hunting the Staging areas

Share your deer hunting knowledge, give tips on how to hunt deer. Ask any questions you may have about deer hunting.
Forum rules
Please stick to deer hunting tips and tactics in this forum.
Post Reply
Message
Author
jaydee2trad
Posts: 1173
Joined: Mon Jun 01, 2020 12:28 pm

hunting the Staging areas

#1 Post by jaydee2trad »

I hunted several management areas in my area for years and I mainly have been a meat hunter. For my bowhunting, as everyone knows, I needed to have pretty close shots. Early season when the acorns are dropping (if you are lucky enough to have oaks), it was quite simple, you hunted the acorns. but in other areas, oaks were hard to come by because the land was being managed for pines only. So finding a decent food source could be very challenging. Since the deer browse on so many small things that are scattered far and wide, you almost had to locate a great honeysuckle site. my grandfather had showed me years ago that when you fertilized any food source like the honey suckle or oak trees, the deer can tell the difference and hit them very hard first. So I did this a lot to get the deer to hit my spots better than others. But in some areas, the food source was a lot harder and so it became a different approach. I could find the deer trails where they crossed the dirt roads and learned about staging areas. A lot of the deer would get withing 10 to 30 yards of a road crossing and "stage" or stand around for some time as they checked the road out for danger before committing themselves to the open crossing. Now they can use these spots at any time but right before dark was a pretty good time to hunt them. I prefered not to hunt until dark because it usually meant a deer recovery or attempt of so after dark. in the thickets of the pine plantations, it is usually a blackberry/ briar mess nightmare. There is none of that leaving it over night and come back tomorrow thing here. No, there are just too many predators here, especially the coyotes. So I would look for sign on both sides of the road to find the best possible ambush spots or trees. Then it became a wind thing and I tried very hard to have two different stands for the winds. The staging areas usually have quite a bit of deer droppings as they stand around and kill time before crossing so they are easy to find. Once the rut kicks in, the bucks tend to break all of the rules but they still will use the trails. A staging area can give the bowhunter not only the opportunity for a shot but but a still shot as they stand around for a few minutes. 8-)

User avatar
Elkman
Site Admin
Posts: 1409
Joined: Fri Mar 11, 2011 10:11 pm

Re: hunting the Staging areas

#2 Post by Elkman »

Good info, thanks for sharing!
Calling Elk - Awesome! !€

Post Reply

Return to “Deer hunting tips and tactics”