Figuring Out New Property

I picked up a new lease this year. It is mostly pines and some deep hardwood drains. Not much opportunity for green fields so will mainly be hunting travel corridors. I am having a tough time figuring out where to put stands, since it all looks the same. I have a couple areas that I already put stands on, but need a little advice on what to look for. Their trails are fairly hard to spot in the pines. Any suggestions??

If there are any white oaks in the draws, make sure you clean out around them so you can hang a stand when/if they start dropping.

Outside of that, I would look for trails leading across the draws connecting the pine plantations. I bet you find a buck traveling those during the rut.

N2,
These are DEEP and pretty steep draws(hills of North Tuscaloosa county), do they normally go up and down those hills? I always looked for saddles. Thought deer wanted the easy way to move around

A deer will climb a dang near shear rock bluff here in my neck of the woods

Ha! Well I know if one falls down in one of those gullies, it's gonna be a mother of a drag to get him out

Look on Google earth at the properties around you to see were the deer will have to go for food in the winter. You don't have any food plots but you may have a farm close enough for the deer to travel to at night or a neighbor with large green fields. Concentrate your scouting on the side of your property closest to the food source and set your stand on these trails.

Getting the most recent aerial photo and a good topo map would be my first step. Map out the roads, food sources and anything else you note.

I used to hunt that area. The deer would walk bout halfway down the sides of the bluffs. It is amazing at how steep some of those things were and they would have a deer trail walking parallel on them.

They may not walk down them, if they are extremely deep. I would, at least, side hill them checking for trails. I'd, also, look at the head of those draws before it starts to get deep. There may be a good pinch point in there.

Walk down in the drains and find the creeks or wet weather runoff ditches., They have to cross somewhere and once you find where they cross you can walk the trails going up the hill and decide the best stand placement. Find a good crossing and work from there.

are there gas wells on the propoerty?

Oh sure, I have one gas well on the property and a couple just off the property

how do the gas wells affect movement?

Hunt the roads if they cut through the thick pines. We shoot deer crossing roads at my camp every year.

Give Caltopo.com a look. Free topo website where you can add shaded relief and aerial photos for free and print from computer. What I do when mapping out new properties is get on my atv with handheld garmin and ride all of the road systems mapping it out(it creates a track). import that track of data from gps to caltopo website and I can get a good look at where I was and how close I am to certain terrain changes or funnels that would funnel deer. you can stack layers with this website. maybe this will help..it has helped me find some of my better stands.

Corn. Then you can see if there are many around

Congrats. Ain't nothing like having new ground to figure out. That is fun as heck. Hunting the same ground year after year may produce, but once you have it figured out, it doesn't provide as much of a challenge.

I think that's good advice.

Thank you for that site. Been looking for something like that for awhile.