I shot this buck on Nov. 9, 2023. The afternoon stand was located on a ridge, but not directly next to a bedding area. The buck seemed to be moving randomly, using his nose to check the ground for estrous scent when he came past my stand.
February 27, 2025
By Bill Winke
After hunting as many days of the rut as possible for 34 seasons, I have simplified my approach and settled on my two favorite types of stands. The first is on the edge of a small clearing, ideally planted to something like clover or turnips, but the food isn’t as critical as the location. It would ideally be located between a bedding area and a nearby ag field where the deer like to feed at night. I have written plenty about these staging-area plots, so hopefully their potential isn’t a surprise. Where they exist, they are impressive killing grounds.
The second stand type is the one I want to focus on here, because it is a lot easier to find and nearly as productive. You will find this stand on the edge of the bedding area itself, or in a funnel nearby. I have been consistently thrilled by the many hours I have spent on hardwood ridges fringing on these bedding areas. Last season was just the latest example.
It wasn’t until Nov. 9 that the wind cooperated with the notion of hunting my favorite stand on the new farm. It hangs over a remote, and seldom used, two-track lane along an oak ridge. All around, for hundreds of yards, is nothing but trees. The terrain, with multiple small, secondary bedding points reaching off the main ridgeline, is ideal deer habitat. It is the kind of spot that calls to the heart of a whitetail hunter. It is the classic rut-hunting hotspot. This one could only be made better by having a funnel stronger in attraction than the two-track nearby, as the movement tends to be random on this ridge.
Getting back to Nov. 9, I needed a strong breeze from the west so I could sneak up the long draw leading to the top of the ridge from the east. I had tried to hunt it on other days when the wind was slack, but deer on both sides of the draw knew the cameraman and I were there long before we got to the top. In fact, I didn’t even finish the trip. Rather than bet on a poor hand, we just folded — turned around after the first couple of snorts and headed back out.
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The 10-15 mph wind on Nov. 9 would cover our noise and even blur our movement (as the tree limbs and leaves were moving too). That was the critical part of being able to hunt this spot undetected. Finally, I had what I needed. The season had been very slow up to that point, as I had focused mostly on fringe stands, trying to be patient. The deer weren’t leaving the timber, as there were millions of acorns still in the woods.
We saw around 10 deer that afternoon — roughly 10 more than we saw most afternoons when hunting the fringes! One of them was a mature 10-pointer that showed up nearly an hour before sunset, coming from one of the bedding points, zigzagging through the trees with his nose to the ground. His seemingly random course brought him to 20 yards. The shot wasn’t hard, and the buck was down within seconds, just 60 yards away. That was by far the best hunting day I had last season. These types of spots rarely disappoint during the rut.
Why Bedding Areas Are So Good For all the excitement the rut can bring, it can also bring its share of disappointment. You need to keep things simple and play the odds. When I can do it without alerting the deer I’m trying to hunt, no method of hunting the rut has proven more successful for me over the years than sitting stands near bedding areas.
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Sorting out the rut by focusing on buck sign is like dumping three jigsaw puzzles out on the table and then trying to create one picture using all of them. Eventually you will give up and start looking for a simpler approach. You need to find a way to reduce that 3,000-piece jigsaw pile down to a six-piece children’s version. How can you predict where a buck is going to be next when he doesn’t even know himself? We have to rely on tendencies to do this, and the number one tendency we can always trust is that the bucks will be looking for does. Find the does and you find the bucks. There is no better place to do this than where the does bed.
The Genius of Simplicity The key to success is to base your strategies only on the things you know are true about bucks during the rut and forget about wild guesses and hunches. They are looking for does — case closed!
This aerial overview shows the relationship between bedding points and the draws (possibly ditches) that lie between them. The heads of these draws are very good choices for buck travel route stands during the rut. Bucks look for does in the places where the does feed and where they bed. After the first few days of the rut, the does stop coming out in the open to feed and go into hiding. You can still find them near food sources early in the rut, but after a week of being harassed they give that up and, like them, you are going to have to go deeper into the cover.
The bucks know this. Past the early stages of the rut, everything revolves around doe bedding areas. After scouring one bedding area, a buck moves on to the next. The very best rut stand for most bowhunters is either on the downwind edge of one of these bedding areas or in a funnel located between two doe bedding areas.
Types of Funnels Bottlenecks and inside corners: When traveling, bucks like to stay close to cover so they can melt away at the slightest hint of danger. As a result, they are somewhat predictable in the way they relate to cover. Any place between two doe bedding areas where the cover narrows down is likely to be a funnel for rutting bucks. There may not be a trail or even buck sign in these places, because bucks don’t leave much sign in the places they only pass through — and they may not even use these spots the other 50 weeks of the year. But you don’t have to sweat the small stuff. Sign or no sign, the bucks will be there when the rut gets kicking.
This is a 3-D view of the same ridge complex that I illustrated above. You can easily see the bedding points and the draws between them in this view. Classic examples of cover-related rut travel routes are brushy fence lines between two woodlots, the inside corner of a field separating two thickets, places along an open ridgetop where fingers of cover from opposing slopes come the closest together and the outside bend of a creek or river bottom separating the cover found in two adjacent inside bends. Unless your hunting area is a solid block of trees, studying an aerial photo will reveal dozens of cover-related funnels. Now all you have to do is pick the ones that lie between two doe bedding areas, and you’re set for action.
