Halloween has always been a good day to head out in the woods for me. Rut is normally upon us and the bucks are out moving. A few years back, I killed a young but very nice 8 point on Halloween morning. So...with high hopes, I headed out into the woods this morning before work. I went back to a location that I hunted last week as I feel it is a pretty good location.
I got into the woods nice and early and this was the first morning that I have hunted with a good crisp frost. Shortly after daybreak, the frost on the turning leaves made it rain leaves as you can see in the video below.
I hadn’t seen anything but tons of birds until around 8 a.m. I had a small spike buck come walking in, but the falling leaves seem to have him on edge, or maybe something else. He got to about 45 yards away and seemed to get nervous about something and turned and walked right back to where he came from. He just seemed nervous, not scared or altered so I am not sure what made him turn around. I didn’t see anything else for the next hour. Shortly before 9 a.m., after the leaves had mostly stopped falling and all the frost had melted off of the trees, the sun had come out where I was. I did a little rattling and grunting hoping maybe a buck who had headed to bed down for the day might be in the area. About 30 minutes later around 9:15 a.m., I looked over to see a pair of antlers, but only saw him briefly before he walked into the thicket. I started grunting again, and I watched this deer walk around in the thicket about 75 to 100 yards away for 15 or 20 minutes. Then, I had a doe come from the same location, she was very nervous about the buck, she scooted past me at about 45 yards. He came from within the thicket and headed towards her. The doe quickly took off and the buck followed for about 20 yards and then stopped and went back in the thicket. I lost the buck at this point, but about 10 minutes later I heard a stick break and knew he must be heading towards me so I could finally see how big he was. When he came out of the thicket, I quickly noticed he was a smaller buck, a good little bowl 5 point, maybe 6 point, hard to tell if the one point was an inch long. Probably a two and a half year old would be my guess; he would have been a small 8 had he had brow tines. He proceeded to walk 8 yards away from me presenting many shots. I watched him for about 30 minutes walk along feeding and rubbing his scent glands on overhead branches along the way. The video below is of this deer, but excuse the video quality, I took it on my phone which has no zoom. A video camera is on my Christmas list!
Needless to say I took a video of the deer and did not shoot him; he needs another year to grow up. Hopefully something larger walks by my stand in the next month or two!
Did any of you get out this past weekend or today? How did you do, did you see any rutting activity?
