Editor’s Note: You can scout for the perfect spot for taking deer, put up your stand and camp out to wait for deer to come along. But all your work will do you no good, if you’ve picked an obvious place that other hunters also will choose. The trick to bagging big bucks is to think outside the box like other hunters don’t. Here are some tricks I’ve learned through 50+ years of deer hunting that have helped me overlook the obvious and take more bucks.

Most hunters like to get up in the morning, drink their coffee, eat their breakfast and reach their stands 20 to 30 minutes before daylight. But if you’ll get up 30 minutes before the other hunters, skip the coffee and breakfast, and reach your stand an hour before the other hunters ever come into the woods; then as they enter the woods, they’ll often drive big bucks toward you.

Or, if you sleep in one morning and leave to hunt when the other hunters return for lunch, you can hunt through the middle of the day when the other hunters don’t hunt, and the big deer will move. If you’ll go deep away from an access road, stay in your tree stand, and hunt the last legal minute of shooting time, you’ll hunt at a time when most other hunters don’t hunt, because they can’t navigate in the woods after dark, although you can by using your GPS.

Learn to Scout for Hunters Like You Scout for Deer

If you’ll begin to pattern the deer hunters where you hunt, you’ll understand what the deer know. When you can think like a trophy buck, you can outsmart a trophy buck. Learn where other hunters hunt by studying trash trails. At the end of the season, search for cigarette butts, candy wrappers, empty pop cans, flagging tape and scars on trees where hunters have put up their tree stands in the woods. Mark all these spots with your hand-held GPS receiver. Then when you hunt next year, look at the waypoints you’ve marked as high-hunter activity spots. Avoid these sites just like trophy bucks do.

Once you bag a trophy buck in an area, you usually can return there year after year and consistently take a big buck. A trophy buck understands he can hide there without encountering any other hunters besides you, if you don’t tell all your friends where you’re hunting.

John E. Phillips’ latest deer book “How to Hunt Deer Like a Pro: Volume II,” just was published  on Amazon in print at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BGSP3QPB/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tpbk_p4_i4

The Audible version should be available by December. Since deer hunting and deer hunters are drastically changing each year, John interviewed some top deer hunters like Mark Drury, Dr. Larry Marchinton, Dr. Bob Sheppard, Pat Reeve, Gene Wensel, Cody Robbins, Ernie Calandrelli, Brian Murphy and Luke Brewster, who too k the world’s largest whitetail, to learn their up-to-date techniques for successfully hunting deer and having more places to hunt.

Also, John’s first book in that series “How to Hunt Deer Like a Pro” at http://amzn.to/YpoQHA for Kindle, print and Audible, includes other outstanding deer hunters.

Check out John’s book, “Jim Crumley’s Secrets of Bowhunting Deer” available in Kindle, print and Audible at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008N230PE.

You may have to copy and paste these links into your browser. When you click on the books, notice on the left where Amazon says you can read and hear 10% of these Audible books for free. On the right side of the page for each book and below the offer for a free Audible trial, you can click on Buy the Audible book.