There’s a version of big woods hunting I did for years where I’d work right up to the edge of a mountain laurel thicket, set up in a good oak tree, and wonder why I only got pictures of the big deer moving at night. Took me a while to understand what I was actually doing.

I was hunting a field edge.

That’s how Pat Burns describes it, and once he said it, it made perfect sense. The mountain laurel is the thicket. The oak ridge or bench where everyone sets up their ladder stands is the field. The mature bucks are living inside the laurel and using the internal veins to scent-check everything on the outside before deciding whether to step out. Most of the time, they don’t.

Pat has been hunting this cover in the Northeast for years. His approach to it changed the way I think about these areas.

The first thing he does is pull up a mapping app (Spartan Forge does an excellent job at this with UAV imagery) in leaf-off mode and look for openings in the sea of laurel. Not just the obvious drainages, but the small pockets and slivers where the canopy isn’t closed. In areas where the laurel goes for miles, those little openings become natural funnels. Deer use them as main arteries. When he gets in there and scouts them in the off-season, they’re peppered with sign.

Getting in without making noise is its own problem. Walk through the laurel and you’re announcing yourself from a hundred yards out. Pat’s solution: snip a trail in the off-season. Move brush, clear a path, prep an entry that lets you pop in without disturbing the area where deer are actually moving. Check the legality in your state before doing any cutting, but even bending and moving branches can be a big help. The trail he used to kill his big laurel buck last fall ran close to a quarter mile into the thicket. He’d prepped it ahead of time so he could get to the tree quietly.

One thing I’ve found in these same areas is that the small drainages running through the laurel are often the easiest paths in. The laurel tends to thin out in the center of them, which gives you a little more ceiling to move under. The catch is deer use those same routes, so you have to figure out which ones are active and access them from a dead-end inlet instead of walking straight through.

Bedding in this kind of cover isn’t a science, and Pat was upfront about that. In big woods with miles of laurel, deer can bed, feed, and do everything in essentially the same area. There’s no single spot you can reliably pin them. What you can do is find the historical sign, the multi-year scrapes, the rubs on the same trees year after year, and work out the most likely windows and wind directions.

The bottom line is that this cover exists in a lot of big woods country, especially in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast, and most hunters don’t go in it. That’s exactly why some of the oldest deer around are living there. It’s not that they’re impossible to hunt. It’s that it takes more work to get to them, and most people aren’t willing to do it.

Full conversation with Pat Burns on episode 497 of the East Meets West Hunt podcast. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.