Just read thru this, and one thing I didn't notice:
Usually, "Big Woods" (more wilderness type habitat) deer are much more sensitive to ANY disturbances associated with humans. Am talking not just human scent, but ANY different aromas, as well as visuals and sounds.
By comparison, farmland deer may quickly go back to predictable patterns after human encounters, while wilderness deer stop using an area for much longer periods of time.
Exception to above is a roaming buck during the rut, where you might have your best odds in hunting the same travel corridor or ridgetop saddle days on end. The kind of saddles & travel corridors I'm referring to are often in low deer density areas for the general region being hunted, but rutting bucks will takes these routes while roaming. Most hunters have low patience for hunting days on end without seeing a deer, so may be better served in relocating stand sites daily where doe family groups would normally be found near better forage habitat.
That said, a huge acorn crop may simply scatter the deer over a much larger area, while reducing linear distance travels, meaning some really tough deer hunting, even when deer populations are not low. You may find there is essentially no linear travel between bedding & feeding areas, as the deer are bedding & feeding in the same places, often moving (linear) less than 200 yards in 24 hours (unless bumped or disturbed by hunters).
And contrary to popular belief, deer, including mature bucks, will often bed in open hardwoods!
They tend to bed wherever they are least disturbed by anything that is not a daily encounter for them.
What "disturbs" them is anything different to their ordinary days.
Cars going back & forth down a highway (routinely, all the time) will not disturb them, as they have become habituated to this. OFTEN, some of the least disturbed areas (to the deer) can be found closer to roads, as so many hunters will go in, deeper into the woods, and usually with routes perpendicular (not parallel) to where they park.
It's almost funny how so often the most hunting pressure can be in the more remote areas where hunters come into them from every direction, while leaving vast areas around the perimeter of these areas much less hunted than the areas' centers. Hunters will study topo maps, find "remote" areas, yet different hunters may all be seeing these same areas, just coming into them from different directions.
