Second week sightings invaluable to hunters

Veteran deer hunter Gene Smith shot this big buck during the second week of 2006 season. He credited his success to neighbors who told him they had spotted the deer regularly both before and after the two-week season got underway. Good neighbors help make good hunters, and most of us need all the help we can get, especially as the season winds down.

My neighbors know how much I enjoy deer hunting, so they sometimes tell me about any big deer they've seen crossing a road or standing in a field. Such information is invaluable to a hunter, since these animals don't range very far over their lifetime.

Where they're seen once is quite likely where they can be seen again. That's how all those highway deer-crossing signs get placed where they are.

In the second week of deer season, these sightings come in especially handy. Many will be near paved roads, sometimes even within 50 yards. Those places are ideal spots for scouting food sources and bedding areas. That's the habitat that will attract old bucks after the stresses of the rut have passed. Their bodies are also in need of rest and recuperation after the early hunting season's panic.

The larger second-week bucks are often nocturnal. Hunters need to adjust their behavior accordingly.

Stay near the food sources, including the trails leading to them, and be especially alert at dusk and dawn. A nocturnal old mossback will be more inclined to show up only in the first or last light of any given day.

An exception is when the food source, an acorn-laden oak for example, is in a place remote enough to offer him the confidence to come for a midday snack. If a buck feels secure, from lack of disturbance and the absence of human scent, he is more likely to move about in broad daylight at the tail end of the hunting season.

Even a tired buck must restore body fat that will be needed for surviving the stresses of winter.

I generally abandon the open woods, where the bucks once dogged does, to seek out the thickets in which they spend their days. Brushy slopes and bottoms in cutovers are fine places to look for big bucks.

If the topography is right and the deer trails converge in an area where I have the wind in my favor and at least two or three good shooting lanes, I will still-hunt. This requires self-discipline and a good ability to see game.

Whether you are in a tree or on the ground, watch for movement. Learn to pick out parts of a deer. You might see only an ear, an eye, the flicking of a tail. You might see only a brown spot at first. Just sit and wait to see what walks out. It could be a doe. It could be a fawn. It could be the buck of a lifetime.

Finally, remember that even if you don't see that big buck you've heard about, it might pay off to give it a try the next day. After all, you know where he lives.