Brandon Pressley has been hunting in his hometown of Pennsylvania since he was a young child. In this episode, he describes how difficult it is to hunt bucks on a mountain. He gives an insight into the misconceptions of how close deer can be and how easily they can be overlooked. He also gives his opinion on using trail cameras. Brandon’s passion is in discussing his process of locating deer and the factors that can play a part in a hunt. Learn more from him on how you can face the challenges of hunting mountain bucks.
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LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE:
Mountain Bucks Are Hard To Hunt – Brandon Pressley
We’re heading out to Pennsylvania. We’re going to meet up with Brandon Pressley. He’s got a love affair with hunting mountain bucks, DIY of a plan. Brandon, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, Bruce.
I’m excited to have you because you’re one of these guys who slice and mix it up on public land. Even though there are over nine million hunters in the state of Pennsylvania, you seem to feel that you can beat the odds and be successful, why is that?
There is opportunity everywhere. The amount of public land is available for anybody to go and hunt. There are tons of bucks out there and tons of doe. I know PA has gotten a bad rap lately of not having a lot of big doe populations but they’re held in the little pocket. Your effort determines your success when it comes to that and it’s what I love about it. The harder I work, it seems like the more success I achieved.
You mentioned pocket. If we’re talking about mountain terrain, heavy timber not a lot of agriculture, where would the does be hanging out in that type of terrain?
I like to hunt at the tops of the mountains. Number one, they’re difficult to access for a lot of guys who were out of shape, so that cuts down on the amount of pressure. It’s steep up there, rocky and nasty. The deer feels safe but you’re also going to have your sections at mountain down low that gets overlooked because people think there’s not going to be deer there and they walk right past them. It’s a constant scouting game. You’ve got to put your time in. Once you find them, you could hunt them accordingly. You don’t put too much pressure and we can have your pickings.
You are on public land, you are going to the top of the mountains because a lot of people won’t put that effort, they just flat won’t. The little honey holes that people walk by that’s more of intuition, gut feel type of thing plus being able to read the sign. Let’s camp there a little bit. Let’s talk about those lower areas that have deer that everybody walks by. Why do they walk by them?
It’s a common misconception. People don’t think that a deer can hang out that close to a parking area or a road and they don’t get any pressure down there though. They might even sit within viewing distance of a parking lot and watch the hunters walk up the mountain in the morning or come back down. If they don’t get bumped out of there and they got everything they need food, cover, a wind advantage, they’re going to sit and stay. It’s one of those things that you have to be on top of and be aware of.
Have you ever hunted a deer in these close proximity to roads or buildings or parking lots?
I’ve had a little bit of success there.
How do you do that?
It’s a fine line too because if you say you get in there and you harvest the deer whether it’s a buck or a doe, you spoiled that spot. They’re not going to keep hanging around if they know that they’ve been busted so to speak. It’s like one of those ever-changing things like year by year. It could be hot one year and then cold the next then the following season it turns hot again. I don’t think there’s any distinct way to describe, it’s ever-evolving.
Are you putting a stand up or it is a spot stop?
I’ll go in and scout. If I see something I like, I pick a tree or I usually pick two or three trees based upon the wind. I was going to climb and hang. If I feel confident in that area, I might hunt it two maybe three times, but if I’m not sure, I might hunt it once. If I don’t see anything, then I’m out of there and I’m off to another spot. I don’t like to hang around one area too long. These deer are smart and they can figure it out quick.
You pull into a parking lot within a quarter mile that’s where you’re going to hunt. What do other people say when they see you going into the woods and not climbing the mountain?
If I’m going in the morning, I’m in there early. I don’t run into too many hunters in the morning. If it’s an afternoon hunt, I’m cautious if I’m going to be hunting that close. I’m going to try to make sure that nobody else is around because I don’t want to spoil it too much but it’s happened before. I’ve run into other hunters and I was almost out that way. I don’t pinpoint where I’ve been hunting at.
