You scout and glass a couple of small bucks, a decent 8-pointer and a shooter 10 coming to a bean field like clockwork in the evenings. Will those bucks, and especially the 10-point, be around when bow season opens in a few weeks?   That bachelor’s club will start to break up in mid-September, but a few of the bucks may still run together into October. In what is known as the “fall shuffle,” some of the bucks will shift a mile or more to winter range while some of them—maybe that big 10--will stay right there, close to where you’re spotting them now. Keep glassing the fields and edges, and hang a tree stand or 2 in the nearby [...]

I have been hunting whitetail deer for 40 years, and I cannot honestly say I have ever shot a buck on his scrape line. I might have, I just don’t know. I’m not even sure scrape lines exist. The more I hunt whitetails in different habitats and terrains across the country, the more I believe that scraping is more random and scattered than on some particular line of travel between food and bedding cover. That’s why I don’t scout for scrape lines anymore. From Halloween through November 15 or so, I look for a ridge, draw or creek bottom pocked with a dozen or so dark, stinky scrapes, with fresh rubs nearby.  I set a sit there a few days. [...]

Your strategy starts with a working knowledge of a whitetail buck’s home range and core area. New science reaffirms that the living quarters of most mature bucks are relatively small, especially on lands with good food sources and bedding cover. Researchers from North Carolina State University fitted adult bucks with GPS tracking collars and found that bucks’ home ranges averaged 400 acres in late summer through early October.  Most recently, Clint McCoy, a graduate student from Auburn, tracked 37 collared bucks on a 6,000-acre property in South Carolina. He found that the home ranges of various age classes of bucks, from 2.5 year-olds to 4.5 year-olds, averaged only 300 to 400 acres. One mature buck he tracked lived entirely within [...]

1.Set one or 2 cams in a small clearing in the woods 70 to 100 yards off an alfalfa, corn or soybean field or clover plot. Even before hunting season, many mature bucks hang up and stage in these areas in late afternoon before moving out to the feed after dark. 2. A bottleneck of thick cover on a deer trail that leads into a field is a good bet for a camera. A big buck will usually walk the thickest route in, and you can get a close-up image of him. 3. As you scout the woods, look funnels where two or more ditches or drainages with thick cover come together. Oak trees that drop acorns nearby make this [...]