Don’t Overthink Deer Behavior | Understanding Mature Bucks

We all seem to want to know when the very best day to be on stand is. Heck, many would even like to know the hour. Here’s the secret, though. Deer don’t always follow the script we think they should! Here’s why that’s so important to understand.

This is Chapter 14 of Steve Bartylla’s free online book, Understanding Mature Bucks.

Now, we’re going to start talking about how Mr. Big deals with weather and such, but I want to save the meat of that for the next chapter and give you something to consider in all of this.

For as long as I hunt, I seriously doubt I will forget 2017’s Illinois shotgun season’s second day. It was supposed to be overly warm with extremely strong winds and thunderstorms, and they weren’t lying. The night before, I told my buddies that hunt across the road that they were wasting their time going out in the morning. In fact, tomorrow looked to be a complete bust.

deer movement weather — Even on days that seem like they’ll be a bust, deer can surprise you. Photo courtesy of Steve Bartylla.

As I sat in the house that morning, wind literally howling, thunder crashing and the rain coming in sheets, I got text after text after text from my buddies out hunting in Rednecks during the storm. They were having the best sits all year and one of two scored a true giant that morning.

With the thunder over (please don’t hunt in thunderstorms — that’s just not good on all sorts of levels) and rain lightening up some (still needed to be selective in shot selection, as always, but the rain was just light enough that I could trail. Really, it takes a pretty strong rain or a really bad shot to make it so you can’t trail a deer. Blood doesn’t wash away as fast as many of us seem to believe), I decided to head out early that afternoon. Yes, it was still too warm and way too dang windy, but the neighbors were covered in deer all day so far. I may as well try.

I was in deer before even making it to the blind and all the way through until I’d filled my buck and two doe tags. It was a glorious sit.

Please keep that hunt in mind when we’re talking tendencies. I know I do. Deer aren’t supposed to move in those situations.

Same with the velvet buck I shot on a full moon afternoon on an unseasonably warm early season sit. He also didn’t realize that he wasn’t supposed to be out feeding in daylight, under those conditions.

I try to not talk weather and hunting too much, as I find it’s sooooooooooooooooo easy to talk yourself out of hunting, or at least I see a couple buddies of mine do it a ridiculous amount. What we’ll be talking about next week will merely be the tendencies I’ve noticed. If I stuck to only hunting decent or better deer movement weather days, I wouldn’t have shot probably a quarter of all the bucks on my walls. PLEASE, don’t let weather become an excuse for not hunting, unless you really just don’t want to hunt. If that’s the case, don’t bother making an excuse, just don’t go, as you’ve got no one but yourself to impress in all of this. However, if you want to hunt, I’ve got a lot of mounts that suggest the weather shouldn’t be what’s stopping you, unless it’s just unsafe out there.

Read Chapter 1: Whitetail Tendencies

Read Chapter 2: Whitetail Home Ranges

Read Chapter 3: How Deer Use Core Areas

Read Chapter 4: When Core Areas Shift

Read Chapter 5: Seasonal Shifts

Read Chapter 6: Family Group Dominance

Read Chapter 7: Male Dominance

Read Chapter 8: Deer Population Dynamics

Read Chapter 9: Deciphering Deer Breeding Phases

Read Chapter 10: Big Deer Breeding Behavior

Read Chapter 11: Whitetail Rut Stress

Read Chapter 12: How Deer Deal With Winter Stress