This buck had been spotted using the area near a ground blind and Jay used an afternoon hunt to get lucky. The buck was chased into bow range by a larger buck.

TACTICS FOR EVENING Evening hunting can be broken down into a few simple formulas. Primarily, the closer you hunt to bedding areas, the sooner the action will start. Long walks through difficult terrain call for an early departure, allowing time to move carefully and quietly. If your honey hole is back away from it all, it's likely bedding areas lie close by. Better to arrive early and wait for the action to start than to stumble into moving deer on the way to your stand. Calling can be effective in these spots, especially fawn bleats and light rattling. Deer, even mature bucks, are curious, and attracted to both.

As stated earlier, most afternoon activity starts relatively late in the day and is condensed into an hour or so of prime hunting. An exception my friends and I have noticed is during the days around a full moon, when afternoon activity looks more like morning activity. During afternoons of the full moon, deer seem to rise from their daytime beds early and randomly. We often see the first deer hitting open fields at 2 p.m. during these periods, and deer movement is spread throughout the afternoon. Try arriving at your stand an hour or so earlier during the first days of a nearly full, or full moon. If you don't, I believe you'll be spooking moving deer on the way to your stand.

Food is what deer are seeking in their afternoon/evening starts, and as any experienced archery hunter knows, it's generally easy enough to scout straight to the source. Acorn, or other mast stands deep in the forest are relatively easy to set up on, but the more common and obvious crop fields are much more difficult. The problems are many, but primarily the fields hold numbers of deer, so the odds of getting picked off are high. The edges of fields often harbor difficult winds. If you try to hunt deer that are entering the field, a face-on wind will spook deer behind you in the timber. If you try to put the wind at your back, some crazy doe is going to cross your scent stream 100 yards out in the field and set the whole herd on edge or worse.

On a tip from the boys at Double Bull Archery, we've tried ground blinds set right in the open field with some success. Deer study the blind and discount it because it's not hidden and isn't moving. Don't try to hunt the blind in gusting winds because swirling currents will blow scent all over the place. A light, steady flow from the direction you expect the deer to come from is best, and by all means, use every scent control trick you own.

A more obvious solution to the evening food equation involves getting between the deer and their food source somewhere in mid-stream. This takes a lot more scouting and scheming and usually will involve some kind of natural feature that funnels the deer. Beaver ponds, lakes and rivers are naturals, especially if you can find them in close proximity, but cover itself can be an effective funnel. In the prairies, we hunt whitetails along single windrows, especially those that border creeks or deep ditches, any obstacle the deer can't or won't normally cross at will. Finding a crossing along these routes is like striking gold. Any formation along a travel route that encourages deer to turn suddenly leads to a likely funnel, and it may be nothing more than the brush and timber itself that turns them. These kinds of corners will see regular deer movement.

Don't expect your afternoon travel-route stand site to be good from year to year. The best of these stands is only as good as the food source on the other end. Thus, each year you have to evaluate what the deer are doing and where they are headed. Sites that produce generally do so again when the food source returns or repeats itself.

Remember that whitetails are quite dedicated to their home range during most of the year. They'll travel a mile or more for good feed, but they remain quite dedicated to a favorite bedding area. Tracing these routes and evaluating stand potential is the key to evening success. You may get outlasted by a big buck on these late-in-the-day travel routes, but there's always that one animal that due to weather, time of year or who knows what, will make a mistake. Be there when it happens, settled and ready, and you'll be a believer in the magic of the evening.