Weather change

With the weather change here coming tomorrow. If you could only hunt 1. Would you rather hunt Fri evening or Sat Morning? My stand is on a field edge next to an oat field that is next to standing corn. In a perfect world I'd hunt both times, but got to much going on right now so I can only hunt one or the other. Which time would you guys hunt?

Do you have a little more time if you choose the Morning hunt?

If so, I'd go with that. Sunset is getting pretty early, particularly if it's overcast like today.

Depends have you figured their bedding and feeding areas. In other words you can sometimes ambush a "night owl" heading to bed late. Other times you could hope that one or a few are ready to hit the buffet a bit early.

One place I only hunted in the AM into mid afternoons.

Now being a bit more lazy I usually hunt evenings and concentrate on food sources.

I went to the local dump today around noon. On the way saw several feeding near the roads in a more upscale neighborhood. So anytime is good.

Not enough info to make an educated decision. Flip a coin?

In all seriousness, all else equal, I would do the PM hunt, as it is easier to sneak in and setup quieter in sunlight.

Really depends on when the deer are moving at that location. At my house they are almost always bedded down by morning and start moving about 3 hours before dark. At my cousin's house they usually aren't bedded down until around 9am and don't start moving until just before dark. Having more time in the stand means nothing if the deer aren't moving much at that time.

Deer seem to be on the morning cycle now.

My herd feeds now.

jtb81100 said:

Really depends on when the deer are moving at that location. At my house they are almost always bedded down by morning and start moving about 3 hours before dark. At my cousin's house they usually aren't bedded down until around 9am and don't start moving until just before dark. Having more time in the stand means nothing if the deer aren't moving much at that time.

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Since moving and having tons of deer near me I’ve learned deer have patterns and it’s up to the individual deer or herd what the pattern is. It also changes. At my salt lick and corn piles I almost always get the herd moving through morning and evening. But some mornings it’s 10-20 minutes before dawn. Sometimes it’s 2 hours after dawn. They come through every evening, but sometimes it’s 2.5hrs before sunset, other times it’s a few minutes till last shooting light.

Half the days they’ll come through earlier in the day, like 2-4pm and then come back again around 6-7pm. I’ll also get loners or small numbers through in the middle of the night a bit more than half the time. I think the only times I’ve seen no deer is from about 9am till 1:30pm. Or at least not since this summer.

But at another spot on my property I do occasionally see deer walking through in the woods or on a neighbor’s property at 10 or 11am. Sometimes I can tell it’s “my herd” who’ve just moves on and are walking by over there.

It might be they move around more and/or change things up more because they are living in/near a rural neighborhood versus a farm/wilderness. So they get disrupted by people and dogs and stuff more messing up their routine. Don’t quite know. I do have my trail cam out in my back woods trying to spot my bucks and pattern them. Every few weeks I’ve seen a BIG 8 point, a smaller one and some 4, 5 and 6 points every couple/few weeks. Don’t come to my salt lick or corn though. At least not yet.

Meet and talked to my back yard neighbor yesterday. Really nice guy. He hunts the shore and is just fine with me hunting the back woods near our properties and retrieving off his if I need to. I showed him the picture of the big boy and he’s seen him down in the woods a few times. Thinks he’s about 170 when he’s dressed out.

I was a little nervous asking them about hunting back there and his wife yells for her husband and I just think “oh, well crap. This isn’t goin to go well”.

He shows me his den that’s CRAMMED with WT and Sika mounts, Geese, etc.

Anyway, good luck. My limited experience is, if you’ve got more time, Hunt the evening and setup by 2. If you’ve got less time, Hunt morning and be setup by half an hour before first light and hunt till at least 2 1/2hrs last first light. My guys are slightly more likely to come by in the evenings (they skip rare mornings, never skipped an evening), in larger numbers usually (all 8 or 9 most evenings, sometimes only 3 or 4 in the mornings, other times all of them). More likely to stick around longer. Also more likely to come by with more light. Hard to retrieve though if they take an arrow 20 minutes before sunset and I wait 45 minutes to find it.