By: Bo Adams
Bowhunters are a solitary breed, preferring to spend countless hours in solitude searching for their next trophy. Admittedly, I used to be one among the crowd. However, one day a switch went off inside the head of my hunting partner and me after we realized the shear number of trophy bucks we were seeing in certain areas around town. Despite our initial hesitation to hunt around people, big whitetails filled our minds as we began to search for mature bucks closer and closer to home. It did not take us long to realize that we were on to something special, and since that fateful day hunting the urban sprawl of Middle America has rewarded us with multiple record book bucks.
One of the keys to finding huntable populations of urban whitetails is sorting out the puzzle of where they live. It sounds obvious enough, but many urban woodlots do not hold deer while others close by do. The key, at least in our area of the country, seems to be found in locating old farm sites that the town has expanded around. These farms act as hubs for deer movement and the tree lines that connect into them often divide subdivisions before adjoining other blocks of timber. These tree lines can act as thoroughfares for traveling whitetails, especially during the rut. Google Earth is an excellent tool for locating these areas. On more than one occasion we have discovered properties where tree lines, highways, and houses created a major funnel system that we were able to capitalize on.
I have had the fortune to reside in and hunt one of the largest agricultural counties in the state of Kentucky. Growing up in the deer woods, one thing I never had trouble figuring out was the location of the primary feeding areas. That was relatively simple with the abundance of crop ground. When we started chasing urban deer regularly, one thing that was quickly discovered was that the food sources were not nearly as plentiful. This greatly narrowed down the areas that we would concentrate on hunting. The areas that we hunt around town are often just tree lines and small woodlots, so a primary food source might simply be a small group of white oaks that are dropping acorns. These little areas are also where we have had huge success with food plotting, placing high quality forage in an area where deer naturally feel safe. The biggest problem there seems to be keeping the deer out of the plots, allowing them to reach maturity.
By nature of where they live, urban whitetails are often times more tolerant of scent, noise, and limited intrusion than their rural counterparts. On multiple occasions, I have sat stands as either the hunter or the camera man and had kids playing within a few hundred yards, gotten play by play during a local high school football game from a near by P.A. System, and even had the smell of grilled food fill the air. On one such night this past September, I nearly videoed my hunting partner Taylor Tompkins kill a 140 inch, 5 ½ year old 7 point we had been monitoring all summer. That buck stopped in the only place where I could not film him so he got a pass, and he was also the fifth racked deer we had in bow range that night despite all that was going on around us. Only a small field separated us from a subdivision to our west and a business park to our South. That particular honey hole is inside the city limits and produces year after year.
Hunting urban whitetails is not without its own unique set of challenges. Aside from access, which is the biggest issue the urban hunter faces, the second biggest problem facing the urban bowhunter is finding a way to locate mature bucks. Urban bucks are particularly well adapted at living undetected right under someone’s nose. During the summer months in agricultural areas, developing a hit list of animals a hunter wants to pursue is done with little trouble by monitoring trail cameras and glassing fields in the evening. In town, more times than not, the time tested method of scouting with you binoculars is not an option due to a lack of agriculture, as well as the amount of attention you draw to yourself. Trail cameras become that much more valuable of an asset, as well as just simply getting out and laying down boot leather. In situations where it is possible to glass, it is important to be very low key. We have gone so far as to sit behind a gas station in our trucks to observe one particular buck we were after that was feeding in a field across the highway. Stay low key. It is easy to get caught up in what you are doing and forget that other hunters are driving past the deer you are targeting. Believe me when I say that you do not want to tip them off to the fact that there is a good buck in the neighborhood. In addition to that, non-hunters are also around and they may not think highly of someone hunting just outside their back door.
Thinking outside the box and getting away from what you know to be normal is necessary to consistently score on urban deer. A perfect example of this is the buck that I killed in 2010 from an Osage thicket flanked by businesses and a subdivision. We knew this particular area was a morning spot based on all the hours we spent scouting and time stamps that were on our most recent set of trail camera pictures. The only issue with that was this particular thicket sat in the middle of a field and presented little to no access. We decided to wait until first light, hoping to be able to see any deer that may have been out feeding before they spotted us. It did not hurt that the background noise of the city waking up would be just enough to cover any noise that might be made going in. We were counting on being able to take advantage of these two factors, as the lack of available cover meant that a spooked deer might literally go a mile or two before stopping.
We pulled up behind a local business as it was just breaking light. The ambient, early morning light made it easy to be quiet, and we were able to get settled and set the camera up without making a sound or spooking any nearby deer. Because it was light, I immediately began scanning with my Nikons for any sign of movement. I soon found it, but instead of the trophy I was after I was looking at someone drinking coffee on their back deck a few hundred yards away. My gaze was quickly interrupted by the sound of a buck thrashing a tree to our Southwest. A few tense moments and a light rattling sequence later, I was staring at a 150 class 10 pointer coming up a thicket edge directly to our setup.
It seemed like forever before I got the green light from Taylor, saying that he had enough footage. At 42 yards I cut loose and the buck was down for good seconds later. We were ecstatic…not only did we take a great deer in early October on camera, but that was the 6th buck 140 or better we had taken off that farm, and we were sitting inside the city limits! It was also a sweet way to recover from an opening day miss in Kansas two weeks prior on a 160 class 10 point at 30 yards.
While it is not the traditional backcountry setting of a dream hunt that typically fill the minds of countless bowhunters during the off season, urban areas that hold whitetails can provide fantastic opportunities for trophy bucks. The permission game is tough, a lot of homework and scouting is required, and you have to think outside the box of typical whitetail hunting. However, once you discover the adrenaline rush of taking a trophy buck that most hunters would pass by in their vehicles on their way out of town, targeting trophy bucks close to home becomes a common practice…as opposed to a simple afterthought.
big bucks