Summer VS Fall Patterns

[bowfreak8]

This is a topic that applies for this time of year. All across the country deer will start leaving summer ranges and moving into their fall ranges. It seems every year I am watching a couple good bucks on camera all Summer and "Poof" they disappear. Where do they go? How do I find them again? Those are things I've asked myself many times over the years. Well this past year I had a breakthrough.....I think.

The property I typically get the Summer trail cam pics at is a lot of Hay fields with smaller sections of fairly open woods. It has some thick areas but not all that large. At this property come the end of September most of the mature bucks have disappeared. You will catch them back in the area during the rut but not on a very consistent basis and not with any sort of reliability. I have connected on a number of these bucks but It usually feels like you are chasing ghosts.

Last year I left this property during the rut and went to another property I hunt that is extremely thick hard woods with numerous clear cuts and almost no fields or agriculture. Within a day and a half both me and my father had put down mature bucks and saw numerous others cruising this area.

This year I set 3 trail cameras up on mineral sites for the first time on the thick property and after 2 months have about 100 pictures with zero mature bucks. On the property with fields i get thousands of pictures and have 4 or 5 mature bucks. The only thing I can figure is that these deer don't move into the area until after the leaves the fall.

What do you guy's think?

[tgreeno]

I think you are definitely right. In the summer when the foliage is thick and the bucks aren't pressured they can bed closer to food and still feel safe. As the season starts and the pressure in the woods increases, along with the leaves dropping, they feel they need to move to the thicker stuff to feel secure again. The thermals also change as fall starts to come-in. It makes perfect sense.

You need to figure out both bedding scenarios. Where are they bedding in the summer, and after leave drop. Very early in the season you may still be able to kill one before they change over to the fall pattern. Where they are bedding at what time of year is very important piece of the puzzle!

[G.Tubbs]

I believe habitat changes along with seasonal changes have a lot to do with deer movement. If the mature deer are only being picked up in the fields, there must be a certain food they like at that time.
The doe's on that property are always there taking refuge in the thick stuff. During the rut, the bucks know where to find the doe's. In the fall when things change, leaves drop, crops get harvested and grasses die off. Those bucks don't have the security of the "area corn field" or that patch of tall grass next to the road. There choices for seasonal bedding are becoming less and less as fall progresses. All this is affected by neighboring hunting pressure as well. I'm no expert. These are a few variables I have encountered.

[bowfreak8]

I didn't expect to have the quantity of pics in the thick area as I do the fields but to not have a single mature buck was shocking. This is a place that I know holds plenty of mature bucks in the fall. I think it just goes to show you how different their summer bedding is than their fall bedding. You gotta be careful not to get caught up in the bone you see in summer trail cam pics.

[Brickhouse]

Early this summer when they started growing their antlers I was picking up pics of a really nice 8 for my area. After a few weeks of pics of him developing he quit showing up. I found him one night feeding in a bean field about a half a mile away. I watched him there for a few weeks then he quit hitting that field. I picked him up the next week on the next road over in a bean field about a mile and a half from where I was getting my first pics of him. Then he vanished from that field and now is showing back up on camera and glassed him last night out of velvet near the original spot I got pics of him. Hopefully he is here to stay now at least until the rut. I can't help but think that the guys who hunt the couple other properties I saw him on are pretty jacked up about seeing the buck on those properties during the summer but I don't think he will be there much during the fall. I guess we will see. Just an example of summer vs fall pattern/core area shifts. Interestingly, when he left the property I can hunt I believe it was a result of me putting too much pressure on it checking cams too often (1-2 weeks). When he made the move the 2nd and 3rd time I noticed that there was also a spike in pressure at those times (hunter was using a tractor for a week or so putting up tower blinds and doing some fall food plots)