We know a lot about whitetail buck home ranges, those phantom zones on the landscape where bucks spend most of their lives. We may even know too much about them. In a review of the available science on buck home ranges from Texas to Wisconsin, Florida to Pennsylvania, and places in between, I found that the more data I gathered, the less I understood.
Whether they disperse from their birth range at around 1½ years of age or not, every whitetail buck establishes an adult home range where they will be found 95% of the time. The boundaries of this range are distinct, sometimes using real geographic lines like rivers, ridges and roads – but they are not solid. Bucks can and do go on temporary excursions beyond the boundaries and back. Some bucks travel between seasonal outposts, and all of them patrol their home ranges more widely during the rut. This is all very interesting, but is it useful?
A user-friendly picture of a buck’s home range came info focus when I filtered out all the information that ultimately would not help me hunt a buck more effectively. I was left with a list of six facts you really need to know about buck home ranges.
The Fact You Don’t Need
It’s the most talked-about dimension of buck home ranges, and yet it is the least useful: Average home-range size. Did a number already pop into your mind just reading that last phrase?
Many times I have heard people say a buck’s home range is approximately… Yeah, I won’t repeat it here, not even to see if it’s the same answer you’ve heard before. Any figure you’ve heard is essentially useless for hunting and managing whitetail bucks. Consider this:
- In Louisiana, Taylor Simoneaux of the University of Georgia Deer Lab tracked 14 adult bucks (2½ or older) wearing GPS collars in the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge. The smallest fall home range size was 245 acres. The largest, 2,852.
- In Wisconsin, Dr. Dan Storm and a team at Wisconsin DNR tracked 229 GPS-collared bucks for the Southwest Wisconsin CWD, Deer and Predator Study. They saw home ranges from 50 to 1,000 acres.
- In a Mississippi State University (MSU) Deer Lab study of 60 bucks, annual home range size for 27% of the bucks was less than 500 acres and 25% were greater than 2,000 acres.
Buck home ranges vary so widely in size, shape and structure by individual buck, by region, by season and by other variables that an average for all of them is meaningless. You must get to know the individual bucks you’ll be hunting, and odds are the “average home range size” won’t fit any of them.
While we’re killing off unimportant information, there is not a strong or consistent correlation between buck age and home range size (see the chart below for 37 bucks in an Auburn University study). There’s also no average shape or structure. Let’s move on to information we can use.
Resources Determine Home-Range Size
All deer need food, water and cover to survive. Though home-range size varies widely, there’s one time when an average is useful. Across many studies, average home-range size is larger in regions where resources are more widely scattered or where forage quality is lower, requiring a deer to roam more widely to acquire daily resources.
“When you look at particular areas in the eastern U.S., based on the layout and composition of food and cover, you’re going to have bigger or smaller home ranges based on that,” said Dr. Bronson Strickland of the MSU Deer Lab. “The more those resources are spread out, the greater their home range would have to be.”
The most important bucks to you as a hunter are those that use the ground you hunt in the season when you can hunt them.
You can see this on a broad scale in all the studies I reviewed around the nation. Some of the largest average buck home-range sizes were in states like Florida, where soil and forage quality are lower, and Texas, where forage resources are more widespread in open, arid country. You can also see it locally. For example, Tyler Evans, a graduate student at Penn State University, analyzed GPS data and found that as forests became more fragmented, home ranges of deer got smaller. In this case, “fragmentation” equals more edge and openings, which equals more deer forage. “Unfragmented” forest in Pennsylvania means shaded, mature hardwoods with little available forage and cover.
Keep This Fact: Local habitat improvement – increasing the quality and quantity of forage and cover where you hunt – can potentially shrink average home-range sizes among bucks in your area.
Buck Home Ranges Overlap
It’s important to understand that bucks do not defend dirt. They are not territorial. Instead, every GPS tracking study ever conducted with enough bucks in a local area showed home ranges and even core areas overlapping significantly.
