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- Find the Does. Your next move might not require a move at all if you have scouted well. During the breeding or lockdown phase, bucks relentlessly search for estrus females.
- Hunt the Downwind Sides. Keep in mind that during the breeding phase, bucks become highly efficient. Instead of boldly walking across a field, they might skirt the downwind edges or inside corners to scent-confirm any estrus females.
- Find a Love Nest. You do have another option and whether you make it your main play or a backup, consider looking for a buck love nest. Once bucks find a doe, do they want to parade it through a crowd of potential suitors, or spend more time alone?
- Find a Drifter. By scouting and setting up stands or blinds near highly visited food plots, agricultural fields or the routes in between, you stand a high chance of meeting up with a home territory buck.
- The Pennsylvania Experiment
- Can Older Bucks Affect The Rut?
- What About The Moon?
- Conclusion
In 2002 the Pennsylvania Game Commission implemented new Antler Point Restrictions (APRs). Traditionally if a deer grew at least one antler longer than three inches, or had at least one antler with two or more points, it was defined as an antlered deer and legal for harvest. For decades, 80 percent of antlered deer harvested each year in Pennsylvan...
What effect did this change in the age structure have on the timing of breeding behavior? This is a question we posed before APRs were implemented. Because the rut is about breeding, we can determine when the rut occurs by determining when fawns are born. The way we did this was to check road-killed does for embryos in late winter and early spring....
If APRs did not affect the breeding dates, what about other environmental factors? Does the moon phase affect breeding date? Specifically, how well did the rutting moon—the second full moon after the autumn equinox—predict the rut in Pennsylvania? We can use our data from 1999-2006 to answer this question as well. In the table below we list the dat...
Should we be surprised that timing of the rut was not influenced by changes in the age structure of the population or moon phase? We probably shouldn’t be surprised and for a couple of reasons. First and most importantly, for deer in more northern latitudes, birth date of fawns is timed to maximize ideal rearing conditions. The earlier in the year ...
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Oct 26, 2022 · 5 Mistakes Deer Hunters Make During the Rut. Tony J. Peterson Oct 26, 2022. The rut is the promised land. It’s the great equalizer between hunter and hunter, and hunter and whitetail. It’s a couple-week period that is destined to deliver dumb deer to us, and if we’re lucky, provide a magical encounter or two that makes it all worth the wait.
Nov 1, 2021 · The post-rut begins the last week of the month. Some big deer keep cruising and checking scrapes into the first week of December. Does and bucks congregate both morning and evening near the best late-season food sources—leftover mast, soybeans, corn, browse, forbs. Rut-thin deer feed like pigs to bulk back up before the cold, snowy winter.
Apr 5, 2022 · Ideally, the shorter the time involved in actual breeding/conception, the better for the species. Average gestation from our data, covering almost 50 years, is 198 days. So, a doe conceiving on Nov. 15, 2021, will fawn around June 1, 2022. The tighter the fawning period, the less impact of predators, so we try to manage deer herds to have a ...
- Dr. James C. Kroll
Oct 30, 2023 · The hormone compound is no different in the whitetail buck’s body! Testosterone is an anabolic steroid. This means when it is present in the blood stream in mass quantity, the animal begins putting on muscle at a rapid pace. It gives the animal strength, power and bone density in preparation for the rigors of the rut.
Several data points and observations support this. First, studies have shown bucks forgo feeding during rut by tracking pre- and post-rut weights. According to the National Deer Alliance (NDA), a buck can easily lose 20% to 25% of its body weight during the rut. NDA also provided photos to illustrate the point — one photo was taken in early ...
