One factor IMO is the quality of the forage. The poorer the forage the longer they eat and the more likely they are to daylight feed. They also tend to feed longer as the weather turns cooler and the days get shorter, natures way of telling them to fatten up for winter. Not the only factor, but *a* factor. After the harvest here and most of the prime eats are gone, they tend to feed earlier in the evening and latter in the morning.

The Rut usually changes all this. You see Deer on bald hills in the middle of the day and other oddities.

Finding where they bed is good advice. But getting too close to a bedding area is likely to upset them for a few days at least and/or push them to an alternate area. I try to pre-season scout to find the beds and keep a hundred yard buffer during hunting season.

A lot of their wandering is due to diet, if they don't get the trace elements they need their noses lead them to plants with those trace elements. And they can travel a long ways if the deficiencies are strong enough.

One example near here is profound, a (mostly) Pine forest with sparse forage, Deer favor it in the summer, feed the areas where the daylight lets anything grow. Mostly poor sandy soil, nitrogen poor. A couple of times a year they migrate a dozen miles to a lower area with clay soil, different forage, stay awhile and then migrate back to their normal haunts again. There is actually a thousand year old path worn/compacted a foot lower than the forest floor leading to the mineral rich area.