Success is Fundamental


TrophyBucks.com

You’re chomping at the bit. After months of dreaming about big bucks, and watching your favorite hunting videos over and over, the season is finally here. The temptation to dive right in and start hunting your best areas is like a moth’s attraction to fire. It’s almost irresistible, but it’s a fatal attraction.

October offers opportunities, but at times it can be very tough. Rather than hitting your best stands with gusto and burning them out at times when they’re not very productive, take a long-term approach to the season. To make the most of October you have to understand what the deer are doing in three separate periods.

The First Week of the Season
When the season first opens you have the rare opportunity to hunt big bucks when they're still on some semblance of a pattern. Through the summer they've become almost predictable, and this lifestyle carries over into the first part of the bow season. The bucks will be doing some random browsing, but it’s hard to hunt a “browsing pattern”. To hunt them most successfully the first week of the season, you have to find a concentrated food source.

Usually these feeding patterns are short-lived, but I got a full two weeks of excitement out of one buck a few years back. He remains to this day one of the biggest I’ve hunted. I first saw him feeding in a soybean field ten days before the season opened, and I hunted him there for the first two weeks of the season. I saw him in the distance three times before I finally got my shot. Then I missed. It’s a long story - as are all stories filled with excuses – and it’s a sad one, but I leaned a few lessons. That buck was a great teacher. He showed me that if you find a food source that’s really pulling deer and hunt it carefully you may get more than a just a couple of good hunts. You may even get a shot at a huge buck.

The hottest drawing cards are generally agricultural crops, specifically legumes such as alfalfa, clover and soybeans. Deer will switch over almost exclusively to carbohydrate sources such as corn, sorghum and winter wheat later in the season. When you find a secluded field of high protein legumes you can bet a big buck will be there somewhere gorging himself most evenings in an effort to put on weight before the rut.

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October Whitetails

In this world of fast food, overnight mail, instant messaging and quick fixes for everything from your broken down marriage to your broken down Volkswagen, many are naturally looking for a quick, zero commitment, low monthly payment route to success in the deer woods. It doesn’t work that way. The best hunters earn their stripes over many years, not to mention they hunt in great areas and spend a lot of time doing it.

They have found consistent success not by using a certain product or a never-fail strategy. While every tool has its place, they have shot more than their share of the whoppers by staying focused on the fundamentals.

The entire bowhunting equation for success truly does hang on how well you do just a few basic things. Applying the fundamentals to the best of your ability, tirelessly day after day and season after season, will produce a photo album full of deer hunting success stories. That is how you do it - no secrets, just stick to the fundamentals.

Priority Number One
The most important single thing you can do to shoot more bucks is to keep the element of surprise in your favor – that’s it, no earth-shaking news, but nonetheless this step is critical. Once the deer know you are hunting them, your chances sink faster than the Titanic.

If you are wondering if you are good deer hunter, I have one question that will help you clear that up: how often do you spook deer? Good hunters have learned how to avoid detection on every level. Not only are they sticklers for where they hunt, wind direction, staying still on stand, moving at the right time and all the usual stuff, but they also know how to avoid detection when traveling to and from their stands.