Three key items that can make a significant difference when hunting public land animals
When hunting out West, it is easy to get overwhelmed by looking at the process holistically. You have to find a state, a unit; then draw a tag, find a specific area to hunt, eventually find a legal animal, and get close enough to it! It seems like a lot because it is! That does not mean that it is overly complicated if you break it down into steps. GOHUNT's research tools, like Filtering and GOHUNT Maps, can help you plan your state, unit, and area within the unit.
Then you have to get there and hunt. At that point, you need to go back to your hunting roots and look for the basics. This means paying attention to small details that can help you in your search of animals that are living in large tracts of public land. Here are some of the most important details that can make a significant difference when hunting big game animals.
The western mountains have a vast arid habitat that has the potential to support a large number of animals. These are often sage-covered hillsides with some evergreen timber and miles and miles of roadless terrain. The one thing that can separate a good arid habitat from a bad habitat is access to clean drinking water for the animals that live there. This is why the first small detail that I always look for is access to water. In some extremely dry climates, such as Arizona, Utah, or New Mexico, this clean drinking water may come from stock tanks placed there for wild animals or livestock. In other parts of the western mountains, these water holes might be spring-fed or mountain runoff. As I am hiking around, I am looking for water sources. If an area lacks water, it will not have animals, so I will find a different area.
As I hunt an area, I am constantly trying to assess the terrain and habitat for that year and for years to come. This has me examining the ground and habitat for sign and the age of that sign. For example, when I come across elk droppings, I constantly squish them and try to determine their age. If they are hard and crusty, then I assume they are aged, but an animal was here in the past. If they are squishy, I can assume somewhat recent activity. As I move through the timber patches at higher elevations, I constantly look for beds or rubs on trees. That gives me good insight into where elk or deer are bedding and whether there are bulls in that area during the early season. This information is then mentally stored before being added to GOHUNT Maps as a pin for future reference. These might seem like small details; however, year after year, you can identify a pattern and increase your success rate.
Hunting pressure is another detail that I pay very close attention to, as well as hunter positioning. This starts from the trailhead when I arrive at a certain hunting spot. I like to note how many rigs are there during the different time of year that I am hunting that spot. This is usually a good indication of which week is the most popular and could be avoided in the future. As I am hunting, I also pay attention to where I see hunters at and what they are doing. I have often observed that the majority of hunters come up the valleys of different drainages and have found success by hunting the ridges of the same drainages. They seem to push animals up high, where I am waiting to make a move on them. Hunting pressure can be dissected, and we can learn from the hunting habits of other people. I have also noticed a difference in hunting habits between states. Some states have gung-ho hunters willing to go deep, while others have a lot of road hunters who do not venture far from their trucks. Understanding the way people are hunting — and then hunting differently — can help you find success while the majority of hunters are struggling to find animals.
Although there are many details that can help improve your success rates, these are just three that I pay the most attention to. Paying attention to small details could make the difference in your hunt and success in an individual year, but it will make you consistently more successful throughout your life.
We can use these details to hypothesize and try to understand animal activity in a given area. Paying attention to details is an essential part of hunting and shouldn’t be overlooked.
