Buck Experiment Reveals Daylighting Movement

Corn. It seems more and more are using it to hunt over or just to have at feeding stations. You can buy it in any town year-round. It’s affordable. It goes in feeders that can dispense for weeks. It can be stored for months. And boy does it attract deer. Baiting with corn is one of the easiest ways to draw deer on a property. Problem is, nearly every property has it.

It seems nowadays that most hunters are searching for a secret ingredient to entice deer more than anything else. Competition is rampant with products that tout superior attractant power. I have tried a lot of them, and most of them work.

Now, one problem that I have had through the years at my bait sites is that most good bucks show up at night. I understand that this is not the case for many places, but for the Alapaha River bottom, it’s true. The mature bucks where I hunt do not prefer to stand over a corn pile in the daytime.

Where are the bucks during the day on my property? One place I know they are not, is at my corn. A few years ago, I decided to keep baiting my spots consistently with corn and other supplements, but I placed a camera on the other end of my tract on nothing more than a heavily used trail through a thicket. I was shocked when I checked the camera two weeks later.

Buck after buck after buck walked by my newfound location, with very few doe pictures. Though I did not capture nearly as many pictures in this spot (compared to a corn pile), the pictures that I saw were what I dreamed of seeing. Not only were there multiple different nice bucks, but most were during daylight hours, making this a potential kill zone.

My mind flashed back to stories that older men had told me of their hunting feats in days gone by. Most had started something like this: “Now, I had found this white oak that was dropping better than anything else….” These guys knew the woods. My brother and I would admire anyone who killed a good buck “naturally” as we called it, meaning not over bait or not even over a food plot. To kill a mature buck in its natural habitat is a remarkable accomplishment.

Having said this, I still believe that there is a place in the hunter’s world for supplements and attractants; there is nothing wrong with using them. And if you happen to have bucks that don’t mind showing up to a bait pile in the daylight hours, then I certainly can’t blame you for hunting there. I would, too.

But where I hunt, it is different. I guess my land is reverting in a sense, but in a good way for me. It is becoming more natural. What is that “special something” that my property has this year that the neighbors don’t have?

An absence of bait… oh, and a whole stack of daytime buck pictures!