On Rubs and Scrapes

I was a pro-staffer for a couple of magazines for about a decade. As such, I had access to all the hot tips, advance strategies, etc.
The truth of the matter is that although the phenomena were real (scrapes, rubs). The suggestions of what to do with them were apocryphal. I never engaged in it. However, I’m sure some of that stuff was made out of whole cloth.

I have hunted close to rubs and scrapes my whole career. I never once encountered a big buck coming back to his scrape or servicing a doe at one. I never once found a buck revisiting a rub line.

What I have seen are bucks making rubs and scrapes. However, they were one-off things. There was no repetitive behavior. Yes, I’ve attempted fake scrapes, usually in places where scrapes had been made by real deer the year before. This came to nothing.

There are few basic truths in deer hunting. One is to Find the bed. Find the food. Draw a line between them and hunt along that line where it is most advantageous. In regards to breeding activity, I can add another: Where there is smoke, there is fire. I’ve now been on the same 200 acres for 23 years. Each scrape, each rub is a data point. If you can’t remember them, mark them down on a map. The bucks are a lot like turkeys and largemouth bass: terrain dictates behavior. Deer tend to do the same things in the same spots every year as long as other things don’t change. Well, maybe not every year, but you know what I mean.

I have a stand that is my favorite Opening Day rifle stand. So far, I’ve taken 3 of the top 10 bucks in our camp at that location, and usually, I take them within the first ten minutes of legal hunting.

Campground: A Treestand Profile

This isn’t about being an expert deer hunter. This was dumb luck. I’d drawn a zilch from a stand I’d set up the first fall– wasted a lot of time. I was dragging out the stand and noticed a shred of a rotten 2×4 nailed into a tree at the top of the hill as I was coming out. Figuring it was an old stand, I decided to check it out the next year. It was only about 100 yards from where we situated the family campground, but I reasoned that our camping was done by October. It would make a good Opening Day stand.

What does this have to do with rubs and scrapes? I’d stumbled onto a nexus of deer activity. This was a holding spot where deer would come up and loiter before going into a large pasture. It was in a protected corner under big oaks where they could see and not be seen.
The rubs and scrapes have all occurred adjacent to this spot.

What’s more, If I’m out on the right day, I get to see a fairly regular once-a-year occurrence. There’s the confluence of two small creeks below my stand. Near the height of the rut, a young buck will get himself a herd of doe and chase them along the ravine of the smaller creek (Left Leg Creek to us) and run them up across the larger (Soggy Bottom Creek) and up the ravine on the other side. This will go on for hours from before sunrise until at least noon. If I’m there on the day it happens, I get a real show.

We have other spots in the place like this. Some are easier to hunt than others. We have one spot just behind the house that almost always has a scrape in it, but we have never seen a deer near it during daylight. There’s another spot close by where bucks like to come out and spar in late October. It does us no good– the Rifle Opener is mid-November.

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