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Never Underestimate the Rut

Never Underestimate the Rut

By P.J. Reilly

Some things in life are guaranteed.

The sun will rise and set every day.

Death will take us all.

The whitetail rut will occur around the same time of year — regardless of the weather.
El Nino reared its ugly head in early November 2015 around my home in southeast Pennsylvania. It was ungodly hot, with daytime highs in the mid 70s. The mid-70s in November, for crying out loud!

This was supposed to be prime time for bowhunting, the best of the best in terms of catching bucks roaming at any time of the day in pursuit of hot does. But in that kind of heat? Forget it, right?

That’s the way I felt, and so did my hunting buddies. We just figured someone would hit the pause button, and the rut would resume when temperatures were colder. One thing was sure: It was a waste of time to sit in a deer stand.

Regardless, the season was set to close the next week. I figured if I was going to waste time, it might as well be in a treestand. So I headed out on the afternoon of November 6. The temperature was 75 degrees, and the wind was ripping.

Hot and windy on a November day? This is as bad as it gets, I told myself.

Sweat trickled down my temples as I swayed in the tree. My spot was impeccable. I was at the end of a fencerow overlooking a tractor path that separated a line of trees from a small woodlot in a tucked-away corner of a friend’s farm. It’s the ultimate cruising spot for lovesick bucks.

With the same amount of enthusiasm I have to mow the grass, I went through my normal, rut-time calling sequences: a doe bleat from a can call, followed by a few excited burps from a grunt call … wait 20 minutes and repeat.

Imagine my surprise when I looked up after one of my sequences and saw a nice 8-pointer walking through the woodlot directly toward my stand. It was so unexpected I got extremely nervous. My heart began to pound, my knees weakened and my hands shook as I stood and grabbed my bow.

The buck came to the edge of the woods and looked around for the deer he’d just heard. I drew back my bowstring when he walked through a strip of Indian grass to get to the tractor path. With the deer standing barely 10 yards in the clear, I took aim and released my arrow.

When the buck bolted off and crashed, I couldn’t help thinking, man, it’s hot!

But that didn’t stop the rut.

After cleaning my gear the next day, I pulled the card from the camera behind my house. It showed a nice buck I’d been waiting for all season walking around another one of my stands in the middle of the afternoon November 4th and 6th. The camera temperature stamp said it was 75 degrees.

Countless studies have shown the whitetail rut has nothing to do with weather. Heat, cold, wind, rain, snow — none of it matters.

Photoperiod is what triggers the rut. That’s the amount of daylight during a 24-hour interval. When it hits a certain point in the area where you hunt, “a series of hormonal events are set in motion that result in egg development and release, and the behavioral changes that make female deer particularly attractive to bucks and receptive to their attention.” This, according to the Mississippi State University Forest and Wildlife Research Center.

The right photoperiod where you hunt is going to be about the same from year to year, so the rut is going to occur about the same time each year.

A study by the Pennsylvania Game Commission showed 90 percent of does checked by biologists in my home state had conception dates ranging from October 27 to December 10. That’s the width of the rut. Somewhere near the middle is peak breeding time.

There are exceptions in the deep South, however, where the width of the rut is much broader. According to Mississippi State, does in Gulf Coast states can be bred any time from late summer through late winter.

Analyzing deer within the state of Mississippi, biologists found varying peak breeding periods from late November through mid-February in different regions. What the researchers noted, however, is no matter when the peak period occurred in a given region, the peak always spanned 21 days. 

While the span of peak breeding lasts weeks, individual does are in heat only for 24 to 48 hours. If they aren’t bred during that time, they’ll come back into heat in 21 to 30 days. Bucks seem to know the breeding window for individual does is short. That’s why you see such fierce competition for a hot doe.

I was sitting in a stand on Maryland’s Eastern Shore one November day, when I heard the unmistakable sound of running deer. Occasionally, a big doe would pop into view with a buck hot on her heels. He was grunting like a fiend the whole time. Those two deer ran around my stand for 20 minutes. During that period, new bucks kept showing up. They’d spar with each other, and/or chase the doe.

Running deer, grunting, antlers clacking — it was the ultimate calling sequence, and I didn’t have to make a sound. I just stood at the ready, bow in hand, and waited.

Soon enough, the chase came close enough to my perch, and I zipped an arrow through a fine 10-pointer. The key to my success that day was simple: Right place, right time.

Let’s go back to the estrus window. Since the rut in most places should be viewed as a bell curve where the number of does coming into heat builds to a peak and then tapers off, there’s going to be a rush of activity around the peak of the curve, regardless of weather. 

That peak in the number of estrus does is nature’s way of ensuring at least some fawns survive. It sets the stage months in advance for fawns to be born around the same time in the spring. The average gestation period for whitetails is 200 days. Using that figure, does bred on Nov. 6 in my hunting area would be born right around May 25, which matches what I’ve seen on my trail cameras and with my own eyes.

If a large number of does give birth around the same time, fawns have a greater chance of surviving predators. The fawn crop overwhelms the predator population. Coyotes, bobcats and bears will get some, but they won’t get them all.

I know November 5-10 is always a hot period for rut activity around my home, so I shouldn’t have been surprised that 8-pointer came so readily to my calls on November 6, even though it was close to 80 degrees. That buck probably had encountered other bucks chasing hot does that day and wanted to get in on the action.

What causes hunters to believe unfavorable weather is delaying or suppressing rut is the weather can impact daylight deer movement. High temperatures, high wind and heavy rain can stifle daylight deer movement, even during the rut. That doesn’t mean those factors will affect deer movement. It just means they might have an impact.

So, if it’s 80 degrees in the peak of your typical rutting season and you aren’t seeing bucks, it likely means they are chasing and breeding does after dark, when it’s cooler. It doesn’t mean the does aren’t coming into estrus, or bucks aren’t breeding them.

“In contrast to many hunters' perceptions, weather has absolutely no influence on the timing of breeding behavior,” Mississippi State biologists report. “That is, when a doe comes into estrus there will always be a buck there to court and breed her. Given that a female's breeding cycle is controlled by her internal hormone levels, the outside temperature isn't going to affect when she is in estrus.”

The point is, once you figure out roughly when the best rutting activity occurs where you hunt, plan your vacation accordingly from year to year. It’s not going to vary much from that period.

“Rarely will the timing of the rut change from year to year,” Mississippi State biologists have found. “If it does, it is not linked to moon phase or temperature, but more likely changes in habitat, herd demographics or precipitation, making it that much more unpredictable.

“If nothing has significantly changed from one year to the next in your area, you can plan on circling the same two weeks on a calendar year after year as can't-miss hunting."

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