Shooting all animals that use a zone will also delete it. 4 rifle kills in the same place will delete any zones in the immediate area unless you’re shooting from a hunting structure. It can take 3-7 game days for animals to respawn into a zone, so make sure to rotate zones frequently and rest them long enough to repopulate. Sometimes a doe will respawn into a zone that had only a single buck before, turning it into a doe-only zone so you’re back to square one. If you’ve moved a doe out of that zone to make room for a buck, the doe will pop up somewhere else, and often somewhere you don’t want one. The overall male/female ratio seems to stay balanced though.

Sometimes one of them will shuffle locations when they respawn. In that case, you can shoot a couple does out of a doe-only zone and shoot a couple bucks out of a zone with too many. I’d only start shooting them if your herds get segregated to the point where you start getting herds with 4 or more bucks. They’re usually just replaced by other does. Opinions vary a bit, but most people who’ve put in the hours to have an informed opinion consider shooting does to be mostly pointless if you’re just after trophy bucks. A new drink zone will usually populate close to the one you just deleted, and you’ll have to devote more scouting time to find it. I personally don’t think that works very well. Some people will deliberately delete zones that are too far off their regular route. They are very spread out, so you need tents and some planning to bag more than a handful or two during one drink period. There are usually whitetails literally everywhere else that has water. I’ve heard of people finding them at the crater lake on Mt Leviathan, but I haven’t seen any there. I haven’t seen many on the lakes in the northern 1/5th of the map, although I’m a little less than 100% certain that none exist there at least for some people. Not saying there can’t be any there, but I haven’t seen any.

I haven’t seen a single whitetail on the coastline or river bank on the far right side of the map. It’s easier to start with where you won’t find them. There are whitetail drink zones all over the place. People who’ve located a few zones, but want to find more in may also find it useful. This guide is intended to help newer players who don’t know where or how to start looking for whitetail drink zones at Layton Lakes.

Hunter call of the wild layton lake map