Cold is the word this January. Below freezing almost every night and not much better during the day.
On windy mornings the deer are scarce. But between 8:00 and 9:00 deer are moving. Usually a dozen or so but once I saw over 50.
The last week of January, on a morning in the low 20’s nothing was about until the sun sent warm streaks of daylight into the woods. A buck came out of the trees and walked into the tall dried grass.
This is a young buck with his first rack. A thin, small one. But during the last three months, his first experience of the rut, he has been active. Notice his hocks, they are black and streaked a few inches down his leg.
He is fat too, as you can see in the picture below.
He angled toward my blind and I got a better look of his fat belly.
He looked around, checking out the surrounding area.
He noticed something I didn’t see and then hurried off in that direction.
Something you may, or may not, know is that in January (around here) the rut is still going on. And it will stay ‘going on’ as long as there is a doe that comes in rut because it is not bred.
