Editor’s Note: The first week of deer season in any state usually creates the highest amount of hunting pressure in the deer woods. Thanksgiving, the Christmas holidays and the last week of deer season also are times of the year when the numbers of deer hunters drastically increase – and don’t forget weekends. So, if you hunt at these times of year, longtime, avid deer hunter Terry Drury, who with his brother Mark Drury created Drury Outdoors, offers these suggestions. Drury often has to hunt high-pressured deer and through his experience knows the tactics for taking them.

If you plan to hunt mature bucks in areas where many other hunters hunt, consider these ingredients for a successful hunt.

• First, you must find the deer, know where they feed, pinpoint where they bed and understand where they hide from hunter pressure.
• Secondly, learn from, and scout the other hunters that you will compete with for the biggest buck on the property. Often, you’ll learn more about how to bag a trophy buck from watching the other hunters than you will from studying the deer themselves. If you know where the hunters hunt, and how they hunt, then you have a tremendous advantage over the other hunters because now you have the same information the deer have.
• Thirdly, once you’ve gained this knowledge, decide what the deer has to do to dodge hunter pressure. Then, you can determine how to hunt the buck, so he doesn’t feel any pressure from you. To take the biggest buck on any property, hunt him in a place and at a time when he’s never seen another hunter. If that deer ever discovers that you plan to hunt him, you greatly decrease your chances of taking him.

Almost all tactics that you learn from magazines, books and videos will work when you hunt deer that haven’t had any hunting pressure. However, deer possess high intelligence. Hunting methods that ordinarily will work on unpressured deer usually don’t produce when you hunt deer that everyone else hunts. So, remember these techniques have worked for my bother Mark and me when we’ve had to hunt the toughest bucks of them all – the bucks that everyone else hunts.

To learn more about hunting deer, check out John E. Phillips’ book, “How to Hunt Deer Like a Pro,” available in Kindle, print and Audible versions at (http://amzn.to/YpoQHA). You may have to copy and paste this link into your browser. (When you click on this book, notice on the left where Amazon says you can read 10% of the book for free, and you can hear 10% for free).
On the right side of the page and below the offer for a free Audible trial, you can click on Buy the Audible book. To see more of John’s deer-hunting books, visit www.amazon.com/author/johnephillips.

Tomorrow: Terry Drury – Understand How Other Deer Hunters Hunt