Trying to Find Early Season Success - 2 Strategies

As I write this on September 24th, 2021, it is exactly one week from the bow season opener here in Michigan. The leaves have began to drop, the temperatures have started to drop, and my excitement and anticipation climbs daily as we inch closer to the start of the 2021 hunting season.

2020 was a year to remember for me in the whitetail woods. I killed my first my first public land bull elk in Idaho on September 15th, my first public land Michigan buck on November 2nd, and a 13 point buck on public land in Indiana on November 11th. But that was last year. And even though my 2020 hunting season was successful, that doesn't mean it's time to take the foot of the gas. 

Throughout the summer I've been glassing soybean fields, taking inventory of bucks by placing trail cameras on food to bedding travel corridors, and putting in miles of on-the-ground scouting at various new locations. For me personally, early season has always been a struggle. As someone who has hunted public land almost exclusively the past 6 years, catching deer in their "summer patterns" isn't nearly as easy as some mainstream hunting articles suggest. 

Over the last several weeks I have been listening to dozens of different podcasts regarding early season hunting tactics and strategies. This list of tactics could seemingly be endless, but I have picked 2 early season strategies that I plan to focus on this fall while hunting in Michigan. 

• Early Season Scapes Near Thick Cover 

This is a strategy I recently heard on the Trail Cam Radio podcast by Exodus Trail Camera's. The podcast featured two renowned big buck killers -- Dan Infalt and John Eberhart -- where each discussed the importance of primary scrapes near bedding and thick cover in the early season. The main component of this strategy is to properly identify a primary or community scrape, but to also make sure that it's a scape that mature deer will visit in daylight. Often times a scrape in the middle of open timber will only see nocturnal activity. Dan and John both noted that finding a scrape near thick cover on a bed to feed trail is a recipe they have followed more than once for some early season success. 

• Hunting More Mornings Close To Water

Look up any article on early season strategies and you're bound to find numerous results discussing why evenings are more important than mornings in the early season. Deer feeding late into the morning makes it hard to slip into an effective stand location without getting busted. As they go to bed, hunting the evening can allow you to slip into that stand undetected as they come back out to feed in the evening. While this logic makes sense on paper, I have found that we've had some unusually high temperatures in some recent early seasons. With higher temperatures becoming somewhat expected during October now, I plan to try and hunt more mornings near a water source and thick cover.  

To me, mobile hunting is more than just the gear you use and wear. You have to be adaptable to change, think on the fly, and constantly be looking at the latest wind and weather predictions to make a calculated move. Although these are 2 strategies I plan to focus on this early season, all of that can change in a matter of seconds. What early season strategies have you guys found success with?