From my perspective, I stand an OK chance of seeing a buck during bow season. I have yet to place a camera on my hunting lease where I have daytime buck pictures after about 2 weeks of bow seasoon. I think part of the problem with a club is you have turnover, and each year, new people come in, and they wait to scout until September or so. That plus you have activity pick up for field prep, planting, stand/shooting house maintenance, and all of a sudden, the deer are smelling way more human presence than before. If your lease is timber company property, then you have all these pine thickets that bucks can hole up in, and rarely if ever need to come out of. And I think you just flat have very inexperienced people who come out to hunt, and they don't pay attention to the wind, and that doesn't help either.
I personally think the ability to kill a doe a day hurts the chances of seeing bucks during the day. I think if a buck sees doe's moving about throughout the day, then he will probably do the same.
I am trying to work towards not shooting a doe off a green field for a couple years and see if we can get some doe's more comfortable feeding in them during the day. We stopped letting people bait green fields this year, and I think those results have been positive. I also put up a list of stand sites with the proper wind direction to hunt them, but I don't think everyone follows that either. Also since we didn't get to set up our property with deer hunting as the primary activity, we have to live within the limits the timber company places on us.
And I need ways to get close to buck bedding area's, but honestly, when they get in the middle of a pine thicket, there isn't an effective way to hunt them, short of zipping thru there with a skid steer with a forestry head on it, and creating ways to slip in quietly.
