"Slipping in" when deer are bedded/late morning or afternoon.

[8mm Enthusiast]

Due to health reasons, it is difficult for me to wake up prior to 4 AM which means I can't always drive out far in the mornings and arrive on time to get setup on my trail in the dark.

I have had to improvise on recent hunts and have been forced to setup farther away from my ideal spot as shooting hours were fast approaching and I didn't want to kick stuff up for others.

This brings us to the idea of "slipping in" when the deer are bedded down during the warmer part of the day and being settled in well before the second round of activity picks up around dusk. What experiences do you all have hunting deer in the afternoon and can it truly be as productive as hunting the mornings?

 

[salmonchaser]

Well I just finished season 58. I’m still not convinced the pre-dawn insertion works better than starting in at legal shooting light. With white tails I think it is the best ploy, even with mountain whitetails like we were chasing in Montana last week. Mule deer and Columbia blacktail or Sitka blacktail behave differently. One they don’t pattern as readily as white tails and more importantly they are a heck of a lot easier to walk up on. It seems like white tail can be counted on to use the same trails regularly, mule deer not so much particularly if you hunt them away from agricultural ground. For mule deer and elk I’m more inclined to get in early when I’ve access to private ground and that does pay off. On public ground that I know well I’ve got a couple of ridges I’ll go in by head lamp on opening morning. After opening morning my experience has been I’ve bumped elk while sneaking in as often as I’ve been able to make it to my overwatch and find elk.
I do like the afternoon sit. Typically I’ll work the dark timber into early afternoon then find a ridge, get partway out (you can still walk off a cliff using a headlamp) and sit and glass for the last 90 minutes. Seems like every time I say to my self “how can there not be anything out there” just at dark they show up. In Oregon I’d rather not shoot something just at dark because it just gets harder. I really don’t like doing so in Montana, particularly when hunting by myself.
Now with my second cup of coffee and recalling past hunts I’ve had quite a bit of success slipping into a good area mid day, setting up and getting my opportunities at last light.
White tails are fairly new to me. Think I killed my first one about 10 years ago. I spent 10 days in Montana, near Thompson falls specifically chasing a big white tail. I saw a few small basket bucks, caught glimpses of good mature bucks that did not afford an opportunity and could have shot 3 elk had I a tag or a decent mule deer deer every day. Those white tail are sneaky devils.

 

[Chuck R]

Honestly I prefer late afternoon to evening hunts, most of the time the deer are heading out to feed and are a little more predictable. It also has a set ending point, legal shooting time, so I'm not sitting in a stand thinking "just 10 more minutes" for another 1-2hrs. I head out around 2:00 PM, most movement is about 30-60 minutes before sunset, and I really like overcast days because I think it screws up their "clock" and they'll move earlier.

So I normally hunt them in the am enroute to bedding areas, in the evening enroute to feed. If the weather's crappy I might still hunt in mid-day. Morning hunts I'll double lung them, evenings depending on the terrain and my familiarity I might break shoulders just to reduce tracking.

IF you're hunting the rut, all bets are off, they can and will move about at anytime.

A couple times a year, in the last half of the season when most of the bucks have gone nocturnal, 5 or 6 of us will put on drives at about 1000 AM on some of the smaller patches.