When archery hunting for deer became wildly popular 25 years or so ago, many hunters bought bows and broadheads so they could get the month-long jump on gun hunters that the earlier, longer archery seasons provided.

What many did not expect -- but quickly recognized -- was that across the Southeast, getting a jump on other hunters also meant almost re-learning the process of scouting and trying to pick a location from which you could start filling the freezer with venison.

You just didn't go into the woods in July, August or September and expect to find bucks and does in the same areas, acting the same way they normally did in November, when the woods filled with hunters.

Deer are doing all kinds of things late in the summer that they wouldn't be caught dead doing as Thanksgiving approaches. And the hunters who realized that first were the ones who regularly dined on venison sausage, tenderloin or steaks before the leaves began to fall.

"As archery season approaches, deer are in their summer patterns, and their movements are like clockwork," said Thomas Naumann, who operates Cherokee Run Hunting Lodge. "They're probably the most predictable at this time of year as they'll ever get.

"All they do is go from their bedding areas to their feeding areas to get water, and they do it at the same times every day. You can set your clock by them. That's it. Hunting the transitional areas between their food and bedding areas -- that's about as sure a bet as there is."

Naumann, archery shop owner Shannon Lyndon and veteran bowhunter Jim Smith have made early-season hunting work for years. Their approaches are basically the same: Find the foods deer are eating, find the routes they use to get to it from the areas where they're bedding down during the middle of the day, then pinpoint a place along the way where they're most likely to stroll within bow range.

The first step is finding the food. Depending on the habitat in the area you hunt, that can mean any number of things, and it may change several times within the month to six weeks of archery season. Primary among food sources late in the summer are agricultural crops, the corn and wheat, milo, sorghum, soybeans and even fruits like apples, where available. Most of these foods will be largely unavailable as gun season approaches, with the harvest taking care of most of them, leaving only a remnant that might still attract deer -- but not in the numbers that they did in September.

"There are two different ways I scout, depending on where I'm hunting," said Smith, who regularly kills close to a dozen deer each season with his bow, hunting in a handful of mid-Atlantic and Southeastern states. "If it's a place I've hunted a lot and am familiar with, I pretty much know where the deer are going to be, but I've still got to get in there; I'm not fortunate enough to have the kind of place where I can stay back and scope it out.