What These Top Bowhunters Know That Will Help You Take More Deer
Day 2: More Bowhunting Tips for Deer from Will Primos
Editor’s Note: If Robin Hood only had known what bowhunters today know, and if Robin Hood had had the archery equipment bowhunters now use, he could have fed fresh venison to all the peasants of Nottingham. For many years, these professional hunters’ livelihoods have depended on their woodsmanship and accuracy with bows and arrows. Although the life of a professional hunter seems glamorous, after spending time with these bowhunters I’ve interviewed for this week, I realize they work harder and spend more hours even today trying to learn about bowhunting and the whitetails they hunt than any other hunters I know. Their advice always has helped me find and take more bucks with my bow.
 Will Primos, a bowhunter for 45 years and the founder of Primos Game Calls in Flora, Miss., has produced the “Truth” series of videos and TV productions for numerous years. Primos has earned a major portion of his living pinpointing and taking deer with a bow. If you think the pressure’s heavy when your buck of a lifetime comes in, consider that when big bucks get within bow range of Primos, he has millions of eyes watching him draw and shoot. According to Primos:
* “Hunt the split trails. Before deer season arrives, I go to agricultural fields and find where the deer trails are coming out of the woods and going into the fields. Then I follow the trails back into the woods for at least 100 yards to where each trail splits. That’s where I’ll hang my tree stand, if I get a wind in my favor, because this way I’ve doubled my odds for seeing a buck. I’ve got deer coming from two directions to funnel onto that one trail.
* “Make eating easy for the deer. Often you’ll find groups of trees that produce nuts that deer favor. But you don’t know which tree the bucks will choose to feed under, since the deer have the option of four or five different trees.  Before the season arrives, I clear the ground under one of those oak trees with a rake, a machete or a small hatchet. I’ve learned that the deer more often will feed under a tree with less brush and leaves under it, because the acorns are easier for them to see than acorns under a tree with brush and leaf litter built-up under it. One year, I took a gasoline-powered lawnmower into the area I wanted to hunt that fall and cut down all the trees, bushes and shrubs and vacuumed-up everything on the ground with that lawnmower. Later, the deer came to that tree to feed first.
* “Become the acorn. Once while hunting in an acorn flat, I noticed that every time an acorn would fall out of the tree, a deer would leave where it was feeding and go to the spot where the acorn just had fallen. I was sitting in a white oak tree on the edge of the Mississippi River, and I could see 10 white oaks from my perch.  A big 9-point buck was going from tree to tree eating acorns. Suddenly an acorn fell off the tree to my right about 40-yards away, hit the branches and leaves and finally landed on the ground. When that deer heard that acorn fall, he ran to that acorn. The next time I went to hunt near an acorn tree, I carried a pocket full of gravel with me. I saw a doe feeding and threw one big piece of gravel up in my tree to try to get it to fall through the leaves and branches like an acorn would, which it did. Immediately the deer jerked her head up and looked at my tree. As she put her head back down, I took another piece of gravel from my pocket and dropped it straight down under my tree. When the gravel hit the ground, that doe came running over to my tree, and I took her.
* “Don’t hunt naked. Deer have a sixth sense. I’ve seen young bucks walk right under the tree where I’m sitting, and then when they get 10-yards away from the trees, they’ll stop and look straight up at me. Once when this happened, I was wearing my Mossy Oak Bottomland camo, which made me invisible.  A buck never saw or heard me, but he knew something was wrong. He looked-up in that tree and spotted me. I read an article once that said that deer could sense the electrical charges given-off by the human body if the deer got close enough. I believe that’s true. One of the mistakes I think many hunters make is they clear away too-much brush around their tree stands. Then as they sit or stand, their silhouettes aren’t broken-up. Leave some of the limbs in front of your tree stand, and pick the holes in the brush through which you’ll shoot. You may have to shoot over a limb, under a limb or beside a limb, but you’ll see more deer and have more opportunities to take a buck if you’ll leave some of those limbs and leaves to break up your outline.”
Tomorrow: Preston Pittman Shares His Bowhunting for Deer Strategies
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