A stroke of luck?

Do you ever wonder where terms originate from? “A stroke of luck,” for example, is talking about what? Golf? Anyway, my weekend started with a promising look. Going into it, my hunting buddy capitalized on a doe only hunt. Unfortunately for him, however, he had to watch a nice buck bed down by his expired doe. The buck had been chasing her, so we were suspicious of her being close to going into heat. My Grandpa (who I’ll tell you more about soon) would always cut the tarsal glans off a doe's back legs and pin them to his jacket. “The best scent is a natural one,” he would say! I learned much from my Grandpa’s ways, so I tried out this trick and cut the glands off my buddy’s doe and attached them to a bush right in front of my stand. If she had been in heat, I hoped her scent would bring the big boys a runnin'!

Well….not so fast. I did, as you can see from the video, have some smaller bucks come in and smell the glad, but nothing big came. My buddy is studying animal ecology, and I learned from him a reason why. It’s this: Many times shortly before a doe goes into heat she will secrete a smell that will get some of the smaller bucks exited. But the bucks that have been around a while—the big guys—know this and they won’t get active during daylight until the does are in full heat and close to being receptive. There are several different stages to the rut, and this first stage is known as “the chase.” And this is precisely where my luck ran out this weekend. All I saw were small bucks chasing and pestering the does, but there weren’t any big bucks moving—yet!

While this was my story from this past weekend, it will be changing soon. In the next two weeks we will be in the full swing of the rut. With the combination of that and the massive cold front that is supposed to hit the Midwest this weekend, I can anticipate a killer weekend—literally! I’ll be hitting Southern Iowa for the third weekend in a row, and I’m hopeful that I can send an arrow on its way this time! After that I’m headed to Northern Minnesota the first part of November to hunt my Grandpa's farm, but in doing so I’ll miss the peak of Iowa’s rut. It’s for that reason that I’m hoping for my own stroke of luck this weekend—one that means far more to me than any game of golf!