If you’ve hunted deer for any length of time or are a dedicated trail camera user, you know that bucks seem to either disappear in daylight or mostly appear only at night during the early and pre-rut portion of hunting season. Obviously, that is not a hard rule, otherwise we wouldn’t see so many good bucks taken outside of the rut.

Nevertheless, it is true that bucks are most active between dusk and dawn, preferring to spend their “off-hours” hunkered down in their safe bedding area, somewhere inside their core range. This starts to change once the rut kicks in and bucks abandoned their shyness in the search for estrous does.

For most of us, though, the rut is still a week or two out, so do you abandon all hope and wait?

Not a chance. With a bit of work, it is entirely possible to get lined up on bucks that aren’t quite ready to enjoy the sunshine.

Since bucks aren’t inclined to do as much traveling right now as they will in a few weeks, success will depend largely on locating a buck’s bedding area and the general route or routes he takes to get into and out of it around daylight and dark.

How do you find a bedding area? Yeah … that’s the hard part.

How to Locate Bedding Areas

If you’ve seen a good buck show up on your trail camera a few times, consider the angle he’s coming from. When I see a buck enter my camera’s field of view just after dark or before first light and do so more than once, I know there’s a good chance his bedding area is somewhere in the direction he is either leaving or going to.

The next step is to try and figure out exactly where that bedding area may be. In the mountains where I hunt, bucks tend to bed on the points of finger ridges. These high spots offer them a good view and positions them so that it is difficult for a hunter or natural predator to sneak up on them undetected. If danger is detected, then there are several easy avenues of escape.

After ridge points, secluded benches running just below a ridge are good bets for bedding locations xe2x80x94 especially if those benches are thick with early succession growth or other heavy cover.

Good bedding territory obviously is defined by the environment. In parts of the country, for example, where swamps or cedar thickets are present xe2x80x94 especially those that are difficult to enter and that are adjacent to desirable feeding grounds like ag fields or heavy mast stands xe2x80x94 hunters will often find mature bucks hiding out there during the day.

Once you have identified a possible bedding area or two that your target buck is using, you’ll want to figure out how he gets in and out of it. If you’re looking for a well-worn trail, stop right there because you probably won’t find one. The better approach is to examine the surrounding area and the closest food source and then figure out the logical route between the two.

Here again, your trail camera may hold the key. If the hypothetical buck that shows just after dark is predictably entering your camera’s view from the left and exiting the right, there’s a good chance that his preferred food source is also to the right.

Now you have two likely destinations identified: the buck’s bedding area and his nocturnal feeding area. Draw a line (the best likely route) between them and set up a camera or two close to the edge of his suspected bedding area to confirm. Once you can confirm the buck is regularly moving between these two locations and when, you have some intel to use for positioning your ambush.

Of course, make sure you place your stand downwind of the bedding area/travel route.

Because we are talking about hunting the few weeks leading up to the rut, scent can be used to your advantage in this scenario.

Right now, bucks are setting up their territory, increasing their scrape activity to let other deer know they are there and that this is their turf. They’re also increasingly tuning in for the first whiffs of doe estrus on the wind. All of this means that the casual lounging is about to end, and bucks are becoming more diligent in maintaining their territory.

This is when working established scrapes and mock scrapes with the scent of other deer can possibly help bring that buck you’re after out of bed when there’s still some shooting light available and maybe keep him around for a while longer in the early morning.

The Benefits of a Scrape-Dripper

For this, a daytime scent dispenser is a good bet xe2x80x94 one like the proven Magnum Scrape-Dripper from Wildlife Research Center.

The Magnum Scrape-Dripper is arguably the most effective scent delivery system available for putting scent on a scrape during the daylight hours. And that is the key to this system and why we want to use it in this transitional period before the rut.

The Scrape-Dripper was introduced 30 years ago this year, and it relies on an ingeniously simple method to deliver scent only during the daytime. The bottle can hold up to 4 ounces of scent, and secured to the fill cap is a flexible tube with a full-circle bend in it. The bottle is hung by a cord from an overhead branch so that the scent can drip onto a natural or mock scrape.

During the cooler nighttime temperatures, the liquid scent remains in the bottle. Once the ambient temperatures rise during the day, warming air inside the bottle pushes the liquid out through the tube, drip by drip. As the temperature cools down at night, the air pressure drops inside the bottle and no scent is released.

The benefit of this is two-fold. First, this system dispenses scent in slow measure so that one 4-ounce bottle can last for up to two to three weeks. For a near-bedding location, that’s perfect because it minimizes disturbing the area due to the less frequent refills required.

Second, the daytime delivery of the scent will tell the resident buck that someone is hitting his territory while he’s tucked in his hidey-hole. The idea is to get him to leave his bedding area earlier (or maybe sometime throughout the day) or hang out a bit longer in the morning to try and catch up with the “interloper” who is visiting his scrapes.

Scent Strategy

And that brings us to the preferred scents to use for this strategy. Right now, our preference is something like Golden Buck, which is a buck urine containing tarsal and musk scent, to kick in the territorial instincts. For those hunting in areas that require synthetic scents, Hot Scrape, Ultimate Buck Lure or Hot Musk are good choices. If you run a couple of Scrape-Drippers (a good idea), try using a combination of these scents to give the impression of even more activity.

Finally, while we always recommend a diligent scent-elimination strategy any time you hunt deer, it is especially important to mind your scent and wind direction when working close to a buck’s bedding area. Be sure to position your stand downwind.

Although not all mature bucks adhere to a nocturnal schedule, the big ones seem to favor hunkering down in the day and venturing forth only after dark. By locating bedding areas, identifying the best travel routes to and from the bedding area to the feeding area, being on your stand early enough to you reduce the chance of bumping him, and applying a daytime scent strategy, your odds of meeting up with the big guy while the sun is up will certainly increase.

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Scrape Hunting System: Turn Up the Daylight Action