ation ... no matter how hard they try.
The 4½-year-old buck will rub and scrape more than the 3½-year-old. Furthermore, the rut is all about dominance and breeding rights, and for this reason 4½-year-old bucks go out of their way to prove they are the herd’s alpha males.
It’s not uncommon for several 3½- and 4½-year-old bucks to spend the summer hanging out together in bachelor groups. When this occurs, landowners get excited. Unfortunately, this excitement can be short lived because a white-tailed buck is driven to be the breeder.
When a deer range contains several mature bucks, the stage is set for many of these bucks to be losers in the breeding sweepstakes. The fights to determine who will do the breeding can be intense. When a mature buck loses a fight, he often moves on to another area in hopes of becoming the alpha male.
For this reason, it is extremely difficult to stockpile wild, free-ranging bucks.
If your hunting
property is 250
acres or less,
you will be hard-
pressed to “stock-
pile” one or two
bucks like this one.
To the winner goes the spoils, and any buck who finds himself the odd man out will act accordingly. With the rut approaching and the air filled with pheromones, a buck will begin walking if he is not the alpha.
The buck will go from doe group to doe group. If he finds an area void of a dominant buck, he might set up shop if the doe population is adequate. If not, he will keep walking. During this process, a buck might move multiple times — covering 4,000 acres or more, — which can mean several miles.
The bottom line is the 3½- and 4½- year-olds typically walk until they die. In other words, these bucks cruise from property to property until they eventually walk past a hunter who is more than happy to shoot them.
A few examples illustrate this point quite well.
doe populations in check. We also use trail cameras to help monitor what is on our land.
The buck I killed last fall was a very nice 3½-year-old for our area. I captured several trail-camera photos of the buck, as did some of the neighbors. The buck was also sighted more than a mile from my farm, well off the four cooperating properties. He was obviously an avid walker.
Another good example of a “walker” was a buck I killed on Nov. 19, 2002 — a 150-class, 4½-year-old. A friend of mine had photographed that buck on Nov. 7, nearly 2 miles from where I killed him. I had never seen the buck before I put my sights on him and had never captured him on my trail cameras.
Like last year’s buck and many others I have killed, this 4½-year-old was a walker, and his wandering got him killed.
Such examples are common throughout the East, Northeast and Midwest. What needs to be gleaned from these experiences is that regardless of how good your habitat is, you probably can’t hold all of your prized bucks after the rut begins.
If a 3½- or 4½-year-old buck isn’t the alpha male on your land, it will search for a place to where it can be. When that happens, the buck’s chances of being shot increase exponentially.
majority of whitetail locales. Intense hunting pressure and relatively small hunting properties simply do not allow for older-class bucks in most herds.
Hunters who want to hunt truly mature bucks ( 5½ years old and older) either must go to areas where deer are managed for age (such as Texas) or to remote habitats where many bucks can survive to maturity (such as Saskatchewan).
This figure will vary throughout the country, but after 16 years of working at QDM, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best we can hope to “stockpile” in my area is one or two 125- to 140-inch bucks for every 250 acres. And this can only happen if you do everything right — from food plots to doe management to passing up yearling and 2½-year-old bucks.
If you have similar hunting properties and situations, you will prevent QDM burnout and rediscover the joys of deer and deer hunting only when you face the fact that mature bucks cover a lot of ground in their quest for breeding rights.
And when they walk, they usually die.
Our farm is situated between three other landowners who are aggressively managing for bigger deer. Together, the four properties encompass more than 700 acres. All of us plant a variety of food plots and work to keep our
— Charles Alsheimer has been a regular D&DH contributor since 1979 and a field editor since 1981.
In the real world, having a few 3½- year-old bucks is about the best a land manager can expect, at least for the
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