The True Rut

Here in Montgomery County where I hunt, I saw some minor chasing and I emphasize minor chasing the last week of the season. It is in my opinion that our rut was just kicking in around Feb 6th. I wish they would just back the opening of deer season up two weeks and shut down the season for season for a two week period over Christmas and just extend it on into February until the 24th. Getting multiple pics every day of mature bucks chasing doe right now.

Another thing I would like to see is that they stop allowing folks to shoot quail during deer season. They are only shooting tame cage birds anyway so why does it matter when they shoot them. It is not hunting so I refuse to refer to as such. We had multiple hunts screwed up this year as a result of our neighbors hunting quail and their damn dogs running across the property line. The neighbors even knew we had hunters in shooting houses adjacent to where they were shooting the tame birds and still allowed their dogs to cross over the property line by 200-300 yds.

The rut around here seemed to trickle from the week before Christmas till the end of season, mostly at night. First year I can remember not seeing a buck chase a doe even once. Alot of people around here reporting the same. It was a strange deer season, to say the least.

In Pike County, it seemed on our property the rut was winding down the last few days of the season and from what I've seen on camera since then, seems to be done with now. Doesn't mean there won't be a second one kick in sometime.

I am a little south of you and on my place it is generally at its peak for looking/chasing the last two weeks of January and is usually at its best around MLK day.When the new season started I moved the two week rut hunt up to the last of January and first of February and quickly noticed all the fun stuff was happening the first part of the trip and things got dead the second week.Went back to the last two weeks of January, which this year was spectacular.The last few years my buddy who is local and hunts to season end has seen very little after the 1st.Would not have any problem shutting down a good chunk of December because it is so terrible anyway around my place anyway. Christmas this year you would not think there was a deer on the entire place based on what was seen.

There were a few a chasing mid Jan here but major action was last week of season and week after that's when big boys got moving

Have nighthunter do a conception study. I bet many of you would be very surprised

What would that surprise tell us?

When your deer were actually bred vs the rut activity you’ve actually witnessed

Our deer in Wilcox, and Butler are at peak right now.

I get that, but you acted like you already knew what it would show us and prove us wrong or something, so was curious about what you thought the results would be.

Last year I saw one of my bigger deer nudging a doe through my turkey decoys opening weekend.

Im sorry but I disagree, my place is 5-7 miles from you and I've seen bucks chasing does since the 15th. Theyre still pushing does now, not all the does cycle at the same time as I'm sure you know. there are tons of deer in this area and the does will cycle until until they get bred which may take longer because the deer density is so high. I think the first phase of our rut is the 15-25th of Jan.

What you're seeing right now in Wilcox and Butler is the second group of does, late cycling yearlings and those that did not get bred back in January coming back into estrous. They were breeding does in Wilcox from the 15th through around the 25th or 26th. All dont come in at the same exact time but we saw bucks tending does with the peak being around the 21st. All this current activity is the bucks heating back up and trying hard to find those few does and yearlings that are late coming in or weren't bred the first time. I promise you that if you have a conception/fetal study done on your property, you'll have a bunch that will show as being bred between the 12th and 25th of Jan. Just because you didnt see it doesnt mean it wasnt happening.

While most places in Wilcox I would definitely agree with you on this, but we had very little activity throughout January monitored form the old and around 15 cameras. Even seeing bucks grouped together as late as Jan 28. We are the farthest southeast you can get into Wilcox also.

What you see happening during the day is nothing compared to what is going on at night. Thanks to some clover, a street light, and 15-20 half-tame does…..I was able to watch it all play out in my back yard this year and it really opened my eyes as to when the rut occurs around me. I was also very humbled by what I saw in my backyard at night versus what I could get in my scope during the day. This is what I saw in Macon Co

The bucks started cruising and setting up on doe concentrations approx. Jan 8-18…This is what I’d call the pre-rut….The first stray doe started really getting chased around Jan 19-20…..The peak of chasing activity was Jan 25-28…..Things were going nuts for those few days. There was a lull in action the last few days of the month…Jan 29-31….This is what I’d call the lockdown phase when most bucks are tending a doe. Feb 1-7 saw bucks on the move again. The big boys were moving more as well until they found a doe to tend. This was the tail end of does going into estrous and there was more competition for the few remaining ones. The last time I saw a doe being tended was on Feb 8….after the 10th things kinda just went dead. That’s a brief summary of what I saw. From what I could tell most does were bred between approx. Jan 22 and Feb 8 with the biggest percentage of them probably being bred Jan 28– Feb 1……

I think the rut varies a lot from county to county and even within a county.
And warm weather will make it look like it is either all over or non existent. Whereas it just makes it happen even more at night.
Such as the first week of February when it was in the 70s and even 80.

And the rut itself is kind of a lukewarm rut. I call it a stealth rut.
Because I have never seen a hard wide open rut.
And I think that it mostly happens at night, especially with mature bucks.

Chasing - it is rare for me to see a mature buck actually chase after a doe.
And it seems that it is basically 1s and 2s that do chasing and dogging.
Usually unsuccessfully.

