Whether they like it or not, it will no longer be bird season on Saturday and my setters will have no choice but to rest.
The deer we monitor, on the other hand, do have a choice. And the bucks we are following have all put in a decidedly below-average week in terms of miles logged. If they had smart watches they would be getting notifications that they walked a lot more the week before!
The latest data from our deer have been uploaded to our Rut Tracker page. Check it out (and if the page doesn’t look updated try clicking the ‘refresh’ button on your web browser).
2024 Deer-Forest Study Rut Tracker
Of course, Saturday is the opener of deer season and we won’t be back here until mid-December at the earliest. We received a lot of great questions about deer behavior during the rut (some of which we did not have a chance to respond to) and we plan to tackle those in upcoming blog posts. Thanks for your interest in our research and we hoped you enjoyed the Thanksgiving holiday.