Tucked away in the northeastern corner of the state is a low-pressured public area that holds some fine deer. Here’s one bowhunter’s strategy for taking Bayou Macon WMA trophies.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This is part one of a series detailing four Louisiana public areas with historically high odds of deer hunting success.It was a freezing-cold January morning, only a couple of days after an ice storm blew through North Louisiana.
But Oak Grove’s Mike Lee trudged through the swampy area, slipping across sloughs with his climbing stand on his back.
Soon, Lee was perched in a tree, peering through the predawn gloom.
It wasn’t long before the 46-year-old hunter received his first adrenaline jolt of the budding day.
“About 7 a.m. that morning, some dogs ran some does by me,” Lee said.
While it was exciting, that wasn’t what he was after.
Many hunters might have been disgusted by the presence of the dogs and headed out of the woods.
In fact, a buddy hunting with Lee did just that after the dogs ran past his stand a couple of times.
Lee, however, shrugged it off.
Perseverance paid off, when he heard something walking along the slough about an hour and a half later.
“I heard it coming about 100 yards away,” Lee said.
Each footstep broke ice, and the crisp morning air carried those sounds to Lee’s roost.
Slowly the steps closed in, and Lee finally got his first sight of the deer.
“I saw it was a good buck,” he said.
The animal slowly picked its way along the slough, and then headed into the flooded depression.
“As he came, he angled out into the middle of the slough; he was going around a bunch of tree tops,” Lee explained.
Tension closed in on the hunter with every cautious step of the buck, and Lee watched the animal’s progress through the icy vapor of his own breath.
The chance that the deer would just continue to walk across the slough and disappear in the thicket on the other side haunted Lee, but he remained perfectly still in the hope that he would get the chance to sling an arrow at the meandering buck.
As soon as the big deer worked its way around the last tree top, however, it turned right back to the slough bank on which Lee was positioned.
“It walked right in, about 20 yards away, broadside,” Lee said.
The hunter had drawn his bow already, and loosed a deadly shaft.
The buck jumped and ran, and Lee watched his latest trophy intently to ensure he knew where to look when he began tracking the animal.
Before it went out of sight, however, the deer stumbled and went down.
“He only went about 75 yards,” Lee said. “I saw him fall.”
The buck was a beauty, with a rack of 10 points that eventually measured 133 1/8 Pope & Young points.
That hunt was on Jan. 22, 1999, seven years after the tract of land on which he was hunting was purchased by the Department of Wildlife & Fisheries and renamed Bayou Macon Wildlife Management Area.
Lee hunted “The Macon,” as it’s called colloquially, from the very beginning of the public area, finding that the deer population was thick.
“At one time, it was overpopulated,” he said.
That meant hunters saw a lot of deer, but there were two problems associated with this abundance.
“When it first opened, there were a lot of people hunting there,” Lee said.
So time in the woods on the 6,940-acre tract wasn’t what you might call quality.
The second result of the overpopulation was that the deer were small.
The good news is that the situation has turned around.
“Now there’s not a lot of pressure,” Lee said. “Most of the people who come in from out of town come for the gun hunt.”
That means the bulk of the pressure is limited to only two days (Nov. 20-21) during which the department operates a lottery hunt on the property.
There also is muzzleloader hunting allowed Dec. 4-5, but outside of those two weekends, only archery equipment is permitted.
Lee said the reduction in the overall number of deer during those first few years of operation has reaped wonderful rewards for bowhunters.
“The deer have gotten bigger and better,” he said. “Does average about 120 pounds.”
And the bucks that range through the property sport better-quality head gear.
Of course, the surrounding agricultural fields only help keep the area’s deer fat and happy.
To top it all off, the population is far from thin.
“There are still a good number of deer,” Lee said.
Results of last year’s lottery hunt were 86 deer killed by 406 hunters, which translates into a a success ratio of one deer per 4.7 efforts, biologist Jerald Owens said.
Among the deer killed during that two-day hunt was a 240 pounder and a 10-point stretching the scales to 218 pounds, Owens said.
Twelve deer were taken the following weekend by 141 muzzleloader hunters.
Hunting these deer can be a bit of a challenge, however, because the WMAs terrain isn’t exactly people friendly.
“It’s hard hunting. You can go three or four hunts without seeing anything, and then you can hunt two or three times and see deer every time you hunt,” Lee said.
The literature on the area describes it as “flat with relatively poor drainage” containing two “intermittent streams …,” but Lee said the WMA really is nothing more than a swamp.
“That’s what people call it, ‘The Swamp,’” he said.
In addition to Brushy and Buck bayous (those “intermittent streams” mentioned in the departmental description), numerous sloughs cut through the forests.
These depressions dry up during the summer droughts, but once the winter rains hit, they fill with water, and can confound hunters. Crossing a slough to reach hunting sights isn’t a possibility — it’s an inevitability.
“I hunt in my hip boots,” Lee said. “You can use 16- or 17-inch boots — just don’t step in a hole.
“I’ve done that more than one time.”
The hip boots take care of the situation.
“I just roll them back down to my knees,” he said.
Some hunters simply refuse to hunt such swampy land, but Lee said the presence of the sloughs really makes hunting Bayou Macon easier.
“For some reason, they just travel in those sloughs,” he explained.
That narrows down his scouting: If there isn’t a slough around, he simply keeps going.