It seems to me that 4, 5 6 year old bucks do 98% of their cruising for does at night.
With most of them it is all done at night.

What I see is that these older bucks do not even have to chase.
They just cruise calmly and with authority.
They just show up slowly walking to check a scrape or doe bedding area or a doe feeding area or a hot trail.
And just by show of authority get a doe to submit.

And you just have to be lucky to be in the right spot when he actually does that in daylight.

Agree with ALL of this.

More competition for less does now, plus less pressure on them. Of course you're going to see more actual rutting activity.

Our first phase "peak" rut in north Baldwin County was around the 24-25th of January.

I'm not interested in the spikes and 2 year old bucks. They are just like teenagers, they will chase anything with legs and hole. I am referring to the mature 5-7 old bucks. I saw two mature bucks shadowing does the last weekend of the season and since setting out 14 cameras on Feb 12th, I have noticed a huge increase in buck activity. Granted some of it is due to no pressure, but the bigger more mature bucks are pushing does right now. We killed bucks the last two weeks of the season that were over 200lbs and if they were winding down the rut at this time, there is no way they would still be carrying that type of weight, unless they are just lounging around in the woods and letting all the does come to them for servicing, which aint happening. Well aware of the doe cycle times as we have seen bucks still chasing doe during turkey season with fresh scraping still going on. I got a pic the other night of a buck that would have easily been 215lbs two weeks ago and the new pic, he would be lucky to hit 180.

It’s weird you said that I was hunting in Macon county on January 31st with 2 other guys. I was sitting a hardwood bottom along a creek bend, another guy was on a road between a pine thicket and hardwoods, and the other guy was on a greenfield. We saw 16 does between the 3 of us and not one buck. But on February 2nd one of those guys killed a big mature 6 point that seemed to be just cruising. We had assumed the rut hadn’t really started yet and was just beginning to pick up. We did have a guy kill a nice 5 point on January 21st that he said cane in behind some does but didn’t appear to be chasing them.

This right here is exactly what Im seeing.

This is the same thing I observed too….The older bucks didn’t really do much chasing from what I could see until the very end...and very little even then. They let the young bucks do all of that and then took over by deep grunting, snorting, snort wheezing, pawing the ground, snapping saplings, and possibly through their intense smell. Someone would be very lucky to have a truly mature buck just stroll out onto a food plot during the daylight. They wouldn’t even walk out of the wood line into the street light at night until competition really ramped up in Feb and it got close to time to actually breed the doe they were tending.

They were very responsive to calling but they always approached very cautiously and never just ran in. They usually slipped in part of the way and then stood and watched for long periods of time. They usually weren’t too far away from the heavy concentration of does though and they didn’t like other bucks moving in on them. I had one of the most beautiful 3 ½ year old bucks I’ve ever seen get completely run off one evening when he came in grunting at the does all willy nilly. One of the mature bucks ran off the hill to the wood line and started intensely snorting at him like I’d never heard before. It sounded like “Fuhhh!!.....Fuhhhh!!!.....Fuhhh!!!.....Fuhhhh!!!!”….. Once he got out of the street light it sounded like the older buck got after him and that was the last I ever saw of him.

If I had to pick one week to hunt in our area it would probably be somewhere around Jan 23-29 time frame. You probably have a better chance of killing a mature buck toward the end around Feb 4-8 but you're gonna have to be set up in just the right spot.

If they shut the season down for two weeks at Christmas where I hunt you would miss the entire rut.

Well, it could be adjusted for the Northern and Southern Zones. I realize that the rut occurs much earlier the farther you head north.

I don’t think the mature bucks just get out and roam aimlessly very much until they just have to. Instead, I think they search out heavier concentrations of does and then stage up on those areas. They probably claim one of the first does to come into heat from the heavy concentration….then another one during the peak of the rut……and then maybe a third one toward the end of the first estrous cycle. I had one mature buck stay in here from start to finish and the others showed up in Feb toward the end when I assume things ran dry where they had been prior. Right now as the second estrous cycle approaches is when I imagine they are the most active from a roaming and chasing standpoint.

Glad to see you back posting, CNC! Interesting observations that you shared.

Thanks!.....After what I was able to observe this year I’ve come to the conclusion that most of us just don’t fully understand what’s happening and why we’re seeing or not seeing certain things. We base opinions off of a small sample of information that we’re able to gather from cameras or while hunting. It just doesn’t paint a complete picture of things though.


For example, if you’re looking for mature bucks to be chasing does as your indication that the rut is happening then you would likely let it pass right on by and your perception would be that it never happened until after the season was over or until really late. Mature bucks don’t have to do that until there’s only a few does to compete for. They don’t really have to compete with 2-3 year olds….I’m calling mature as 5 ½ and older

I agree with this. A few of the guys I hunt with have been hunting that property in Macon county for over 10 years and they said they’ve only seen “True rutting activity” 3 or 4 seasons.

