It’s best (read safest) for posters to be in treestands.
#Deer drive yahoo drivers#
In fact, during a bow season push, if I’ve volunteered to be a driver, then I don’t mess with carrying my bow.Īs for safety during firearms season: Drivers and posters should shoot only when they can clearly identify their target AND what’s beyond it. Posters will get the majority of shots during a firearms season drive, and all the shots during a bow season drive. The method I’ve described works well during bow or firearms seasons. As deer smell - and eventually hear - the approaching danger, they’ll move to get out of the way, hopefully leaving toward the awaiting posters. If the push is conducted straight downwind, it takes fewer drivers because each person can zigzag and spread his or her human odor throughout the woodlot.
After posters are set up, it’s time for drivers to move into position, either upwind or crosswind of deer.
As whitetails enter woodlot B, they will stop running and begin to feel comfortable again. Yes, deer will flee from woodlot A when pushed by drivers, but that’s okay because posters should be waiting in strategic locations in woodlot B, which might be 200 yards across an alfalfa field. Deer drives work well if you can push deer from one small woodlot, say 20-40 acres, into a nearby woodlot. Here’s what the successful ones had in common. While the majority of my time has been spent waiting to ambush deer from ground blinds and treestands, I have had the chance to plan and execute many deer drives. In the four decades since my first deer hunting experiences with my dad and uncles, I’ve had the opportunity to pursue whitetails from Idaho to Kentucky, and Saskatchewan to Alabama. As I said earlier, we killed a few whitetails (antlerless deer mostly), but I’m sure we simply educated the local herd and caused mature bucks to become even more nocturnal. Looking back at it now, trying to conduct deer drives in our area of northern Minnesota was a low-percentage play. Our hunting area contained massive tamarack swamps and overgrown clear-cuts, which meant whitetails didn’t have to move when pressured. The landscape included no ag fields, no lakes, nothing to funnel deer.Ībundance of thick cover. The only terrain breaks in our big-woods hunting area were a couple of narrow two-track logging roads. My dad and uncles were a bit impatient, which is another way of saying they walked fast when driving, and they didn’t want to sit long when posting. With posters set up on the upwind side of a drive, whitetails immediately knew something was amiss and could begin slipping away undetected, or hide in impenetrable cover.ĭrivers walked too fast. Looking back at those attempts, I can name a few reasons why:ĭriving into the wind. We occasionally killed a deer or two, but the majority of the time deer escaped without a shot fired. Plus, in my experience, whitetails will return to their core range and habits in a day or two, so stand hunting and still hunting the area isn’t off the table forever.Īs a young rifle hunter in northern Minnesota, I was part of many big-woods deer drives planned by my dad and uncles. So why don’t I simply admit to being a deer drive hater? Because they work - and conducted correctly, they can be safe. Others who hate deer drives say safety is a concern. Those who hate them believe the method ruins future opportunities to stand hunt or still hunt a given area for whitetails. Me? I sit firmly on the fence between the two extremes.īesides politics, not many topics can spark as heated a conversation at hunting camp than deer drives. Not only do they hunt across the country, much of it on public land, but they use deer drives/pushes very effectively with minimal drivers and posters.ĭeer drives - some hunters love them, others hate them. One YouTube channel the author highly recommends is The Hunting Public (photo above).
#Deer drive yahoo how to#
YouTube is filled with helpful how-to content about deer hunting from stands, but few hosts do a good job of explaining how to push deer.
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