Secondary rut and dwindling food sources are enough to funnel deer into range of your weapon, if you figure out where the funnel is.
North Carolina’s whitetail numbers have remained steady the past four or five years, it’s clear the majority of antlered deer are still being killed in October and November.
December is among the toughest times to bag a buck for the weekend hunter, mostly because the major portion of the breeding season is in the rear-view mirror. During the rut, bucks stay on the move, looking for receptive does, and that usually puts an antlered whitetail in front of just about any hunter who sits in a tree patiently.
However, from Thanksgiving through the final month of the season, you don’t have to have a pack of hounds to take deer; still-hunters don’t have to hang up their bean-field rifles for shotguns to bang away at rabbits or squirrels. Plenty of nice bucks are taken down the stretch, because about 25 percent of does aren’t bred during the peak of the rut, and they’re ready for another roll in the hay 28 days later. This natural cycle suggests a few tactics that may put deer in a hunter’s sights as the year approaches its end.
Scott Osborne, the retired deer biologist for the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission, agrees that late-season buck hunting is problematic but not impossible.
“December rut hunting kind of depends on the situation,” he said, “such as buck-to-doe ratios, herd density and condition. “Theoretically, every adult doe, from yearlings to older does — and some fawns — they’re going to generally have a very high conception rate, assuming you’ve got enough bucks out there.
“If your herd isn’t real overpopulated and has a good sex ratio, most does will get bred (in) November. If they don’t get bred, they’ll be receptive again 28 days later.”
Most areas of North Carolina don’t have balanced buck-doe ratios, because bucks remain hunters’ favorite quarry, and because that’s the case, another double-edged condition exists.
“Younger does, especially yearlings and in a lot of cases fawns, often don’t have good conception rates when they first ovulate,” Osborne said. “And when that happens, they ovulate the second time, and you have younger bred does.”
That factor describes December’s “secondary” rut. It means bucks will be roaming again, looking for those unbred does.
Osborne said hunters shouldn’t be surprised because this activity also occurs twice more each winter.
“I do a lot of rabbit hunting,” he said. “In January and February, it’s common to see fresh (buck) scrapes. Whether they’re made by young bucks or not, I don’t know. I do know they’re sign posts for does.”
However, an active secondary rut may occur in some areas and not at others, Osborne noted.
“It’s the age-old thing that although adult deer sex ratios tend to even out over time, you often see a little disproportionate mortality if you’ve got a lot of hunting pressure and kill a lot of bucks, like (in eastern North Carolina) where you can change the sex ratio — so some of the does don’t get bred the first time,” said Osborne, who figures that 75 percent of all does become pregnant during the first rut, with about a 90-percent conception rate. In a balanced herd, that means 25 to 30 percent of does will be unbred coming into December. And that means an active chasing period.
“I’d hunt places with plenty of does and some buck sign — rubs, scrapes and trails — even if trail-camera photos showed bucks only moving at night,” Osborne said. “If there are unbred does, bucks will be after them in the daytime.”
Another factor during December will be food availability.
“Food will be a big part,” Osborne said. “A lot of people believe acorns will be gone by December, but that’s not accurate every time.
“If you’ve had a good acorn year, you might not be able to find acorns in December, but deer can find them. When acorns fall in September and October, a lot get buried under leaves. Deer can smell and paw them out.”
Obviously food plots also can play a major role during December, especially if the acorn crop has been sparse.
Another aspect of December hunting is changing weather patterns. In North Carolina, that relates to one important aspect of hunting — wind direction.
With bucks not as focused on hot-to-trot does but more aware of their surroundings, hunters shouldn’t do anything to give these wary creatures a reason to flee an area. That means paying attention to the wind, especially in relation to stand selection and walking to and from those stands.
Raleigh’s Paul Chamblee has killed his share of trophy bucks from North Carolina to Maryland to the Midwest. He always tries to be aware of wind because he knows how it affects deer movements.
“You’ve always got to be aware of wind direction,” he said. “I like to get as close as I can to bedding areas (to place archery stands), but not so close the wind will carry my scent to them.”
Even though Chamblee has killed big whitetails in open fields with a tack-driving rifle, he hunts almost exclusively with archery equipment these days, so avoiding detection by a deer’s nose is his first task.
“First, I try to stay clean,” he said. “I wear scent-proof hip boots and never leather-soled boots; they pick up scent. I found out a long time ago leather leaves scent on the ground. I also wear cloth gloves, not leather, if I have to touch branches. It’s a major mistake people make, grabbing branches with their bare hands.”
Deer are forever sniffing low-hanging branches, often browsing away on remaining leaves.
Chamblee also advised hunters to have plenty of stands set up for the late season.