That’s why I try to read what people on here say. Especially you since you live in the area I hunt.

I’ve also noticed from the stories that these guys have told me. Most of the Big deer they have killed down there have been after January 15. Also there are 21 “permanent” stands/shooting houses that don’t get moved around much if any from season to season out of all of those stands only 7 have had more than one big buck killed out of them through out the years and some of the stands haven’t had a deer killed out of them. That of course has nothing to do with when the rut starts. I just think it’s a neat observation

I'm at the Clark County Monroe County line and we had a good rut with young bucks. Big ones probably chasing now. They could start bow season in November and extend season to end of February.

ME TOO!

I have a good friend that is a taxidermist in Troy. He said that the last weekend in January was his best days of the year. He got in 23 bucks on that Saturday. Our deer are usually still working scrapes this late, but on Sunday we were looking at some new land and all the scrapes I saw had not been worked in several days.

I think many hunters are just sitting on food plots and going off of what they see happen in the plots. If you’re gonna have any chance of killing a mature buck or seeing what’s really going on…..then you’re gonna have to back off the food plots a little and concentrate on the doe bedding areas and transition zones. Even just backing off the food plots 30 yards may be all that it takes. What I saw the bucks doing most evenings was following the does to the field but stopping just inside the wood line. They’d stay inside of the cover and watch the does from there. My problem here at my place is the bedding areas are extremely close to my field and there’s just not enough of a transition zone for me to take advantage of. I’m pretty sure they can see me walk out the back door from one bedding spot. The bucks seemed to either be bedded inside of the bedding areas with the doe they were tending or they would be laid up on the edge of the bedding areas watching/scenting major trails leading out of it toward the plots (once the cruising phase was over)….checking for a hot doe to pass by as the does left out in the evenings. You’re either gonna have to catch them in the transition zone between bed to feed or you’re gonna have to catch them just off the edge of the plots skirting the edges and watching the does that are feeding in them or the doe that they’re tending. A shifty wind will kill you though.

Older mature bucks don't chase, they don't have to. They've been around several seasons and know when the does come in heat. They'll keep tabs on a close doe group or two and when the time is right , they get their share.

Saw a study a year or two ago said the "lock down phase " is much shorter than thought if your area has one at all. Too many does out there that the boss buck could be banging to lay up with just one for several days. The only time I've seen a buck breed a doe it was a chance meeting , wham , bam , thank you ma'am. Several studies show many twins have different fathers . Those does are hoes.

We used to have a split season for North and South till Chucky cut his deal to get game check.

In the area of the state I hunt in I would guess 70% of bucks 3 years old and older are killed within a 15-20 day period. Another 20% are killed a month or so later during a 7-10 day window. The other 10% are killed throughout the rest of the season. This happens to be every year. Somewhere around 85%-90% of the does are bred during that first 15-20 day period. During those two periods you will see bucks out cruising for does chasing does and tending does walking around grunting all forms of rutting behavior. everything from spikes to mature bucks. You see more young 1-3 year old bucks because there are just more of them, and by the time they get 4 or older they just don't run around with reckless abandon as much. There are not many mature bucks for the simple fact that they die before they get mature. According to studies 1.5 year old bucks cover more ground during the rut than anyother age class but they do it in a small area. Think 14-15 year boys looking all the time but not going to far from home. 2.5 and then 3.5 year old bucks probably travel greater distances and rut harder than anyother age class this show up in the very high rate of post rut death to these age class bucks think 20-30 year old men they will go anywhere anytime if they think they have a chance. 4.5 and older bucks just do not run around like crazy people over a little tail they probably don't have the testosterone levels of younger bucks or the stamina to do so think 40 -50 year old men they still like it but have a little better sense than they use to, this shows up in there post rut death rate also which is much lower.

The first day I knew I had a mature buck move in was sometime around Jan 15-18….I wasn’t really paying much attention to dates and things at that point. I walked out on the back porch a couple hours after dark to see what was happening one night and saw a young 6 point feeding with the does in the clover patch. I had seen the young buck several times in the week prior but this time he was acting skiddish as all hell. He would put his head down to eat then jump like a booger had got him and stare back down at the wood line. Suspecting that there may be an older buck around, I grabbed my grunt call out of the house and blew it a few times just to see what would happen. Sure enough I heard a deer walk up to the wood line and start pawing leaves. He then walked out into the grown up part of my apple orchard and started using his antlers to snap what I would discover the next day as being dog fennel. He was thrashing chit and making all kinds of racket. (I noticed dog fennel and other saplings freshly broken over more and more after that.) He finally walked out into the edge of street light to see what was going on and stood around just long enough for me to get a good look at him before he disappeared back into the woods. That was one of only two times that I ever got to lay eyes on that buck even at night. You could smell that joker about as loud as a skunk though.

