Photo

Click on photo to enlarge

Phillip Gentry

Outdoor Editor Phillip Gentry photographed this wide racked 6-point buck crossing a field in the Mountain Hunt Unit this week. Experts agree the rut is about to peak in the Upstate area.

I’ll have to confess that people rarely get upset with me for driving too slow or not paying attention while driving. I’m not one who ordinarily spends time multi-tasking behind the wheel, not even using a cell phone as much as some of those I see on the roads. But earlier this week I needed to apologize to somebody who practically had to slam on their brakes to keep from hitting my truck in the rear.

I travel a good bit both as an outdoor writer and during working hours with my day job. Much of my travels take me through rural areas, and I am rarely without a camera within reach. I get shots of the occasional flock of turkeys on the side of the road and more photos of geese eating in fields than I can count. I’ll have to admit this past week was one of my better encounters.

As a courtesy to the landowner, I won’t tell you specifics but will say this shot came from the Mountain Hunt unit area. The next most important thing I can say is that this shot was taken at 11:40 a.m. Of course, that’s pretty typical when deer enter the rut phase.

To confirm my suspicions, I called Chuck Mulkey, who owns Chuck’s Taxidermy and Deer Processing on Abbeville Highway in Anderson, the jumping off point to a great many deer lease tracts and farms in lower Anderson, Abbeville and McCormick counties.

“So far this year I’ve taken in over 900 deer for processing,” Mulkey said. “And 75 percent of them were bucks. We’ve had some big bucks coming in since mid October, and then over the last week, it really slowed down.”

My opinion on that situation is that we’re par for the course. The phase known as pre-rut, when bucks spend a lot of time rubbing, scraping and tussling with other bucks gets a lot of them killed. Then they enter the actual rut. The rut phase is dictated by the does, who stop running from bucks and start standing to be bred. In terms of hunter success, there’s usually a lull because deer patterns change.

That’s why the buck I saw and photographed this week at 11:40 a.m. is significant. Hunting pressure and a change in the attitudes of the females are making deer more active during the middle of the day and at night. According to the Farmer’s Almanac, the next full moon will be Nov. 13. That means I’ll be glad to give you my opinion this week on how to hunt deer this weekend, but next week, I’ll have to write about striper fishing or squirrel hunting or something else. Hunting the rut during a full moon has never been one of my strong points.

Mulkey had some good advice, and we’ll go with that for this week.

“Most of the hunters who did check in deer in the past week said they had killed their deer between the hours of 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., so I’d suggest getting in the stand about 1 and staying ‘til at least 2 – longer if you can,” he said. “I’d also plan on using a can bleat (doe call) or at least a grunt call every 15 minutes while I was in the stand. That can bleat has called in a lot of bucks and several of the better bucks this year.”

Got outdoor news or photos you want to share? E-mail Phillip Gentry at pgentry6@bellsouth.net.