The Best Week for Finding a Trophy Buck
Where to Find Thick-Cover Sanctuaries
 Editor’s Note: Famed baseball announcer Dizzy Dean once said, “If you done it, it ain’t braggin’.” And friends, I’ve done it. I’ve found the magic week to hunt deer that increases my odds for bagging a trophy buck. You don’t have to bet on moon charts, tide charts, soothsayers or any hunting aids. I know the very best day to bag a trophy buck because I have the scientific research and the qualified experts to unequivocally back me up.
Many deer hunters have the mistaken idea that a thick-cover sanctuary must cover 30 acres of a 5-year-old clearcut or a briarpatch as large as a football field. “Though does may hold in as much as 30 acres during the time of estrus, they may spend most of their time in patches of cover as small as 1/2-acre to 1 acre,” Dr. Keith Causey, retired professor of wildlife at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama, reports. “The doe will look for a thick-covered region where she feels sure a buck will come to sometime during that 24-hour period when she is in estrus.” Often-overlooked honeymoon sites for deer include:
* a patch of thick cover;
* the edge of a drainage ditch in a field;
* a pile of limbs;
* sticks and tree roots piled-up in the middles of fields;
* a briarpatch in the center of a mature pine forest;
* a cane thicket that runs along the edge of a creek or a branch; and/or
* a patch of thick cover behind a gate, a house or a barn.
Remember, search for a thick-cover honeymoon suite big enough to only hold one doe, away from the spots where you see young does  and yearlings. “Hunting these little patches of thick cover by using a man drive often will pay big-buck dividends,” Harold Knight of Knight and Hale Game Calls comments. “If you know where does go and hold during the rut, and you put on a man-drive in that region, you’ll move-out the does along with the buck that’s hoping to breed them.”
You can pinpoint the best week of the season to take a trophy buck based on when most of the does in the area you hunt conceive. However, weather conditions can slightly alter when that week occurs. Generally you will see and have the opportunity to take the best bucks on or near the date the biologist in your area gives as the peak of the rut. By hunting isolated, thick cover, you’ll greatly increase your chances for taking a trophy buck.
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