7 Tactics For Primetime

Experience an action-packed whitetail-rut hunt.

- Randy Templeton

It was the first weekend of November, and I was traveling to southwest Iowa for an annual hunt with friends Travis Paul and Andy Timmerman. Throughout the 250-mile journey, I counted more than a dozen ruby red smears across the highway and several carcasses, including a 180-class buck that a hunter from Missouri sideswiped on his way home. Sights like this aren’t usual, but it was a fair reading of the rut’s intensity.

For many Midwestern hunters, the November rut is clearly the whitetail season’s most popular phase, and rightfully so, considering one minute the woods can be dead silent, and the next, a rut-swollen buck could appear from just about anywhere. It’s also the time when big-buck dreams become reality for thousands of hunters each year.

No single strategy guarantees success, but I’ll share several tactics that’ve helped my friends and me score during primetime’s golden weeks. With any luck, you’ll glean the winning combination and score big this year, too.

Timing is Everything

If you were to strike up conversations with a dozen hunters you’ve never met and simply mention the word “rut,” the entire afternoon will be consumed with sharing photos and stories of seasons past. At some point, the conversation will likely turn to opinions regarding the timeframe when the rut occurs. Some might claim it occurred a week earlier or later, while others will say it was spot on with the previous year.

No doubt hunting pressure, buck-to-doe ratios and warm temperatures can affect the rut’s intensity and the amount of daytime breeding activity that occurs. The truth is research shows that the rut transpires at approximately the same time—give or take a couple of days—every year in a given geographic location.