Late season bow hunting is your best chance at a monster buck
The woods can feel eerily quiet and still after November…there is no doubt it is compared to intense neck swelled, slobber drooling, hoof wearing chase and seek phases of the rut. For some, especially bow hunters, that first snowfall of the late season is a relaxing and more than welcome sight and sound. For anyone bow hunting it means the war has stopped…a white flag has been waved between the orange army and anything brown that’s not already down! It’s a time that often be overlooked as your best chance to bag a monster! Knowing this treasure cove of late season information might just have you welcoming winter with open arms.
The excitement of bow hunting the early season with flush with green food plots and camo is comparable to the same level of excitement brought on by the white lifeless woods and cold dead crop stalks of winter, but only to those who know the late season’s secrets. This is the time when bucks finally develop a pattern again. Instead of traveling the countryside looking for love, a buck will close up his core area to only necessities, with only a light urge to seek love.
The fact is that if you planned correctly in terms of late season food sources AKA standing corn, standing beans, Brassicas, etc. then you are on point for a late season giant. In fact so many factors come together that gives a single acre late season food source the power to pull giants, it’s almost insane not to have any if possible.
First off bucks will and are still looking for love and they will find it! Two circumstances come together often resulting in single ladies still running around…either your sex ratio is off and does are still needing to be bred or you have a great sex ratio and a lot of food that results in fawns to be bred. That’s right fawns…If they reach the critical weight for your region (around 65 for the Midwest) they will come in, and that scenario is even better than the rut! Fawns will be the first in and last out of a late season food plot…and instead of a mature doe a fawn is the easiest deer to fool. A monster following a fawn out into standing beans is exactly the scenario bow hunters know can happen and wait for in the late season.
Even if the big boy isn’t chasing tail there is an awfully good chance he is coming into that food source. Big bucks are smart, every hunter knows that “it’s how they get so big”…but this is when those big boys can mess up big time. A rut tattered and torn buck is wore out and hungry, worse (in your case better) yet he might be injured from fighting or poorly placed gunshot, making him desperate for an easy meal. This makes an ideal late season bow hunting set up for a close shot.
A minimally pressured late season food source is the dynamite spot for bow hunting in the late season. The last month and even weeks of hunting season won’t seem so desperately hopeless and instead an anticipated and planned out prime opportunity for bow hunting.