If your going to be consistently successful on bagging big bucks you have to know how to adjust your strategy to what the deer are doing! Here are some tips and tricks that will keep you in the hunt when others are still trying to figure out what the heck is going on.
Deer can change their pattern like flipping a switch!
If you haven’t already noticed, deer have an uncanny way of keeping most hunters in a fog. Many hunters stay consistently behind the curve and typically it takes most at least three days to figure out the deer have changed their pattern. What are they doing, and why? More importantly, how can you capitalize on the current pattern. Many hunters will continue to go back to the same stand time and again because they have always seen deer there in the past or maybe its an easy walk to a stand that has a nice view out of the wind. It might be a field that he has been seeing deer feeding in regularly but all of a sudden he has not seen a deer in three sittings. Deer can change to a new pattern at a moments notice, like flipping a light switch. All hunters are going to get behind the curve from time to time but the best of them learn to quickly recognize a change has happened and adjust their hunting strategy accordingly. If you are hunting close to home, being a few steps behind may not be a big deal but if you have taken time off of work to hunt or you are hunting a 3 day firearms hunt, you cannot afford to be out of tune with what the deer are currently doing.
A good example of a feeding pattern change happened this year here on my lease in central Florida. Bow season opens here around the third week of September. Baiting is legal here on private land and most hunters typically run a feeder with whole corn. Before the season opened the deer were hitting the feeders hard but just as the opening weekend arrived the deer abandoned the feeders all together. What had happened? The feed had changed! Live Oak acorns had begun to fall and the deer changed their feeding pattern overnight. Deer love corn but will walk right over it to get to an oak tree that’s dropping green-n-whites!
On a hunt in Illinois a couple years ago I was hunting my favorite stand on a point of some planted pines, overlooking a picked corn field. I had been seeing a pile of deer and some really nice bucks, when over night a front blew in and dumped 12” of fresh snow on the fields. The next day, you literally could not find a track on that field, or any other. Overnight, the deer had switched to browsing in the woods. You could walk across a 60 acre field and maybe cut a couple tracks, get to the fence and look over, more deer tracks than you could shake a stick at. The deer were stripping anything with a leaf in reach, even the dead one that had fallen on the snow. That was a 4 day gun hunt and by the time we figured out the change it was to late and we went home empty handed.
If you find some hot sign, hunt it immediately! Don't try to save if for later!
One of the most important tips I can give you is, do not try to save some smoking hot sign for a latter hunt. This almost never works! Typically, you will return a week later only to find the sign dried up and the deer have moved on. How many times have you found yourself hunting something you felt was pretty good only to run across feeding sign that just had the ground pulverized or a line of smoking scrapes and rubs along some ridge and think to yourself, “I’ll come back here in a few days and hunt this”. If you are lucky enough to stumble onto something hot, jump on it immediately! You can bet the farm its going to change and most likely sooner than later.
In the Midwest the scrapes you find in late October freshly pawed on a daily bases will be abandoned by the first week of November as bucks begin a frenzied search for the first does to come into heat. Deer will typically quit a soy bean field as soon as the corn is combined in favor of the easy picking’s and preferred feed.
Many changes in deer behavior can be timed with the season, the harvest of a crop, a weather change, etc.
Always be on the lookout for the next change and learn to recognize a shift in the pattern at the earliest possible time and you will be a more successful hunter, guaranteed!
Good hunting,
Larry Stephens
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