Aldeer.com Forums Alabama Deer Talk Serious Deer Talk Forum Map of Alabama deer restocking program

They are representing “peak rut” for the green a little wrong……The actual peak is 23-28…….Feb 8 is the extreme tail end of the 1st cycle…….The brown is likely just about 10 days earlier…..it may be a full two weeks ahead……I’ve seen a few strays over the years hot early around the 9th……..I’m pretty sure this is a “variance” deer….. but after that nothing happened for another 10-14 days until we hit the later rut …….I believe estrous dates are actually a lot tighter than most folks think within each population of does….Lets just say we have a population dominated by late January breeders……all of those late January does are gonna have a bell curve of estrous dates that is fairly tight and pretty much any individual population would naturally have a similar width bell curve…… The reason the rut lasts longer though in different areas is the variance caused by overlapping bell curves. Extreme south Alabama where folks have historically been complaining about late ruts probably has a rut that natural selection has shifted back another week or 10 days and they likely do have a peak date in early Feb the same way you see the brown area doing 10-14 days earlier……It would appear to be slightly changing as you move north/south because if you were to continue this progression southward moving it forward and forward you would eventually find yourself in the Keys with a rut in July.

I think the reason nature is choosing for a transition like that is due to how the vegetation changes during fawn drop. It’s following the timing of the plant cycles. Nature is choosing to have fawns during a period that matches a certain stage of vegetation growth……This is why its changing the way it does north to south because of the way the seasons change in timing. It seems to be the same concept with turkey poults…….Nature matches up the babies being born with the proper plant stage of food and cover for them……This would be an important concept to understand if we want to take measures to help the populations because this is really pointing us toward what nature says is “optimal”. It would stand to reason that over time natural selection would want to move it back to this smooth north to south transition though that may take a while and we may be hampering that. In a nutshell what this is saying is that the timing of the availability of certain (plants) nutrients influences reproductive rates.

Just a side note to some currunt observations......Coyotes are a much more strategic chess player in this game than we give them credit for……They are far and away not doing things randomly……They are hyper-focused on food sources and they learn patterns of mortality very well…….