For Whitetails, Plan B is Just as Important as Plan A

The 2024 whitetail season is in the books. Good riddance! Maybe it went better for you than it did for me. I sure hope so. I spent the entire season hunting two bucks. That would have been fine if they had shown up a few times. I hunted at least 50 days for those deer. Assuming morning sits along with afternoon sits during the last week of October and throughout most of November — not to mention a few, early-season afternoon hunts and some frigid December and January sessions — I probably had close to 90 sits.

Yeah, you read that right — 90! Just think what good things I could have done had I spent that time being socially responsible. I could have helped build a house for a needy family or even gotten a second job and given the income to the Salvation Army. Instead, my total net reward was one sighting of each of those two bucks during the entire season. Yep, two total sightings.

Boy, when I form those words in my head, it sure sounds bad. I went on stand 90 times and saw each of my target bucks just once! The bigger of the two was in late November at about 150 yards; he didn’t come to the call on that windy morning. The other buck came by just past shooting light one evening in early November.

That, my friends, is what you call utter defeat. I am sitting here now, still trying to make something positive of this, if for no other reason than to salvage some pride. Maybe if I tell you the trap I fell into, I can spare you the same fate, but the real purpose of this article is to help us both look back with a constructive eye toward turning a bad season into a winner the next time around.

How I Failed

My problem was assuming too much. I had the buck I was most excited about hunting on trail camera often the year before in the area where I planned to hunt him. A lot of the photos were in daylight, so I assumed he would follow the same script during the 2024 season. I set my entire strategy (and my stands) around that expected behavior. Well, to come right to the point: he moved and he changed. He became a lot less daylight active.

Every buck is different, and this one proved that point in spades. He didn’t do what I had seen so many others do. From being daylight-active in his normal range during the 2023 season (the same area where he had lived the year before), he transformed into a mole and dug a hole and crawled into it during the 2024 season.

More accurately, I think he moved his core area about a quarter mile and then stayed close to his bed until after dark. I had seen bucks become more nocturnal as they reached middle age, but rarely had I seen them move when they had spent the prior two adult years living in one spot.

He showed up on camera in daylight on Oct. 30 for the first time all fall. That gave me some hope he was back and that I would get him soon enough in his old haunt — or at the very least see him a few times. Though I hunted around his old core area as carefully as I could for weeks, he was a very infrequent guest.

In fact, I had photos of him only two more times during the next three weeks, and those were at night. I finally did see him in late November on the fringe of his old core area on a morning hunt, but he wouldn’t come to my grunt call.

Ironically, he did show up in daylight on one of my cameras about 500 yards from where I was hunting him the last day of the early bow season — the day before the firearms season opened — just to rub it in!

The other buck was a nice 8-pointer that had some age on him and had been living in the same area as the one I was most excited about. He was just along for the ride, but a definite shooter had he just showed up. He too had been a regular on my cameras over the years and had even shown some daylight activity in the area where I was hunting back in September. I saw him once, right after shooting light in early November. I figured he was a sure thing. Nope, that was it; one and done. Since then, I have gotten plenty of photos of him around the farm, but only one during the entire fall in daylight.

Here’s a reality check for people waiting years for an Iowa bow tag. If you had drawn that “dream tag” and come to hunt my farm on a week’s vacation during prime time (a pretty good sounding option, right?), you would have had roughly 14 sits (two sits per day times seven days). Well, I had 90 sits. You would have had to draw the tag at least six times to get as many sessions on stand as I had. It would take you roughly 24 years to draw the tag that often — and still you would have no buck! Welcome to the promised land! Obviously, I did something wrong. Let’s figure out what it was.

What I Did Wrong

I assumed the buck I was hunting was going to act like most of the other bucks I had hunted over the years. I assumed he would keep the same basic core area and range he used the year before and that he would continue to be daylight-active. He didn’t do any of those things, but my assumption was natural and not the biggest mistake I have ever made. The real mistake was not having a plan for what I would do if he didn’t follow the script. Not having a good Plan B is what really cost me my season, and that is the meat of this article. Plan B is just as important as Plan A.

I also stuck with Plan A too long. By the time I realized that it wasn’t going to work, I was already into November, and it was more or less too late to find a new hunting area or even scout new, more aggressive stand locations. I needed to shift in the direction where I thought the buck had likely moved. And I needed to hunt closer to the bedding areas, since he wasn’t moving much in daylight. But in the back of my mind, I still believed it was just a matter of time, until the rut ended and he disappeared completely.

I needed more places to hunt that buck, and I even needed more bucks to hunt. I could have found some additional places to hunt had I started early enough, and I sure could have scouted up more stand locations closer to bedding areas had I done it during the off-season. As sensitive as this buck seemed to be to pressure (he was already mostly nocturnal), I wasn’t feeling too good about pushing into the places I thought he might be living with a stand on my back in mid-November.

