Although some outdoor writers may claim that moon phase or position dictates rut timing or movement patterns of deer, no one can produce a magic formula for animal magnetism. Here’s my advice: Instead of planning your vacation time to hunt based on the moon theory, hunt whenever you can during the rut. For the majority of the country, the rut is correlated to photoperiod or the decreasing amount of daylight hours - the second week of November.
Even if you still don’t believe that photoperiod triggers the rut, let’s assume you’re the deer god. As deer god, you want your does to drop their fawns during the time of peak nutrition. This time period during the end of May (across much of the whitetail’s range) ensures the quality and quantity of does’ milk to be at their highest. Under the moon theory, the fall equinox can vary by more than one month, which would mean that fawns may or may not drop during the period of peak nutrition. As the deer god, you’re smart enough to see to the fallacy in that plan. Many of your does and fawns would die due to inadequate amounts of quality milk. To summarize, the moon theory occurs in magazines and not in the wild.
Fallacy #2: The rut has four distant phases: seeking phase, chase phase, breeding phase, and post-breeding phase.
Just like the moon theory, these phases of the rut are manmade descriptions and no sound data whatsoever delineates the rut into these phases. Like almost all mammals, some does enter estrus early (prerut), most are on time (rut), and some are late (post-rut). The percentage of actual breeding fits very well on a classic bell curve (see Figure 1). Many does on the right-hand side of the curve are fawns breeding for the first time. Obviously, all rutting activity can be assigned to a specific phase. Some bucks may be running does while others are actually breeding, and still others are bedding alone.
Fallacy #3: Dominant bucks do most of the breeding. Although many believe this to be true, dominance in the deer herd comes from two factors: weight and attitude. New research shows that even if a buck supports Boone and Crockett headgear, on average he may be responsible for only three fawns per year. Additional genetic studies have shown that even in herds with balanced age structures, bucks of 3½ or 4½ years of age are the dominant breeders. So far, the world record stud buck only sired six offspring per season. Note: This does not include breeding attempts, but the number of fawns sired.
I have friends in various places telling me different things as far as how far into the rut we are. Some are saying they are constantly seeing bucks pushing does, others are saying they are seeing bucks fighting only and ignoring does and yet others are saying the bucks are paying attention to other deer, buck or doe, anymore than normal. I think it takes 1 hot doe to set off the rut in an area. Once she spreads her smell thru the woods, the ruts really starts. My group hunts in several areas..In Owings Mills we saw a big buck beat up a little one but not chasing does. In Monkton, we had a buck with his nose up a doe's rear and in Hampstead we haven't seen anything to indicate the rut is on at all.
