Part 4 - Mapping Public Land Whitetails | Identifying Bedding Areas

good morning everybody welcome back to the fourth episode of our mapping whitetail series that we're doing in partnership with onyx on today's episode we're going to talk about mapping bedding areas and identifying potential Stann locations from the map if you watched episode 3 we went out to these public areas and we were scouting access trying to predict where the hunting pressure is going to occur this fall we marked a bunch of points on the map now we're coming back in here to the office and trying to figure out where the best bedding locations are gonna be so I'm gonna jump right into it here based off what we found in the last video we concentrated on this one area that I've got marked here in the center of the screen we drove all the way around this place scouting the access routes and by doing that we eliminated most of this area for likely hunting locations and as you can see right here in the center of the map I basically excluded most of this area it's about 500 acres in total this middle chunk here and I've excluded 450 acres of it so now that I've done that we're gonna go down here and we're gonna concentrate on this one little sliver that it's kind of landlocked by the private land and we touched on this a bit in the last video but I'm gonna get into more detail right now as you can see when you get clear down here at the end of it this is probably one of the more difficult pieces to access on this public area you can start to see the habitat change a little bit I'm gonna kick it over to the satellite layer here you can see when looking real close even over here on the private land that there is some mixed type of timber it looks like maybe some cedars some grass and stuff that is mixed in with the hardwood timber and if you kick on the hybrid layer you can tell that it's on the side of a ridge funneling down towards that bottom there's a little field in the bottom there I'm not sure if that's planted or if it's just grass and CRP but there's lots of diverse cover right here in this area and like we mentioned it's a very hard spot to access on this piece and those will bed anywhere in here they may bed up on top of the ridge family group sa-do's I'm kind of excluding them for the purpose of this exercise Buck's will bed in very specific locations because they survive by using their senses to their advantage they got to be in a place where they can smell what's behind them with it where they can see what's out in front of them or they can hear danger coming with that said in Hillier terrain like this they tend to bed off of these points and on the sides of these ridges and they'll put themselves in a spot where they've got cover to back that cover behind them and it's open out in front that's why I put this pin right here is because it's located right at the edge of that little band of thick cover and that deers going to be watching to the south towards that open field with the wind blowing over top of the ridge and likely there's gonna be dough's bedded young bucks bedded up closer towards the top of the ridge but the best buck betting locations are probably going to be located around this elevation line now this is not an exact science it could be close to this spot many times we don't get it exactly right from a mapping standpoint we'll have to go in there boots on the ground and confirm but judging by our access and our hunting pressure scouting that we did last time this looks like the area that's getting the least amount of attention so we're going to mark it on the map I'll just show it to you real quick from a bigger picture here you can see this 500 acre chunk that we've got in the middle here and there's one spot that we're gonna pay attention to and it's that back Ridge now we're gonna stick with the same piece here and I'm going to show you a different betting example for a buck if you go over here to the east side and this is a spot that we drove around but we didn't walk into it all there is some pretty steep terrain as you can tell from the topo lines I'll kick my topo layer on so that you can see it a little bit better you can tell we've got some Hills right in here and the road system is located down here in the bottom along the north end that's where the access is going to come from so people are gonna have to walk up those hills and to get to the back corner of this I'll actually measure it out it looks like it's going to be about nine tenths of a mile to get from the road all the way up to what call the peak of this Ridge where all these these little secondary points and stuff come together and that walk is going to be uphill the entire way it's going to deter a lot of people from going in there but what we're doing in this type of situation in hilly or timber we're looking more at the topo lines on the map if you zoom in right here next to my line that's about nine tenths of a mile to get to that point and there is an obvious ditch that goes off of the back corner right here you can see it kick it over to the topo layer so you can see a little bit better we've got a couple ponds right here at the head of that ditch where it's dropping into the bottom and this is right on the edge of the public and private fence at the back of that property gonna be very hard to access and I'll go ahead and drop a waypoint right here so don't forget it one reason I picked this spot is because it sets up well for prevailing wind bedding most of the time in our area we're getting westerly type winds northwest winds for a cold front for example and in hilly terrain like this Bucks will bed around these elevation lines that I'm following with my cursor right here and they'll choose this spot with wind blowing over the top as you