Sep 13, 2014 4 min read

After 58 years of hunting and playing around with rifles, you would think I have learned something. Instead of sitting in front of the television, my wife, Eileen, and I would spend evenings watching the edges of local alfalfa or corn fields, watching for deer, big bucks in particular.

Over that period of our lives, I soon developed an opinion that bucks change their habits around the start of October. Bucks I had watched from mid-August seemed to disappear, replaced by others I hadn’t seen before. I won’t pretend to know why.

Perhaps it was the change in available food or was tied to the breeding cycle. Who knows? But I am fairly certain it occurs.

I’m not saying all bucks change scenery, but I have seen enough that do.

I also noticed there is a pecking order among male deer. Where a group of bucks is spotted, the lesser bucks will be seen licking the face of the dominant buck. This is a sign that he is the alpha.

Bucks that get into fights are not rivals from the original group, but instead occur when an outsider invades the alpha buck’s home range.

Many hunters get excited when they see a buck rub on a tree. While the rub does indicate there is a buck present, they seldom come back to the same tree. The rub tree can be used to indicate the size of the buck in certain circumstances. Seldom will a small buck rub a big tree.

The purpose of rubbing is to strengthen the neck muscles, not remove the velvet. The buck will use a tree that gives him some push back, so the size of the tree can be a clue to the deer’s body size.

Finding a scrape is a different story. An active scrape will be visited again and again as the buck searches for a female. I have often thought of the scrape as a buck’s calling card.

Many times, a scrape will be made on a ridge and the buck will leave a line of scrapes on that ridge. Find a scrape line and you have found a good place to set up shop.

When hunting with a rifle, a stand of osage orange trees will attract deer. Why just during rifle season? Deer eat the fruit of this tree – we call them monkey balls – but only after they have been hit by a good frost.

What they get from this bitter fruit, I don’t know. But I have seem them feeding on them. My last two bucks were shot under a monkey ball tree.

In terms of firearms, many hunters go afield with too much gun. A deer is not really a large animal and is about 9-inches across at the rib cage.

It doesn’t take an elk rifle to down one. Place a .243 in the chest and the deer is yours. Place your .300 super duper magnum too far back and you’ll have a deer to track. Sorry, that’s the way it is.

If you go to the range and put all of your shots on the paper, you can hit a deer.

As most know, I am a rifle shooter. Shotguns are for somebody else. I call them shot-out rifles. They have no rifling.

I am also guilty of trying to get my deer rifle to shoot in 1/2-inch groups off the bench. You don’t need that kind of accuracy when shooting at a 12-inch target.

Still, I like to say an accurate rifle instills confidence. That’s why I try to get my old pre-64 .270 to keep all the shots within a 1-inch mark.

Performance is something else I want. In my gun room, there are six rifles chambered in the .270, with the same person loading the ammo from the same can of powder. The bullets are the same, as are the dies.

There is a 200 foot per second difference in them.

So unless you have a chronograph, you are guessing on velocity.

Personally, I want good accuracy combined with performance. But deep down, I know the target is large and doesn’t require pinpoint accuracy.

It’s really not too early to begin preparation for deer hunting, be it with the bow or rifle.

The shooting ranges will begin to get crowded soon enough.

George H. Block writes a Sunday Outdoors column for the Observer-Reporter.