Yes, he could have walked past my stand on that morning in late November instead of passing 150 yards away. And he could have come charging to my grunt call. Then I would be writing about how crafty I was to be patient and wait on the fringe for my opportunity or how effective a grunt call can be when used at the right time. Funny how small things can change the course of a season — and in some ways, limit our learning curve.

In some ways, it is better that I didn’t get him that morning. If I had, I would not have learned this important lesson, one I am sure will be useful to me for the rest of my life. If you are serious about bowhunting whitetails, you need more than one plan. Plan B is just as important as Plan A.

What Will I Do About It?

Hopefully, my target buck will still be around this fall. If so, I will have a much better plan for how to find him and hunt him. I will have trail cameras in a few more places to figure out his range sooner so I can react to it before the season starts. It really stinks to play catch-up in early November. It is way too late by then. It is tough enough to be successful when you are dialed-in — nearly impossible when you aren’t.

In addition to having my cameras in a few more places, I will do a much better job of scouting this winter. I haven’t hunted that property for long and I need to know it better. I need to know where I can get in and out without alerting the nearby deer in a lot more areas.

Scouting is critical, not just to find sign, but even more so to find the entry and exit routes that can keep you undetected. It is possible to mess up an otherwise good spot by missing the best ways to sneak in and out. It can take time to figure out how to win that chess match, and the sooner I get started on that project, the better my Plan B.

Second, and just as importantly, I need a few other properties to hunt. Again, it is a bad policy to start looking for new hunting areas in early November. I need to find those options now, during the off-season, and scout them during the winter. Then I can pivot more easily should this buck not even be on the farm this coming season.

It was a humbling season, but sometimes that is what you need. It is the poke in the ribs required to learn all you can now, so the same thing doesn’t happen again. For every unsuccessful season, there are lessons to be learned and solutions to be applied. We just need to look harder. Poor seasons aren’t fun, but they have much to teach. We learn a lot from them; maybe more than we do from successful ones. Looking at the past season with a critical eye is the key to making next fall even better.

Four More Things That Can Ruin a Season

In this article, I profiled one way a season can go south. But there are other things that can also derail success, and each of them comes with a lesson and a solution. Here are four more that come to mind.

1. Your Hunting Area Goes Bad: This is a very common and discouraging problem — and probably the biggest reason why people stop bowhunting. We hunt an area for a few years and assume it will always be a good option. So, we get lax and stop looking for new spots. But things change. The neighbors give permission to a group that shoots everything that walks, or they let their new dog roam free. Maybe the nearby sanctuary now has a house right in the middle of it. Or, heaven forbid, the current owner sells it. You can never stop looking for better spots, even if the one you have seems good. Unless you control all the variables, you can’t count on your spot being good forever.

2. The Weather Throws a Curve: I set up most of my best spots for a northwest wind, the best wind for rut hunting. But what happens if it blows from the south the entire first two weeks of November? I quickly burn out my few good south wind stands and there I sit, cursing the weather and my “bad luck.” Yes, maybe the weather wasn’t ideal, but the bigger issue was my lack of preparation. I should have scouted more spots for non-ideal winds. You can sometimes react to the weather by hanging new sets, but it is hard to nail the best entry and exit routes without lots of scouting and plenty of time in thought. Plus, the older I get, the less I feel like doing that and the more inclined I am to over-hunt my existing stands. Flying by the seat of your pants too often is the recipe for a crash landing in a bunch of educated deer. Prepare now for any prolonged wind direction you might get this fall, even if it is not the one you want.

3. You are Hunting a Ghost: I have also made this mistake. I spent weeks one year hunting a buck that was dead. Man, talk about a hard lesson! Trust your gut instinct. If you feel that you should be seeing him, but you aren’t, or you aren’t getting photos of him as you head into the best part of the season, it is time to move on to Plan B. I have a friend who will only hunt his target buck until a certain point in the season. If he isn’t seeing him, or getting regular photos of him by that date, he moves on.

4. Overhunting Your Best Stands: This is an obvious season-wrecker, but it is still very common. In fact, I still do it. It comes down to the common problem of not having enough pre-set options. You are stuck on one buck, or one small property, and you hunt that deer or that area way too hard. A lot of people ask me what public areas are good in my home state. I have a few I know are productive (I never tell people exactly where they are, however), but what I do tell them is to have four or five options pre-scouted so they can react to changing deer movement and hunting pressure quickly. You can’t waste critical stand time scouting during the best part of the season. It is a very good rule to have twice as many spots and stand options as you think you will need.

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