If I may expound on those three basic rules:
WITHOUT QUESTION, the simplest technique we've found for increasing our sightings and harvests of older, hunter-wary deer is to analyze where we've been hunting over the last 3-5 years and placing stands in the "gaps" in our hunting pressure. Because we collect such detailed data on our hunting practics, we have important information such as the location of each stand and total hours hunted for each stand, going back many years. Using this data, we can produce a "topographic map" of hunting pressure going back as many years as we want to calculate (and 3 years appears to be adequate). When we see holes in our 3-year cumulative hunting pressure, we place stands in those holes for the upcoming hunting season. And a critical point is, we place at least one stand in each "hole" whether there is buck sign present or not. Often, that area has gone unhunted because their is no buck sign. But buck sign (rubs and scrapes) are communication devices intended to influence other deer. Bucks won't waste the effort to make sign where other deer will not see it. Many mature bucks use travel patterns other deer do not use. As they travel these areas other deer do not use, they will not make sign, hence even areas where a particular buck travels may not have any of his rut sign. The point I'm trying to make is that just because there isn't any buck sign doesn't mean an older buck isn't using the area. If there isn't any buck sign in a given "hole" we are trying to cover, we simply place a stand (or more than one stand) to cover the best terrain pattern we can find in that location.
This pattern also comes back to the rule about not overhunting stands. Although every hunter has experienced a paricular stand that will produce deer sightings--or even rarely, older buck sightings--year after year, those situations are rare. In most situations, hunting a particular stand over and over is the death-knell of that stand for very hunter-wary deer. Unless a hunter is hunting a very remote area, most mature deer have lived to maturity because they have learned how to avoid hunters. And a deer doesn't have to see/smell a hunter while they are on stand to know a hunter is in the area. Our bodies and clothing shed scent constantly. As we sit on a stand, human scent is literally pouring off our bodies and drifting down to the ground. A hunter-wary deer may come by that location that night or even days later, smell that human scent, and learn one more location to avoid at least during daylight in the future. A hunter-wary deer will simply accumulate a mental inventory of places hunters are frequenting and avoid those areas, even if only avoiding them during daylight hours, hence greatly increasing his/her chance of survival. Over-hunting stands is the quickest way to educate deer on how to avoid you.
Lastly, "hunting near cover" is simply a rule we developed after looking at years of observation and harvest data. After placing the harvest location of every older buck we've ever killed onto a habitat map of our property, we noticed a pattern developing. By placing a 100-yard buffer around every patch of good bedding/security cover on the property, we noticed that almost all older buck kill locations fell within these buffers. Although these buffers only cover around 40% of the property, and we are spreading our hunting pressure out across the property, 90+% of our past older buck kills occurred within these buffers. Now this doesn't mean cover habitat is the only thing that matters. We have food plots and hunt near them, and have killed older bucks near food plots. However, the key is finding feeding areas or locations near feeding areas that fall within these cover-habitat buffers. If you are going to hunt feeding patterns, look very carefully for feeding areas that are closest to good cover.
