Just because the rut is going doesn't mean the big boys will be just standing in the open. Big blacktails are always hard to find, even during the rut. Keep hunting hard and look for does. When you find one in heat, there will be a buck nearby.
Good luck! Hope you can find Mr. Big!
They are five feet back inside of cover watching and sniffing. They can get careless and that is how I usually see them if I am not looking back inside cover with my binocular, but they are pretty cagey even in the height of the rut. They just are a secretive animal though - that is how they got to be mature bucks.
Your binocular is your friend and that means your full size binocular. Look just inside, over, through into every thing.
I learned a lot about blacktail bucks in college. I went to St Martin's College and that is how I spent a lot of free time - looking for deer on the St Martin's Monastery campus. Back then you never saw me w/o a Leica 9x25 binocular with the strap around my neck and the binocular in my shirtjacket pocket.
Wait a minute you say! I thought you said my full size binocular. Well I was living with the things and hauling around a full size binocular was not an option. Plus, I was looking for them just for kicks - you are serious about locating a nice buck to shoot.
That Leica is also IF and I would strongly encourage a CF binocular that has a much more shallow, and selective, DOF. This helps to separate an antler from foreground and background branches.
So long as a mature buck thinks he is hidden he will almost let you walk up and put a saddle on his back before he bolts or even just ambles off.
I say this after watching rutting bucks that were part of a deer herd that is particularly tame. Mature bucks are secretive. You don't see them, but they are watching you.
All of that being said, the rut started early on the islands I hunt and when I was taking my RV out and setting stands a week before the season this year I saw a two point that was really, really nice and a monster four point w/brow tines at mid day right out in the open working a doe herd and then saw two more mature bucks moving in to check out an apple tree for scent of does in heat just as I was leaving for the day. They were not checking out that apple for food, they sniffed around and left a half-dozen apples laying right in front of them.
The rut was definitely on and given that it had to have just started those mature bucks were all kinds of careless. But this experience is novel to me.
