How to Get Your Buck if You Only Have a Few Days to Hunt

Use mapping apps to scout for out-of-the-way buck bedding or travel areas. Photo by Dodd Clifton.

Here on the blog, I’ve advised you to start scouting for bucks in late summer. I’ve told you about good spots to set cameras and tree stands in September. I’ve hit on the best sign to find and watch as the rut approaches in October.

That’s great if you have three or four months to do that. But I realize life has a funny way of cutting into your hunting time, with kids’ sports, music lessons, work obligations, and chores around the house.

If you only have a few days to hunt this season, here are some things that will help you tag out.

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HUNT WITH A GUN

You might love to hunt with a bow, but you know how challenging it is. Success rates for whitetail bowhunters are 10 to 15% in most states. So why not hunt your few days with a gun, which will dramatically increase your odds of bringing home venison. You can go to the range one afternoon this month and sight in a .270 or muzzleloader with plenty of accuracy to kill a deer when your firearms season opens in November or December. And of course, those months are when the rut is on in most places and when bucks move the best.

TIME-EFFICIENT RECON

You might not have time to drive an hour or more to a hunting property, but you can scout it from home or your truck. Spend some time studying land images on a paper or digital aerial map. Look for fields, power-line cuts and hardwood ridges where deer might feed. Check dark cover — thickets or pine stands — where bucks bed. Look closely for draws, streams and other funnels that connect feeding and bedding areas. A few hours of analyzing land images will let you eliminate up to 50% of marginal deer habitat before you leave the house. Then when you can swing a day off this month or next, drive out and ground-scout the other 50% of spots where deer will likely move later this fall.

There are two big things to look for on your recon day, and neither includes deer sign. First, drive around your hunting area and look for parking areas where other people will leave their trucks and walk in when gun season opens in November. This is vitally important if you plan to hunt the rut on public land.

Then devise a plan to hunt where those other guys won’t be. One time, biologist Grant Woods monitored the hunting pressure at a large property he managed. He found that all the hunters spent 100 hours or more in hot zones of several hundred acres around fields and roads. The surrounding timber and thickets received only 10 to 20 hours of human pressure, and some spots weren’t hunted at all. “Once we’re done with an analysis of a property, we’re never surprised to find that most of the oldest and biggest bucks are shot in those lightly pressured spots,” Woods said.

That’s where you need to spend your precious few days this season — in one of those out-of-the-way buck holes. Plan on hiking in early and hunting all day. Set up in a little brush blind on a vantage where you can see and shoot 100 yards, or carry a climbing stand on your back if that’s an option.

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HUNT MIDWEEK IF POSSIBLE

A few years ago, Auburn University researchers tracked GPS-collared deer on a moderately hunted public area. They found that when hunters arrived Friday, daytime doe activity dropped noticeably, and bucks hardly moved on Saturday and Sunday and into the next week. By the next Wednesday, the woods had settled down, and deer began to move again.

Because your time is limited, hunt whenever you can this season. But if you can get away and hunt a buck hole on a Wednesday and Thursday in late November or December, do it. You’ll have the woods pretty much to yourself — and a decent chance to get your buck.