Public land bucks and hunting pressure

If you’re new to hunting public land often times you’ll come to aldeer asking for help and people will tell you to go deep to get away from the pressure. Most of the public land I hunt has so much access that it’s nearly impossible to get away from folks so I just hunt where the deer sign is and try to use the pressure to my advantage. A great example was last December. It was Saturday December 21st and a good friend came out to hunt with me. I showed him on the map where to go and dropped him off. We were hunting the same cutover 600 yards apart. Just after daylight he had a spike feeding in front of him and around 9am he shot a 7 point. I even had to shine a guy off us in the dark that parked between us and was walking in.
On December 27th I went back for a morning hunt to the same spot. I walked in and climbed a tree in the dark where I had sent my buddy. When it go daylight I could see the tree he climbed less then 10 yards away from me. At 8am I killed a 6 point. The cool thing about these hunts is that we were 200 yards away from an access road that we both watched people drive up and down on before we shot our bucks. For the most part, hunters drove past this cutover to get to other spots and they weren’t walking through and leaving scent. This spot was the classic overlooked place. So I guess the 2 main takeaways from these hunts is....

1) Don't be afraid to hunt close to access if the deer sign is there
2) vehicle traffic doesn’t necessarily equate to hunting pressure
3) you do not have to hike a mile in to see and kill bucks

Now neither one of these bucks are old mature deer, but that’s not what we were after on these hunts 😀
December 21st buck


December 27th buck


I also want to say thank you to all of y’all who watched the videos and subscribed to Southwood outdoors last season. I didn’t take my video camera turkey hunting but I plan on uploading some new content real soon. If you haven’t checked out the channel, click the Southwood outdoors link at the top of the page and check it out.

I agree 100% that avoiding pressure does not necessarily mean getting further from the road than everyone else. The spot I consistently see the most deer at in Cahaba is so close to the road you can hear the cars driving by. But the only way to get to it is a very tough walk straight up a huge hill that no one else wants to do. I pack in very light and sit on the ground so that I can make it up the hill. I'm usually soaked in sweat by the time I get there, but the nice part is the drag to the truck is all downhill.

People mistake "lack of pressure" to mean that there are several hundred acres where people don't go. Some of the best low pressure spots are a 20 acre briar patch too thick for most humans or the top of a ridge or bottom of a ravine too hard to get to. It's not like deer use google earth to pick the furthest spot from a road to live. They stumble upon small areas they happen to notice have very little human scent and they rarely get disturbed in while bedding. Mature bucks do very little roaming in the daylight outside of the rut so all they need is about 20 or 30 acres where they feel safe to bed and occasionally feed in the daytime.

The biggest buck I've ever seen in over 30 years on the private land I hunt was within 75 yards of the hunting cabin and the highway in a place no one would ever think to hang a tree stand. A dog roaming by jumped it from its bed in the middle of the day. I bet it had lived and bedded right there by that cabin and the highway for years because despite the proximity to hunters, none of us ever actually walked around that 20 acre patch between the cabin and the highway.

Good stuff alclearcut and I agree. When hunting pressured hunting land, public or private, you just have to stay on the buck sign.

An episode of The Hunting Public I just watched showed the guys hunting public land in Ohio that was wrapped up with hundreds of trucks parked everywhere. They kept having hunters bump into their spots so instead of trying to get further from the gate, they went to an overgrown strip mine that had no trees big enough to climb and sat on the ground in their ghillie suits. And of course, they got several mature bucks on camera in an area where they were prepared to have to settle for a 2 yr old due to the high hunting pressure.

And stop telling people how to and where.

I don’t mind helping new hunters, but I’m adamant that people need to do there own leg work and stop looking for handouts. A few years ago I named a wma that I hunted. I was naive and didn’t think it mattered. Unfortunately I had to learn the hard way the lengths people will go to kill a pine goat.

I use to hunt Skyline and Little River WMA alot. One particular place I found was very close to a parking area. I would get there super early, put down my tailgate, prop up 4 wheeler ramps and just walk into the woods. People would pull up and unload and haul rear to catch me. Lol. Killed several bucks right there.

