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With archery season less than a month away, Pennsylvania hunters are starting to get restless. Many hunters are looking forward to getting in the woods, climbing a stand, and seeing if this is the year they bag a personal-best trophy for the wall or fill the freezer with meat. Some of these hunters will try new spots untested in past seasons and wonder if they chose right. Other than getting lucky early, the best indicator of potential success is finding deer signs, specifically rubs and scrapes. But how reliable is this method?
What are rubs and scrapes?
When you boil it down to the most basic level, rubs and scrapes, combined with an acute sense of smell, are part of a deer's highly developed communication network.
• Rubs are created when a buck rakes its antlers against a tree, scrub, or brush. When they do this, scent glands on the buck's forehead transfer that smell to the object's surface and leave behind a notification to other deer that they have been there.
• Scrapes are a little more complex than rubs but are still made to notify other deer of a buck's presence. To create a scrape, a buck paws at the earth and removes the top layer of vegetation, depositing scent from the interdigital gland. The buck then urinates on the bare earth and rubs against, and chew on a nearby branch to deposit forehead and eye gland scent.
So, what do rubs and scrapes tell hunters? Despite what many hunters believe, neither tells you where a buck will be tomorrow or even next week. They tell you where a buck has been. Some sites will be made and abandoned. Others will be revisited as the buck builds a territory for the upcoming rut. Learning how to tell the difference will help a hunter understand where to be.
When evaluating rubs and scrapes, a hunter needs to consider several factors:
• Freshness: Was the scrape made last night or last week? Are there indications the buck, or another buck, has revisited the site?
• Surrounding area: Is the rub or scrape isolated, or are there other such sites in the surrounding area? One could indicate a curious younger buck passing through; several could indicate a mature buck setting up house.
• Direction of travel: If there are multiple rubs and scrapes, they will indicate direction of travel. When this happens, is that trail setting you up for a possible shot? How does it impact your ability to access your stand?
• Time of year: Rubs and scrapes can occur any time during the season, and younger bucks often create them out of curiosity or because they are mimicking what they saw older bucks do. The most important indicators of mature buck activity occur closer to the rut; these are also the ones that tip you off about where bucks will be for more than a day or two.
CONCLUSION
Rubs and scrapes aren’t the key to locating deer, but they’re part of it. Alone they mean little, but when paired with proper hunting practices and preseason scouting, they can turn a puzzle into a picture.