As deer hunters, we eagerly anticipate the the rut — that magical time of year when deer movement is at its peak, and you never know what may show up in front of your deer stand. But once the rut winds down, it’s easy to feel a little deflated. Deer activity slows, patterns shift, and filling a buck tag becomes more challenging.
Don’t hang up your bow or deer rifle just yet, though. There’s still plenty of great hunting to be had — it just requires a fresh approach. Let’s explore some strategies to help you fill your buck tag post-rut.
Understanding Post-Rut Behavior
Before diving into strategies, it’s essential to understand what’s happening in the whitetail world post-rut. Simply put: bucks are exhausted. All that running and chasing over the past few weeks has taken its toll, with some bucks losing up to 30% of their body weight. And with winter approaching, recovery becomes their top priority.
During this time, overall movement by bucks decreases, because they aren’t out seeking and chasing does, and their attention turns back to nourishment. Food becomes the driving influence of their daily movement, as they return to a “bed-to-feed” pattern similar to what we see in the summer, albeit with different food sources. Understanding this shift is key to post-rut success.
Post-Rut Food Sources
To hunt successfully post-rut, you need to know what deer are eating now. We’ve already established that food is the driving factor, but you need to pinpoint the right sources.
The good news is that food is more limited this time of year. Most agricultural crops are harvested, white oak acorns have started to germinate or rot, and a lot of forbs and grasses have gone dormant.
In fact, if you look at a deer’s diet composition in late fall and winter, typically over half is woody browse, followed next by mast (acorns). Forbs, grasses, and crops only make up a small percentage of their diet, because those things just aren’t as readily available.
If you’re fortunate enough to have good food plots in place, or cut corn or bean fields with lots of waste grain, then those can certainly attract hungry bucks looking to recover from the rut. If not, you’ll need to focus on natural food sources.
While white oak acorns may be mostly gone at this point, acorns from red oak trees are often readily available. Unlike white oak acorns that start to germinate shortly after hitting the ground, red oak acorns don’t germinate until the following spring. And their higher tannin levels keep them from rotting as quickly as their white oak counterparts. So, even though red oak acorns may no be a deer’s first choice when white oak acorns are available, they can be an excellent late-season food source to intercept a buck.
Browse is an important part of a deer’s winter diet, but may be a little more difficult to pin down, depending on available habitat. If you have any green vegetation still present in your hunting area like greenbriar or honeysuckle, these can be attractive late-season food sources.
But deer will browse on a variety of woody vegetation and buds this time of year, so focus your efforts where they can easily access that type of browse – old fields and young forest settings or wooded areas where the trees have been thinned enough to allow for good understory growth.
If these types of areas are abundant where you hunt, it may take some boots-on-the-ground scouting to figure our where the deer are concentrating their feeding efforts.
Importance of Scouting
Knowing where to find post-rut food sources is great, and will definitely help you in your efforts to fill a late-season tag, but you have to be able to pinpoint exactly which of these food sources are currently being used. And to figure that out, you need to do some in-season scouting. While you may think of scouting as something you do before or even after deer season, it’s just as important to continue scouting throughout the season.
As we’ve already discussed, deer behavior changes as the season progresses and the buck’s focus changes from food to females, then back to food. Additionally, food sources change and deer react to hunting pressure, so you need to continue scouting to keep up with those changes in behavior.
Otherwise, you’ll find yourself hunting where the deer were, not where the deer are.
So, what exactly are you looking for? The MRS — most recent sign! That may be fresh deer tracks, droppings, evidence of deer browsing the vegetation or cracked acorn hulls lying around.
Hot food sources don’t last, so when you find one the deer are hitting, you need to take advantage of it as quickly as possible. And if you give it a few hunts and it doesn’t pan out, move on to the next one. They may only be hitting it at night.
Use Your Trail Cameras
Many hunters, myself included, ease up on trail camera use as the season progresses. But post-rut is the perfect time to redeploy cameras on new food sources. Make sure batteries are fresh and cameras are positioned in areas with active sign.
Trail cameras can confirm whether deer are using a spot and, more importantly, when. This intel allows you to fine-tune your strategy. If deer are hitting a food source consistently at first or last light, it’s time to move in.
Final Thoughts
If the rut has come and gone, and you still have a tag in your pocket, don’t give up. Post-rut hunting may be challenging, but it also offers opportunities. With bucks following a more predictable bed-to-feed pattern and hunting pressure down, your chances of locating deer and seeing them during daylight increase.
Stay adaptable, scout aggressively, and focus on food. There’s still plenty of time to fill that tag.