On average, a whitetail buck’s home range is a square mile in size, explaining why sightings of certain deer can be rare at best. (Shutterstock)
November 05, 2024
By Josh Honeycutt
A monster buck slinks past a trail camera, and poof, like a ghost, it’s gone again. You recognize it as a deer that briefly visited the property the season before, but it didn’t stick around long then either. You’re left wondering if it’s a deer you’ll ever have a shot at hunting. We call these “drifter bucks.”
So how do you hunt these seemingly nomadic bucks? Let’s look at the different types of drifter bucks, why they’re classified as such and how to find them.
DRIFTER BUCKS DEFINED “Drifter” is a very loose term for a deer that seems to move from one area to the next. It’s here today and gone tomorrow. Very few deer behave this way, though. By nature, whitetails aren’t nomadic. Instead, most become quite loyal to their home ranges and core areas, especially later in life. There are numerous reasons why deer seem to be nomadic, though, and there’s more method to the madness than meets the eye. Here are five different types of drifter bucks.
1. LARGE-RANGE DRIFTERS Some whitetails have large home ranges, making it reasonable that they rarely pass by the few cameras you deploy. Oftentimes, habitat type influences bedding cover, food sources and water availability. The seasonality of food sources and what the land offers impacts when, where and how deer use the landscape. According to Matt Ross, director of conservation with the National Deer Association (NDA), food source availability is one of the bigger reasons for expanded home ranges. Hunting pressure can impact home range use, too, and affect where deer live and the way they use the landscape. An individual deer’s personality can also impact the size of it home range. Bucks express unique habits and tendencies, and each whitetail behaves differently.
Advertisement
Ross says that deer that are pressured usually take at least three days to return to pre-pressure patterns. He cites a study from the Noble Foundation in Oklahoma that concluded that one hunter per 75 acres can have an impact on deer behavior. By contrast, one hunter per 250 acres has little to no impact.
Some bucks will rarely leave their core area, which falls within the home range and is often between 50 and 75 acres in size. (Shutterstock) 2. SMALL-CORE DRIFTERS Some deer seem like drifters because they have small core areas—and you’re just outside of it. A whitetail’s home range is the entire area it utilizes, and the average home range is approximately 1 square mile, or 650 acres.
A buck’s core area is located within its home range. Oftentimes, it ranges from 50 to 75 acres, but this can vary by habitat type. The core area is the acreage where a buck tends to spend the majority of its time—as much as 75 to 80 percent. Oftentimes, as a buck gets older, the size of its core area decreases.
Advertisement
“We like to bowhunt more than anything,” says John Altman with the “Hunting ME” YouTube channel. “We found that if we are not in a mature buck’s core range, there’s no chance of seeing it. He’s not moving around. The rut is the motivator.”
3. BUCKS WITH WEIRD RANGES An oddly shaped home range might also impact how often you see a deer on camera or in person. Few whitetail home ranges are square, rectangular or any other geometric shape, and they don’t follow property lines, either. Most are quite organic and sometimes very irregular. Numerous factors can impact this, including available bedding cover, food sources, water sources, topography features, stage of habitat succession, other deer and hunting pressure.
4. THE ROAMERS Although a little-known phenomenon, whitetails sometimes leave their home ranges and go on excursions. “Last year, we had an encounter with a deer that we didn’t know anything about,” says Altman. “He came through a few days before Thanksgiving, about the third to fourth week of the rut. That told us he had serviced every doe he could in his core area and was out looking. Once a buck gets to a certain age, he isn’t going to leave his home range until he feels he’s bred every doe he can.”
Once a buck has bred all the does that it can in its core area, it might roam far and wide in search of additional receptive females. (Shutterstock) 5. GONERS FOR GOOD Some whitetails just relocate. Maybe they have different spring/summer and fall/winter ranges. Perhaps they spend 11 months of the year in one spot and the rut in another. They might even pack up and permanently move to a new area altogether due to pressure or changing habitat features. Home ranges can be quite fluid.
HOW TO TAG A DRIFTER BUCK Altman and company try to focus on harvesting ultra-mature deer, those that range from 5 1/2 to 8 1/2 years old.
“One old bugger, we watched him over the years turn into a very old deer with lots of history,” says Altman. “I passed him at age 4, then never got eyes on him again until the morning I shot him 9 years later. It’s incredible what they teach us.”
For Altman and company, trail cameras play a big role in hunting these mature deer that are difficult to pin down.
“We rely heavily on our cameras because they can be in places that we can’t be all the time,” Altman says. “We run 50 to 60 trail cameras, and most of these are cell cams. That sounds like a lot, but it’s not when you think about how much ground there is.”
According to Altman, buck behavior changes a lot when they go from 4 1/2 to 5 1/2 to 6 1/2 years old and beyond. In Maine where he hunts, deer that reach ultra-old age classes become very loyal to their spots. They don’t move a lot, and finding them is very difficult. He says that you might run 10 cameras in an area looking for a big, mature deer, and be close to it, but never snag a photo.
f your cameras don’t reveal a big deer, don’t immediately give up hope. These big, mature bucks hole up on small pieces of ground, and you must keep searching. Make no mistake: Tagging a drifter buck isn’t easy. But when you do, there’s perhaps no sweeter moment in the deer woods.
This article was featured in the November 2024 issue of Game & Fish magazine. Click to subscribe .
