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