It’s interesting, I can tell you in 479 shows, nobody talked about hunting at the parking lot within a quarter mile or less of a parking lot and it makes sense because I can remember some places in Wisconsin where I did a lot of hunting that I’d go and I’d hunt. I sit in my tree stand, I come back and have my headlamp on and all of a sudden less than 100 yards from the parking lot, there goes a doe. I’d bust her, she snorts and goes her way. I’m going, “I should have been hunting at the parking lot.”
There was this one, it was down below lots of pines, a ridiculous scrape line and this was probably several years ago. I had a trail camera at the time. I put a trail camera upon that scrape line and I hunted three-quarters of a mile away. I come back down out of the mountain and I checked the trail camera on that scrape line that day that I was going to hunt down low but talked myself out of it, there was an eight point there in the morning. He’s probably 130 class in about an upper 130 to low 40 class, ten points there in the evening on that scrape line. This is probably 300 yards from a parking lot. That’s when all the light bulb went off in my head and said, “Maybe you should pay a little bit more attention to these areas.” It was a hard lesson learned.
For me, it’s groundbreaking stuff and there are other guys and gals out there that are like, “Don’t tell them the secret.” I’ve always heard that especially during gun season, the army moves in and they’re busting bucks and does all the way to the stand somewhat on public land. Here, if you think about it and do some scouting, I think that’s the critical thing. Pick your poison, you had a hot scrape line and everything was there for deer to be there whether nocturnal or not, you wouldn’t have any idea till you’ve pulled your cards. That make sense. You’ve hung a trail camera but aren’t you afraid of Jesse James walking off with your trail camera?
It’s always in the back of my mind and sometimes you just got to take those risks. I think about theft all the time and it’s gotten to the point where I have accepted that if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. Fortunately, I’ve not had any camera stolen so that’s always a plus but we’ll mess with them sometimes. They acknowledge that they see them or they’ll pull the card if it’s not locked up to see what’s on it but not so far so that’s good.
Hunting is a constant scouting game. You’ve got to put your time in, but once you find them, you could hunt them accordingly. Share on XUnfortunately, it happens out west in the mountains because more guys and gals are using trail cameras on similar stuff that you do for whitetails where they’re doing the same stuff for elk and the cards disappear and the whole thing disappears. I had a buddy, the person cut the tree down because he had it locked. The guy chain-sawed the sucker right off. It must have been a heck of a honey hole and they didn’t want them hunting their bull and it’s on public land that’s for sure. It’s interesting out there and I’m going to say this and shut up, don’t do that. One trail camera costs a buck. I understand that somebody had to buy that and you go rip off a line of trail cameras, that’s not good stuff.
That’s lowball. They spend the money on it. They spend the time to put it up there and they’ve got the excitement built up, “I can’t wait to go check it.” You get off there and someone snagged and it’s got to be one of the worst feelings in the world.
How do you pick your areas you’re going to hunt? You said there are thousands of acres of public land but how do you decide where you are going to hunt?
We can look at topographic maps, saddles, benches or any terrain change. The Game Commission is doing a lot of these controlled burns and even clear cuts here in the mountain which is just great. It’s spurring tons of deer activity. Keying in on those points, those transitions, the edges, everything like that. I go a lot of cyber scouting and mark it. I get apps on my phone, mark points of interest. I get up in the mountain. I’ll walk my way through the mountain on the different points that I have marked and try to find trails, rubs and bedding. Scrape lines up here are huge if you could find a good scrape line, you almost guaranteed that it’s going to be back next year.
You’re talking about scrape line not rub line?
I’ve never found a real concrete rub lines through the mountain that led me to some success. I’m sure they exist but I’d rather hunt a scrape line over a rub line.
You are talking three, four five, half-a-dozen scrapes?
Four or five and it can be short-lived, it can be 100 yards or they can stretch out to the longest one I’ve ever tracked was a quarter mile. It was huge. It kept going and going.
