Montana bowhunting guide scores trophy whitetails without bait

Keith Miller said he’s successfully guided whitetail bowhunters for 11 years in southeastern Montana, where baiting is prohibited.

Contacted last week, the Bozeman hunter was already checking out treestand sites and beginning to cut out shooting lanes for the seasons that start in late summer.

“We do a lot of preseason scouting because a lot depends on the crop rotations,” he said. “We hunt the riverbottoms and look for bottlenecks and pinch points in travel corridors between where they bed and feed.

“In July and August we do long-range glassing to see what food sources the bucks are hitting and move blinds as needed.

“During the rut we’ll use blinds and a decoy to draw in bucks. We get pre-rut bucks trying to establish dominance.”

Miller, whose company is Montana Whitetails, has hunted over bait with friends in other states and prefers the no-bait hunting in Montana.

“My experience in Michigan is that the mature bucks zero in on the bait and then tend to circle downwind, and leave, especially if they’re hunted hard.

“In Ohio, where baiting is allowed, a friend and I hunt without bait a ridge on a 100-acre property. Once we ran into a father and son who’d been hunting there over bait for years and never killed anything nice.

“Yet in four days, my friend and I killed 8-point and 10-point bucks by hunting a saddle between two bedding areas.

“A lot of bucks have a tendency to become even more wary when bait is out. I’ve had more success over natural travel corridors and being ultrasensitive to the wind.”