How far do bucks travel during the rut?
Mature bucks routinely cover 3–5 square miles during the rut and have been GPS-tracked making excursions of 5+ miles outside their summer range. The seeking phase produces the longest travel; lockdown brings movement back down to a few hundred yards a day.
Telemetry studies in the Midwest and Southeast consistently show home-range expansion of 2–4× during late October and early November. A buck whose summer pattern covered 600 acres can be traveling across 2,500–3,000 acres during seeking and chasing. Excursion behavior — multi-day trips entirely outside the home range, often timed to a hot doe nearby — is documented in roughly a third of mature bucks each rut.
For stand strategy, this means a buck on your camera in mid-October may be a complete stranger by November 8 — and a stranger on your camera in November may be a 3-mile resident on the move. See your state's rut date pages for the seeking and peak windows.