2009 is providing rare weather conditions for North Dakota/Minnesota muzzleloader and late season bow hunters.  Temperatures in the 30- to 40-degree range have made getting out in the field more tolerable than in other years.  If you are fairly new to muzzleloader or bow hunting, this gives you a perfect opportunity to test it out without a large investment in cold weather gear.

Conventional wisdom says that by this time of year hunters shouldn’t “waste” all day sitting in a tree stand (is anytime spent outdoors truly wasted?).  In a normal year, the cold would push the deer from their feeding grounds to their bedding area fairly quickly.  It has been my experience though that given warmer temperatures the deer will take longer than usual to bed down.  Sit back, give them time, and enjoy the outdoors.  If your equipment already contains the clothing normally required to hunt at this time of year, you will be very comfortable sitting for an extended period of time.

With the shorter days you are going to want to focus on bedding areas as opposed to the feeding grounds you would focus on early in the season.  Without the snow packed into the CRP (Conservation Reserve Program) and shelter belts like it normally would be, hunters have a good opportunity to walk into some of those areas that would be prohibitive in other seasons.

Even with the warmer weather it is still important to remember to layer your clothing.  You’ll get warm while you are walking, but you will cool off quickly when sitting.  It is very easy to overestimate your ability to tolerate the cold while you are moving around.  It gets cold awfully fast when that slight breeze takes a hold of you in the tree stand.  It’s best to have too much clothing and not need it, than not enough and wish you had it.  A staple in my bag is a pair of Glomitts.  They keep my hands pretty warm, and it’s easy to slip off the mitten part to work a string or trigger.

Late November and December hunting is more of a solitary act than the November rifle season.  The landscape is no longer spotted with little orange people, the periodic crack of the rifle is replaced with…silence.  It’s a time of year when an outdoorsman can reconnect with the land.  Take advantage of this favorable weather while you can, in this part of the country it changes, quite literally, overnight.