Let’s talk about that behavior because a lot of places we’ve all heard of community scrapes and you’ll have a 10×10 scrapes. I’m thinking in some places, I have seen a couple of scrapes lined out but I have seen multiple scrapes. I don’t know if I have been in the wrong place or haven’t been looking in the right places. What’s your thought about these multiple scrapes or signpost and rutting behavior or indicators to us all?
Multiple scrapes with lots of licking branches that are torn up in a condensed area, I’m hunting it. I’m going to be on that late October or early November. That to me is prime. That’s what I key in on that time of year but the key for me honestly what I’m looking at those is not as much the point on the forest floor but licking branches. If there’s more licking branches, the better. If they are twisted, tangled and snapped, that’s something that gets me excited. That means there’s a lot of deer hitting them. A lot of deer increases your chances of a buck. The more deer that are on that, the more buck they’re going to hit it.
I’m thinking here with the orbital land, all the things they do when they are licking the branch and all that is a bust, you must have a lot of deer. A lot of mature bucks that could be 1.5, 2.5, 3.5, 4.5 years old but to have that type of activity that’s what I’m thinking.
There’s definitely a lot younger buck to use those than an older buck but I would say an older buck here on game lands is four, you got a decent amount of three-year-olds but they’re all going to be hitting those scrapes. There are a lot of trail camera footages. It got me going on that and learn what to look for through trial and error and it’s what keys me off more than anything is the licking branches.
Have you figured out which way the buck is going or they’d be going both ways but figure out which way it’s going? Have you ever backtracked to see where he was eating or sleeping or hanging?
I try to look for beds too and I’ve found more than my fair share of mountain buck beds but it seems like there’s just so much opportunity for them to bounce around from three to four different beds. It has been hard for me at least to be able to pinpoint one bed, hunt a certain bed for a certain buck. I don’t see why they would spend all their time coming back to a certain bed. I think they rotate the bedding areas. Even with food, the abundance of acorns I don’t think that they could key in on one bench or one ridge. It seems like we had good acorn crop the past few years that everything’s so widespread and that’s why I like keying in on these scrapes. There seemed a bit more concentrated and I want to say, you could predict their movement a bit better but it seems like the window to hunt those is a little more concentrated than if you would try to hunt a particular bed or the Oak ridge.
Tell me how you are setting up on the scrape line. Have you got a climber? I’m thinking climber versus hang on. You get a climber and what scrape do you pick? Is it left, right, east, west, north or south depending on the wind? Tell us about your set up.
On the top of the mountain, the winds are going to be a lot more consistent than if you’re off the edge and if your middle or low it’s tough, it’s going to swirl on you. I like to find something up consistent and anything along that scrape line if it’s a drawn-out scrape and there are inch any deer movement. You hunt a pinch point along a scrape line and if it’s a cluster of scrapes like you’re saying, a little community scrape area, I try to set up with the wind and the best cover I can to my advantage. I sit and wait and see what comes along or maybe ride a little bit.
Do you grunt?
If I have to, yeah. Everybody’s got a grunt call. You’ve got to be careful, sometimes they will just take off on you.
It’s about the same thing for rattling. At the right time, if you hit it right, the rattling is a blast. You’ll see a lot of deer.
I’d like to be a bit more subtle with my rattle. I don’t like to get too aggressive with it. If you’re a bit more subtle with it, you’re more prone to get a reaction out of some buck that’s close by as opposed to being too aggressive their tail goes up and then they’re a little bit more cautious approaching or they might hightail it out of there. I’m subtle in the call that I do.
If you’re subtle, then deer got great ears and if the wind is right, it’s going to carry but it’s a lot different.
We use the buck before and he took off like I slapped him in his hindquarters. I use that out of there. That was the last time I did that.
I was at the farm and I got one little stand. I love the hunt. I’m rattling and I see this eight-pointer come through and I’m rattling again and then it stopped and I snort-wheeze and as you said, he was gone. I got my butt kicked. I am loud. I could put it down, they are going to be ten yards they couldn’t hear me, but for the most part I am pretty loud. One of my buddies said, “You sound like Muhammad Ali.” We’re meandering around here but that’s one nice thing. It’s your hunt, it’s your technique and if you get something working, I don’t care what the guys at the bar, at the shop, at school or at work say. If it’s working for you, keep doing it.
