Archery seasons are beginning to open all across the country. For many crossbow hunters, opening day is a culmination of hard work and countless hours spent in the field scouting, planting food plots, placing and filling feeders, managing trail cameras, sighting in your crossbow arrows and broadheads, and setting up blinds and stands. After all this work, the time has arrived to create an early-season crossbow hunting plan for the early part of the season when bucks are still following their summer feeding and travel routines or are just beginning to exhibit pre-rut behavior, depending on when your archery season begins. This early part of the season gives you a shot at determining a buckxe2x80x99s daily traffic pattern and to hunt accordingly, helping the investment of all that time and energy pay off in a successful harvest.
Deer Movement Patterns
If you have trekked around your hunting location, you have hopefully identified the areas where deer travel and congregate, and you are very familiar with the trails to and from these locations. If baiting is legal in your state, you likely have set-up feeders or placed mineral attractants on or near these spots. By regularly scouting these trails on foot, especially after a good rain, you can determine where there are fresh tracks and lots of deer traffic. Well-placed trail cameras along these travel routes and areas of congregation will offer some valuable information that will help you to create and refine your hunting plan for the early part of the season.
Advantages of Early-Season Crossbow Hunting Plans
One of the huge advantages of hunting early archery season is the high likelihood that bucks are in a daylight movement pattern and that they will continue to follow this pattern, possibly for a few weeks, until their pre-rut instincts begin to develop. Your trail camera pictures now give you a visual accounting which documents the time of day and specific locations where bucks are hanging out. This is a great time to review the earlier sets of pictures taken a month or six weeks before your most recent pictures were taken.
Are you beginning to see a pattern emerge relating to the time of day and location of one buck or a set of bucks? If so, you have a very good chance to see these bucks in the same area and time during the first few weeks of season and you should plan your early hunts based on this information. If you see a buck at one spot in the morning and another in the evening, plan to hunt each of these locations to match the movement data you have already collected.
By following these recommended steps for formulating your early-season crossbow hunting plan, you will likely see more deer in the early weeks of season, which, with a little luck, will help you to be successful. Good luck to all hunters this season!
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