You Can Have a Second Chance to take a Buck in January
Day 4: Other Ingredients Critical to Having the Chance to Take a Buck the Second Time
Editor’s Note: To bag a buck during January and possibly have a second opportunity to bag a buck, you need to know these critical ingredients for successful hunting.
 * The age of the deer makes a difference in whether a buck returns to the site where he has been spooked. Mostly the younger, less-experienced bucks will be the first ones to venture back into places from where they’ve been frightened. Often the older, more-mature deer will take longer to come into the area or won’t move into the region at all, after they’ve been spooked in it.
 * Sex also plays a role in a buck’s giving a hunter a second chance. When deer are in the rut, two of their primary concerns are breeding the estrous does and running-off rivals that may enter their home ranges to breed the does. Therefore if a big buck is spooked during the rut but hasn’t winded the hunter or identified the sound that has startled him as a man, the buck may return to that spot to determine if the sound he’s heard or the object he’s glimpsed is a doe or an intruding buck.
 I believe this characteristic of bucks in the rut is another reason I had a second chance at the big buck on White Oak Plantation (see Day 2) during the rut. At first, the buck was with two-other does. When he was spooked, since the deer didn’t smell me, and the first thing the buck heard coming from the area where he’d been frightened was the grunting sound of another buck, then I think the deer naturally assumed that what had frightened him was another dominant buck moving into his home range to try and breed his does. Perhaps this assumption was also why the buck came bounding-in so quickly.  However, once the animal was at the site and couldn’t see the challenger, he became nervous. When the wind shifted, and the buck picked-up my human odor, he identified the sound he’d heard earlier with the scent that was filling his nostrils and realized he was in harm’s way.
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