Getting the Lay of the Land
Using Topographic Maps to Help Plan Your Hunts
Game cameras can give a hunter a big advantage during the season, but if you're only putting game cameras out on your feeders or food plots, you're missing some opportunities. By studying the terrain of your hunting area, you can probably identify some additional spots where you should at least stake out a game camera, and probably hunt over as well.
One of the best topographic features you can exploit when hunting is a "saddle". A saddle looks just like its name: a low spot in a ridge that provides the most convenient path from one side of a ridge to another. The highlighted portion of the image below is a saddle.
The great thing about hunting a saddle is that it's the most likely spot for deer to be if they're moving from one stand of woods to another. Every deer won't pass through the saddle every day, but your odds are going to be better there than just about anywhere else. You've got to use some common sense, though. Deer won't use a saddle that doesn't offer any cover - they're going to be more skittish about being in the open than they're going to be looking to save themselves a few steps. Not only does it need to have the right topographic shape, but it needs to offer the right amount of cover to make the deer comfortable, but still give you a shot. The images below show what looks like a great saddle topographically, but the satellite image reveals the fatal flaw - no cover at all. The only cover is a thin fenceline that's not thick enough to offer any concealment at all. I've hunted the area in the map for 6 years, and I've only seen *one* deer in the highlighted area.
One of the nice features BuckStalker offers is the ability to have both a topographic map and a satellite view of your hunting area. By toggling between the two, it's pretty easy to identify which topographic features are actually going to work to give you an edge when hunting. And don't forget to think about the bigger picture: topo maps will show you where any nearby water sources are, and BuckStalker will let you mark the locations of any feeders or food plots in your hunting area. Finally, there's also the Heat Map that will turn your set of game camera pictures into a kind of 'deer radar' to show you which locations are the most active at different times of the day.
If you want to learn more about using topographic maps to help identify prime hunting locations, I strongly recommend you read "Mapping Trophy Bucks", by Brad Herndon. He write extensively about a wide variety of topographic features that can give you an edge when you're looking for a real trophy buck.
Bob Tipton, 4/20/2010