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Find Your Big Buck Now
 Now’s the time to find the big buck you want to take next year. The hunters who take the really-big bucks don’t wait to start pre-season scouting until 2 weeks before hunting season begins. Most of them generally start scouting the week after hunting season ends. During the pre-season, the bucks will come out of their hiding places and move more during daylight hours in open places, and the bucks will begin to feed with the does. Since there are no other humans in the woods or on the wood roads or the edges of fields, you’ll have a much-easier time spotting bucks, which still have their antlers. Then you can judge the sizes of the antlers and the sizes of the bucks. Therefore, at this time of year, your chances of seeing and identifying a big buck to hunt next year are much greater than they’ll be 2 weeks before deer season starts.
 The quickest and the easiest way to locate that trophy buck you want to take next deer season is to ride the roads on the lands you hunt and look for those deer with your Alpen binoculars. Once you spot the deer with your binoculars, use Alpen’s window mount and spotting scope to zoom in for a close and personal look to better evaluate the deer’s antlers and body size. But don’t let your research stop here. Using the spotting scope, study the face and the body of the big buck you locate, and search for identifying marks that will allow you to recognize that buck after he drops his antlers. Then you can look at a group of deer and keep up with that buck throughout the spring and the summer and learn where he’s living, feeding and moving. You also can watch his antlers as they develop. As the buck comes into velvet, his antlers will begin to grow, and he’ll put on mass.
 If you do your initial detective work to locate the bucks with Alpen spotting scopes and binoculars, and you have dependable places to spot the bucks, you can fine-tune your search using motion-sensor cameras as summer fades into fall. These trail cameras will provide you with the dates and the times the bucks are moving on their trails, traveling to and from feeding and bedding areas (including green fields, pastures and croplands), running their scrape lines and using escape routes. This information will enable you to mark the locations on a map with GPS coordinates and save the locations as waypoints on your GPS.
Once you have dependable places where you can spot the buck with your Alpen optics, then as the summer fades into the fall, you can start using trail cameras to determine where the buck is coming from and where he’s going after he leaves green fields, pastures or crop lands.
 By keeping up with that trophy buck’s movement patterns from the end of the season until the beginning of the next season, you’ll be able to work out a game plan, pick out stand sites and know exactly where to hunt when deer season arrives. Also, as you use your Alpen binoculars to locate a big buck and keep up with his movement patterns by driving through the woods and around the fields, you’ll see a lot of deer. If you observe bucks now through the spring and the summer, more than likely you’ll pinpoint two or three or possibly as many as five or more, really-nice bucks you can hunt the next season.
Then you can use a hand-held GPS receiver to reach any of those hunting sites during the day or before daylight, when you have the proper wind for hunting. If you’re a serious deer hunter, now’s the time to use your Alpen optics to find that trophy buck of a lifetime and set up a game plan to take him.
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