Where are the bucks?

It’s not a big buck but seeing it today would have made me feel good.

The only sound I heard in my tree stand today was that of the northwest wind soughing through the branches. The temperature plummeted to a chilly 27 degrees, early this morning and even though the wind was a bit more than I'd prefer, it didn't stop some of the deer from moving.

A couple of does and fawns eased out of the tag alders 250 yards away, walked up a low hill, and stood there like sentries checking out the battlefield below. The deer fed up high, eased on down through the field, fed some more, crossed a woods road, and entered a low-lying tag alder run near my stand.

I sat quietly, dressed warmly in my Scent-Lok suit, and waited for the deer to arrive. It was my hope they would pick up a buck along the way, and bring him in close to me. The logic was sound on my part, but something got lost in the translation for the deer.

Uncooperative whitetail bucks. A day when few deer of either sex moved.

They got into the tag alders, jumped the creek, and headed east into another big field. Perhaps a trolling buck found one of the does to his liking but I suspect those antlerless deer old enough to be bred, had been.

There was no deer grunts near me. The bucks were apparently bedded down or up and moving elsewhere ... but not in my neighborhood.

The does and fawns didn't come my way. They didn't go to another hunter a quarter-mile away, and they apparently failed to rouse the interest of any nearby bucks ... if any existed.

It was one of those morning and evenings when nothing much moved until well after dark. Driving out the woods road revealed a buck here, one a mile farther down the trail, and a sprinkling of does and fawns. There didn't seem to be many deer moving, and no pattern to their movement.

The rut sometimes happens this way. The first round of does get bred early in the rut, and then several days may pass, and another spurt of rutting activity seems to kick in about Nov. 8-10. and it will be good again until the Nov. 15 firearm opener.

The mid-day hours are really my favorite rutting time to hunt, and I find far fewer hunters afield. It's easy to make your way to a tree stand or ground blind, and seldom will we bump into a deer, and then from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., the chances of seeing bucks on the move seem to increase.

A few deer moved on the drive home but not many.

It doesn't always work out this way. Nothing about deer hunting is cast in stone. There are some days when rutting activity seems to slow down. Blame it on the weather, too much hunter traffic in the woods, nasty weather ... whatever. There are days when mid-day bucks are on the move, and days when they are not. Go figure.

Right now it's tough for me to hunt anytime except from 4 p.m. to the end of legal shooting time. Admittedly, it may not be the best time to hunt, but we get away when we can. We work with what we have, and next year things will be different.

I've hunted many years during the rut, and this one has been one of the strangest seasons I've seen. But deer hunting means going through days of little or no deer movement, and days when the deer are constantly on the move.

We just have to live with what we have, and try again the next day in hopes that things shift around. You see, for me, deer hunting is far more important than deer killing.

Still, it's nice to see deer up close and within bow range.

Posted via email from Dave Richey Outdoors