You hear it all the time: A hunter gets a bunch of trail-camera photos of a buck early in the season and then, poof, the deer pulls a Houdini and disappears for the rest of the season. How nice would it be to track his movements and know exactly where he went? Well, that’s what I was able to do with 37 bucks at Brosnan Forest, a 6,400-acre study site in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. My graduate research at Auburn University focused on buck movements in relation to breeding strategies and hunting pressure, but I’d like to share a few examples of buck behavior that could help you understand those early season vanishing tricks.
I wrote a feature article on my findings about hunting pressure for the October/November 2014 issue of QDMA’s Quality Whitetails magazine. If you don’t get Quality Whitetails, become a QDMA member today.
Before we get into the maps of buck movements, here are a few details: Each buck wore a collar that collected a location every 30 minutes from August 24 to November 22, which includes the unusually early rut at this location (80 percent of breeding in this population occurs between September 20 and October 30). The dots on the maps below are waypoints from GPS collars.
Now let’s look at some buck behaviors. Early season vanishing tricks can often be attributed to a home-range shift like the one you see here:
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