Giving up an afternoon's hunt is a sacrifice few hunters are willing to make. However, the rewards can be well worth it. Perhaps no individual realizes this better than Pat Reeve, a whitetail hunter who hunts widely and is co-host of North American Whitetail TV.

"It really is hard to spend a hunting day watching deer," Pat admitted. "Most of my hunts are about five days long. Spending the first day or two watching instead of hunting used to eat at me, but nothing can tell you where to put a stand better than the deer themselves. When I see a mature buck, the guesswork of if there is one in the area is removed. Then, just by watching what the buck is doing, he typically shows me where to put a stand."

On the surface, it may seem ludicrous to sacrifice 20-percent or more of a trip on throw-away hunts. Sure, there's a chance that a big boy may either saunter by or be coaxed into range through calling, but the odds are low. When one considers that Pat has harvested 17 trophy-caliber deer in the past two seasons alone, many he credits to making this sacrifice, it becomes easy to see its value.

MAPS OF SIGN
Finally, plugging deer sign into a GPS unit and transferring it to a clear film overlaying a map of the property is another seldom used scouting tool that can pay off. During spring scouting trips, the vast majority of the previous fall's sign is clearly laid out. Plotting trails, bedding areas, food sources, scrapes and rubs enables the hunter to more accurately tie everything together.

In addition to getting a hunter where he's going, GPS units work well for noting specific locations of sign. Pooling this information and matching it to maps can help to unravel deer patterns in a hunting area.

With the ability to more clearly see the big picture, it becomes simpler to piece together sign and understand why it was left. In turn, that leads to more effective strategies for intercepting the daylight movements of mature bucks.

These maps can also be used as a guide for how changing food sources will affect movement patterns. By creating an overlay for each year's sign, in time, all of the more common combinations of food sources will be documented. Once that occurs, when the north field is planted in corn, the east in beans and south in alfalfa, on a year of poor acorn production, all one must do is flip back to the overlay of previous years that match this combination and see how the deer reacted.

When combined with hunting logs, this becomes even more beneficial. Simply by jotting notes on weather conditions, moon phase and observations from the stand each trip out; we build a database of information to draw from. Using the maps of sign and food sources along with the log, removes much of the guesswork about which stands provides the greatest odds of success in a given season.

CONCLUSION
With the volume of information available to today's deer hunters, tools for scouting and strategy have been laid before us like never before. With these tools and techniques comes the tendency to believe that there is one right way of doing things. Some of the topics covered in this piece definitely fall outside the norm. However, in the right situation they just may open the door to filling a tag with a trophy buck. They've worked for me more than once.