Hunting Halloween Week Will be a Treat

My Buck-O-Lantern

I love hunting around Halloween! This year the weather, Rut and moon conditions will all combine favorably to make the week of Halloween 2012 a real hunting treat.

Satellite view of Sandy's remnants.

Hurricane Sandy has washed ashore and weakened, but Iowa hunters will feel its impact in our weather. Sandy's westward progress and immense size has resulted in a band clouds about 1/2 the size of the continental US that can be seen all the way in eastern Iowa. At the surface, high barometric pressure has halted right over Iowa in an "atmospheric traffic jam" of sorts. This cool, Canadian high will have to wait for Sandy's remnants to move before it leaves Iowa. Other than the wind direction being a bit screwy, crisp mornings and light wind afternoons is perfect weather for hunting! Especially with the Rut brewing.

The Iowa Rut is here! Hunters are witnessing big bucks moving in broad daylight and bucks following does. This has all the earmarks of the Seeking Phase of the Rut blending into the Chasing Phase. This phase will last around one week placing Peak Breeding close to November 8th and Lockdown the week afterwards. Above is a graph of deer season activity levels for this year. I based this graph off of my experience, research and field notes but essentially this is just an educated-guess-opinion -a model of sorts. As such it is subject to environmental factors such as weather, human pressure, etc. (I'll talk more about my methods in another blog). In my estimation this Sunday, November 4th is near the peak of Rut activity. If that's correct, the next week to ten days should feature the best Rutting movement we'll see all year.

Rutting Full Moon viewed from Colorado. Photo submitted to ABC5.

Finally, the Rutting full moon is waning and the moon phase is becoming more favorable for hunting. Many hunters have been experiencing unusually slow hunts. One theory is the bright full moon nights experience high deer traffic. This natural "night light" has many mature animals going back to bed before the sun rises and waiting to leave their bedding areas until well after sunset. If the deer activity is highest when the moon is out, morning/midday hunts are going to become quite active with the moon rising at night and setting midday this weekend.


There is always something special to me about hunting on Halloween and with these great conditions I'll make time to hunt this week. So if you miss the day's of being rewarded for dressing up in a costume, join me. Don the camouflage, pretend to be an ugly bush and try not to scare the deer.

Happy Halloween from Heather and I!