Southwest Rut Report, Week 4: Texas Hill Country Rut in Full Swing

The Texas Hill Country is always a precursor to the rut in the majority of the southwest. This year is no exception. Last week I visited with my buddy Blake Barnett from Trailing the Hunter’s Moon, and he thought the hill country rut was just about to kick into high gear as he had been noticing a number of scrapes and some considerable buck movement.

Blake called me a day later to confirm. He watched multiple bucks with broken antlers come through his property cruising and scent checking. Broken antlers usually mean the bucks are sparing with each other and rubbing on trees and brush. My social media feed corroborated this as my friend Larry Weishuhn posted a video of a large scrape next to a bush that had been destroyed by what I presume is the same buck that made the scrape. I have been hearing reports of scraping and rubbing north of the Hill Country as well. The Texas rifle opener on November should have plenty of rut activity in the northern half of the state.

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Elsewhere in the southwest, we are seeing mountain mule deer on the move. Bucks are traveling and does are starting to pile up in their usual rutting grounds. It’s fascinating to hunt a place where such migrations happen. I used to hunt a ranch that never had more than 10 mule deer on it in September but once October hit, that number grew exponentially. By mid-November there might be 200 deer on the place. Once the does started showing up, you had about three weeks then you would start to see immature bucks and eventually once the first does came into estrus, the mature bucks showed up. While we are still a week or two away from any good rut activity in the mountains, the signs I’m seeing give me hope that it will start sooner than later.

The southern halves of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona still have a while to wait. Mid December is generally the first of the rut in these areas with late December to mid January being the peak.