After choosing a property as your hunting area, spend some time riding around it looking for bucks. This requires good optics, either binoculars or a spotting scope. For pre-hunt scouting, you want a lot of magnification. A reasonable minimum is 10x, with a wide field of view.

Spend most of your scouting time early in the mornings or late in the evenings. Where it’s legal to do so, extend your scouting to after-dark hours with night-vision optics.

Try to spend most of your glassing time in places where bucks feeding or loafing would not be obvious to anyone driving down the road. Those bucks attract too much attention. Come bow season, there will likely be so many hunters in the area that the bucks will alter their habits. At the very least, other hunters will hinder your ability to make a hunting plan and carry it out.

Start looking for late-summer bucks in remote corners of pastures, obscure meadows and in fallow fields near croplands, wetlands and waterways.

A hunting plan is the objective of pre-hunt scouting. Throughout the process, you should be doing a lot more than looking for deer. Watching them is fun, but don’t get so wrapped up in observations that you overlook the purpose of your mission. Discovering that the buck you want is all-important. But to give yourself anything more than a lucky chance at tagging him, you need to learn as much as possible about his habits. Once you know the buck is there, each new piece of information you can glean from your scouting trips will help you formulate a hunting plan.

WATCH AND LEARN
You can determine a buck’s travel routes and destinations (feeding areas if you scout in the evening, and bedding areas if you scout in the morning).

Of the two, morning scouting is most important. Feeding areas change along with variations in natural food availability. If you scout during August, deer may be feeding heavily on alfalfa or some other green crop or leafy wild plant. Come bowhunting season, they will have changed to mast, such as acorns or late-maturing farm crops including corn and soybeans.

If any location patterns remain consistent, they will most likely be the bucks’ bedding areas. These may not change until the rut gets into full swing, which is typically weeks after bowhunting season opens. They may use the same bedding areas, though perhaps not as often, so it’s good to keep them in mind.

TRAIL CAMERAS
Trail cameras can be a great help in early-season scouting. They often provide those pleasant surprises mentioned earlier, revealing bucks no one knew existed. These handy tools give you around-the-clock eyes in your hunting area. But you must do some scouting just to find places to set up trail cameras -- which are often also the best places to set up stands.

One excellent place to set up a trail camera is a funnel, a place where natural obstacles, land formations or waterways constrict deer movements into a very narrow path.

One of the things trail cameras have taught me is that bucks and does sometimes tend to take different routes, especially in open cover. Funnels, however, affect all deer.