Spring Deer Scouting

By Robert Lane

In late March and early April, most outdoorsmen and women in Maine are tuning fishing gear, buying new tackle and anxiously waiting for ice-out on their favorite lakes and ponds. After a winter like this one, that can be several long weeks depending on what part of the state you live in. If you’re anything like me, most of your tackle was inspected, cleaned and any necessary repairs made over the winter. When the waters open up, I want to grab it and go.
So what to do in the downtime between the last of the snow in the greengrowth and the day when you can finally launch the boat or canoe on your favorite waterway?

It is a wise hunter who sallies forth to take stock of deer activity in familiar and new hunting grounds.

This time of year as the snow depth decreases, deer assume their normal travel, feeding, and watering patterns. It’s one of my favorite and most productive times for early scouting for next fall’s venison.

Deer move more now, and shallow snow depths provide good tracking capability. Numerous clumps of fresh droppings show up well in the final patches of snow. These provide clues to where deer are spending most of their time, as opposed to just passing through. Not only is this a good time to determine how many animals are in a particular spot, I can also get an idea of the size of the deer that have survived the previous hunting season and recent winter.

Most of these things are relatively easy to do while hunting a familiar area. I religiously spend ample time afield this time of year and throughout the summer to be sure that I haven’t missed anything and that my regular stands will still be good producers. Even then things can cause the animal’s patterns to change - wood harvesting, maturing growth, drought, and worst of all, development. Over the years I‘ve seen one or more of these factors effect the deer patterns in an area that I hunt exclusively. I still manage to bring home the venison from that diverse chunk of forest, but only because I spend considerable time and effort over the course of the year scouting it.

When I first started hunting my favorite honey hole fifteen years ago, it had been selectively harvested the year before. I was able to take advantage of long, exposed shooting lanes, edges of dense fir stands, alder thickets and sprawling tracts of beech and oak trees. There was lots of feeding going on in the leftover hemlock tops and newly sprouting raspberry bushes as well.

Nearby there is a small pond where the deer drank and bedded in the thick growth around its edges. They had tramped well worn routes from bedding cover, to feed and water. Through observation I managed to select several spots for my self-climber where I had managed to take a deer each season.

Over the years these cuts grew in with beech, pine, and birch which dramatically changed the deer’s patterns. This also altered, and, as I thought at the end of one season, lessened my options, as I no longer had the advantage of a good view of a major staging area. This is an area where the animals stopped to wait for the cover of darkness before moving into a field 300 yards away.

In mid January following hunting season, I walked into the tall pine tree where I had shot a nice 8 point buck from my stand on opening day. I had taken a deer from this spot for 9 consecutive seasons. When I shot my last buck from that stand, the line of sight to the stand of beech and oak it overlooked was pretty much grown in and the previously well worn deer trails into it had also grown in. The deer were hardly using it anymore. On top of that my shooting window which to shoot into the feed area was shrinking to the point of being obliterated by the growth that was getting thicker by the season. I figured this stand was pretty much finished as I didn’t have permission to cut the pines and birches that were now blocking my view from twenty five feet up in that big pine. About six inches of snow covered the ground, and not a single deer had passed through the stand of oak where I took that season’s deer.

I walked about a hundred yards beyond the new growth and found a wall of spruce and fir bordering another stand of beech and oak.

The deer were using the conifers as a protective backdrop on their way to a field three hundred yards to the south and the route was heavily traveled. There were rubs from the recent fall all the way to the field and the prevailing winds were in my face. I could come straight in before daylight and not have to worry about being detected by the deer that were most likely bedding on the edge of a field to the north. I studied this area for an hour or so and selected three tall oaks and a pine for possible stands.

The following weekend I packed my self-climber and climbed the trees that I selected the previous week. I selected two of them that gave the best views and the broadest shooting areas and marked them with orange surveyor’s tape. One might think that I had next year’s primary stands wired, but I wasn’t finished just yet. Both of these trees faced east and the rising sun would be hitting me right in the face for most of the morning. On the other side of the trail I found a tall pine facing west, overlooking an open spot that was torn up with last fall’s rubs. Fresh tracks covered this little spot among thick firs. I now had a morning and an evening stand overlooking a major travel route from bedding and feeding areas with relief from the blinding sun.

In late March of this year I spent an afternoon at my new stand site. As I expected, the trail was well worn, and thick with fresh deer droppings. Two distinct sets of large tracks told me that a couple of good bucks were hanging around the neighborhood, allowing me to follow them to a couple of alternate routes that they were using into an excellent ambush for the October bow season. I’ll continue to monitor this area over the summer months. I’ll also climb those trees again in order to see what it’s going be like on opening day, when the beech and oak leaves are full.

I now know where to be on opening day of bow and rifle season and can hunt confidently knowing that I have a good understanding of deer movement in my area. Not a bad find for a few days of scouting shortly after the season closed and again in the spring when it’s great just to be outside in nature.