I did a good bit of playing around with calling this year and found out that you can really get them to respond when that doe their tending or doe group their shadowing gets out of their sight. If they think another buck is trying to move in and they only hear it happening then they need to move up and check it out. This is something I think you can use to trick them if the does are feeding in the plots and they’re hanging back and not able to see the situation well…. You’ve got to have a steady wind and be very, very patient though. You just about have to approach it like calling a turkey. Give them a couple grunts and then sit motionless letting them hunt you. I almost pulled it off a couple tines in the aternoons but never could make it happen. Either the wind screwed me or I screwed me by moving at the wrong time.

Ok I've killed a mature buck in montgomery county on the 15th or 16th of jan the last 4 years running. the big mature bucks are moving around more becuase they've bred what does they were going to in their core areas and are now venturing out stll looking for hot does. Just becuase you don't see them on camera doesn't mean they aren't with a doe. I have bucks showing up that I haven't had a picture of since december and they are all run down too.. pretty normal stuff if you ask me. your neighbors killed a 150+ at 3 in the afternoon chasing a doe in late January so I'm not sure how you can say it didn't start until Feb 6th

I didn't say there wasn't some isolated moments where a doe may be coming in early. With as many doe as we have they are going to begin their cycles throughout January but the PEAK of the rut is not until February. And, I have enough cameras out on my place that I pretty know when a cricket farts. I have pics just last week of bucks basically bedding down with a doe. She moves, he moves.

Maybe you have a very skewed buck to doe ratio…..All the does here seemed to come in within about a 14 day window. I’m referring to the first estrous cycle. You could clearly tell when it was over.

Do you see/hear many does walking around alone "bleating"??

Nope we very seldom hear does bleating. Our buck to doe ratio is 2 to 1. That is 2 does to every 1 buck.

I saw one this year right after the main flurry of chasing was over. She came through early one afternoon bleating every 5-10 seconds. She passed by me and went out of sight and then about 30 minutes later she came back through. I could be wrong by I assume that these are does in heat that don’t have a buck to tend them.

I still think you may be missing the first flurry of rutting activity for some reason. It’s just hard to believe that you’re just now peaking from the standpoint of does going into estrous for the first time. Things may be vastly different from here to there I suppose. Tracking calls for that area peaked about the same time as other areas around us. From Jan 25-28, you could walk out on my back porch at any time after dark and hear bucks chasing and grunting. It was wide open for those few days. On Feb 10 I saw 24 deer on my afternoon hunt and not a single one was a buck. Nothing happened after dark that evening either. It was over. I had a few bucks hang around for a couple days after that. I had them respond to some grunting after dark from my porch and heard one of them snort wheeze at another one but by Feb 12 they pretty much all left and I was back to where I started before the rut rolled around.....nothing but does. It all played out from roughly Jan 20 - Feb 8 for the first go around.

I think the crazy weather did have an effect on the rut this year we normally see some chasing but not this year had one pic on a camera of a small buck chasing.
Another weird deal for where we hunt was normally in December we don't see a ton of deer this yet that was completely not the case and actually had some bucks respond to a lil rattling in late December.
I also will add that where we hunt in Indiana the rut was off by 3 weeks later than what it has been the past ten years

How have you verified this?

CNC please expand on the doe bleating, you hear it often? You have some sort of theory ?

I hear it very , very rarely myself.

I hear it very rarely as well. I think when the main flurry of does came into heat in late Jan….. just after that 3-4 day period when I saw things going nuts…..I think during that brief period that there were more does coming into heat than what there were bucks to tend them and breed them. On the front end and back end of the 14-16 day window of does going into estrous then there’s only a few does here and there that are ready and there’s competition for them and they all get bred…… but during that main 3-4 day flurry during the peak when does are coming into estrous all over the landscape….then there’s probably more available than what there are bucks to breed them. This is dependent on buck to doe ratio of course. I think that doe I saw roaming around bleating just after the flurry of chasing was doing so in search of a buck to breed her. She’ll likely be bred on the second cycle. That’s my theory anyhow.

Great read. My small window of experience in Alabama is a mature buck is hard to kill. Every once in awhile one will make a mistake and show himself. Most days you just scratch your head and wonder how it could have been different. Occasionally I get a little down then I remember that I’m in Alabama in late January with a possibility of a mature running a doe by me 2 months after hunting the rut in my home state and bordering states then it’s alright!! Lol. (Might be a run on sentence lol)

The front end and back end of that 2 week window will be like winning the lottery if you get lucky enough to be set up on the few does in heat at the time. This is what I think throws so many people off. You got one guy who sees a bunch of does and no action but then another guy sees multiple bucks dogging one doe and thinks the rut is wide open. When we talk about buck to doe ratio we’re really talking more about the buck to hot doe ratio….that changes by the day during that two week period. The very first doe to come into heat is going to have a chit load of bucks after her but you’re gonna be real lucky to be set up on that particular deer. Same thing on the back end of the window when the last few does are coming into heat. I think this may even be more intense from a competition standpoint as some of the older bucks have to start moving around. It's gonna change by the day from the start of that two week window through the end of it as a few hot does on days 1-5 becomes a lot of hot does on days 5-10 and then back to few hot does. during days 10-15... I’m not even gonna tell what I saw in my backyard on the night of Feb 7 because most folks will likely think I’m full of chit.

