CREATURES OF THE SWAMP
My friend Lou Kindred had his suspicions of swamp potential confirmed several years ago, when he and family members headed for a wetland near where they’d been hunting on dry ground.
“The first couple of weekends of the season had quite a bit of hunting pressure,” he told me. “None of us were used to it or liked it, so we headed back into a nearby swamp, primarily to get away from as many people as we could.
“That’s no different from what bucks do, especially the good ones, which we realized shortly after we started hunting the swamp seriously and began to know our way around back in there.”
The more time they spent out in the swamp — on the dry islands, specifically — the more deer of the antlered variety they found. They immediately also discovered an unexpected bonus — sound effects. The right kind.
“The swamp produces a pleasant, and tension-building, sound you seldom hear elsewhere — the splash-splash-splash of deer walking through water toward your stand,” Kindred said.
“These sounds are best in shallow water, because you hear definite footsteps. It’s not the continual sloshing created by a deer moving through deeper water. And the sounds naturally are much easier to hear on days with little or no breeze. It gets your heart beating
