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As chance would have it, Cook and his colleagues collected deer from Choccolocco WMA in Cleburne and Calhoun Counties this year. The average date of conception was December 10th. �This WMA was restocked in the 1940s with deer from North Carolina,� says Cook. �This is the main reason it has an earlier rut date. Most areas in Alabama were restocked in the 1950s and �60s with deer from southwest Alabama.�
In most parts of the state, the rut starts in January, which Gray noted, tilts the odds in your favor. Studies of deer fetuses are ongoing to determine exact breeding dates in the state and thus the rut. The average conception date appears to be Jan. 20.
"That's the actual date that the doe is bred," Gray said. "So you would expect to see an increase in chasing, scraping and bucks just out on the hoof looking for does a week to 10 days before that."
While mid-January is the average rutting date for most of the state, it varies somewhat in a few locations.
The rut tends to occur in December in the Pickens County area of west central Alabama, Gray observed.
The deer along the Chattahoochee River in the southeastern part of the state tend to breed in November, as do some deer in the Bankhead National Forest in the northwest.
"The different rut dates are apparently indicative of different genetic populations of deer," Gray said. "But we can't say that with 100 percent certainty. Many areas in our state were stocked with native Alabama deer, and those deer have a January rut date. But we also have some areas that were stocked with deer from Michigan and North Carolina that rut earlier."
Research has documented average conception dates in Alabama occurring around Thanksgiving, mid-December, early January, and even into early February. For most of Alabama, the peak of breeding season, or the rut, occurs around mid- to late January.
Mean date of conception was 21 January (n = 778; SE = 0.594), and mean number of fetuses per gravid doe was 1.749 (n = 780; SE = 0.019). We detected a sex ratio for the entire study that was slightly skewed towards males (52.1%), but this did not differ from equality ([X.sup.2] = 1.0913; P = 0.296). Sex ratios for the six conception periods did not differ from equality (P > 0.25; Table 1), but we did detect differences in proportions of males when comparing periods. When comparing the sex ratio of the first 3 periods against that of the last 3 periods, we found that a greater proportion of males (54.79%; [X.sup.2] = 4.28; P = 0.039) were conceived during the first half of the breeding season than during the second half (49.01% males).
