A Saddle's Versatility Lets You Hunt High or Low

When I started saddle hunting 20 years ago, I immediately saw some advantages to the system. Although mobile hunting in general has come a long way, even then saddles were less bulky and much lighter than a climbing stand, and they allowed you to potentially shoot around the tree at several different angles — all of which were great things if you were a mobile hunter who was not hunting pre-prepped trees.

Over the years, many other advantages to saddle hunting have come to light. In my opinion, one of these is key, and that’s concealment. This is especially valuable when you can’t find the perfect tree which, we all know as mobile hunters, is often the case. The ability to put the tree between you and your quarry is a major advantage. While you can do that in a treestand, shooting around the tree with that type of setup can cause some challenges.

There are a couple scenarios that stand out to me from over the years that highlight where this concealment advantage really shines, particularly instances where you are forced to hunt low or need to hunt rather high due to the features of the tree or the situation at hand.

Quite often, I find myself in a scenario where it is just optimal to stay low under the canopy or even at ground level. By placing myself in the saddle behind a sizable tree, I gain the concealment I need that normally only a ground blind or brush pile could provide. The other situation is one where I find it optimal to hunt really high up, such as in parts of the country where the forest’s mature trees are very tall and don’t have any limbs until you get to the canopy 30-plus feet up. These trees often resemble a telephone pole with zero cover, so sitting in a traditional treestand or climber would make you stick out like a sore thumb. The saddle, however, allows you to set up on the backside of the tree and use the tree as cover. All of a sudden, those telephone pole-looking trees can provide adequate concealment.

When to Hunt Low

Where I live in southern Michigan, it’s common for the mature deer to get pushed into the thick, dense cover — often swamps and marshes — due to extremely high hunting pressure. Many of the trees in this type of habitat don’t offer you the opportunity to get high off the ground, so I often find myself hunting 12 feet or lower, sometimes even at ground level. When hunting in this manner, I often look for a good-sized tree trunk and just set up on the backside so I am decently concealed.

Another reason it might benefit a hunter to hunt low is if you are in a situation where you set up in a hunting location that is close to where you suspect a buck to be bedded. In a scenario like that, the noise and movement involved with ascending a tree could be a detriment and ruin the hunt before it even starts. This is exactly the scenario I found myself in a few years ago when chasing an old, gnarly, 6-point buck that I had been after for a couple years.

The Big 6

I’ve been lucky enough to take several nice bucks over the years, but I don’t think there has been a buck that I wanted to wrap my tag around more than this large 6-pointer that I had the good fortune to chase in neighboring Ohio. I’m not sure what it was about the deer, but I became mesmerized by the buck. Perhaps it was all the encounters and visuals I had of him but could never get a shot. Or perhaps it was his huge frame while only sporting six points and a few kickers. The deer moved through the landscape with such confidence while never putting himself in harm’s way.

One of the most astonishing things about this buck was that he was able to obtain age in an area that has very little cover and extremely high gun pressure considering the amount of available cover. Deer drives are favored in this open landscape, and the deer hunters seem to leave no stone unturned. The land consists of tiny woodlots ranging from a couple acres to 10 acres, the latter being a sizable piece of cover. Somehow, the buck survived out in the open.

Over a span of two years, I got visuals of the deer in three different areas as much as 2.8 miles apart. He seemed to avoid the woodlots and liked to travel and bed along little creek ditches in the agricultural fields or in the standing cornfields. I believe once the cornfields came down and the gun seasons arrived, the deer traveled nearly five miles to an area where there is no hunting allowed.

At the start of 2019, this buck was my only real focus near where I lived. Other than an Iowa bow tag, I was committed to spending my season chasing this particular buck. I started the season hopping around familiar areas where I had historical sightings or data from the previous year.

It was not uncommon for me to lay eyes on this buck. I’d often see him cruising along a subtle creek ditch in an agricultural field or exiting a cornfield. He was always one step ahead of me though. I would hunt him in one location and then I would get a picture of him in another location a mile and a half away. I would then hunt him in that location and his sign would pop up in a completely different area. This scenario played out from the second week of October through early November. I felt like I was chasing my tail.

