Whitetails 365 December 2018, Late Season Hunting

This month, I’m trying to help out Rick from Wayne County Iowa. Rick writes “I love hunting the late muzzleloader season each year. But, because of limited vacation, I usually rely on hunting around my work schedule and on weekends. Some years, I get lucky and my work schedule allows me to hunt evenings and weekends. This year, I’ll only be able to hunt weekends and mornings until about noon for the late muzzy season. Do you have any ideas on how to take a mature buck on a morning hunt this time of year without harming my evening hunts? Should I give up hunting the mornings and only hunt the evenings on the weekends? I do have standing soybeans to hunt over. I ask this because some years it seems like when the weekend comes, and it happens to be warm out or raining I don’t see much, then during the week it gets cold so I’m missing the good hunting. I’ve heard more than one professional hunter say to not hunt mornings this time of year. Any suggestions?”
Rick’s situation is not unique at all. Most hunters don’t have unlimited time off from work where they can pick and choose every day they hunt…waiting for the “best” days and not hunting the marginal days or times. I get frustrated when I hear professional hunters tell the masses to not hunt mornings or only hunt a cold front. For me, I recommend only hunting evenings during this time of year if you have all season to hunt or you have a target buck patterned on an evening feeding pattern. Under those two scenarios, you probably should consider hunting only the evenings this time of year. But Rick has a very valid concern…if I wait to hunt only the prime times of evening hunting over food or when the weather is right, I risk not being able to hunt at all. So, what are some late season options for a hunter that finds themselves in these shoes?
I can best answer this scenario by describing my son’s 2016 late muzzleloader hunt in Wayne and Decatur counties in southern Iowa. In over 30 years of chasing whitetails, I never learned as much about late season hunting as I did on this hunt. Going into his hunt, we knew we had nine straight days to hunt over his one week of vacation he took. The long-term forecast showed the week would start off warm with rain and end with cooler temperatures. We made the decision to hunt mornings on my farm in Wayne county where we could hunt food to bedding travel from a distance; and hunt the farm in Decatur county for our evening hunts overlooking standing beans and corn.
The evening of day one brought cooler than expected SE winds with rain and drizzle. Even though it was cool out it was still warm and balmy for this time of year. The farm hadn’t been hunted since mid-November, so our thought was even though the weather wasn’t perfect, we could still catch deer on their feet during daylight. We did. Our target buck showed up just before quitting time, but Forest couldn’t get a shot in the standing corn.
The evening of day two brought similar weather and similar results with some deer sightings only this time no mature bucks showed up. The deer movement was lethargic as best. Even the deer we did see came out late and didn’t show any real signs of urgency with their feeding pattern.
Day three brought our first morning sit. We were able to get in between their nighttime feeding and daytime bedding only because those two locations were close to a half mile apart. Deer were bedding on a southern sloped switch grass field intermixed with cedars and feeding a half mile to the east in a standing bean field. There were a ton of deer using that bean field and traveling back to bedding making it difficult to get into position without bumping deer. To make matters worse, there was no clear path these deer liked to take walking back to bed…they were spread out over several hundred acres using a draw, some tall grass and weeds, and open hay ground for their travels. We got into position well before sunrise and watched most of the deer including three big bucks pass by us before legal shooting. In fact, had it not been for our optics, most of these deer couldn’t even be seen by the naked eye. As the sun finally came up, only a few stragglers passed by during legal shooting. The three shooter bucks had made it well into their bedding before sun up as we watched them from a distance spar around before laying down like bachelor group bucks do. Would they come back just a bit later one morning to give us a chance? The thing to note here was these deer were only using my farm for travel. The beans were on a neighbor’s farm to the east, and the bedding was on a different neighbor’s farm to the west.
Day three evening was much the same as the previous two in that deer movement was mild at best and all during the last few moments of the day. The weather stayed warmer than usually with low pressure and dreary conditions.
Throughout the nine days of hunting, deer movement was entirely predictable. Every time the temperatures dipped, and high pressure snuck in for a day deer movement spiked…noticeably. Morning hunting became a cat and mouse game as we moved around a bit trying to put ourselves in position to cut off those shooter bucks before they got back to their bedding cover. We never pulled it off during the morning. We saw those mature bucks several times but each time it was using our optics before sunrise and legal shooting. If we had access to that bedding ground, there is no doubt we could have made a play on those large bucks…but we didn’t have that access. This made it for us, impossible to harvest those animals. However, had we gained access to that property by asking permission, or that property was ours to begin with, it was clear to me that setting up close to that bedding area would have resulted in a morning mature buck kill during late muzzleloader season.
So, this is what I learned about morning hunting for a mature buck during that time of year. Being brutally honest this is the only method I know of (besides driving deer) that could get you a shot at a mature buck during late muzzleloader season in the morning. And, here it is….if you have a scenario where a main food source like standing beans or corn is quite a distance from a mature bucks preferred bedding, AND you have a way to get close enough to this buck’s bedding area without actually going into his bedding, you can have a very legitimate chance of killing a mature buck during a morning hunt in the late season. In fact, after what I saw in 2016, it would be quite easy to pull off. The two keys are the distance between food and bed, and your ability to get close enough for a shot without going all the way in. I want to be clear here too that I only say you can’t go all the way into their bedding because in my opinion, if you do, you stand the chance of blowing up the whole setup your very first time as many of these deer were already in the bedding area each day before we stepped out of the truck. In our scenario, the preferred bedding was old CRP mixed with some trees…so we could see into their bedding from a distance making a longer shot the preferred approach.
Rick, my advice to you is simply this…if you can get into their bedding area close enough for a shot while not spooking those bucks getting in and out, that’s your ticket for a morning hunt! If you have bedding cover right up to their food source, the chances of this happening aren’t that great. If there’s a decent distance between that soybean field and where they bed, get in early and make a play on those deer! If, on the other hand, there is a good pattern of a target buck using the soybeans during daylight, hold off for a bit and try to first take him on a weekend evening hunt. This whole chess game is what makes chasing big whitetails fun!
I had intended on covering one more questions about buying land or leasing, but this late season question posed by Rick took me too long to explain. I can be long winded sometimes. Next month starts off the 2019 year, and with it I will cover the buying/leasing topic I had intended on covering in this issue. 2019 will once again be covering reader questions and I might just have some content of my own I’d like to cover. If you have any questions or a topic you want covered in 2019 for this column, please send them to me at tapeppy@gmail.com.