The Best Place to Find a Buck Deer in the Early Season with Bowhunter Jerry Simmons
Day 3: Jerry Simmons’ Early-Season Hot Spots for Bowhunting Deer – Apple, Mulberry, Honey Locust, Beech Nut and Pecan Trees
Editor’s Note: Nationally-known bowhunter Jerry Simmons of Jasper, Alabama, gives us more bowhunting tips for early-season deer.
  "I do like to locate fresh clear cuts with poke sallet in them to find bucks before the season," Simmons reiterates. "But poke sallet isn't the only food that draws deer to clear cuts in the early season. Clear cuts also have legumes, briars, shrubs with leaves and fruit and young plants that the deer can eat." Many bowhunters in the Northeast know that abandoned apple orchards provide productive places to see and bag bucks. In the South, an area that doesn’t grow many domestic apples, many bowhunters have had success hunting near wild crabapple trees. "Any crabapple tree that bears fruit can be a spot to look for a buck," Simmons advises. "I think the most-productive crabapple trees to hunt in the early season are either close to or in a thicket. The crabapple tree forms a low canopy over the deer's head, and the low bushes and trees provide the type of cover that makes a buck feel comfortable."
Simmons has discovered that deer often will come to mulberry trees to eat their green leaves early in the season and then later their golden leaves. Deer also prefer the bean pods of the honey locust tree during the early season in the area Simmons hunts. These trees grow east of the Mississippi River except for the far Northeast and along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. “Deer will come from miles around to feed on the honey locusts when their bean pods fall to the ground or when they can eat the beans off the trees," Simmons explains. In Louisiana and Mississippi, wild pecan trees provide one of Simmons' favorite early-season food sources to hunt over. "Pecans may float down the rivers and be left on the land after the river floods," Simmons says. "These pecans will germinate and grow into trees. These wild trees will produce small pecans not big enough or meaty enough to be sold commercially. But they do make excellent deer food."
  Too, you'll find highly-nutritious plants for deer in the 10 or 15-yards from the edge of the field to the wood line that many deer hunters often overlook. "The plants, shrubs and trees on the edges of agricultural fields receive the benefit and the nutrition from the fertilizer that's used to make the crops grow bigger and better," Simmons mentions. "As this fertilizer washes off to the field's edges, the bordering vegetation puts on more leaves and produces more-nutritious food than plants further away from the field. For this reason, although the crops have been harvested, and the ground is barren, bucks will concentrate along these field edges in the early season." Even if the field has a crop, the deer may stop to feed on the edges of that field during daylight hours before venturing further into the field later in the evening. "Deer also will feed on the wild beech nut if the tree produces a good crop," Simmons advises. "Beech trees primarily grow west of the Mississippi River. In the early season, bucks too may feed on other soft mast such as American Beauty berries, dogwood berries, muscadines, wild grapes and even kudzu."
To learn more about bowhunting deer, get John E. Phillips’ new ebooks “Jim Crumley's Secrets of Bowhunting Deer,” “Bowhunting Deer: The Secrets of the PSE Pros” and “Deer and Fixings.” Go to www.amazon.com/kindle-ebooks, type in the names of the books and download them to your Kindle, and/or download a Kindle app for your iPad, SmartPhone or computer.
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