Deer Dictionary

Deer bedded down refers back to the above note regarding deer beds. Deer that bed during the day are typically on alert using the wind and the natural surroundings to their advantage in an attempt to smell, see, or hear and intruder long before it becomes a threat. Often deer will bed in different directions so that not all sets of eyes are pointed in one direction. Deer that are wounded will often bed down before recovering and moving forward staying ahead of the hunter.
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The licking branch as it is referred to would probably be better categorized as a nibbling branch as a buck tends to chew or gnarl the end of the branch to leave scent behind. Deer have several scent dispersing locations on their body which all play a part in leaving it’s signature for other deer. You will find the licking branch right about chest height above a scrape.
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A deer scrape is made by a buck. The buck will work the ground usually down to the bare dirt as a visual sign to other bucks that he considers this area his unless a larger buck comes along and runs him off. Smaller bucks will typically understand from the sight and scents left in a scrape that this buck is either larger and older than them or similar in size at which point the new buck may challenge the resident. You can fool a buck by creating a mock scrape as a challenge to his hierarchy.
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A buck rub is the action of a buck removing the bark from a tree by running it’s antlers up and down the trunk and often it’s tines are used to shred smaller brush. A buck rub can tell you many things once you learn to read a rub. Besides being a visual sign to other deer you will find that there is a lot of scent is left behind which, like the deer scrape, tells the other deer a lot about the animal that made the rub. While big bucks don’t always rub on big trees it’s more often than not that small bucks rub on smaller trees so a big rub could tell you something about the size of the deer.
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