Benton's Books

In order to be a successful deer hunter every year, you absolutely must get out in the woods or field and do a sufficient amount of scouting. This should be done at various intervals throughout the year. There are several situations that can possibly change the deer habits from year to year and even from the last time you scouted to the next. You may think they are doing a certain thing in a certain area, but yet since you last scouted the area, the adjoining property may have been logged and they stopped approaching your area from that direction. The weather may have caused a drastic change in their movements. A forest fire may have consumed their food sources and cover. The only way you will be able to stay on top of their current activities is to periodically check their activities, by adequate scouting.

        Scout several times throughout the year and document all of the different sign you find. Study these notes throughout the year and formulate your strategy, based on what you perceive the deer to be doing, by the time hunting season arrives. It's very important to determine their patterns in order to properly plan your hunting strategy.

        Locating the deer sign is extremely important, but equally important is when or what part of the day or night it was made. All sign other than sign found during the heavy rut, should be related to the fact that normally the deer will feed at night, midday and very early in the morning or very late in the afternoon and bed down during the day with a few exceptions. This tells you what they are doing and when, so if you can add to this puzzle the 'where' factor, you can formulate your strategy. Scout for the current bedding areas and current food sources and find their trails into and out of these areas.

When hunting the whitetail deer, scouting is a definite pre-requisite for a good successful hunt if you omit luck from the scenario. Depending on what part of the season you are in, will determine what to look for when you are scouting. During the rut, you stand as good as or better opportunity to get a nice buck than any other time. The primary reason is that the bucks have one thing, and one thing only on their mind, and that is servicing those does. This fact alone makes them most vulnerable to us hunters. This is the time of year to focus most heavily on scrapes and rubs. Scrapes are especially pertinent only to the rut. There are certain types of rubs that you may find early on in the season, created as the bucks are rubbing the velvet from their racks, and also from the creation of signpost rubs. It is exciting, and always gets my adrenaline flowing, when I find rubs and/or scrapes especially in the same area.

        Pay close attention to rubs when you find them, since they can tell you a great deal more than simply the fact that the deer was there. These various clues are revealed in the chapter on Preseason Scouting. Learn how to really analyze each rub that you find and make notes of your findings for future reference.

Chapter 11 (Page 141)
The Rut

The most exciting time of year for deer hunting is during the rut. This is the time of the year when does come into estrous and the bucks become obsessed with the right to service those does. During this time of year, there is much increased deer activity. With both sexes at their peak sexual cycles, there are more deer killed on the highways, and more deer observed in general, because they tend not to concentrate as heavily on safety, but more on their sexual drive. This condition makes them much more vulnerable to us hunters and offers us our best window of opportunity to successfully bag them. This period varies somewhat from the northern states to the south, with our peak rut here in Tennessee falling around the second to third week of November depending on certain conditions.

        There is a great deal more vocalization, body language, and glandular scent communication during the rut, between the bucks and the does. Whitetail deer have scent glands between their toes on the outside of each hind leg, on the inside of each hind leg, just below each eye, at the base of their antlers, and in the case of bucks, in the roof of their mouth, all of which are used for communication purposes, and especially sexual communication.

In order to be a successful whitetail deer hunter, you must learn their habits. You need to know what they are likely to do under certain circumstances, and why they are doing it. The whitetail deer is one of the most challenging animals you could ever hope to hunt, and probably the most challenging in North America. He will constantly surprise you with his ability to evade you in the field or woods, and for this reason, it is here on his own home territory that you must study him. If you are a fairly new deer hunter, spend a lot of time in the woods just studying him and his habits. Take a camera, field glasses or a spotting scope, a note pad, and your stand into the woods, and set up and spend hours getting to know the whitetail deer. You will never completely get to know him, but you will learn much valuable information to help you when hunting season comes around. Read books, watch videos, talk to veteran hunters, and absorb all you can to qualify yourself for the whitetail deer hunt.

        Deer have some habits that are instinctive, others that are strictly rut related, some that are stimulated by hunger or thirst, and still others that are generated by their association with man.

        Deer communicate through their scent glands, body language and actions, and their vocal sounds. These are all very powerful means of communication among the whitetail deer. We as hunters can learn a great deal from them about
their communication simply by observing them in their natural habitat. What you learn about their communication, will greatly enhance your ability as a hunter.