Patience: The Key To More Big-Woods Bucks
By Mark Melotik
Veteran turkey hunters know that one of the keys to success with most every setup is a good dose of patience. A fired-up tom’s booming gobbles might be seemingly shaking the woods all around you, but it might well be another frustrating hour — or two — before he finally struts into sight. And then there is the type of extreme patience needed to wait out a trophy-class bigwoods buck. Spoiler alert: It can be multiple days!
Noted big-woods bowhunter and tree saddle pioneer Brad Kuhnert of Minocqua, Wis., has seen the pattern all too often. Each late winter and early spring, Kuhnert invests dozens of hours scouting huge stretches of public land near his home, hoping to locate the haunts of a few different mature bucks that left their tell-tale rut sign beginning the previous fall.
Kuhnert looks for big rubs and scrapes, and mostly-faint one deer trails. And he knows he’s found a survivor when those trails hold large, fresh tracks. At that point, Kuhnert figures he's likely found a new target for the coming fall.
Kuhnert invests heavily in post- and preseason scouting, and when he finds what he believes is a mature buck’s core area, he evaluates it based on several factors. One of the most critical is the area must allow good access — he must be able to come and go as undetected as possible. Good examples include remote edges of lakes (accessible by boat) or crossing rivers with steep banks (accessible with waders or canoe).
With grade A access confirmed, Kuhnert chooses three to five ambush locations with suitable trees, giving him several options to hunt the location over multiple days during the rut. All of those locations might fit within a 60-yard circle. The goal is to find where the buck will be most vulnerable, and then choose trees suitable for use with his tree saddle system, that will allow hunting these locations in various wind conditions. As an example, Kuhnert might set up just to the west of a promising trail running south to north, and also have an option or two on the trail’s east side.
Kuhnert, who has hunted some of the best deer-rich counties in Illinois and Iowa, sees a very different situation in his native Wisconsin big-woods environment, where deer are much more sparse. There, he says the increasing population of wolves over the past 20 years has drastically changed buck patterns.
“Patience on stand is important most everywhere, but it’s even more critical in the big woods, because those mature bucks are just not as patternable,” Kuhnert said. “I think up here in northern Wisconsin, those mature deer are on a four- or five-day [travel] cycle. There are plenty of times I’ve been on stand four or five days in a row without seeing a single deer. I think survival is a big part of that moving around, and in my opinion a lot of it has to do with the predators. If a buck up here used the same area five days out of seven, the wolves would figure that out pretty quickly.”
Even during the rut, Kuhnert knows deer sightings on stand in his local haunts will be sparse. He’s ready for it.
“Even after going deerless for four or five days running, I’m always thinking, now’s not the time to leave, because I’m that much closer to the next encounter. Especially if I’ve scouted an area extensively, I have the confidence to hang in there. Usually, it pays off.”