Re: Hunting the timber or cut blocks - how do you choose?
I will hunt older cut blocks for mulies, especially toward the end of the day where i like to sit and wait for an hour or two until the light fades to see what comes out
For blacktails, i find most of them are hunted pretty heavily already so i just hunt the timber.
I mind the wind and i try to move as quiet as possible and if i break a branch i'll just stop for a while. Remember, moving slow and being quiet isn't always about being stealthy ..... the less noise you make, the easier it is for you to hear OTHER noise around you. And when you're in thick blacktail timber you CAN hear them quite well, actually .... but not over your own noise that you're making.
Having said that, they almost always spot me first. They're just good at spotting predators. it's their job in order to survive. However, if you remain neutral and make no sudden movements, it is possible they won't be spooked and will just continue on their way. I have a video of a doe and yearling on my Instagram that passes by at 15 yards and I have time to get out my cell phone and start recording and she doesn't spook.
The only times i've been able to see them close undetected is while still hunting, when they come to you. A lot of people find still hunting boring .... but try it! You might be surprised what you see in just 45mins of sitting down overlooking a relatively open section of timber. They whould be moving around pretty good during the day Mid November onwards.
Re: Hunting the timber or cut blocks - how do you choose?
Something I've been thinking about lately is sense of time. As Caddisguy mentioned above; a deer might stand still for an hour making sure everything is safe. They don't have schedules or clocks and have all the time in the world to look, listen and smell the world around them to ensure their safety. As humans, we are used to a different pace, in our normal lives, we get up, race against the clock to have breakfast, rush to get to work, something always has to be urgently done at work, we lose our patience if we're delayed for a minute in traffic, etc. etc., you know what I mean.
Then suddenly we have two or three days off to go hunting, we rush home from work, madly pack up and maybe even take off Friday night, drive 3 or more hours to the spot, sleep poorly in the cab or canopy of the truck, force ourselves to get up an hour before daybreak, rush noisily off into the bush and then...attempt to adapt to the pace of the animals we're after.
Meanwhile the buck we're after is taking one step, stopping, looking, listening, maybe taking a bite of something, then waiting some more before taking another step. Who is going to see whom first?
Re: Hunting the timber or cut blocks - how do you choose?
Lots of good advise above - Over the last 10 years I have observed deer behaviour change a lot and I relate it all back to wolves moving in.
Where they use to freely walk in the cutblocks, they now stand at the edge and poke their noses out and then retreat back in. My sock softly brushed against the stump I was sitting on and the deer 150 metres away fled - they were comfortably eating before. I had walked in in wool socks, to a remote cut 2hrs before daylight.
Feeling you are a ninja can depend on how pressured the deer are (humans/wolves)
I am setting up a lot more in the timber this year for sure, but am finding some of my shooting lanes hard to move to without deer spotting the movement.