Don’t be afraid to try something. There’s a lot of trial and error involved with everything with bow hunting. If you find something that works, try it again and if it keeps working, keep doing it.
Many times, we’re afraid to scare that buck away. Don’t do that to yourself. Enjoy the experience and learn and just like Brandon sharing some great tips. He has learned a lot by trial and error and that’s the only way to do it. If you go out and fail a lot, all of a sudden you’re going to get better and better.
You can’t go to the woods or the mountain and be scared of trying something. You might lose your opportunity that way. There is nothing wrong with trying it once and you never know what might happen.
It is 3:00, 4:00 in the morning and it is dark. Do you put your headlamp on to go up the mountain?
It depends where I’m at. If I were to use like a subdued red light or if I need to high beam it to make my way through the terrain but the closer I get to my stand, the more cautious I am. Obviously, you don’t want to be crashing through the mountain and when I get to my stand its red light only. You don’t want to have your high beam 500-lumen headlamps shining around when you’re about to set up.
Do you have to set up every time or in Pennsylvania you can leave your stand out?
You can. You have to put your CID number on, which is on your tag, a name and I believe a phone number if you’re going to leave it up there. I’m in and out every day take my stand with me. I haul it in and I haul it out. That’s how I hunt. Even if I’m going back to the same area, I haul it out. It’s how I am. It’s my preferred method.
Are you using hang-ons or climbers?
I have one of each. I prefer my Lone Wolf Hand Climber. I’m more comfortable with that than anything but I have climbing sticks and hang-on if needed. With a lot of these trees, I can get up with my climber. There are some situations where the tree is just too small and you have to use a hang on and that’s why I have it as a backup scenario.
Let’s break down an area. If you think you’d like to hunt an area, do you do Google Earth or other apps before you go in or do you go in and do a speed scout and either confirm or eliminate?
I’ll look at it on an app called MyTopo. I’ll go in, mark points of interest where I believe I might find something and then go in and either confirm if I was right or wrong. I’m constantly marking scrapes, bedding and heavy trails. I will even mark other tree stands that I see or if I come across other people’s trail cameras, I mark those on my map as well. When I look at the big overview, I can get a feel for what’s going on, “This treestand and trail camera that I saw is close to this parking area, that’s where that guy’s coming from.” I formulate a plan of how I want to access the hunt and go from there.
You go in, you scout it, you see some sign and then how do you figure out how to get right back to that place? Do you just pin it with GPS?
I’ll do like a go-to. I want to go to this waypoint. It will give me a straight-line distance or whatever. I don’t always go straight line but I find out how I want to access it, which way I want to go, based on the wind direction. Where I feel the deer might be and the best way for me to get to that stand and like I said, I might hunt that stand once and that’s it. I might come back two maybe three times but I don’t like to hunt the same tree or the same area more than three times maybe four times at most. I like to stay mobile.
Why is that? Three sets, four sets and I’m out of here.
There are a couple of reasons. Number one, the deer are good at feeling out the pressure up here. That’s their whole existence. They’ve been pressured from day one through archery season, a ton during rifle and a little bit in late season. It keeps smelling you or they come across your ground scent and it’s not going to be too long. They’re going to be out of there. Number two is we’ve got tens of thousands of acres of mountain land up here or should I limit myself to this one little spot. I got to spread myself out and see what’s available.
I hear you saying that. In August how many places you have set up that you want a hunt?
I would say I usually have like five or six areas and in each of those areas, I have “three to four” stand locations that I want to hunt and there’s always ever-changing in season scouting which could throw another loop into it. It could create another opportunity for me.
You can't go to the woods or the mountain and be scared of trying something. You might lose your opportunity that way. Share on XWhat I hear you saying is you’ve got 15 to 20 setup sites whether or not you’re going to use it or not who knows, depending on the wind. There are a lot of variables that are going to hammer that but then how do you decide your rotation? You got plenty of places to go and now we got to put him on a rotation so we don’t burn them and I like one or two, three, four sets at most and I’m out of there.
