Tips

G/L this year.

I love to hunt funnels and prefer a funnel over any other stand location. If you can hunt a funnel, hunt it.

Stay away from using calls such as grunts, rattlling horns, etc. until you've practiced and feel you can emulate the calls as intended. If you go out and "blindly" make the calls you'll get frustrated that you aren't getting a response. Go to youtube and look up deer calls. Field and Stream magazine posted several videos of the Deer Doctor(Peter Fiducciou, I believe) performing calls. I thought they were pretty educational and they helped me tweek my calling.

I'm not sure that I would still hunt, or walk through the woods as you stated you may do unless the leaves are wet and there aren't many sticks on the forrest floor. If the leaves are dry or there are a lot of sticks, the deer will hear you comming before you see them and scatter. The exception to this would be if you had a drive organized.

My last tip would be to have fun, journal your hunt, and take pictures of your kill so that you may share them with friends and family present and future.

Good luck my brother.

I agree with rockman on this one. If you're in a stand, stay there until legal shooting hours are done. I've shot more deer in the last hour on a stand in the evening than any other time. The second most productive time is the first hour after legal shooting hours (30 minutes before sunup and 30 minutes after sunup in most places).

A more important tip (and one you didn't ask for) is practice shooting. I don't mean at the range from a bench. I mean from all different positions from different places. If you have a place to do it, practice shooting from a deer stand. Set up targets at different distances and in different locations from far left to far right. Once you get good at that, learn to shoot with your off hand and practice with that. All the hunting in the world won't help you if you see that monster buck and then can't get a shot at him, or worse, miss because he snuck past on the wrong side.

I normally shoot left handed but just this last weekend I had to switch from left to right in order to get a clean shot at a deer. Which reminds me... I need to oil that front sling swivel... dang, squeaking piece of....


But then...
Opinions vary...
And that's just mine...

Hunt well, hunt safe.