Night School

You can kill a nocturnal deer without resorting to dynamite, shining or any other illegal method.

Every deer hunter in Louisiana thinks his parish has the most notoriously nocturnal deer in the entire state.

In the case of Curtis Simpson from West Monroe, he may be right.

Simpson may live in West Monroe, but he hunts Union Parish, home of the most nocturnal deer in all of Louisiana.

While you’re arguing that your deer are more nocturnal than those in Union Parish, consider this. One of the largest deer Simpson has killed was literally sweating due to an all-out sprint to get back to its bedding area before daylight.

“I was talking to a guy doing a seminar at Bass Pro shops a while back, and we were talking about nocturnal deer,” Simpson recalled. “He mentioned how he believed how morning kind of sneaks up on deer during a full-moon phase.”

According to the seminar presenter, deer don’t realize when morning is approaching because it’s such a gradual change as opposed to a dark moon. Therefore, he believed that deer wind up being late trying to get back to their bedding areas.

Since this conversation, Simpson put this theory into practice and started setting up his stands on the edges of bedding areas. On one particular morning, he intercepted a rushing 130-inch 8-point 20 minutes after daylight broke. The buck was running to get back to its bedding area within a cutover; Simpson made sure that he didn’t arrive.

“I killed three bucks the year before last,” Simpson said, “and they were all the same scenario, trying to get back to a cutover so they wouldn’t get caught out in the open. When you’re hunting nocturnal deer like these, you’ve got a small window of opportunity. Up here, it’s over by 7:15 or 7:30.”

The reasons deer, mature bucks especially, go nocturnal during hunting season are many. Some may claim these bucks have some kind of innate alarm to sense when hunting season arrives, but the truth lies somewhere between increased human activity in the woods, changes in their surroundings in the form of freshly cut shooting lanes and giant piles of corn suddenly popping up everywhere.

We’ve all heard it a million times, big deer don’t get big by being stupid, and the stupidest thing a big deer can do is stand out in the middle of a food plot during daylight hours. That’s why hunting food plots rarely ends in the killing of a mature buck, except for maybe during the rut.

Food plots are great additions to a hunting property, and there are ways to design them so that older deer feel more secure, but the simple truth of the matter is that most mature bucks only visit food plots at night.

Therefore, sitting on a food-plot stand from sunrise to sunset is nothing more than spinning your wheels as far as big bucks go. If you want to kill big, mature bucks in Louisiana where they make only cameo daytime appearances, you’ve got to hunt rather than sit.

And hunting nocturnal bucks means finding their bedding areas. The typical scenario goes something like this: Sometime before or right at daybreak, bucks make a beeline back to their bedding areas. Around noon, they get up to mingle around a bit and take a bathroom break. And right around nightfall, they get up and head back out.

The common denominator for nocturnal deer is the bedding area. It is where they return in the morning. It is where they mingle during the day. It is where they leave at night. For these reasons, finding bedding areas and understanding how to hunt them is the key to killing nocturnal bucks in Louisiana.

“My strategy is to first find where the deer are bedding,” Simpson said. “Where I hunt, they like to bed in thickets and in clearcuts. What I like most is finding a jungle-thick clearcut that butts up to some hardwoods. Then I look for where they’re going in and out of the clearcut, and that’s where I set up.”

On the other hand, most unsuccessful deer hunters set up on a food plot where all they kill is time. People kill big deer on plots and open lanes every year, but Simpson says these kills have more to do with luck than anything else.

“A mature buck is going to be out of a food plot before you even get there in the morning,” he said. “And he’s not going to come out in a plot until it’s too dark for you to see him.

“By setting up close to the bedding area on a trail that a big buck uses to move back and forth to a food source, you may be a half mile from where he’s feeding. But that’s what gives you that little bit of window where you can catch them coming back from or heading out to a food source.”

Simpson identifies these travel corridors by looking for rub lines rather than scrape lines. He’s of the opinion that mature bucks run their scrape lines only at night, but they use the travel corridors anytime they leave or return to their bedding areas. And there’s more to reading a rub line than simply finding a few roughed-up trees.

One way Simpson reads the rubs is by how many he finds. If he finds several all in a line, he assumes this is a trail a buck uses to leave its bedding area. A buck leaving its bedding area is in no hurry to get out in the open.

Therefore, he tends to make more rubs because he’s just kind of waiting around and taking his time. A line with fewer rubs possibly indicates a trail used to head back into a bedding area.

“And you can also tell how he’s using a rub line by what side of a tree the shiny spot is,” Simpson said. “Whichever side of the tree is shiny is the direction that buck was traveling. If all the shiny spots are pointing back toward the bedding area, that’s an exit trail. If they’re all pointing away from the bedding area, that’s an entrance trail.”

By setting up close to bedding areas, Simpson puts himself in a position to catch a glimpse of a mature buck first thing in the morning or last thing at night. However, there is another tactic Simpson and his hunting partner Jason Pittman from Covington use that can pay off big time.

“Curtis taught me as soon as I started hunting with him that sometimes it’s best to not even get into the stand until 10 a.m. or even later than that,” Pittman said. “At some point during the middle of the day, that buck is going to get up and get a light afternoon snack, and you can bet he’s not going to relieve himself in his own bedroom.”

A buck getting up to stretch his legs isn’t going to roam very far from its bedding area. Pittman likened it to us getting up in the middle of the night. The only thing we’re going to do is hit the john and see if there were any snacks left on the kitchen counter. We’re not going to move any farther than that.

Both hunters argue that if you don’t catch that big buck sneaking back into its bedding area first thing in the morning, you might as well get down and come back later when you have a better chance of catching him milling around.

“I’ll sit from maybe 11:00 to 1:00 or 2:00,” Simpson said. “If I haven’t seen him by then, I’m probably not going to. Understand that this buck has been up probably seven hours or so during the middle of the night, so the likelihood of him coming out right after he goes to bed is slim unless he’s behind a doe.”

To catch these mid-day bucks, Simpson and Pittman try to set up as close to the edge of a bedding area as possible without being so close they disturb him. That means hanging a climbing stand somewhere on the edge of a clearcut and standing timber. This edge is typically where that buck is going to stretch his legs before going right back to bed.

“Hunting these big, mature bucks that only come out at night is a real challenge,” Simpson said. “Rather than hunting a few different deer that your food plots are pulling in, you’re hunting an individual buck. And when you pick out an individual deer to hunt, you’re setting yourself up for failure.”

Going one on one with a deer that only comes out at night and in his territory is the ultimate deer-hunting challenge. He’s got all the advantages, and you’ve got none. The best you can hope for is to find his bedding area and get close enough to it that you’re in range when he makes a mistake.

“There’s no greater feeling in hunting than when you go one on one with an individual, nocturnal deer and drop him in his tracks,” Simpson said. “If you’re sitting on food plots all day long, you’re going to miss out on all the fun.”

About Chris Ginn 778 Articles
Chris Ginn has been covering hunting and fishing in Louisiana since 1998. He lives with his wife Jennifer and children Matthew and Rebecca along the Bogue Chitto River in rural Washington Parish. His blog can be found at chrisginn.com.