Opening Day Jitters

By Craig Boddington

Originally published in the January 2025 edition of Safari Times.

The first day of any season is special, with everything bright, fresh and new. The weather may be terrible, the moon may be too bright or the game may not be moving. Good conditions or awful, it doesn’t matter. If we can, most of us will be out there on that first morning.

I don’t know when your Opening Day falls, but if you are in North America, likely yours has come and gone. Most of us have multiple season openers. It depends on the game, where we hunt and what methods we employ. I suspect most of us have one special Opening Day that we most look forward to.

Mine is Kansas rifle season for whitetails. It’s always the first Wednesday after Thanksgiving. This year, Dec. 4 is as late as the calendar allows.

My neighbor Chuck Herbel and I had been working toward this day since the end of deer season a year ago. Not constantly nor continuously, but steadily. Food plots, feeders, mineral blocks, clearing trails and lanes, improving and moving stands. Adding stands.

Our friend Lee Murray, stalwart of the Michigan SCI chapter, purchased some ground adjoining Chuck and me. West of me is an awesome habitat that hasn’t been hunted in 20 years. On Dec. 4, we planned on using some brand-new stands in this untouched country. It was very exciting. But so are favorite (and proven) old stands: Schoby, Below-the-Corral, County Road, Gibbs Crossing, Hagen, Oak Grove, Sonne, Well-Head and others unnamed.

Everything is a little different each year. Moisture varies, thus do mast crops, and watercourses change. Some deer trails are the same, and others are new. In the past few weeks, some perennial rub and scrape lines have popped up like mushrooms, along with a few in places we haven’t seen. We had better spring rains this year, a few more acorns and wild pecans. Still, it was a brutally hot and dry summer, at least the third drought year. The antler growth was still not what it could be.

The way the calendar works, this is our latest rifle season opener since 2017.

Combining drought with late season, I’d been worried to death about this Opening Day much of this past year. We think our rut peaked about a week ago, which is normal. This year, with a later opening, I expect the primary rut to be winding down at best. We can’t do anything about it. The season is what it is. However, we’ve kept the woods undisturbed. We did almost no bowhunting this year, and we started supplemental feeding earlier than ever.

We do have one small advantage. In our area, we’ve maintained a high buck-to-doe ratio, which I think has aided unusually active secondary rut as unbred does recycled. We usually see this in the latter part of our 12-day rifle season, and I expect the later season will make it more visible this year. I hope so. Otherwise, it comes down to the moon phase and weather.

We can’t do anything about that, either. So, I’ve been scared to check.

Until today. It will be a fairly dark the first week — good. It will get brighter the second week — not good. We might think about holding back some historically high-producing stands for that second week.

I believe in the moon phase, but only insofar as this reality: Daylight whitetail movement is greater when the moon is dark and less when the moon is bright.

With a short, long-set season, we can’t fix it, but it’s not the kiss of death. In my experience, when the moon is bright, there’s less early morning movement and more midday movement (so I sit longer), with late afternoon movement fairly normal.

Overall, I believe weather has the greatest impact.

And we can’t do anything about the weather except pray. Our southeast Kansas deer seem to be fair-weather creatures. They like it not too hot, not too cold. They move best when mornings are frosty, warming up to the high 40s with a maximum of about 60.

We haven’t had a brutally cold rifle season for years. The last time we did, the temps dropped into the teens. I figured it would be glorious, deer moving like crazy. No, all it was was cold, especially on open tree stands.

Our deer didn’t like it and shut down almost completely, with virtually no movement until late morning.

Farmer’s Almanac predicts a severe winter. It may not come to pass, and the book doesn’t suggest exactly when the temps might plummet. I’ve been watching, hoping for cool weather. But it is not too much of a good thing.

I’m not a global-warming guy, but climate change, whether permanent or temporary, is obvious. Recent autumns have been warmer. In my experience, too warm is worse for deer hunting than too cold.

The day before the 2021 season, we had perfect conditions: frost in the morning, about 50 degrees at sunset and bucks chasing like crazy.

A weird warm front came in overnight, and it was over 70 degrees at daybreak. On that Opening Day, we couldn’t buy a buck. There were few sightings on some stands, none at several. Unseasonably warm and suddenly hot. They just quit moving.

On Opening Days in Kansas, we’ll have six or seven hunters in the field.

We don’t expect our hunters to rush, but you can’t stockpile whitetails. A good buck should be taken when seen.

Accused of being a pathological optimist, my glass is always half-full. Even when it’s empty. On every Opening Day, I expect a couple of bucks down. That year, when there was nothing the first two days, I was ready to slit my wrists. On the next Friday morning, it cooled off. Deer started moving again, like turning a switch.

Lee Newton took the first buck on the third morning and 24 hours later, the camp was filled out.

As well as cool temperatures, we want clear skies. I have preferred specific wind directions for certain key stands. On Opening Day, a steady 10 mph breeze out of the north would be nice. Maybe, dear Lord, that’s asking too much…don’t want to be a pest.

I recently looked at the 10-day forecast for Elk City, Kansas. Wednesday, Dec. 4, was (naturally) forecast to be the warmest day next week, but not bad. The forecast was a low of 39 and a high of 60. That’s within the comfort range of our tender, sensitive deer. The forecast called for cooling for the rest of the week, with no precipitation and no high winds.

I hope it was a good Opening Day. I’ve already given you my consistently optimistic prediction. I better have the meat pole and the hoist ready.

Of course, six days out, I have no idea what’s really going to happen. Boom, bust, something in between. Any way it breaks, it’s going to be good to be in the woods. I hope some of my deer friends cooperate. Even if they don’t — and sometimes they don’t — we’ve done what we can to set the table and prep the ground.

Now, it’s up to them and our hunters. I’m anxious to see what happens on this “latest-possible” Opening Day.

Still scared to death, I’ll let you know what happens.