For late-season firearms success, you gotta make your own luck

If you’ve been hunting Minnesota’s firearms deer season for any length of time, your seasons have probably run the full spectrum of outcomes. You’ve probably had that season during which a buck sauntered by in the first half hour and your season was done. You’ve probably also had a season (or a few) in which you hunted hard and stuck it out with nothing to show for it but tag soup.

If the first act of your 2024 firearms season has been a dud, it might be time to see if you can make your own luck. Although conventional wisdom will tell you to let a buck come to you, sometimes you have to throw the playbook out the window and take matters into your own hands. Sometimes the best medicine for a subpar season is to get up and do something about it. Here’s how you can take the buck by the horns (pun intended) and turn your deer season around.

The basics

Essentially, what we’re talking about is a version of still-hunting. Traditionally, still-hunting is thought of as moving at a snail’s pace through the woods to attempt to find a buck in his bed before he sees you. There’s no doubt this can be an effective method if you have the patience and knowledge of the woods to pull it off.

With that said, if your season has been crappy thus far, it’s likely because you may not be on a good buck or the hot does are in a different neighborhood than your own. Along with that, it takes a very specific set of weather circumstances to successfully still-hunt, and with gun season winding down, waiting probably isn’t an option.

That’s where a modified still-hunt can save your bacon. When I employ this method, I’m still moving slow, but I view it more as deliberate, carefully chosen steps rather than the inching along required for true still-hunting. I’m trying to be quiet, but I’m more or less trying to sound like any other critter in the woods. It’s not the silent, tortoise-like pace of true still-hunting, but it’s also not barreling through the woods like a freight train.

Work the wind

Without exception, it’s vital to keep the wind in your favor. That doesn’t necessarily mean the wind has to hit you square in the face, but any crosswind needs to be blowing toward an area you’ve already covered, and where you don’t expect deer to be bedded.

Deer are interesting critters when it comes to their physical senses. Whereas turkeys will bail no matter how they catch you, deer seem to have varying degrees of trust in their senses. For whatever reason, deer don’t seem to fully trust their sight or hearing, often sticking around to try to gather more information or moving downwind to catch a scent stream.

When it comes to deer and deer hunting, two words I rarely use are “always” or “never.” While there are exceptions to almost every deer rule, deer always trust their noses. If they catch your wind, the game is over. They’re not sticking around to find out anything else. They’re gone.

For that reason, keeping the wind to your advantage in some way is critical for putting the sneak on a buck.

Find the edge

Whether I’m on private land or trying out a brand-new piece of public land, I always try to find the edge when conducting a firearms season still-hunt maneuver. When I say “edge,” I’m talking two different habitat types coming together. Think hardwood ridge meets wetland, a cedar swamp adjacent to a timber harvest, or a narrow strip of woods surrounded by a crop field.

There are dozens of iterations of this, but the point is to find and concentrate on areas where multiple habitat types come together. Virtually everywhere I’ve ever hunted, these spots are deer magnets, and they have a way of concentrating deer activity in ways that lend themselves to this modified form of still-hunting. Focusing your efforts on the edge is the best bet toward maximizing your chances of encountering deer.

Apart from having the highest odds of encountering deer, ecotones where habitat types come together generally have fair to good visibility, which is critical to the hunter. With this method, the odds of you seeing the deer before it knows something’s up aren’t great, so getting eyes on the deer the second it gets up is vital, as the shot opportunity is often fleeting.

Make it count

Having successfully (and unsuccessfully) employed this method in numerous areas, the scenario often unfolds in a similar way regardless of location.

Assuming you’ve worked into the wind and have methodically chosen your movements to sound as natural as possible, what will often happen is that you’ll get a little too close for comfort on a bedded deer, and it’ll get up out of its bed.

Most of the time, you may be within 10 to 50 yards of the deer at this point. In my experience, the deer is often confused, and its reaction ranges from simply standing up and looking around to bounding maybe 20 yards and stopping, at which point it’ll look back and try to figure out what got so close. Occasionally, it will head for the hills, but if you’ve done everything right up until that point, generally it isn’t going to move far.

Decision-making needs to happen quickly when hunting this way. You need to be ready for a deer to stand at any moment. Once you’ve done this a time or two, you might find that you fall into a sort of autopilot mode. Your steps are deliberate, and you’re hyper-aware of everything in your immediate vicinity.

When a deer gets up, you need to be ready to shoot in a matter of seconds. It all happens extremely fast, but getting a look at the deer and deciding if it’s one you want to kill has to occur in a couple of seconds at most, and within a second after making that decision, you need to be aiming.

Most often, there is a moment or two when the deer will either be standing and looking back or slowly walking. It’s a fleeting time window, but it’s critical to get your shot when your odds of connecting are highest.

Depending on the cover type, sometimes it will be open enough that you catch the deer at a distance (maybe 70 to 100 yards), and you’ll be able to assess the situation. If the deer is already looking at you, the worst thing you can do is stop and pull up your binos. Most often, if a deer doesn’t think you can see it, it won’t move.

As soon as you exhibit physical signs of going into “hunt mode,” it’s not sticking around. You can see the same thing on open fields when a coyote is simply traveling from one point to another. Yes, the deer know it’s there and are watching it intently, but unless that coyote starts acting like it’s going to give chase, those deer will most likely stay put.

If you’re in this situation, the best thing you can do is to slow down even more, but keep slowly moving to the nearest tree or any type of cover you can get behind to assess the deer. This is also your best bet to get a shot if it’s a deer you want to harvest.

Phone a friend

This is easily my favorite and most successful way of employing an active still-hunting strategy. If you have a buddy you’re hunting with, have him walk into the wind on the upwind side of suspected bedding cover and stay at least 200 to 300 yards in front of you. At that point, start walking along the downwind side of the cover.

It’s critical that both hunters are walking at the same slow, methodical pace. There’s no medal for fastest walker – the point is to sound natural and take your time. This ensures the highest odds that one or both hunters will get a shot if any deer are in the vicinity.

What will often happen is one of two things: Either the deer will get up near the first hunter (similar to how I described earlier) and that hunter may get a shot, or the first hunter will “wind bump” any bedded deer, which are then likely to try sneaking out the back door where the second hunter is bringing up the rear. You may have heard similar methods referred to as a “bump and dump” style of hunting.

I like to do this through numerous patches of cover and switch off being the lead walker with my hunting partner. This can be a successful and fun way to get a deer on the ground.

Whether you’re hunting public land or private, with a friend or alone, safety is critical to a successful and fun hunt. Though blaze orange is already required during gun season, make sure it’s actually visible to other hunters. If you’re wearing a pack, make sure it has a large patch of blaze orange on it somewhere. Know at all times where your partner is walking and try to maintain lines of sight with each other if at all possible. If you’re on public land, keeping blaze orange visible to any hunters you aren’t aware of is always a good idea.

With the clock winding down on firearms season, give this method a try if you’re struggling and willing to go for broke. While this method doesn’t work every time, it can boost your odds if you’re struggling to even see deer while hunting out of your regular stand. If the stars align, you or your friend might just end up dragging out the buck of a lifetime.