Autumn Whitetails

A large White-tailed buck walks out of the woods and looks around at the does foraging in the field.

November 7, 2022 – Freeze warnings and frosty nights lit by the autumn moon cause ghostly shadows to appear from things both known and unknown in the fields and woodlands of Northeastern Illinois. The night creatures, large and small, are aware of the changes that come in the fall and are on-task with finding and caching food, while others are fattening up on the summer’s bounty of acorns, grasses, and small prey for the coming long and challenging cold Midwestern winter. For Illinois’ largest mammal, the White-tailed deer, autumn is the breeding season for these majestic creatures, and an uneasy tension seems to hang like a ground fog across the autumn landscape.

The female whitetails are on heightened alert as a small herd of does and yearlings all look towards a wooded area trying to avoid roaming bucks with big ideas. The days are becoming shorter, there’s a chill in the air, and by mid-October, the rut, the period of breeding, will intensify and continue through December with a bit of overlap into the new year. The new generation of fawns will be born in the spring in May or June of the coming new year. In the meantime, awe-inspiring shades of red and golden leaves rattle in the autumn breeze surrounding the farm fields, hills, and hollows throughout our river valleys; these are the homes of the celebrated Illinois White-tailed deer. The bucks have been leaving calling cards by scraping saplings and low-hanging branches, licking, chewing, and leaving scent markings from the glands on their forehead.

The changes in the behavior of the male whitetail deer during the time of rut become deliberate as he is focused only on finding a doe. Those dominant White-tailed bucks, some of which have become nocturnal, venture out into the open during daylight hours, throwing caution to the wind in their pursuit of that doe in heat. Those dramas in nature play out consistently year after year with new players over time. A perfectly worded description, a photograph, or even a trophy mount cannot come close to the actual observation of one of these monarch bucks foraging at the edge of a field near some does on a beautiful autumn afternoon. In the coming weeks, the rut will begin to cool off a bit, the landscape will take on more of a winter look as 2022 autumn fades into the history books. There will still be bucks chasing females that come into heat late; even into January, the passing on of genes continues.

Along the field’s edge a buck using some low-hanging branches as a rub is leaving his scent as a message to other deer.