It's cold and miserable, and mature bucks are as scarce as hens' teeth. So how do you fill a tag during the last weeks of the season at the 11th hour? Our resident expert has some timely advice.
By Steve Bartylla
I won't lie to you. The hunt was brutal. With temperatures dipping below zero -- and well into double digits below zero at that -- and steady 15- to 30-mph winds, the only thing that kept me in the stand each day was my Heater Body Suit. Each day I had to fight the temptation of literally racing to get to the stand, just so I could crawl inside the suit and warm up, only to dread having to eventually slip out and fight my way back to the truck.
For late-season hunting during extremely cold weather, the author believes you should first locate a big buck to hunt by identifying the animal's food source. Then you should set up your stand with a minimal amount of disturbance to the woods and use a low-impact routea both to and from that stand. The colder it is outside, the better!
You're probably thinking that, despite the combination of brutal conditions and the fact that the deer were already ultra-skittish from a season's worth of dodging both lead and arrows, I conquered every obstacle with bravado and the legendary king of all bucks. Wrong!
The truth is that I didn't even see a deer during the eight straight days I crawled up into my various stands. To this day, I still wonder if every deer in the tri-county area where I was hunting had gotten a group rate on a vacation trip to Mexico. Sure, I sucked it up and went out each afternoon, but I'd be lying if I said I enjoyed the hunt. It was flat-out miserable. During the periods when I wasn't wearing my Heater Body Suit, it might even have bordered on being life threatening.
Like it or not, that's exactly what late season in the Upper Midwest and North can be like. It can test the will of the most avid hunter. I can't speak for anyone else, but I've never bought the romantic notion that some hunters have embraced: that facing the worst Mother Nature can throw at a hunter and trying to endure it is a noble endeavor. Mother Nature can be nasty. To my way of thinking, she often saves the very worst for deer hunters. The thought of being able to endure it has never meant anything to me.
On the flip side, being able to kill a mature buck means everything to me! That, my friends, is the one and only reason to go late-season hunting. And luckily, even though Mother Nature can be miserable and even though deer have many biological and behavioral traits working against the hunter during this phase, late season can be and often is a great time to kill a mature buck. So let's get down to the nitty-gritty and talk about some of the best ways to achieve this goal.
FIND THE BUCK
The first step in taking a late-season buck is to find one or more that you want to shoot. Although this step is vitally important, some hunters often seem to overlook it. In my 32 years of deer hunting, I've never tagged a mature buck during late season without having first seen him at some earlier point and then later purposefully setting up to kill him. And during most of those seasons, I've invested a good bit of time in late-season hunting, often on some pretty choice land.
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