StrategicHabitat.com - Habitat Plans and Hunting Setups
Randy VanderVeen - 616-560-7488 - randy@seemorebucks.com
In this video I want to show you a couple ambush setups I made last January for a landowner in GA which will give him a much better opportunity of getting close enough to take one of the few big bucks in the area.
Hopefully this will give you some ideas on how you can spot opportunities like this on your property and implement the same strategy.
After hinge cutting for a couple days in southern MD, I headed down to GA to meetup with Doc who was a not only a cattle rancher, but a full time surgeon as well.
He and his ranch manager John are just great family guys who also have a ministry where they bring in young men just out of the military and provide them with work and training on different aspects of running a cattle ranch. They take them to church on Sunday and help them get back on their feet for life after military service.
When I arrived, Doc and John showed me around the more than 1 mile square ranch
Even though most of the farm was cattle pasture, he had pockets of woods scattered around that we would drive to and scout on foot.
Since Doc is primarily a gun hunter, most of his stands are raised box blinds located in a food plot where deer can see him come and go. I gave him ideas on moving some of the blinds off the food and into cover, and hiding other blinds with miscanthus grass and hiding his access switchgrass.
After looking at a few more of his blind setups and explaining how planting a screen would help to hide them from deer on the property, they caught on to that idea real fast and Doc came up with a new name for switchgrass….
Another area they showed me was an open strip of timber with overly mature trees in a low flat that bucks would just cruise through during the rut. They weren’t sure how to hunt it or how to get deer to spend more time in there to create more predictable shot opportunities.
So later that afternoon I spent a few hours dropping several big trees to let in more sunlight for new woody browse, and then hinge cut other trees to create some horizontal cover and a predictable deer travel corridor within easy shooting range of some higher ground on the other side of the fence where he can hide a box blind inside the cedar trees. Also cut a barricade from the deer trail to the cattle fence to keep the bucks on the trail and within view as they pass by the blind. This area will also turn into a bedding area as more regen pops up due to more sunlight. This will definitely become an area bucks will check for does during the rut phases in November.
One of the ways bucks travel to get to this area is by crossing a road and a creek, working their way through wet ground, around a cattle pasture, and jumping a fence that John lowers for deer during the hunting season.
Doc and his neighbors have seen the biggest bucks take this route every year. The problem was getting close enough for a shot without tipping them off.
So the next day I checked out this area to see how the bucks were moving through it.