Whats are your deer scouting meathods, that seem to pay off for you? do you use trail Cams, do you have a favroit brand? use maps? Any one been useing goggel earth? I know it all ends up with feet on the ground time in the woods. but what have you found helpful?

I have not used goggel earth but maps are a big thing for me and when I can get a hold of new araial photos I can pick out lots of key locations to check out. I am hunting commercail paper copany land here, miles and miles of it, but lots of "dead Ground with no deer" so keying in on spcific areas is importintat. I use trail cams on bear and moose to an extent, but not for deer. key tool for me is snow and gps, love to folow a set of tracks and mark the trail, then the next fall scout this out for the deer. Some of my best locations have been found this way. I do have the oppurtudy to spend lots of time in the woods, which helps with my scouting and deer hunting set ups.

I use some trail cams.....google earth isn't that great unless you have thousands of acres to hunt....then its good....Where I live the deer pattern me just as I pattern them ....I hunted 7 days for the buck I killed and road my four wheeler in.....No freakn Luck....Then I walked into my location and in two days of hunting I got him....

I scout the areas I will be hunting for track , sign,
rubs and scrapes. No cameras ( would use one if I had one.}
I rattle a lot so I often see deer that are out of their usual patterns.
I always walk in.

I am hunting over large areas, a township here is 36 square miles, and hunt mainly on 4 of them I lease and put bear baits out on, plus some other areas, but the deer are in pockets here, with lots of square miles with no or next to no deer. We drive into the woods on the company's logging roads, and walk off these, we are not allowed to use ATV's in Maine except on designated trails, or written landowner permission.

I did spend about 12 hours in the woods today marking the bear bait sites with my GPS, moving some sites that had been cut over, making sure I could still get a truck down the roads. I saw 3 deer, no bucks but that's OK, I did mark where I saw them with my GPS, so latter on, probably when I have bear hunters on a stand, a few miles away i can go into these areas and scout some more for deer, and still hear a hunter shot a rifle at their bear, makes some of the evening's go by quicker when hunters are on stand. I know this process won't work for most of you but thought I would add it any way.

I scout new areas first with my Tahoe Hybrid on trails open to vehicles in the ANF. In all-electric mode it is virtually silent and is a new form of "still hunting" I use for scouting. Deer do not associate a vehicle with a predetor so I usually see more deer and cover a larger area than I can on foot.

Where I hunt on the west coast, scouting is a little different for a few reasons. First, I hunt public forest land, which is hundreds of thousands of acres. I have a few spots that I mainly hunt, and do some sign watching; trails, tracks,ect. Our deer migrate from the mountains, down to the foothills during winter. They have usually made their way back to the high country by May-June, but this year, weve had several cold, wintery spring storms, which I think will cause the migration to be delayed. So where I was hunting at 5,400'-6,000' last archery season, this year when August rolls around, Im thinking most of the activity will be a lot lower. Only some trips to the mountains, and seeing where the beat up trails are will tell for sure. Once the general sense of where they are is found, then its a matter of finding the feed and water holes they will be hitting.

Deleted Member said:
I use some trail cams.....google earth isn't that great unless you have thousands of acres to hunt....then its good....Where I live the deer pattern me just as I pattern them ....I hunted 7 days for the buck I killed and road my four wheeler in.....No freakn Luck....Then I walked into my location and in two days of hunting I got him....

 


What trailcams you using now? 


outdoorsfoot.com


 

Am hunting land that I have hunted since I was a kid. Lots of Hunting Pressure. Cameras are very good to find when Deer are visiting the Food Plots. Always walk in.

I only have one trail cam right now but I use it like crazy. When I find what I think is a good area I usually set it and see what shows.