RUT REPORT
The browless buck and a younger 7 we saw together often throughout the summer months
October 7th-October 13th
Zachary Glay
The best time of the year is finally here. Deer season is upon us and we now have the opportunity to grab our bows and head into the woods to chase those special creatures called White-tailed Deer! In a new segment on the website titled Rut Report, we will be putting out a new installation weekly. In this we will review what happened this past week, weather, hunts, buck movement, etc. and look forward to the following week and predictions. Based mostly out of southeast Ohio, we will primarily focus there but will key in on any stories or movements we hear about elsewhere.
Week in Review: The first cold front of the year is here. With temperatures dipping into the 30’s at night and even the days hovering in the crisp 50’s, bucks are beginning to shift into pre-rut action and scrapes are heating up! We moved a couple cameras into rut positions and saw an uptick in doe movement as well. Those cameras began to see bucks sparring, running alone, and hitting scrapes on a somewhat regular basis.
Hunt Recap: With one doe down and a cold front moving in, we thought this week would hold some surprises, and boy did it! We had 3 hunters in the woods in southeast Ohio. I was able to hunt only one morning, while Cary (our dad) and Josh got a few good sits in. While my dad and I got to see good doe and small buck movement, Josh had the week to talk about. He saw some good up and coming bucks spar and push each other around, great doe movement, and even had a close encounter with our top consistent hit list buck. On a morning sit, a buck we call Browless pushed a smaller seven point around and chased him off before freshening a scrape and walking away himself. The real treat came Saturday evening when on October 7th, the biggest buck we have seen consistently stepped into the same food plot I shot that doe out of the week before. While the buck never presented a good shot for Josh to take out of the Maverick blind, he got great footage and never spooked the buck. Really reinforcing our belief that this buck will be back and killable throughout the season.
A still image from a video Josh got out of the blind of the big shooter, check out Instagram for the full video
Looking Forward: Storms are rolling through all weekend across the state and with that comes a regulation of temperature. We begin to settle into our typical October and patterns begin to shift. With a turn away from their summer patterns we start to focus on natural mast crops and big oak ridges; bedding transition zones, and weather fronts that will put them in food plots just before last light. Lastly, we shift our focus to wondering when they will start acting “rutty” and start hitting rub lines, scrapes, vocalizing, etc. The only asterisk on this coming week is that Ohio’s waterfowl season comes in on the 21st so distractions could be aplenty.
