clue what I was doing, I didn’t have any good spots to hunt, much less to hunt early and often. After reading and studying and asking questions and spending a lot more time in the woods, it wasn’t until the start of this season that I began to locate huntable spots on public land where I could reliably see deer. Once I found a few of those spots, I hunted them way too often, too early in the season. I’m not opposed to hunting good spots early on, but if you haven’t patterned the deer well and are just showing up frequently or at random times, you’re just as likely to run deer out of the area with your scent and presence than you are to “happen” across a shooter deer. Doubly so if you’re nowhere near the rut. Big bucks can be killed at any time, but they tend to be more diurnal (active during the day) in the time leading up to and during the rut.
3) Using too little or ineffective concealment
I’m guilty of both. I like to hunt from the ground, but doing so with a longbow presents its own unique set of challenges. The bow’s size requires more space to shoot and its lack of mechanical advantage or let-off requires me to wait to draw until no more than two seconds prior to taking a shot. Many times this year I sat in makeshift blinds out of brush that were either so thick they lacked adequate shooting space and lanes or were so sparse that I was busted by deer getting in position to shoot. I’ve found that elevated tree stands, particularly those 20’ or more off the ground, provide a number of benefits including highly effective concealment and scent detection minimization. When your equipment allows, pop-up tent blinds are very mobile, easy to set-up and take-down alternatives to elevated tree stands that, when thoughtfully placed in relation to the wind, can also help with scent control.
4) Being out of position to take the shot
This is another problem that comes wrapped with a silver lining. If you’re out of position to take the shot, at least a shooting opportunity presented itself. That means that you selected the right place to hunt, were hunting it at the right time, and the winds and gods were in your favor such that a deer came within shooting distance but you couldn’t capitalize on it. I’ve been caught out of position by deer taking trails behind, but very close to me,
limbs I could have cut down, not having a plan to turn 180 degrees on my elevated tree stand, the list goes on. Bag more deer by hunting from a shooting position. Keep your arrow nocked and hold your bow with your shooting grip with the arrow pointing in the direction you expect to see deer. From there, ensure you can quietly and with minimal movement shift to various other shooting windows. These are things you can only practice while you are hunting where you are going to hunt.
5) Practicing the wrong way
I practiced diligently essentially all summer, shooting 50-200 arrows per day (5,000-10,000 over the summer) from a variety of distances, angles and elevations to the target. I practiced shooting sitting down, kneeling, and even left handed. And I practiced to the point where I was good and profiecient at those shots. But when hunting season rolled around, and multiple early season opportunites presented themselves, I shot over my target five separate times. The reason? I hadn’t practiced the specific way I would be hunting. I hunted from an elevated hang-on stand with fold down seat. In other words I hunted high up sitting down. In my head, I accounted for these conditions by practicing both high up (I would stand on hills or walls and shoot down at the target) and sitting down (I would sit on my bottom, on various types of stools and chairs) but I didn’t practice high enough up and more importantly I didn’t practice at tree stand height while sitting down at very close distances (the shots I described were all instances of me setting up directly above heavily travelled bedding to feeding lanes and each time I missed I was 15-25 feet high sitting down shooting at distances of 10 yards or less). I’m convinced I could have practiced 80% less (and freed up a hundred hours to fish) if I had just practiced the shots I later learned I would encounter, very high up, shooting a steep angle down, at very close horizontal distances.
6) Relying on weather and apps to determine the wind
Atmospheric winds (large scale movements of air driven by the thermodynamics of the sun) correlate with surface winds (winds observed at a particular place at a particular time) but that correlation is not always perfect nor even positive. Put simply, just because a warm front is moving in from the south and the prevailing wind at a spot just ahead of that front is forecasted or listed as having observed southerly winds doesn’t mean that wind is blowing from the south at that location. I have on more than one occasion planned a hunt, hunting site, or path to hunting site based on what my iPhone said the wind was doing and was going to do for a particular period of time and place only to go to that place and have the wind do the exact opposite. Surface features, pop up storms, and a variety of other factors impact the current and forecasted “weather” for a particular city versus a particular tree in a valley opposite a lake where you are hunting. Winds can and do shift sometimes for no apparent reason. The important thing to remember is to try and plan for it, and when you’re there, always know the direction of the wind. Adjust how you get to stand, set up, even draw your bow accordingly. A fancy tool as simple as a string and feather can be installed on any bow to provide instant and accurate current wind direction readings.
7) Hunting old sign
“Sign” refers to indication an animal has been in an area (tracks, scat, rubs, trails, bent grass such as in bedding areas are all examples of “deer sign”). Determining the difference between a rub from last season versus last week is easy. But what about the difference between a 12 hour old rub and a 12 day old rub. I’m fortunate enough to be able to observe deer in my backyard and I walk these woods almost daily. Many times this season I would observe a rub the day it was made (a benefit of sometimes observantly walking a very small section of woods in the morning and again that same evening). Seeing these “fresh rubs” turn in to “old sign” was very a enlightening experience. The first several days after a buck makes a rub or scrape, it maintains a distinctive “freshness” to it. Soil from a scrape is loose, has a fresh earth scent, and antler and hoof marks are visible and distinct. On runs, the bark shavings’ color and consistency still closely match the undisturbed bark from the same part of the tree. Feces deposited at the site appear shiny and have a slight odor to them, and the presence of urine is noticeable. As I returned to these signs, I noticed the decay in freshness stalled. It became hard to tell if sign was from last week or last month. It was clearly from this season, but the older sign became, the more difficult it became to determine how old it was. It simply was “not fresh”. Over the course of the season, especially pre-rut and on, you should be able to begin to identify signs at various stages of freshness and how it looks as progresses in age. Use this knowledge and skillset to maximize your time afield by hunting the freshest sign possible.
8) Planning the hunt but not hunting the plan
“Plan the hunt and hunt the plan” is just one of a hundred sage nuggets of hunting wisdom my dad has fed me over the years. Despite it being proven to be a good idea over and over again, I still allow myself to deviate from a well thought out hunting plan or worse, go to the woods without one from time to time. If you don’t have a plan, if you haven’t surveyed maps and looked online and communicated this to someone, you aren’t just being dumb, you’re being dangerous. Let someone know where you’re going and when you expect to be back, just in case. If you have put the time in to crafting a plan, follow it. Odds are, unless some unforeseen and significant change in conditions occurred between you creating the plan and executing, you’ll be better off sticking to a plan than winging it the day of.