For his doctoral research at the Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute (CKWRI) at Texas A&M-Kingsville, Dr. Aaron Foley studied the movements of 101 bucks, most of them 3½ or older. Beyond just our simple concepts of “range” and “core area,” Aaron found that most bucks had two to three “focal areas” within their home ranges. Most bucks visited these focal areas every 24 to 28 hours, and visits lasted about five to six hours. Since this was a rut-peak phenomenon, Aaron surmised that estrus does were in these areas. Moreover, he saw that focal areas of many different bucks overlapped!
Of course, bucks compete with each other in tight quarters, such as when two of them arrive at the same estrus doe at the same time, or at the same food source. Previously established rank, body language and other cues prevent most true fights, but even when they fight, they continue to share the same neighborhood afterward.
Keep This Fact: The home ranges and even core areas of multiple bucks can overlap the land you hunt.
Seasonal Use Is Most Important to a Hunter
One of the big revelations of the GPS-collar era is the fact that some buck home ranges are divided into seasonal compartments. While some bucks expand and contract movements within a single boundary across seasons, some travel back and forth between two distinct areas.
MSU Deer Lab researchers determined 33% of 60 bucks they tracked have what they call a “mobile” style and use two, separate, non-overlapping activity centers. Generally these fall into summer and fall (or rut) centers. All bucks in the study used slightly different summer and fall areas, with an average distance between the two of 1,300 yards (0.75 miles). But for mobile bucks, this distance is greater. One mobile buck that became famous on social media, Buck 140, used activity centers that were 18 miles apart and on opposite sides of the Mississippi River!
This means your summer inventory of bucks, whether conducted with a trail-camera or binoculars, does not determine your complete fall menu. Many summer bucks will shift away from your area as the rut arrives or leave completely for another area that may be many miles distant. However, the good news is that new bucks are likely to replace them.
This also applies to trail-camera surveys conducted just before hunting season opens. Dr. James Johnson of the UGA Deer Lab found that up to 30% of unique bucks photographed in baited trail-camera surveys did not continue to appear in non-baited trail-camera monitoring during hunting season on three of his study sites. Additionally, he detected 43 unique bucks during hunting season that never appeared in the pre-season survey, a 60% increase!
Keep This Fact: The most important bucks to you as a hunter are those that use the ground you hunt in the season when you can hunt them.
Unequal Visitation
If there’s an encouragingly consistent fact about buck home ranges, it’s this: MSU Deer Lab’s work suggests the daily home range size is small.
“At the finest scale, here’s where there is remarkable consistency in buck home ranges: every single day they’re using about 200 acres,” said Bronson Strickland. “Whether it was pre-rut, peak rut, zero rut, it was about 200 acres a day. The problem is, the net displacement from day to day is a lot greater during the rut.”
In other words, that 200-acre day-use area will be somewhere else in the buck’s home range tomorrow, especially during the rut. In summer, the 200-acre day-use area might not change much at all, Bronson explained. But during the rut, today’s day-use area might be 400 yards away from yesterday’s. Tomorrow’s might be in a different location again.
MSU Deer Lab produced an outstanding brochure titled Understanding Buck Movement: How, When and Why Bucks Navigate the Landscape. In this document, they report that 74% of bucks in their studies changed “focal areas” every 6 to 10 hours. This is similar to Dr. Aaron Foley’s Texas work mentioned earlier, where bucks returned to focal areas every 24 to 28 hours.
Keep This Fact: Even when a buck’s home range overlaps your hunting area, he’s unlikely to be seen daily in a small, huntable area, especially during the pre-rut and rut. No single bedding area, sanctuary, or food source is likely to attract daily visitation by a particular buck.
Hunting Pressure Changes Home-Range Use
For his master’s degree at the MSU Deer Lab, Dr. Andy Little of the AWESM Lab at University of Nebraska-Lincoln studied buck movements on Oklahoma study sites with varying levels of hunting pressure, from no risk, to low risk (a hunter per 250 acres), to high risk (a hunter per 75 acres). Predictably, bucks responded quickly to hunting pressure. They reduced their overall movements to use less of their home ranges. They shifted focal areas toward areas of less pressure, and they used those smaller areas more intensively. They also shifted daylight movements toward heavier cover and away from open areas.
