Do you prefer morning or evening hunts? Which has been more successful for you?

Morning or evening single choice
	Morning
	Evening
	I stay in the stand all day
Votes accepted starting: 05/28/14 05:51 PM You must vote before you can view the results of this poll.

I have seen all of my better bucks on evening hunts. Ill add to that most of my better bucks have come around 3 in the afternoon, not at dusk. Not saying it is better, just how its been for me.

I personally enjoy evening hunts better too. For me a morning hunt is about as good as its gonna get as soon as the sun comes up while evening hunts seem to get better as you go, gives me more to look forward to.

I agree.

I've had good luck with both morning and evening hunts, mid day also. I have changed my feeder timers to go off slightly before shooting daylight and it seems to have the nocturnal mature bucks lingering around for a last minute bite to eat before they crawl back under a rock. Likewise, I find it frustrating for the evening hunts as it starts to get too dark before I start to see lurking shadows waiting for the cover of darkness to come out to feed. That's part of hunting though...

I hunt all day - but I would prefer to shoot an animal in the morning - only because I hate cleaning animals in the dark - and if I get business out of the way in the morning, I can be watching football and napping in the afternoon - or maybe go out a second time.

Although I like hunting both, the mornings have proven to be more successful for me for bucks. And, as mentioned, it's nice to have daylight for the stuff after the shot.

Probably bout 75% of the deer I've killed have been in the morning. We don't have running water and it sucks trying to clean in the dark.

its about 50/50 for me as far as success goes.

by far I prefer the evening hunts over morning hunts, simply because I like that time of day better.


I see mature bucks both morning and evening, but the ones wearing the largest headgear (which has no bearing on a deer's behavior) have been between 1pm and 5 pm.

I'll hunt anytime and success is about 50/50. Of my top 5 bucks, 1,2,5 were taken in the morning and 3,4,6 were taken in the evening. I will say that I've seen a lot of bucks between 11-2 so if you aren't hunting mid-day, at least during the rut, then you might be missing an opportunity. This is mostly trail hunting, not feeders. YMMV. If pushed, I probably prefer morning-it's neat when the forest wakes up.

I enjoy a morning hunt better for all the reasons mentioned above, but I have probably had more success in the evening. That could be skewed due to the fact that I probably get out more evenings than mornings due to work, etc. Having said that, my best buck, a public land B&C, was taken at 1:30 pm.

That's something people should also look at before determining what is more successful for them. Do you hunt more in the mornings or the evenings?

Rarely have success in the evening, but I do hunt mornings and evenings. All of my bucks have been taken in the mornings. All I have ever seen in the evenings are spikes and does.

I enjoy morning hunts, all the bucks I have taken have been in the morning usually I just see does in the evenings.

What are we hunting?

Pigs- anytime, mainly at night.

Deer- typically evening I like better for rifle season. Archery I like mornings better.

If it is for whitetails it will depend solely on the ranch. I have been on a ranch where we had much better luck in the mornings in the Hill Country and then on one in South Texas. The next ranch I was on had much better luck in the evenings in Central Texas. The place I am on now is better in mornings. Harvest records and logs tell you a lot about a place. A lot depends on cover, natural forage, travel routes, supplemental feeding and food plots.

It is the deer hunting section.

WT or MD?

Both, although the only MD buck Ive shot was in the morning. I did watch a couple nice 4x4 duke it out at about 3 in the afternoon. I also noticed the MD werent as active right at last light, they seemed to pack it in earlier. This was Childress area over a 200 acre wheat patch. Just my experience

For MD in Pecos County we hunt them all day long. Our biggest deer have been killed just about any hour of the day. The 3 biggest all over 180 were killed in the mid-day hours. I killed one at 2:30 on a clear day. Killed my buck last year at 10:30 in the morning. Have killed them before sunrise and just after sundown also. A lot for us depends on the weather(wind,temps and cloud cover) as to when the deer move more. Moon phase really plays into mid-day movement. We have no feeders or any farmland on our ranch or anywhere close to us.

It used to be my dad wouldn't even get out of bed to hunt till 0800, when there was a full moon. I'm no biologist but I have seen deer move in the morning after a full moon. I try not to over think it and just enjoy the quiet time, whether deer or no deer.

I sat down one day at the lease when I was all by myself going over all of the deer I have killed and it was pretty much a 50/50 split on morning and evening. I like the mornings myself though. There is just something cool about sitting there in complete darkness waiting for the sun to come up and wondering what all those shadows moving around are.

As far as midday is concerned: I use to hunt all day and pretty much never saw a good buck from 10am-3pm. I did kill one buck at almost straight up noon but he wasn't really anything to write home about. Once I started using game cameras they confirmed what I already knew about mid day movement and even when I did catch a decent buck on camera during mid day it was always a deer I could see on any given morning or afternoon hunt anyway.

I am no biologist either but when you have to hunt MD on native habitat you have to learn to hunt them on their schedule. They eat when they are hungry. Full moon overhead at midnight and deer are up at midday after that. We have learned to throw out everything you know about WT when hunting MD on this place. You have to find the food source(s) to find the deer. Some deer get up and feed on a regular basis at daylight and some lay till mid morning or all day till mid to late afternoon then get up. The better the rainfall year the more scattered the deer. That is a large problem with very light densities(2-6 deer per section) on 70,000 acres for us. You can get great weather and see 30-40 deer one day then weather conditions change the next day and you see only 3-4 all day long. Get a heavy freeze after season starts and it kills what they were feeding on and you have to relocate the food source. It has been a learning curve for me over the last 7 yrs now. I had to unlearn all the WT hunting things I had learned over the past 40+ years and learn to hunt MD on that ranch. That is why I now love hunting MD.

Interesting JCB.
I should say if I'm hunting E Tx. I'll sit all day usually, if not then at least till noon grab a quick lunch and head back

I prefer mornings.

For what its worth......the one buck I did kill at noon was in east Texas.

I see more total deer in the morning. But tend to see more quality bucks in the evening.