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Bountiful Hunting After the Rut

November 23, 2009 - By midweek, we can depend on bucks entering the post-rut period, a fun time for skilled hunters because deer behavior gets more predictable.

But I'm getting ahead of myself – way ahead.

A quick bit of background helps understand the post-rut period better.

A recent column covered significant points about the heart of the rut. Meticulous research has proven that from the Maritimes to the Carolinas, a majority of whitetail breeding takes place each year, starting around Nov. 13-15 and ending Nov. 23-25. In this period, deer behavior can be erratic because the sexual urge makes both sexes wander willy-nilly in their quest.

A bulk of the mating occurs early in this 10-day procreation extravaganza, too, so a majority of Maine's does have already bred well before this weekend. One major exception involves very young females that haven't yet entered their first estrus cycle, which will occur in December.

As the theory goes, bucks go bonkers during the 10 days when most does are mating, giving hunters an advantage. This assumption leads to the conclusion that shooting a rutting buck then proves easy.

However, I humbly question how careless bucks get in mid-November, and two reasons contribute to my dubiousness.

• After a lifetime of deer hunting, my encounters with bucks during the estrus period have run the gamut from cautious, cagey males of all ages outwitting me to mature, big-racked deer acting just plain stupid. The rut offers hunters a crapshoot.

• Thirty years ago, a New Hampshire engineer armed with years of data discovered that hunters harvested a majority of Maine's 200-pound or larger bucks on Saturdays, Veteran's Day and Thanksgiving – an obvious statistic. More shooters get out then than during midweek, showing hunter numbers influence the buck harvest more than breeding activity. These crowds push game animals around, and moving deer are vulnerable deer.

This coming week in the post-rut, bucks may still be looking for younger does, but mostly they concentrate on feeding to fatten their bodies for the rigors of the upcoming winter. They must replenish valuable stored fat or face death in the white, hungry season.

Hunters talking about the post-rut often fall into two camps:

• Some folks think bucks wander widely now, concentrating on nutrient-rich choices with high-calories such as acorns, beechnuts, apples, corn and so forth.

• Others feel bucks settle into dark, dense thickets with herbaceous forage and move little while resting and fattening.

For some reason, hunters and anglers often adopt an either-or philosophy and seldom accept a middle ground. I say mast-laden ridges or harvested fields with leftover corn draw bucks like a fast-food joint brings in teenagers. If acorns prove scarce and farmers do a bang-up job of clean harvesting, bucks in that area hide in dark thickets and eat herbaceous plants, which biologists claim contain ample proteins and nutrients to fatten deer.

When I think of either-or, post-rut behavior, an image pops into my mind. The woods where I grew up have hardwood ridges laden with oaks, and in good mast years, bucks hit these ridges hard during the regular firearms season and then in the two-week muzzleloader season following it.

These wily males bed in a nearby swale meadow that has alder and leatherleaf thickets as well as spruce- and fir-covered islands. For hunters who find the trails between the bedding and feeding areas, setting up a hunt is easy. They find well-traveled byways between the two and stand downwind, waiting for a shot.

Heavy hunting pressure makes deer nocturnal, but in 2009, hunter numbers in central Maine have looked low to me, so whitetails still move around until after sunrise and start again an hour before dark.

For those of us with muzzleloaders, the season reached the halfway point, Nov. 21. The first three weeks have ended, but we have one more week of regular-firearms hunting and two more weeks of the black-powder season in the bottom two-thirds of the state.

Our deer herd may be ailing, but a couple mild winters will help remedy that situation. Also, Maine hunters now have a six-week hunt as opposed to the four-week seasons of my youth. These two pluses add up to what I like to summarize with a clich – the good old days are here and now.

KEN ALLEN / ALLEN AFIELD , Portland Press Herald, 11/19/09


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