In 1960, I began studying habits and behavior of wild deer in a portion of Minnesota’s Arrowhead Region to improve my odds of taking older bucks, and later to improve the odds of my children to take mature bucks as well during their first years of bucks-only hunting. That was the year I nailed my first platform between two evergreen trees, six feet above the ground, hoping it would make it easier to observe yet unknown activities of unsuspecting deer.

Within an hour of standing on that platform the first time, a mature doe accompanied by a yearling buck, a yearling doe and a fawn walked toward me on an adjacent deer trail and halted to feed on tall grass directly beneath my platform. I remained as motionless as possible. After about ten minutes of this, those deer then laid down about 15 feet away and began chewing their cuds.

Shortly after, I heard something else approaching on the deer trail behind me. Again, not daring to move, I waited. Soon, 10-point antlers appeared below. They were so near that I could have reached out and touched them. They were soon followed by the body of an enormous buck, the kind I had often dreamt of taking during the previous 15years, but never saw.

After halting a minute or two to stare at the bedded deer, the buck continued walking past along that trail, finally disappearing from sight.

A short time later, the doe and her young stood up and followed the buck. When finally able to begin breathing normally again, I felt overjoyed by what I had just discovered: an extraordinarily effective means of viewing normal habits and behavior of wild unsuspecting whitetails, and an extraordinarily effective means of hunting older, very elusive bucks.

During following hunting seasons, my children and I began regularly taking two or more trophy-class bucks per hunting season. We attributed this to our improved elevated stands placed near dominant breeding buck ground scrape sites and bedding areas.

Little by little, however, older bucks in my study/hunting area were becoming wise about our growing number of permanent stands (legal then). Identifying tracks in snow revealed that many were making wide detours around our new and old stands.

In 1985 and 1986, I introduced portable chain-on tree stands with plywood platforms and a doe-in-heat buck lure in my hunting/study area. At first, antlered bucks of all ages were hopelessly vulnerable to both, making it possible to take older bucks without knowing anything about them. All I had to do was to install a portable tree stand in practically any tree, and place containers of cotton soaked with doe-in-heat urine containing pheromone on the ground around them. Soon, I’d see antlered bucks sniffing those containers.

By 1989, however, many of my older study area bucks were already ignoring the same buck lure scent and wildly detouring or fleeing from elevated stands where such buck lure scents were being used by a hunter.

After four or more years of being hunted by almost all hunters using treestands and buck lure scents was separating white-tailed bucks four or more years of age into two groups: 1) those that were cunning and intelligent enough to survive, and thereafter remember how to successfully identify and avoid hunters using these hunting aids each time they were encountered during following hunting seasons; and 2) those that were not cunning and intelligent enough, which, of course didn’t survive.

By doing this, we were creating a rapidly growing number of “super bucks” that could not be taken by hunters using these hunting aids.

In 1990, older white-tailed bucks living in my new study/hunting area near the Canadian border countered everything my sons and I used or did until the final day of that hunting season. That morning, I tried something new: sitting where well-hidden on a backpacked stool at ground level next to a browse area never hunted before, using a grunt call for the first time—all of which enabled me to take a dominant breeding buck accompanying a doe in heat at 7 a.m.

Yes, we continued to take older bucks by doing all of the same things for a number of years, but by 2008, we were no longer able to successfully use brush blinds, blinds stuffed with fresh cut evergreen boughs, treestands and ground-level stand sites that lacked adequate concealment; stand sites with obvious man-made shooting lanes; stand sites loaded with our trail scents; almost all stand sites that had been used before; doe-in-heat buck lures; cover scents; grunt calls; rattling antlers; mineral blocks; and ATVs or snowmobiles, because our older bucks were deliberately avoiding us. In West Virginia, where I spent winter months studying whitetails in 1985, older bucks and many older does were completely ignoring corn feeders.

In 2000, older bucks were completely ignoring a variety of food plots in an area I was asked to evaluate in northern Wisconsin. All of this meant, of course, that older surviving white-tailed bucks are quick learners.

Because my sons and I so often end up stand hunting at sites before big bucks have even decided to go there, as soon as they realized we were again hunting them each November—tipped off by a sighting, sounds and/or our airborne or trail scents—several big, notoriously-clever bucks in our study/hunting area actually began taking time to search for us at our current new stand locations near feeding areas, between one hour before first light and sunrise, before they could feel safe moving about and feeding in the area.

Others repeatedly walked on my footprints in snow after I headed to camp for lunch. To have any chance of successfully hunting bucks doing such things, we learned we had to make unexpected changes in how and where we hunted them, every day and every year.

Our number-one and most productive of many changes we made was never using a stand site more than once, usually no more than one half-day—even one that was previously productive. This made it necessary for older bucks that routinely searched for us to search for us every half-day, improving our odds of spotting some before they spotted us.

After years of trying to outfox such bucks, it became our goal to take older bucks the first time we hunted them to avoid having to repeatedly match wits with them. This made us fussier and fussier about our stand sites, now using 100 percent natural (unaltered) blinds on the ground or in trees with a solid background; and departing from newly selected stand sites as quickly possible (to minimize trail scents) 2 to 3 weeks before a hunting season begins; and never returning to them for any reason until the hunting season begins.

To further reduce our identifying trail scents, we greatly minimize trails we use (mostly deer trails)—our cruise trails and stand site approach trails only—during hunting seasons, which helps to keep whitetails in our hunting area from abandoning their home ranges and/or becoming nocturnal, in turn greatly improving our odds of taking mature bucks. We even spend extra time at rifle ranges each year to ensure we can continue to drop bucks in their tracks, because spreading trail scents throughout our hunting area while tracking wounded, greatly alarmed deer. This is highly destructive to subsequent hunting.

There’s more to know, of course, but you now know why I can’t help but be very impressed by how much our mature white-tailed bucks have changed over the decades.

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