Prep For Hunting Season

Hunting season is just around the corner!  While summer is a great time to fish and swim in pools, it's also a great time to get outdoors in the woods and prepare.  Here's a list of things that you can do to prep for the final weeks till the season:

• Backyard bow practice!  Start drilling on your form, aim, release, and follow-through.  Backyard bowhunts are another fun thing.  You put out a target (a 3D makes it a WHOLE lot funner!) and you start from one side of your yard, and creep up on the target, and make a shot.  You practice your skills for a stalk or still hunt.  You can also do this on a treestand.  Go up, sit like normal, then act like the target you set up, say, a deer, walks into view.  Slowly stand up and draw, aim, release, and follow-through.
• Scout!  Look for tracks, trails, browsed plants.  Food sources, bedding areas, you name it!  If you can locate a trail that is close to bedding and food sources for around the year, your set!  For example, one place that I'm looking at putting a stand is close to a trail that passes oaks, a greenbriar patch (which deer like to eat), and bedding.  And when it rains, a small ditch actually makes a temporary pond.  Perfect spot for a stand! Which leads me to my next point...
• Hang Stands!  Looks for spots like what I mentioned above.  Not only that, but bedding near creeks, trails, food sources, near corn fields, and so on.  
• Sight in your gun!  If you don't sight in your rifle, you won't hit anything.  Not only that, but practice with it, let it become almost a part of you since your so good at handling it.
• Put out trail cams!  (I'm repeating myself) Near trails, bedding, food sources, mineral licks, so on.

Other things that I'll leave out of the "big" list is establishing mineral licks and food plots.  Now, food plots are meant to complement natural food sources, not replace them.  You might could just seed a place with naturally occurring seeds, or let the plants come up by themselves.  Sometime food plots can be a pear tree, or an oak stand.  They don't have to be a lawn of clover.  And they are not necessarily necessary to have a great hunt!  I just do a little bit of it because I enjoy doing it.

Stay safe, get your licence, and get ready to hunt!  Until next time!