As I’ve laid out in a previous article, my aim is to be a Basic Hunter, not a mediocre hunter. What this boils down to is becoming really good at the fundamentals of hunting. I do not have the time or the resources to get good at the advanced aspects of hunting. That doesn’t mean I have to quit hunting or resign myself to tag soup. I can have a full freezer and a buck of my desired age class each year if I can get really good at the fundamentals.
One of the fundamentals of hunting is the rut. I don’t know about you, but the rut is my best shot at taking a buck. This is the one time of the year when a buck’s safety is not his number one priority. Finding a hot doe becomes his top priority instead. Because of that, finding a hot doe also becomes my top priority, and I want to get really good at finding hot does.
Hunting the Hot Doe
Much of the basics around rut hunting is finding does – either where they bed/eat or travel corridors between where they bed/eat. The theory is that bucks want to be where the does are and the law of averages states that bucks will eventually end up there. That is a good start, but that strategy requires time that I don’t have.
I want to take this tactic a step further and look for the hot doe. The doe who is currently in estrous right now, driving all of the other bucks crazy. She becomes a buck magnet. If you’ve ever experienced a crazy rut hunt with a bunch of random bucks and does running around like kids at Chuck E Cheese after chugging Mountain Dew, you know what I mean. This is the action I want to have every time I go out to hunt the rut. I know it’s not going to happen every time, but when that is my goal, I experience far more frequently than when my goal is to just find the does in general.
Obviously the craziness of the rut is what I want to see, but there’s a distinct advantage a Basic Hunter has using this strategy over someone who only hunts mature bucks. When there is a hot doe around, there will most likely be one boss hog who has claimed her for his own. There will also be a bunch of random satellite bucks who try to move in and steal her from him. A big-buck hunter will only be after the boss and ignore the rest in most situations.
As a Basic Hunter, however, I’m not particularly picky about whether or not I get the satellite buck or the big buck. I’d prefer the big guy, but not enough to pass on an opportunity at another target deer. My last two bucks I have killed the previous two years were using this method of finding the hot doe. Last year, I took the satellite buck. This year, I was fortunate enough to tag the big guy in the area. In both situations, there was a big buck with multiple smaller satellites running around. Whichever buck of my desired caliber crosses my shooting window first will have an arrow sent his way.
Finding the Hot Doe
There are telltale signs of a hot doe. Since I always want to hunt where the target deer are, I want to have visual confirmation of my target deer, which in this case is a hot doe. This visual confirmation can come in many forms, including trail camera evidence, scouting out an area, or simply driving around and glassing from the road.
What I am looking for is sign of that toddler-in-Chuck-E-Cheese deer behavior. I want to see random pictures of a doe sprinting past a camera at midday with a buck on camera 60 seconds later, nose to the ground. I want to see a buck standing out with a smaller buck 50 yards away as they eyeball each other. I want to see a dominant buck 75 yards from the road in broad daylight staring at me from a small patch of brush or drainage in an otherwise wide-open field. In short, I want to see abnormal deer behavior. Sprinting deer, bucks doing stupid things, all of it indicates that species-preserving hormones are driving decision-making and not a buck’s self-preservation.
Create Opportunities by Building a Portfolio of Properties
I talk a lot about how much time I do not have to hunt, but I want to be clear about how to select those times when I do want to strike. I should feel so confident that I will have an encounter with my target deer that I would be a fool not to prioritize hunting over other activities that I normally choose over hunting.
When looking at all of the time I had available for me to hunt over my state’s archery season, I counted 58 possible days in the field. I then looked at all of the possible windows I had to actually get out with my schedule. I would have had, at most, eight different times throughout the archery season in which I could get into a stand. Maybe one of those would have been an all-day rut sit, but most are either a morning or evening hunt. That’s 13% of the season. 2% of the calendar year. If you feel confident, take the shot, because you don’t get many.
With my successful hunt this year, there was some manner of luck involved to have the big guy walk past my stand first. But fortune rewards the bold, and I knew I was putting myself in a great situation that morning. I knew I had to get out. I had a target deer confirmed in the last 24 hours. I also happened to luckily have a morning of no meetings at work until 11:00 AM. I worked with my wife to have her get the kids where they needed to go that morning. I had about four hours to get it done. I took a swing because I knew I the chance for success was high.
I need to have access to enough properties that when a window of time opens, I have at least one option at a target deer. I can’t have a window of time open up in the rut and say ‘well, guess there aren’t any deer here, no point in going out.’ Not an option. No hot does on property A? Then look at properties B through F. There’s bound to be one during the rut. I’m not just a ‘rut hunter’ in the sense that I sit the same spot year after year and hope something walks by, relying on the rut to cover my hunting inadequacies. I have a plan and a reason for why I go out each and every time.
This same rule applies for shooting does or any deer during any time of the season. I have certain properties in my portfolio for the rut, certain ones for pre-rut, certain ones for does, etc. A Basic Hunter doesn’t usually have access to one prime property that covers all parts of the season. Build a portfolio of mediocre properties that serve a specific purpose, understand what that purpose is, then learn specifically how to identify when that property fulfills that purpose. Get really, really good at the basics.