Deer season is over and the fish have not started biting.  Late winter can be an incredibly boring time of year for the deer hunter.  I thought I would try to help everyone out and make a list of post season boredom breaking ideas.

1. Winter is a great time to put up a trail camera.  A winter wheat field or a small corn pile can really concentrate deer in front of a trail camera.  Here are a few trail camera setup tips.
2. Get out and hike with the family.  Take the kids out for a walk on your deer lease.  Look for rub lines, funnels and white oaks that could be likely stand locations.  You also stand a great chance of finding some shed antlers.
3. Run out and by the Sunday paper.  Deer leases are expiring and hunting clubs are looking for new members.  Don’t miss out on your chance to join the most popular deer hunting club in your area.
4. Grab the shotgun and hit the range.  Shooting trap and sporting clays is a great way to spend a Saturday.

Deer season is over in most parts of the United States and it is now time to begin planning for the 2007 season. There are still many deer hunting related activities that you can do even though season is over. Many people love to search for shed antlers. This can be a ton of fun and you verify which bucks made it through the year alive. You can also continue a supplemental feeding program and monitoring the area with trail cameras. Another off season project could be maintaining or building deer stands on your property. I have always been a big believer in getting this done way before opening day. For my hunting style I prefer lock on stands and self climbing stands. But for many other people they take building deer stands to the extreme. Take a look at these extreme deer stands.

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.