WHERE THE PROS HUNT AT THE BITTER END
 Southern
Techniques
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.
 Toxey
Haas, the creator of Mossy Oak camouflage in West Point,
Mississippi, employs midday methods to take trophy bucks
at the end of the season. Haas hunts each day by considering
the wind, the weather, the barometric pressure and what
the deer have done in the past few weeks. He also divides
the southern deer season into three basic hunting patterns.
During the early season, he hunts around food, in the
middle of the season, he hunts trails, and at the end
of the season, he prefers to hunt bedding areas. "To
bag a trophy buck, you must put together all parts of
the trophy buck puzzle, regardless of the time of year,"
Haas says. "A deer must feed, drink, breed and
bed down no matter when you hunt it. But when guns fire
and hunters ramble through the woods, the way a deer
approaches these activities must change if it wants
to survive.
"Because I hunt deer all season, I'll know where
those deer have  bedded-down.
At the end of the season, I'll begin to hunt closer
to their bedding sites. But I don't move near their
bedding areas without first planning ahead and observing
where other hunters do and don't hunt. For example,
I know of an 80-acre bedding area close to a soybean
field that the deer feed on all season. However, the
owner of the property doesn't allow anyone to hunt there.
But I have permission to hunt that place for two or
three days the last week of the season." When Haas
hunts leases with high hunter pressure, he searches
for productive bedding areas no one else hunts
like ...
* small patches of blackberry and honeysuckle immediately
behind the clubhouse,
* thick cover directly by a gate on the road leading
into the lease and
* a dense thicket in the middle of a cornfield everyone
knows a hunter can't approach without a deer's seeing
him.
" Once
you learn where everyone else doesn't hunt, then you
understand where the biggest buck on the property must
live," Haas explains. Haas believes hunters have
trained deer all season to know when the maximum hunter
movement occurs from 30 minutes before daylight until
10:00 a.m. and from 2:00 p.m. until dark. Haas uses
a sleep-late tactic for his end-of-the-season hunting.
"Although bucks avoid hunters, they won't bed down
for 12 hours without feeding or breeding," Haas
commented. "They must get up and move sometimes
in the middle of the day in thick areas. I sleep in
late during the last two weeks of deer season. When
everyone else returns from their early-morning hunts,
I go into the woods. Then as other hunters come back
to the woods after lunch, I leave the woods. Using this
philosophy, the bucks and I both have the least amount
of hunting pressure."
TOMORROW: MIDWESTERN BUCKS
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