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Deer Hunters – Use Your Optics Now
 Very-few deer hunters will go into the woods during deer season without a pair of binoculars and/or a spotting scope. However, many deer hunters don’t realize how critical using their optics right now is. Many deer hunters don’t bag the bucks of their dreams because they don’t take the time to scout for them before the season. Now’s the time to use your binoculars and spotting scopes to locate the bucks you plan to hunt this fall. Here’s why.
* Whitetails will be out in open places around agricultural fields, on green fields and at watering holes during daylight hours because there is no hunting pressure on them in the summer. By using your binoculars and spotting scope, you can watch the bucks as their antlers begin to form, decide how many bucks you’ll have to hunt and learn where the biggest bucks are beginning to appear.
* The further you stay from the deer you want to take this fall, the better your odds are for harvesting them once deer season starts. By using an Alpen spotting scope, like the 20x50 Mini-scope or the 15-45x60 Compact, you can stay several-hundred yards away from bucks feeding in green fields and on agricultural crops, determine the size of their antlers and learn the trails they are using to enter and leave the fields.
 * You can inventory your herd in the summer by using Alpen binoculars or spotting scopes. You can see how many does, fawns and bucks live on the land you’ll be hunting and determine the buck-to-doe ratio. This information will help you determine a reasonable harvest prescription for the upcoming year. You can get a better idea of how many does and how many bucks you should harvest, and what size bucks you’ll have to hunt.
 * You can learn the deer’s favorite nut and fruit trees now. By using Alpen spotting scopes and binoculars from some distance away, you not only can identify nut trees, but also look up into the limbs and see if those trees are putting on acorns or fruit or not. Knowing which trees will have fruit or acorns and which trees won’t can help you lay a better game plan for where you need to hunt. Once you’ve identified the trees that will bear nuts or fruits, and more specifically, the trees bearing the deer’s favorite nuts or fruits, then pick out a tree where you can hang a tree stand. Mark that tree as a waypoint on your handheld GPS by the name of the nut or the fruit tree you’ve found.
* You can take a stand on the edge of a clear-cut, a firebreak or a power line in the summer months and use your Alpen spotting scopes and binoculars to see where and when bucks cross. Often, these clearings will be on the edges of thickets where the bucks hold during daylight hours in deer season. By obtaining that information now, you can cut trails into these thickets after the bucks have left them and create sites for ground blinds and tree stands that you can hunt from when deer season arrives, and hunting pressure forces the bucks to stay in those thick-cover places during daylight hours.
 * You can scout lands you can’t hunt. Often, if you’ll ride country roads and begin to look for trophy bucks now, you can obtain permission at this time of year to hunt that land in the fall. There’s no point in getting permission to hunt land where you haven’t seen a buck that you really want to take. But if you find a buck you want to hunt, you may be able to obtain permission to hunt there. By using your Alpen binoculars and the Alpen 735 Spotting Scope Kit with a 703 Car Window Mount (included), you can see the bucks from public roads with these optics, then determine who owns the land and try and obtain permission to hunt there.
Most football teams begin to scout their opposing teams during spring practice at the inner squad end-of-spring-training games. From this information, they know what the opposing team’s strengths and weaknesses are. Then the coach and the players can create a better game plan for their game where they meet this team for the first time that season, than if they don’t have that information. Deer hunting is the same way. Finding the buck you want to hunt using Alpen’s quality binoculars and scopes now will drastically increase your odds for finding and taking that buck on opening day of bow season or gun season.
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