Well, the 2025 breeding season is a wrap. And as The Ink Spots sang in 1947 or Hank Williams, Jr. crooned in 1968 (depending on your taste in music), it’s all over but the crying. The same goes for my hunting season. Whether you found success or not in the woods, deer took part in their usual activities but it did look a little different from years past.
As we shared throughout the fall, female travels since before the rut started in mid-October were the lowest we have recorded since 2013.
And for males it was not a record low, but nearly.
The Rut Tracker shows average daily movements of male and female deer from the beginning of October through the end of December.
You’d almost think that there is a second rut beginning in early December. But if you’ve been reading our posts for a while, you would know that in Pennsylvania there is no evidence for a “second rut.”
So why does the decline in buck movements stop and doe movements increase?
It turns out a small army of armed invaders entered the scene and threw a wrench in the works. Bear and rifle deer seasons are minor holidays in this state.
In the days before and after Thanksgiving deer aren’t thinking much about love, they are mostly avoiding hunters! The green bar represents the rifle bear season, and the gray box represents the rifle deer season.
With thousands of hunters in Penn’s Woods during those days, deer movements clearly respond to this human activity. I will have more to say about that in our next blog post.
With the close of these major hunting seasons, the remaining population takes a breather and you can see movements sink to their lowest levels as seen in previous winters.
For the next few months, any differences in activity between males and females completely disappears. Like us, they are conserving their energy to make it through the cold, dark days of winter.
-Duane Diefenbach
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