Bad Deer Hunting Habits You Need to Break

I hate to admit it, but I’ve screwed up more hunts for myself than other folks or coyotes have. In my earlier years of hunting, a lot of those mistakes stemmed from bad habits like hunting historical spots or trying to outwork the competition, only to run myself into the ground.

If you’re not careful, you can backslide into those same habits (and results). Whether you want to end a bad streak or find more success in the deer woods, here are a few bad habits you should drop.

Nostalgia is a powerful thing, and it’s probably cost you more deer than you realize. It can be tempting to try and recreate the magic of a fabled treestand or honey-hole, but once the habitat or hunting situation changes, those places can dry up.

Instead of hoping for a long-awaited sequel, try scouting new spots. These new spots could be miles away, or you might find that you just need to shift your focus a few hundred yards. Regardless, you can’t keep doing the same thing and expect to achieve different results. That method is a sure way to land you in whitetail purgatory (at your own doing).

While hunting the same spot over and over might give you the best recipe for tag soup, you can also walk (and talk) yourself out of a good spot. Mobile hunting, for all the opportunity it’s created, has also bred the misconception that all the good hunting spots lie miles from the trailhead or parking lot. This isn’t always the case.

Sure, you might not want to hunt that food plot in spitting distance of the parking lot, but there are other overlooked spots that might be within easy walking distance. Before the folks built a house on the neighboring property, one of the best deer trails on my family’s property happened to cross the county road. Before it dried up, my dad, grandfather, and I would hunt that spot where piles of does and occasionally a good buck would cross well before shooting hours ended. Sure, it felt a little weird watching all the cars go by, but the deer didn’t mind it, and it made for an easy drag out.

This approach doesn’t just apply to private land either. Last year, one of my hunting buddies shot a great buck within sight of his truck. He watched multiple small game hunters walk into that management area that evening, too. Prior to killing that buck, he found a ton of fresh droppings and tracks, so he hung a camera and got a few photos of that buck daylighting there. He killed that buck on his first sit. That’s a great lesson in letting the sign tell you what the deer are doing, instead of overcomplicating deer hunting.

I recognize the irony in this point, as someone who is attempting to give hunting advice. However, we live in an information overload, where hunting tactics, videos, and utter nonsense fill our ears and feed. It can be hard to separate the truth from the BS, and that especially applies to hunting.

There are tons of great resources out there for hunters, but like anything, a healthy dose of skepticism can help you determine what’s useful from what’s useless. In a recent interview with MeatEater’s Tony Peterson, he elaborated on this point and noted that most of the information or industry “secrets” peddled out there comes from hunters in privileged positions. That’s not an indictment against those hunters, but a lot of the time, that “expert” advice comes across as tone deaf to the average hunter bumping elbows on public land.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t indulge in hunting content and tips and tactics, or that they aren’t useful. However, you should spend even more time figuring out what works best for your own hunting situations.

If you’ve dabbled in trail cameras at all, then you’ve probably fallen prey to this trap (I know I have). Every year, I have buddies send me trail camera photos of bucks. Great bucks. I can count on one hand how many of those bucks my buddies killed, and I’d still have a few fingers to spare.

Most folks see those photos and assume that if they sit in point A, the buck will show at point B, and that’ll be all she wrote. However, those folks usually neglect to interpret that piece of information in a way that is useful. They see it as the whole story when it’s only a small piece of the puzzle.

Instead of making a ton of assumptions, try to ask more questions when you get a picture of a big buck. Which way was the wind blowing? Can you go find his tracks to see how he entered and exited that spot? Were there other deer around? These are just a few of the variables that you should consider. Just because you get hard evidence via a photo doesn’t mean you should take it at face value.

Unless you want the same results, you’ll have to make some changes to your deer hunting strategy. Even if you don’t, you can bet the woods—and the deer—will.