Pre-rut bucks prefer to make rubs on slender saplings of aromatic species such as sassafras and cedar. Photos by Lance Krueger The rut is coming. We know that much. Whitetails will gather and breed, bucks will relax their prodigious survival instincts, and the odds of seeing and killing deer tip toward hunters. But the rut rarely tracks with the calendar across the country, or even within individual states. Weather, crop harvests, hunting pressure, doe populations, and other localized factors also determine what the bucks are doing where you hunt.

So the time stamps on these clues will vary depending on where you …read more