Kiddie-Pool Watering Hole

You know it’s a bad drought when water is your best deer-hunting “food  source.” GON reader Jimmy Arnold sent some great trail-cam pictures of a water source he created with a plastic pool. 

“After reading the article on tips for hunting small tracts (November issue of GON), I would like to share with you my experience this summer,” Jimmy said. “Back around the last of July, I was watching the news one evening when the weather man was talking about it was going to be a very hot and dry summer. A hunting buddy of mine, Rodney Simpson, and I hunt a small tract of land in Walker County. There is not any running water on the property, and I was afraid the deer would leave our property in search of water, if it got that bad. I went and bought a plastic swimming pool and put it in a place that I could get to easy to fill it up. I put a trail camera near it to see what would happen. It took about a week for the deer to get accustomed to it. They would back off and look at it, but I reckon their thirst got the best of them. They visit it everyday, and when I check my camera, there is always one or two standing in the middle of the pool. I pour a 55-gallon drum of water in it about every two weeks. So we have kept our deer and brought some in from our neighbors. So it really works.”

According to Capt. Stan Elrod, of DNR Law Enforcement, there’s nothing in the law that makes it illegal to hunt over a watering hole.