*When will the rut begin in your area? Check out the clues in, “When To Hunt The Whitetail Rut”.
When temperatures plummet by 10-15 degrees or more during the last 7-10 days of October, following a mess of unstable weather…make plans to hit your favorite bowstand! If you have a giant that lives close, he may not wander for miles like he will during the peak to post rut phases, but he will tear up his local hangout. Have you ever heard from a buddy that the rut is slow, but at the same time you personally are seeing rubs, scrapes and great buck movement in your neck of the woods? You both have the same moon phase, but the reason for the difference is because pre-rut activities are largely confined to a buck’s primary core area. If you don’t have a buck living within his core area on the land you hunt, it is very likely you will not experience pre rut behavior. A buck of virtually any social status can easily find one of the first receptive does available, but his primal urges are really kicked off by the annual change in the season and the decrease of light in the sky. He doesn’t need to wander far, but with that first frosty morning he begins to assert his stardome within the several acres surrounding his daytime bedding area. Make sure that those frosty mornings are a large part of your pre rut strategies!
How Do You Hunt the Pre Rut?
Obviously I love a frosty mornings, and it’s because mature bucks can be considerably active during those Pre-rut, cold and calm mornings! Morning temperatures in the 20s are often still in the high 30s at noon, even if the daytime high will be 52 degrees. I find mature bucks cruising all morning long, with my “sweet-spot” of buck harvests occuring 2-3 hours after sunrise. During the middle of the day however, there really isn’t much of a need for bucks to be overly active. Warming temperatures deminish buck activites considerably into the aftrnoon hours, but I have noticed a small increase in movement during the evening as the temps begin to fall during the last hour of daylight. My absolute favorite stand locations are positioned between mature buck daytime bedding areas, on secure, brushy travel corridors. When you add the topographical features of a connecting cruising bench you may find that you have located a reliable spot to kill a pre rut buck for many years to come!
The pre rut phase is not quite yet the time for all day sits! I have had great success with a pattern of hunting an oustanding morning stand that relates to a mature buck’s daytime bedding area as late as noon, and then switching to an evening stand that relates to food for the last 3 hours of the day. The majority of my oldest and largest bucks have been produced during pre rut morning hunts, but a couple of harvests have also come from evening pre rut sits, typically within an hour of dark or less. I place a huge priority on morning hunts during this phase because I have experienced that I have several hours more during a sit to take advantage of mature buck movements, than during the evening hours. This is also the time when I have been able to effectively target a specific mature buck that I may have been after for years, while he is still within a very definitive pre rut, core pattern of movement. Until that buck has a tough time finding does within his core area, he will stay fairly “local”, but like all good things, they must eventually come to an end and he will begin to range far and wide for his next receptive doe during the end of the 2nd phase and 3rd phase of the rut.
