The seasonal whitetail rut is just around the corner, giving hunters great opportunities to get on a quality deer. (Shutterstock)
October 17, 2024
By Lynn Burkhead
For college football fans, there are several Saturdays every autumn that represent the best the sport and the season have to offer.
From Texas and OU in the Cotton Bowl to Alabama and Auburn in the Iron Bowl to Michigan and Ohio State in the Big House or The Horseshoe, those are special days that live in a gridiron fan’s memory forever.
While we're certainly big college football fans here at Game & Fish magazine—you should sit in on some of our team meetings from week to week each fall—we're even bigger fans of the outdoors world as the leaves change colors and mallards drop into the decoys , loud-mouthed and colorful pheasants erupt from Midwestern cornfields , ruffed grouse hold over a point in an old New England apple orchard , and Rocky Mountain elk bugle on a steep hillside out West .
But for many of us here at G&F—most of us, in fact—the autumn calendar’s best time is when white-tailed deer begin to stir with the shortening days, a freshening north wind arrives, the last of the white oak acorns fall to the ground and October slowly bleeds into November. Put simply, it’s hard to beat the heart of the whitetail season during the rut, regardless of where in the 37 U.S. states that have such seasons you actually get to hunt in.
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Hunting the fall whitetail rut is the highlight of most hunters' season. (Shutterstock) In those states, there’s little doubt that the early season deer hunting action can be good in September , during the pre-rut days of early October and in December and January’s post-rut phase too .
But in much of the nation’s whitetail country, and especially in the best states and counties where giant racked bucks prowl about, it’s the whitetail rut that begins shortly after the jack o’lanterns get carved each season that we love the most and think about all year long.
Why a 12-month obsession for something that happens over the course of a few days each fall? Well, if you’ve ever sat in a treestand and watched rush-hour traffic in the deer woods—or is that rut-hour traffic?—then you’d likely understand the argument that I have with the late singer Andy Williams each December as he croons about the Christmas season being the most wonderful time of the year.
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While I love the Christmas season as much as anyone, the early November rut in my backyard gives the December rush a good run for its money as the year’s best. I learned that lesson many years ago while sitting in a surprisingly frosty early November deer stand one day near my North Texas home. While I had notched a few deer tags in my limited hunting career at that point, I had never witnessed the full-blown rut in all of its glory.
Until that chilly Saturday deer hunt—an outing not too far from the Red River that separates Texas and Oklahoma. That particular day, the woods were alive with falling leaves and white-tailed does crisscrossing through the woods as bucks chased them about.
On a sizable farm owned by the Davis brothers, there were half a dozen of us hunting various stands scattered around that piece of Cross Timbers territory . By the time the sun had gone down on Saturday evening, all but one had a good buck hanging from the camp meat pole. A couple of those bucks were real Muy Grande trophies, another couple were borderline whoppers, and then there was mine bringing up the rear guard, even if it was without question one of the best bucks of my hunting career.
During the rut, amorous bucks will drop their guards while trying to mate, giving hunters the upper hand. (Shutterstock) As we sat around the campfire that night and reflected on the craziness of the day in hallowed spots like Amen Corner, the I-35 Condo Blind and the Game Warden Stand, we were all starry-eyed and smiling big after a day of deer hunting unlike anything that any of us had ever seen before in the deer woods, despite there being nearly 100 years of hunting experience among our crew.
In all of the years since, that single day has remained as the benchmark of my deer hunting experiences even though I’ve gone on to tag bigger bucks that hang on the wall. And while I’ve had amazing rut hunt experiences in other states, that day of helter-skelter deer ruttiness remains the standard by which all other deer hunts are measured against in my mind.
The guess here is that many of you understand such sentiment, having your own crazy rut hunting experiences all across Game & Fish country. From big New England bucks running about as the leaves erupt into blazing autumn colors in the Adirondacks of New York to cruising Georgia bucks moving through a mix of hardwoods and pine trees to bucks splashing across shallow prairie country rivers in Oklahoma to world class record book bucks cruising the woodsy farming ground of Illinois , the whitetail rut is can’t miss territory no matter where you hunt each year .
We understand that, and we’re getting ready to cash in plenty of kitchen passes ourselves over the next several weeks as the 2024 rut unfolds. But we’re also getting ready to help you have the best rut hunting experience of your deer hunting lifetime as Halloween approaches, and then slowly moves towards Thanksgiving Day.
That means some work on our end over the next several weeks as Game & Fish gets ready to roll out the 2024 Regional Rut Update . In this year’s edition of the RRU, some of the best deer hunting writers in the land will tell the stories about this autumn’s whitetail hunting craziness as the rut unfolds all across America.
During the rut, bucks battle for the right to mate with does. (Shutterstock) With the likes of Darron McDougal, Josh Honeycutt, Bob Robb, Tony Hansen, Ryan Fair, Doug Howlett, Mark Kayser, Nate Skinner and more telling the tale of this year’s rut, there will be weekly updates on big bucks taken, gear that all rut hunters need in their backpacks and how-to hunting tactics that will help you make this year’s rut hunting craziness the best that it’s ever been in your neck of the deer woods.
Because once you experience the whitetail rut in all of its chasing, grunting and antler-clashing glory, you’ll always keep coming back for more, especially on a frosty November dawn.
Thanks to the whitetail hunter’s version of the Super Bowl, a time on the annual calendar when you avoid sleep, hunt all day long and dream of big rutting bucks until your tag gets punched once again.
And when that happens, it’s simply time to sit back at camp with friends as a big racked bruiser buck gently drifts in the wind, the campfire crackles and the weekend's big pigskin game drifts across the November airwaves on the radio.
Because for the American deer hunter in places scattered from Texas to Iowa to New Hampshire and everywhere in between, there’s little doubt that the rut is truly the best time of the year.