Clint McCoy also studied buck movements under hunting pressure for Auburn University. He looked at GPS location data for 37 adult bucks across three hunting seasons on a South Carolina study site. He found adult bucks traveled an average of 55 yards farther away from deer stands at the end of hunting season compared to the beginning. He also found it took two to four days for buck movements to return to normal around a deer stand after it had been hunted only one time.
Keep This Fact: The mere act of hunting a buck, and how you hunt him, can change how he uses his home range. If he can predict you, he’ll avoid you.
A Home Range is Forever
In those hunting-pressure studies mentioned above, bucks did not hang For Sale signs on their home ranges. They shifted locations and times within their existing home range to avoid hunters.
All the evidence gathered in numerous GPS-tracking studies reinforces the idea that adult bucks are extremely loyal to their home ranges once they establish them at around 1½ years of age. Some have been seen to drown because they wouldn’t leave home ranges flooded by the Mississippi River, and those that did leave returned as soon as catastrophic floodwaters receded. With one weird exception of a Missouri buck that went on a 186-mile trip to seemingly nowhere, bucks are loyal to their home ranges because it affords survival advantages (Endorsing that idea, the weird Missouri buck died on his trip.)
“I’m never going to say ‘never’ or ‘always’ with whitetails, but with everything we have put a collar on, I’m not aware of any instance where a buck utilized this 500 to 1,000 acres and the next year he was 10 miles down the road utilizing another 500 to 1,000 acres and never to return to the original,” said Bronson Strickland. “They have learned where food and cover resources are located. They have worked to achieve a spot in the social hierarchy. Do you want to throw all that away and take a risk to go somewhere else? I wouldn’t think so.”
Keep This Fact: For all practical purposes based on the majority of tracking-collar studies, adult bucks do not abandon home ranges. Bumping or spooking a buck, or even wounding one, is unlikely to cause him to leave the area permanently for unfamiliar woods.
How Can You Use This Information?
Focus on Bucks That Reveal Themselves the Most: If you are seeing or photographing a particular buck frequently and consistently across seasons, or within a particular season, then you are likely located in what may be a small home range. Or, you are located in his core area or a focal area. This is actionable information that gives you an advantage, but you must tread lightly and avoid being predictable. Remember that pressure can change those movements!
Be Ready to Judge Strange Bucks Quickly: There’s evidence that localized bucks aren’t necessarily easier to kill. Ashley Jones of MSU Deer Lab broke out and analyzed 43 bucks (18 “movers” and 25 “sedentary” bucks) on private hunting land where she also measured hunting pressure and activity. Bucks that were “movers” – shifting between home range compartments and covering larger areas – exposed themselves to hunters 81% more often during the rut than sedentary bucks.
So, while you’re hunting that particular buck that seems to be hanging around your area a lot, always be ready to capitalize on other bucks you’ve never seen before. Rut range expansion and excursions may bring them in front of you without warning. You know you want to kill that familiar target buck, but where is your line on age or antler size for a buck you’ve never seen before? Practice your buck aging skills every chance you get. “Age This!” in NDA’s weekly newsletter is a good place to start, and watch our YouTube video on aging bucks in the field, below.
Know and Hunt The Resources: If home-range size is a function of resource acquisition, then knowing the resources will put you in buck movement patterns. At any point in the season, where is the food? Where is the cover? Where are the does?
Improve the Resources: Bucks are likely to hold tighter to your hunting area if it contains better resources than surrounding areas. Improve the habitat to increase forage and cover. Research at CKWRI showed that a well-fed, healthy buck can spend an additional six hours a day hunting for does during the rut instead of feeding – which means he’s more visible to you!
High Rise: A Cautionary Tale
I think of a tall-tined Georgia buck my dad named “High Rise.” I captured High Rise on camera for four consecutive years at Grace Acres, from a well-endowed 2½-year-old until he was 5½. He used a specific area of our hunting land during the rut and could be counted on to show up in front of cameras every few days without fail. We hunted him at 4½ and 5½ without success. He never reappeared at age 6½, and a couple of years later his fate remains a mystery.
I don’t need to tell you there are no guarantees when hunting whitetail bucks. But science still gives us knowledge that increases our understanding of buck movements and therefore our chances of outsmarting them. I hope you now have a better understanding of buck home ranges that helps you this season and in those to come!