The more you travel around and talk to hunters the more you realize how nuts the rut plays out in some areas due to how things got restocked……There are some places around here where you could legitimately have a doe coming into heat anytime from Thanksgiving to Feb 10……..The Uchee SOA is sitting in one such area where a hodgepodge of doe stockings merged together with possibly what was left of some native does……There’s about a 10-15 mile wide swath east to west through that area where folks could be seeing something different from one property to the next just depending on the makeup of the doe herd that currently occupies their property….

What makes it even more interesting is that while everything is probably fairly stable these days, there’s still going to be some fluid movement of the different doe populations still occurring just depending on which does live and reproduce more successfully. There’s going to be areas like this all over Alabama where different doe lineages are merging or have merged together…..It kinda throws some of that traditional management stuff out the window about shooting does to create a tight rut …..Its almost not even possible for some folks……It would be interesting to see how the dynamics of the larger buck herd is reacting to such situations……Are some bucks moving long distances all season looking for hot doe areas??

I’ve spent my whole life hunting in Mobile, Baldwin, Dallas, Marengo, Clark, Washington, and Conecuh counties. Our rut is basically the same time of year in those counties. Mid-late January.

I’ve been hunting in Southwest Lowndes County for 30 years and you can hack your watch to the rut being plus or minus a couple of days within January 21st. We have always had a big camp out weekend on MLK weekend and it’s always in the middle of the rut.

We hunted little river SOA last weekend and killed a doe and a Buck. Both stunk to high heaven and had very dark tarsals. Also found 8 fresh scrapes. They sure acted like they were about to rut.

They stink here too and scrapes everywhere like always. Rut still not till end of Jan as always.

Northern Dekalb and parts of Jackson are about to break wide open.

Its gonna be the areas where restocking occurred from multiple different sources……There’s gonna be areas around bankhead where different doe lineages merge together……areas around Cleburne and Calhoun Counties and so on……Lots of places where these transitions occur from one rut timing to another….. When you hear some guys say that they have two ruts…..they really do. Its possible that some may have 3 or even 4 if you count the early and late January does as being seperate "ruts"……Between Uchee and Seale there are deer in estrous in Nov, Dec, and Jan and they all overlap and intermingle within a distance of 5 miles……Can you imagine what the bucks must be doing in that area? You would think they would all be completely run down by the end of the season…..I’m not sure where the Christmas rut stuff comes from though unless there were some native deer left when restocking occurred…..It could just be a secondary rut for the November does but I don’t think so…..I’m pretty sure it’s a primary rut some are seeing at that time....Like I said though, its not unique just to this area.....Its occurring all over Alabama

Not all over Alabama. I just mentioned 7 counties where it is not occurring.

Christmas rut is strong north of the river in Tuscaloosa county

This is kinda how I picture that repopulation occurred after restocking…..According to the maps there wasn’t any restocking in Russell Co which is something else that makes me think there might have been some native deer left there…..But the map had to fill up in some form or fashion like you see here and what gives us the crazy hodgepodge in some locations…….Again, this isnt just unique to this area…..There’s lots of areas just like this and why folks see such crazy rut timing in some places…….

It would be interesting to know how many native does were left around the state when restocking occurred……Technically it would have only taken a few hiding in isolated areas to start forming a doe herd from that lineage ……Most of the native deer in the state should have had mid to late Dec ruts……That makes me wonder if that’s where a lot of these Dec ruts come from…..I don’t think we released any does with those rut dates….At least the maps don’t show it…..Its possible that they came from undocumented releases

If you want to understand how it’s still a fluid situation…..Then look back at the chart I just posted and imagine that we had hunters in the green circle completely quit shooting does while the hunters in the red and blue circles blasted away at them…….If this occurred then the green circle would keep pushing westward over time and we would change the landscape……

Now that’s an extreme example to explain the concept but its exactly what’s occurring from one area to another just to lesser degrees…..More are born over here, more are shot over there…etc…..Its why if things arent regulated in Bankhead you have the potential to see the Nov rut eventually disappear there as the surrounding populations push in…..Low reproduction and a lot of doe killing in the middle of the bankhead circle combined with burgeoning doe herds around the perimeter equals the potential for change.

Throw in the effect major rivers, highways, and habitat breaks are having as barriers to doe expansion…. acting like restrictor plates on a race car…… and your starting to paint the full picture of “The Alabama Rut”

Now we’ve complicated the map even further ^^^^ by adding an additional “hunter” into the mix in the form of a major highway……He’s hunting 24/7/365 and he loves does that try to cross the highway back and forth on a daily routine…..He’s constantly sniping one here and one there as they do it……This doesn’t mean that doe movement is completely halted but it becomes restricted……The more traffic the more its restricted…….If we run that scenario now where we stop shooting does in the green and blast away in the red and blue……The push westward is reduced in comparison to what it was before we added the highway….The push now has to exceed the road mortality first…..

So now imagine if we change the scenario and we make it to where hunters are shooting enough does on both sides of the highway that we have no expansion push occurring at all….The doe herds would be nearly isolated from one another……This is what’s occurring to different degrees from one area to the next around the state…..In most areas we are controlling the doe populations to such a degree that you don’t get enough “push” occurring for doe lineages to jump major highways and interstates and you get a recycling from within so to speak for each area…..In some places there may be large populations with enough doe production to exceed the highway effect…..

On the above map I know that there’s some Nov does intermingled that are at least 3-4 miles west of the highway…..If hunters blast those does out though then they could potentially eliminate their early rut. Its most likely that new ones arent going to push into the area from the east side of the highway and the ones that do exist to the west are just recycling from current Nov doe groups that already live there…..Knock out those few early Nov does and they’ll more than likely be replaced by the other doe groups that exist on that side of the road.

This is the fluid situation that’s actually occurring in the woods and how all these factors are interacting with each other to determine the outcomes we see…….You may think it would be cool to have property in some of these places but from what I gather it can really be feast or famine…..I’ve hunted these areas myself and can confirm that……..I think I’d probably prefer to just hunt an area that had a pure rut but this is what many hunters are dealing with none the less…..

Here’s a couple questions I’d still like to see the answer to in a study to better understand the situation…….How much variability in estrous timing from one doe to the next occurs normally in a herd that only has one pure rut…….In other words, what is the normal width of the bell curve, how far do outliers occur, and at what frequency do outliers occur under normal circumstances?.....Also, how much annual variation is there with estrous timing of each individual doe??....Meaning that if she comes into estrous this year on Jan 23…..how close to that date will she cycle the following season……AND…..how close will her female offspring follow those same dates?

Folks want to know the exact minute that the rut kicks off on a certain quarter acre of land but will complain about corn pile hunters. Just be in the woods as much as life allows. Y'all sure like to complicate things.

Madison County is already showing swollen necks, active scrapes, and does being pushed by younger bucks.

The bucks in my area of Jackson county has always been the best the first week of January. My buddy has land up above pisgah that is wide open right now

It don’t matter. If you have to rely on the rut to kill a buck with a season as long as ours then there are larger issues to deal with.

The Southwest Alabama counties are going to be pretty consistent because nearly all of the restocking in those areas came from native deer in those areas. You never got any new genetics introduced in significant amounts. It's the rest of the state where Southwest AL late rut swamp deer genetics were introduced into some remaining native herds and additional restocking from NC or MI that gets weird.