Based on camera eveidence, we got our peak in Clarke county around the 26th.

I do agree that it’s all about being set up on the right doe at the right time. They could be wide open a few hundred yards away and you would be thinking all of the bucks are dead/gay.

I have hunted the same property for most of my life and I have seen the peak rut as early as Jan 18 ( that was probably 20 years ago), but in the last ten years the peak has always been around Feb 3-4. This year was an outlier with the peak being Feb 11 through the 15th. On Valentine’s Day this year I got more pictures of mature bucks cruising than I had in the last month total. I would easily give up a few weeks somewhere else in the season for a few more days in February but it is what it is.

It’s my understanding that the timing of does going into estrous varies very little from year to year….Is this correct?......Isn’t what we see as hunters and camera runners what varies more than anything? This could be due to the weather or maybe due to where we have our cameras placed, etc…..

Primary breeding varies very little from year to year. I've heard for years , "the rut was late this year" " it was too warm , they didn't breed " " they ain't ruttin' I ain't seen any chasin". Every excuse in the book , however , 3rd week of July fawns start hitting the ground like always. Just because hunters don't see the activity they think they should doesn't mean it ain't happening. I've been deer hunting nearly 50 years and the same property for 30 . Some years I see low activity during the primary breeding , but I know it's happening.

Visual aid...…..

Absolutely correct.

Agreed

So a doe “coming into estrous” seems to be a several day process from being chased...to being tended.....to standing to be bred...to still smelling but through breeding. Something that I think holds true is that the closer it gets to time for the doe to actually be ready to breed….the more vulnerable the buck tending her becomes. Also, the more competition present during this "ready to breed" period, the more vulnerable the bucks become. There were times when the older bucks wouldn’t come out of the wood line and into the street light. They would do all kinds of vocalizing and give the younger bucks hell once they passed through the light….but they weren’t coming out into it for chit. When those does got ready to breed and competition ramped up though…..then they not only came out of the wood line but they bedded down right beside the doe in the light. Having half tame does made things really interesting since the does didn’t care if they could smell me on the back porch but the bucks did. After agonizing over them not coming out where I could see them well….I horse laughed when I saw them bedded in under the light with the last two does because they no longer had a choice.

It wasn’t nearly as damn funny though when I walked out the back door before daylight to go to my stand with it reeking like rutty buck and those does barely bouncing off from me and no buck to be seen. I let everything grow up this year and all my trails to my stands where through thick sage grass and dog fennel. One morning as the rutty buck smell felt like it was burning my nose..... I paused and thought real hard about heading down that dark trail without using my flashlight to light it all up like a tug boat lighting up the Tennessee River. I didn’t though….I finally just said to myself that if one of them big bastards got me then it would just have to be one hell of story for someone to tell on Aldeer about how I went out.

I do have a couple really interesting encounters I had that I'll share....One was in a ground blind and the other was trying to get some does out from under my stand by snort wheezing one evening just at dark....I'll probably just wait until tomorrow morning to tell those...…..

Dr. Randy DeYoung’s article in Quality Whitetails explained this concept and documented through research that breeding is done by bucks of all age classes, irrespective of the herd’s age structure. Yearlings and 2½-year-olds even get in on the action on the King Ranch in Texas, where more than 50 percent of the bucks are 3½ years of age or older. Randy’s research also showed bucks that successfully breed do not sire many fawns. The most prolific buck in their studies only sired six fawns in a single year, and on one study site successful bucks averaged less than three fawns per year over an 11-year period. Anna Bess Sorin found similar results in a Michigan deer herd where 17 bucks sired 67 fawns for an average of 3.9 fawns per buck. Individual bucks sired anywhere from one to nine fawns in her study.

Dominant bucks don’t monopolize the breeding, and they don’t even sire all of the fawns from each doe they breed. Black bear biologists have known for years that a litter of cubs could easily have more than one father, but multiple paternity in whitetails is relatively new information. Randy and his colleagues were the first to report on this. Their study of captive deer revealed multiple paternity occurred in about 24 percent of compound litters. Approximately one in four sets of twins or triplets had two fathers! This means does are breeding with multiple bucks, which further clarifies that individual whitetail bucks do not monopolize breeding.

Anna Bess then documented the first cases of multiple paternity in free-ranging whitetails. She reported multiple paternity in 22 percent of twins, a percentage similar to Randy’s findings. She also noted bucks that jointly sired twins appeared to be at least one year apart in age (A word of caution, though: these deer were aged using tooth-wear criteria. Recent research suggests this technique can have an error factor of plus or minus at least one year for older age classes).

