"The first morning, I'll go in and hunt in an area where I know the deer travel a lot, and after I finish that first morning, I'll do my scouting. I'll try to pinpoint where they're bedding and traveling.

"Early in the seasons, you're hunting food sources. It's good to acorns and alfalfa, apple trees, corn and soybean; they're always good," Smith said. "This one place we hunt early in bow season, we'll go in July and look see what kind of blooms are on the apple trees, how the food plots and crops are doing," Smith said. "In that kind of place, I'll know in July where I'm going to hunt, so I'll hang my stand and get out of there, stay out the next couple of months.

"I'll look around while I'm there and see if there are good nuts on the trees, and I'll keep in contact with the landowner after I leave, ask him if he's seeing deer and where, if the acorn crop looks like it's going to be good, whether the deer have moved from one side of the place to the other, and I'll talk with people I know who live around there and get information from them. But I won't go back in there until it's time to hunt."

Lyndon will do plenty of pre-season scouting with an eye on how deer access the major feeding areas on the land he hunts. "I hunt travel corridors from bedding to feeding areas; they are almost like natural funnels. Usually, you can locate some of your better trails going to and from the food sources," he said. "I know what foods are going to come in where. Usually there are a lot of grapevines producing early in bow season, and your corn and soybeans, and then the acorns will usually start to fall.

"I like walking creek bottoms because you can see the good crossings, then you can walk out the trails and see where they go," he said. "I'll walk them out to where they split up and just kind of disappear. I really like to find a place where two or three trails split, a junction."

Lyndon doesn't scout much deeper in the woods than the junction, because he knows the trails typically lead to bedding areas, and he wants no part of stumbling around in a thicket that a big buck might be calling home. He'd much rather walk the trails out in the opposite direction, figuring that they will get more and more defined as more deer move in, heading for the primary food source.

Naumann said that being able to watch fields or other open, cultivated areas takes much of the guesswork out of scouting. He can watch deer, note the time they enter or leave an area, then backtrack and figure out the pattern they're using for approaching the soybeans or corn.

"People see a lot of deer in the evenings in soybean fields that haven't been harvested, and if you spend enough time, you almost know when they're going to move from their bedding area to the feeding areas; they are really creatures of habit late in the summer," he said. "You want to catch them coming in; you want to set up close to the feeding area without getting too close to their bedding areas. I like to stay 20 to 40 yards off a major trail -- where I'm comfortable taking a shot."