Early Season Mornings

gwm

5 year old buck +
Curious how many hunt mornings in the early season?

I usually only hunt evenings until late Oct but temps this weekend have me thinking twice.........
 
If I can get the time off to hunt Im hunting morning and evening!!! During the rut I do my damnedest to sit all day. I passed a nice buck last Nov at 12:00 noon
 
I've seen a lot more mid morning action than I've ever encountered from a O dark 30 sit. Trail cams have action all day up until the end of August (last time I pulled cards).

The thing I'm most concerned about with daytime highs in the 50's is getting a carcass handled before it rots. There's no aging it outside of a cooler with those temps. I'll be hunting this weekend (I hope - need to button up some stuff here first), and early next week, but I'm prepared to haul the deer to Thielen's instead of butchering it myself.
 
If I can get the time off to hunt Im hunting morning and evening!!! During the rut I do my damnedest to sit all day. I passed a nice buck last Nov at 12:00 noon
If I got the time, I hunt morning and evening. Since I've been in the concrete jungle, my bowhunting gets crammed into a 3-5 day trip and that's it. I just like getting in the stand and leaving the phone in the duffle bag back at the cabin.
 
Working 3rd shift I prefer evening sits but do an AM once in a while if I have the night before off.
 
Never for me. Maybe it's the layout of my farm but if I hunt early season mornings all I'm doing is bumping deer in the dark, in September.

I don't like letting them know I'm after them this early in the season.
 
I do for a couple of reasons.

First off I only get 1 evening sit per normal weekend. We get up to the cabin Friday night too late to hunt. And we leave Sunday around noon. So if I didn't hunt mornings I would only be able to hunt Saturday evening. What I do is hunt low impact spots that I don't plan to hunt hard come later in the season and really don't care if I burn out or not.
 
This will be the first early season that i don't hunt. with no doe tags and no bucks on an obvious food to bedding routine, it's kind of a waste of my time. i'm going to get out about 9am and scout in the mornings though. i have a ton of open managed forests to look at in wisconsin.
 
This will be the first early season that i don't hunt. with no doe tags and no bucks on an obvious food to bedding routine, it's kind of a waste of my time. i'm going to get out about 9am and scout in the mornings though. i have a ton of open managed forests to look at in wisconsin.


I agree with this. If I could not shoot does I would not hunt either. No shooter bucks patterend or showing up on camera at all.
 
I'm trying like heck to let my camera action dictate my hunting. I wasn't planning on hunting mornings but I do have some action coming through in the mornings including a decent 8 point. Unfortunately the wind will be wrong tomorrow am for me to hunt it. I think I'll probably try to follow the hunt smarter not harder this year as I think I spooked too many does before prime time last year. Would love to be out there tomorrow am but don't want to spook them off with the wrong wind.
 
We hunt some stands in the morning in the early season. Strategic spots only. We see deer, not very many mature bucks.
 
I'm trying like heck to let my camera action dictate my hunting.

That's how I determine my early season, morning hunts plus wind direction. Eventually it just becomes wind direction and then by crunch time I just hunt when I can.
 
it depends on the spot for me. I will stay out of my property completely until at least October 20-25th, unless cameras tell me that i need to do otherwise. My property is set up to hunt both AM's and PM's...but the AM's are a little better in terms of deer movement and the PM's can sometimes be a little dicey getting out of the stand with spooking something. I will however head out to the farm i used to live on to hunt prior to when i will start hunting my property. that farm is an evening only spot. stands are impossible to access in the morning without blowing deer out of the fields. One of my other spots is always better in the AM's no matter the time of year.
 
It's getting tougher and tougher to only hunt when cameras tell you or when the wind is right given the limited time to hunt due to family obligations as well as trying to bring my daughter along. I did put up a ground blind in a spot I hope won't be intrusive, more of an observation blind than anything.
 
I don't do a lot of early season AM hunts. In fact, very, very few. For me to go, it takes having a setup like MO is describing, where the bucks are feeding a good distance from where they are bedding and I can cut them off somewhere closer to their bedding, without blowing up the woods. Those situations can be well worth it, but there just aren't many setups like that in the locations I hunt, if any at all.

Years ago, I used to hunt early AMs as much or more than PMs, but I did waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy more damage than good. Now, I do so very sparingly, on a very low impact basis and only when I have intel telling me that I can kill a buck I want. Hunting smarter, not harder has worked extremely well for me and jacked my success rate up a lot more than I would have believed.
 
Odds are that you'll tip the deer off rather kill him (I did that enough years ago). No need to ruin a good stand on marginal odds but maybe someday I'll come across the right situation to sit the AM early season.
 
Doesn't anyone scout anymore or just rely on cameras. I have yet yet to kill a buck based on a camera "pattern ". Cameras help me id bucks, but Truely patterning a buck seems to be giving cameras a little too much credit. At least compared to ole fashion scouting, if that is practical, because many places can't be scouted.
 
Doesn't anyone scout anymore or just rely on cameras. I have yet yet to kill a buck based on a camera "pattern ". Cameras help me id bucks, but Truely patterning a buck seems to be giving cameras a little too much credit. At least compared to ole fashion scouting, if that is practical, because many places can't be scouted.

i do all of my traditional boots on the ground scouting while shed hunting....the March and April woods tell the tell of the previous fall/s blatantly...and over several years in the same area patterns emerge...all with out pressuring deer near to or during season. I may drive around and glass fields in the summer and early fall or even take a spot light for a ride here and there....but once the season is eminent or underway I drastically reduce my intrusion....but the cameras are there watching for me....and that makes the intel from the camera the most recent information...which during the season is as good as it gets.

As far as deriving a "pattern" of a buck from strictly from a camera/s that's not how i use the cameras...more like a piece of the puzzle.
 
I only use cameras to tell me who's using a trail if there's a big hoof print on it, or to do inventory over the minerals in the off season. I've had very few pictures of the monsters I've seen with my own eyes on camera. I know they're there, but they don't follow the herd much. I use the cameras to gage herd health more than figure out what shooters are around. Once the cruising starts - everything you think you know could be wrong.

My early season plans this year are to stake out a heavily used transition trail that comes in from the cut-over lot next door and joins to my central corridor trail which leads to some good bedding deep in the woods. Since they harvested the neighbors trees, it's going to change things for me in ways I'm not aware of yet. Deer are moving into my property sooner along the ridge than they used to, so that's a plus, but wind could be a bigger factor now than it had been as we don't have the buffer zone on that edge.
 
I'm not even bowhunting this year, but I'm hoping my stepdaughter and/or her boyfriend shoot a young buck in the a.m. Amazingly funny for me to type something like that...but its true :)
Good for you! Can't take this crap so serious! Let the arrow fly
 
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