Recipes for a successful shed-hunting season

Wilkes Barre, Pa. — The late-winter blues are officially upon us. Ice fishing is coming to a close, it’s the end of most hunting seasons for Pennsylvania residents and the rivers and lakes are a little too chilly for your average open water angler. For a select few though, mid-February through April marks “the most wonderful time of the year” – shed season.

For those who are just getting into the hobby, let’s go over some key factors to finding white gold in the Pennsylvania wilderness.

Putting your focus on feeding areas, bedding areas and travel routes will help you create a recipe for success this shed season. It will also give you a good excuse to spend a little more time outside with family and friends and learn about the behavior of your local whitetails and surrounding wildlife.

First off and most important, locate deer food. This time of year, most of the hormones, breeding drive and ambition to travel is at an all-time low for whitetails. The only thing on their mind is to stay alive and fight off hunger. If you put yourself in an area where deer are feeding regularly, it’s inevitable that you will stumble across a few antlers.

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Heavy brush areas that border freshly logged plots of land are at the top of the list for finding some freshly dropped sheds. The availability of nutrient-dense, fallen tree top buds, coupled with the dense cover from underlying brush creates a haven for whitetails.

Areas of planted crops such as corn, soybean and clover fields also prove to be areas of high activity, provided that the food source has not diminished over the winter months.

Often, when you are able to locate a food source, you will be able to piece together heavily used travel routes leading into bedding areas. In the late winter months, whitetails want to move as little as possible to find food and will often bed within a short walking distance from their main source of nutrition.

As a rough estimate, deer will spend about 50% of their time feeding and 50% of their time bedding this time of year. It’s all about calories ingested versus calories spent.

Keep an eye out for oblong depressions in melted snow or uniformly packed leaves and grass about 3 feet long by 18 inches wide. Whitetails will generally bed during the high points of the day on a south facing slope and feed during the night when the temperatures drop.

South slopes are important because these will always be the first to melt off snow, exposing food sources and allowing the deer to warm back up after a chilly night of feeding.

Following travel routes of whitetails will absolutely produce some antlers, but don’t get discouraged when the trails lead into ultra-dense cover. A majority of the antlers this writer finds are through areas in which even his labradoodle has a hard time navigating through.

Remember the deer live there and you don’t. They are much more adapted to navigating tight terrain even with a rack on their head. The low-hanging branches and twisted brush will also act as an obstacle that could potentially jar an antler to the ground as they pass through.

When you come across a single antler, stop immediately and scan the nearby surrounding area for the match. Slowly expand your search in tight circles out to about 100 yards. Sometimes the match side is within arm’s reach and sometimes it can be 1,000 yards away.

Regardless, when you find an area that contains one or two antlers, ask yourself why they dropped there and focus your time grid searching and following every travel route possible in the area. Whitetail bucks will form large bachelor groups this time of year, and often when you find one shed, there will be more nearby especially if it’s an area where they spend the majority of their time.

A common misconception is the need to cover as much ground as possible. This is true to a degree but more importantly, slow down your pace and train your eye to spot something as small as a button buck shed. The smallest antlers are the hardest to find and for myself I typically find antlers in dense cover that can easily camouflage a five-point side.

Also, light conditions are important when it comes to picking out a flash of white tine on the ground. On sunny days, try to position your search with the sun at your back so that the glare and shadows don’t disguise an antler from your vision.

Cloudy, wet days often produce the best results as the light tan color shade of an antler stands out heavily against wet leaves and grasses. Focus your search in an area with heavy deer droppings in close proximity, well used travel routes and dense cover near a promising food source.

At first, you may get discouraged by an unsuccessful outing. However, go into it with the intention of not expecting any antlers and focus on learning about the behaviors of whitetails this time of year by paying attention to physical signs around you. With that, success is destined to come.

On average, this writer and a friend typically come up with 50-120 antlers per season on public land and it’s not without effort. Many failed outings paired with miles and miles under walked have created a recipe for success solely through trial and error.

Get out of the house during this early spring slumber and keep in mind that there is no substitute for persistence and experience.