WHERE THE PROS HUNT AT THE BITTER END
Middle State Strategies
 Editor’s
Note: They've been chased, shot at, cussed at, spooked
and aggravated all season long. But the biggest, the
oldest and the smartest bucks on any property you hunt
have managed to survive until the end of the season.
These large, older bucks write the textbooks young bucks
study to survive. Some of the nation's best hunters
employ strategies that will take these end-of-the-season
bucks each year. These masters of the hunt tell us their
tactics for bagging late-season bucks.
 Jim
Crumley, the creator of Trebark camouflage from Roanoke,
Virginia, hunts deer with his bow until the last Saturday
in January. Depending on when the rut starts in each
state, hunters in the middle states may hunt either
during or after the rut in January. "At the end
of the season, you may sit over what looks like an active
scrape all day for several days and never see a buck,"
Crumley says. "I hunt at the end of the season
by not concentrating on finding a trophy buck but instead
searching for areas where does travel. When the rut
nears its end, bucks will look for the last estrous
doe. But the does will search for food. Once I find
food that attracts the most does, I set up a stand near
the trail the does use to go to the food."
Crumley finds success in the late season by hunting
abandoned fields - -
alfalfa fields or other crops that haven't deteriorated
completely. "By fertilizing Japanese honeysuckle,
blackberry bushes and broad-leafed forbs in abandoned
fields in the spring, these plants will bring forth
more nutritious leaves than any other plants in an area
during the winter," Crumley reports. "In the
late season, the does will move into these fields and
feed. Once I learn on which trails does enter and exit
the fields during the last week of the season, I'll
put up my tree stands near those trails. I'm confident
a buck will appear there." Even when the leaves
on the  blackberries
and the honeysuckle look so brown they seem ready to
fall off the plants, Crumley has discovered the deer
still feed on them. While others in the nation hunt
thick-cover spots hoping to find bucks in the late season,
Crumley uses the opposite tactic and hunts the wide-open
spaces of abandoned fields and pastures where he assumes
the does will show up followed by large bucks.
TOMORROW: SOUTHERN TECHNIQUES
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