It’s not a big target, mind you. A deer’s spine only measures about 3 inches across. However, the good news is, if you’re shooting straight down at a deer’s spine, you’re pretty close to it. However high your stand is, that’s how far away you are. So, it’s not too difficult to precisely locate an arrow when you’re shooting a target that’s 20 feet or less away.

The best scenario is to have the deer facing directly at you. When you draw, you want the deer’s head and hindquarters to be in perfect north-south alignment in your sight picture, with the head pointed south. This way, all you have to worry about is being precise with your left-right shot placement. If you shoot an inch high or low, you’ll still hit the spine.

How do you master this shot? Practice, practice, practice! Take a 3-D deer target into the woods, climb up in your stand with your bow and arrows and shoot over and over again. If you’ve never taken this shot, expect it to feel uncomfortable at first. Keep practicing, however, and you’ll get used to it.

TOO DARK
The most deer movement during fall archery seasons tends to occur at first and last light of the day. Low light, however, is not the best condition for shooting a bow.

“I couldn’t see him through my peep sight,” has been uttered by more than one bowhunter who encountered a buck early or late in the day but failed to score.

There are several ways to improve your ability to see to aim in low-light conditions. Low light is going to most affect archers who use peep sights attached to their bowstrings. When you look through the peep, things are going to be darker than when you’re not looking through the peep. So, what do you do?

Well, you can opt not to use a peep sight. Try tying two lengths of dental floss onto your string at what would be the top and bottom of a peep sight. When you draw, line up your sight pin between the pieces of floss, just like you would center your pin when looking through a peep.

Or, you can learn to use a peep, but shoot with both eyes open. If you’ve always been a one-eye shooter, this will take a lot of practice on the range to learn. But when you master it, you’ll find it easier to see than if you just used one eye to aim while looking through your peep.

If you’re like me and you want to use a peep, but you just can’t master that both-eyes-open trick, make sure you use the largest peep you can find. Peep sights don’t all come with the same opening. Look at yours and compare it with others at your local archery pro shop. If you see one that’s bigger, make the switch. Or, you can take a drill bit and drill yours to make it bigger. Just be careful you don’t slice the string.

Make sure you’re using fiber-optic pins on your sight. If you have solid metal pins, you’re really going to have trouble seeing them in low light. The fiber optics collect available light to make the end you use to aim glow under low-light conditions.

Stay away from battery-powered, lighted pins. When it’s dark, the light will act like a spotlight shining right into your eye and you’ll have trouble seeing anything beyond the pin. If it’s legal where you live, you can add a light to your sight-frame that shines down on your pins to make them brighter.