The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
–Robert Frost from the poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
Robert Frost was not thinking about white-tailed deer during the rut, but right now most hunters are and the last stanza from his poem is appropriate for both deer and hunters.
We are half way through October, which does not mean we are dark and deep into the fictitious October Lull. We are within a week or so of the start of interesting buck activity.
I took all the deer we have monitored since 2013 and created a graph of the daily mean of miles walked for October through November.
It looks like males rest up, compared to females, during early October but by the 3rd week they are on track for an exponential increase in activity.
The gray shaded area around each line represents the 95% confidence interval. This is simply a statistical measure of the precision of our estimate of the mean value. It does not say anything about the movements of individual deer, just that we used data from a lot of deer to estimate the daily means and that they are pretty good estimates.
Also, keep in mind that the latter dates on the graph correspond to bear and rifle deer seasons so deer movements change more due to human activity than deer social behavior.
Half of females are bred by November 13th every year (You can read about the timing of breeding here and here). That corresponds very closely with the peak travels of bucks.
Cumulatively, you can see that females are consistently moving a little more than 1 mile/day, which is basically a straight line cumulative increase in total miles traveled.
This fall we have dedicated a whole page on the website to overlay the mean distances traveled based on all previous deer and a running tally of distance traveled in 2024 based on deer that we are currently monitoring. I will try to update this a couple of times a week so if you can’t be in the woods, you can certainly see what you might be missing!
Go there now, and you can see how this year’s deer compare to previous years.
2024 Deer Forest Study Rut Tracker
–Duane Diefenbach
