The great thing about writing about hunting and fishing is that I get to apply the same tips and techniques to my own hunting and fishing as Louisiana Sportsman readers do.
However, there are two tips I’ve shared over the years that have really made an impact on how I hunt my own property.
Bassmaster Elite Series pro angler Dennis Tietje said something so simple and understated during a deer-hunting interview one time that I could have easily dismissed it as not worth sharing in an article.
“To successfully hunt the rut,” he began, “you’ve got to hunt where your does are during the daytime.”
The advice didn’t seem all that pertinent at the time, considering we can’t hunt deer at night. But the more I thought about it the more truth I saw in Tietje’s advice.
It got me started thinking about how I hunt my own property in Washington Parish, and I realized that the majority of pictures I had of deer were at nighttime.
And these were the same places I had been hunting during the daylight.
The more I thought about Tietje’s advice, the more foolish I realized my own hunting habits were.
I started moving my cameras around my property until I started getting daylight pictures of deer. But it wasn’t simply a matter of moving them from one plot to another. Rather, I moved them from the edges of the plots to the woods surrounding them.
It was then that a whole new world of deer hunting possibilities surfaced.
I couldn’t believe I was getting pictures of deer all day long in the heart of a pine plantation just to the northeast of one of the plots that nobody hunts except for kids and out-of-town family and friends.
The more I investigated the pines the more deer sign I found that pointed to daytime deer activity. The place was full of rubs, scrapes, and deer trails — sign I just don’t see in or around my food plots.
That’s when I started hunting the woods surrounding food plots rather than hunting directly on top of them.
Strangely enough, my success rate skyrocketed when I started hunting the places on my property the deer were using during the day.