Big hunting week, with Thanksgiving and all. Enjoy it with family and friends, and use this advice to tag a buck. –MH

Deer behavior: Post-rut begins everywhere in central and northern states, but there is still breeding going on. If you get lucky and see one of the last receptive gals, you’re apt to see one or more bucks following her. The does that have been bred are beginning to transition back to food plots, fields, and other food sources. Bucks are tired, spooky and largely nocturnal, but still ready to breed one more time.

Key sign: Primary doe trails, buck tracks, reactivated scrapes.

Moon/weather: The colder and frostier this week, the more likely you are to see bucks on their feet in daylight hours. Great, the forecast most everywhere is for a major cold front tomorrow! With the moon moving to first-quarter, half-illuminated and some 90 degrees away from the sun, overall deer movement might not be great, but the cold will help. Translation: Hunting will likely be challenging, but if this is your rut week off work, stay out there and keep grinding.

Science fact: Research of collared deer from Maryland to Texas shows that 20 to 40 percent of mature bucks continue to make trips out of their core areas in the post-rut in search of the last does willing to breed. You might catch a big buck you’ve never seen before moving by your blind, another reason to grind and hunt all day.

Top Stand: By now many crop fields have been picked clean, but it doesn’t take a lot of feed to attract rut-weary deer. Find a little strip of beans or corn, and find a lot of deer. Try to set up in a spot with the last good feed, funneling terrain and thick cover, where weary, pressured bucks can hide, but where they can also opportunistically hook up with a receptive doe that comes to or from the feed.

Tactics: Keep re-checking ridges and bottoms blazed with rubs and scrapes that you found in early November, and go back and hunt in the vicinity of any scrapes that show signs of new activity. Lay an estrus-doe trail into your stand; a buck on a last hook-up mission might cut it and come in. If you hunt private ground where the pressure has been relatively light all month, try a last shot of rattling, but only in the morning; studies show the post-rut is one of the best times to pull in a 4½-year-old buck after sunrise. Don’t miss a day if the temperature dips into 20s or teens because many does and some bucks will hit the feed in daylight; if and when it warms back up, mature bucks will go nocturnal again.

Happy Thanksgiving and good luck!