What’s Your Step Two?

[Deerkins]

Step One: Find him.
Step Two: Blunder in, do something stupid, spook him off never to be seen again.
Step Three: Repeat until the season is over.




What?

I laughed out loud, probably the most realistic answer.

Since you know where he is now, aggressively scout the surrounding areas, looking for places he may transition to once pressure, acorn, leaf drop occurs. Think about where he might shift to as his behavior changes in the upcoming months.

In these areas find high traffic areas, perhaps make a few mock scrapes and hang cameras to monitor. That way, as his travel patterns shift on you, you will be able to quickly adapt to the situation.

After putting out cameras in other nearby areas, and thoroughly scouting them out, then I’d consider a quick scouting mission, if I felt I was missing something with his current routine

What you don’t want to happen and is quite likely, is for him to move off from his current pattern, without having any knowledge of where he may have gone and how to hunt those areas..

All of the responses have been great but your last sentence is really what I am scared of and I think you address it really well... the only reason I have even considered scouting him in September so close to the season is because I am expecting a pattern shift and I don't want to lose him and not be able to get back on him. Preparing for that shift, and being able to keep tabs, without pressuring him right now and scaring him to kingdom come, makes a ton of sense to me.

The good thing about knowing where he is now, is that it’s opportunity to move freely around him to gather intel, obviously the closer you encroach on his bedding area the more cautious you have to be to to things such as ground scent especially, but if you’re smart about it, I think you can get away with a lot more activity than most people believe.

I’ve noticed most of the bucks I’ve hunted made pattern changes early season or just before it, by adjusting how they were entering and leaving their general bedding area, but not abandoning it.

If someone was monitoring one entry exit point, they could come to the conclusion that he was run off by other hunters, or left for another area. But in reality he could still be there, but has started using the back door instead of the front door. This has been a reoccurring theme I’ve picked up the last few years.. usually in my area they’re moving to acorns, from summer browse, but it also seems to be that they’re taking pressure into account, because their “back door” has been opposite of the direction that most human intrusions would come from..