Just as a quick example of one possibility.....What about if let's say a buck had a nice quiet honey hole where he had spent his whole life undisturbed and then suddenly one day the land sells and the new owners start coming in and cleaning out a place to build a house right in the middle of it?.....
That's a variable outside the scope of basic needs.....There's a lot of things that could be at play.....What about if maybe that buck that had been dominant suddenly got too old. Maybe he has to move on to somewhere else....it's of options.......

house hell, what if a huge meteor crashed burning into his lil sanctuary on day, just missing him. Would he relocate???

Maybe.....maybe not......what it might make him possibly do is show random data points on a tracking collar where he left his core area for a few days for a reason the people doing the study didn't know had occurred......theres all kinds of singular event that could occur on any one give day of a bucks life to make him stray off of his normal routine.....There's also the consideration of what happens when he is no longer top dog and suddey the aloha dog becomes subordinate.....I also bet there's at least some small aspect of phycology at play amongst deer ...... especially males.....I see it with dogs without question. The point is that there's a lot of possibilities why the studies show bucks randomly going on a walk about. Of all the possibilities...I seriously doubt "just because" is one of them

Here’s another very real possibility that may not be considered when looking at the data……What if its not a “walk about”…..but more like a “run for your life”……Now we can disuss the back and forth of yotes in another thread but I’ve seen so much evidence of it while tracking that I have little doubt in my mind anymore that yotes targeting the weak and wounded deer of all ages....... What if the buck was run down from the rut or maybe he got injured and the yotes targeted him as a deer they could push around until he succumbed from weakness??? I’ve found them as far as a mile to a mile and half from the hit site as a result of yotes doing this….Maybe that excursion was him being pursued by a pack of yotes and he fled to somewhere he could get away from them…..A deer’s natural defense against this is to head to a body of water…..Maybe that’s why he went where he did…..He stayed hunkered down for a day or two and then went back home....There’s way more to understand about these things than we know….We can't just say it"s "just because" and never think any deeper into it.….

A mile is not an excursion in my book. That’s normal movement. Deer travel a mile or more under normal uninterrupted 24 hour time periods.

I agree with you.....Keep in mind that I'm talking about deer we were still able to recover....I'm almost looking at the ones I referred to as just the minimum of what's possible. There's been other ones we didn't recover that may have done who knows what. I've tracked a bunch of them where we suspected the coyotes of getting them up and pushing them and eventually we'd just have to call it off. I could easily see there being situations where a deer could go for miles if the yotes kept pursuing him and he didn't have any bodies of water nearby. Its possible that at a certain point they abandon their usual tendency to circle back and switch to a bee line in a straight direction as a last resort to get them off his tail. Again though,,,,don't get too hung up an any one example I'm throwing out.....The point I'm trying to make is just that there are a lot of very real possibilities for what could cause such a behavior to occur. Something just tells me that calling it a "walk about" and saying they do it "just because" like he's going on s spiritual journey to find his true self is just not accurately describing what's taking place...….. .

The walk abouts and excursions I’m referring to are often repeated, not one time ocurances. They’ll leave for weeks at a time, go miles, stay there, and then return. Next year they do it again. I’ve tracked quite a few deer on long tracks and most of the time, in my mind anyway, they’ve been there before. I know it’s a complex issue.

I agree with you....it makes much more sense to me that they would go somewhere they're familiar with rather than into a complete unknown. That would go against any survival instinct, etc.....I wonder if it has anything to do with where they were born? Are there any patterns to them? What time of year do they happen?

Here's some interesting buck movement info. I heard the author give a seminar on his research at a QDMA convention several years ago.
https://www.qdma.com/10-things-know-mature-buck-movements/

Here's another possibility of where they're going......I have basically got the area around me maxed out with doe groups from the standpoint of social capacity....Any dispersing young buck that passes through gets kicked on down the road pretty quickly. I usually don't see ANY bucks during hunting season untill 12-14 days ahead of the does going hot. Then suddenly bucks just start showing up. I'd love to know where and far they're coming from. Some stay for the whole rut and some get booted out by other bucks. More on that later......Bu t that's typically the only time I see them with one exception.....right around the first of October and into the first week of bow season I'll often times have encounters with or get pictures of different bucks.....often times good ones too. They disappear by the second week of bow season and don't show back up until Jan.....It's common to see the same ones come back.

So the other possibility for an familiar place for them to go on this "walkabout" might be to their breeding grounds or whatever you want to call it. Maybe the spike in testosterone right after antler sheddi.g gives them a false indication of the rut happening or something. I'm not sure why they might go there outside of those times but if we agree it's.likely a familiar place they've been in the past....that's gonna be a pretty narrow list of options probably

That's good info......I wish they would have came up with a better way of describing that one other than "deer take short vacations".....That'll end up misleading some folks. They went on to say that there was no way to predict when and how far......What it probably should have said is something like.... "We can only track the deer and know what he alone is doing....we don't have the ability to see everything that may be occurring around him....There are too many unknown variables to be able to say why they leave their home range in these instances"...….What they damn sure aint doing is "going on vacation"

Another option may be a seasonal food source that is only available in certain locations for a limited time.....fruit for example.....