can see my red line here my access line there's actually a trail that goes up across the tops of those ridges that's where any people are going to be coming from to get back in here to this back corner and if that buck is bedded where my pin is with a northwest wind or a westerly wind coming off the top of those ridges he's going to be able to smell any danger coming from the access point they put themselves in situations like this and Hillier terrain so they can watch down below them they can smell what's behind them and it also offers a perfect escape route they can bound off into that bottom be over on private land probably into some security cover in just a matter of seconds if they have danger coming in from behind them if you look back at the satellite view right here you can see that there's kind of some broken timber right here around the top of this Ridge and I would anticipate that to thicken up a little bit where the sunlight is getting to the ground right there and our pin is just right on the backside of that sort of broken habitat show you what it looks like from the hybrid layer those books are going to be bedded down in that day or on the edge of that Ridge with any type of westerly wind they can bound off over here onto the private land to the east so I'm gonna mark that spot is a potential location to look at to scout now we're gonna jump over here to the lake and I'm a little bit more excited about this place just because access is more challenging if you to get to a lot of these areas on this lake like we saw in the last video you've got to use a kayak and odds are there's very few people there doing that originally when we were scouting from the map you can see the initial spots that we excluded we thought this bridge right here was actually a bridge when we got there we realized it was basically just a rock levee that runs through and bisects this lake there's no real place for a boat ramp I mean there's a symbol right there that says boat ramp but there's not really a boat lamp launch there at least from what we saw so that's a great sign for us that means you can't get you know a fairly decent-sized boat with a prop in this northern half of the lake you have to go down here to the end of the road where we were parked and put in a kayak to get to a lot of this really good marshy bedding cover on the north end here now judging by what we saw from the road this looks like some fairly heavy marsh cover right here at the north end of this lake you can kind of see here on the map that looks like a bunch of willows a swamp if you will that pours down into the lake basically just tons of different thick habitats coming together in one of the most hard to access areas of this piece of public land I don't know exactly where they're gonna be betting here but when we scout it we'll come in and we'll follow this bottom transition right here where this hill sort of Peters out into the marsh we will follow that transition scouting for trails that go out into this Marchi vegetation then we'll take those trails in there and we'll start looking for bedding I'm just going to drop a pin there that's telling us we need to go and scout that if you look over here to the east there's a small draw of what looks like hardwood timber running out of the marsh and up here onto the hill on a private land and this private land over here looks like it's fairly thick maybe some CRP cover lots of little Cedars fencerows all kinds of thick stuff that Bucs love and it butts right up against this little finger trees that leads out of that Marsh and I would anticipate there being some pretty good travel routes right there for bucks to get from the marsh betting area to the private land over here onto the CRP cover and it's possibly a spot that's getting overlooked because it's just a little patch of trees right there but if you really look at the details here you've got looks like a hay field that butts up to it on the south side you have some topography some terrain so there's gonna be a ditch with water flowing into the marsh right there you got hay fields on the north side you got some thicker cover on the north side of that ditch somewhere the deer travel is gonna be funneled in that area I don't know if it's going to be a good spot to hunt necessarily but it probably would be a good one to at least put a trail camera and definitely scout it's gonna mark that as well on a quick side note we tend to find the best mature buck bedding in close proximity to water while ago you saw when we were looking at the hills to the west over here on this other piece that I picked a spot off the side of that hill right next to a pond we tend to do that often and right here you've got these little tributary creeks that lead into this lake and they form all these little curves these ox bows and stuff Buck's will bed right on the tips of those ox bows I'll just drop a point to show you my example here right there's one right there is one any type of flat marshy river bottom type terrain they're gonna bed in spots like that where they have wind coming in from the land side and they can escape down through the water they'll either just bound off down in there and jump across the water in some cases they'll even swim across it to get to the other side but when you think about it it's a perfect spot for him to bed because nothing can get to him right there a coyote or a bobcat isn't likely going to swim that River and he can lay there with a wind coming in from the land side so if a predator comes in from that direction he's going to smell them long before they even get to him that goes back to my original point on how bucks bed and different types of terrain they're always going to put themselves in spot where they have a scent sight or sound