I decided to go back to the drawing board and really think about the optimal strategy to pursue this buck. I went through old trail-camera data, checked my hunting journal and analyzed the previous sightings, and one location in particular stood out. It was a unique piece of cover oddly located in a wide-open landscape.

This cover consisted of marsh-like habitat mixed with some conifer thickets and a stand of poplars of various ages. It created nice diversity and served to be a bedding area for a couple of local doe groups. In the stand of poplars, there was a main scrape with thick cover surrounding it. I had placed a trail camera in there and the buck had routinely showed up on that scrape once or twice a week throughout October, with the frequency increasing slightly into early November.

As November rolled in, I made the decision that I was going to volume hunt this location every chance I got when the wind direction allowed it. Due to having a full-time job with very little flexibility, the kids’ sports and family priorities, I have a very busy schedule. Sometimes, I can get out for the morning, sometimes just for the evening, or even just midday, but I decided I would spend every moment in that location until the buck finally slipped up and came through there.

On the evening of Nov. 4, I took my Tethrd saddle, sticks and platform into the area. I worked my way over to the scrape and picked out a tree in the perfect location considering the wind direction and where the does typically bedded. It was a quiet evening, and although I could’ve ascended the tree to 10-12 feet high, I opted to hunt just above ground level so as not to create any extra movement or unwanted noise. This particular area is very small and one odd noise that didn’t fit the norm could have ended the hunt before it started. So, I set my platform roughly 12 inches off the ground and on the backside of the tree. The conifers behind me created a dark hole off to the side of suspected movement, offering good concealment.

About 30 minutes before dark, I heard some chasing out in the nearby tall grasses, followed by a deep, drawn-out grunt. As I grabbed my bow, a doe burst out of the grasses, stopped 15 yards in front of me and looked back. My shooting window was very small, so I drew my bow back anticipating the target buck could be coming in behind her. As fortune would have it, a huge white frame of antlers materialized from the brush. There he was, the buck I had been obsessing over for months, standing broadside at 15 yards. I centered my pin on his vitals and delivered the perfect arrow into the lungs.

Climb Toward the Sky

As mentioned earlier in this article, I’ve found saddles to be an advantage in areas that have limbless trees that offer little to no cover, locales where you are forced to hunt high to maintain concealment. In 2018, I found myself in such a place far from home on an out-of-state, late-season hunt. With some key intel from a friend, I was able to get on some deer that were on a strict bed-to-feed pattern heading from the hills out to the surrounding wheat fields.

My buddy and I scouted midday to determine the likely travel route and ultimately the kill tree. The woods looked bare and empty. Foliage was down and the trees in this area were extremely tall, with zero limbs until you got to the canopy 30-40 feet up in the air. It seemed like no matter the tree I selected, I would be skylined.

I opted to pick the tree in the best location and climb as high as I could. The hill points dumped down into this bottom and the terrain created a nice bench that was loaded with deer tracks and scat. I ascended the tree 30-plus feet and set up on the backside of it using my Tethrd saddle. This allowed me to use the tree to remain hidden, since the deer working down the hills would be nearly at eye level with me at certain points.

The sheer number of deer I saw over the next few hours was astounding. I couldn’t believe the whitetail density in this area. Throughout the hunt, I had to beat roughly 30 different sets of eyes working their way out of those hills. By being on that backside, I was able to sift through dozens of deer before a mature buck finally showed and worked his way to the food.

After watching more than 10 different bucks work through the area, I looked up at the top of the hill and saw a deer that stood out from the rest. His body seemed darker and bigger. Then I saw an impressively wide rack. My buddy had told me about a really wide buck that he thought was 6 or 7 years old, and I immediately knew it was him. The deer worked down the ridge like he had done it hundreds of times without any consequences. This time, however, he was in trouble, because I was perched 30-plus feet high on a Predator Platform right along his travel route. The buck stopped to scent check a nearby scrape and offered me a beautiful, 18-yard broadside shot that I was able to capitalize on.

Versatility Is Key

When posed with the question, What are the advantages of a saddle-hunting system?, reduced bulk of equipment stands out, followed closely by versatility, especially in those scenarios where you may be forced to hunt extremely low or extremely high. The ability to set up behind the tree and create your own cover makes this method an ideal tool when a tree that offers perfect concealment just doesn’t exist where you need to be for a successful hunt.

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