First stud from my own land.

[BenA]

Congratulations on a great buck! And, congratulations on all the work you've put in to make it happen!

 

[T-Max]

Yessir! Most excellent and well deserved! Congrats!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Oleo]

Great story! Not sure how those images loaded on other screens, but I got a little more leg hair than I was expecting as I scrolled through it. :)

 

[omicron1792]

Great story! Not sure how those images loaded on other screens, but I got a little more leg hair than I was expecting as I scrolled through it. :)

Older I get I start to look more and more like the animals I hunt.

 

[omicron1792]

Harvested another one today. Not like my last one but still at 200lb deer. My property lives at the crossroads of three rut maps. I’m actually in the jan9-24 rut zone, but a few miles north is dec 25-Jan 8, and in that zone is a small area of dec 9-24. As we know, deer don’t read maps.

Never seen this guy before. He came racing in nose down.

 

[356]

Harvested another one today. Not like my last one but still at 200lb deer. My property lives at the crossroads of three rut maps. I’m actually in the jan9-24 rut zone, but a few miles north is dec 25-Jan 8, and in that zone is a small area of dec 9-24. As we know, deer don’t read maps.

Never seen this guy before. He came racing in nose down.

View attachment 60703

Congratulations on another great harvest from your place. The research on rut behavior suggests you have both native deer as well as some that are descendants of repopulation efforts. The potential of a long rut seems like a blessing and a curse. Definitely makes hunting interesting…and in your case, productive!

 

[matinc]

Omi great job it's awesome reading and watching your habitat improvements take hold. Congrats

 

[omicron1792]

Congratulations on another great harvest from your place. The research on rut behavior suggests you have both native deer as well as some that are descendants of repopulation efforts. The potential of a long rut seems like a blessing and a curse. Definitely makes hunting interesting…and in your case, productive!

Thanks my man.

The history of deer in Alabama is one of over harvest, degradation of habitat, and basically extinction.

But, we did repopulate and improve and now have over 4 million deer.

Check out rut mat. Apparently repopulation was handled by several different agencies and some private individuals, so we got all kinds of genetics.

 

[Mortenson]

That's wild. So you can hunt the rut in that tiny spot on the eastern edge on Nov 8, but move a county to the west and catch the end of the rut on Feb 8.

 

[omicron1792]

That's wild. So you can hunt the rut in that tiny spot on the eastern edge on Nov 8, but move a county to the west and catch the end of the rut on Feb 8.

Yes! I check this map every year (they update id yearly) but I just read the writing on the left and it basically says what you just said.

 

[BenA]

That's wild. So you can hunt the rut in that tiny spot on the eastern edge on Nov 8, but move a county to the west and catch the end of the rut on Feb 8.

A lot of the southern states have wacky rut dates. Louisiana has breeding dates from September 26 - February 26. Florida might even be more wacky.

 

[bigbendmarine]

Florida's even crazier than Alabama. I'm in North Florida just to the east of Tallahassee and our peak rut on my homesite is very dependably between mid-November and Thanksgiving. Have friends who live within 5 miles of me who often don't see much rutting activity until late December.

Can't speak to precise accuracy, but the top one does peg my place right (I'm in Jefferson County). Bottom one is maybe too generic to capture as much variation as seen in top graphic. There is some debate in my specific area whether or not bloodlines brought in from other areas LONG ago contributed to the variation. For what ever it is worth (or isn't), my acreage sits against a 4,000 acre plantation that I think did have deer transported down from up north decades ago.

 

[omicron1792]

Florida's even crazier than Alabama. I'm in North Florida just to the east of Tallahassee and our peak rut on my homesite is very dependably between mid-November and Thanksgiving. Have friends who live within 5 miles of me who often don't see much rutting activity until late December.

Can't speak to precise accuracy, but the top one does peg my place right (I'm in Jefferson County). Bottom one is maybe too generic to capture as much variation as seen in top graphic. There is some debate in my specific area whether or not bloodlines brought in from other areas LONG ago contributed to the variation. For what ever it is worth (or isn't), my acreage sits against a 4,000 acre plantation that I think did have deer transported down from up north decades ago.

View attachment 60706

View attachment 60707

I will see if I can find the article, but there was a large plantation here that did the same thing. The state brought in mainly northern deer genetics, but this guy brought in about 200 Texas deer. So most deer in our state now have some Texas genes.