Let me tell a quick story about a neighbor to a property I used to manage. Let’s call him Fred.

Well, Fred bought a 20 with dreams of plastering his walls full of mounts. He worked in a larger city, but would spend most every weekend puttering around on his little oasis of tranquility, shaping and manipulating the place into exactly what he had visioned.

I got to know, “Fred” quite well and he is a great guy, but almost every season he would convince himself that there wasn’t a buck on his grounds worthy of hunting. They were all just too young and needed extra years or the rare mature bucks he’d get just didn’t seem to have much headgear.

Fred entered most seasons we were neighbors nearly as depressed as someone that had just lost their best friend in the world. His cams held nothing to be excited about and he’d barely hunt his 20, thinking that it didn’t make sense to pressure the deer off that he wanted another year on, when there was nothing there he wanted to hunt.

Here’s the rub. I managed a 3,200 acre chunk of prime grounds on the other side of his fence and it held truly great deer. I’d try to encourage him, but it never seemed to work. Frankly, he never had a clue what all would show up on his grounds, until he swapped chips during