The Best Place to Find a Buck Deer in the Early Season with Bowhunter Jerry Simmons
Day 4: Bowhunter Jerry Simmons Finds Bucks among the Dead and Along the Road
Editor’s Note: Nationally-known bowhunter Jerry Simmons of Jasper, Alabama, gives us more bowhunting tips for early-season deer.
  A few years ago while Simmons hunted the edges of a wildlife management area early in the season, he came upon a deer trail. This trail led from the WMA to a cemetery behind a nearby small country church. “The church looked like a circuit-rider's church that maybe had had services once a month when the preacher was in the area," Simmons recalls. When Simmons followed the trail from the WMA to the cemetery, he found a large water oak tree dropping the first water oak acorns he'd seen. "This section of the WMA had few acorn trees," says Simmons. "The one water oak in the cemetery had plenty of deer droppings, acorn hulls and deer tracks under it. I knew of all the early-season hot spots I'd ever found in the past, this water oak had to be one of the best." Simmons walked back to the WMA he'd left and set up his tree stand about 20-yards off the trail the deer used to feed under in the cemetery. Before the ending of the day, a nice 8-point buck came down the trail and headed for the cemetery. When Simmons had a clear shot, he drew his bow and took the buck that fed with the dead. "You'll often find big bucks in or near weird places where no one in his right mind will hunt," Simmons comments.
Bucks along the Road:
  One time Simmons found a nice early-season buck in another unusual place – along the edge of a secondary road on an Alabama WMA. "I’d been scouting that morning," Simmons remembers. "When I came up from a creek bottom, I found an old logging road. I could tell by the tracks in the road that hunters had been driving their vehicles and ATVs up and down the road regularly. Because I was only 150-to 200-yards away from the main road running through the WMA, I could hear plenty of road traffic. As I walked down this secondary road, I saw a white oak acorn tree dropping nuts right on the edge of the road. Although I couldn't believe it, I saw more deer sign there than any place I'd found in the WMA. I thought that if deer fed under this tree, they surely had to be feeding at night, as much traffic as the area had. Since I hadn't found a better-looking place to hunt, I put my tree stand just inside the wood line to allow me to see all the way around the tree. I figured if I did see a buck, probably someone would come down the road and spook the deer. But this woods road stand still looked like the most-productive place I'd found to bowhunt in 2 days of scouting. While I was listening to the traffic on the main road, two 6-point bucks came up and began to feed under the tree. For some reason, one buck spooked before I could get the shot off. But instead of running, the second buck just stood there and watched the first, giving me an opportunity to take him."
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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