As Mississippi’s season progresses, deer hunters need to know where their targets are. Have they changed areas? Have they gone nocturnal?
Chris Roberts’s quest for a particular buck that had been appearing on his game cameras was wearing thin when he got in his stand in south Lauderdale County last winter.
The buck had disappeared about a week before, so Roberts decided to hunt a different area; the weather was right and the wind coming from the right direction. About 4 p.m., a tall-racked buck stepped into a shooting lane, and Roberts quickly shouldered his rifle, centered the crosshairs and squeezed the trigger in one fluid motion.
“Tic-Boom!” roared his .308 as the bullet struck home, and the buck collapsed instantly. The 180-pound buck sported eight points with long tines and scored 1323/8.
“I’d hunted this buck for a couple years,” Roberts said. “After I killed him, I checked the cameras and found that he had been there the night before and several times in the previous days. He’d left his normal zone, retreating to a less-pressured area.”
Roberts, from Collinsville, is a lifelong hunter and sales rep for Tecomate Wildlife Systems who grew up hunting high-pressured whitetails in east Mississippi and west Alabama.
“I started hunting that buck in the fall of 2019, but he only moved at night,” Roberts said. “He showed up on the game camera last fall again, and we got a lot of pictures of him, so I started hunting him again. He disappeared for a while, so that’s when I changed hunting areas.”
Roberts had bush-hogged a lane on the north end of his property in September; he discovered that the buck was using that area in late December.
“I hunted him as much as possible without putting too much pressure on him,”he said. “We try to keep our hunting areas as undisturbed as possible, and that’s probably why he’d retreated to an area that hadn’t had a lot of hunter activity.
“During the early part of December, we’ll start seeing some scraping and rutting activity, but I will focus on food sources like food plots and acorn trees,” Roberts said. “I’ll focus on the food sources closest to the bedding areas. We try to catch some of the first bucks looking for does in estrus, and you will find does near the food.”
A typical area would have an acorn bottom bordered by a pine thicket or thick cutover that would serve as ideal bedding grounds. Roberts likes to work the edge of the thickets and catch bucks as they leave the bedding area, before it gets too dark to shoot.
Food plots
In areas like east Mississippi, where you have a lot of red-clay soil, pine timber and cutovers with few mast-producing trees, food plots become a vital part of the equation; they can help the deer herd year-round.
“My preference is to have a rectangle-shaped food plot — the bigger the better,” Roberts said. “You will feed more deer by having a bigger plot; thus, you will probably hold more deer in the area and see more of them during the winter. Deer are edge feeders, and they feel more comfortable coming out into bigger fields. I’d say that plots need to be at least an acre, and several acres if possible.”
Roberts prefers a couple of different Tecomate seed mixes, including Max-Attract, a blend of winter wheat, winter peas, forage oats, clover and chicory. It’s a mix that’s high in clover and chicory, which sets it apart from other mixes.
Another mix he prefers is called Greenfield, which is a fall annual and has brassicas: big, leafy turnips, rape and other broadleafs.
“Deer will forage on Greenfield during the early season, but after you get a frost, they will really shine during late season,” Roberts said. “The sugar will go to the leaves, and the deer will also dig up the roots and eat them. This blend is good year-round due to the perennials.
“Lanes are good for hunting and being able to see further in thick areas, but they’re not particularly good for feeding a lot of deer,” he said. “I killed the buck we discussed as it was crossing a lane, but he wasn’t feeding.”
Scrapes
There was a scrape on the edge of the lane, and Roberts had previously set up a camera on the scrape; the buck was crossing the lane going from his bedding area in the pine thicket to his feeding ground.
“Scrapes are a good resource on finding out what you have in an area,” Roberts said, “but they’re not particularly good places to hunt. Almost every buck that comes by will visit the scrapes and leave their scent, but they may not frequent the scrape regularly enough to pattern them. I still prefer hunting as close to the food areas that are closest to bedding areas, because the bucks don’t like to move a lot during the daylight hours after gun season is in full swing.
Hunting by the wind
“I don’t wear any special type of scent-control clothing or anything,” Roberts said. “I just try to stay as clean as I can, keep my boots as clean as possible, wash my clothes in non-scented detergent and let them air dry. But the main thing is, I keep the wind in my favor no matter where I’m going to hunt. If the wind is blowing from my stand towards the direction the deer come from, then I’ll hunt a different stand that day or move a portable stand to a different spot in the area so my scent won’t blow across their trail.”
It only takes a big buck getting a whiff or two of human scent to send them to another locale.
When it comes to hunting and fooling wise, old bucks, you can never forget which direction the wind is blowing during your hunt, or you might not see hide nor hair if deer are crossing or approaching downwind. Before picking your stand, check the wind direction before every hunt.
Hunting midday
By mid- to late December, hunters in parts of Mississippi will see rutting activity almost any time of the day or night, so it’s good to vary hunting tactics and times. Hunters try to pattern deer; that’s why they hunt food plots late in the afternoon or acorn bottoms early in the morning. While they are both good bets most of the time, deer can also pattern hunters if they do the same thing day after day.
When hunters head to stands before daylight, go back to camp after a couple hours, then head out for the afternoon hunt, deer may pattern them and feed at times when hunters aren’t there — or just wait until after dark.
During many late December or January hunts, I’ve harvested quality bucks during the mid-morning after discovering deer moving while I was scouting for sign. On more than one occasion, I’ve had bucks walk right up to me between 9:30 to 11:30. While I was originally surprised, I’ve since learned that the deer usually have patterned hunters by mid-season where there is regular activity, and many feed openly when the woods go silent.
In-season scouting
While many hunters use trail cameras to locate deer before the season and around food plots or feeding locations, they may not use them in the most-productive areas. If bucks are appearing on cameras after dark, hunters need to know where they are during the daylight hours. To learn that, you need to find trails that are heavily used during the period of time when you are hunting.
Locate trails crossing creeks or streams, active scrapes and streamside management zones and put cameras on them. I use a Moultrie XA-6000, which sends the photos to an APP or to my computer. It will also send the pictures to my cell phone, but I’d rather check my phone APP. If you have the camera set up on areas like this, you can pattern bucks and know instantly when they are moving during daylight hours.
After interviewing successful hunters over the past few years I’ve learned that time is my most-valuable resource, so I want to hunt when bucks are moving. The new generation of cameras allows you to know when that time is without having to go into the woods to check them. In Lauderdale County where I live, bucks start looking for does around Christmas, and the daylight rutting activity just increases through the first 10 days of January.
I’ve captured many daylight pictures of bucks, deer I’d only seen on film after dark since before the gun season opened. Last year, I harvested my first buck on Christmas Eve and followed that up with a couple more in January, in large part by hunting when and where I knew the bucks were moving.
Be the first to comment