Bow Bucks When the Weather Sizzles
Day 4: Archery Champion Anna Reaves Knows the Importance of Tree Stand Placement and Wind Conditions when Deer Hunting
Editor’s Note: When temperatures range from 60 to 90 degrees, bagging a buck presents problems for most bowhunters. As we hear and read more about global warming, hunters throughout the nation will continue to face the problem of how to hunt bucks in very-warm weather. Let’s talk with some of the nation’s bowhunters, and learn the tactics they use to take bucks when the weather sizzles.
 Placing her tree stand high in a tree also helps archery champion and avid bowhunter Anna Reaves eliminate odor. “I hunt 18- to 25-feet up in a tree to get my odor above the deer,” Reeves reports. “I know this strategy works, because deer have come-in to my stand before, even after the wind should have carried my odor straight to them. But they’ve never smelled me.” To keep from forfeiting her accuracy, Reaves practices at home from a tree stand 25-feet high.  “I have several 3-D targets I turn in different directions to practice shooting from the height where I plan to hunt,” Reaves comments. Since hot weather and early bow season usually mean areas will have thick and lush foliage, Reaves rarely hunts where she’ll have a shot at more than 20 yards. “Even though I take 95 percent of my shots at 20 yards or less, I do practice shooting out to 40 yards,” Reaves reveals. “I may have an opportunity to get-off a second shot if the buck stops after I’ve hit him.”
 Reaves also keeps the wind at her back when on a stand, although most bowhunters prefer to have the wind in their faces. “I want the buck to come from behind me, pass under my stand and then present the shot,” Reaves advises. “If the buck comes from in front of me, he may not turn and give the broadside shot I need to take him quickly and efficiently. Or, he may not present a quartering-away shot. However, if the buck comes from behind me, I almost always can get either a broadside or a quartering-away shot. With the deer in this position, my arrow will travel forward through the buck’s vitals. Although sometimes deer surprise me and pass in front of my stand, most of the time I hear deer approaching and see them before they pass under my stand.”  Too, Reaves pinpoints the deer’s food sources in warm weather. When the season begins in Mississippi in October, instead of hunting over acorn trees like many hunters, Reaves locates honey locust, persimmon trees and Johnson grass fields in the swamp. “To take a buck in hot weather, you must move into thick cover,” Reaves says. “In warm weather, bucks can remain in these thick-cover areas all day without leaving, because they have cover, food and often water. If you can’t enter the thicket and take a stand in thick cover, you probably won’t get a shot at a buck in hot weather.”
To learn more about bowhunting deer, see John E. Phillips’ book “The Master’s Secrets of Bowhunting Deer” at http://www.nighthawkpublications.com/hunting/mastersbow.htm.
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