Terrain Features And Rub Lines

Terrain Features And Rub Lines by Ken McBroom
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Most deer hunters know how important rub lines are to locating bucks in a particular hunting area. Rubs have paid off for me over the years but over the past few seasons, after reading Mapping Trophy Bucks by Brad Herndon, an excellent tool for your deer-hunting arsenal; I have come up with a new approach. Terrain features are easy enough to find, features such as funnels, saddles, points and hubs. You can find success hunting these features even if there is little or no deer sign within them, especially on public land with lots of pressure which tends to stir up the herd and forces them to utilize these features to escape potential danger. Hunting terrain features this way works well and should be utilized, but this article will focus on the combination of terrain features and rub lines.

I have had success with hunting terrain features alone, but the lack of confidence in the area always made it difficult to stay on stand the entire day, which becomes a necessity when hunting any part of the rut. To gain the confidence I needed to keep my butt in a tree I needed the definite knowledge that there was a good buck in the area. This is when I began combining terrain features with rub lines and big rubs.

The area I hunt is a good mixture of hardwoods, swamps and cutovers with lots of ridges as well as croplands. Over the past several seasons I have located great terrain features that tend to funnel deer through the area providing for some great hunting. In the past couple seasons I have began to scout these terrain features for rubs.

You should begin your scouting early in an attempt to locate the first rubs of the season. Mature bucks almost always make these rubs. I don’t mean those barely visible rubs in August and early September. These rubs are often just where a buck (of any size) was just cleaning the velvet off his rack. The rubs you should look for is good rubs like you find in November. When you locate good rubs in Mid September to Mid October mark the spot and/or hang a stand because you are in the living room of a mature buck. These rubs are not easy to locate, as they are few and far between not to mention the foliage is still thick and visibility is limited in the woods.

These scouting trips are for the serious hunter who wants to harvest a good mature Whitetail buck. The heat can be unbearable this time of year in the south and while the chiggers and ticks keep most hunters out of the woods the snakes tend to keep out the rest. A friend of mine had to go to the emergency room shortly after one such scouting trip as the seed ticks had covered many delicate parts of his body. He still scouts year round although he is very cautious and sometimes feels imaginary ticks crawling all over him.

The trick, after locating these rubs, is to align them within areas of the terrain features already noted. The rubs and rub line do not necessarily have to be in the middle of the terrain feature you are hunting just nearby. In fact I prefer the sign to be away from the terrain feature that links the area where the rubs are and the area where the buck that made them is likely to bed during the day.

Rubs, I have found, can be a double edge sword for the deer hunter. Your initial reaction to a shredded six-inch cedar is to get up a tree and hunt within sight of that rub. Sometimes this works but most times the hunter should try to locate the area that the buck is likely spending his day. If the rub is in the wide open next to a field or in a stand of mature hardwoods, where you can see a mile, then that buck is likely to be visiting those rubs at night and a sighting during good shooting light is not likely. Now, having said all that, I have found, through hours of sitting by a rub line in the open not expecting to see anything only to have several bucks come by and more times than not the biggest buck moves later in the morning like ten to noon. Hence the double edge sword. Do you hunt at the rub or move back and locate a terrain feature that funnels the buck by your stand area as he moves either to the rubs or from the rubs.

Paying close attention to terrain features can help you see more deer but the great thing I have noticed since using this technique is that I look more at the big picture and focus more on the deer’s habitat than just on where I find the sign. Many years ago I felt like I was hunting areas that even though covered up with buck sign was just not the right spot, but I continued hunting these areas because I was seeing deer. These deer were does and young bucks but it kept my confidence level up enough to hunt all day and hopefully get a shot at a good buck.

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