By the time the late season arrives, the deer have seen hunters invading their space for two or three months. As a result, they're downright skittish and most have altered their behavior to minimize their susceptibility to encounters of the human kind. For the most part, late-season deer are nocturnal creatures, spending the daylight hours in thick security cover and feed under the cover of darkness. It might take a week or more, but eventually the effects of minimal hunting pressure bring the deer out of their hiding spots.
Some bucks will resort back to similar travel routines and patterns they used before the season began. The funnels, rub lines and travel corridors you hunted during the pre-rut and rut once again show signs of renewed activity. When the mercury drops like a rock, deer go into survival mode in preparation for a decrease in metabolism and the grips of Ol' Man Winter.
Combine two months of chasing and breeding with the strain of dodging countless hunters, and the deer are understandably worn down.
By the time the late season arrives, deer need to regenerate their spent fat reserves. That means refueling with large amounts of food, even at the expense of security by feeding during daylight hours. Finding deer in the late season isn't that tough if you can find a primary food source.
The old saying "find the food, find the deer" couldn't be more true during the late season. In the absence of deep snow, deer will find fields with adequate free grain left from harvest. However, when deep snow and ice prevent them from finding enough food on nearby fields, they'll travel longer distances to find it. If you have the only standing food source within a mile or more, rest assured you'll be pulling deer off the neighboring properties too.
A few days before our departure, a blizzard swept across the state and daytime temperatures hadn't climbed much above zero. Upon arriving in Corning, we found two feet of snow on the ground and some roads were completely drifted shut.
Pam hunted all week without seeing a good buck. On New Year's Eve, which was the final day of our hunt, Andy mentioned seeing a big 8-pointer while harvesting a nearby piece of ground. That particular farm hadn't been hunted much and a ton of deer had been bedding in a CRP field during the day. By afternoon, they were making the transition toward 20 acres of standing corn on the neighboring property. If there was ever a piece of ground that begged to be hunted, this was it. That morning, Andy took a ground blind in with a snowmobile and set up within range of the trails coming out of the CRP.
The wind that afternoon was northwesterly at 20 mph and gusting to The temperature hovered at minus degrees, without the wind chill factor. I dropped Pam off around 3 p. That might not seem like a long walk to your blind, but the 5-foot drifts on the terraces and frigid temperatures made it tough to say the least.
On three occasions she sunk waist-deep into a snow drift, but managed to belly crawl out and continue on. When she was out of sight, I headed back to town to start packing. I hadn't been gone more than a half hour when my cell phone rang.
I was contemplating whether to shoot when a big 8-point suddenly appeared on the same trail. The bigger buck caught on to that and started to veer away. Fortunately, he paused just long enough for me to find the vitals in the scope and squeeze off.
Instantly, his front legs folded and he started plowing snow. After four decades of hunting whitetails, I've learned enough to know that the weather has a definite effect on when deer feed. Sustained cold forces deer to feed to survive, but when the barometer starts dropping and heavy snow or ice threatens to cover their primary food source, their internal "need-to-feed" mechanism kicks into overdrive. Past experience has proven that deer feed heavily as a storm approaches and the barometric pressure drops and again shortly after it moves through and the pressure begins to rise again.
Being on-stand two hours before and after a storm moves through can pay off big time. This happened to be the case for my friend, Andy, on the last evening of the season. Andy had been hunting a soybean field most the week but hadn't laid eyes on the buck he was after.
A storm front was expected to move in before nightfall, so he headed to the stand a bit early. Not long after arriving, a few deer began filtering into the field. It started snowing shortly after, and the deer just kept coming.
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Big Game , Deer , How-To. By the time December and January arrives, most deer have been hunted for three months or more. All that hunting pressure leaves whitetails more cautious and If you want one of the biggest challenges in whitetail hunting, set your sights on a mature buck in December.
After general gun season resets the deer herd to survival mode and the rut winds down to nothing, it becomes challenging just to see a buck, let alone kill one. Slipping in to sit evenings Several years ago I was sitting on a Minnesota buck tag as December rolled in. I figured filling that tag was a long shot, but I also had nothing to lose by trying. Knowing that, I went looking. With the benefit of snow I found enough trails to justify hanging a few stands.
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