The October Change

By Sam Gascon | PUBLISHED October 18th 2021

The October Lull: Fact or fiction?

October is truly one spectacular month. The morning air becomes crisp, the kids are back in school, and forests around the country become painted with vibrant reds, oranges and yellows. October’s not only a beautiful time of year, but it also seems to be a universal time of movement and change. Leaves fall from their trees, crops are pulled from the ground, migrating birds fly south— everything seems to ‘get going’. Well… everything except for hunting.

If you’re a hunter, you’ve probably heard of the dreaded October Lull. If you’re not familiar with the term, the so-called “lull” refers to a time each year — specifically mid-October — in which much to an Okayest Hunter’s chagrin, bucks suddenly disappear from the radar. If you ask any hunter if this dip in activity is real,  they’ll tell you it is. However, if you were to ask researchers from the University of Georgia, they’d tell you otherwise.

Students at the University of Georgia placed GPS-tracking collars on a random selection of wild bucks, and charted their movement throughout the summer and fall. By calculating the distance the deer were traveling every 30 minutes and comparing it to the other times of the year, they found that deer movement actually increases during the October Lull.

So if deer are moving more during this time, why do hunters everywhere find themselves staring at empty fields? To find the answer we can look to the beginning of this article— things are changing!

Deer patterns are not exempt from the list of things that change and move throughout the fall. For example, let’s say a buck had been feeding in a corn field all summer. When that corn is harvested, the buck has to find its food somewhere else. It doesn’t disappear, migrate or die, it adapts to the world changing around it. 

So when you’re planning on setting out during this ‘lull’, remember to shake it up— everything else is!