Once he’s found a slough with some travel trails along the banks, he begins looking for the next piece in the puzzle.
“I focus on food sources,” Lee said.
There is no shortage of oaks, but Lee said he prefers the overcup variety because the acorns seem to draw deer like politicians to the pork barrel.
“I’ve seen deer pick acorns floating in the sloughs,” Lee said.
Other favored foods include persimmons and honey locust.
Lee said that once he’s found a productive feed tree, he begins looking for signs that deer are making regular visits.
“I look for tracks and droppings,” he said. “If I find those, I know deer are using the tree.”
Rarely does Lee set up right on the feed tree, however.
“I try to get them right before they get there,” he explained. “I catch them on the trail.”
But he doesn’t simply back off a little ways and set up: Instead, he looks for high-traffic areas.
The easiest way to up the odds of sticking a deer is by looking for bottlenecks.
While sometimes that’s where two sloughs pinch the land between, the best areas to find funnels are where sloughs and cutovers meet.
Cutovers are found all across the property because of DWF work to thin the forests to improve the habitat.
“When I find a funnel, I know my odds are better if deer are active,” he said.
He sets up so he can ambush deer as they pick their way through the narrow trail.
If sloughs don’t produce, Lee said a good early season option is to hunt on the boundaries of the property, on the other side of which are agricultural fields.
“The deer go to those fields to eat beans and corn,” Lee said.
Lee still sticks to his game plan, however, and finds nearby funnels through which deer travel to the fields.
However, after rifle season opens on the surrounding properties, the ag fields stop producing.
“When rifle season opens up, they shoot whatever walks out,” Lee said. “The deer quit using those fields.”
Of course, scrapes and hookings play into Lee’s battle plan.
“I definitely hunt rub lines and scrape lines,” he said. “I’ve killed deer making rubs.
“I’ve killed a deer that pulled his head off the tree and walked around to the other side, and I shot him.”
While the deer tend to leave these calling cards along the sloughs, Lee said he still focuses on funnels, whether created by two sloughs, by thickets or a combination thereof.
While funnels are almost no-brainers, Lee said sometimes even the best-laid plans fall apart.
Take a hunt last year, when Lee watched an estimated 140-class 8-point ease along the edge of a slough.
“He was supposed to come between two thickets,” he said. “I just knew that deer was going to walk right past me.”
However, the deer apparently hadn’t read the playbook.
“It was coming right to me, and then it turned and walked through the thicket,” Lee said. “He chose to go between a thicket and the open woods.”
Lee wondered what had gone wrong until he climbed out of the tree at the end of the hunt.
“I looked around where he walked, and I found a travel corridor,” he said. “I guess he was on a his regular travel pattern.”
Calls can sometimes be productive in bringing such deer closer.
“I’ve seen deer come barreling out of the thickets,” he explained.
Lee also will blind call, but he’s always very sparing in the use of grunts, even if he sees a deer that is walking the opposite direction.
So Lee usually only calls once or twice to retreating deer.
“Sometimes they don’t respond,” he said. “I’ll just let them do their thing.”
And then sometimes, the deer do respond, but not like any hunter would want.
“It seems like sometimes you can use it, and he’ll go as hard away from you as he can,” he said.
Take that big 8-point he saw last year: Once the buck had moved through the thicket and bypassed Lee’s stand site, the hunter pulled out a call and put it to work.
“When he went down about 100 yards, I used that Primos can (call), and he didn’t like that. He didn’t like that at all,” Lee said.
The deer picked up its pace and quickly was out of sight.
Lee said he believes such incidences are proof that individual deer have been educated.
“I think people get caught using a grunt call, and that deer knows what it is,” he said.
The 8-point, for instance, did what no smart deer would do after Lee called.
“He stayed out in that open woods,” he said. “I think he caught somebody using a grunt, and he wasn’t going anywhere near one again.”
Rattling is something that Lee avoids in the Macon.
“You don’t get a good response,” he said. “I don’t know if there’s just a period of time when it’s effective or what, but I’ve never had much luck with it.”
Because the majority of the hunting on The Macon is limited to archery equipment, Lee said special care must be taken to avoid spooking deer.
Scent is minimized by his use of hip boots, but he doesn’t stop there.
“I like to hunt high,” he said. “I usually try to get 25 feet.
“I just try to get out of their eye sight and high enough to minimize the chances of them smelling me.”
His stand preference is a climber, but sometimes he has to use lock-ons.
“It just depends on if there’s a tree I can climb,” Lee said.
But the most important factor he considers is wind: Lee never hunts a site, no matter how promising, if the wind is blowing toward the target area.
To ensure he’s not shut out of hunting on any given day, Lee finds two or three likely ambush spots.
“If I can’t hunt one spot, I’ll have another spot for backup,” he explained.
Lee said weekday hunts are best because there are few other hunters on the property.
Weekends, on the other hand, bring out the squirrel hunters.
But the veteran Bayou Macon hunter doesn’t necessarily shy away.
“I’ll use them,” Lee said. “If I see them, I’ll ask them where they will be hunting the next day so I know where they’re going.”
The following morning, he’ll be set up so any deer fleeing the small-game hunters will walk right into his lap.
“If I know they’re going to a certain place, I’ll get downwind,” he explained. “I know what I need to do.”