Great description TN Larry.
In very poor acorn years to no acorns at all, I find bucks make much less sign than in decent acorn years. I believe that is driven by energy reserves. Making sign burns precious energy reserves, and in a poor acorn year, deer have almost no excess energy to burn. I've found few rubs this year, although slightly more than the true total acorn failure we had in 2022. Similarly, scraping is way down this year, although where they decide to finally make a scrape, it gets a lot of traffic. And food plot and field edges appear to be the hot locations this year, as well as trails leading into open food sources.
In addition, in a previous post, I had talked about how field-edge scrapes get used less in daylight than scrapes back in the woods, and that trend intensifies the deeper into the season we get. Daylight usage of field-edge scrapes drops to very low levels by December, while scrapes "back in the woods" maintain about the same daylight usage all season. However, looking at just the data from this year and 2022 (another acorn failure), exactly the opposite is true. Field-edge scrapes have far higher daylight usage than scrapes "back in the woods." I believe that is because food is at such a premium this year that doe groups are almost living in the plots, and bucks are advertising their presence at food plot scrapes around the clock. Even now in mid-December, I'm getting videos of 2 1/2 and 3 1/2 year-old bucks working food plot edge scrapes at all hours of the day, something tht normally would not happen at this time of year.
