Rutting Activity is Heating Up

Over the years I have spent plenty of time hunting over scrapes, and along scrape lines. Often, I walk away from these spots wondering how I could hunt an area so full of deer sign and not see a single deer. Even after reading article after article stating study after study reveals the majority of buck activity in scraping areas take place at night, I still continue to hunt these places. I guess you could say I'm a slow learner.

It makes sense; if I was a big buck, a survivor from years of hunting seasons, then why in the world would I want to walk around in the daylight pawing the ground and raking leaves -- messing with two of my most essential survival skills (sight and hearing.) The answer is: I wouldn't -- unless of course I was in an area I felt absolutely secure in (I'm talking Fort Knox secure.)

The point I'm trying to make is this: The buck pictures above were taken over a scrape along a scrape line that runs for several hundred yards down a hard to reach bench in a secluded thicket on a remote hillside of heavily hunted public property. What's more -- this wasn't the only buck using this scrape (there were several other nice bucks as well,) and over three-fourths of the pictures this camera took were daytime pictures. Maybe the reason this scrape was visited so much during the day was because it was located in a doe bedding area large enough to accommodate several small family groups, remote enough to be rarely visited by hunters, and thick enough where a buck could easily disappear from view by doing nothing more than sliding off the bench into the dense, tangled, mess of briers and brambles on either side of the shelf.

If you're a public land bow hunter it's time to pull out the stops and move into the bedding areas. Gun season is only days away and an army of orange will be moving in. Use these thick, remote, areas to your advantage. Don't give up on them either. Even after opening weekend, when it seems hope may be lost, my cameras show mature bucks still move during daylight in this thick cover.