It’s been almost a year since I visited this North Dakota property, and my first order of business was to check out the specific place to stay.
It’s actually more of a single bedroom — the top of an oxbow lake so petite on a narrow river system that the cover will only hold one or two deer, but this buck may be the largest on the property. I think the buck I tagged in the 2022 archery season was bedded here before he gave me a shot that looked out over the edge of a standing corn field.
A few weeks ago, my buddy Sam Schmid and I returned to the property. Following a narrow path through the canary grass, we found a huge deer bed.
I walked another 10 yards or so to the specific spot I wanted to investigate, just beyond the thickest cover. Sure enough, another deer (deer?) had taken that spot. Watch the video below to see it happen.
The huge bed was worn to the ground. It was propped up against a piece of dead wood that provided horizontal shelter near the riverbank. Above it was a stout, overhanging shrub that was mighty enough to provide shelter from both sun and snow. The shade on this warm July day provided a temperature difference of about 10 degrees. It had all the ingredients of a bed used at many stages of the hunting season.
I think of these beds as a “place within a place.” There is plenty of general deer bedding habitat on the property, but areas like this – beds that offer best protection from predators and changing weather conditions – are few and scarce.
These beds are consistently taken over by dominant deer. Your chances of finding deer using them often only raise in more open areas where this type of cover may be narrow.
I no longer operate any cell phone cameras and very few, if any, standard SD game cameras, so I almost never have a photo that tells me a specific deer is in those areas. The best way I’ve been able to shoot more deer since I gave up cameras as my primary scouting tool is to find those areas on foot and trust that the deer using them are often deer I’d be cheerful to finish the season with.
You can guess where they are by understanding how deer operate certain terrain features: think oxbow lakes in river systems, lee-facing headlands, banks and basins in watersheds in mountainous areas, headlands near islands, or petite pockets of higher ground in saturated marsh areas.
Areas of habitat diversity are great starting points in all types of landscapes. Scouting a map gets you closer to your target, but you greatly raise your chances if you love scouting the field almost as much as you love the hunt itself. Get in there, find those spots, and then think: How can I set up? How do I get to that spot? What are the adjacent food or water sources that might dictate when and how deer come and go from that bedding area?
The answers to these questions can change from year to year, so here are some things to aid you with your behind schedule summer scouting. Here are a few other priorities I focus on when I’m in the woods just a few weeks into the season.
How has food changed?
The areas I hunt in Minnesota are becoming pretty standardized because they are consistent when it comes to crop rotations. If a field is corn one year, you can bet it will be soybeans the next.
That’s not the case when I hunt in North Dakota. Crops include everything from corn to soybeans, sugar beets, alfalfa, and wheat. Deer relate to them in different ways, from petite to huge, depending on the season.
The first step I take when scouting in behind schedule summer is often to walk the edge of a field to see how deer are using the crop. You can watch from a distance if you’re worried about deer bedding down the field, but I get a lot of information in a tiny time by quickly recognizing the edges of fields. Act more like a farmer checking his crops than a hunter stalking.
RELATED STORY: Late Summer Deer Hunting Tips to Help You Find Them
This was very beneficial last year in early August in North Dakota when I found trampled paths along the cornfield and huge areas where the stalks were completely down. It helped me decide where to go on opening weekend.
This year was different. By behind schedule July, there was minimal sign of feeding in the fields, and the area had more wheat planted—now fully mature—than I’ve ever seen. I have little experience hunting near wheat, but the deer paid no attention to it.
We shifted our focus to the timber around known breeding areas. Which oaks produce acorns? The forests are full of mast and natural vegetation that deer crave.
One of the areas I hunt has a large bend in the road that I know has a lot of deer. It’s full of oaks, which I’ve learned have a lot of acorns, and the deer were gnawing pockets of Canada nettle that cover the low areas in the droughty riverbed.
Across the road is a soybean field that should be full of deer in early September. We found one of those “spot-in-a-spot” areas where cattle could graze, which is being put to good operate.
It’s a lot of factors that come together and make this an area worth paying attention to early in the season.
A look into the future
I had trouble finding deer during the first week of November 2020. The reason? I was focusing too much on previous years’ hunts.
Things are changing and the question I had to ask myself was: Where are the does now? I kept coming back to the strip of timber along the river that I had marked on the onX map in behind schedule July. The field adjacent to the trees was planted with sugar beets.
Sugar beet fields can be dynamite areas after the beet harvest. Many beets are left on top of the ground, and deer like to pristine them up between mid-October and early November.
I thought about this during the 90-degree heat this summer as I prepared a tree to jump into with my hunting saddle, right next to a bedding area near this field. On the morning of November 3rd, I used the river to get into the tree without being seen and placed my tag on the deer at 8:30 a.m.
I want to set myself up for opening weekend success by scouting in behind schedule summer, but I always keep an eye on the rut. Do I have a solid plan for trees to climb around bedding and food sources that should sustain deer in behind schedule fall? I may have to adjust, but I want to make sure the answer to this question is yes in many locations.
Take some time to focus on deer in behind schedule summer. You will be glad you did in the months to come.