Actually the vacation statement probably stemmed from one buck in particular. During the Maryland study they had one buck go on almost a straight line about 7-8 miles to a area with a lake and stay about two weeks each year. This was not during the rut and when he got to his destination he moved very little, then came back home on a straight line. They couldn't explain it, the best guess is that was where he was born and he was going "home" for a visit. There was a major highway running through the large study area, some bucks would cross the road freely at any time , some would get very close , but never cross. Many would skirt around hunters, just out of sight. Some would range far during rut , some wouldn't get off a few hundred acres. Some moved almost only at night, others moved fairly freely in day light. One thing for sure they found , you wanted to find a mature buck in daylight, go to the thick , nasty hiding spots.
The biggest take away was they are individuals.

I laugh at anyone who says "deer do this"....because I know they don't know shitt about deer.

That’s pretty interesting about the lake buck…..He definitely had a reason for doing it….or rather there was some factor that influenced him….just by the fact that he repeated it over and over.

I’m not saying this is all there is to it but a couple of big factors that are going to dictate that movement during the rut is gonna depend on how much each buck HAS to move…..That’s gonna depend on where he ranks in dominance and how the does are concentrated and distributed. For example, just due the habitat layout and management of other properties around me etc……I likely have the highest concentration of does in one small spot for a mile or more in a circle all the way around me….I say that having got to know and tracked for all of these places so its not a wild arse guess…..I’m gonna use one seasons events to explain but my opinion is based off of numerous seasons of observation….So that being said…..

A few years ago just ahead of the does going hot I had one older buck move in along with a 4 year old 8 point (who was a bully) and a few younger bucks…..The older buck and the 8 point without much doubt got the first couple of does to go hot out of the ones I had concentrated. This would have been several days to a week ahead of the majority going hot…Everything I’ve read says that the tending and breeding process takes them about 3 days…..So after about 3 days those two bucks were finished with their doe and they came right back to get another one….both were still there when the peak of the rut started. That’s when more middle aged and younger deer moved in and chit was going every which way... So the older buck and the bully 4 year old both came back and picked up a second hot doe and tended her for three days…..When they were done with those then they came back again to get one last doe....…..(there’s was around 20 does in this one spot)…...Now this is getting us into the tail end of the rut and suddenly this is when other older bucks started appearing…..Why???......Likely because there were no does left to breed wherever they were at before….They had to start moving around to find the last ones….meanwhile the one that came into my place from the beginning never had to go anywhere to get his….

Now, dominance is gonna dictate how that shakes out too….especially amongst the middle aged deer. The bucks that are dominant are gonna stake claim to these spots like mine…..The subordinate deer are gonna be forced to travel and move around a lot to find does. The amount of pressure placed on their dominance is going to change as well from the first of the rut the end…..The tail end when there only a few left is when it be tested the most.

My point being that deer will be individual just like the 4 year old bully that made laps around my place bowed up and grunting……..but they aren’t just gonna up and leave a whole pile of hot tail because they like to travel or something….There only gonna move and leave concentrations like mine if the HAVE to......The old bucks that showed up at the tail end came there because they HAD to. There’s more complexity to it than what I laid out here but I tried to keep it simple just to illustrate how the doe distribution and dominance play a role. I just smile when I hear my neighbors “managing does” because I know where their old bucks are gonna go looking for the last piece of hot coochie when they run out of them.

They're definitely all individuals and act accordingly.

Let me jump back a little and explain a little more behind the tactic I mentioned earlier about strategically placing a feeder in an area to draw the doe out of the bucks sight…We got side tracked and I never went back and explained the thinking behind it…Again, like I’ve said before this is not to mean that every buck with always do it this way.

An old buck starts out by just shadowing the doe he’s tending. He’s more like a stalker creeping in the shadows at this point. He keeps his distance from her and keeps alert of his surroundings. He may drift back a ways and be 100-200 yards behind her sometimes….maybe more….Right now he knows she’s not ready and he’s only keeping tabs on where she goes so that he’s there when she does get ready to breed….He doesn’t get too bothered by young bucks and such. He’s that old bull standing on the hill that walks down there and ..…..well you know the rest

Alright, so as the hours pass and the doe gets closer and closer to becoming receptive to letting a buck mount her….that old buck is gonna suck up closer and closer to her and is gonna get more defensive about keeping other bucks away and not letting her get out of his sight…..There’s a magic time period right before the doe is ready where he becomes the most vulnerable he’ll likely ever be…..We may be talking about a few hour time period. Once she becomes receptive to breed then they will likely hunker down in a thicket and be hard to catch moving. But during that period right before she is ready .....he will let his guard down and risk exposing himself to danger in order to make sure he’s the one that breeds her. This is when our little feeder trap will snap and catch us a mouse. A certain amount of its just gonna be luck and that doe bringing him to the plot and trap when during this vulnerable time….Now they very well may follow her out in the open during other times too but this is just when the odds are the most in your favor.

Yep, and when they say deer ALWAYS do so and so, that's all I need to hear.

yeah, at 12 midnight

You are taking the time to actually read what I'm writing, correct?,,,,,,Because I think I've specifically said just the opposite in damn near every post.




Its all good though....besides deer my one other interest in life is psychology...…. so I recognize all of this isn't really even about deer so much...... Y'all go right ahead though......To be honest, I probably enjoy analyzing the way folks interact and behave in these discussions as I do the topic of deer itself.

So are you saying that all does become receptive and ready to be bred at midnight??? What if she's ready to breed at 4:00 in the afternoon??