Traditional deer season may be behind us, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still do some hunting. The difference is you will be hunting antlers or sheds and not the deer themselves. With the prime shed season still to come, you have time to get ready, and if you’ve never done it before, learn some tips to help you get started.

Finding sheds used to be something that just happened. Few people were looking for them, so it was more a matter of luck while hiking, scouting for spring turkey, or just getting outdoors. Now, shed hunting is a pastime, with some devoting almost as much time to finding a shed as hunting the deer that dropped it. Lucky for you, shed hunting does not require any special equipment and will utilize many of the same skills and lessons learned from deer hunting.

First, you need to know when deer will start dropping their antlers. For most of Pennsylvania, the prime time is mid-February to April.

Many factors can affect when a buck drops his antlers, including age, health, environment and genetics. Younger deer tend to drop later in the spring, while an injured or ill deer may fall as early as late December or early January. A good food source and bedding cover will allow deer to hold antlers longer, like when hunting; learning your local herd is the key to success.

Knowing when to look is only the beginning. The biggest change is knowing where to look. While a buck’s territory may cover a vast area, their winter activities will be more localized. They are no longer looking to breed but to survive the winter. Bucks will need a reliable food source, a safe bedding area that provides shelter from the weather, and water. The closer these are to each other, the better. This is where a buck will spend the majority of the winter months.

You can further reduce your search area by using your trail cameras. By placing a trail cam in a likely area, you can not only see if there are bucks nearby but also whether or not they have dropped their antlers yet. Place some food near the camera, and you will have more bucks, better shots of their antlers, and may even find some that shed right there as they feed.

Even with pictures and a deep knowledge of deer movements, finding antlers in acres of woods or fields is still like finding a needle in a haystack. Despite what many think, antlers blend into the forest floor more than expected. The only way to counter this is to train your eye and do a lot of careful scanning. But you can increase your odds.

The dropping of antlers is purely random. No lever or switch makes it happen, and nothing says both will drop at the exact location or even on the same day. But there are some things to move the process along — being jarred, rubbing on something, or getting caught. You can use these outside influences to narrow your search even further by looking at the crossing where deer need to jump over some things, heavy brush where they can get tangles, or bedding areas where antlers may drop while getting up and down.

While you can expect to put a lot of miles on your boots during your first few hunts, finding your first shed will make it all worthwhile. Finding sheds of a deer you have watched all season or even consecutive sheds season after season will be like finding the Holy Grail.