The only problem with early spring is it looks like late fall, except you don’t get to bowhunt whitetails. The landscape looks glum with its leafless environment, brown and gray façade, and the occasional snow drift tucked away on a north slope still waiting for a strong ray of spring sunshine to conquer its winter dominance.
With all this playing out on your whitetail hunting property, overcoming a bad case of cabin fever becomes almost impossible. Instead of waiting for those first green shoots to spring out of the soil, get busy evaluating your hunting property. There’s no better time than early spring to assess, analyze and chart a course ahead to improve management goals and gauge your approach to hunting. Here’s why.
Why Early Spring?
Before I dive into the nuts and bolts of why a pre-green inspection warrants your time, be selfish. Admit it. You have been holding back on treasure hunting your property for shed antlers, especially those from your target buck. Whitetails begin shedding antlers in January, and depending on genetics and stress, jettison through April. Typically, bucks that exhaust more testosterone (think mature here), drop antlers earlier, giving you ample urges to hit the woods.
Selfishness is OK in this early intrusion mission. Finding shed antlers sheds light on the actual size of a buck. I cannot tell you how many times trail camera images of bucks during the rut fooled us on size until we shot a deer or were able to examine its shed antlers. In most cases, the trail camera images suggested a smaller size, especially in mass, to what a buck sported in real life.
You also may sadly come across deer that succumbed to winter, possibly from wounding or predation. Although a bummer, this allows you to remove any unlucky target bucks from a future hit list. Now on to the analytical reason to hit the woods prior to the spring green up. You see the woods as they appeared when you left them after hunting season.
Yes, the terrain of early spring highly resembles what it appeared like during late fall. No leaves on limbs provides an unobstructed vision through the woodlands. Trails are even more defined by winter usage and moisture, leaving routes packed by hooves in the telltale mud of spring. You clearly see where deer prefer to travel, giving you the opportunity to mark these pathways on your HuntStand hunting app or memory.
Also glaringly standing out in the dull backdrop are the signs of the previous rut. Like muddy trails, scrapes of a few months back, some even used yet, stick out more obviously than a freshly staked ground blind on a soybean field edge. Look for large scrapes that indicate community use along field edges and swarms of scrapes leading to possible sanctuaries, or unknown food sources such as a hidden acorn factory.
Rubs also stand out in the barren backdrop. Those of yesteryear lack the sheen and glistening sap of those created just a few months beforehand. Like scrapes, note rubs of significant size and groups of rubs whether strung along field edges or interior travel lines. Marking these rub masses on your hunting app could lead you to new hideouts like a trail of cookie crumbs to a cookie thief.
As you begin to amass clues, unleash your inner bloodhound. It’s time to follow the trails and go where you couldn’t during hunting season. That’s right — remove the “do not disturb” sign and invade the bedrooms on your property.
