A key to bagging older bucks: getting into places that other hunters avoid. Photo by John E. Phillips.

Some of the state's biggest bucks live in river bottoms: Most hunters in the Bayou State recognize this -- and many of them probably wish it weren't so.

From the Pearl in the east to the Sabine in the west and the Atchafalaya Basin in the middle, the state's swamps are some of the most daunting areas in North America -- hugely difficult to traverse and infested with mosquitoes, alligators and poisonous snakes. Which is why many big bucks live and die from natural causes within their confines.

"Your really big bucks live in locations very few hunters tread," said Alexandria's Jason Robicheaux. "Everyone has heard the saying that a buck does not get big being stupid. And they also don't get big hanging out in the open. The swamps of the state do hold some monster bucks, because they are hard to get into. Hunting these areas can be tricky, and if you can learn the little details that are important for river-bottom hunting, you can be successful."

Let's look at the techniques and hotspots for river-bottom whitetail hunting.

TECHNIQUES
After Hurricane Rita ravaged the Sabine River bottoms, my corn feeder was leaning a bit, but still standing, and still dispensing corn and drawing in deer. All of the trees of the right size within shooting distance of my feeder had been either knocked over or snapped off at about 10 feet -- and I like to hunt at least 15 feet up. That left me with no alternative but to go to the ground, which is a situation many hunters have found themselves in over the last two seasons because of storm damage.

Over the last few years I've used portable ground blinds like the Double Bull, Taj Mahal and others to hunt hogs and turkeys by means of bow and arrow, and now I find myself hunting whitetails on the ground, especially in the bottoms.

During the first weekend of bow season I set up a portable shoot-through ground blind called the Wig Wam between two big fallen pines 17 yards away from the feeder. Saturday evening I passed a shot on a fork-horned buck, as lease rules stipulate we can only take 6-point bucks or better, and then saw a fawn doe slipping through the damage. These deer never saw me although I was at eye level with them and very close. I later ended up taking a nice 8-pointer.

The key is that I was able to set the blind up where the wind favored me. A deer's most useful survival tool is its nose, which is far more sensitive than a human's. By using portable ground blinds, which you can set up in less than five minutes, you can beat the wind and greatly increase your odds of scoring on a wary whitetail.

There are dozens of portable blinds on the market; you just have to figure out which one best suits your needs. Happily, most of them are affordable and might help give you a chance to hunt in areas that Rita rendered seemingly unhuntable. In many areas in the southern half of the state, forests still look like wastelands thanks to Rita and Katrina, so ground blinds are a great option. Moreover, hunting on the ground can be quite exciting.

Admittedly, drawing back a bow or raising a rifle at the eye level of an animal is a bit challenging, but if you play your cards right and pay attention to wind direction, you might just have more success than ever.

According to Jason Robicheaux, still-hunting is another good option for river bottoms. "One of the things you want to be mindful of when hunting down in the swamps is that deer are not afraid to go in the water," he said. But it's usually not their first means of travel."

Robicheaux recommended that hunters look for ridges in the swamps that cut across ponds and low areas and go to protected islands. "By 'island' I do not mean a big thing in the river," he explained. "I'm talking about an area of high ground with some cover, out in the middle of water that might just be a foot deep or even less. Big bucks lie up in these spots and then move around when there's little pressure. If you know this habitat of deer, you can slowly creep into these areas and push the deer out."

Creeping onto the islands and jumping the deer is Robicheaux's preferred method of still-hunting these spots. He's had quite a bit of success this way, because the deer aren't used to being hunted in their "safe" zone. "Most people will not go the extra mile to get this done," he said, "so the deer will sometimes not break until the last second. I shot a buck once that was just sitting there amongst the brush, thinking it was hidden -- and I was only 15 yards away."