Arizona Hunting Club & Outdoor Adventure Group

Deer and Elk Scrapes and Rubs Photographs

Elk and deer make rubs near bedding areas, water, travel lanes and food. There are numerous types of rubs that can tell you a lot about how the area is used by the animal that made the rub including.

• Numerous rubs in a small area indicate a buck's dominant area
• Numerous small rubs in wooded area indicates a buck bedroom
• Rub clusters away from the bedroom indicate a doe bedding area
• Rubs on trails indicate travel routes from bedroom to night time feeding areas
• Rubs on one kind of tree show an animal's personal rubbing preference
• Rubs on certain size trees indicate the animal's size
• Rub routes lead to doe beds first, then on to food by dark
• The bare side of the rub indicates the direction the animal came from
• Dead leaves on a tree indicate an old rub
• Green leaves and fresh sap bleeding from a rub indicate a fresh rub
• Use rubs to backtrack to a bull or bucks core bedding area
• Scrapes are rubs that include overhanging branches and pawing the dirt
• The amount of mutilation of overhanging branches indicate rub's importance

The cool thing about scrapes and rubs is that they can tell you which way the deer and elk are moving in the afternoon. In the morning hours just before sun up, the animals will usually feed in a field right until sun up. Due to the lack of trees in a field and the fact that they need to get back to the bedding area, they don't make many scrapes.