There are several explanations for the joint siring. Remember, bucks will repeatedly breed does during the 24 to 36 hours they are in estrous. It is plausible in cases of multiple paternity that a buck breeds a receptive doe and then gets displaced or run off by a larger, older or more aggressive buck while the doe is still receptive. The larger/older/more aggressive buck then breeds the doe, and the doe can have fawns sired by each of the bucks. The initial breeder may have been a young buck who was in the right place at the right time before getting displaced by an older buck, or he may have been the most dominant buck in the area but was “run down” from prior breeding activity and was displaced by a more aggressive animal. It is also possible for the doe to breed with other bucks. Behavioral observations and genetic studies clearly show all breeding sequences do not result in conception.

So where does this leave you and your management program? You need to recognize bucks of all age classes will breed does. This is good because it ensures genetic diversity and fitness. As long as adult sex ratios are relatively balanced, it also ensures most does are bred during their first estrous cycle. This timing is crucial to ensure that fawns will be born during optimal fawning dates the following spring – when natural forages for the nursing doe and the weaning fawn are abundant, and fawns have more time to grow before the onset of winter.

This doesn’t mean you can’t intensify the rutting activity in your area or minimize the number of does bred by young bucks. Older bucks generally make more rubs and scrapes, engage in more fights and increase the overall rutting activity in an area. These can all enhance the quality of your hunting experience. Fortunately, Randy’s and Anna Bess’s research also revealed that even though young bucks do some of the breeding, mature bucks do most of it in populations with good age structure. Their research showed bucks 3½ years of age and older sired 70 and 85 percent of fawns, respectively, in populations with reasonable age structure and sex ratios. Thus, all yearlings and 2½-year-olds collectively only sired 15 to 30 percent of the fawns. This is much better than when yearlings and 2½-year-olds comprise 80 to 90 percent of the buck population, such as under many traditional deer management programs, and would thus sire nearly all fawns. The physical and nutritional stress of actively participating in the rut no doubt has an impact on the health and future development of these immature bucks. Also, does appear to select mates based at least partially on age – older does tend to select older mates. If older bucks are not available, older does may spend more time unsuccessfully wandering and searching for them. They will breed with younger bucks but it is typically later in the fall.

So, is a dominant narrow-antlered buck going to create an abundance of narrow-antlered bucks in your area? Breeding strategy suggests not. Plus, about 50 to 75 percent of yearling bucks disperse 1 to 5 miles from their birth range. So, unless you control several thousand acres, many of the bucks born on your area end up somewhere else. If a dominant buck is taken early in the season or lasts several seasons, does this spell trouble for the herd? Again, breeding strategy suggests not. As managers we can’t control or even predict which bucks breed which does in the wild. Fortunately, deer evolved with a breeding ecology flexible enough to withstand the results of poor management on our part. That same breeding ecology produces exceptional results when we manage the deer herd wisely. Wise management includes a balanced adult sex ratio and a complete age structure for bucks and does. Passing young bucks is a great way to ensure there are bucks in all age classes, and even though mature bucks don’t breed all of the does, they do breed the majority of them.

For your area.

Yep…I agree….although most of us should just be able to just change the dates and have something similar playing out. There’s some places though that really strike my curiosity where this probably isn’t as clean. Places like around Eufaula Refuge where deer are rutting heavy in Nov while just up the road the rut is in January. There’s got to be some funny stuff going on in the areas in between. There’re many other areas as well where different rut dates intermingle like Bankhead for example. It would be very interesting if we could know exactly what was taking place across the landscape in these areas. I suspect there have to be a few does coming into estrous from Nov to Jan in these transition areas.

Where I live the middle of that graph would be around 15 Jan. 15 miles from here as the crow flys it would be end of Nov. somewhere between here and there I am sure there is deer breeding from middle of Nov untill the end of Jan.

I have witnessed the bucks chasing the does and grunting from Robert e Lee day to Feb 5th over the years and I dont think the Feb days are a secondary rut in my area
This year we saw the majority of the bigger bucks cruising the last 2 weeks of January

So here’s one of the stories of my encounters with these bucks….

I was in my stand that the boys call the treehouse. It was getting dark and about time to get down. I had 7 or 8 does around me at the time. I try to keep them from seeing me climb out of the stand as much as possible just so they don’t start paying it a lot of attention. For whatever reason I decided to make a loud snort wheeze call thinking that it would startle the does enough to get them away from while I got down. Well, as soon as made the call a deer came charging in from behind me. It was one of the few times I had a buck respond by actually running in. He got to about 60-70 yards and slowed down to a walk. At about 40 yards I could make out the image of deer step out into the trail I use to get to my stand. I looked through my scope and could see him just well enough to tell that he was working the little scrape that was there but I couldn’t tell which buck he was……

I thought “Damn, I sure didn’t want to have to spook one of these good bucks off. What should I do?”….Meanwhile its getting darker and darker. A few minutes went by and I decided to blow like a deer and see if he ran off….Nope, that didn’t work. I made a few more noises at him with no luck. I finally got tired of waiting on him to leave and just decided to stand up and climb down. I hated for him to see me but I was ready to go eat supper. I gathered my stuff up and climbed all the way down out of the tree but the buck still hadn’t run off. When I hit the ground the smell of rutty buck lit up the air. This is when I started getting a little nervous because all I had was the light on my cell phone for a flashlight. Keep in mind that I’m only a few hundred yards from my back door. It's usually no big deal.

