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Patterning Doe Groups to Fill Your Buck Tag
A lot of hunters put effort into finding and patterning bucks in order to harvest them, but now is also a great time to pattern the doe groups using your hunting property. In a few weeks, those doe groups are going to be the focal point of the mature buck you want to wrap your tag around this fall. The obvious place to start is at a food plot, but that isn’t a requirement for locating doe groups. The oak trees may still be dropping acorns in your area, and doe groups will tend to use these areas on their way to larger agricultural fields. If you have multiple types of oak trees dropping acorns, focus your effort around oaks in the white-oak family as those are preferred by deer over red oaks.
Another spot to look for doe groups is along the edge of cover. Transitions between field and woods often have an abundance of preferred deer forages because there is more sunlight there than in the woods. Most of the forbs that were lush all summer are drying up, but I’ve seen raspberry bushes and greenbrier with edible leaves hanging on well into October. We haven’t had a killing frost here in southern Minnesota, but there will be one this week. That being said there are still plenty of green plants out there that these doe groups will be keying in on. Overgrown fields get overlooked as a food source because they don’t appear as palatable as a groomed food plot, but there is actually a fair amount of forage in these set-aside areas.
The other great way to pattern and keep a doe group in an area would be to use supplemental feed and/or attractants. Having high quality feed available for your deer will help keep them from wandering off onto the neighbors looking for food. This also keeps the bucks following those does to stay put. There are some people that think mature bucks avoid feeders, but those bucks that won’t normally visit a feeder will go near it to check the reproductive status of the does using the feed site. Obviously check your local regulations before you hunt near an active feed site.
Don’t be discouraged if you are only seeing a lot of doe activity at feed sites. The bucks won’t be far behind in a few weeks. We are at the very beginning stages of the rut cycle, and the does are still tolerating bucks making advances toward them. In the later stages of the rut, however, the doe groups that have been hitting your food plot all year don’t come out anymore because they are tired of all the harassment they are getting, especially from the younger bucks. In that case, your time is betting spent in or around the best cover and hunting downwind of known bedding areas, as bucks will be cruising there in search of receptive does. The moral of the story is you don’t always have to pattern the bucks to kill them, sometimes knowing where his ladies are will give you a better chance of filling your buck tag.
-Tim Neuman, Wildlife Biologist
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