Sure does limit what we can talk about on here

Y’all want to see some real hunting pressure, get in a club in SW AL. That’s hunting pressure!

Wish there was some big public land around here to hunt. Might could find a place to get away then

Great post, I really like finding bucks in overlooked areas. I think those type of areas are becoming more dependable nowadays because with the new mapping technology a lot of guys are going deep to find hard to get to places. Hard to get to places used to be a surefire tactic and still can be because lots of guys are lazy but there are also more people going deep now.

Southwood and I actually met each other in a hard to get to place in the middle of public land. I cyber scouted an area that I had never been to but it looked promising on the maps. I went in with my stand on my back and about the time I got to the area that I wanted to climb I heard a whistle in the exact spot that I wanted to climb. I thought how the heck is there someone already in here? We had both come from different roads and apparently we were both thinking the same thing. I respectively turned around and slipped off in a different direction and made a hunt several hundred yards away from where I heard the whistle. As I was on the way back to the truck after the hunt I heard the whistle again and it was Matt, he had heard me shoot and was coming to offer help in finding my deer. I had made an unsuccessful shot but it was a good hunt on public land because our WMA interaction was respectful and we became friends that morning. He could have gotten mad and showed his butt like some people do on public land but he has more character than that and he understands that sometimes that stuff happens. We both worked hard to get to the area and treated one another with respect, that's the way that it is supposed to work. Southwood is a stand up guy and I will be glad to help him recover an animal from the most remote place anytime.

Agreed

I live near and primarly hunt Choccolocco WMA....it's extremely large (like 50K+ acres) and almost all rugged steep. For years and years it was just about 100% mature open hardwoods, and I would complain that we needed some cutovers. Well the last 10 years I've gotten what I wished for, but it has had "unintended consequences" in regards to hunting pressure....the openness and new roads have given "easier" access to those deep/hard places. So we've also learned recently to not overlook "right by the main road" spots. It has sorta reversed the process....you used to go deep and let the other hunters push the deer from the road to you, now it's stay close and let the deep hunters push the deer back to the roads.

Side note: What happened to me was several of the places I used to walk WAAAYYY into were now accessible from the "back side" due to the new clearcutting, so I'd get up ignorantly early and walk ignorantly far, be up my tree an hour before it even thought about getting daylight, only to have someone walk in on me right at daylight from the back side. It surprised me because folks had never done that before, but the new access "ruined" my old spots.

Not at all. We got lots of politics and religion to discuss.
I don't tell anybody anything about hunting. I always encourage new hunters to take up golf instead.

Best public land buck I have killed here in the Carolinas came about 200 yards from the truck on what I thought was a busted hunt. My intended parking spot had 3 trucks in it before I got there. I found the next pull off down and dropped off on the other side of the road and waited for daylight. The strip of public ground on that side was only about 1/2 a mile wide. Once I eased down a bit in the woods the place was torn up with sign. I sat down and 20 mins later I shot a nice mature 8 point. Never heard the guys parked where I wanted to hunt fire a shot. Finding the close up spots to the road takes a bit of boot leather but can be worth it. Just gotta put in your time. I’ve told numerous guys that wanted to hunt public land the only way to learn is to put in time. Usually takes about a full season to get a grip on any new territory if you don’t have a ton of vacation time to scout in season.

I've seen a picture of a big buck hiding in a storm shelter on a vacant lot, I think the house got blown away or something....Southwood is right tho hunt sign and keep wind and pressure in check..deer know if they being hunted or being passed by a truck or atv...big difference

I grew up hunting the Anniston Army Depot. If you can picture it, it's a grid of roads with "igloos" lining each road about 200 yards apart. Those igloos are large concrete bunkers covered in earth, and over the years they've grown up with brush/weeds on top. Many of those igloos had fairly routine human activity in them (it's where they stored the chemical weapon heads). The deer used them for bedding, and it was just the norm to see a buck's head/rack sticking up from the weeds when you drove by.