I have a bit of a hiatus here as I'll be out of the country until thanksgiving, but man, my season so far has been a blank. No deer sighted while on stand.
I attribute this to a failure to scout more than anything, and that I've been reading too much into terrain and not 'hot' sign like scat and fresh tracks. Also I've wasted hunts on areas that I simply don't know how to hunt well, like coastal marshes - I've hunted trails and beds with scat in/around them and not seen deer, which tells me they must be further out/use the area differently than I anticipated.
I don't know how much our extreme/exceptional drought conditions are altering deer patterns, but I have been struggling to find that fresh sign or hot feed trees we all talk about. I've found stands of cow oaks, water oaks, willow oaks raining acorns with little or no ground disturbance nor deer droppings - which has only made me wonder, could the drought be making it so the ground disturbance can't be 'read' as easily? or could it really be that the deer simply aren't in that area?
When I get home, I intend to get in the rhythm of arriving around 12 and scouting for 3 hours until I find a setup I like, and then start hunting terrain/perceived travel routes as the rut kicks off before Christmas and into New Years.
I've criss-crossed and spent a good bit of time + 4 separate sits in a ~500 acre block of one NWR and just not seen sign that I am confident in. I never gridded it off or anything. But I am wondering if that's just not an area that holds deer. I had success and encounters there last year, around Thanksgiving and Christmas, and maybe it will be a decent area again. At least so far, though, I've been wondering if I've just been spinning my wheels there, looking for something that's not there.
I hope y'all are knocking 'em down though. I appreciate all the help and insight y'all give. This is a super fun puzzle to try to piece together.