Hunt 365 will be taking on another year of whitetail habitat, food plots, hunting tactics, opinions (mine of course), and everything in between. This year, I will follow pretty much the same format I’ve been following; trying to provide timely information to the year-round working-class hunter so that they can enjoy the pursuit all year. Think about it…if your passion is whitetail deer hunting, and you can only hunt weekends or maybe if you’re lucky a week or two of vacation, it makes sense to enjoy your passion each and every month. Not just when it’s open season. If you would like to have a specific question answered or topic covered, please email me at tapeppy@gmail.com. Make sure to include a subject like Deer Question so it doesn’t get sent to my spam folder.
And with that, let’s get right into January. January for me ends out the season with the late archery and muzzleloader hunts. It’s that time of year when Iowa hunters can kill the biggest most cautious bucks on their farms and also that time of year that we start singing the off-season blues knowing that it will be another 9 months or so before it’s once again open season. Hunters who put away their weapons and forget about open season for the next 8 months are often times behind the curve when it comes to how their season will fair. Proper preparation, planning, and execution of a plan can take you a long way toward a successful fall.
The great thing about our hunting ambitions is that they are not a one shot. We get to try over and over, year after year. Good hunters will take seasons that didn’t go well and assess them for their failings. If a season went well, then we should assess for what went right. You can have a great season; one you would define as successful even if you didn’t get a great buck. What is critical for us as hunters is that we are honest with ourselves about what worked and what didn’t, and then repeat the successes and stop doing what didn’t work. These are the things I routinely assess after each season for my own hunts. They set my sights on improvements for my hunts, habitat, stand placements, and fixes I can make so that close calls/or being off just a little doesn’t happen next year.
Stand Placement/Shooting Lanes
Every time I sit a stand, regardless of the season, I pay close attention to a few very important things. First, while I am on stand are deer busting me both picking me out visually and getting down wind of my position and smelling me? And, is the stand in the right spot so that I can harvest deer in that area; and if it is, are there proper shooting lanes to get both a bullet or arrow to its target? Many areas are great areas, but seeing a shooter buck and getting a shot at him are two different things.
I’ve had the experience of both finding great locations, but then having to move a stand once or even twice to make sure I was close enough to target deer while at the same time being down-wind of those spots and in a tree with cover. Sometimes a stand that was great for many years is now off just enough to make most deer out of range. This can happen because of a downed tree…maybe a tree that fell on a fence making another crossing. It can happen because of a changing food source, or natural habitat changes like maturing hinge cuttings.
In 2019, I had the most unpredictable and weirdest experience with this. I sat a great ditch crossing several times during what I consider prime season. On each sit, I saw deer but they were not even remotely using the crossing I was sitting on. I was a good 50 yards or so from the crossing itself so I couldn’t see the problem. Well, after three sits that should have been perfect, I needed to just take a peek. I went to the crossing and the usual giant trail was absent…and then the problem. Down in the ditch, a metallic helium balloon had landed and got hung up right at eye level for a deer, right over the would-be trail. The way it was hung up allowed it to bob and sway and act as a scare deer mechanism. A helium balloon cost me one of my best-go-to spots during late October/early November. A downed tree could do the same thing.
I had another experience in 2019 with a great stand I call Cage Fight. It is set up as a bedding staging area with a very small food plot complete with mock scrape. It’s a spot you go to on a windy day (for quiet access) and sit as long as you can. You can see deer in this spot all day as bucks cruising looking for does will frequent the small plot, does will get up and grab small bites to eat attracting buck’s attention. The stand is located in such a way that westerly winds blow my scent out over a deep drop off making getting smelled on stand almost impossible. My first sit, I had a giant 7 point, an old declining brute I’ve been watching on that farm for many years, come in but offered me no shot. He came straight on, examined the small plot, looked around, and left without giving me a shot. My shooting lanes were inadequate, even poor. Had I spent just a few more minutes examining this spot during the offseason, this 7 or 8-year-old legend would have met his demise…instead all I can do is talk about it. A close call!
