If there is agricultural land in your hunting area, that’s almost certainly the place to start looking for the area’s biggest bucks. For deer, good nutrition comes from diversity -- a wide variety of foods, which is usually a byproduct of varied habitat. The best trophy-buck habitat can be described as a patchwork. When viewed from the sky, the ground looks somewhat like a patchwork quilt, with numerous small blocks of different habitat types including cultivated lands, overgrown fields, wetlands and mature woodlots.

If your chosen hunting area is big woods, there will be fewer deer because there’s much less food available. Find areas within those big woods that have the greatest variety of habitat. Loggers can be a hunter’s best friends. In recently timbered areas, more sunlight reaches the ground, encouraging the growth of low vegetation that deer favor.

Most state foresters can supply hunters with a list of areas that have been recently clearcut. Correlate that list to lands inside your target “big buck” county, and begin to narrow your search for public (or private) hunting grounds nearby.

Think in terms of the three stages of forest growth: seedling-sapling, pole timber and mature timber. The seedling-sapling stage makes a great deal of edible vegetation available to deer. Generally, this is the most productive forest type for deer. Within a few years, low brush grows to the pole timber stage. Trees grow tall and thin, and their thick leaves shade out vegetation at ground level, so that there’s less food available for deer to eat. This is usually the worst forest habitat for deer.

When trees mature, they produce mast crops (acorns and other nuts), which provide good late-season food for deer, though it’s not as abundant or diverse as in a seedling-sapling stage forest.

Woodlands managed with good wildlife habitat in mind will include all three stages of growth and will have a lot of “edge” habitat.

THE TIME FACTOR
Age is the toughest trophy-buck factor to control. Bucks seldom produce record-class antlers until their fourth set of antlers, and it takes at least three years to develop what most bowhunters would consider a trophy rack. In areas open to public hunting with firearms, most bucks are killed before they grow old enough to produce decent racks.

To maximize their chances of finding older bucks, Bowhunters have two options: Gain access to land that is lightly hunted, or find places where few hunters go. This typically means walking farther, climbing steeper hills, hunting thicker cover, getting there earlier (and staying later) than most other hunters.

ASK AND YOU MAY RECEIVE
Now you should have an idea of where you’ll want to hunt, but you’re still not ready to do any on-the-ground scouting. First you need to gain access to the land. That’s no problem if you are targeting public land, but on private land, you should get permission from landowners. Whether or not the law requires it, written permission is always your best route. And off-season is the time to approach landowners for a friendly, general conversation that, hopefully, ends with permission to hunt.