Another Seven Days To Hunt

[Swede]

It is Thursday September 21st when you arrive at your elk camp location. You have the remaining three hours of that afternoon and the next day to prepare for your seven day planned hunt. You can stretch it a little by managing your camp set up chores, and having a late dinner today. You rifle hunted this general area three years ago, but now you and two friends are back with bows. You and a friend each threw a tree stand in the utility trailer, and you are prepared to bivy hunt if the situation calls for that. As in the previous seven days to hunt, what is your plan A and Plan B for your chosen hunting area?

P.S. Rifle hunters I am interested in how differently you will approach this situation and will prepare another thread tomorrow, for a late October hunt.

 

[WW]

By now the major rut should be happening. But they can still be moving around due to being harassed by satellite bulls. So I\'ll start my morning hunt out with location bugles just to find the general area they might be in. Nothing real aggressive , just sort of an ( I\'m here, where are you) type of call. Once I have them located, I\'ll move in and try to pressure the herd. If they run on me, I\'ll give a smaller bull bugle accompanied with just a few cow mews. Then I start to beat the heck out of a near by tree or bush in a displaying manner. Hopefully this will give the herd bull the impression that I was able to peel of one of his cows before he tried to move them out.

This is the time of year to get aggressive. But if it causes them to run, it can also be a time to sound smaller than the herd bull if it will draw him in. Also lost cow sounds while dogging a moving herd have been successful tactics that have worked for me in the past. They may not pull in the herd bull but can pull in a satellite that has also been dogging the herd.

So that is plan A and plan B all tied up in one. The only difference would be working on different herds in different areas. By this time of the season, I should have several good areas already located to hunt.

 

[JohnFitzgerald]

Plan A - Setup camp and get a good dinner. After dark, start using contact bugles until I get a good idea of where the elk are.
Plan B - Stick with plan A until I get a vocal bull to hunt. From there, plans change depending on the bulls attitude.

So, say you are a tree stand hunter and have 5 or 6 stand locations. Would it be bad to give some bugles around each? Then if you get a response, hunt the one with the best results that next morning? I think finding the elk is 50% of the battle.

 

[Swede]

John: I certainly don\'t think there is anything wrong with your approach to stand selection. I never do that. Instead I rely on the evidence I see on the ground relating to use near my stands. Trail cameras are useful too. I would not call much from the water hole the stand is over.

 

[cohunter14]

I think finding the elk is 50% of the battle.

I think this is true regardless of what weapon or time of year you are hunting,and I would venture to say it is even more than 50%. I think the biggest difference is HOW you go about finding the elk during each of these times of year.

Not being a bow hunter, take this for what it\'s worth: I would probably do some listening right away and maybe use a location bugle or two to see if anything is nearby and worth hunting that evening. If there isn\'t much for a response, I would want to do my best to get the tree stands in that evening so they are ready for the hunt, assuming I already have a good idea of where I want them based on previous hunts. If I get those tree stands in, I would be very interested in what the areas look like around the tree stands, similar to what Swede said. After getting the stands in, a lot would depend on the amount of sign by the tree stands. If it looked good, I would plan on starting the hunt there first thing in the morning. If it didn\'t look too promising, I think I would give location bugles during the evening, like JF said. Depending on the response, or lack thereof, the next morning would be spent getting in position based on what I hear, or covering some ground and using location bugles to figure out where they are if I got no response.

 

[Baby Huey]

On the path for D?j? Vu with this thread! My buddy and I hunted an area rifle season for cow elk a couple years ago and want to head back to bow hunt soon, so this thread is right in line with how I will plan our bow hunt.

So, let?s look at my Plan A. Since there are about 3 hours of light left, we would set up the wall tent and get the stove set up in it, which should take about an hour. I would head back up the road from our camp about a 15 minute drive, where there was a spot we found with some good rubs and sign. I saved that waypoint in my GPS, and that is where we would head that first evening. It would take us about 45 minutes to hike back uphill to that spot. We would definitely be listening for elk on our way to the spot since it is the end of September. Hopefully we would hear or run into some elk to hunt. If not, we would probably set up a couple hundred yards apart from each other after we confirm on an area to call. We would do some cow call sequences the rest of the evening and see what happens. Then bust out the headlamps and head back to camp and finish setting camp up and get some dinner. We would look at continuing Plan A and head up to that area the following day and hunt around. My style is to silently slip through the forest constantly glassing and listening for elk.

For Plan B, we would look at heading down a rough road with our ATV\'s about 5 miles away where my buddy took his cow rifle season (about 1/4 mile off of the road). There are a couple of good flat areas surrounded by steeper terrain with drainages running through them, about 1.5 and 2 miles off of the road. Those flat areas were where we were heading rifle season and ran into the cows when my buddy took his. Again, we would be still hunting - both glassing and listening for elk to hunt.