Recently, I wrote an article about each hunting season being different from every other. Due to a variety of factors, the most important being weather, this hunting season has been a lot different than the last one. The biggest challenge hunters and wildlife are facing this fall is drought.
For whitetail hunting in the mountains, drought conditions play a huge part in how whitetails live their daily lives. Whitetails will readjust their entire feeding and bedding patterns during drought conditions. In the mountains, deer normally bed on the upper third of the ridge, but not during extreme, dry weather. I’ve often found that whether it’s a drought year or a wet one, deer almost always bed within 500 yards of a water source.
Like us, whitetails can go without food for many days, but they can’t survive long at all without water. In most places, water is never a key source for hunters to hone in on or pay attention to. Water is usually abundant throughout most of the northeastern part of the country.
Deer get the majority of their water supply from mountain springs. Nonetheless, if rainfall is not abundant, the springs will dry up and water will only be available in the bottom of the valleys where the main stream runs. When water is not available in the higher elevations, deer movement dramatically decreases. During the rut, when deer are most active, water is vital to their survival. As bucks roam from ridge to ridge in search of does, they will seek out water several times throughout the day. Some of the best rut setups for hunters are along deer trails that lead to water. When water is hard to come by, bucks will not move as much as they normally do.
During this archery season, on Halloween, I had a client set up in a creek bottom, close to water. We targeted a massive 11-pointer that we were getting on a trail camera. Trail cam intel showed us that the buck was coming down to the creek during the evening hours to get a drink. In 70-plus degree temperatures, which are not ideal for whitetail hunting, we felt we had the perfect game plan to predict where the buck was going to be that afternoon. It made perfect sense that the hot weather would trigger the buck to seek out water during daytime hours.
As luck would have it, my client was fortunate to bag the monster buck at 5 p.m. just 20 yards from the stream. The buck worked a scrape and then headed right toward the water before my client made a perfect shot on him. That buck was definitely headed to the creek to get a drink. Another big key that led us to harvest the buck was finding fresh buck sign along the stream. The creek bottom was polluted with rubs and scrapes.
A lot of hunters I have talked to this year are saying that they are seeing deer in new areas as well as not seeing deer in the areas they usually do. Due to drought conditions, food sources have also been impacted by the hot, dry weather. Whitetails prefer browse sources that have moisture in them. Without adequate rainfall, deer will spend more time on north and east slopes, looking for plants that live in moist soils. Soils are always more wet on north and east slopes due to lack of sunlight.
The pattern of activity I’ve noticed mostly this year is that deer are bedding lower on the ridges during the day, and then they go up to higher elevations at night to feed. Due to a low-elevation frost, most oak trees only produced acorns at higher elevations. The large gap between food and water has also made hunting much more challenging.
Ultimately, I do expect the pattern to change in the near future. The 10-day weather forecast shows multiple rain showers passing over our region. Deer will quickly go back to their normal feeding and bedding patterns once water becomes more abundant. Even if we do experience more dry weather, when temperatures start to remain cooler, mountain springs will hold more water even with minimal precipitation.
Deer hunters should always keep water in their game planning and scouting missions. When water sources are limited, water becomes the biggest factor toward having success.
