Excalibur Hunting Tips: Setting Up Your Treestand and Blinds

Where to set up a tree stand or a ground blind? There's probably a million answers and not a lot of them are wrong. But there's certain things we look for when we head onto a property that gives us a good starting point. What we love to look for is pinch points, natural saddles, bowls and channels. Places that those deer are going to like to congregate. So when we go to a property we'll walk, we'll try to find where the heaviest deer sign is and when we find an area that has the heaviest deer sign, then we'll start looking within that area for a nice pinch point or a natural bowl. Somewhere that we can get a good vantage point and somewhere we can get a good stand set up we've got something behind us. And behind us is very important. Almost all of our stands are set up with some kind of a barrier behind us. Whether it's an open field, heavy brush that the deer don't like or a ridge or a valley. Somewhere that the deer are going to not want to travel that makes them uncomfortable is going to try to keep them from swinging down into our trail. In the early season more often than not this is on a field edge. So on that field edge where the deer are approaching that field, we'll look for little bowls and little channels leading to that field where the deer might stage up. And a staging area is where those deer like to come to and then sit and purvey the field. So they're going to want to sit there and see the field. They're going to watch and especially those older age class bucks are going to want to make sure that it's safe before they head out to the field. Those little staging areas are where we like to set up and you can usually find them because they're the bowls and channels that lead out to those fields. Contrary to popular belief those big bucks don't like the deepest nastiest parts of the bush. The thick bush where they can't see is not where they like to travel. Rather they're going to come and they're going to stage up somewhere on that field where they can see the field, see the surroundings and decide if it's safe for them to proceed. So quite often before we set up the ground blind or the tree stand we'll walk those deer trails and look back towards where we want to set up to see if that deer is going to have a good vantage point. To see if that deer is going to feel comfortable, feel like he can see and feel like he's going to move through there quite naturally. Another great spot you're going to find are natural pinch points and that's almost like an imaginary funnel. So it's not actually walls but it's barricades that are going to narrow down the deer's travel. So if you've got four or five deer trails that are spread out over 100 yards and you want to bullhunt there that's not going to give you a good shot opportunity. But if you watch those trails there's going to be spots where they funnel onto one trail to go through where two ridges meet or where they come through a channel or where a channel is wide and narrows down to a bottleneck. And those are going to be good spots to get in and get set up and ensure that you're going to get a shot at that deer within a good close range. As the season progresses a lot of times we'll move those stands away from the field edges as deer are utilizing those fields less and into a little bit heavier timber. But we're still going to utilize the steps that we take in the early season. So we're going to want to bury behind us to try to keep those deer from swinging in behind us. And we're going to use the natural land formations to try to make sure that we're in a spot where the majority of the deer in that area are going to want to travel. And the reason we've moved that stand off a little bit in the late season is we're becoming less focused on food and more focused on that deer's travel while he's looking for does. So even though we may have moved some of those stand locations now we're still going to look for the same things we did in the early season which is natural funnels, pinch points, different little bowls and channels in the bush, different land formations are going to help narrow down the deer's travel to condense it to where we want to be to get set up for a shot at a buck that might come through there. Another point we have to consider is how we're going to get to and from that tree stand without being detected. Because if you have the best stand location you can imagine but you can't get to it or you can't leave at night without busting deer you're going to burn that stand out really fast. So sometimes it's a bit of a compromise to getting in the best location but also the best location that you can get in and out of undetected. And lastly whether it's a tree stand or a ground blind we want to brush it in so it matches its surrounding. And sometimes there's not a lot of brush in the understory of the bush so you're not going to put a lot of brush around your blind you might just use some dead logs to make it blend in. Sometimes you're in quite thick under brush and you're going to want to brush the blind in extremely well so it fits in. It's the same thing in the tree stand. We often tie branches and we tie bundles of brush up in the tree so it masks the outline of a hunter up in the tree. It creates a good screen and as the season goes on the leaves die it turns brown and black and it still masks the hunter silhouette sitting up in the tree when the other leaves have long fallen. Using these natural land formations and pinch points and staging areas as well as brushing in that tree stand or ground blind so it looks natural and undetectable to the deer. And also making sure you can get to and from that stand undetected is only going to make that stand more effective come this fall.