My Favorite Day of the Year
Posted By
Bill Winke
at
5/13/2009 12:00:00 AM
Filed under:
journal
I'm going to keep this short. My favorite day is November 7. Year in and year out, if November 7 is cool, it is a great day to shoot a big buck. Not sure why, but this date is almost foolproof. Some years it is November 6 or November 8, but it is almost always November 7 plus or minus three days. In other words, if I had to pick just one week to hunt each year, I would schedule my entire lifetime worth of vacations for November 3 through November 10.
Here is why I think this holds up year after year. Recent research by Karl Miller indicates that rut timing is not dependent on anything (not moon phase, as some suggest) other than the amount of light in the day. Decreasing length of daylight triggers the does' estrous. Daylight is affected by the time of year, thus from year to year, you will get more or less the same exact amount of daylight on the same dates. So the rut is basically timed the same from year to year. The biggest variable is not when the estrous occurs, but how much buck activity you will see during the day. That is affected by hunting pressure and temperature. But the rut occurs at the same time each year whether you see it or not.
Now, to make sense of it, the first few hot does often attract the most attention and when they come in, the mature bucks want to be there to do the breeding. Once there are lots of does in estrous, the bucks don't have to travel as much and thus move more sparingly and often only at night. However, when the first does get cranked, the big ones are the most vulnerable.
My first and still biggest November 7 trophy - 1995.
