How to Adjust Your Hunting Strategy as Rut Activity Begins to Decline

Mild fall weather is giving way to harsh winter temperatures, taking with it the wild bucks that are doing nothing but searching for does. Now that rut season is on the decline as we enter December, you’ll need to adjust your hunting strategy to account for the cool down of the reproductive energy you saw throughout the fall months. There’s still time to harvest that buck you’ve had your eye on all year before the season closes on Dec. 31. Here are some tips on how to adjust your hunting strategy as the rut season, and hunting season, comes to an end.

Hunt Near Your Feeders

Now that the rut season has wound down, the deer herd will be looking to restock their bodies’ nutrient supplies. They’ll be focusing on finding as much food as they can in the snow. Deer will eat acorns, woody browse, and other items that are easily found on top of snow, but they’ll also be looking for food that’s more nutrient-dense like corn, soybeans, and alfalfa. If you have a Feedbank Gravity Deer Feeder, stock it with these items to bring the deer to your property. It’s also important to keep your Wild Water Mineral Supplements refreshed during these winter months to give the herd a burst of nutrition through the water supply.

It’s important to note that if you haven’t been feeding the herd all year, now is not the time to start. Their bodies go into survival mode and they carefully digest the food they can find because they know it’s scarce and their bodies have adjusted accordingly, causing them to conserve energy by processing what their body is familiar with. If you introduce a new type of food now, their bodies won’t be able to handle it.

That said, if you have been feeding the herd all season, now is the time to capitalize on that consistency. The deer herd will remember that you’ve been providing these nutrients all year and will seek you out when the natural food supply starts to come up short. This underlines the importance of not hunting directly on top of your food plots. If you have left the food plots alone, the deer will be more likely to come back. If you overhunted the feeders in the earlier season, they might have learned to associate it with danger.

Supplemental feeding isn’t legal everywhere. Please check your state’s guidelines before putting out a feeder.

Re-Check Rub and Scrapes for Mature Bucks

Circle back to old rubs and scrapes from earlier in the year to see if older bucks have come back around. Mature bucks will pass back through areas where they made successful rubs and scrapes earlier in the hunting season, places where they got the doe. You might find one passing back through to see if that same rub and scrape can attract another unbred doe.

Keep up the Rattling

Rattling and calling can still be beneficial in the late season. You won’t need to rattle as often because the bucks aren’t as testosterone-filled or looking for a fight, so too much rattling wouldn’t correspond with the decreased activity. It could stand out like a sore thumb. Rattling a couple times per hour could do the trick. You’ll have more success rattling on unpressured land. If you try to rattle this late in the season on a popular spot of hunting land, it’s likely the deer are already wise to the game and know better than to respond. If you hunt your own land or hunt someone else’s private land, the rattling could have the desired effect because the deer haven’t been over-exposed to it throughout the season.

As the 2025 rut season winds down, use our Banks Outdoors products to adjust your hunting strategy and adapt to the decline in activity. You might even bag a surprise late-season buck.

How do you adjust your hunting strategy as rut activity begins to decline? Let us know in the comments below!