For many hunters, they don’t get serious about their whitetail hunting until the month of November. I’m not one of those hunters. In fact, in many ways, my season began the day after last year’s season ended. That’s when I get serious. Making that yearly assessment into what went right, and what went wrong is done best right after each season while it remains fresh in your memory. But, making in season assessments and adjustments can actually make or break a current whitetail season. Yearly planning will go a long way toward making sure your season is successful, but modifying those plans during the season can help any hunter capitalize on changing conditions that you can’t always plan for. There is a fine line between adapting to changing conditions, and just being impatient!
Identifying Preferred Food
I talk a lot about having preferred food sources on your private farms and lands that you hunt. This requires having some diversity going into each season because you can never tell what the predominant weather pattern will be, and with it the food source deer will be keying in on. Last year was a great example on how the weather alone can draw deer to one food source over others. Much of November saw cold conditions and even some snow. By the time November came around, standing beans and corn were drawing the lion share of deer over other plots of clover, brassicas, and cereal grains. Most years, a green food plot of turnips or winter rye will produce some great hunting well into December…sometimes later. Last year, beans and corn were the tickets very early on. That’s not to say in your area it wasn’t different…but the key is identifying which food sources are the most attractive at any given time.
Also in 2018, I had a great alfalfa field very near one of my farms that was drawing deer all summer and into fall. Throughout October, I could rely on this field to be the destination for most of the local deer each and every night. I planned my sits each night to coincide with that late afternoon pattern that put deer on that alfalfa. Colder temps and snow had most deer completely abandoning that alfalfa very early in November. Many years, alfalfa will draw deer into December. 2018 found most deer off greens early on, and into grains if they were available.
Who knows what 2019 will bring? Will it be colder again, or a hot one? Snow? One thing you might want to consider is a potentially late fall harvest because of the wet and cold spring. I think there might be a lot of corn and beans that won’t get harvested until well into November this year. An abundance of food in the fall can keep deer spread out across their ranges making it potentially more difficult to key in on feeding patterns. Every year I rely on my food plots to be some of the only remaining preferred food sources to remain after the fall harvest…this in turn can help to narrow my efforts and makes it easier to plan the classic bed to feed pattern. Because of a late harvest potential, I need to be mindful that this might not happen this year until later in the season.
Along with a late harvest potential, each year I’ll plan to key in on freshly combined corn. Fresh cut corn can really draw deer; at least for a few days right after the harvest. Many years this takes place in October, this year it could run later? In any event, watching for it and planning to take advantage of the attractiveness of cut corn can make or break a weekend hunt. Weekend hunters and hunters with more limited time need to adapt each season to changes they can’t control like weather and farming practices that can have huge impacts on their hunt. Recognize what is going on around you and adapt quickly or you’ll be left out of some great hunting.
Adapting to Hunting Pressure
Every year, by the time November roles around, whitetail deer across almost the entire Midwest have been exposed to increasing levels of hunting pressure. If you’ve planned your attack right, you’ve done a potentially great job of keeping the deer on your property from thinking you are hunting them hard. But even if you’ve done everything almost perfectly, deer will no doubt begin to feel the pressures of the hunt. The scent you leave behind, the occasionally bumped deer, that doe that picks you off from 200 yards and snorts at you for an hour…all add up to a deer herd that at least on some level know they are being hunted.
What about the neighbor that hunts hard every day? Bumping deer almost every time on stand. Busting deer on their way out from almost every evening hunt. This can have an affect on your property as well. Then there’s hunting public land that is shared with other deer hunters as well as small game hunters, and the occasional hikers just looking at fall colors as they walk past your stand. It all adds up to a deer herd that is starting to pattern us! Deer will always seek out unpressured areas if they get pushed to hard. The goal is to keep them unpressured to the extent that we can control what is going on around us. But we can’t control neighbors or other hunters on public land or land that we share.
What we can do though is adapt to the hunting pressure the same way the deer do. If deer are getting pressured and bumped right at their evening food sources, they will either relocate or come after dark. If they are getting pressured and bumped in their bedding areas, they can and will abandon those areas for more secure and unpressured areas. Some great spots early on in the season, that should by all accounts still be great because of great food and cover, might very well be abandoned or used far less just because of hunting pressure. Many hunters won’t recognize what is going on and will continue to hunt what looks to be a great spot only now it is either not being used or being used only after dark.
On public land being mobile can go a long way toward keeping your hunting area fresh. Finding more and more remote hard to get to spots will keep the pressure down. On my farms, keeping them fresh or not letting the deer know I’m hunting them is a critical part of my success. If I bump deer at all, I’ll immediately look at a different approach to that specific hunt…different entry or exit—is the wind swirling—is the stand too open? I will completely abandon a stand site if I bump deer going in or out, or while on stand.
If you hunt with a group or share a farm, you can also have some pretty good results patterning the hunters around you as well. I used to hunt with a group of 4 or 5 hunters (depending on the season) and I would often choose stand locations based on where the other hunters were going or had been hunting. Through the years I got some goofy looks for picking spots that were a little unconventional because I was trying to avoid areas that other hunters were pounding. Some great spots—truly some of the best spots you could possibly imagine—I never hunted back then simply because the other hunters in the group hunted them way too hard. As the season stretches on, it becomes more and more important to hunt areas that have seen little to no hunting pressure. These days, on my farms, I keep hunting pressure to a minimum by having plenty of stands set up for all the different wind directions. Each and every stand has an exit and entrance strategy, and I’m not getting busted on stand. This allows me to bounce around and hunt many different stands based on wind direction. I’m not going nuts checking cameras constantly, or scouting in and around the farm very much at all.
One last tactic that has really changed the way I hunt my farms (or private land) over the years is to “give” the local deer herd their evening food source. I don’t hunt their evening food source at all any more until well into late season. By giving them this one spot where they know they can go and feed in complete peace from hunters, it has really helped to provide a local deer herd that is a lot less pressured. This is a far better strategy than the all too much talked about sanctuary we here about all the time. Give your local deer herd completely unpressured evening food sources and you’ll have much better hunting through the whole season. You can still hunt their bed to feed patterns, transition food plots on the way out to their main food sources…but leave them alone at those destination food sources. This will do more to keep the deer acting unpressured than most other things we try to do.
There are certainly other things that hunters may very well need to adapt to each hunting season. But for me, if I can keep on top of preferred food sources so I know where the deer want to feed…and do everything I can to put myself in position to hunt unpressured deer, it will go a long way toward a successful season this November.