Identifying Different Types of Deer Bedding Areas

Discover how to find each kind of deer bed.

Mapping out deer bedding areas on your property is the key to any successful ambush or deer drive all season long.

Print off an aerial photo of the land you’re scouting, so you can make note of areas you spot deer beds. This is a crucial element in patterning the deer to give you a sense of their habits and behaviors.

While scouting, also keep an eye out for other deer signs (deer trails, scrapes, and rubs). This gives you a great sense of where to set up trail cameras, tree stands, and hunting blinds.

It’s important to understand the six different types of deer beds as you prepare for the hunt. If you follow these early-season deer hunting tips, you will increase your odds of bagging the trophy buck this season.

Learn about the different types of deer bedding areas with the help of Blain’s Farm & Fleet.

1. Night Beds

This type of deer bed gives you a valuable starting point for a morning hunt. And it provides insight necessary for locating daytime beds.

Search in places such as crop fields, food plots, oak flats, orchards, and natural wood clearings. You should see food sources nearby, since deer are nocturnal and feed during the evening.

2. Doe Beds

Search near brushy areas adjacent to the night beds you have already located to pinpoint daytime beds of doe family groups, including fawns and yearlings of both sexes.

You can expect doe beds to be 34 to 40 inches long, accompanied by fawn beds 30 to 36 inches long. These beds should be odorless and clean. Oftentimes, you will find deer scat just a few feet away.

3. Bachelor-Group Beds

You can often find these between 1/4 and 3/4 of a mile from night beds in the late summer and early fall. If you are hunting on flat terrain, look for swampy areas and wilderness with dense cover.

Walk uphill along hallows, ditches, and spur ridges to rugged terrain and pockets with dense cover, if hunting in an area with varying degrees of elevation.

4. Loner-Buck Beds

As the name indicates, search for these beds in isolated patches of thick cover, such as a rugged hallows enveloped in deadfalls from a windstorm.

Also, check cover that’s often overlooked, such as a dense thicket along the side of a farmer’s driveway. Look for rubs on trees nearby and large droppings around the bed.

5. Rutting Buck Beds

As soon as the rut arrives, traditional patterns and behaviors mature bucks display throughout the year get thrown out the window. Mature bucks will abandon their thick, remote bedding areas and camp out in doe territory.

This is the time to search doe beds you discovered earlier and look for large, rank-smelling, oval impressions of a single rutting buck.

6. Winter Beds

When hunting season comes to a close, bucks and does begin to bed near one another. However, they are usually segregated by sex.

Look for winter beds on southward facing slopes that receive a lot of sunlight or in thick cover along stream bottoms.

Pay attention to the smallest doe beds because female fawns and yearlings often come into heat a month later. When this happens, the trophy buck of the area will not be too far off.

Hunting Gear Required for Scouting Purposes

To figure out where deer are bedding, feeding, and traveling, you must have the appropriate gear. Shop Blain’s Farm & Fleet for all of your hunting needs this fall.

We have everything from trail cameras to hunting apparel to make scouting more efficient and successful. You can also stop in our stores to purchase your hunting license.

For more guides and how-tos like this one, visit our Hunting Blog.