How to Handle the Crowds While Whitetail Hunting Public Land

The first was, I know he has never whitetail hunted on public land. Ever. The second was that if you think you can’t find big bucks on public land in Iowa, you’re not trying very hard. The deer are out there, and it’s not just the premier states where you can find good deer on ground open to anyone.

The key to finding the deer is to understand how crowded the land will be, and when it will be the most full. This task often starts with timing.

No whitetail hunter in his right mind loves the Lull, except for public land hunters. While the general deer movement might seem to die in the beginning of October, this is not something public land hunters should worry about. In fact, they should embrace it.

We’ve been fed a narrative that there are a few weeks each season before the pre-rut kicks off that are just not worth the time in the woods. Since most folks believe this, it keeps most hunters out of the woods. That’s when you want to go if you’re a public land deer hunter. This is as simple as the advice to hunt during the midweek when you can, as opposed to the weekends.

If you think of the season as a week (forget the late-season for now), you can look at the Lull like it’s a 15-day long Tuesday. There just isn’t going to be much pressure out there, and that matters to pressured deer. It matters so much that they’ll move when they aren’t supposed to, because the prevalence of hunters is low. That’s a good start to avoiding the crowds, but it’s not the only thing you can do.

On my private land hunts, I always start out with the easy stuff around the opener. That’s the time for the field-edge sits and the obvious food sources. After the pressure builds, the leaves start to fall, and the food sources shift, those easy spots die. That’s when I move a layer back into the cover to hunt staging deer.

When it comes to public land hunting, the deer might already be pushed back a layer before the season even opens. You see this with over-the-counter elk as well, but it seems like a lot of folks like to go out and scout around right before the season. Even though they aren’t actually hunting yet, the deer don’t seem to care. They don’t like the sudden influx of two-legged predators, and they react accordingly.

Oftentimes the easiest way to avoid the crowds is to try to think through what one layer deeper into the cover would mean. If everyone is on the edges of the openings, you might only need to hunt 100 yards from them. Remember that even though the woods might seem crowded, the crowding will happen in very specific spots. Your job is to identify those and try to get in a little deeper. To work just a bit harder than the average hunter. Then, you need to relax.

There’s a saying about how average people become wealthy by investing that goes like this: time in the market beats timing the market. What this means is you can try to figure out when the next crash will happen or when to jump in on a new trend that should cause some stocks to blow up, but you won’t get it right. The big money firms with access to the best minds in the business can’t get it right, and they stand to make billions. Your odds of figuring out something they don’t know and then being able to time the market consistently are close enough to zero to be zero.

Investing consistent amounts of money in indices-tracking mutual funds and ETFs for three decades or so is a different story. Stocks go up and down on a daily basis, but the market goes in one direction over the long haul. Whitetail hunters who want to avoid the crowds learn to think this way as well.

Instead of waiting for a cold front in the second week of October to hunt, they put in time when they can. Instead of bailing on their setups after an hour and a half because they lack confidence, they trust their scouting and give each sit four or five hours. They avoid crowds mostly by not being a part of them.

Aside from being a tad bit obsessed with scouting, this is probably my number one strategy for avoiding people and finding deer on public land. Most people are impatient, and that causes them to hunt like most people. Be patient, and you’ll differentiate yourself from the masses and increase the odds that a deer will walk by when you’re there.