Riding to my Kansas box blind during a cold, dark December morning, I listened to my outfitter, Ted, go over the list of potential shooter bucks I should watch for.
“There’s
a good 10-point,” he said. “He should be easy to recognize because he’s pretty
wide. I saw him one day when I was working on the blind and even got a picture
with my phone.”
He
handed me the photo, which was somewhat grainy but clear enough to tell the
deer was definitely a shooter. I was amazed the buck had come close enough for
a recognizable photo. Then I noticed something else.
“When
did you take that picture?” I asked. “Oh, that was back in September,” Ted
said. I didn’t say anything, but doubt began to creep in.
I
didn’t see that buck or any other shooters the first day. He didn’t show the
next day, either, but a 3-year-old with a split main beam sorely tempted me in
the waning moments of daylight. Had he been a year older, I would not have
hesitated.
By
the third morning, I was getting a bit discouraged until my mind wandered back
to another Kansas hunt several years earlier. It was a November bowhunt, during
which the outfitter also showed me pictures of bucks to watch for. And each
time, I saw at least one of the target bucks. “Maybe,” I thought, “with the rut
winding down, the wide-racked photo buck will return home.”
My
attention had been focused largely on a brushy draw in front of me, as that’s
where most of the previous deer sightings occurred, but every once in a while,
I’d do a 360 to glass the open plains and rolling hills behind me. During one
such perusal, something caught my eye in a small patch of low brush barely
larger than a baseball diamond. A quick look through my Swarovski binoculars
confirmed it was a set of antlers — big antlers — and another set of ears.
Somehow, without me seeing them, a buck and doe had gone into the thicket and
bedded down just more than 100 yards away. Admittedly, it took several minutes to
regain enough composure to make the shot, but I did.
I
was still marveling at the magnificent beast when Ted rolled up, walked over
and said, “Yup, that’s him. That’s the buck I was hoping you would shoot.”
Looking at the buck again, I suddenly realized he was right. It was the buck in
the picture. I also realized I shouldn’t have been so skeptical about the
possibility of the wayward whitetail returning home.
Site
fidelity is a term biologists use for an animal’s affinity for an area. After
leaving its natal home range, a yearling buck searches for a new place to
settle. It’s nature’s way of ensuring better genetic dispersal. However,
wandering through unfamiliar territory, the buck is at one of the most
vulnerable stages of his life. But if he finds an area with the right food,
cover and water, and manages to survive hunting season, predators and winter,
he’ll be in much better shape the next fall. By then, he’ll have had almost a
full year to learn his home range. Then he can learn the patterns of hunters
and predators that use the home range, and his chances of survival increase
with each year.
Natural
selection is the driving force behind physiology and behavior. In some habitats
and for some species, it might be more advantageous to migrate, as with
caribou, or to be nomadic, like pronghorns. The whitetail’s best strategy is to
stay home. The more familiar a deer is with its home range, the greater its
chances of surviving to breed and pass along its genes. A whitetail’s home
range is defined as the geographic area where that animal spends 90 to 95
percent of its time during the year, as determined by tracking deer with GPS
satellite collars. I always found that definition a bit misleading because it
implies where a deer will travel is determined by its home-range boundary, when
the opposite is true. For me, it’s clearer to define home range as the area in
which a deer can be found 95 percent of the year. The home range is defined by
the deer’s annual movement, and cannot be determined until the year has passed
and all data points plotted. In human terms, think of it as your home,
neighborhood and place of work. The other five percent might be that week-long
vacation in the Bahamas.
You’ve
likely heard someone say the average home range of a whitetail is about one
square mile, which is fairly reasonable. But you must remember that’s an
average. Depending on the quantity and quality of habitat components such as
food, cover and water, not to mention potential breeding partners, home ranges
can vary in size considerably. Some might be five or even 10 square miles;
others a fraction of that. That’s a lot of ground for a hunter to cover,
particularly if he’s targeting one or a few bucks. Fortunately, deer don’t use
all areas of their home range with the same frequency. Within their home range
is a core area wherein they spend more than half the year. And several studies
have shown that for mature bucks, that might be only about 10 percent of their
home range — possibly as few as 60 to 100 acres. Our core area might be our
home or even one room in our home. There are some obvious selective advantages
to this strategy. Familiarity gained from spending more time and gaining more
experience in a smaller area improves a deer’s ability to avoid danger there,
and older deer become masters of learning and exploiting their home ranges. You
might think this concentrated activity would give hunters an edge. It does, and
it doesn’t. One obvious edge is that after you’ve located a buck’s core, you
can focus your time and energy there. Folks who hunt midwestern states such as
Kansas, Iowa and Illinois have a distinct advantage. They actually have several
advantages, but the biggest is that relatively open habitat makes it easier to
observe deer. For the rest of us, and even for them, the most effective tool
you can use is trail cameras. They can help you find and then hone in on core areas
of the shooter bucks you seek. But… . There’s a saying among turkey hunters
that “roosted ain’t roasted.” It means that just because you know where a
gobbler sleeps that night doesn’t mean you’ll be able to kill that longbeard
the next morning. Somewhat the same applies to deer, especially mature bucks. I
don’t get much chance to hunt truly mature deer (4-1/2 years or older) on my
home ground because hunting pressure prevents them from reaching that age, but
my son and I found one a couple of years ago on our cameras. It’s taken us
several seasons to hone down his core area, and though our image frequency has
increased, we have yet to see him during daylight. I guess that explains how he
got old in such a heavily hunted area and also suggests some of the
limitations. One of the big disadvantages is that you must be extra cautious about
minimizing your intrusion into core areas. If a tool box was stolen from your
garage, you might not notice it for several days, but if someone put a new
centerpiece on the table where you eat dinner every night, you’d pick up on it
instantly. You’re going into an area where a mature buck spends most of his
time, and he’s intimately familiar with it. Cause too much disturbance and
several things could happen. Studies show that with increased hunting pressure,
deer don’t necessarily leave an area. They just spend more time in thick cover
and move less in daylight. And although they won’t abandon their home ranges,
they will shift core areas. A better strategy might be to approach core areas
the same way you approach bedding areas: by concentrating on the fringes.
You
wouldn’t hang your stand in the middle of a bedding area. (Though there are exceptions
to that rule.) Instead, you hunt edges, nearby travel corridors and feeding
areas. You’re still better off because knowing corearea locations helps you
select which fringes, feeding areas and travel corridors to hunt. Besides the
active approach of finding core areas, you can also take a passive approach by
making your ground more attractive as a potential core area, even on smaller
parcels. One way is to minimize hunting pressure. Another is to improve the
habitat. A hunt I wrote about in a previous issue of Whitetail News provides a
good example of both. It occurred in an area we hunt lightly but decided to give
a full season off, effectively turning it into a sanctuary. The dense
surrounding cover provides great bedding cover but is lacking in nutrition.
Releasing a couple of wild apple trees and planting a small patch of Imperial
Whitetail Clover tipped the balance. Pictures showed the area was being used
regularly by three older bucks, and I took one the first afternoon I hunted the
plot. Creating or improving bedding cover with techniques such as hinge cuts
can be an especially effective way to attract more concentrated activity. Deer
spend most of the day in bed (we should be so lucky). If that bed is on your
ground, it increases your chances of catching them on their feet and decreases
your neighbor’s odds. Knowing older bucks show greater site fidelity is also
one more reason to consider passing up sub-mature bucks. By the time they reach
two and certainly three, a buck has probably settled into a core area. I found
one a couple of years ago that seemed to have settled in on my ground and will
turn four this year. And unlike the other big buck we’ve been chasing, this one
comes out during the day — or at least he did this past year.
