Bedding areas are an integral component of every hunting property. Deer bed in different areas depending on if they are bucks or does. Learning how to find a bedding area and the best way to hunt a bedding area is an essential skill to hold in your hunting tool belt. Intruding upon these bedding areas or hunting near them at the wrong time can ruin your hunting at that location for the season.
The first deer bedding area is the doe bed. Typically, these doe beds will be found in cover near food sources. Does tend to bed in groups so expect to find multiple beds in these locations. Keep in mind that preferable food sources change throughout the fall months, so don't expect does to bed around the same field all the time. Become familiar with what foods are most palatable to deer at each time of year which will help you narrow down possible bedding locations.
The buck bed is the one that all hunters hope to find. For the big buck hunter, there's nothing better than getting a big whiff of a stinky buck and stumbling upon his bedding location. The best places to find these buck beds will be in isolated areas with the thickest, nastiest cover on your property. Mature bucks will bed alone and they love their privacy. Look for areas that are out of the way and don't see much traffic from humans or the rest of the deer population.
Some common factors that will help in locating any deer bed are areas that are too thick to see further than 5-10 feet, downed logs or mounds that serve as a wall or backdrop to lay again, good overhead cover such as conifer branches, or low growing shrubs, and dry, flat, elevated patches of ground. If you have trouble locating areas that fit this description, then it's time you get out there and create them. We'll go into this process in another article, but this can be a very effective weapon in the hunter's tool belt.
Lastly, it is critical that you know when to look and hunt a deer bed. The best time to look for deer beds is the month or two right after your hunting season closes. If you go walking through your property during hunting season or even just before the season starts, it's possible you could scare the deer out of that area for the season. By looking right after the season ends, you'll be able to locate deer beds that are most likely in the same areas during hunting season. If you wait until spring or early summer to search for bedding areas, these likely will be completely different locations than during season. The same caution should be given to hunting over deer beds. While there is a time and place to hunt right over a bedding area, the majority of the time you should hunt travel corridors between bedding and food sources. We'll go into more detail in follow-up articles.
I hope you've found this brief description of bedding areas to be beneficial. Each one of these topics will be discussed in more detail in posts to come, but these basic details provide you the basic understanding of deer beds and how they vary between does and bucks. As you know, whitetails often surprise us and bedding areas have been found in the oddest locations that don't make any sense. Deer will bed wherever they feel secure, so give it some thought before you head out to explore your property. Learn more about how to improve your whitetail habitat by viewing our other posts.
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