NC’s Whitetail Rut
NC is my home state so this information was very interesting to me. I read every hunting magazine I
can get my hands on and watch all the major hunting shows. In all the shows and publications the RUT is the main topic. The breeding is not the exciting part. The exciting part is the chasing. This is the period when big bucks make mistakes and are harvested. It is a period when all hunters want to be in the woods. In the north and midwest hunters can basically pinpoint the rut to the same week year after year. I have seen some very exciting chasing activity in PA but I have never really witnessed a full blown rut in NC. I mean I have seen a buck chase a doe but I have never seen a half a dozen bucks running 1 doe all over the country side while fighting and grunting. Then I read a recent article in NC Game and Fish that provided data from the NC Wildlife Resource Commission that showed 3 very different breeding periods across the state.
I found it very hard to believe that the rut was so different in the same state. By different I mean one area showed peak buck activity the last week of October while another region showed peak activity the last week of November.
“The annual cycle of white-tailed deer in North Carolina is similar from the coastal areas to the mountainous regions of the state. There are, however, some important differences between regions. One of these is the onset of the rut and the breeding season. In our extreme coastal counties, breeding activity begins in September and extends through February. In the mountains, breeding periods range from late October through March. In fact, biologists have documented the evidence of deer breeding statewide in every month except during the months of April through July.
The majority of the breeding activity, however, occurs in a 3 to 4 week period in all regions. The peak breeding periods by region are: Lower Coastal Plain (last week of October); Upper Coastal Plain (first week in November); Piedmont and Foothills (third week in November); and Mountains (first week of December).” www.ncwildlife.com
I still don’t fully understand why breeding would occur on the coast before it starts in the mountains. It would seem that with the milder climate on the coast that there would be no rush for fawns to be of age before winter.
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