“Most people pick a stand site and use it all year,” he said. “But when you climb down after dark, (deer) will come by and smell where you walked. The next night, they’ll come later. Pretty soon, they won’t come at all, and a hunter will wonder what happened to his deer.”
If a doe or small buck walks past a hunter’s stand, Chamblee recommended not releasing an arrow or pulling a firearm’s trigger.
“What’s that saying … good things come to him who waits?” he said. “That’s what you need to do … wait.”
Chamblee said wise old bucks often follow several hundred yards behind does and smaller bucks.
“If a group of does or a buck that isn’t a particularly impressive animal comes along, keep waiting,” he said. “Big bucks will let does and smaller bucks walk in front of them. Being patient can increase your chances to take a wall-hanger.”
If a hunter is going to a field he’s not hunted earlier but knows the area draws deer — and he’s to hang a lock-on style stand — Chamblee advises him to place the stand exactly where he enters the field.
“Never, never walk around a field looking for a place to hang a stand,” he said. “With the range of today’s rifles and muzzleloaders, why put a stand at the far end of a field you’ve entered? If you walk a field’s edge in the morning, because the air’s usually cool, your scent will flow to the bottoms around the field. If you’ve walked around a field, you’ve laid out a river of scent.
“If the stand site’s on the opposite side, walk across the middle of the field, not around the edge. If you go through the middle, your scent often will disperse up, especially if it’s a sunny day.”
If a hunter doesn’t care much about shooting bucks but would rather have a doe for venison, Burlington’s Harlan said food plots should be high on the list as preferred late-season stand sites. Food plots will draw does in December, and the does will attract bucks.
“I pass up bucks I see when I’m hunting and shoot only does,” said Hall, a retired Commission biologist who manages private land-holdings in Alamance, Caswell and Person counties. “I’ve got a few acres around my house and about 200 acres leased, but I let my daughters shoot the bucks. I’ve got enough bucks hanging on my walls. Even if I saw a really nice deer, I’d probably pass it up.”
Baiting also becomes a great tactic as the season wanes, because most agricultural fields have been harvested and the leftovers vacuumed up by Thanksgiving. Corn scattered on the ground is like candy to whitetails, according to Hall, who likes to hunt fields and corn piles.
During December, he said his best advice is just “to be out there.”
“I hunt when I can and go whenever I’m not helping (my daughters),” Hall said. “You gotta go hunting whenever you get the chance, especially in December. You won’t see too many bucks or does sitting in your living room.”
Well, maybe no and maybe yes.
Julian’s Don Ellis proved one of Hall’s tenets — perseverance — to be true, but he also trampled all over one of Hall’s recommendations and several of Chamblee’s tips.
Ellis said his wife told him one morning she saw a “nice” deer behind their house.
“I didn’t pay much attention, but everyone was gone that morning and I wasn’t planning on hunting,” said Ellis. “I fixed some breakfast, then I looked out the window and saw a doe and two fawns playing in a field. Then I saw a decent-looking deer.”
Ellis ran to retrieve his binoculars, but when he returned to the window the buck was gone.
“I went out in the yard to work at something, maybe mow, and I thought, ‘Hey, it’s a beautiful morning,’ so I decided to climb into a stand I’ve hunted for years,” he said.
The two-person stand is at a corner where a hay field, a 100-acre cutover and a 100-acre tract of hardwoods meet.
“Deer come out of the woods or cutover and go into the field. It is kind of a funnel,” said Ellis, who sat for 20 minutes that morning before an enormous buck walked into the field from the cutover.
Ellis was hunting that morning with an unscoped .54-caliber Thompson Renegade muzzleloader loaded with 90 grains of Pyrodex and a 245-grain Buffalo round.
“Wasn’t much to it,” he said. “He walked out 25 yards broadside, I aimed and shot him in the side, and he dropped in his tracks.”
The rack of the 200-pound whitetail, had 16 scorable points, netted 162 7/8 inches and was the top non-typical buck taken with a muzzleloader entered in the 2013 Dixie Deer Classic’s big-buck contest.
Ellis doesn’t consider his accomplishment remarkable because, “I’ve hunted that stand for years, along with my son Logan, who’s 21 now, and he killed his first deer out of it. Me and my daddy built that stand when I was 13.”
So Ellis has hunted from one stand for 36 consecutive years. Did he ever feel the need to try a different spot? His answer would make Chamblee probably choke.
“Not really,” Ellis said. “I killed a nice 8-pointer several years ago and said I wouldn’t shoot a buck again unless it was bigger. I’ve killed a lot of does out of that stand the last seven years. It’s so productive you can usually pick the (deer) you want to shoot.
“I have a trail camera (at the stand), but we hadn’t seen this buck before. So I guess I was a little lucky.”
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