Indiana’s firearm season to hunt deer is about a week away and there are some indications that if you intend to hunt this year, you might have a better chance of killing deer.

Indiana deer biologist Joe Caudell says the rut is likely to coincide with the beginning of firearm season, meaning hunters are more likely to come into contact with bucks who are running. The rut is the mating season, and is a time when bucks are more active.

You probably know it as a time when more people hit deer. In fact, Caudell has been using that as a factor to calculate when the Indiana rut happens.

“To try to give us at least a uniform way of doing it, what we did is looked at when the peak in deer/vehicle collisions occur,” he said, on Indiana Outdoors radio. Caudell said a study conducted by the University of Georgia showed that can be an accurate way of determining when mating season is happening.

“The firearm hunters will actually be much closer to the peak of that rut this year,” he said. “That also usually helps the harvest be a little bit higher.”

He said it is also possible to have a second mating season, though that is not usually the case in Indiana.

“In places that have high deer populations and unbalanced sex ratios, so you’ve got a lot more females than you do males, that does happen,” said Caudell. “It’s just cause all the females didn’t get bred and so the ones that didn’t get bred they come back into heat again and so the bucks ramp up their activity.”

Caudell said many people have already been enjoying archery season.

“I was just looking at the numbers and we’re actually up from last year and some of the past few years at this time.”

He said one reason may be that the cool weather just has hunters in the mood.