Best Hunt

[Shep 41]

What's everyone's Favorite time of Deer season?

Mine is opener of bow season and the first 10-15 days after. After that and my favorite time is just about everyday from November 9 until just after thanksgiving. First week of December can also be great as well.

 

[BSK]

/How do you tell them all apart? Typical 3x3's, buttons and spikes can look very similar.

Learning to differentiate bucks by the slightest antler differences is a real art and takes a lot of practice. This is especially true when a property is loaded with 8-pointers. Quite often it's slight differences from side to side, differences between bucks on how much taller (if at all) the G2s are from the G3s, spacing between G2s and G3s, slight differences in the way points lean (forward, back, inwards, outwards) slight bends are "swoops" in tines or beams, how far apart the ends of the beam tips are, etc. And surprisingly, the best antler trait to look at is brow-tines. Brow-tines can be very unique. They can be tall, short, slightly mismatched, have a lean, or be farther out the beams from one buck to another.

Just finished up a census for one of my clients that included 99 unique bucks. The hard ones were the 17 different spike yearlings, and the 30 different 8-pointers.

As I'm going through pictures, each time I come upon a buck I've never seen before, I give him a unique identifier number and crop out pictures of him from as many different angles as possible, especially profile pics, and looking directly at and away from the camera. I then enter his ID number, number of points, and a brief text description of his rack into a spreadsheet. Each time I come upon a buck I don't think I've seen before I can sort the spreadsheet and look at the data for all the bucks I've previously identified with that number of points and see the text descriptions. Then if there are a couple that might be him, I can jump over to my cropped pictures of each of those bucks and see if he is already in the inventory.

 

[Jaahspike]

My data suggest breeding peaks first in northcentral TN (towards the KY border) and the Nashville Basin (the peak 10 days being Nov. 8-17). Breeding gets progressively later the farther south and west from Nashville you travel. By the time you hit Memphis, peak breeding is mid-December.

Thank you for this information!

 

[redblood]

Week before muzzleloader

 

[BSK]

Week before muzzleloader

Sadly, that's often our peak for mature bucks on camera in daylight. Often wish MZ opened Nov. 1.

The way the calendar works, MZ can open anywhere from Nov. 3 to Nov. 9. Our peak mature buck activity each year usually falls right around Nov. 4. So some years we get to hunt it and some years we don't.

 

[redblood]

Sadly, that's often our peak for mature bucks on camera in daylight. Often wish MZ opened Nov. 1.

The way the calendar works, MZ can open anywhere from Nov. 3 to Nov. 9. Our peak mature buck activity each year usually falls right around Nov. 4. So some years we get to hunt it and some years we don't.

Its the perfect time here too. Scraping / rubbing activity is well defined. All the bucks are still alive and have faced very little pressure and deer are still in the oaks making oerfect archery setups

 

[30-06 type of guy]

2nd week of November thru the end of the month

 

[Bgoodman30]

Simple hunt where the bucks are... Find em first..