Editor’s Note: Most big bucks stay in thick cover or hard-to-reach places during hunting season.  To have an opportunity to bag one of these trophies, create a place to hunt them. 

Make sure you have the landowner’s permission; then move 8 to 10 yards inside a thicket, and cut a trail 4-5 feet wide that will allow you to walk into the center of that cover and set-up a ground blind. Cut shooting lanes that spoke out from your ground-blind site. Now you not only have a place to hunt, you’ve created a path for big bucks to use.

A hunting friend of mine told me how he made a place to hunt the big bucks on his family farm.  “We had a high sage field between my family’s garden and the woods. The deer would get into the garden and eat the vegetables every summer. We often saw some really-nice bucks feeding there in the afternoons. However, the bucks always seemed to vanish each hunting season. I really wanted to take one of those big bucks with my bow.

“So, I set-up a tripod stand about 30-yards from the woodline and used a lawnmower to cut a path through the sage to the vegetable garden. The deer could get into the garden anyway, but I just made a nice, clean path for them to travel. I used the lawnmower because it had a very-narrow cutting radius, and I knew the deer wanted to feel like they were still in the thick cover of the sage while walking down the cleared path. This tactic worked perfectly for me. The first day of bow season, I climbed into my tripod stand at about 2 pm, and before dark, I bagged a buck with my bow that scored 142 2/8-points, a very-nice deer for my section of Alabama.”

To learn more about hunting deer, check out John E. Phillips’ book, available in Kindle, print and Audible versions, “How to Hunt Deer Up Close: With Bows, Rifles, Muzzleloaders and Crossbows” (http://amzn.to/11dJRu8).  

Tomorrow: Secrets #5 and #6 – Don’t Bet On Your Memory or Act Stupid and Secret # 7 – Change Times to Hunt Deer