Sunday, July 23, 2006
Picking Apart The Tag Alders
If there is any type of growth found in Michigan that rivals the laurel hells of the southern states, it would be tag alders. They don’t grow very high, but the trunks grow in every direction.
They remind me of a maze, but fortunately, most tag alder thickets aren’t too long or wide. A guy could get exhausted if they spent very much time trying to unravel the secrets of an alder thicket.
Let’s face it: whitetails love tag alders. They can walk through a thicket, and run through them at a fast pace. Of course, deer are much more nimble and sure afoot than 99 percent of the human population.
There are a few small alder patches on my land with stands that overlook them. It’s possible to watch a whitetail buck walk into a thicket, bed down, and then leave an hour or so before sun down.
You’d think that a deer in a small alder thicket would be easily seen. That’s not so. Oh, on occasion, if a buck stands, turns around a couple of times, they can occasionally be spotted.
They are difficult to see. Their hair blends in with the color of the bark, and a buck with white or darkened antlers will look just like an alder branch. Alders are perfect bedding areas for deer.
Trying to work inside the alders is a lesson in frustration. Deer will hear, see or smell you before you’ve traveled 20 feet. There is little cover tall enough to get up into on the inside of a tag alder thicket, and that pretty much rules out trying it and spooking the animals.
The trick to hunting these animals that bide their daylight hours in the alders is to spend copious amounts of time studying the area from a good distance. Obviously, it pays to be downwind of the thicket, but most important is knowing the deer are inside.
If your viewing area allows watching all sides of the thicket, and noting when bucks and does move out, the next step is to determine where they go next. Often, they will take the shortest route to other heavy cover en-route to their evening feeding areas.
It may be necessary to move the stand two or three times to zero in on their normal route of travel. Once you’ve pinned it down with 100 percent accuracy, it’s time to determine how they travel through the next patch of cover, which on my land, may be another tag alder thicket.
Their next stop may be at the food site or it may involve even more travel. Deer following a consistent pattern in late September will be vulnerable to an October hunter who plans his hunting area wisely.
Most deer, however, bed within 200 or 300 yards of where they will feed, and it may involve only one move to lock in on their exact travel pattern. But know this: when deer leave a tag alder thicket, they often follow curves or rolls in the terrain for some distance before they come up for a brief look-around. Sometimes a doe will pop up on the closest rise in land, stand and sniff the air while looking around, until she leads the others off on what they consider a safe travel route.
Another thing to keep in mind is that deer will often stand 10-15 feet back in the tag alders, and study the landscape and the trees in the general direction of where they will travel. An old dry doe may stand for 30 minutes without moving, and study the land ahead for danger.
The hunter must be aware of this study period before deer move. It’s important to realize that you may be 300 yards away, but if the terrain favors the deer more than you, they will have areas where they stop to study everything in front of them.
One movement, one stray whiff of human odor, may spoil a week of preseason scouting. This scouting period, in many cases, is every bit as important as the actual hunt. Stay as far away as possible but try to pick an area where other deer won’t wind you.
Who wants to spend hours in preseason scouting only to have a deer sneak up behind you, blow and snort, and frighten off the deer you’d planned to hunt. That would be the final insult.—The Whitetail Wizard