Game of Minutes

Author: Steve Bartylla

It’s been said many times that literally everything can change, when hunting, in a matter of minutes. Heck, you can make a great case that it’s really a matter of seconds, particularly during the rut. All it takes is a hot doe or a buck determined to rage rub a tree or trash that mock scrape, and the game has gotten way more interesting, in just a matter of seconds.

The exact same applies to whether that buck simply jumps that line and fence a handful of minutes before or after dark. He does it before and he is at risk. If we can get him to burn an extra 2 minutes on our side, it just may be the difference, and we can often do way better than just 2 minutes!

Here’s exactly how I use a combo of licking branches and full-blown mock scrapes to further help achieve exactly that.

Wasting Mr. Big’s Time

We must all realize that bucks are most vulnerable just before, during, and a few weeks after the majority of breeding occurs. It’s during this time they tend to move most and more during daylight than any other time of season.

I’ve very often referred to attempting to manage free-range deer as herding cats. Frankly, I’ve found them to be fairly similar in both effectiveness and in building frustration levels. Even when managing stupidly large, prime Midwestern whitetail utopias, one loses a surprisingly high percentage of bucks each year.

In my years of experience in management, I’ve found that their natural mortality rate alone drops their life expectancy to less than half that of does, just due to the social stresses of rutting-related activities and their average of 25-30% weight loss over the rut. Then, one must add what magnets those velvet-covered, blood-rich, developing racks are to all sorts of disease-carrying and potential infection-causing, biting insects.

That said, hunting is a big reason bucks we either want to tag ourselves or get another year on never give us the chance, and that’s to be celebrated, not cursed. If we have every right to do whatever legal act we want and tag whatever legal deer we choose to shoot, so do the neighbors, and I DESPERATELY want and cherish that right! So, the neighbors deserve nothing but sincere congrats when they tag what thrills them, just as we do, regardless of whether we wanted that thrill or thought the deer needed another year, ourselves.

Though there is next to nothing we can legally do, short of erecting high fences, to keep bucks from crossing property lines, we sure can do a bunch of stuff to get them to spend a disproportionate amount of time on our side. The more that occurs during daylight, the higher the odds of either us tagging or getting that specific deer another season. None of this is a lock, and we’ll still lose way more than we think we should, but I have zero doubt it has made the difference on more than a handful of bucks over my years.

Quite frankly, the quickest and best way to get bucks to spend more time on our grounds when they’re both at the highest risk and most other hunters are in the deer woods – right before, during, and a couple of weeks after the rut – is to make them work harder on your grounds to leave their mark and find hot does. When one’s deer cover is a park effect woods, simply cutting sight distance with more cover and forcing the bucks to bird dog the woods, as opposed to effectively searching it with a glance, can literally make hours of a difference a day.

That said, something most everyone can do is be sure there is a glut of lick branches, sticking out like sour thumbs, most everywhere the bucks will be checking for does, feeding, watering and their routes between. As mentioned in a previous blog, I make a single, full-blown mock scrape within easy shooting distance, and with the lick branch pointing back to the stand, by almost every stand site. In my experience, having a number of juiced mock scrapes in the overall area sincerely helps create an overall feeding frenzy of extra scraping activities, assuming the lick branches are available.

Though I certainly won’t pretend to follow a formula, to put it in perspective, on a 40 with 3, half-acre food plots, 4 defined doe bedding areas, and a primary water source, I’m looking at around 5 or 6 full-blown mock scrapes, 10ish lick branches per plot, at least 4 lick branches around the water and at least 6 around each doe bedding area. Then, toss in a dozen or more in the transition zones and/or cruising routes.

Every one of those mock scrapes and lick branches they work on will waste anywhere from 30-300 seconds or more. As a bonus, as you’ll find out in the next blog, doing so can even transform stagging plots into true social hubs, drawing bucks both for feeding and making it a regular stop when rubbing and scraping.

Conclusion

Management and hunting really can often be a game of minutes. The more daylight minutes we can get Mr. Big and his younger brothers to waste on our side of the fence, the more likely we will achieve our management and hunting goals.

Bending a bunch of branches to a buck’s nose level and sticking them in their face is easy and doesn’t have to cost a cent. As a side benefit, it sure helps show us where bucks will and won’t scrape real fast. In a couple of years, almost every lick branch you bend will have a scrape under it, as it’s really that easy to figure out. You just need to start bending, nailing, wiring, and/or hanging branches in their face, at the right spot, and they’ll do the work!