Mark Kenyon’s Whitetail Field Notes: Preparing for the Rut

Opening day has come and gone. The October Lull is fading in the rearview mirror. And, now, the whitetail rut is staring us right in the hairy eyeball. It’s just about here.

As you might have guessed by now, my opening day plan did not go as I’d hoped. In fact, the two bucks I’ve been after in southern Michigan have been complete ghosts. One hasn’t shown since October 3rd. The other, which I wrote about last time, has been AWOL since the beginning of September but did, in fact, show up again. I have a single trail cam video of him, as of last weekend, in the last seven weeks. This is opposed to the nearly daily observations or photos I had of him over the past two years during this same timeframe. Strange, to say the least. All of this is to say, my usual single buck-focused strategy is not panning out this year. They’re simply not here.

Fortunately, there are other options. Such as the absurdly tall brow-tined buck I was able to hunt and kill about two weeks ago in another part of my home state (detailed in this podcast). Or the new buck that showed up around the same time in my main area, who is now making near daily appearances all over the farms I have permission on. He’s an impressive deer, maybe four years old, maybe three? I’ve yet to decide exactly what I’ll do if he waltzes in front of me. Should I shoot or hold out hope that one of my original target bucks, who I know for sure are mature, will return? It might just be an in-the-moment decision.

Nonetheless, the last week of October is here and that means it’s time to turn up the temperature on my hunting plan. Over the next seven days or so (across the upper two-thirds of the country), testosterone levels will be peaking, and bucks will be hard at work finding the first doe to come into estrus. It’s an excellent time to catch bucks moving in daylight and maybe making a mistake or two, all while still mostly sticking to their home core ranges. If you have a buck on some kind of pattern, now is one of the best times to make an aggressive move. Unfortunately, as I just described, I don’t have that situation myself. So instead, I’m on the search.

I’m going to begin hunting parts of my permission properties that I’ve not been able to hunt or scout to this point, but doing so in a way that still takes advantage of normal pre-rut activity. I’ll be hunting the edges of several different doe bedding areas, near the most attractive evening food sources (in my case, oak flats, green food plots, and cover cropped fields), and in range of well-used scrapes if possible too. I consider this a time to ramp up the aggression level of my hunts, pushing a little deeper into the cover, hunting mornings, and adding light calling into the mix.

But I’m not in full-blown rut risk-taking mode either. I’m not pushing into the middle of bedding areas, I’m not hunting all day, and so on. The plan is to rotate around a series of different spots like this, bouncing from one new region to another, until I hopefully get eyes on one of my two mature bucks and uncover exactly where they’ve disappeared to. If that happens, it’s game on.