Rattle & Roll
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
On the Monday after Thanksgiving the sound of gunshots will start at about 6:30 a.m. and continue until dark. In most places on the opening day of Pennsylvania’s statewide firearm deer season, the best hunting strategy is to pick a good spot and sit still — hunting pressure will keep the whitetails moving all day.
But on quieter weekdays and during the later hunting seasons when deer are returning to routine behaviors, firearm hunters could benefit from some archery hunting tactics. Among them is a sleight-of-hand called “rattling” that dates to pre-Columbian Indians and is in the playbook of most of the best archery hunters.
“Once all the does are bred, the mature bucks have a lot of testosterone built up and they still want to breed. They’re still looking for does after the peak of the rut,” said Abby Abbondanza, a former professional hunter, avid archer and frontman for popular Pittsburgh country band The Hillbilly Way.
At this latitude the rut peaks now. Pennsylvania Game Commission biologists calculate the range of the whitetail’s narrow breeding window based on a 2000-2007 necrospy study of spring roadkill does. Of 6,000 female deer examined, 91 percent of adults and 26 percent of first-year fawns were pregnant when they died. Deer gestation period is about 201 days. By measuring the length of the fetuses, researchers were able to determine the approximate dates of conception. Ninety percent had been bred between midOctober and mid-December, placing the peak of the rut in mid-November.
It’s no coincidence the Sept. 30-Nov. 11 statewide archery season puts hunters on deer during the preand early rut. Archers have to draw the deer in close — 30 yards or less. The rattling of antlers tricks territorial bucks into believing that trespassing males are clashing within their proprietary breeding zones. When the subterfuge works the possessive bucks are drawn in to break up the “fight” and chase off the interlopers.
Many hunters initially were leery when a multiyear study conducted on a large Texas hunting preserve in the 1990s found that the biggest mature bucks were disproportionately receptive to post-rut rattling. Conditions in the study area differed from Pennsylvania deer country in that the sex ratio was balanced, something Game Commission deer managers are still trying to achieve in some areas. But in the study area, deer density was high, the age structure was diverse and hunting pressure was minimal — conditions oddly similar to those of Pennsylvania’s secondgrowth urban forests.
To find out what kind of rattling the bucks preferred, researchers in the South Texas study tested four rattling sequences — short and quiet, short and loud (three, 10-minute segments including one minute of rattling followed by nine minutes of silence) and long and quiet, long and loud (three, 10-minute segments including three minutes of rattling followed by seven minutes of silence). During the loud segments, researchers also scraped the ground and broke branches to simulate the sounds of deer in battle.
Throughout the threeyear November and December study, the Texans conducted 171 rattling tests luring in 111 antlered deer. During the pre-rut, 18 bucks approached in 60 rattling sessions. During the peak rutting period, 65 bucks responded to 60 rattling sequences — by far the most productive. But of the 29 antlered deer lured during 51 rattling sessions in the post-rut, 10 were 3½ to 4½ years old. Remarkably, another 10, or about a third of the total, were 5½-year-old bucks.
Another finding — 60 percent of the study’s responding bucks, mature and immature, approached downwind, apparently trying to sniff out the scent of the trespassing males.
“Loud rattling attracted four times as many males as quiet rattling. Length of rattling was not significant,” wrote the study’s lead researcher Mick Hellickson and colleagues in a report abstract published by Southeast Study Group. “Lower response of mature males during rut peak may have been because they were engaged in courtship of females. In general, responses were slower and more deliberate during post-rut.”
In time, archery hunters came to embrace the now-landmark antler rattling study. But the research also holds value for anyone who hunts during post-rut seasons, including Pennsylvania’s twoweek firearm deer season, as well as the post-Christmas flintlock, late archery and extended firearm seasons. Elements of the report could apply to discerning hunters who will only harvest mature deer, and Pittsburghers who know that some of the biggest racks in the state are in Allegheny County.
Abbondanza said postrut rattling attracts bigantlered bucks on properties he leases for deer management in Washington County and Ohio, particularly during the second chance that nature gives to whitetail does who don’t conceive during the initial rut. They enter a second estrus in about 22 days.
Sheds can be found or purchased, but Abbondanza said commercial rattling tools can be just as effective.
“Real antlers are sometimes hard to carry,” he said. “There are lots of good things out on the market, imitation horns made of hard ABS resin. You can make them sound big or make them sound small.”
Abbondanza hits the faux-antlers together harder and grinds them against each other with more force to simulate a clash of big bucks. He said it’s best to listen to the rattling from a deer’s point of view.
“The sound carries pretty well. You don’t want the deer to think [the trespassers are] bigger than him,” he said.
He couples the rattling with an occasional grunt or snort-wheeze.
“I do it for 60 seconds once every hour and a half,” he said. “I’ve learned from trial and error that if you do it again 15 minutes later, there might be a buck coming. He’s just taking his time coming in and you don’t see him. If you do it when he’s too close he’ll pinpoint you.” Start by rattling lightly. “After 20 seconds I get a little bit louder,” he said. “It’s tempting to do it more, but it best not to. It doesn’t always work, but if it’s going to work you have to be patient.”