Morning Hunts And The Early Bow Season

When I am hunting from home, I rarely hunt mornings during the early bow season. Often, when I try, I just booger things up for the more productive evening hunts.

But when I am hunting out-of-state during the early season, I'm not going to spend mornings sleeping-in and then just lay around all day waiting for evening. Instead, I search out places where I can hunt mornings without spooking the deer I plan to hunt in the evening. Usually this means having two or more properties to hunt, one primarily for morning hunts and one for evening hunts.

For morning hunts, I am looking for trails that lead to bedding cover, which is a minimum of 400 yards off of the feeding field. The farther the deer are traveling between the field and their bedding area in the morning, the better your odds of not spooking the deer by hunting too close to the field.

Often, the problem during the early season is that deer tend to bed very close to the food source. I've seen them bed down only 20- to 40 yards from the field edge, but a couple of hundred yards is more common. If the deer are bedding that close to the food source, and you have any intention of hunting that field in the evening, forget trying to hunt those trails in the morning. But if the deer are bedding at least 400 yards off of the field, you have a fair chance of intercepting them in the morning as they make their way back to the timber after a night of feeding on crops. The best case scenario is to locate a funnel where trails merge between feeding and bedding areas.

The other location I like to hunt in the morning is a secluded pond or spring seep where the deer come to drink before bedding down for the day. Remember the word secluded. Sure deer will drink out of clear, cold trout streams, winding through the pastures or from ponds dug for the cattle in pastures with no natural water, but nearly all of these visits will occur at night. During that first hour of shooting light, deer are much more comfortable grabbing a drink back in cover.

And don't worry that the water in these small ponds is nasty looking. Deer will drink the warm, chocolate colored and sometimes algae covered water from a place where they are comfortable, before stepping into the open to grab a slurp or two of clear, clean, cold water.