By Eric Bruce

Three elements that go a long way toward helping you put a tag on a buck are rut sign, a pinch point, and lightly hunted land. Dakota Owens and his father, Chris, found and utilized all three and did indeed fill a tag—with the tremendous Georgia ten-pointer shown here.

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By Scott Bestul

The breeding peak has long passed in much of the region, which is a good news/bad news affair. The bad, of course, is that the long-awaited crazy time has slipped away for another year. The good news is actually two-fold: There’ll be another (though minor) wave of rut activity in the next week or 10 days, and bucks will find those late-cycling does (and newly cycling fawns) near food sources. If you can find a hot food source now, your chances of getting close to a nice buck will skyrocket. Guess correctly on your stand site—like Logan Marum did on the dandy Wisconsin buck shown above—and you can still tag a monster. [ Read Full Post ]

By Brandon Ray

These reports focus on the whitetail rut, but there are mule deer as well as whitetails in my part of Texas. Year-round observations of muleys on our ranch in the Panhandle indicate that their rut starts later than whitetails. Typically, the muley bucks start acting interested in girls about Thanksgiving. But not until December 1 or later do they really start chasing and acting goofy. While November is the month to hunt rutting whitetails in the central and northern half of Texas, December is the month to see mule deer in the rut. [ Read Full Post ]

By Mike Bleech

Rutting behavior has been unusual this year, and more evidence of that comes from David Hartman, president of the New York State Whitetail Management Coalition. There are many scrapes and rubs in his southern Catskill region, but this year there is a new twist to it: Deer have been using pine and hemlock as licking limbs over scrapes.
 
“I’ve never seen them do that before,” Hartman said.
 
Bucks were chasing does during the first week of rifle season, which started November 17 in his area. But that has ceased. He attributes it to the normal behavior of deer being mostly nocturnal once firearms season opens. [ Read Full Post ]

By Scott Bestul

In case you haven’t been keeping track, we’re into our third month of reporting on the 2012 rut here at Field & Stream. That’s a lot of information, stories, and analysis, not only by our reporters, but also from the experts they interview. I’m enjoying my 40th deer season this fall and I’m still learning from them.

South Central reporter Brandon Ray brought up an excellent point—and a needed skill—as he discussed the rut in his area: the art of tracking and monitoring the rut each fall, then using the information from past years to not only forecast next year’s rut, but decide on the best techniques to use as the season unfolds. One of the most common mistakes made by deer hunters (and I know because I made it again this fall in Wisconsin) is to slightly miss the signs that mark the onset of serious rut activity. This omission puts us one step behind the deer...which is rarely a good place to be. [ Read Full Post ]

By Mike Bleech

Hunting a new area is always fun, especially when you find as much deer sign as I’d found on a farm country wood lot in northwestern Pennsylvania where I had gained hunting permission. Somewhat surprisingly, but keeping in line with the unusual rut this year, I found no scrapes and just one rub on a finger-size sapling.
 
Late in the afternoon, with my wife, Jeri, on stand about 50 yards to the east from my stand, I started calling, using my bleat-grunt-grunt sequence. It seemed like the perfect time and place to do so, since we were close to land where we could not hunt, and we knew of no other hunters in the area. [ Read Full Post ]