First thing first! What is roe buck scouting?
Well, a successful hunt starts with ample preparation. Scouting is the art of planning your hunt, becoming familiar with terrain, and learning the behavior patterns of your roe buck, bust also very important is judging the size of the bucks before the hunters arrival. Modern scouting is divided into two phases, e-scouting with technology like thermal devices and old fashioned “boots on the ground” scouting. Both way requires time and resources.
No matter how you do it, the goal when scouting deer is to figure out the areas that deer are frequenting and how they travel inside those areas.
The roe buck are territorial animals, they live in an area approx 2-3 square miles, except rut time and winter time when they get together in large groups up to 100 animals, sometimes even more.
Roe buck scouting for the hunt that will take part in May is easier have to be done one or two weeks before May first. Vegetation is low and animal are calm because is no hunting pressure. When you scout is important to do it 2 times per day as you were hunting, mornings and afternoons when animals are more active. Is better if you write down all observations and comments in an agenda or in your phone and after 3 or 4 days make the conclusion and have a general idea about the behavior of the buck in each area. Judging the trophy quality when scouting is also a major advantage. No matter how good and experience you are as an outfitter, is one thing to judge the trophy for several occasion, alone and from different angles and distance and another thing to judge the trophy with the client asking if the buck is the right one. If you are a hunter or an outfitter you know that feeling.
The hunting areas in Romania, as I said in several of my articles on my blog, are huge, sometimes bigger than 10000 hectares, So you don’t go for several day in a row for the same buck to make scouting.
Based on the information from the local rangers, you, as an outfitter, make a certain route, a trail inside the hunting area where you will check multiple places where “big” roe have been spot before. Here an important help you will get if you use a good quality of thermal camera. Is better to make the trail one day from point A(departure point) to point B(destination point) and next day you will leave from point B to arrive in point A. This way you will have the chance to surprise more bucks in same area in different time frame.
The same trail(route) you will follow with the hunter too. As I said before the thermal camera will give you an important advantage locating bucks that otherwise will not be seen only with binoculars, especially early morning when the temperature is low, but a good camera will do the job in the afternoon as well.
In May period, when the bucks are territorial and stay in the same area scouting is relatively easy, things are more complicated in the rut time when bucks are searching for the female in more large areas. In the rut is better to start scouting only few days before the hunt as is a big chance that the buck you see one or two days before the hunt to follow the same doe in the same area, after few days the buck will lose interest in the same doe and start looking for another doe, therefore he will be a long distance from the place you saw it 4 or 5 days before the hunt.
That being said, this are only my guidelines in what roe buck scouting, how you do it it depends on you, but remember that scouting can be a major ingredient of a successful hunt.
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