advantage like I mentioned with the last piece when you zoom out and you get to looking at this big picture you're skipping over a lot of land you're eliminating 80% of this area and just going to a very specific spot to look for bedding in stand locations and when we find these stand locations you'll see it in the next video we're gonna find the bedding and then we're going to take the exit trails out of the bedding and start trying to pick trees that are very close if not in the bedding area now I'm going to skip down here to the south and this is the spot that were most excited about I would say just from our access scouting on the last trip we found that very few people were going down this minimum maintenance road up here there's actually a couple deer in the middle of the road when we drove down there there's a white bear right there there's a little buck right there from not a legit access point into any of this timber from that road it was fairly thick odds are it's going to keep the majority of people out of here and if you use that water to access it you can get to a fairly large area down here that is potentially getting little hunting pressure I'm going to zoom in here you can see our road up here where we were parked right there and as we zoom in and we start to look at this back Ridge right on the edge of my exclusion square I guess you could call it you see that there's a bunch of thick cover I don't know what it is probably a lot of locust mixed in with Cedars and tall grass stuff that Bucks absolutely love and if you look at the topo lines that's why we love using this hybrid feature so much just because it kind of shows you everything all in one view if you look at the topo lines here there's a small ditch that runs down here there's another one that runs down here right along that East fence and there's a pond right at the base of it where those two ditches run down looks like there's some mature trees that butt up against a lot of that cedar and hedge and locust cover along the edge of that Ridge got a lot of habitat types mixing there and it's forming a lot of edge dear love to bed in spots like this right up against those edge lines where there's thick cover that butts up against open cover and what I'm assuming is in these ditches there's more mature trees the Timbers probably more open so those bucks will bed in and around those looking down the ditch and they'll actually use that ditch as an escape route I'll show you what I mean here I'm gonna drop a point they'll bed in these various locations on any type of a westerly northerly wind because that's wind coming off of the top of the ridge blowing over top of the bucks back and then he's gonna be looking down these ditches I like this Center ditch right here the best looks like there's quite a bit of thick cover in and around it those bucks can bed right there along the edge of the ditch and use that as an escape route they've also got water very close right there I'll kick it over to the topo map where you can see there's a pond there's a drainage coming down right there there's actually a more shallow pond right here that you can't really see on the topo map but you can see it from an aerial view that likely funnels deer movement in and around these bedding areas somehow so the potential for a good stain location in this spot is pretty high I would say there's going to be good buck bedding located somewhere in and around the leeward side of this Ridge what I mean what I mean by leeward is the downwind side of a Ridge you can see where the cap of the ridge is up here to the north this little circular spot that's right there at the highest point of the ridge so with the northerly wind the leeward side is over here where I've got my points marked now we've learned a lot from the map right here but we still don't know what exactly it looks like having never set foot in this bedding area before like I mentioned these are just guesses right now but we're narrowing it down we've got these areas of interest these very specific areas that we're gonna walk straight to on the next video when we go out here and do some scouting but I really like this spot right here we're probably just gonna walk in there from the road when we go Scout it because we're not too worried about scent during this time of the year but when it comes time to hunt it that's not going to work because you're gonna blow all the deer going in that one direction we'll probably access from that boat over there and just kayak across to get to this bedding area of interest here without alerting a ton of deer so it has the potential to be a really really good spot so hopefully you see now how we've narrowed down these bedding areas and these potential spots of interest and on the next video we're gonna go out there put some boots on the ground and find some actual stand locations can't wait to get out there and check this spot out it looks really really good but if you don't already have the onyx hunap want to remind you guys that we got a great promo code discount with them you should go to onyx Maps comm you can save 20% if you use our discount code it's THP now it's case sensitive capital T capital H capital P you just put that in on onyx Maps calm save you 20% on all their app products we use it all the time as you've seen in these videos but that's it for this video guys thank you all for watching we'll see you on part five when we get out there and Scout these bedding areas [Music] you [Music]

Channel: The Hunting Public

Views: 183,937

Rating: 4.9318032 out of 5

Keywords: public land, deer hunting, buck bedding, map scouting, OnX Maps, aaron warbritton, whitetail deer

Id: OguefTZ_S_k

Length: 16min 47sec (1007 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 30 2018