I was walking around some fields the other day hunting woodchuck/groundhogs when I stumbled into into a scrape line. I'm from North Eastern, PA and I don't remember ever seeing scrapes before the middle of Oct.. I got one of my trail cams and set up on the most active looking scrape. 2 nights after setting the cam I couldn't help myself to see what was working it. I got 3 different buck come in to that scrape, 2 buck that I got photos of earlier in velvet. Time to start setting up on scrapes, might be my best chance of getting a photo of the 2 bruisers I've seen, but didn't get on cam at my feeding areas.
Believe it or not, I've seen them year-round and I've read where that it isn't all that uncommon. Apparently some bucks do it as a territorial marker of sorts outside of the pre-rut timeframe.
I've seen what I'm going to call community scrapes year round. The other ones that pop up here and there as early as late august.
Well to be fair I've never been one to heavily scout, especially any earlier than mid. to late August. It just always seemed around the middle of Oct. is when I've always started to see scrapes popping up all over the place and start to see a lot of rubs. When I was out the other day, it seemed like there were a lot more scrapes than I'm used to seeing this early, but again I'm hunting in a new area so not sure if that has anything to do with it. I'm still pretty new to archery, so I'm still pretty naive about certain things, especially when it comes to scouting. I always seem to find good places to sit that have great deer movement, but that's just using the lay out of the land more so than deer sign. I guess what I was seeing was more common than I thought and it isn't happening at a unusual time like I thought. Just the amount I seen this early seemed odd for this area, but that could just be my lack of experience.