I took my phone out and shook it to turn the light on. When I did he finally bounced off but he only went about 30 yards into the thick stuff and stopped again. I guess one of those does was the one he was tending or the group he was shadowing and I’d gotten between him snort wheezing…..It apparently pissed him off. I clicked the safety off of my gun and held it on my hip pointed toward him as I started walking up the trail headed to house. As I approached where he had bounced off..... he jumped backwards another 30 yards or so and stopped again as I walked on off….He never did completely run off though. It was a pretty uneasy feeling knowing that he was in the bushes pissed off at me and might come charging out at any moment....especially with the strong smell of rutty buck on the air like it was..... It did strike my curiosity about using the snort wheeze to call in bucks though.

So how long did it take him to finish?

Ha!.....I’m not gonna lie, I was a little skeered a couple times this year even with a rifle in my hand. Having does that have gotten fairly used to you makes things really interesting when you get in between them and the bucks that are tending them.

The other close encounter was hunting in a ground blind……

This was after I figured out that the older bucks were running up and down the wood line shadowing the does. The wind was blowing up the holler out of the swamp and I could smell rutty buck coming from that direction strong. I made a little ground blind where I could see him working up the wood line and waited. What I didn’t realize at the time was that there was also another buck bedded up on the other end of the holler behind me. About 15-20 minutes before dark I was intently watching down the holler for the buck to come sneaking up the wood line when another buck snorted about 10-15 yards behind me and scared the holy chit out of me. It was thick with privet behind me but the ground is sandy and wet and he snuck right in on me without me ever knowing he was there. He did exactly like I thought they’d do by skirting the edge of the field but this one came from the wrong direction.

Well, I suppose his doe he was shadowing must have been out in the field feeding because he didn’t run off. Instead he bounced backwards about 40- 50 yard and started going ape chit snorting and making noises. I tucked in behind the tree I was using for cover and gave him a snort wheeze and a long deep grunt but he wouldn’t come in far enough for me to see him through the thick privet that was behind me. That’s when it hit me that I better not forget about the other one in the swamp that I’d been smelling all evening. I spent the next 15 minutes as it got dark looking back and forth wondering if I should be more concerned with killing the buck in the swamp or being charged by the pissed off buck behind me. It finally got dark enough that I just said the hell with both of 'em....I'm getting out of this thick chit and back to the house.

You also have to remember that the calendar gets off by several days every few years. Like this coming Thanksgiving is on the 28th, last year it was on the 22nd, so saying thanksgiving is the peak of the rut in your area, well that can change from year to year.

The “noises” that buck was making in conjunction with the snorting sounded like something a stud horse would make when they’re pissed off. That's the only way I know to describe it. I heard one making the same noises during the peak of the chasing phase one night. There was an older buck that would stand off to one side of where all the does were feeding in the clover patch and as the younger bucks filtered through, he would charge after them making those pissed off sounds before returning back to his spot where he was watching the does from. I guess that’s their way of trying to run off the young un’s. I had another buck that I believe was a 4 ½ year old that I saw come out of the woods all bowed up and strut around my field in a loop 3 or 4 times grunting every 10 seconds or so. I think he was pretty much doing the same thing…..showing his dominance to the young bucks that were running wild. I ended up seeing him one afternoon and let him walk. He was a solid 8 point just outside the ears but his G3’s were short and I had already decided to hold out for one of the really good bucks I knew was creeping around.

They have pretty much stopped rutting as far as chasing or shadowing does but they are still fighting. Got several pics in past 48 hours of bucks fighting but they are reforming into their bachelor groups.

It should be about time for any does that weren't bred on the first cycle to come back into heat if they cycle back in after 28 days. I figure that if any were missed then it was most likely during the peak of the first estrous cycle. That would be around the very end of Jan for me which should put them coming back into heat pretty soon.

It's funny to me that QDMA has been preaching that we should hammer does to have a "more intense rut phase". Based off your experience, as well as common sense, this mostly happens at night, and only lasts a week or two. Hardly a reason to nearly extinct a doe population. I'd rather see deer all year.

I don’t think there’s anything you can do that’s really gonna change that two week window of does going into estrous. I think that’s probably just natural variation in the timing of each individual doe coming into heat. You could increase the amount of competition for them during that period though by having a better buck to doe ratio….along with decreasing the amount of does that get missed during the peak. I think having mature bucks in the population also alters things and keeps young bucks from over stressing themselves. Old bucks don’t compete with young bucks….they just shut them down and send them on their way.

