With hunting season about to get underway, most hunters have a pretty good idea where they're going to hunt. The few who don't are scrambling for last-minute opportunities to get in on hunting camps or on private or public land.

What many sportsmen and women overlook, though, is that quality hunting can be as close as your back door. Throughout the Panhandle of Florida, for example, landowners with tracts as small as 5 or 10 acres may have access to fairly decent hunting. And while many of the deer you can harvest in these little backyard plots will be does and small bucks, you'll occasionally run across a really nice buck. What's more, with a little habitat manipulation, you can improve your chances of finding a buck in the six-point to eight-point class; not a Boone and Crockett buck, but one that will make a nice trophy.

The truth is, deer can be found anywhere their essential needs for food, water, and cover are met. This can be a 2,000-acre farm or a city park. And since deer are notorious for adapting to the human presence, the animals in these areas frequently are abroad during daylight hours. They are attenuated to human activity, and often are easier to hunt than their deep-woods brethren.

Deer in urban areas frequently cause problems ranging from destruction of vegetable gardens to collisions with automobiles. In one north Florida community, officials have instituted a restricted deer hunt within the city limits, for local residents using shotguns only, to help control the burgeoning deer population.

SO HOW DO YOU FIND A SMALL PLOT where you can hunt? Start by looking close to home. Get a detailed map of your area and outline the city limits with a marking pen. Then look outside the line you have drawn for those little mini-farms that were so popular 10 years or so ago. From there, move out into rural areas.

What you're looking for is an area with the three things deer need, which we've already mentioned: cover, food, and water. All of these need not be on one piece of property, but they must be within a reasonable distance. Specifically, look for areas with a mosaic of land use types--some agriculture, some open areas, some wet areas--all connected by "corridors" of trees or other good cover. In places like this the deer can move about the landscape easily, and you can find good ambush sites.

Don't be put off by locations that have had recent timbering operations, or where landowners have cut trees to build a house or do landscaping. Where hardwoods have been cut, the deer will come in and eat mistletoe that was in the trees. They'll feed on browse that has resulted from the exposure of plants to sunlight, and on mushrooms. In short, throw out your notions about hunting in the deep woods and look beyond the obvious places where you've always found deer; backyard hunting is a totally different game.

Once you've identified an area that looks promising, expand your search by getting aerial photographs from your county property appraiser. From these, you can pinpoint some specific spots where deer may be found. You also can go to the property appraiser for the names of landowners to contact, once you find an area that looks good for hunting.

I'm going to make a couple of rather broad assumptions here. First, I'm going to assume that you have a good enough idea of the kind of habitat deer need to use maps and aerial photos effectively. My second assumption is that you already have a good idea of how to approach a landowner for permission to hunt on his or her land. While both of these topics are worthy of further discussion, I want to use the rest of this article to tell you how to prepare and hunt the land you've found.

THE AMOUNT OF PREPARATION you can do, of course, will depend to a great extent on the size of the property and the relationship you have with the landowner. If you find someone who has 5 acres and wants help controlling the deer that are eating his fruit trees, you probably can't do a whole lot to improve the hunting situation there. But if you're lucky enough to know someone with 15 or 20 or 100 acres in pine trees, you may be able to do some planting, and build a couple of permanent tree stands.

Ideally, what you want is a long-term hunting situation. I've been quite fortunate in that respect, since I own 100 acres that I hunt on. The suggestions I'm going to make here are based on 10 years of experimenting with different management techniques in a permanent setting. But you can adapt them to short-term, even one-year leases. So let's say that you have located a small area where you've gained permission to hunt. What now?

The first step is to analyze the area. Don't look at just the part you're going to hunt, look at the big picture. Where are the cover and water relative to where you can hunt? What food sources are available? And most important, where are the corridors of cover that connect them?

Identify those corridors and the resources they connect. Then on the aerial photo, draw the outline of the area you're going to hunt. Look for places that two or more corridors intersect. Near this intersection look for dense cover where deer may bed, for bits of edge, for water sources; in short, learn what specific parts of your area the deer may be using, and for what purpose.

NOW, CAPITALIZE ON WHAT YOU KNOW. What I'm going to say next will sound like heresy to most experienced deer hunters. And I wouldn't suggest using this technique on a public hunting area, or anywhere that gets human activity only during hunting season. But remember, these deer are accustomed to the human presence. They adjust to changes in the landscape within a few days and go on.

Plan your ambush. Close to the place you've identified as being the most likely for high deer use, place a permanent or semi-permanent blind. Personally, I prefer a platform in a oak tree. But you can use anything you want, in a tree or on the ground, so long as it is sturdy and secure. Don't wait until the week before hunting season to put up a stand. Rather, do it about July. That will give the deer time to become accustomed to it and ignore it. In 10 years of hunting from such platforms, some of them quite exposed, I have never seen a deer look up at one unless I moved around too much or made too much noise. I once watched a doe and twin fawns from a distance of 60 yards for more than an hour. I was sitting in the sun and got hot, and shed several layers of clothes while the three deer kept on feeding. Not once did any of them even look up.

This brings me to my next point. After your stand is in place, wrap it with camouflage fabric. Camo is available in most fabric stores starting in the middle of the summer for a couple of dollars a yard; get enough to disguise your stand with a little left over. Now comes the second part that will give most hunters pause. With any leftover fabric, or with a cloth feed sack or some other fabric, hang a couple of pieces of cloth so that they move freely in the wind.

