“In August or September, deer are not moving very far, so when you see a big buck or a big track -- if you see a deer around a bean field -- he’s probably not going to travel very far. Most of your scouting will be visual sightings and tracks,” Hiers said.

Davis said that deer can and will change food sources almost overnight -- when food sources change, especially in terms of a crop being harvested and becoming available or unavailable.

“They’ll change their habits somewhat as their food sources change,” he said. “And that’s where your scouting back in January and February comes in, because you’ve gotten the total picture then and know how deer are getting to and from different places.”

Pye doesn’t target agricultural offerings as much as he likes to set up around favorite foods that are temporary.

“The first acorns that drop, they’ll hit them as soon as they come in, but I try to key on persimmons and muscadines and scupperdines because deer like the soft mast, and they taste so good. They’re at their sweetest in September,” he said. “They’ll pound them really, really hard because they’re not around very long. A deer may visit a persimmon tree two or three times a day to see if anything else has fallen off. Especially on a windy day, you need to set up downwind of a persimmon tree. I’ll leave a stand (close to) a persimmon tree until the last persimmon falls off. And you look at the muscadine and scupperdine vines, and you never see any on the ground. You know they’re not just disappearing into the ground. They’re getting eaten.”

Hiers doesn’t like to set his hunters up too close to a food source, fearing that deer will become aware of human presence and change their habits.

“You try to stay downwind of a food source so they can come to it and not smell you,” he said. “If you get too close to a food source, you just educate them. I try to keep my hunters about 150 yards away. People ask why, and I tell ‘em, when you’re riding in the neighborhood, you can smell somebody who’s barbecuing outside. You don’t even need to have wind to get that kind of scent out, and it’s the same way with deer. On a still, hot day, your scent just sort of seeps out.”

INTERCEPTIONS -- WITHOUT A FOOTBALL
Figuring out where to set up your stand between a deer’s bedding area and primary food source isn’t as easy as it seems. There is the question of wind; you need stand locations so you can stay downwind even when the wind changes on a daily basis.

Then, there’s the question of finding the route that deer will use most regularly to get from Point A to Point B.

Davis looks for natural funnels, geographic features that deer will use, based on the fact that they like to stay in cover and are basically lazy.

“One of the easiest places to identify as a funnel is an area where you have open land on two or three sides and a small strip of woods, say, coming into a corn field,” Davis said. “That’s an excellent travel corridor for deer. Also, creek beds and ditches are great; they’re the same type of setup where deer can go from their feeding source back to their bedding areas.

“Deer are lazy; they will take the easiest route. They tend to find low spots, especially if you’re hunting in hilly terrain.”

Pye tries to pick out areas where he can find several trails merging after leaving bedding areas -- as long as they’re not too close.

“If you find a persimmon tree or an early food plot that deer are coming to, the tracks will be obvious,” he said. “You can follow the trails back in the woods until you find a little pinched area they’re coming from.

“Places where you find trails with tracks that are going in both directions, those are awesome places, but they can be hard to hunt during bow season, because the deer are coming both ways, and when the wind shifts, you don’t really know which way they’ll be coming from or to.

“I like to hunt trails where all the tracks are going in one direction. You can set up on a place like that and increase your odds because you know they’re coming from a certain direction.”

SUMMER OR FALL PATTERNS
Bucks spend much of the summer in bachelor groups, and does and fawns may gather together in groups.