I usually have a good handle on which bucks are using which area and I just rotate it. Sometimes I get up in the morning and I think I’m going to hunt spot A and that’s where I’ll hunt. The next day, I’ll hunt spot B, wherever I want to go is where I want to go. The wind for the most part in the fall is consistent so it’s not too much of a game-changer although sometimes you get an odd wind here there. That might play a factor in how I hunt certain areas but I go with wherever I feel like I’m going to have the best opportunity that day.
The forecast says on Thursday or Friday, that front is coming through. What do you do? It is Tuesday night you hear the weather report, the front is coming through on Thursday. One, you can get off of work, if you go back to do work and then two how the heck do you decide from all your potential sets where you want to be because as you know fronts are great.
I assume you’re talking about the cold front. What time of the year is it?
It’s in late October just before the rut.
Whatever scrape I feel like is going to produce, that’s where I’ll be on. If there’s a cold front in late October based upon my early fall scouting, with trail cameras, you find which bucks are and which area and that’s how I approach that.
Do you do an all-day sit?
If I can, yes.
In the cold front, the barometric pressure, you can have a big Delta in that and the bucks as we know are going to be moving and they’re not chasing yet, but they might be seeking or they might be just opening up scrapes and set the stage.
More often than that, you are going to get your late morning, early evening activity but in late October, you just don’t know. Some could show up in mid-day. I would definitely sit all day.
Tell me a little bit about the buck over your head that came out of Pennsylvania, I’m assuming?
That was 2009, I believe, November 11th which I’ve shot four bucks on November 11th. It seems to be my lucky day. I was hunting a scrape and it was cold that day. I don’t know what the temperature was. It was cold. It was early, 8:30 in the morning and I heard this crashing and this buck came crashing through this blowdown and he didn’t walk around it. He went right through the middle of it. It came down, hit the trail, he turned and he came on a line right to that scrape. It’s gone to the scrape and I smoked in fifteen yards. He ran and crashed.
He was completely clueless that there was a human being within 100 miles.
He had no idea. He didn’t know what was happening.
That’s being persistent and being the right place at the right time. You have to make sure you get off on November 11th because that’s important. Let’s switch it up and let’s talk about your trail camera use on public land and the pluses and minuses.
I like to run mine on video mode. I don’t like pictures. Pictures will give me an idea what’s happening but a video with audio is the whole shebang, a huge learning tool. Mostly I’m a big proponent of scrapes with hunting and trail camera use. I like to put them in easy access to funnel something that I can get in and put the camera up and get out without creating too much of a disturbance. Edge trails and any transition point seems to be another good one for me but it’s always on video mode. That’s the big thing right there.
I haven’t heard that I’m just thinking back. The video mode, doesn’t suck up a lot of your storage?
I run a 32 gigabyte cards, energizer lithium batteries. It’s a bit more expensive but I feel like the information that I get from that is well worth it.
How many minutes of video can you get off the card?
It depends. I’ve got some Browning’s that are full HD and they fill up pretty quick. I got some lower-end HD quality Browning’s that I can get quite a few more videos on it. It all depends on the compression size of the video and the video length and all that jazz. It’s dependent upon each camera.
It doesn’t depend on the doe or buck that’s dancing around the scrape or doing whatever?
I like to run either ten or twenty-second videos and I’ll do either a five-second, ten-second delay depending upon the setup and the area too. Typically with trails, I would like to have a shorter setting for the delay because they’re not going to hang around too long. With scrapes, I might just have it on a shorter video with a longer delay because they might be there a bit while. It’s dependent on how you use them.
You get this video downloader all to your laptop or your smartphone or how are you viewing it. More importantly, how are you building up your storehouse or your journal?
