The early season can be the best time to pursue one of the largest whitetails you may ever encounter.

Mark Drury is well-versed in the early-season chess match. Over the years, Mark has been developing a reliable approach to early-season hunting that leads to success.

Finding A Daylight Buck

Once the velvet begins to come off, the early season dreaming of clockwork velvet bucks in bean fields can end abruptly. His habits begin to point toward the fall transition.

To address this, Mark’s approach begins early in the year. His purpose is creating a habitat that makes the buck feel secure and provides him with food throughout the year. This involves understanding the deer’s preferences and planting accordingly to attract them to your hunting area.

If you’re unable to make this kind of investment, the philosophy still holds true. You either need to find a better spot or improve your current location in any way possible. This might involve using more trail cameras, going on scouting missions, or finding other strategies to attract the buck to your hunting area.

Ultimately, you have to locate the buck or at least determine where he might be hiding.

Using MRI (Most Recent Information)

The deer are still in summer patterns during this phase of the season.

It is a chance to exploit holes in target buck routines that you likely don’t have during the majority of the fall. Mark’s advice is to, “Take advantage of those summer patterns to have success.You have to pay attention to those summer pictures.”

The best way to do this is through MRI. A doctrinal term amongst the DOD team, Most Recent Information means studying the freshest scouting data you have available to you. More specifically, it’s the most recent and valid data you have received from your trail cameras.

Many of the giant midwestern whitetails Mark has put an arrow through have rarely come as a complete surprise. Often, the data Mark has gathered on a particular buck has been pieced together in volumes from previous years, “I look back at previous year’s pictures and try to figure out which spots perform well during the early season and which ones simply don’t.”

Mark doesn’t rely solely on historical data. If he goes to an area where a target buck lives during this season, it’s likely because he has new information that the target is active there during the day and the conditions are favorable. Otherwise, relying only on previous year’s data would be risky.

Some factors to consider when it comes to MRI are time of day, weather conditions, moon phases and rising/setting times, frequency of images coming in, direction of travel during those huntable times, and wind conditions. All of which are considered within the DeerCast app forecasting.

If you have good trail camera coverage of your hunting area, do what they tell you. Observe as many conditions as you can to try to hunt a time that replicates that of a daylighting buck.

Don't Risk It

During the early season, fawns are still under the protection of hyper-sensitive mothers that are ready, and more than happy, to blow out an entire field of feeding deer. Bucks are only beginning to disperse from their bachelor groups, and are more on the nocturnal edge of their crepuscular nature, making them less vulnerable.

All of this is compounded by the often stifling heat that leads to necessary, exhausting, and often obsessive scent mitigation.

Hunting the fringes of your property, and even managing does if you don’t have a very good attack plan this time of year is your best bet for scratching the early season itch.

Even pulling your truck into a small property can tip off bedding or feeding deer.

During the early season, a buck’s home range can be quite limited to areas for bedding and feeding. This can make it challenging to plan a hunt and to move into the buck’s space. It’s important to consider factors such as wind speed and direction, thermal currents, and overall accessibility. Mark also suggests avoiding morning hunts during this phase, unless you are specifically targeting a buck that is heading to bed after daylight hours.

Unless you know that the early season is the best chance you have at a buck, Mark recommends not risking it, “You can do yourself a huge favor by not going to those farms that generally don’t perform during the early part of the season.”

It’s safe to say that the early season is made for the most committed of our bowhunting ranks.