I think you just need to have some perspective on things and not look at every situation with a cookie cutter solution. For example, my little spot here is loaded with does and there are very few bucks that live here outside of the rut. So for pretty much 48 out of 52 weeks my mature buck count is zero. Does that mean I need to shoot a bunch of does? I’m just off the edge of some urban/rural interface and back in the direction of “urban” are all kinds of awesome little hidey holes where a buck would love to lay up and get old. Patches of woods within town….old run down lots that have grown up, etc…..Places that aren’t hunted and are less than ideal fawning areas so not a lot of does. When the rut kicks in those bucks leave those little hidey holes where they spend most of the year and they move to where the does are at. It becomes an All or Nothing type situation for me.

The bucks go to where the does live during the rut and as it gets later and later in that two week window….they really concentrate hard around areas with high doe concentrations to catch those last few. Bucks just kept showing up here as the rut progressed through those two weeks. I had about 20 does using my field during the last week of the season while the neighbor was blasting away on their fields and used the last week to finish up doe management and keep them in check. On the night of Feb 7 I walked out on the back porch and had two hot does bedded down under the street light with somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-20 bucks around them. It was hard to tell exactly how many there was. A few bigger ones were bedded with the does and others were standing in my apple orchard behind them and filtering in and out. I had seen 8 on my morning hunt that day and I realized why that night. Those were likely two of the last does to come into heat around me and they were on my place while the neighbor was shooting the chit out of ‘em on his. It was short lived though because most of them were gone by the next night and only a few older bucks remained from what I saw.

I’m just using this an example of how things don’t work out as neat as the math. Things just don’t happen that evenly across the landscape and they change with the seasons or by the day during the rut. Each person will have to decide for themselves if they need to shoot does and when they shoot them. For me as a small land owner….that herd of does is my meal ticket. I’ve got to just do a better job of setting things up specifically for killing mature bucks….be more disciplined hunting the wind…..and spend my time in the woods when things are right. I’ve been mistaken about when the rut actually goes down in the past thinking that it was happening earlier than it actually was…..I also recognize the phases of the rut much better now and know how I should be tweaking things a little with each phase.

Enjoyed the post CNC

Same with us on our small family place. We feed those does and leave them alone only for the big boys to show up for those 2 weeks. Still sometimes it just doesn't happen in the daylight but at least we have a fighting chance with the "live bait"

Thanks man....I snapped this pic today to show what some of the bucks have been doing to the dog fennel and other small saplings. I assume this is part of a display of aggression or dominance toward other bucks.

I've hunted the same property (950 ac.) for 46 years.
When I think I have things figured out, everything does
a 180.
The influence of the northern sub-species seems to show
up some years by a little earlier rut, but it changes.
I've always considered Jan. 10 to 15 as the moving, looking
phase of the pre-rut. This bears out most years.
Conception date studies (but few samples) run from Jan. 20
to Feb. 5.
We had lots of chasing tracks last week. Haven't looked
very closely in the past 5 or so days.
The running and chasing on our place probably happens
during dark hours more than a significant amount of the time.
Our place was cut, sprayed, and burned on a majority of the acreage,
recently.
Similar to most places, the rut starts with younger bucks
kicking in well before the mature bucks get active. And for
the "weather has no influence" people, I would disagree in
that there is more movement in cold weather during the rut
in daylight hours. Also, some of the best chasing and foolish
acting happens on very windy days.
So much for the ramblings. However, listen to our very
knowledgable biologists. They may not be able to judge
things you are seeing in one particular spot, but they dang
sure can be close.
SO, IF WE ARE ABLE TO GET SOME OF THESE GUYS BACK
ON HERE, DAMMIT, BE CIVIL. BELIEVE IT OR NOT, THEY
KNOW MORE THAN WE DO.

What do you mean by "We".....Do you have a rat in your pocket???

Sorry, excluding Coach K. 😚

There’s a lot of smart folks on here. I don’t have anything against the “biologists” and I enjoy them participating…..but sometimes y’all act like them and only them have the capacity to understand this stuff. It’s not theoretical physics or anything and these guys are just regular folks like the rest of it. I say that as someone who’s been in a club and shared camp with our regional biologistt Bill Gray and someone who sat in class right beside the wildlife biology students and took many of the same classes…..A lot of knowledge can be gathered from spending time observing things with an open mind. My neighbor doesn’t have a degree in wildlife biology but I bet she understands wildlife behavior better than many of our young biologists. She probably spends 250+ days a year in the woods with a camera. There’s also something to be said for wisdom that can only come with age. Young people are just too over confident in what they know to know that they don’t know it all or have it all figured out. I’ve been as guilty as anyone.

Harold, you are an exception. Seeing you and equating you
with a knowledgable biologist, would be like having Fred Sanford
run the diamond room at Tiffany's. --- Ok, joke!! ---
What I'm saying is there is alot we can learn from these guys.
Just hold on to your feelings and listen to them, which is
what we all can get better at to gain a little from the actual
research side of the business. What you and I see and experience
often ties in with these guys. It just gets lost in interpretation.
A down to earth, come to Chuck seminar would be good. Eye to
eye contact. No button pecking. Ask your questions and learn.
It won't happen. So, these biologists volunteering to be guinea
pigs is what we get. We just need to give them a chance to
express themselves. They are all good folks and want to help.