Whitetail Hunting in October can be Great

I don’t want to give you false hope for October. I enjoy the month’s aesthetics, but taken as a whole, it’s a tough time to kill a mature whitetail. Summer-like weather often lingers well into October, but predictable summer-like deer behavior is a thing of the past.

Indeed, one of the best things about October deer hunting is anticipating November deer hunting—but it’s a mistake to write off the month completely. A few special ingredients blended with a perfectly timed cold front can create one of the season’s best opportunities for killing a big whitetail, though the window is short-lived. It all came together for me last fall, on October 30, when I shot a hell-of-a buck with a crossbow at 12 steps. Here’s how it went down.

A HOMEBODY BUCK

I usually don’t have a single “target buck” that I chase all season to the exclusion of hunting anywhere else. But if ever there’s a time to focus on a particular deer, this is it. If your trail cameras are revealing a good buck that’s on a steady pattern—even a nighttime pattern—your best chance of tagging him is frequently in late October. The buck I killed last fall first appeared on my trail camera in mid-September, under a gravity feeder I’d placed on the edge of a 2-acre clover plot.

There’s no service for a cellular trail camera around that plot, but it’s accessible in a vehicle, which made it easy for me to check a conventional trail camera each week without much intrusion. The buck, a tall, heavy 8-point with long, unmistakable brow tines, was there most nights, sometimes appearing just after the end of legal shooting light. That regularity told me he was probably bedding nearby, too.

A PREDICTABLE FOOD SOURCE

Plenty of bucks seem to be homebodies in September, but the pool thins come October. Some bucks shift home ranges completely in the fall. At minimum, food source patterns change dramatically. Cornfields are cut, soybeans yellow and wither, green browse goes dormant, and acorns fall. For this plan to work, you need to find a buck using a predictable food source that will stay attractive all month, despite the environmental changes.

So, what are those food sources? Bait seems obvious, but it’s not legal everywhere. Even if it were, shelled corn loses a lot of appeal once acorns begin falling. But tender greens command a premium as green browse fades away. Cool-season food plots planted in clover, cereal grains or brassicas are especially attractive in October. So are alfalfa hayfields and cut cornfields over-sown with a winter wheat cover crop.

We had a bumper mast crop last fall, and I thought the big 8 I had on camera might change his patterns to focus on acorns. But even as the acorns rained, my food plot was getting greener and he still stopped in for a nibble a few nights per week (even as the bait went virtually untouched). By mid-October, the buck was still hanging around. The only problem was, all my photos of him were still at night.

PATIENCE

The timestamps on my photos told me that the buck was often in the plot just after dark, meaning he had to be up on his feet during shooting light somewhere nearby. I had a good idea of where he was bedding up in the timber, and I even had a lock-on stand set where I thought I might get a shot at him. I considered making a move on him there.

But I wasn’t positive of where he was bedding. In fact, the only thing I knew for sure was that he ended up in that food plot at some point most nights. And I had a ladder stand on that plot, near a creek that I could access by canoe. With a north wind, I could slip in and out of the stand virtually undetected, and hunt the area repeatedly without spooking anything. I couldn’t say the same for the setup in the timber. So, I decided to play the long game, hunt when I had an evening north wind, and get a little more aggressive come November. Throughout October, my wife and I both sat for that buck several times in the ladder stand without seeing him.

THE RIGHT FORECAST

October hunting action can quickly go from a crawl to a stand-up-and-run. In the final third of the month, sometimes as early as October 20, but often not until Oct. 25 or 26, serious pre-rut activity begins in my neck of the woods. This is perhaps due to an early estrous doe or two, or perhaps because the bucks are looking forward to November far more than we ever could. Either way, it’s as if all of that energy is being kept under a cork in a leaky bottle. Meanwhile, the deer are still following a fairly predictable pattern, especially if you’ve found a homebody buck on a steady, green food source, like the big 8 I was chasing.

All you need to pop the cork is the right weather forecast. On October 30 last year, a massive cold front swept through the Midwest and Southeast, causing daytime temperatures to plummet by 20 degrees and setting record lows in many areas. The front was big enough to make the news and cause the usual hysterics – climate change was no doubt the culprit for the apocalyptic 38-degree forecast on Halloween.

Still, I climbed into the ladder stand early on the evening of Oct. 30, expecting to fill my buck tag. I quickly realized that, despite wearing a few extra layers, I hadn’t dressed heavily enough, as it was raw and damp in the wake of the front. Fortunately, there was enough deer activity to distract me from the discomfort. A randy fork horn chased a doe in and out of the plot, and 30 minutes before dark, a nice 3-year-old 10-pointer stepped into view.

I heard the big 8 grunting up in the timber long before I saw him. All of the photos and scouting time culminated into an encounter that lasted less than a minute. The buck stormed into the field with his neck low and stretched, and a doe darted away from him and ran straight at my tree. The shot opportunity seemed inevitable, though I had to nearly yell at the buck to make him stop long enough to squeeze the trigger on the crossbow. He was quartering sharply to me, the bolt hit him at the crease between the neck and shoulder, zipped out the ribs on the offside, and buried into the ground. The buck ran 10 yards and fell over dead, and the doe snorted once behind me. The young 10-pointer in the field stared for a bit before turning and walking stiff-legged out of sight.

The calendar and the weather both agreed that it was becoming November, slowly but surely. It almost seemed a shame that October had to end first.

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