You got to listen to this garbage

[Purebred Redneck]

I picked up my July Missouri Game and Fish only to find a "wonderful" article about scouting for bow season.

A direct quote
"The fact that we may have arrowed a nice buck or a mature doe near such and such oak grove, orchard, food plot or whatver food source the year before or during some opening day in the past means very little for the upcomming season."

This guy needs to lay off the crack
Provided there are no major changes such as clear cutting timber or letting food plots grow into brush, you should be able to have success hunting in the exact same tree year in and year out. Period !!!
I don't care if you haven't hunted a piece of ground in 10 years - if you go back and look I'll be willing to bet there will be the same deer trail running right by your old tree

What say you?

[klsm54]

I have to agree with you Red, as long as, like you say, things haven't changed dramatically.

I don't know about further south, but up here in the north country mast crops are a crap shoot. We may have acorns this year and none the next. The White Oaks may be barren and the Red Oaks will have a bumper crop, or vice versa. Apples are very susceptible to late frosts. These factors all effect how good a spot is year to year, as does different crops being planted in certain fields.

In my opinion, the worst years are the ones when there is too much feed. If apples are plentiful along with Red, White, and Pin Oak acorns, and Beechnuts abound along with some hotspots planted in corn, the deer might be spread out and only frequenting any one area every couple days. Years when there are only one kind of acorn, no apples or corn in an area, make it easier to find where the deer will be.

[deputydon]

Having hunted the SAME blinds since 1986 and having killed deer out of them every year I'ld say unless things change like 54 said the deer follow the same "trails" their "mama" showed them ( or they learned) just like we take the same roads to work, play, ect.

[stumpjumper]

Red ~

I dought the dude is hittin' the crack pipe. To much thought went into that article. Now Peyote on the other hand may of given him a deeper insight to the deer trail theary..

Like Scott pointed out about up in the North Country here where we come from. Drastic change is a part of life up here. The food source changes all the time here. I guess that is how mother nature made it. Here awhile back there was one heck of a change we went threw. Back in the 80's. klsm & Bubba are my closest neighbors. Don't know if you guys were affected by or remember that big Gypsy moth blight we had us up here. It killed off oak forests threw out Cumberland County, or I should say South Jersey. When you have a kill off, pine is what comes back first & grows faster then the oak. So now the pines took over alot of our oak forests. I live on the border line of our Pine Barrens. It didn't take much for those pines to push that much more south.
Now the other factor was food plots? I'm from the Southern part of the Garden State. For the most part here in South Jersey, if it ain't woods, it's cleared fields. Farming is a big part of life here. One of the big cash crops here is soy bean, & corn. So what this amounts to is one helluva bait pile. Here, a water source is the ticket to locate. It's easy to find there food source. It's everywhere. So there could be several places the deer could enter there kitchen so to speak. Now if you know where springs, ponds, rain drainage ect.. , are then you calculate these two factors, & where they are beddin' down, then you can find the trails you need. I like to stay out of there beddin' area, so I don't spook them while I'm headin' to my stand or one of my improvised ground blinds. So this puts me on there trail between the feedin' area & water hole.

If a spring dries up, or the farmer grows salt hay this year instead of other tastier foods, this deer trail will move to a better kitchen. Now it comes back to findin' there water source again, & then on to the new trail.

Another fact that has happened quite often with me. Even if there was NO change in the food or water source, or any major changes with there surroundings, I have had to move some stands to accommodate the change in the trails they used in the past. Sometimes they moved only 30 to 40 yards away, & also have had them completely stop using a trail all together. The biggest change I see in deer trails is the one used by the buck. he is more unpredictable then the does & younger deer, including young bucks.

So I guess what this dude was tryin' to get across holds good ground. The key factors he used ---(NO MAJOR CHANGES).

If this applies to the area you hunt, then you'd be a fool to move your stand, because the deer will be there. You may want or have to move your stand in a different spot on the same trail because of wind conditions, or maybe you are sky lighted & the deer can spot you along time before you know or never know he was there, then have at it. Moving a stand or blind 30 - 100 yards from your original spot pays off quit a bit.