At the halfway mark, this year's deer season stands about where it usually does at this point – far fewer hunters and fewer deer sightings by those that are still hunting. In a year which sees Thanksgiving follow on the heels of opening day, as it did this year, by the beginning of the second week of the firearms season, hunter numbers drop off rather sharply. This is understandable since many hunters take vacation or time off from work the opening week.

Once opening week is over, you normally won't encounter that many deer hunters on any given weekday. Those final two weeks can often be the most satisfying time for hunting unpressured deer. And once the firearms season has ended and the special late muzzleloader and archery seasons open, hunters are at a premium, especially if the snow is deep and the temperatures are frigid.

Reportedly, opening week's deer harvest was good, but nearly two weeks remain in the firearms season, and it will be the full season's harvest that will indicate whether hunters took too many or not enough antlerless deer in our WMU 7M, and whether the DEC will have to readjust their DMP numbers up or down for next year's season.

Few big game animals can test hunters' skills and resolve more completely than whitetails. Despite their widespread availability and abundance, mature whitetail bucks have an uncanny ability of avoiding hunters and traditional deer hunting methods and approaches. Often, the taking of the biggest bucks falls into the category of luck – the hunter being in the right place at the right time (or even the wrong place, but at the right time).

That said, does luck play a major role in successful deer hunting? The answer is a definitive maybe, depending on the area being hunted and the degree of hunting pressure there. But there's little question that the hunters who do the most preseason scouting, while also understanding and digesting the signs they encounter, increase their odds of successfully taking a mature buck, especially on opening day.

However, once deer have been exposed to several days of hunting pressure, the rules that determine success have changed radically. Those prime hunting areas and escape routes of opening day will seldom see deer using them again, or until hunter densities there have dropped off significantly and for several consecutive days. So now the key for successful hunting becomes one of relocating the favored haunts of the remaining deer.

Although a mature whitetail's home range is usually about a square mile in size, it's usually far from being symmetrically square in shape. More than likely, it's oval or even L-shaped, which means at its longest distance it could span two miles or more. So the big buck you glimpsed opening morning, but that no one got, could be a long way from that initial sighting by opening day's end. This is when the hunter needs to revise his or her thinking as to where to look for deer later in the season.

Instinctively, deer survive by being both reactionary and conditioned to avoiding danger. And during hunting season, humans obviously represent danger. Once deer begin to encounter abnormal numbers of humans in their range, they'll attempt to seek a location within that range which has the lightest density of humans present.

Such locations need not be remote or far removed from human presence, but rather ones that see few if any human intrusions. More often than not this translates to thick cover. Dense briars and swamps, low-growing evergreen plantations, overgrown hedgerows and blowdowns, and standing cornfields are historically the types of retreat covers that deer seek out for security.

Deer will also become more nocturnal in their habits, venturing out of their retreat covers to feed and breed between the sunset and sunrise hours. Mid- to late-season hunters who concentrate their efforts in the woodlands will no doubt encounter fresh deer sign, but which was probably made during the previous night. So while these hunters anticipate seeing deer in these areas, the animals are probably some distance away, secure in their retreat covers for the day.

In past decades, deer drives were a popular method used by groups of hunters to move deer from dense retreat covers. But as the number of hunters declined and more land became off-limits to hunting, drives became less and less commonplace. Today it's relatively rare to encounter hunters putting on an effective drive in our region. More likely will be the two- or three-man drives, where one or two hunters meander toward another one or two hunters, hoping to move deer by them. While this can be effective in small covers, it seldom works in larger ones since there's too much space between the drivers that allows deer to double back.

The secret of successful late-season hunting is changing your attitude, both in where and how you hunt, and also in what you should reasonably expect to encounter as far as deer are concerned. Gone are those opening day, periodic strings of deer being pushed to you by abundant hunters on the move. Now, with fewer hunters afield, coupled with fewer remaining deer (that have been hunted for several days), hunters need to acquire more than a little patience and resolve, and carefully start poking around those dense covers that other hunters have been avoiding.

Snow on the ground is a big help during late-season hunting since it makes locating deer retreats easier and also helps in spotting the animals residing there. However, this is not altogether a totally positive situation since deer seem to recognize they are more visible when there's a snow covering. When there is none, they tend to hold a bit tighter and often venture out into the slightly less-dense edge areas, which gives the still-hunter a slight advantage.
Although still-hunting or small drives can be effective in the late-season, so too can taking up a watch near a cover area during both the initial and last hour of daylight. For as each day of lighter hunting pressure goes by, the deer tend to gradually begin returning to their preseason habit patterns, which involves moving from bedding to feeding areas while it's still daylight. Once a route to and from these areas is located, an early and late watch that's slightly downwind from the trail can be effective.

I can recall several late-season watches along a retreat area trail when I was flabbergasted by the sheer number of deer that filed by, having apparently shared that same dense bedding cover area for several days in a row. And on two memorable late-season afternoons, the last deer in line were heavy antlered bucks – my reward, I guess, for not giving up after opening week's "easy deer hunting" was over.


Donate Your Deer Hides


The Chenango County Federation of Sportsmen's Clubs is asking successful deer hunters to donate their deer hides to help support its "Send a Youth To DEC Camp" program. Hides may be dropped off in the appropriate bin at Mayhood's Sports Shop, Rte 12 just south of Norwich.