THE REAL RUT
It is a pretty picture. A heavy bodied buck with thick and sweeping antlers holds court in a section of woods recently shed of its foliage. A line of rubs and scrapes ring a kingdom into which no other buck will step for fear of getting thoroughly thrashed. The big-woods monarch spends its rut breeding doe after doe — every doe in its domain — making sure the fawns that hit the ground the falling spring carry one genetic code that promises to deliver big bodies and antlers.
It is a great picture, but the only problem is it only exists in hunters’ minds. In reality, it is a far cry from what really happens during the whitetail rut. In the past, outdoor writers and hunters could only guess what happened during the rut based on anecdotal observations and vivid imaginations. However, a new generation of researchers and tools are painting a much clearer picture of the whitetails’ habits and behaviors, and is helping unravel the rut’s mysteries.
Dr. Randy De Young, a research scientist and assistant professor of wildlife biology at the Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute, is one of those young guns and has devoted his life to studying whitetails. Straight out of an episode of CSI, De
