Braxton Taylor
It’s a near-constant drumbeat in many hunting circles. The public land is just too crowded. It’s a blanket statement tossed around, at least partially, to blame folks like me for promoting public land whitetail hunting too much. It’s also a good statement to use if you want to explain away how you didn’t fill a tag last year.
It’s also, in some areas, true.
At least at certain points of the season, it’s true. But overcrowding is subjective. The hunter unwilling to put in a whole lot of effort might find that it’s pretty easy to believe the woods are overcrowded. The same goes for the hunter who only wants to hunt one parcel or one part of a single parcel. To that hunter, a couple more trucks in the parking lot might be way too much pressure in his spot.
The truth is, if you’re a public land whitetail hunter, you have to work with the pressure, or you’ll find yourself totally overwhelmed. It’s one of those things that is a pretty simple concept, but that doesn’t make it easy.
Timing Is, Literally, Everything
Every whitetail hunter wants time in the woods during the pre-rut and the rut. Because of this, a huge percentage of whitetail hunters spend most of their time in the woods during about a three-week window.
I saw this firsthand last year when I drew an Iowa tag for a so-so zone. I hunted only public land during the middle of October. I saw plenty of stands and blinds in the woods and enough trucks parked on the side of the road to force me to switch up my plans several times. Not so many that it was a lost cause, though, and one little concentration of river-bottom activity kept me on my toes until I arrowed an eight-pointer as he walked up to sniff my decoy.
A good buddy of mine also drew that tag, and he stayed to hunt after I left. Every day, as October inched toward November, he texted me updates. As you can imagine, the pressure increased daily, and exponentially on the weekend.
The thing about public land whitetails is that people want to hunt them like they’re on a private-land hunter’s schedule. If you only hunt a few weekends around the rut, you’re going to believe the deer woods are too crowded because that will be your experience. But you’re not entitled to an amazing rut hunt just because you want it. Putting in effort when others won’t be there, when conventional deer wisdom says it won’t be as good, is the best way I’ve ever found to have productive hunts on public.
Sure, I’d love to see that chase-fest all day long while not worrying about sharing the woods with every other licensed hunter in the county, but that’s not in the cards. I’d also rather have productive hunts whenever I can get them than fight the crowds for a prime-time sit.
Backup Your Backups
I’m a firm believer in winter scouting. I think March is the best time to find fall ambush sites, and would rate my time poking around on public right now as more valuable than any other scouting I do all year long.
This is because I can’t stomach not having lots of stand-site options because I know that it’s very likely, on any given hunt, that someone will be in a spot I’d like to sit. It’s just part of the game as a public land hunter.
Two seasons ago, while filming a Rough Cuts episode with Steve Rinella, I bumped into this problem. While I had scouted my ass off in the Oklahoma sun for a few days, I only found one real concentration of deer. I found several so-so spots as well, so I had backups. None of them were humming with deer activity like the small area we managed to kill three bucks in, though.
On the second day of our four-day hunt, we drove out to sit that spot, but there were two guys walking in with climbers on their backs. There was no real way to follow them in without screwing up their hunt, and that’s not really my style, so I went to a backup spot.
The sinking feeling of knowing we were relying almost solely on one tiny acorn-, and persimmon-filled dry creekbed was a good reminder to keep looking. And that having backup spots to your backup spots is the best way to ensure that no matter how crowded things get, you can always head to a spot where you have some level of confidence. That’s so important.
Conclusion
In some regions, at certain times of the season, public land can absolutely be overcrowded. Acknowledge that now, plan your season to take advantage of the times when most folks won’t go, and start scouting. The more spots you have to default to when the pickups show up, the less likely you are to declare the whole thing a lost cause.
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