Editor’s Note: Avid deer hunters recognize the importance of scouting for deer in the summertime – perhaps in places you’ve never considered.  

To preserve meat, early settlers salted their meat and smoked it in smokehouses. As the meat cured, the drippings from the meat, which also carried salt, went into the ground. If you’ll pinpoint the location of an old homestead and search for the spot where the smokehouse once stood, you’ll often find a salt lick – a deep hole the deer have used for many years. Remember that before the days of the refrigerator, people preserved meat by salting and smoking it. 

Find Your Buck at the Outhouses: 

The early settlers also dug deep holes in the ground and erected outhouses over them. Human waste always has been a productive fertilizer. Even today, companies still process human waste, sterilize it and use it in some types of fertilizers. The locations of old outhouses contain the richest dirt on any property, and the fruits and the nuts from trees growing in these areas generally will grow large and contain the tastiest fruits and nuts in the region. These trees usually will attract more deer than any other fruit or nut trees there. 

Because many hunters don’t understand the value of locating old home places, outdoorsmen often overlook this type of scouting. However, if you’ll spend your time doing research to pinpoint where old home places once have stood on the property you hunt, you may identify the location of the old smokehouse and the old outhouse; you also may identify deer trails leading to these two, long-ago-lost deer-hunting hot spots. 

To learn more about hunting for deer, check out John E. Phillips’ “Bowhunting Deer: Mossy Oak Pros Know Bucks and Bows” available in Kindle, and print, (http://amzn.to/1QGvdQx) and “How to Hunt Deer Like a Pro” (http://amzn.to/YpoQHA), available in Kindle, Audible and print. You may have to copy and paste these links into your browser. (When you click on either book, notice on the left where Amazon says you can read 10% of the books for free and hear 10% of “How to Hunt Deer Like a Pro” 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, check out https://www.amazon.com/John-E.-Phillips/e/B001HP7K6O, click on all formats and look at the bottom of the page to see books. 

Tomorrow: Use Trail Cameras and Automatic Feeders for Summertime Deer