muddy
Well-Known Member
Long Range Glassing to Kill Trophy Bucks
by Patrick Simpson
In the hunting world we live in there are so many steps that you have to take to consistently tag mature whitetails. I’m not going to go over all the steps most have been covered well in numerous articles, you know: playing the wind, entrance and exit strategy, rub and scrape lines and the list goes on.
I’ve found some great scrape and rubs lines that really have gotten me fired up over the years. The older I get the less attention I pay to them as far as hunting right beside them. Don’t get me wrong, I like seeing them in the areas I hunt. I think a lot people don’t realize the vast majority of those scrapes and rubs are made outside the envelope of shooting hours. This means that it’s unlikely to get a shot at the deer right where all the major sign is a lot of times.
There are two ways to know for sure that there is a big buck using an area during hunting hours. One way is getting really popular is to put out a trail cameras and try to get a picture of the buck walking down a trail or feeding in a food plot. By my experience with trial cameras is that 90% of the pictures are well after dark in the areas that I place them at. Trail cameras are great scouting tools and are excellent to find out what is roaming around on the farms you hunt. They just aren’t going to tell you exactly where to hunt to get a shot at the big buck in all likelihood. It’s only a guessing game where to hunt a buck at when you don’t have any day time pictures of him.
You can take the guessing out with my preferred way scout. Long range glassing, it is a tremendously rewarding way to scout and the advantages are almost endless. I use a set of Leupold Wind River Olympic 10X50 for the last couple years while glassing and absolutely love them. They are light weight, gather light really well and are super clear. It is very important to have a good set of binoculars for glassing, especially if you are using them for hours at a time. A cheap pair just won’t due, they won’t gather light well and they will make your eyes tire quickly.
I like to glass fields, draws and ditches to see where the deer come out and move through. It’s my preferred way to scout. It sure doesn’t affect the deer like walking through their area.
Advantages to Glassing over walking through areas deer feed and move through.
1) You’re not going into the buck’s area and leaving your scent to put him on alert. There have been a few bucks I have hunted in past years that would move to a new area after they discovered I had been in there sanctuary, of coarse these were all very mature and seasoned bucks.
2) You won’t bump any deer when your glassing from hundred of yards away. When walking through a bucks area your bound to jump a deer up eventually when scouting. You know they say you can jump a buck once in a certain area and if jump him up a second time it will be the last time you’ll jump him there. Although I’ve seen this to pretty much hold true. I don’t want to risk jumping any deer if I can keep from doing it. One buck in particular that I’ve had numerous encounters with that is 7.5 + years old, you bump him once and he’ll move areas. Deer are just like people, they all have different personalities and dispositions. Some bucks are social and some aren’t, the bucks that aren’t social are the hardest to kill in my opinion!
3) Many times there are multiple trails that deer use in an area to go to a food source and if you’re scouting by walking around in the woods you see all the trails and guess at which one to hunt. When you glass and see the buck consistently come out of the same spot you know exactly where you can intercept that particular buck at.
4) Plus, you can actually see what bucks are in the area and set a standard of buck that you want to shoot. You can’t shoot a 150” buck if there isn’t any in the area your hunting. I personally like to glass until I find a particular buck I want to shoot. It’s not that I don’t like sitting in the stand because I do, it’s just that I don’t like contaminating my areas with scent. I prefer the buck to not even know that he is being hunted, if you play the wind right, stay as scent free as possible and are really careful hanging a stand or set-up on the ground he’ll never know your there!
Just this year I was hunting a farm in Illinois. I was hunting on the edge of a picked cornfield where I had seen a really nice long brow tined 160” plus buck come out of point days earlier while I was hunting a couple hundred yards away. I really wanted to stay an extra day and try to get a crack at that buck the next evening, but I had to get back home for business.
A couple days later I had returned and sit up on him hoping he’d do the same thing as a few days earlier and come by within bow range. I didn’t see that buck that night but I did see a tremendous main-frame eight pointer work a field edge across the cornfield from me for about an hour. He was hitting some scrapes and checking doe’s out in the field and I decided to change my focus to him.
The next morning I set-up on the ground taking an educated guess where he might move through on that early November morning. When he cut across the cornfield that morning he missed me by about a hundred yards. After sitting until lunch time and not seeing him again I was sure he had bedded up for the day, so I snuck out and grabbed a bite to eat. I was in a climbing tree stand less than an hour and a half later on the edge of the cornfield with the wind in my face. I felt very confident I would see the buck before sunset and hoped to get a chance.
Sure enough with about 50 minutes left of legal hunting hours I hear a deep grunt to my right. I turned my attention to the location of the grunt and out pops a doe out of the timber. A couple seconds later the big basic eight rolled out to the cornfield. I waited patiently as the doe feed my way with the buck milling around behind her. My stand was located about 4 yards off the cornfield right between two fresh scrapes that I had watched the big buck work the night before. As the doe started past my stand, the buck headed to the scrape just to the right of my stand. He worked it for a couple minutes and then started towards my shooting lane. The buck spotted me just before he totally exposed the vitals for my shot. I drew and shoot through the shoulder angling back towards the vitals. I should have been more patient and waited for him to move further into the shooting lane. I didn’t get good penetration and needless to say I didn’t get the buck. I was really depressed and disappointed that I didn’t find him the next morning after hours of searching, it really hurt me down to loose a good opportunity at that deer. I knew the buck had made it just fine; it was very evident that I had only given him a flesh wound. It was a real rush to have a 170” monster eight at eight yards right where I wanted him, but sickening to not get him. If he’d just came a step further down the trial he’d had been mine. Hopefully I’ll get crack at him later this year or next year!
by Patrick Simpson
In the hunting world we live in there are so many steps that you have to take to consistently tag mature whitetails. I’m not going to go over all the steps most have been covered well in numerous articles, you know: playing the wind, entrance and exit strategy, rub and scrape lines and the list goes on.
