Dr. Ken Nordberg shares his most productive method for stand hunting mature bucks.

During my first years of hunting mature bucks near the Ontario border, I created a hunting method that I named “the gentle nudge.” It proved that human airborne odors spreading downwind from a stationary stand hunter’s body can be used to influence mature bucks within 100 yards downwind to travel without urgency up to 200 yards downwind or more toward an undetected stand hunter. That’s also something that older bucks stubbornly refuse to do when aggressively driven downwind by hunters making drives.

Since then, beginning in 1990, with the help of my three sons, other hunting partners and the pack of gray wolves that inhabited the100-plus-square-mile area surrounding my new deer/wolf study/hunting area, we developed six new stand hunting methods. Another method made use of human odors spreading downwind from several stationary stand hunters to move bucks toward several downwind stand hunters (large-group stand hunting).

After worsening global warming and our long-protected wolves finally reduced our deer numbers to three per square mile and which became desperately hungry, and then hunting deer day and night, our surviving does with young made some startling changes in habits and range utilization beginning in 2018. They formed small herds, abandoned their long-traditional home ranges, became fully nocturnal and changed feeding and bedding areas daily throughout areas as large as two square miles.

Since then, wolves have been unable to further reduce their numbers, and during the past two hunting seasons, we eleven Nordbergs, who normally took four mature bucks per year during the previous 30 years (our self-imposed limit), could only take one per year. Thus, we began a new series of studies to determine what our deer were now doing, and to develop new hunting methods to take mature whitetails, additionally being made increasingly nocturnal and more difficult to hunt by worsening global warming.

To successfully hunt these deer, it has been necessary to improve stand site concealment annually. Throughout the past 30 years, we have only managed to create three stand sites that remained productive for taking such bucks for longer than two years. Our most productive mature buck stand sites to date are those that provide excellent, unaltered, natural concealment with a solid background (on the ground or in a tree) never used before.

Opportunistic stand hunting is the most productive of mature buck stand hunting methods ever created by my three sons and I, thanks to the ruse and cruise trails our gray wolves taught us to use. Its greater productiveness is attributable to taking quick and skillful advantage of fresh deer signs made by one or more mature walking (unalarmed) bucks at two or more new locations discovered midday daily, that reveal vicinities where these deer are active right now and will therefore be likely will be active again later that day and the following morning (if not alarmed).

These discoveries are made possible without alarming deer by using the “wolf ruse”—nonstop walking with our heads pointed straight ahead—to hike along a large circular series of connecting deer trails designated for this purpose in each square mile we hunt (cruise trails) between 11 am and noon daily beginning on day three. This trail also serves as a main trail to branching stand site approach trails. During hunting seasons, cruise trails and stand site approach trails are the only trails we use, thus allowing our deer to live freely throughout most of their separate home ranges.

During the first three days of a hunting season, we generally stand hunt at two different elevated or ground level sites daily, selected and prepared two weeks before the hunting season begins. Beginning on day three, we each stand hunt at two different ground level sites selected daily via mid-hunt cruising, mostly using backpacked stools at natural ground level blinds to hunt near trails or sites where mature bucks are currently active throughout the rest of the hunting season. Generally, using these trails only during hunting seasons eliminates range abandonment by whitetails and keeps them doing predictable things at predictable sites during predictable hours, greatly improving our odds for taking mature bucks every day of a hunting season.

It generally takes 1 to 2 years to set up this kind of hunting in a square mile, but once done, it’s an amazingly successful way to hunt older bucks and other deer, year after year. Though it was initially designed by me to be used by single hunters hunting alone in different square miles, it recently occurred to me that it could also be great for multi-hunter stand hunting. Imagine 6 to 8 hunters sitting about 100 yards apart at choice sites, two half-days or all day, in one portion of a square-mile, with their airborne scents influencing downwind nocturnal deer to move toward other stand hunters, day after day, in different portions of the same or different square miles. This will force otherwise stubbornly nocturnal deer to move about and be seen during legal shooting hours without alarming them enough to make them abandon their ranges for the rest of a hunting season.

Even seasoned hunters can learn new methods to make their hunt more successful. Find more in the fall issues of MidWest Outdoors, available by subscribing on our website.