The Realm Wire
A blog style place for whitetail hunters!
"Keeping up with One"
October can feel like a long month for whitetail hunters. The excitement of the season opener, the anticipation of the first cold front, to the begging for November. All this combined with the ever changing mind and activity of a mature whitetail can make for a roller coaster of a month in the deer woods. You ran your trail camera all summer, you hung your stands in the "primo" spots. Now October is here and you haven't seen the deer that you sent your buddy trail camera pics of the last three months. We are going to dive into some things that have made us successful in the latter part of October.
- MOVE YOUR CAMERAS
Now that the corn and bean fields have turned to deserts, it's time to move your cameras to different spots. Find scrape lines between food and bedding. Or better yet make your own scrape. I'd say 90 percent of my cameras are over mock scrapes that I have made. It's a great way to manipulate a whitetail to not only get in front of your camera but to set him up in bow range for your tree stand set up. There are a million scents out there, we are personally using and love the "Day Walk" branded scents.
2.WAIT FOR A COLD FRONT
This year has been unseasonably warm here in Indiana. We've had two cold fronts thus far and both have produced plenty of deer falling and more daylight activity. Instead of wasting days in the woods just to hunt. Plan more around these cold fronts to try to cross that buck off your hitlist. The old saying goes "you can't kill them from the couch" but I like to say " you can't kill them if you bump them 30 times" or something like that.
3.OCT 25
The legendary Bill Winke always used to say he would never even sit till Oct 25th every year. I always talk about "switches" in a whitetails mind and firmly believe when the 25th hits your daylight activity substantially increases. This is the time when they are going to start searching for that first doe to come in heat. More new bucks will start showing up everyday aswell. Travel radius will double, triple, and has no barrier. I like to describe this point of the year has a buck acting like a college guy. They will be checking every bar (bedding area) and club (food source) to see where the "chicks" are at.
4. STAY MOBILE
To Layne and I this is maybe the most important item on this list. Sticking to the same 25 year old ladder stand that your great grand pappy hung will definitely kill a deer. But if have a buck circled like NCIS evidence board, you have to be mobile. We have both been hang and hunters for the past couple of seasons and even have dove into the saddle game. Having a mobile set up that allows you to get to where you need to be is such a game changer. Throw out all your summer time data. You need up to the minute data cause each day is ever changing. I know there are haters of cell cams out there and I get it. But they can be such a tool to dive into what a buck is exactly doing. I always try to come up with a reason why he did this or did that. Whether it might be, such as a wind change or pick another 1000 possible reason he walked by your camera. The buck pictured above I shot on Oct 28th and solely off trail cameras data from the prior three days. We walked by every time the wind switched to the south. Without knowing that info I might not of ever caught up with him. Yes it's cool to look at your pics of deer on your phone. But use your trail camera data as a tool rather than a piece of art.
To wrap up, we could write so many more things that have helped us along the way, but the most important thing is to just go out and expierence all this for yourself. We like to say you learn by doing. Whether that be success or more than likely a failure. You could learn something from every sit in the tree if you really wanted to.
-Mason Hartman 10/25/26
