I used to do this... and found I was actually decreasing my chances of killing older deer. I'd hunt nearly every day, pushed the bucks off my farms and forced them to become completely nocturnal and unkillable. I kill way more mature deer now by hunting smarter. Leaving them alone until the time/ conditions are right so they actually move in daylight. My farms will go unhunted until Dec 17th.
Interesting. With the overabundance of acorns on the ground, one would think that they have ample food to recover.
The moon doesn't affect deer movement.
What Deerhunter10 said, but we see this surge Nov. 28-Dec. 5. It is almost exclusively community scrapes and almost exclusively the oldest bucks on the property. It seems it's almost a "last hurrah" for the mature bucks on my place, as after this surge peaking around Dec. 2, the mature bucks vanish, not to be seen until the next year.
I HATE the years when Nov. 1 is on Friday or Saturday. That makes Thanksgiving fall a week later and means MZ season doesn't open until Nov. 8 or 9. Our peak number of older bucks and peak movement year after year is Nov. 1-4. We'll miss that completely next year. However, we traditionally see two peaks of chasing: Nov. 9-11 and Nov. 17-20. I suspect peak breeding falls in between - somewhere around Nov. 10-20. We will at least catch both of those peaks during MZ season next year, but it will be past peak by gun opener.
The old bucks literally haven't eaten in 3 weeks. That's normal. But our entire deer density is up, so there are more does to chase/ tend/ breed. I think that is what is running them into the ground. Higher caloric expenditure this year for whatever reason (again, the only thing I can think of is more does, especially 1.5yo does who bred for the first time this year). But yes, there are still plenty of red oaks on the ground, and they are pigging out now that the breeding is taking a back seat.
