Here are some tips and tactics for you fishermen who also hunt deer.
Bowhunters, keep an arrow nocked the last 15 minutes of light or stay attentive with your muzzleloader to complete the hunt by leaving via flashlight. Getting lazy and exiting before darkness is a mistake. That’s why you carry that flashlight.
Remember, a buck or even a bachelor group that didn’t move all day might jog past you toward the feed in the last few minutes of daylight.
Let us say you have the luxury of a stand with three deer trails that crisscross the woods and dump into a clover field or food plot 60 yards away. On the trail, where the first does show up, is where you’ll see 80 percent of the deer that evening.
In other states, like the upper Midwest, the deer have a very defined breeding period of 10 days to three weeks in November, but it varies completely in much of Georgia because the state was restocked about 80 years ago from many other deer populations with different breeds and therefore different rutting periods. Coastal Georgia’s deer rut in October, northern Georgia mountain deer rut in December. That means you can successfully hunt the Whitetail rut for almost five months.
While there are some properties and clubs in Georgia most excellently maintained as to the deer population, most people hunt public land or small private woods where the habitat rations are rough. On these lands, many does live because they are not hunted and that buck-to-doe ratio extends to a second rut. Warm to hot weather is a factor too. It may be 70 to 80 degrees during the days and that makes the bucks run does in the cooler nights, though you won’t see the action. That makes your daylight hunts difficult and makes you stay in the stand or blind or get in the stand both long before and until complete darkness.
Always your best strategy is to scout well and hang a stand or set a blind in an obvious travel corridor not on the edge of a food plot. Hunt that travel route for days during the extended rut, and sooner or later you’ll see a shooter.