Again, the aim here is to accustom the deer to movement and sound around the stand. Chances are good that you'll be shooting at short range. If the deer are attenuated to sound and movement, they are likely to ignore anything you do. I first figured this out quite by accident. Several years ago, I somehow wound up with a piece of camo fabric that was more netting than solid fabric, quite thin and easy to see through. To make it more opaque, my husband stapled black plastic garbage bags on the back side of the camo.

> ON OPENING DAY, I WAS HORRIFIED to find that every time the slightest bit of breeze blew, the plastic scraped back and forth on the platform. But I needn't have worried. A spike buck wandered by, ignoring a sound that by now he was accustomed to. Bad move. He wound up in my freezer.

Next, augment the resources you can see from your stand. One key to hunting on a backyard tract is to identify what the deer need that they don't have anywhere else in the area, and provide it. For instance, if you're hunting on the sandhills of the central Panhandle, free water may be a serious problem. You can sink a tub into the sand, and provide a source of water where you want the deer to be.

Also take a look at the kind of vegetation on the tract. Is it piney woods, or pines mixed with hardwoods? If so, does the landowner burn the area?

If not, you might want to suggest that he or she do so. Better yet, you can offer to either burn it off yourself, or pay someone to do it. By burning off the undergrowth on either a two-year or three-year cycle, you can create a lot of fresh forbs that the deer use heavily during the winter.

Let me interject a word of caution here, however. Burning anything, be it open pasture or piney woods, involves a degree of liability. Do not start out on this yourself if you don't know anything about it. Contact an Extension forester, the Division of Forestry, or a consulting forester for help.

THE NEXT PART OF THE PLAN involves planting food plots. This is not as simple as just throwing some seed on the ground, or even disking it in. If you're going to do it right, you're going to have to do a little planning ahead.

And here's the last thing I'm going to throw at you that will make experienced hunters shake their heads. The reason for planting a food plot is not only to attract deer, but to improve the bucks you're going to see. On the surface, it seems impossible to improve the nutrition of the deer in such a situation. But think about things a minute: if you're hunting in an area of mini-farms--5- and 10-acres plots-- chances are not many people are hunting around you. That means any bucks which you improve through your habitat manipulation probably will not be taken out of the population by anyone else. If you're hunting on a larger tract--like, say, the 100-acre farm I hunt on--you should have enough area for at least a couple of bucks to hang around all year. This is not to say you're going to produce a Boone and Crockett buck, only that you can increase your chances of seeing a nice one. So what should you plant, and when?

That depends a lot on where you are. Again, consult with the Extension Service for some specific suggestions.

As a general guideline, though, plan to plant both a summer crop and a winter crop. In the summer you can plant crops such soybeans or peanuts, or forage peas, joint vetch or alyce clover; in the winter, plant a mixture of small grains and clovers. But I'll remind you that you don't have to do things on a huge scale here; a 1/2-acre plot can bring in a lot of deer.

When I say "plant it right," I mean that you need to provide enough fertilizer and water to grow a decent crop, even if the deer do keep it looking like a golf course. The reason Florida doesn't produce many big deer is poor nutrition. Our infertile soils produce small deer with small antlers because the vegetation the animals feed on is poor in minerals. The addition of adequate fertilizer provides some of the phosphorus and other minerals that deer need to grow good antlers.

YOU ALSO MAY WANT TO CONSIDER supplemental feeding. I'm not talking about throwing corn out on the ground, though that is a good way to attract deer to an area. (A word of caution here: according to Florida state wildlife law, if you feed corn you must do so for at least six months prior to the start of hunting season.)

Neither am I talking about so-called "mineral blocks" or "salt blocks." The supplemental feeds I'm referring to are those blocks or cubes of compressed stuff that look like so much cubed cattle feed. Not only do the deer love the stuff once they develop a taste for it, the feed provides many of the minerals the deer need. If you're going to do this, however, be prepared to make a year-long investment in deer feed.

The deer need these minerals all year, not just during hunting season. In fact, the period of time when deer need these extra minerals is almost exactly the same time you're least likely to get out there and plan for next year: the first several months after hunting season ends.

One other thing: if you're going to the effort of increasing the deer herd's nutrition in your area, don't shoot little bucks. Small spikes are just last year's late-born fawns, and they'll catch up. Larger spike bucks will sport nice racks by next year, if you let them walk.

ALL OF THIS SOUNDS LIKE A LOT OF WORK, and it probably is. But think about it this way: would you rather do a lot of work at a hunt club 20 or 30 or 50 miles from home, or in your own backyard? While nothing, including these techniques, can guarantee you a deer, what they can guarantee you is a chance to hunt close to home, on the spur of the moment. For me, that's a strong incentive. I can walk out of my office at 4:00 p.m. and be in a deer stand 15 minutes later, to sit until dark a little after 6:00. That's hard to beat.

And if you think the notion of "growing" your own big deer on a small plot is so much nonsense, consider this. When we started managing our deer, we shot only does and spike bucks; we never saw anything bigger. Then for three years we stopped shooting spikes and took only a couple of does on doe day. At the same time we started following the guidelines I've outlined here.

The third year of this regime, I shot a reasonably nice seven-point, and let a four-point walk. The following year my husband took a beautiful eight-point buck in the same place I had seen both bucks the previous year; two weeks later I took a four-point, also in the same place. I'll be the first to admit that four deer is not a large sample size. But it certainly beats the bucks we were seeing before we stared planning for deer in our backyard.