Pine thickets are the best habitats for deer because they get adequate cover for camouflaging. If you want to experience hunting of deer, the Pin thickets are the best location for you. The following information will make your hunting experience more productive and memorable.
Pine Thickets and Deer
Pine thickets are evergreen and thus give protective coverage to deer. Deer take pine needles and leaves as their food in day time. Just before dusk, they go to nearby agricultural areas or hardwood groves where briers and blackberries grown.
Methods of hunting
For hunting, you can use any of the weapons such as rifles, 12 bore guns, slug-loaded shot-guns or even Bow and arrow. You can hunt from a tree stand in small clearings within the spines and after taking proper ambush, shoot deer at a distance of 10 to 20 yards. For locating deer, you can go along the borders of the thicket, any gap, roads or isolated hardwoods.
Significance of Scent
Because of the thick growth of the pine thickets, sight is obstructed, both for the hunter and deer. Therefore, deer use scent for detecting physical presence of any hunter. Similarly, hunters make use of the pine-based cover scents for locating the location of deer. In order to deceive deer, when you enter any pine thicket, crush some young pine needles in your palms and rub the same on your boots, clothes and hands. It will be better, if you keep your hunting clothes inside a sealed plastic bag along with some green pine needles.
Shooting Lanes
In order to get clear visibility and shooting lanes, you should clip or trim the surrounding vegetation. You can select your shooting lanes by determining the direction from which the deer is likely to come towards you. But you should take care to see that the area has a natural look. For that, you should trim the minimum possible vegetation. It is essential that you obtain permission from the land owner for cutting or trimming of vegetation.
Manipulating the habitat
If you have land of your own, you can make changes to the pine thicket so as to be appealing to the deer. You can create game trails with dimensions of 5 feet height and 4 feet width that would provide easy travel routes through the thickets. Deer can penetrate through dense vegetation; yet, give preference to travel through easier trekking provided by trail. For locating deer, you should route the trails from the resource patch to denser areas where the deer feed. AS an alternative, you can clear-cut the patches for the sunlight to penetrate in to the ground that would facilitate growing of tender plants, relished most by the deer.
For getting a hunting license, you need to be over the age of twelve. Before obtaining a hunting license, you have to pass in a sportsman education course. However, there are certain categories of people for whom hunting license may not be required. They are active-duty military personnel, Native American tribes, veterans with disability and full-time non-resident students. A resident landowner solely engaged in farming that may include the lessees and their immediate families such as spouse and children are exempted for getting license for small games.
Photo Credit: https://montana-wild.com/tag/northwest/
There are number of Places for Deer Hunting. You can choose any of the following suitable places for deer hunting.
- Kentucky is the bluegrass all throughout the seasons with large, healthy and balanced herds. The state has large public land and the regulation for hunting is quite friendly.
- Indiana offers the most successful hunting experience, with 0.084% chance of taking a Booner and is the best location for hunting deer
- Missouri has good areas of public land that gives a statistics of 8.3 hunters per square mile. The 38% of buck harvest belongs to the age group of 3 ½ years
- Illinois has a good harvest of antlers; almost 100,000 annually. It has good amount of public land suitable for hunting.
- Kansas offers the third best chance for hunting the monster bucks
- Iowa offers a 0.078% chance of harvesting a Booner
- Mississippi offers a good number of bucks aged 3 ½ years
- Texas has good harvest of bucks aged 3 ½ years
- South Carolina has a buck density of 3.06 bucks per square mile