If you want to experience a close encounter with a mature buck before the season runs out, you'd better retool your hunting strategies. By now, the bucks know your ways of doing things as well as you do! Photo by Jim Casada.

It's unfortunately the case for too many deer hunters that, deep in December, it's opening weekend they want to remember. To be sure, the glory days of the opener -- its hunter's moon waxing and waning, velvety dawn fogs giving way to mornings cold with a million frost diamonds sparkling in the early sun -- is a glorious time in the world of the whitetail hunter.

Yet those with the right sort of mindset, patience and persistence can find that December as well can be a delightful time to hunt. Here are five tips, each linked to specific types of hunting techniques, that should help you extend your whitetail season, increase your likelihood of late-season success, and, we hope, put venison on your family's table.

LATE-SEASON FOOD SOURCES
Their hormone-fueled mating-season behaviors being a noteworthy exception, deer are essentially what they eat. Most hunters recognize this to some degree, and you'll hear plenty of pre-season discussion about oak mast, the odd year when there's cause for celebration thanks to beechnuts "making," and mention of the more prominent types of "deer candy" (soft mast) such as persimmons and muscadines. By December, though, you can pretty well count on every acorn adorning the forest floor having long since been eaten, wild grapes having come and gone, and deer turning of necessity to different foodstuffs. Knowledge of these late-season delicacies and their availability can make a real difference in your hunting.

A good starting point would be two fairly widespread types of soft mast that are certainly appealing to whitetails. Deer absolutely love the pods of honey locust trees, and munch daintily on both the seeds and the sweet "meat" found in these long, crescent-shaped fruits.

Unlike nut trees and most types of soft-mast sources, which tend to drop their fruits in late September or October, honey locusts hold on to their pods long after the first frosts. It's common to see outlined against the winter sky a thorn-laden tree whose limbs are totally bare of fronds but festooned with thousands of hanging pods clinging on tenaciously. All it takes to send them tumbling to the ground, however, is a good December nor'easter, and if you can be suitably situated near a honey locust tree after the wind-loosened bonanza tumbles to the ground, you'll be in great shape.

Interestingly, you can often find other types of soft mast, albeit not in the same quantities as honey locust pods, this late in the year. Persimmons, for example, can cling to trees with surprising stubbornness, and fall sporadically from mid-October right into December. Find trees still holding some of the sticky-sweet orange globes, and chances are mighty good that deer will check them out.

Precisely the same holds true for what old-timers used to call "winter apples," those species such as Staymans and Winesaps that keep well and sometimes hold on trees quite late. If you're fortunate enough to have access to an old homeplace where some apple trees still stand, a commercial orchard, in which some fruit is invariably overlooked by pickers, or maybe just a tree or two out in a pasture somewhere, be sure to check them out. If fruit's in the neighborhood, deer will find it.

Then there's the matter of browse. Deer seem to turn to certain types of browse only after a number of frosts have occurred. Anyone who's experimented with planting brassicas in food plots soon learns that those varieties don't have much appeal for deer until cold weather enhances their sweetness; similarly, whitetails love honeysuckle that has been touched by frost.

If large patches of this invasive import from the Orient grow on the land you hunt, give some thought to doing some "stealth" management on it in late summer. You can carry a bag or two of fertilizer into the fields and woods and do a bit of highly specialized "farming" by scattering it around honeysuckle without anyone else knowing. The additional nutrition and succulence will appeal to deer -- and give you a great place to locate a stand late in the season.