If you haven’t tried your hand at hunting, now might be the time to get involved. Check out our deer hunting for beginners tips below!
Deer Hunting for Beginners: Time to Get Started
Across the nation, men and women headed into the woods with rifles in hand to bag their deer for the year. It might be time for you to head out there and give hunting a shot, too!
Hunting a deer means a lot more than just telling everyone about the big buck you got. Deer hunting is about meat, it’s about tracking, it’s about scouting and its about marksmanship.
It’s a bundle of skills that are all incredibly beneficial to the average prepper and survivalist. If you consider what happens after the kill you could also add butchering and preserving into that mix, too!
You will find that setting up in the woods, quietly, and waiting for your that deer to come trotting along is also a practice in patience. So if you’re ready to learn, continue reading.
1. Hunting Land
One of the biggest problems that most people have in the modern age is where to hunt. If you are new to hunting you might hear that people need permission to hunt lands and there is truth to that. However, it is much better if you simply seek out public lands.
Public lands are literally owned by YOU! These are lands that can be used with limited rules and are your best bet for getting on big swaths of land that can be hunted and you will be able to learn that piece of land consistently.
2. Rifle
Firearms season is a great place to start because you can kill a deer from further away but still have great success. It doesn’t require that you become some kind of stealth warrior and get within 20 yards of a spooky whitetail deer.
If you are tight on cash, I would recommend you get yourself a scoped Savage hunting rifle. I bought a 30-06 by Savage, and it is a great rifle to carry and take out into the hunting lands. I bought this rifle for right around $200.
The 30-06 is a serious round that will put an animal down in almost any case. However, a well placed .22 is enough to kill a deer. If you can hit the heart and lungs the animal will fall to almost any size rifle round.
3. Shooting
Just owning the firearm is not enough. You have to shoot it and be sure that you can hit what you are aiming at. You will have to ZERO your rifle in or set it up so that the sights or the scope do place the bullet on the target.
This takes time and practice. There are many public lands that also feature sighting ranges for rifles.
These are places where you can go to sight your rifle in and test how accurate it is. An hour at the shooting range, and you will know how well you can shoot at 100 yards or 50 yards.
From there, you just keep practicing until you are as accurate as possible.
4. Camo
Better than all the camo in the world is a good hunting blind. A hunting blind allows you to set up on the ground and be covered until the shot needs to be taken.
Good camo can be effective, but I find a good hunting blind is a better investment. Camo prices can be outrageous, but you can actually be near invisible to animals with a good camo blind and a simple camo overshirt or hoodie.
5. Scouting
One of the most important aspects of hunting is scouting. Scouting is what you do before the hunt. It’s about getting out into the woods to see where the animals are living and eating. If you can find out where they bed down and where they eat, you will be able to find the routes they travel each day.
Scouting is an adventure in and of itself and should be treated as such. You are looking for a number of different things to tell you that deer are around the area. Here are some of the best signs:
- Fur
- Prints
- Scat
- Scrapes
- Rubber or scratched tree trunk
- Food sources
If all of these stars align in one area, there is a good chance that you have happened upon an active group of whitetail deer. Knowing that means that you can find a good place to set up that blind and maybe have some luck.
Start Slow and Enjoy the Ride
Hunting is a way to train all kinds of skills that pertain to survival. When you shoot a deer, you are going to track and trail it using its blood. This is another skillset to build on. Every bit of what you do on that hunt, successful or not, will be an opportunity for learning.
In the technological age where so much of what we learn and do is through a screen, hunting gives you the option to get out and put it all to the test in the real world. Good luck!
Do you have other deer hunting for beginners tips you want to add? We’d love to hear from you in the comments section!
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