Get Rut Ready — A Coastal Kick-off

David Howard has 40 years experience hunting deer in McIntosh County. Here is a 125 3/8-inch P&Y that he killed in 2017. The buck was 7 1/2 years old.

You know he’s out there, roaming around somewhere on the place. Ground sign here, trail-cam photo there, antlers everywhere… what’s it going to take for the two of you to meet up?

He’s getting instinctively restless, is the buck, possibly not even realizing where these urges are coming from, but he is feeling the need to be on the move. He’s even run off his bachelor buddies of just a few weeks ago, establishing a zone all his own where they’re no longer welcome.

Does? Yes, please. Bucks? Only if they’re looking for a fight.

And if he’s going to make a mistake that puts him into the hunter’s crosshairs, now’s most likely the time. The all-important rut has him doing and going, unlike any other time of the year.

And if you hunt the Georgia coast, you’ll get first crack at it!

GON’s annual Rut Map below shows the hottest times of year for both bucks and buck hunters. It begins by the Atlantic, possibly even as early as opening weekend. And that, as McIntosh County hunter David Howard says, is only the beginning.

David, his dad Skip, and son Dawson, have developed unique rut strategies on the acreage they hunt that have resulted in several deer being entered in the GON Truck-Buck Shoot-Out competition. It’s tough for coastal bucks to compete, but that doesn’t mean they can be called small. The Howards typically harvest 6- and 7-year-old deer—which speaks for itself.

“Most of my hunting is on the coast in McIntosh County, concentrating on the northern part of the county,” David says. “It includes about 4,000 acres around our farm. Our club is just north of Townsend on Highway 17, near a little town called Jones, the west side of I-95. Typically the hot spot day for our rut to kick in is Oct. 19, or thereabouts. We also get a second rut that goes with a lot of the rest of the state, in mid-November. When I actually see rutting bucks chasing does, it seems to be that third or fourth week of November.”

So many hunters identify the “rut” with “easy.” I’ll simply take my billy club and go whack one over the head now that they’ve gone goofy! And the truth is, this can actually be haphazard hunting. If a rutting buck—no matter how old or intelligent—spies a blonde or brunette female of his species dashing by and emitting all sorts of interesting odors, he’s apt to toss discretion, as well as sanity, to the winds and do his best to track her down in view of propagating the species. If she decides to cross I-95, well…

However, for the serious hunter, it always pays to have a plan.

“We keep feeders going year-round and food plots year-round,” David relates. “There’s a good bit of water oaks, red oaks and live oaks on our property that all draw deer in.”

A perfect case in point of a rutting buck’s vagaries is David’s only Pope & Young deer.

“I had hunted that deer for a couple years, and it was just crazy how things came together. The first pictures I had was a mile away from where I wound up killing him, and I had hunted him hard there. I set a camera up in some pines and got a picture of him the first night, then got several more of him that year (2016), but I never laid eyes on him. I had all night photos except for a couple in the daylight pawing a scrape. The area is planted pines with a drain that runs down through it, and I thought he’d stay on the other side of that property. It’s a 10-acre tract that butts up to a field behind my house, and in 2017, we went out there starting in July clearing brush and limbs and began getting daytime pictures of the buck in velvet, almost like clockwork.”

David Howard killed this 130 2/8-inch buck in 2012. It’s currently the No. 5 buck of all-time for McIntosh County.

Weather can play into the mix with a rutting buck—and sometimes the hunter may find himself equally as caught up in things. Hurricane or no…

“A couple of days before opening day of bow season, I had a decoy I had just set up behind the house at the edge of those pines, shot it two or three times just to be sure how the arrows were flying, then went back in. Next day I went outside and my decoy was torn up. We had heard coyotes howling around in two or three places, and I blamed them. But then I saw deer tracks everywhere, and my decoy had gouge marks all over him!

“Well, there was a hurricane forecast to be coming through and we were going to get out of there and away from the coast. But next morning was opening day, so I said I was going to hunt him that morning and then we would leave. Right at daylight I heard him coming and thought it was hogs because he was not at all quiet. He went to a scrape where all I could see was him kicking dirt. Then he came over and started eating acorns under my tree.”

