Dr. Ken Nordberg explains how to find perfectly fine, mature bucks that have managed to elude us much closer to camp.

Though now 84 years of age and becoming reluctant to hunt whitetails distant from camp, as has long been my custom, by no means am I planning to let up on keeping my odds as promising as possible to take a mature buck this fall. In fact, what I am planning to do this year, which I’m certain you have never heard of before, can be quite rewarding.

Staring at internet satellite maps of my whitetail study/hunting area, I finally recognized the fact that my hunting partners and I have been regularly passing through areas frequented by mature bucks without any intention of hunting them, simply because we had bigger bucks in mind that lived in more distant ranges.

Right now, I know of three of such bucks. Though I have never seen the largest of them, I know it is now a 5 1/2-year-old, making it a probable 10-pointer in its prime, weighing about 300 pounds (not an uncommon weight for bucks of this age in the region I hunt). This buck will be my first choice to hunt this year.

One of the strange things about routinely ignored deer is some adapt to our passages through their home ranges in a way that might be considered very strange, especially for a mature buck. This adaptation is made evident by a specific deer sign: fresh mature-buck-sized tracks (in snow) made by a deer that walked (and was therefore unalarmed) a significant distance on footprints of a hunter made 1 to 4 hours earlier.

The last buck I tagged that did this had walked 3 to 4 four times a day on tracks I made on a 100-yard-long section of a trail (leading to a series of more distant stand sites) three days in a row before I finally decided to take advantage of its obvious extreme vulnerability to skilled stand hunting. About three hours later, it was centered in my scope 100 yards north of where it had been walking on my tracks.

Numbers of deer discovered doing this has a lot t do with the way you hunt. If you prefer to make drives or still-hunt, wandering randomly, you won’t find many, if any. Such hoof prints are most frequently found by stand hunters who take the precaution of avoiding any display of hunting behavior while hiking to and from stand sites.

To make this adaptation occur, deer along your stand trails must become convinced you are harmless and unlikely to stray from your accustomed path. If you are only seen or heard moving steadily past (nonstop) at a moderate pace along a completely predictable path with your point straight ahead, acting as if only interested in getting to some distant destination fairly quickly, you will soon be considered “harmless” by passed deer 2 1/2 years of age or older.

The problem is, that buck knows exactly how and where to identify you via sight, hearing and/or smell without your knowledge each and every time you enter the vicinity in which it has been walking on your tracks. Whatever time you normally pass through the area, it will wait for you to appear, using all its senses to determine whether or not you are indeed that same harmless human it can trust to pass through without threat. If it discovers you (or someone else) doing something different, approaching from the same or a different direction but then halting and not continuing past, for example, it will become alarmed and abandon the vicinity quickly, usually silently without your knowledge. After that, you will find no more of its tracks on yours during that hunting season.

To successfully hunt the largest of these three bucks later this fall, I have some important scouting and precautions to take care of first. Because I know I will probably alarm that buck to some degree while doing this, these tasks must be completed by the middle of October to ensure the buck will be back in its range, doing predictable things on opening morning.

I want at least two ground level stand sites, plus approach trails—existing deer trails cleared of dead branches for silent passage and marked with fluorescent tacks for unerring travel in darkness. They must be separate from the trail the buck and four of my hunting partners and I have been regularly sharing in past years. As has been their custom, it will be traveled by two of my sons and their sons hurrying to distant stand sites 30 or more minutes before first light next opening morning—setting up that buck. My approach trails must be widely separated from that trail and enable me to approach silently and unseen and sit downwind or crosswind of where I expect the buck to appear on that trail while the wind is blowing from one of our most prevalent wind directions—southeast to southwest or southwest to northwest.

My ground-level stand sites must provide me with excellent natural cover and require very little or no preparation—nothing new and obvious there to attract the attention of that buck. I will install no unneeded trail cams or mock scrapes in this area, getting my preparations done quickly with minimal spreading of my trail scents (which will fade away in four days) and not return until opening morning. When my sons and grandsons return to camp for lunch that day, I hope to have everything in readiness for them to drag my 10-pointer to camp.

There’s more than one way to hunt whitetails. Learn some new methods in the fall issues of MidWest Outdoors, available the first full week of each month at the newsstand or by subscribing on our website