Do you guys ever have seasons where it seems that your entire deer herd goes nocturnal for a while? I know too much hunting pressure can do that with deer and hogs, but we've not been hunting much over the last few weeks and deer movement has slowed to a crawl. Cameras reveal lots of deer but only nighttime photos. Everybody around us is reporting the same thing. Our acreage is in a very rural area with a lot of different landowners and several big hunting clubs but it is now rare to hear more than one gunshot on a weekend evening. Everybody is scratching their heads. It's been pretty warm lately and the moon has been bright, but this seems really odd, as we're not doing any very different from previous deer seasons. Of the last 5 times I've been on a stand, I've seen one deer, total. That hasn't happened to me in at least 10 years. It's weird.......
Honestly, I'd say this is more the norm than not for Southeastern deer hunting. The seasons in most states are ridiculously long and the limits too high. Take Georgia for example. Our rifle season in the North part of the state (including ML) is 82 days! In the Southern Part of the state it's a whopping 96 days. This in a state with 10 million people and an over the counter license that allows you to shoot 2 bucks and 10 doe.
Year after year I see many deer the first 2 weeks of season then they pull a disappearing act. Our rut typically is around November 10th in the part of the state I'm in and we'll see activity, but once the rut is over it's like a wasteland. We have 7700 acres of hunting and we have a few people that shoot things they shouldn't shoot but we set much lower limits than the state allows and we do our best not to over pressure but still they aren't stupid.
I have many trial cameras on the property and I only check them when the wind is right for me to sneak in and get them and that being said it's still no more than once a week and sometimes only once a month. The first couple of weeks of the season I'm getting lots of daytime pictures and after that it's almost always at night. Sometimes they'll hit the plots during the first hour or last hour but still almost nocturnal. I have a couple of cameras that get 500+ pictures a week and less than 10% will ever be in the day.
The first two weeks of season I rarely had sits where I'd see less than 5 deer and usually it was 10-15+. After rut that went down to a trickle where I'd see one or two and rarely none. We have a break in the doe harvest from Dec 1st - 25th and most people in Georgia don't hunt much after Thanksgiving. I suspect when I go back after Christmas I'll have a lot more daylight pictures and see plenty of deer as they've almost had a month of time with very little hunting / human pressure.