Another thing that caught me off guard was the number of NE winds we got in 2019. I have really only one good stand for a NE wind, so that will change. I also made note of many locations on new farms I hunted that could use a stand or blind to take advantage of movements I had not predicted until I sat those farms. This is not the same as seeing a deer—putting up a stand in that spot. But movements I witnessed over and over that I could exploit with a properly placed stand.
In January, while your memory is fresh, make a written list if you haven’t been keeping a written log all season. The goal is to go to every stand during the off season and make sure you have your stand in the ultimate spot in that area. 5- or 10-yard movements can make or break a location. Make sure your shooting lanes cover all possibilities. If the best tree in the area doesn’t have enough cover, makes plans to add cover by hanging cedar trees or camo netting around you to break your outline. This offseason work and attention to detail will pay off.
The last thing I make note of and assess are my entrance and exit routes. If you bump deer going in and out of stands you are making mistakes. You will burn out those stands and make the deer there harder and harder to hunt. Sometimes you’ll have to altogether abandon stands simply because of this. Other times you can make adjustments to how you get in. Get creative. I have a great stand or two that I can only hunt during days with at least some wind. Dead quiet days I simply cannot get in without deer hearing me because I am so close to bedding. Other spots I have learned over the years that if I wait until just after sunrise I can get in, but going in early and I’m doomed—others I need to get in early. The point is this; do your best to get in and out clean and make adjustments if necessary.
Bedding Cover
Because one of my favorite ways to hunt deer is to create or exploit bed to feeding habits of deer, it is then critical that I have bedding cover where I hunt. Also, I have a vested interest in being able to manage the deer herd I hunt in the form of selective harvests (letting smaller bucks go). This is near impossible if I can’t keep and hold deer on my property. A secure bedding area that offers bedding habitat, woody browse, and no hunting pressure are good ways to keep deer on your property. There are many things we can do as hunters that will affect the quality of the bedding cover we provide. Letting our scent blow into bedding areas, hunting hard the bedding we have, or walking around or through bedding cover on our entrance and exits.
In 2016 I bought a small farm that is mostly tillable ground. This farm was bought with the intent of being the future site of our home, and to double as a hunting spot for me. The only cover on the farm is a draw that runs through half of it with a few fingers coming off. I never once hunted or stepped foot into the draw the entire season once it started; although I did make several observation sits from distant fence lines. My conclusion is that although hunting pressure for this draw is near zero, very few deer routinely bed in it. Why? There is simply not enough cover and daytime woody browse available. It was not what I expected. I had hoped that by simply not hunting the draw at all, that deer would find it desirable. I was wrong. I now have plans to convert a canary grass bottom (in the draw) to switchgrass with pockets of dogwood and pines. The finger’s edges will also be planted with switchgrass with pockets of dogwood and pines. In a few years, I will have enough cover to make my home farm what it needs to be.
If you don’t have deer consistently bedding on your property, you need to make plans yourself to change this through cuttings of mature timber, or plantings of bedding grasses or woody browse. Maybe the plans are to not hunt the bedding or be more cautious on entrance and exit. Keeping deer on your property the entire season, instead of relying on them to come into your property from adjoining farms is a much more successful way to hunt.
Food Sources
My final assessment each year is really pretty easy. I simply ask the question did I provide a preferred food source from season opener until the last time I wanted to hunt. And as easy as it sounds it is not always easy to do. It usually requires having green food sources early on like clover, alfalfa, winter rye, or brassicas. Then it usually requires a grain plot of soybeans and/or corn for the late season. Some farms, some years, can get by with only green plots as the brassicas will bring in deer if grain crops are not available. But, as easy as it sounds, each year by the end of December I am starting to get worried about my grain crops making it until the end of the season—especially on cold and snowy years. The assessment part is pretty straight forward. One thing a lot of food plotters get wrong is assessing how a food plot looks, as compared to whether it actually draws deer to it. The latter is obviously more important! It’s important to take note of this if you want to have a great food source to keep and hold deer for your hunt. If the answer was no for any part of the season, now is the time to start planning 2020 and what you can do different so that you just don’t repeat what you’ve always done.