(A) 14 Step Season Prep: Step 9- Building Bedding Areas

When I first started bow hunting seriously I focused a lot on food sources. Although food is vital to deer, I didn't place enough emphasis on bedding areas. Now my early season deer hunting concentrates on food sources but quickly turns to bedding areas or transition areas as the rut nears. Some of the farms that I have previously hunted were only good during the rut because they had outstanding bedding areas. However, some farms had poor hunting during the rut because they lacked good bedding areas. The trail camera picture above shows two bucks checking the downwind side of a good bedding area during the rut. They do this day and night if they aren't already breading a doe. Hunt doe bedding areas during the rut. Not just the traditional buck bedding areas. Sometimes does are going to head for some thick cover to hide from harassing bucks this time of year.

By now you should have completed most of your spring work to prepare for next deer season. Hopefully during your post season scouting, you successfully located good bedding areas. On one of the farms that I hunt, the bedding areas are somewhat minimized once the vegetation is thin in November. We have identified most of the current bedding areas but they don't seem sufficient for the current deer population. So this spring I worked with the landowner to build and expand an existing bedding area.

One thing we did back in March was identify the current bedding areas that the deer were using. We wanted to expand on this. There is a large ravine that runs north and south and is located in the center of the hunting property in the middle of the woods. This ravine is protected to the north by a highway and has a pond for a water source in the north end of it. The south end of the ravine dead ends at the beginning of huge agricultural fields. For the last two years, we have agreed with the land owner to stay out of this ravine. We wanted the deer to have a safe haven where there would never be any human contact or hunting pressure.

This March, the land owner and I decided to expand this bedding area. We fired up our chainsaws and cut down numerous trees on the north east edge of this ravine by the pond. We dropped almost every tree in an area approximately equal to half an acre. This really opened up the forest floor for more sunlight. We tried to cut the trees above waist high or higher. Our goal was to only make our saw cut deep enough for the tree to fall to a horizontal position. If the tree is still somewhat attached, it will continue to grow and sprout. Once we dropped all of the trees we had a very thick place for the deer to bed comfortably. There were some good deer trails already leading to this area.

A couple of weeks later I returned to this man made bedding area. I raked out a few bed locations removing the leaves, twigs, branches, etc. so the deer could be more comfortable. This is an area that we will continue to stay out of until next spring when we shed hunt. However, we will hunt the far perimeter edges as the deer leave this bedding area (200+ yards away). For this reason we built a big bedding area to hold a lot of deer at the same time. Numerous small ones are also a good option.

I can't stress to you how important it is to know where your deer are bedding. Once you know where they are sleeping and eating, all you have to do is hang a stand in between the two spots to improve your hunting success. Many hunters build new bedding areas or improve on existing ones. They can be large like the one I just described or very small. If you are going to build a bedding area, first think about how the deer will approach it, the direction they will face while in laying in it, how close can you get to hunting it, etc. The small bedding areas don't take much more time to build than it takes someone to hang a new stand location. Think about it. It is not to late to build or improve a bedding area and it could really improve your success for the next deer season.