I check them on my phone which eats the battery up so I got to go a different route with that next year. I’ll take a tablet with me or something. I bring the cards home, sort through the videos, keep the ones that I want and delete the ones that I don’t. It’s a whole process but I got my file, my folders of the different bucks and I’ve got the end-season footage, I’ve got the postseason footage. I even have a separate folder that I have named Daylight Shooters, which are daylight shooter bucks during the season to see if I can decipher any trend in the daylight movement.
I know a lot of guys who spend hours when they get a lot of cameras and they’re using photos and year to year they’ll watch buck number 572 grow and become a hit list type up and they become familiar with them as part of scouting. Not only are you watching the buck but you’re scouting and watching his behavior and seeing what he’s doing or not doing and then the other thing is moon phases and barometric pressure and wind direction. How do you measure those with your videos?
Barometric pressure. I don’t pay too much mind to wind direction, I typically use that to set up. I won’t hunt a particular spot based off of a certain wind thinking a certain buck will show up. I haven’t found that correlation to be true up in the mountain. Moon phase, I don’t know. I’m still on the fence on that one I think maybe it plays a part but the biggest thing that I found to spur or any movement is cold fronts. If you got a front coming in, it just sets them off. That’s the biggest factor that I look for.
There are tons written about moon phases and some people do play the barometric pressure and obviously the wind. If your stand isn’t in the right place and you can’t hunt on your stand. Everybody, if they have to go to work on a cold front, they’re chomping at the bit, getting their stands at least 20 minutes or 30 minutes. It doesn’t matter just to be out there because you don’t know. That could be any time in the fall. It doesn’t have to be after October 26th.
We had a cold front come through in mid-October one year during the October lull or whatever. It set him off. It was hot there for a couple of days. The weather was cold but the action was hot.
Brandon, we talked a lot about hunting. Obviously, you know what you’re doing and as I understand you started archery when you are twenty years old and you’re basically self-taught. What’s that story?
I wanted more and at the time, archery was my only way to do that. I went out and bought a bow at Dick’s Sporting Goods. I got it all set up there and trying to get my hands on as many books as I could about archery and how to be a better archer. I started buying DVDs, all the Drury Brothers’ DVDs back then and watch them and practice. The first year I saw deer, I didn’t kill any and I believe it was my third hunt, my second year of bow hunt and I blew a fawn in distress call. I had one come in and I whacked her and that was it and I was hooked.
It tastes good too, doesn’t it? It’s remarkable and I’m assuming you’re a solo hunter but you have a crew you hang with and switch off techniques and talk about hunting with?
I may have a buddy to hunt some private ground close to where I’m at but that’s a whole different ball game. I’m a couple of miles away and the deer are hard to come by. It’s like night and day difference. I go out by myself.
You got one buck at the wall right behind you. I have done pretty well figuring out. I love how you broke down hunting the ridge tops, hunting the mountaintops and not even worrying about the between stuff but getting right up on the top of the mountain looking for saddles, looking for transition and pinch points. The biggest thing I’m taking away and readers, you should scrape lines not just scrape here and then a scrape quarter mile away but we can see multiple bucks that are working the territory and I like that a lot.
The key to that is you’re going to have your doe groups that are on pockets but if you find those scrapes near those doe groups, the bucks they know about them and it’s a numbers game. Eventually they’re going to show up. It hasn’t failed me yet, let’s put it that way.
Can you explain to people how hard it is to get up to the mountaintops, side hills or anything and why that set you apart from other people in Pennsylvania especially archers? It’s about hunting the mountaintops and why that sets you apart from other archers in in Pennsylvania.
It’s an effort thing. You’ve got to work for whatever you get and that applies to life in general and going to the top is difficult. It’s not easy. You’re going to sweat and it’s going to be quite a workout for your legs. If you’re carrying a stand and some clothes and a bow, it’s going to be a workout for your back and it’s a physical challenge. It’s a mental challenge and then once you’re up there to stay all day, it adds to it. A lot of guys aren’t that committed. If they would show that commitment, it will probably pay off for them.
I appreciate that. On behalf of thousands of readers across North America, Brandon Pressley, thank you so much for being on the show.
Thanks, Bruce, for having me. I appreciate it.