What’s a little hurricane when it comes to a big buck? And this is where those coastal size-wise genetics factor in.

“That buck netted 125 3/8 inches,” David said. “He just did make Pope & Young, but he made it. Thing is, he was a 7 1/2-year-old deer and had started going downhill a little bit.”

David, 51, and the owner of Howard Plumbing, moved to the Darien area in 1986, so he’s had nearly 40 years of McIntosh hunting to keep tabs on local whitetails and their ways. There is a long-standing tradition of running deer with dogs in the coastal swamps, and he and his father Skip were part of that for a while. Then things moved in a different direction as far as the type of deer David wanted to take. It was a game-changer that required a whole new plan.

“About 2008, I quit running dogs and decided then that we were going to start killing bigger bucks,” David stated. “We knew that big deer don’t get that way by being killed when they’re small deer. So we created what we call sanctuary blocks. We made three roughly 25- to 30-acre blocks, each within around 100 acres on our farm. We do not step foot into those blocks and haven’t for years. We hunt the perimeters of them, but we don’t go into them.”

What that means is that a buck could possibly live his entire life unbothered and even unseen within his own private domain. But then that October-November urge kicks in, and it’s time to be on the move. If the does he craves aren’t coming to him… and remember, that P&Y was killed roughly a mile from his home range. It may have been a fluke that he was taken where he was, but then that’s the way it goes with bucks, and especially during the rut. One of the finest heads I’ve seen, a Boone & Crockett from middle Georgia, was taken when an aging hunter got tired of walking to a stand before daylight, sat down with his back to a fence post and shortly shot the massive buck walking right up to him through a cotton field.

Charlie Elliott told me once that a turkey gobbler is so brilliant because his brain is the size of a pea and he’s so stupid that he doesn’t know where he’s going in the next five minutes, so how is a hunter supposed to figure things out and get ahead of him? UNLESS there’s a hen involved. Same principle can be applied to a rut-crazed buck. The Howards see it in play regularly.

“I don’t know exactly what our buck-to-doe ratio is, but I think we have pretty strong competition,” David says. “My son Dawson (21) has killed several bucks actually chasing does; he killed two when he was home from college last year and both were with does. He’s entered several in Truck-Buck, and we’re still hoping.”

Dawson Howard drives home from UGA several times a season to hunt. Over the years he has passed up a lot of deer, and the results are working. Dawson killed this buck last December. The 13-pointer grossed 130 and was 6 1/2 years old.

One of the more fascinating tips David shared perfectly displays the passion his family has for the whitetail, as well as the enjoyment of matching wits with what I believe is the toughest critter of them all to outsmart­—when he’s not taken off his game by a female.

“We’re always finding scrape lines during the rut, and if they’re going in several directions, we make mock scrapes to kind of link them together. You’re always guessing which stand to sit in, so we come off those two trails of scrapes to connect them with doe estrus urine and have the bucks come to us. It doesn’t always work, but we have had success in doing that.”

And as if a buck is not already off his rocker, those mock scrapes provide an extra shove.

“I like to use three different scents: Code Blue, Golden Estrus and always Tink’s HotShot Gel Stream. I know it sounds crazy, but if all the scrapes are full of urine, they’re all going to smell the same. If you always put the same scent in the same scrape, the buck thinks it’s the same doe. But if you use three different kinds, they may think it’s three different deer, get curious and check it out. We just keep it changed up so that it’s not always the same scent.”

Whether or not it makes sense doesn’t matter to a deer hunter; if it works, it matters! And David puts up a telling point when discussing photos he sent me.

“Three of the deer you see were 7 1/2-year-old bucks that had reached their maximum potential, and that’s all we can ask for. Dawson’s was a 6 1/2. Those bucks were never going to get any better, and if you can fool one with all the experience he’s gained in those six or seven years, that’s as good as it gets in deer hunting. We typically see tons of deer, but we just don’t kill them. Dawson comes home from school at UGA two or three times a year, and we spend our time together in the woods. We love all kinds of hunting and fishing, but our dedication is to deer hunting.”

That dedication is what it takes. And it’s obviously paying off for the Howard clan.