Scouting is the legwork, and location preparation is the manual labor that lays the foundation for success. And knowing the proper seasonal and daily timing for each hunting location is the strategy that will make you a serious threat to taking the best bucks your hunting area has to offer.
Most bowhunters scout and prepare locations during pre-season, when all trees, bushes, brush, and vegetation are in full foliage, and when looking at lackadaisical summertime deer signs that typically revolve around preferred feeding locations and transition routes to them. Why? Because that seasonal scouting method has been passed down through generations of hunters.
If hunting in a heavily pressured area, because most other hunters are scouting and preparing locations during pre-season, there is only a slight chance of an early-season opportunity, because any mature bucks likely turned nocturnal beyond the confines of their bedding areas prior to the season opener due to the sudden influx of human activity.
A mature buck doesn’t know you or the other hunters in the area are just scouting; they view the pre-season human intrusions as an immediate threat to their existence and when hunting heavily pressured lands, you must deviate from generic hunting methods if you want to be more successful than your competition.
In late February 1976, once the snow melted and exposed the grounds’ previous season’s deer sign, the author did something he had never heard of or read about: He scouted and prepared locations prior to spring green-up. It was an awakening!
Another taboo practice is replicating the hunting methods of most TV and YouTube personalities that hunt on fantasyland, zoo-like, ultra-managed properties with zero competition and many monster bucks that have been allowed to grow to maturity without any negative consequences. Mature bucks that are fed and raised in a similar manner as a 4-H animal to win a ribbon, or cattle before taken to market, are not remotely a challenge to kill as a 3 ½ year old or older buck with seemingly a PhD at avoiding hunters in a heavily pressured area where most hunters are targeting any legal antlered buck.
I’ve exclusively bowhunted pressured public and free-permission lands in Michigan since 1965, and during my early years, every deer hunter in print media wrote about scouting during pre-season and in-season, and that was fine for my kill criteria at the time. I never considered how pre- and in-season scouting and location preparation negatively impacted mature deer activity or gave much thought to the seasonal and daily timing each location was best suited for.
As my bowhunting skills improved and the kill criteria changed, by the mid-1970s, I was targeting and consistently taking 2 ½-year-old bucks. I had figured out how important the rut phases were for taking mature bucks and learned that my pre- and in-season scouting intrusions were severely altering daytime doe and mature buck activity, hindering my progress toward taking older bucks.
The question was, what can I do outside the generic pre- and in-season scouting intrusion box, to not alter daytime mature buck activity?
In December, 1975, after a couple weeks of exiting my bowhunting locations in the mornings and entering them in the evenings, while walking through the terrain it hit me that buck signs and the rut phase runways, scrapes, licking branches, rubs, and the reality of what security cover the area offered once the foliage was down, was much easier to identify than during pre-season.
In late February 1976, once the snow melted and exposed the grounds’ previous season’s deer sign, I did something I had never heard of or read about: I scouted and prepared locations prior to spring green-up. It was an awakening. In the naked terrain without foliage, I could briskly bypass areas without adequate security cover for a mature buck in a heavily pressured area, to visit, transition through, or bed in during daylight hours.
I also scouted interiors of bedding areas I had been hesitant to scout during pre- and in-season and did it without concern of spooking deer. Between that first February scouting trip and the end of April in 1976, I prepared 11 new locations, and I’ve been doing it ever since, calling it “post season scouting.” Since then, at least 90% of my scouting, location preparation, and regrooming of previous locations have been done during post season.
For my most recent instructional book, “Ultimate Guide to DIY Bucks”, I researched several Pope & Young biennial statistical summary books and in every whitetail state, 55 to 65% of P&Y entries were taken during the rut phases, which throughout the Midwest runs from late October through late November.
With those statistics, it makes sense to concentrate most of your hunting time and efforts on the rut phases and scout and prepare locations during post season, while buck signs such as scrapes, licking branches, rubs, transition corridor runways, runways within secure bedding areas, and sign in general from the previous season are still identifiable.
Advantages of Post Season Scouting
1) Prior to spring green-up, the previous season’s buck signs, such as scrapes, rubs, scrapes and or rubs along runways, primary scrape areas, the number of utilized licking branches hanging over scrapes, well-used transition corridor runways, and runways deep within bedding areas are still clean and obvious and can be seen from a distance.
Conversely, during pre-season scouting, much of this sign is either overgrown or visually covered with new growth, ground vegetation, and brush and tree foliage, making it nearly impossible to identify. Also, your visual distances are much shorter due to the dense foliage.
2) When preparing trees for the rut phases, you’ll be looking at the leafless tree from a deer’s perspective from the ground and be able to see exactly what background cover, or crotch cover, in the tree cover you’ll have, if any. This visual information should dictate how high up the tree you prepare your setup to be out of their peripheral vision or to have some form of body concealment cover so as not to get picked. This is especially important when hunting heavily pressured areas where mature deer look for hunters in trees.
Using a saddle is a huge advantage in this scenario, as when used correctly with a ring of steps, you can move around the tree in either direction to hide behind the tree’s trunk, making tree and background cover much less of an issue.
Conversely, during pre-season, the tree you choose and the trees behind it will be in full foliage, giving a false sense of front cover and background cover, which could cause you to set up too low.
3) With the leaf foliage on bushes, saplings, trees, and brush being down, and the tall weed vegetation being wilted up and bent over, the area you’re scouting will look very similar to what it will look like during the rut phases when most foliage has fallen, giving you a visual of the exact amount of security cover the area will have.
This security cover information is extremely important, as, unlike most TV and YouTube fantasyland properties where deer move into wide open areas, food plots, and short or harvested crop fields during broad daylight, in heavily pressured areas, the few, if any, mature bucks that have survived to reach maturity have learned how to use security cover to avoid hunters during daylight hours. Bucks that don’t rapidly learn how to use security cover typically get killed during their first antlered season.
