It’s finally time to hunt again

For as much joy I get out of preparing for the deer hunting season, I’m thrilled to say the preparation is over, and it’s time to hunt.

I’ve hunted deer since I was a little kid, tagging along with my dad and his friends before picking up a gun myself at age 12.

The extent of my deer hunting for a year — after I passed the youth hunt age restriction — was typically just the nine-day gun hunt in late November, with the occasional antlerless-only hunt sprinkled in should the first gun season have not gone as planned.

I didn’t pick up a bow until our family got its own hunting land, and even then, I wouldn’t have considered myself a real avid deer hunter.

Deer hunting simply lacked the excitement that a spring turkey hunt brought me, but I was still content to sit in the woods and relax for a morning or afternoon hunt.

Things changed in a big way when I started to get into some land management practices. We weren’t doing anything too crazy to start out with, but after learning how deer used the property, the projects started started to get a little bigger and are starting to yield better hunts.

Every year, I always found myself sitting in one particular area of our property, so this year, I finally came up with a plan on how to regularly hunt the spot.

This spot has a little bit of everything. The tree, that now has a stand in it, sits on the edge of a wooded area, with a once weedy field now trimmed up. The trimmed field was set up to serve as a highway between several different habitat features and is where I anticipated my shots coming from.

Behind the field, there’s now a mix of cut trails, woods and deer bedding.

To my left, there’s a decline in elevation leading to a little stream that I’ve noticed many deer also like to bed next to.

And behind me, there’s a neighboring private crop field to serve as a food source.

It was a project that I spent several hours on over the course of a couple days on two weekends this summer. Instead of completely changing the area around, I decided to not plant anything in the trimmed field, deciding to give it a year and see how the deer react.

From the couple of trail camera pulls we’ve done before the bowhunting season began, to say the work in that area has paid off would be a massive understatement.

Since basically two days after I wrapped up the work in there, deer have been walking through the trimmed field at nearly all times of the day. What was most shocking was the lack of nighttime photos we got in that spot, instead having fawns, does and bucks walking past at 8 a.m., 10 a.m., noon, 4 p.m. and of course right at first and last light.

Maybe the deer have always used this area, and we just haven’t seen it with no cameras placed there, but the trail cam photos have completely changed how I planned to hunt this season and has unlocked a passion for deer hunting that I’ve never felt before. There’s just something about seeing time and work put in during the offseason pay off that adds another layer to the hunting.

I actually planned to stay out of that spot until early October, but the daytime photos in late August have altered my opening weekend plans. Instead of hunting the spot I primarily did last year, which isn’t really all that far from this spot, I now plan to sneak back into this new spot, sit out some forecasted rain and hopefully notch a tag on a buck.

I’m always excited for the first hunts of the year, but words truly cannot describe the anticipation I’m feeling for the opener this weekend.

To all the bowhunters reading this, hopefully you also have reason for optimism on the opening weekend of the bowhunting season. If you fall more into the category of soaking up the first hunt of the year without many deer encounters, do your best to enjoy that, too.

This time of year only comes once a year, and you know as soon as the season ends that you’ll already be looking forward to the next deer hunting season.

Stay safe out there, and happy hunting to all.

Morgan Rode is the sports editor for NEW Media. Readers can contact him at sports@newmedia-wi.com.