Like oil and water, grapevines and timber stand improvement don’t mix. Known for their aggressive competitiveness, grapevines choke out sunlight and steal vital nutrients from healthy hardwoods.

 

They also take over and weigh down the crown of healthy trees causing irreparable damage to essential timber. Although there was a day I would walk by a grapevine, today I realize the harm they cause and will deaden them whenever possible.

 
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While cutting down some grapevines this year, I decided to put them to work. Might as well have something as aggressive and hardy as a grapevine benefit the bowhunter in some way. So, we decided to use them as concealment for our climbing sticks.

 

Break up your silhouette more effectively

This bow season we are adding more natural foliage under and around our tree stands in order to break up our silhouette more effectively. After cutting down the grapevine and pulling it from the crown of the tree, we wove it through and around our climbing sticks. The grapevine is easy to lace into the climbing sticks and stays put without much hassle.

 

Simply allow the heavy end of the grapevine to hang towards the bottom of the climbing slicks while weaving the thinner part of grapevine from the bottom of the climbing sticks toward the top. Depending on the size of the grapevine and its overall weight, you may want to fasten it with zip ties or a section of paracord.

 

Not only did this disguise our setup from the possibly curious passerby, but hopefully made us less visible to the wary whitetail. Breaking up the silhouette of the climbing sticks by using the natural elements of the grapevine made them almost invisible from just a short distance away. The next step will be to hang bundles of brush around our treestand so the deer get used to seeing a dark blob in the tree.

 

If you have any tactics for treestand concealment feel free to share them with us.