For years now, hunters have ben shooting some huge whitetail bucks in small to tiny tracts of land in cities and suburbs where bowhunting is permitted. In Connecticut, northern Virginia, outside New York city, even out in Missoula, Montana. Kevin Robinson is one of those hunters, and he’s killed all these bucks in the suburbs of Missoula. Try his tactics wherever you hunt bucks around houses, roads and towns.
When archery season opens in September, Kevin hunts high draws that overlook the city in the evenings. In his favorite setup, his tree stand is tight to one of 2 deer trails that run up and down a mountain. Having scouted and glassed the area for a month, he knows the pattern of these suburban bucks. If a big deer has not passed his stand by a certain time in the evening, he knows he is not coming on the first trail, but could be walking the second trail. So he gets down, gets the wind and thermals right and sneaks over to one of 3 ground spots to watch along the second trail. That’s how he got the three-beamed buck on the left side of the photo.
Kevin says, “It’s all about scouting and watching early-season deer on their tight and predictable summer pattern.”
He hunts fairly hard if low impact in September, but when mid-October rolls around he stops hunting and leaves the local deer alone until later in November (some hunters believe in the October lull, others don’t). “Not hunting for 4 or 5 weeks, that’s hard to do, but I know how good the hunting will be as the rut comes on,” Kevin says.
In November he typically hunts from a tree stand set lower in the draws and nearer houses, roads and developments. “Local town bucks that I hardly ever see up high start moving around and looking for does, and the bowhunting really gets good.”
For city and suburban bucks, Kevin says grunting works well, and a drag line with doe scent can be good in the rut.
