Pressure-Cooker Whitetails | Understanding Mature Bucks

We all know that human pressure impacts deer activities dramatically. What may surprise many is how. Most believe pressure sends deer running wild, and it can in a few specific situations, but understanding what they do far more often may just help fill future deer tags.

This is Chapter 16 of Steve Bartylla’s free online book, Understanding Mature Bucks.

OK, so we’ve covered a lot to this point. We now understand home ranges, core areas, dominance, social stress, climate stress, seasonal shifting, the rut cycle, photoperiod and I’m still missing a bunch we’ve covered in the past 15 chapters of our mature buck book. So far, we’ve generally stuck to understanding what makes Mr. big tick, how he tends to react to various stimuli and how he generally acquires what he wants. We have one more big factor to consider, before we start wrapping up by putting some of these pieces together.

Understanding how deer react to hunting pressure is of tremendous importance to both hunters and habitat managers. To be honest, it’s hard to exaggerate its significance to both.

We all understand that deer react negatively to hunting pressure. Most all hunters see it play out every season, whether they realize it or not. A common scenario is nothing more than taking a week off to head for your hunting grounds. Very often, the quality of those sits go nothing but down with each hunting day of the trip. Most often, that’s merely the deer reacting to the new hunting pressure.

A bunch of studies have confirmed this. If pressure is limited to a specific area, deer merely shift all or the majority their activities to the areas void of pressure, unless the pressured areas have something they really want and can’t get or can’t get in the same quality in the non-pressured area.

In that case, deer simply reduce their daylight movement levels, in the pressured areas, yet will move freely in the non-pressured areas. When Mr. Big decides to spend daylight in the pressured area, presumably because it has something they really want or they just don’t realize an area of their range is void of pressure yet, he has the strong tendency to merely reduce all daylight movements.

That’s also the same tendency they have when there is widespread hunting pressure over their entire home range. Heck, there could be a 40 just off their home range that isn’t hunted at all. It may as well be on the other side of the globe. If it’s not within their existing home range, they simply don’t realize it exists.

When a deer’s entire home range is under pressure or the area they really don’t want to leave is, they simply find the area they feel safest, hunker down and ride the day out more or less in hiding. The higher the pressure and the longer that pressure occurs the more they hunker and less they tend to move during daylight.

Conversely, when they shift to pockets lacking pressure, they tend to move freely within those pockets, while visiting the high pressure areas at night, assuming they even have a good reason to do that. A lot of the most successful public land hunters have figured that out and use it to their advantage.

READ: HOW TO SUCCESSFULLY HUNT A NOCTURNAL BUCK

Prime example was hunting the Corps of Engineers land along the Illinois River. The easily accessed timber strips along the river were just tore up with rut sign. The scrapes and rubs in the strip separating the river from the farm fields was some of the most impressive mature buck sign I’d ever seen, explaining why there were a bunch of hunters sitting the strip. The catch was that the overwhelming majority of deer are bedding on the islands on the Illinois River. Well before first light, I was unloading a canoe and paddling out to those islands, being sure to be completely set up before the other hunters arrived.

The reason was simple. As soon as they started showing up, still well before first light, the deer would literally migrate from the fields to those islands, where they would spend their entire day, moving freely on those islands, but rarely swimming the river back to the strip of woods before dark.

Our next chapter is on hunting pressured bucks. So, I’ll save that for then.

I’ll wrap up with how key this understanding is to management. You know those sloppy hunting neighbors, that no doubt shoot every dang thing that moves and have been the subject of countless, “If we could only get _______ to _______, our hunting could be great,” type conversations? Rather than spend your time fighting against them, make them work for you.

If you can fool deer into believing they’re safe on your ground, it becomes that island on the Illinois River, with the deer piling in before first light and generally not leaving before dark. No, it is unlikely to be as cut and dried as it was for me hunting those islands, but one can most often get pretty close.

Assuming you control the dirt, it’s generally a very achievable goal. You can manage the dirt and remodel their world to manufacture low-impact, high-odds stands. When doing so, remember, we CAN’T smell compared to deer. I firmly believe we educate way more deer after we’ve left the woods than we ever do while in it, simply from the odors we leave behind.

With that in mind, manufacture stands that are low impact to get to and from, and hunt. So long as the deer don’t see, hear or smell you, you were never there. The catch is that it takes very special stand locations to pull that off from, and few occur naturally, in great spots that are near zero impact to reach and hunt.

Luckily, if we are remodeling their world anyway, with a little planning, we can manufacture just that! Frankly, doing so can often improve hunting for most more than any other thing they could do, at least on that dirt. Always remember, our minds, creativity and powers of analytical thought can be our most powerful weapons. Use don’t be afraid to or hesitate in using them to their fullest capabilities!

Read Chapter 1: Whitetail Tendencies

Read Chapter 2: Whitetail Home Ranges

Read Chapter 3: How Deer Use Core Areas

Read Chapter 4: When Core Areas Shift

Read Chapter 5: Seasonal Shifts

Read Chapter 6: Family Group Dominance

Read Chapter 7: Male Dominance

Read Chapter 8: Deer Population Dynamics

Read Chapter 9: Deciphering Deer Breeding Phases

Read Chapter 10: Big Deer Breeding Behavior

Read Chapter 11: Whitetail Rut Stress

Read Chapter 12: How Deer Deal With Winter Stress