Conversely, during pre-season, when everything at ground level has foliage and the weed vegetation is tall, much of the area will visually appear to have false security cover, leading you to prepare spots in inadequate locations for rut-phase mature buck activity.
4) Every inch of your hunting area, including the all-important interiors of bedding areas, can be thoroughly scrutinized with as many visits as needed because spooking deer during post season will not affect next season’s deer movements.
Conversely, any pre-season scouting and location preparation intrusions will adversely affect early-season daytime deer movements in heavily pressured areas.
5) Throughout the winter, especially if there has been heavy snow and ice from ice storms, dead trees and branches fall and often block runways to location sites. To ensure runways remain useable, once a location is prepared, you can walk every runway within shooting distance of the tree for at least 50 yards in each direction and move deadfalls and branches and trim overgrown brush along the runways to make it easier for deer, and especially a buck with good headgear, to transition down.
On most public lands, it’s legal to use a chainsaw to cut wide enough sections out of downed trees that block runways. A mature buck will almost always take the path of least resistance if it offers adequate security cover, and cleaning up runways will ensure they will continue to be used.
Conversely, during pre-season, that type of intrusion and activity will likely ensure that, during the early season, any mature buck activity in your area will be during the security of darkness.
6) You can use local deadfall to block sections of slightly out-of-range runways and then create a new section of that runway so that it bends and passes within your comfort shooting range. Well before the season, the altered deer movements down your altered runway will have become habit.
7) Because there are so many months between post season and the season opener, a scent control regimen is not required.
Conversely, during pre-season when the weather is warm, no matter what your scent control regimen, there is no way to properly prepare a location without sweating and leaving human odor and that is enough to temporarily alter a mature bucks daytime routine and turn him nocturnal outside the confines of his secure bedding area, ruining any chance of taking him if it’s an early season location.
During post season, when the foliage is down, you will also be scouting for early-season locations, and it is imperative to be able to identify mast and fruit trees by either their bark, shape, and or branch configurations because there will not be any mast or fruit in them or on the ground below them as there would be during pre-season. Mast trees may have nut shells on the ground and buck signs nearby to verify buck activity and should also have identifiable deer dropping beneath them.
In areas that get snow and /or cold winds, shortly after the pressure of deer season is over, all deer, including mature bucks, will transition to bedding into lower lying areas that are more protected from the cold winds and to be closer to the most preferred winter food sources.
It’s common when snow gets deep to have areas that deer fed and browsed in, and consistently transitioned through during season, to be totally devoid of deer activity in the winter and this is especially true in big timber and hill country, where there may not be enough exposed food and browse in certain areas for deer to survive on throughout the winter. There are areas in northern Michigan where, as the snow deepens, deer will travel up to 15 miles to winter in cedar swamps or the closest agricultural areas.
It’s almost a waste of time to scout for beds and travel patterns when there is deep snow, as most beds and runways will be misleading to where those same deer will be bedded next season. Also, with snow on the ground, scrapes and last fall’s rut phase runways will be covered up, so you can’t see them, so wait until the snow is gone to scout.
In episode #103 on the Eberhart Outdoors YouTube channel, John videos a large area of timber with zero deer sign in the snow, an area that obviously held deer during the season, as evidenced by the many rubs.
If time is an issue, scout and mark all potential locations as waypoints in OnX or with other notes, then go back once your scouting is finished to prepare them. Scouting must be done before green-up, but location preparation can be done a bit later.
If you’re tagged out or done hunting by the end of your gun season, and there is snow on the ground, you can scout for future late-season bow locations. Gun season pressure is much more intense and threatening to deer than bow hunting pressure and in heavily pressured areas, it’s very common for mature bucks to bed deeper into the nastiest security cover that’s available and the best way to locate those locations is when the deer are there and spooking them is a non-issue.
In this instance, because you are done hunting and not concerned with spooking deer, you can backtrack routes in the snow to locate the exact spots where deer bed once pressured, and there should be obvious hints as to what was bedding there. How large is the bed? Is it a single bed? What’s the size and shape of the tracks near it, and if there are any nearby rubs, what’s the size of the tree and height of the rubs? If there are multiple-sized beds in a small zone, that indicates a doe and her fawns bed there, which typically means there is not an antlered buck bedding very close to those beds.
If you scout on a windy day or when the snow is soft and quiet, you might even be able to see the deer bedded up ahead or see them once spooked. The next late season, and for seasons thereafter, snow or not, the odds of that buck or other bucks bedding in that secure location or area are good. Secure bedding locations are a premium during gun season and as mature bucks get taken, others down the pecking order list will likely move into their location or area to bed during and after gun season.
Scouting is the legwork, and location preparation is the manual labor that lays the foundation for success. Knowing the proper seasonal and daily timing for each hunting location is the strategy that will make you a serious threat to taking the best bucks your hunting area has to offer.
John recently released an instructional 3-book series titled “Ultimate Guide to DIY Bucks” with the goal of making you a serious threat to mature whitetails, no matter your choice of weapon or the terrain or area of the country you hunt. They are available in paperback, hardcover, eBook, and Audiobook (I narrated and edited the audiobooks) on Amazon, and the paperback and hardcover books are also available at www.Tethrd.com/DIYBucks
John has exclusively hunted public and free-permission properties, taking 37 Michigan record-book bucks from 20 different properties and another 21 P&Y bucks from 15 out-of-state properties. He also runs the Eberhart Outdoors YouTube channel, conducts 2-day whitetail workshops in the spring, and has done many dozens of podcast interviews and all links and information are on his website at www.deer-john.net