I’ve found some great scrape and rubs lines that really have gotten me fired up over the years. The older I get the less attention I pay to them as far as hunting right beside them. Don’t get me wrong, I like seeing them in the areas I hunt. I think a lot people don’t realize the vast majority of those scrapes and rubs are made outside the envelope of shooting hours. This means that it’s unlikely to get a shot at the deer right where all the major sign is a lot of times.
There are two ways to know for sure that there is a big buck using an area during hunting hours. One way is getting really popular is to put out a trail cameras and try to get a picture of the buck walking down a trail or feeding in a food plot. By my experience with trial cameras is that 90% of the pictures are well after dark in the areas that I place them at. Trail cameras are great scouting tools and are excellent to find out what is roaming around on the farms you hunt. They just aren’t going to tell you exactly where to hunt to get a shot at the big buck in all likelihood. It’s only a guessing game where to hunt a buck at when you don’t have any day time pictures of him.
You can take the guessing out with my preferred way scout. Long range glassing, it is a tremendously rewarding way to scout and the advantages are almost endless. I use a set of Leupold Wind River Olympic 10X50 for the last couple years while glassing and absolutely love them. They are light weight, gather light really well and are super clear. It is very important to have a good set of binoculars for glassing, especially if you are using them for hours at a time. A cheap pair just won’t due, they won’t gather light well and they will make your eyes tire quickly.
I like to glass fields, draws and ditches to see where the deer come out and move through. It’s my preferred way to scout. It sure doesn’t affect the deer like walking through their area.
Advantages to Glassing over walking through areas deer feed and move through.
1) You’re not going into the buck’s area and leaving your scent to put him on alert. There have been a few bucks I have hunted in past years that would move to a new area after they discovered I had been in there sanctuary, of coarse these were all very mature and seasoned bucks.
2) You won’t bump any deer when your glassing from hundred of yards away. When walking through a bucks area your bound to jump a deer up eventually when scouting. You know they say you can jump a buck once in a certain area and if jump him up a second time it will be the last time you’ll jump him there. Although I’ve seen this to pretty much hold true. I don’t want to risk jumping any deer if I can keep from doing it. One buck in particular that I’ve had numerous encounters with that is 7.5 + years old, you bump him once and he’ll move areas. Deer are just like people, they all have different personalities and dispositions. Some bucks are social and some aren’t, the bucks that aren’t social are the hardest to kill in my opinion!
3) Many times there are multiple trails that deer use in an area to go to a food source and if you’re scouting by walking around in the woods you see all the trails and guess at which one to hunt. When you glass and see the buck consistently come out of the same spot you know exactly where you can intercept that particular buck at.
4) Plus, you can actually see what bucks are in the area and set a standard of buck that you want to shoot. You can’t shoot a 150” buck if there isn’t any in the area your hunting. I personally like to glass until I find a particular buck I want to shoot. It’s not that I don’t like sitting in the stand because I do, it’s just that I don’t like contaminating my areas with scent. I prefer the buck to not even know that he is being hunted, if you play the wind right, stay as scent free as possible and are really careful hanging a stand or set-up on the ground he’ll never know your there!
Just this year I was hunting a farm in Illinois. I was hunting on the edge of a picked cornfield where I had seen a really nice long brow tined 160” plus buck come out of point days earlier while I was hunting a couple hundred yards away. I really wanted to stay an extra day and try to get a crack at that buck the next evening, but I had to get back home for business.
A couple days later I had returned and sit up on him hoping he’d do the same thing as a few days earlier and come by within bow range. I didn’t see that buck that night but I did see a tremendous main-frame eight pointer work a field edge across the cornfield from me for about an hour. He was hitting some scrapes and checking doe’s out in the field and I decided to change my focus to him.
The next morning I set-up on the ground taking an educated guess where he might move through on that early November morning. When he cut across the cornfield that morning he missed me by about a hundred yards. After sitting until lunch time and not seeing him again I was sure he had bedded up for the day, so I snuck out and grabbed a bite to eat. I was in a climbing tree stand less than an hour and a half later on the edge of the cornfield with the wind in my face. I felt very confident I would see the buck before sunset and hoped to get a chance.
Sure enough with about 50 minutes left of legal hunting hours I hear a deep grunt to my right. I turned my attention to the location of the grunt and out pops a doe out of the timber. A couple seconds later the big basic eight rolled out to the cornfield. I waited patiently as the doe feed my way with the buck milling around behind her. My stand was located about 4 yards off the cornfield right between two fresh scrapes that I had watched the big buck work the night before. As the doe started past my stand, the buck headed to the scrape just to the right of my stand. He worked it for a couple minutes and then started towards my shooting lane. The buck spotted me just before he totally exposed the vitals for my shot. I drew and shoot through the shoulder angling back towards the vitals. I should have been more patient and waited for him to move further into the shooting lane. I didn’t get good penetration and needless to say I didn’t get the buck. I was really depressed and disappointed that I didn’t find him the next morning after hours of searching, it really hurt me down to loose a good opportunity at that deer. I knew the buck had made it just fine; it was very evident that I had only given him a flesh wound. It was a real rush to have a 170” monster eight at eight yards right where I wanted him, but sickening to not get him. If he’d just came a step further down the trial he’d had been mine. Hopefully I’ll get crack at him later this year or next year!
