Check Your Equipment and Practice:
When you begin preparing for bow season, your initial step should be to check your equipment. Make sure all your tree stands are safe. Check the straps, the chains, the bolts and the nuts, and oil them to make sure they all function properly. Go over your bow to determine if it needs new string and is shooting straight. Also inspect your arrows and broadheads. Then, practice like you’ll play.

Last year, I went out into the backyard and started shooting my bow. I really could hum those arrows, and I looked good shooting. But at the first part of the season, I missed deer. That’s when I realized that I hadn’t practiced shooting from a tree stand. Shooting a bow from a tree stand is different than shooting from flat ground. So, I had to encourage myself to stop being lazy and practice from my tree stand, which meant climbing the tree, shooting from the tree stand while wearing my harness, climbing down the tree to retrieve my arrows and then starting over again.

Practicing shooting from a tree stand is a hassle, but missing deer because you haven’t shot from a tree stand is an even bigger hassle. I practice shooting my bow wearing my headnet and gloves. Too, I move and shoot from different angles in the tree stand to see if it will squeak and determine how quiet I can be in the stand. I’ve spooked deer at the first part of the season because I haven’t been moving as quietly as I needed to in the stand.

Stay Scent Free:
One or two weeks before the season, I wash my tree stand and decoys down and my hunting clothes with Hunter’s Specialties Scent-A-Way Soap and place them in a Hunter’s Specialties Scent-Safe Bag with a Fresh Earth Scent Wafer to make my clothes smell a little like old dirt.

Plant Food Plots:
I don’t start planting my food plots until the first of September because I live in Alabama where we generally don’t have but 1 or 2 days of freezing temperatures before the first of the new year. I like Hunter’s Specialties Vita-Rack Fall Mix because it has a variety of crops resistant to different types of elements that mature at various times during the fall. For instance, if you have a lot of rain or very little rain, an ingredient in the Vita-Rack Fall Mix still will grow. Deer are like me and you at a buffet. We won’t just eat fried chicken and cornbread. We also will eat turnip greens, green beans and all the foods offered on the buffet. Vita-Rack has cereal-type grains, as well as broadleaf and clovers, so there’s a variety for the deer to eat.

Identify Natural Deer Foods:
To find and take deer at the beginning of bow season, use a quality pair of binoculars to determine the natural foods available to deer at this time of year. Pinpoint any wild plums or persimmons, check oak trees to see if they’re bearing nuts, and examine other mast-producing shrubs and trees to determine what type of mast crop is growing and will grow on the lands you’ll be hunting. Too, I start scouting my green fields to see the type of deer feeding there. More importantly I want to find the trails the deer are using to enter and leave the green fields.

Ninety percent of hunters hunt right over the edge of the green field. But if you’re shooting bucks and does over the green field at the first of the season, by the time the rut starts, there won’t be a deer on the property that wants to come to the green field during daylight hours. So, I prefer to follow the trails out of the food plots and hunt 1/4- to 1/2-mile away. Once the deer reach the food plot, they know they’re safe. Then when the rut comes in, the does retreat to the food plots where they’re safe, the bucks come looking for the does there, and then I can hunt the food plots. Or, I won’t hunt two or three food plots all year until the rut. The best places to hunt during early bow season are the deer’s travel routes and creek crossings, but stay away from those green fields.