This applies to any piece of land, regardless of relative pressure. Find the places hunters don't go, you'll find the deer. They just become more dogmatic about it as hunter pressure increases. Yes, the deer will alter their behavior with human pressure. I think a lot of this movement gets disoriented on public land because of the timing of hunters entering the woods. I have witnessed a lot of deer movement from 8-10am, and I'm convinced this is deer that laid up near a food source, and are moving to their actual bedding area for the remainder of the day. If left undisturbed, they may stay there well into the morning. ![]() Sometimes this happens as the sun comes up. Then they'll often bed down in or near the food source to digest their food. Deer find a food source at night, and eat there. One "exception" if you'd like to call it that, is a pattern I'm sure I'm not the first to notice. Your smell, the noise you make accessing, or the movement to do so will all work against you in trying to penetrate these locations. Now take apart why they've chosen those spots, and you'll start to see why it's not so easy. With the exception of the rut, but even during the rut, your best odds of seeing those deer during daylight hours, is to be as close to those spots as possible, without them being aware of your presence. If you can't hunt areas with huge uninterrupted wilderness where deer don't encounter humans, and it's below 50 degrees all the time, assume the deer you're hunting are spending most of their daytime bedded, or within extremely close proximity(measured in feet, maybe yards) to a bed/bedding area. You'll think about them, as if they are like you. If you've got it in your head that some arbitrary circumstance makes some deer "deer" at night, and others "deer" during the day, you'll have bad results. Framing it this way changes your perspective. But I think a more useful exercise is to assume ALL deer are nocturnal, ALL the time. The advice above is sound, to locate these spots, and hunt in close proximity to them. And they'll only venture out at dawn/dusk, and when it's dark. But if they are pressured, or it's warm, they will confine themselves to a very small area during daylight hours. Two things tremendously affect to what degree that activity takes place at night - human pressure and temperature.ĭeer don't just lay in one spot from daylight to dark. It just means most of that activity is at night. It doesn't mean deer don't eat, travel, breed, etc. As in, they are creatures that spend most of their time during the day bedded, and most of their time at night traveling and eating, and doing whatever deer do.Īlmost all of that sign you see? It's laid down at night. When people say "the deer are nocturnal", it inevitably is taken as a black and white statement.ĭeer are nocturnal. I can put a pile of corn out there and have does coming to it at all hours of the day. I hunt there once or twice a year, if that. I have sole access to hunt my aunt's 10 acres. While only having about 9 hours of daylight certainly doesn't help, I think pressure is the main reason they go "nocturnal". It would explain why it seems like the older bucks just vanish after gun season, and then show back up the next summer. ![]() I imagine they get pushed in there during gun season and just live in there until there antlers fall off. I have found spots in nasty thickets where after crawling on hands and knees through tunnels of thorn bushes so thick you wouldn't think a big buck could get his rack through, you'll pop out in a little open pocket where every twig on every bush is browsed, there's a months worth of buck turds, and a matched set laying there. I've also spotted bedded deer several hours before dark and watched them stay bedded until after last legal shooting light. They'll get up and browse within a few steps of the beds and lay back down. They may not be truly nocturnal but in extreme pressure situations I've seen it were they'll put themselves in a spot that's just about bullet proof (figurativley and sometimes literally) and not leave that spot during daylight unless pushed out of there.
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