Photo by Ron Sinfelt.

If shoppers put together a list when they go to the grocery store, if an engineer checks off a list of safeguards before firing up a piece of machinery, it only makes sense that hunters who are preparing for early-season archery hunts should have a list of their own.

After all, isn’t getting venison for the freezer or a big set of antlers for the trophy room as important as your daily bread or the machine that sends electricity through the power line?

A bowhunter has a list that he has to check off before he heads to the woods for an early-season hunt, whether he’s going to put sausage and chops in the freezer or seeking a trophy buck in the first few weeks of the season.

First, where are the deer bedding?

Second, what are they eating?

How do they get from Point A to Point B?

Are bucks still in bachelor groups, or have they split up? How many does and fawns are feeding together?

And if everything above works out, is your shooting eye sharp enough to put the arrow on target?

If you can answer all of those questions intelligently -- and shoot well enough, bow season may be a profitable one for you. However, you can always stand to hear from experts who know the ticket to bow-and-broadhead success.

Knowing how to pattern early-season deer movements comes naturally to experts like David Pye, John Davis and Terry Hiers. But it isn’t that easy for everybody else. Therefore, taking a few tips from them will help tip the scales of success in your direction.

BED AND BREAKFAST -- MINUS BREAKFAST
Pye said that figuring out where deer are bedding during the daylight hours is a matter of looking for two kinds of places -- depending on the kind of habitat or geography where you’re hunting.

“A bedding area is pretty much going to be either in a super-thick spot, or on top of a ridge, a high spot,” he said. “And there should be a water source not too far away.

“If you’re hunting in a place with mountains or ridges, a buck may bed on top where he can see everything coming. Anywhere else, it’s most likely going to be in the heaviest cover around.”

Davis does much of his pre-season scouting at the end of the previous season, during the winter or early spring, when trails are easier to see and find because of the lack of vegetation. Pye likes to check out potential bedding areas well before the season, and he’ll go right in, looking to find the depressed ovals on the ground that indicate beds. However, a better sign is often deer droppings -- but only a certain kind.

“The best thing you can find -- other than the little ovals where the beds are -- is to find droppings all clumped together, compressed real tight,” he said. “When a deer first gets up, the first spot where he eats anything, he’ll drop a load, and they will usually be in solid clumps -- not spread out.

“You find those kinds of droppings, and they won’t be bedding too far away, because they won’t walk far from their beds to the first place they get something eat or drink. Usually, that’s the first thing they do after they get up.”

EARLY-SEASON GROCERIES
Hiers runs a commercial hunting operation, and getting hunters in range of nice deer is his primary concern. Like Davis, he does much of his pre-season scouting at the end of the previous season, especially locating bedding areas.

“Guys who consistently take big deer, they all have their pre-season scouting done in January; they know the bedding areas on their land,” he said. “The rest is hunting for food sources.”

Hiers knows that agricultural fields are prime early-season food sources for deer, whether it’s soybeans, peanuts, corn or grain. He does much of his scouting with binoculars from a distance, trying to see deer that are moving in and out of fields. And he’ll further scout the perimeter of those fields, looking to see where animals are entering and leaving -- giving him ambush spots.