When former Louisiana Sportsman editor Todd Masson and I began working on my land in Washington Parish, we set out stands right on the edges of the small plots we had planted.
This worked well for a couple years. For one entire season, I watched the same two yearling does browse the cemetery plot — perched on top of a 15-foot ladder stand strapped to a pine tree hardly 20 yards from the plot — just about every time I hunted it.
Mopsie and Flopsie, Masson nicknamed them.
Even though the stand for the bicycle spoke plot was hidden at least partly in the edge of a jungle of trees pushed over by Hurricane Katrina, it wasn’t much better.
Whoever hunted that plot had to literally walk right through the middle of it just to get to the stand.
As naive as we were, we stilled killed a few deer.
Stands right on the edges of the plots and traipsing through the middle of where we expected deer to come out were probably two of the main reasons we never saw any mature bucks.
It wasn’t until I pulled the ladder stand off the pine tree at the cemetery plot and set it on a water oak on top of the bluff did we start seeing bucks.
Now, rather than sitting right on top of these postage-stamp plots, we have backed off to hunt the trails that connect the plots.
It’s been our experience that we can attract and hold more deer if we let them feed in relative safety once they get to a plot.
Five years hasn’t just changed the lay of the land to make it more attractive to deer, it’s also changed the way we hunt that same land.
And that has made all the difference in the world.
