Here’s what to pinpoint with scouting leading up to archery deer season

It had been almost a year since I’d been on this property in North Dakota, and my first order of business was checking out a specific bedding area. 

It’s actually more of a single bedroom – the tip of an oxbow so small on a narrow river system that the cover is going to hold only a deer or two, but that deer could very well be the biggest buck on the property. I believe the buck I tagged during the 2022 archery season was bedded here before he presented me with a shot coming out to the edge of the standing cornfield. 

My buddy Sam Schmid and I were back on the property a few weeks ago as we followed a subtle trail through the canary grass and found a good-sized deer bed. 

I walked about 10 more yards to the specific spot I wanted to examine just inside the thickest cover. Sure enough, another buck (bucks?) has taken over the exact spot. Watch the video below to see how it sets up.

A big bed was worn to the dirt. It was up against a piece of deadfall that provides horizontal cover near the edge of the riverbank. Above it is a thick, overhanging bush strong enough to offer cover from both sun and snow. The shade on that hot July day provided what felt like a 10-degree temperature difference. It had all the ingredients of a bed that gets used during many stages of the hunting season.

I think of these beds as the “spot within the spot.” There is plenty of general deer-bedding habitat on this property, but areas like this – beds that offer the best protection from predators and multiple weather conditions – are few and far between. 

These beds consistently get taken over by dominant bucks. Your chances of finding a buck using them frequently only increase in areas of more open country where this type of cover can be limited.

I run no cell cameras and very few, if any, standard SD game cameras anymore, so I almost never have a picture telling me about a specific buck on these properties. The No. 1 way I have gotten on more bucks since ditching cameras as a primary scouting tool is by finding these spots on foot and trusting that the deer using them are often deer with which I’d be happy to end my season.

You can guess where they are by understanding how bucks use certain terrain features: think oxbows in river systems, leeward-facing points, benches and bowls in drainages within hill country, points off islands, or small pockets of higher ground in wet areas of a swamp. 

Areas of habitat diversity are great starting points in all types of landscapes. Map scouting gets you in the ballpark, but you up your odds considerably when you love boots-on-the-ground scouting almost as much as you love hunting itself. Get in there, find these spots, then think: How can I set up? How do I access this spot? What are the adjacent food or water sources that may dictate when and how deer are coming and going from this bedding area?  

The answers to these questions may change from year to year, so you can help yourself with late-summer scouting. Here are a couple of other priorities I focus on when in the woods just a couple of weeks ahead of the season. 

How has the food changed?

The areas I hunt in Minnesota become pretty patternable because they are consistent when it comes to crop rotations. If a field is planted in corn one year, you can bet it will be soybeans the next. 

That’s not the case where I hunt in North Dakota. Crops include everything from corn to soybeans to sugar beets to alfalfa and wheat. Deer relate to these differently, ranging from a little to a lot, and depending on the time of year.

My first order of business when scouting in late summer is often to walk field edges to see how deer are using the crops. You can glass from a distance if you worry deer are bedded next to the field, but I gain a lot of information in a short amount of time by speed-scouting field edges. Act more like a farmer checking his crops than a hunter sneaking around.

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This was hugely beneficial last year in early August in North Dakota when I found worn trails along a cornfield and large areas where stalks had been entirely knocked down. That helped make my decision on where to go on opening weekend. 

This year was different. Sign of feeding along the fields was minimal in late July, and there was far more wheat – now fully mature – planted in the area than I have ever seen. I have little experience hunting near wheat, but the deer were paying it no attention.

We shifted our focus to the timber around known bedding areas. What oaks are producing acorns? The woods are filled with mast and natural vegetation that deer crave. 

One area I hunt features a big oxbow that I know holds a lot of deer. It is filled with oaks that I confirmed have plenty of acorns, and deer were browsing heavily on the pockets of Canadian wood nettle that blanket the low areas in the dry riverbed.

Across the road is a soybean field that deer should be hitting in early September. We found one of those “spots-within-the-spot” type of buck beds here that is getting good use.

That is a lot of ingredients coming together that make this an area to target in the early season. 

An eye on the future

I was struggling to find deer during the first week of November in 2020. The reason? I was putting too much focus on hunts from the prior years. 

Things change, and the question I needed to ask myself was, where are the does right now? I kept coming back to a strip of timber along the river that I had marked on my onX map in late July. The field adjacent to the trees was planted in sugar beets. 

Sugar beet fields can be dynamite areas after the beets are harvested. Many beets get left atop the dirt, and deer happily clean them up during that mid-October to early November period. 

I was thinking about that during the 90-degree heat that summer as I prepared a tree to slip into with my hunting saddle, just off a bedding area near that field. On the morning of Nov. 3, I used the river to get into the tree undetected and placed my tag on a buck by 8:30 a.m.

I want to set myself up for success on opening weekend by scouting in the late summer, but I always have an eye toward the rut. Do I have an exact plan for a tree I am going to climb into around bedding and food sources that should hold deer in the late fall? I may have to adjust, but I want to make sure the answer to that question is “yes” across multiple locations. 

Spend some time focusing on deer in late summer. You’ll be glad you did in the coming months.