Creek crossings: Anytime you find a creek separating two places where does like to bed (a typical situation in bluff and hill country) you’ve got a dynamite ambush site for the rut. Deer don’t like to swim when they can walk, and they don’t like to climb up and down steep banks if a short detour will bring them to more gradual crossings.
Low-bank, shallow-water creek crossings are some of the very best deer funnels. Deer also travel along the creeks, bringing a second travel route into range of any stand located near a good crossing.
It is easy to see the creek crossings on an aerial photo. The point between two sharp bends is very often the most used crossing, as the banks here tend to be more gradual and the water more shallow. You can generally see crossings easily when you study an aerial photo or topo map. Look for S curves in a stream or river; the flat part of the S (between the two curves) will usually have a deer crossing. The tighter the curves in the creek bed, the higher and more undercut the banks will be on these curves. That will force the deer to use the shallow crossings between these high-banked bends.
Ideally, the creek flowing through your hunting area is shallow. By fall, even most year-round streams are running low. You can walk right down the bottom of the creek bed to the base of the tree that supports your stand. Being below the surrounding forest floor has its advantages; deer won’t be able to hear or see you unless they’re very close. And by walking in the water, you don’t leave any ground scent that would put deer on alert.
Ditch tops: The typical ditch starts at the top of a slope as a small dip in the terrain — possibly extending out into a ridgetop field. As the swale cuts down the slope, it becomes a ditch that grows deeper and steeper. Deer that aren’t being pushed won’t normally cross a deep ditch, because there are usually easier crossings nearby.
Creeks and ditches separating doe bedding areas tend to be great funnels, but they can also serve as great undetected entry and exit routes. These ditches typically lie in a draw between adjacent wooded ridge points. When the draw carries enough runoff, it will form a ditch. Not every draw between two bedding points will have a ditch in the bottom, but it is definitely worth finding those that do, because the tops of these are some of the best possible pinch points for buck traffic during the rut.
As the bucks travel back and forth from one doe bedding area to the next, they will have to detour around the ditch. If you play your cards right, that will bring them right past your stand. In other words, you are looking for ditches deep enough to influence buck travel that are also located between two bedding areas. Find this setup and you’ve got a killer spot. They are out there.
Setting the Trap Now you have to decide which funnels to hunt — or do you just hunt near the bedding area itself? Unless you have an unlimited number of good spots to hunt, you need to go out of your way to avoid spots where you risk educating deer, at least at first. You can afford to be more aggressive as you approach the end of the rut or the end of your hunting vacation.
The hardest part about hunting stands near bedding areas is getting in and out without the deer knowing you are there. Even if you enter and exit in the dark, you still need a modest wind to make enough background noise to cover the sound and blur your movement. Trying to do this on a dead still day is really tough! It is always good to hunt the downwind fringe of the bedding area itself. These tend to be used a lot during the rut. The downside is that you may not get many hunts in these core areas before the deer know. That is why you need to sprinkle in plenty of hunts in the fringe funnels. Of the three types of funnels that most often show up near bedding areas, the creek crossing needs the most caution.
The best creeks are the ones that aren’t down in valleys where swirling winds are almost guaranteed. The flatland creeks are much easier to hunt. Just look for crossings (and high bank funnels) between two large inside bends filled with cover and you have a great spot. Keep it simple, sneak in using the creek for cover and you should enjoy action.
When to Hunt Bedding I start hunting near bedding areas around the last week of October, roughly three weeks before the peak of breeding here. Bucks are just starting to prowl a little bit, and they are staying close to home at this time. As the rut advances, they will cover more ground. So, if you have one specific buck in mind, the best time to make your play is the last few days of October, before he gets on a hot doe on the neighboring property.
But when you start that early, you need to hunt these areas sparingly and only when the conditions are perfect. Otherwise, you risk burning them out. You need the right wind, both regarding direction and velocity. It has to be blowing away from the places where you expect the deer to be and hard enough to cover the sound you make when sneaking in and out. Wind speed may be the number one requirement for deciding when to hunt. If it is still, it is really tough to hunt these spots.
I have had good success hunting the ridges both morning and evening. In fact, in addition to the buck I shot from the ridge in 2023, the ones I shot in 2020 and 2021 both came from similar setups. And both of those were also afternoon hunts.
Ridgetop bedding areas are perfect for all-day hunts. Once you get within a week or 10 days of the peak of breeding (at the very start of when the does are coming into estrus) you should be thinking about sticking in these spots from dawn to dark — the action here can be good all day long.
If you’re struggling to make sense of all the buck sign you find leading into the rut, take heart in the knowledge that there is a simpler way to hunt. Forget the sign. Look for features of the terrain and cover that create bedding areas or the funnels between two bedding areas and you’ve found great spots for taking trophies.
Bill Winke has been writing for bowhunting magazines since 1991 and also hosts his own “Bill Winke” YouTube channel.
Author’s Notes: On the hunts in this article, Bill used a Hoyt Carbon RX-8 Ultra bow and Hoyt Integrate arrow rest, B3 Archery Exact Hunter bowsight, B3 Claw release aid, Easton FMJ arrows tipped with B3 EXO Destrukt 3 broadheads and Code of Silence outerwear.
