Whitetail Scout School Part II: The Preseason

We started naming the bucks the last week of June. "Pistol Grips" was a heavy nontypical sporting Y-shaped stickers that resembled pearl-handled grips from a Colt revolver. "Hollywood," a huge-bodied 10-point, hung close to the road, barely budging as we videotaped him. "Wants to be a movie star," my buddy Ted Marum said with a laugh one evening as the buck stared at our idling pickup from 50 feet away. "Dagger" earned his nickname from his long, knife-bladed G-2s that bobbed as he grazed from an alfalfa patch as green as an Irish landscape.

These bucks, and many others, were whitetails I knew well last summer. On languid evenings, Ted and I would drive lonely country roads that surrounded his leases in western Wisconsin. It was common for us to see at least a half-dozen mature whitetails, and on many drives we'd spot three times that number. At each sighting we'd stop the vehicle, glass the buck with binoculars and spotting scopes and videotape him if light and distance allowed it. Within a few weeks, we could identify many bucks at first glance from long range.

Summer deer watching is a time-honored activity in Wisconsin, where going for a "deer drive" is heady recreation, a chance to top a lazy summer evening with wildlife viewing. But for Ted, whose job each fall is to put big bucks in front of paying clients, we were completing an important step in preseason recon. Though the crisp days of hunting season were literally months away, we both recognized a summer scouting program as an important building block to autumn success.

In the first installment of this three-part series, we examined the first step in a year-round deer scouting plan: post-season scouting. This month, we'll look at putting together a preseason program that will carry us up to opening day.

The most obvious advantage of summer scouting is that there is simply no better time of year to census the number, quality and location of bucks in your hunting area. Come late spring and early summer, whitetails put on the feed bag and become highly visible. After a winter of subsistence feeding, deer now face a veritable salad bar of nutrition and attack it like post-meet wrestlers who've starved themselves to make weight.

This need for feed puts deer on their feet at all times of the day as they visit high quality food sources. I've watched trophy bucks pigging out in alfalfa fields at midday, grazing like contented cattle. But look for prime feeding to occur in the last hour of dusk, especially on cooler evenings and just prior to a storm. Whitetails are content to stay in a small home core area now and will observe a bed-to-food routine that's highly predictable.

With the lush growth that accompanies green-up, nailing down preferred foods might seem difficult. However, you can usually count on seeing the most deer near the highest-protein feed. In farm country, this usually translates into alfalfa and soybean fields. In more wooded climes, deer seek out grasses, forbs and sedges near openings. Not only are these woods-edge food sources palatable and highly preferred, but deer also enjoy them because edges offer relief from swarming deer flies and other insects. Conveniently, this also makes bucks more visible to hunters.