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Setting Up First Part Of Deer Season

With hunting licenses going on this past Monday, local sportsmen are beginning to change gears. The thought of a cool, crisp fall morning, the sound of twigs snapping in the distance, listening to the geese as they fly from the evening roost to feed fields and the sight of your deer is beginning to creep into all our minds.

Yes, it’s fun to glass bucks in bean fields in August, but for most areas of the country, the same food sources you drooled over all summer will either be gone or become quickly obsolete come opening day. Numerous food habit studies have shown that deer make a hard shift from high protein to high energy foods during the throes of summer as they prepare for the rigors of the fall breeding season and subsequent winter. This is also a time when food that dominates deer summer diets become far less attractive due to a decline in palatability.

Study after study has shown buck movement rates are at their lowest point during the peak of summer, and come early fall, around the end of September into October, they are still low compared to the rut.

This causes a fairly extreme and sudden behavioral change in where you’ll find deer feeding, as they begin concentrating on mast sources like acorns and apples. A lot of hunters are aware of this change and prepare for it by scouting these new food items ahead of schedule.

For those of you who will be hunting an early season where a typical first-snack-of the-day trap can be set on the edge of an agricultural field or food plot, a word of caution: not all bucks are as susceptible as you may think, even as an afternoon-only sit. Common knowledge for most seasoned hunters is that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to hunt food sources during mornings, right?

Deer spend most of the night in those fields feeding, and start moving back into cover to bed around daylight. However, most believe afternoons are doable, capitalizing on when deer arrive for the evening to feed. But recent research has shown at least a few examples where the distance bucks traveled to those summer foods is so great that daylight activity at the food source was very limited.

Why do we fix this, it is easy to say? It would be to set up much, much deeper in the timber This allows you to capitalize on those delayed movements well before shooting light expires in the evening, and to catch a buck on his feet before he beds for the day during a morning hunt. The trick here is not to get too close to bedding areas on a PM hunt and not to stroll through the areas where they hang out before they bed down in the morning. Like much in the whitetail world, nothing comes easy but with a little planning it will work.

I have been watching the same bachelor group for a month or more from The View and formulating a plan of attack on Oct. 1. These bachelor groups will hang out together throughout the summer months, but once the first one starts to get “froggy” they will break up. These are groups of bucks that travel together and generally follow the same movement schedule of bedding and feeding. Bachelor groups may contain bucks of many different ages, including yearlings. Bucks in an individual group are usually not related to each other, and not all bucks join bachelor groups.

Research has shown the average buck begins using a larger percentage of his home range as the rut approaches, so movement patterns and locations of each buck may vary. These early season patterns look great and are somewhat useful but are no where good enough on opening day because they will change quickly.

This is another reason why you should not rely entirely on the intel you gathered during summer. It can be useful to detect the buck age structure of the general area and to identify particular bucks you may want to target, but the best -laid plan should ultimately include being ready to move elsewhere, because there’s a good chance the same bucks you were watching could be miles from where you first viewed them.

While it’s easy to think you’ll be able to identify some bucks you want to target purely through summer observations, you’ll probably need to gain additional information through use of trail cameras, boots on the ground and old-fashioned neighborly fence-side chats to actually tag one.

Trail cameras can be placed in areas where you’ve seen these bachelor groups from afar during late summer, and through the process of elimination and by systematically moving them further in the direction the deer are coming from, you can then begin to pinpoint where they will be once the season opens. For most of us, however, that will likely mean talking with one or more neighbors to either gain permission to hunt, or to simply trade stories to see if they’ve encountered the buck in the past. This is where QDM Cooperatives come into play, and although it may seem counterintuitive to actually tell your neighbors about what bucks you’re seeing, it can really fast-track your success to killing more and older bucks when you work together.

When it’s really hot outside, my absolute favorite thing to do is dress in my heaviest gear and go for a stroll. Obviously, that’s a joke, but I use it as an analogy to say these bucks aren’t moving much at the start of the season. Study after study has shown buck movement rates are at their lowest point during the peak of summer and, come early fall, when your season probably opens, they’re still low compared to the rut. In fact, one recent study 50 trail cameras were used on 2,500 acres to test the validity of a passive non-baited camera survey technique. Cameras ran for a full year, and researchers got 61 percent of all buck photos in 8 percent of the year, which was the month of November.

The point is that when bucks are moving less, it’s a lot harder to see and kill them. This means you’ve got to do more ground work by scouting, running cameras and talking to your neighbors to pattern bucks as they change their behaviors at the end of the summer; bucks are still moving, you just have to determine where they’re moving and why.

Early season hunters need to be flexible. Much is changing in the whitetail world from the beginning of October to mid-November. From food sources to the rut, these are the biggest changes to a whitetail they face every year. To be successful, we all need to be able to change as the deer change.

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