The October Lull Is a Myth

Ask ten hunters about late October and most will tell you the woods go dead.

The bucks you patterned in early season vanish. The cameras go quiet. You might as well wait for the rut.

It feels true. It isn't.

When researchers put GPS collars on mature bucks and watch them through October, daylight movement doesn't drop. It holds, or it climbs right into the pre-rut. What changes isn't how much he moves. It's where.

Three things shift under your feet in late October.

The bachelor groups break up, so the bucks you saw running together in September scatter to their own core areas. The food flips, green fields and early mast giving way to fresh acorns, and the deer follow the drop. And the early-season pressure you've already added pushes the older deer off the easy spots into thicker cover.

The "lull" you feel is just the gap between where the deer were and where you're still hunting.

So don't burn two weeks waiting it out. Find the fresh food, the white-oak flat that just started dropping, and move tight to the cover the pressure pushed him into. The pattern didn't end. It moved.

RackIQ reads your terrain and your cover the same in October as in November, because the deer didn't leave. The job is relocating with them, not sitting home until the calendar says go.