Ryan Rothstein

As those who know me will happily inform you, I may have something wrong with my brain when it comes to deer and deer hunting.
I’m sitting here in early January, and I’m already thinking about September and beyond. I’ve got tabs on a handful of bucks whose sheds I’d love to find, and I’m praying they make it through to next hunting season, because they’ll be dandies. For those crazies like me, the absolute last thing I want to do is sit inside and watch TV.

Despite this fall being incredibly warm and overall deer activity being mostly sluggish as a result, the heart of the whitetail rut is staring down the barrel at us. No matter how insistently the weather clings to balmy temperatures, whitetails are going to start breeding, and soon.
Along with that will come all the classic rutting behaviors that we dream about – a parade of bucks dogging a single, harried doe; a pair of brutes locking antlers in a battle for breeding rights; and, above all, that buck we’ve spent months obsessing about doing something he absolutely shouldn’t do and heading right for our stand in broad daylight.