Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2015 i Deer & Deer Hunting

If there’s one thing that could make me happier in the deer woods this fall it would be a complete off-the-grid experience. Not asking for much here; just a few days during the rut — perhaps a few 10-hour vigils where I’m completely unplugged from the stressors and distractions of this so-called modern life. Yes, the cell phone is still coming along for the climb to that treestand, but it’s being placed in silent mode and tucked into my pants’ cargo pocket ... only to be retrieved in case of emergency. I’m not sure about you, but unplugged is the best way to recharge my inner battery. There are so many sights, sounds and smells that are missed when we’re not fully engaged in the deer woods experience. I want…

Legend has a way of, over time, becoming so entrenched in our consciousness that we accept it as fact. Whether these legends are passed down in fireside tales from grandfathers and fathers or presented in writing and, shall we say, enhanced with the flourishes of time, we grow to appreciate them. Such was the birth of the Remington Arms Company, a legend that began with young Eliphalet Remington II of the small settlement of Ilion Gulch, New York, when he created a flintlock rifle for a target shooting competition. This was in autumn of 1816, in a small town on the Mohawk River in the middle of a young state beginning to grow, flex its muscles in the world and take shape for the future. The 23-year-old Eliphalet reportedly, as…

Once upon a time owning a rifle that was capable of MOA accuracy was rare, but new manufacturing processes and improved triggers and optics have helped make the dream of honest 1-inch groups a reality. Better yet, the competition among rifle makers to develop ultra-accurate guns at reasonable prices has been a boon for customers, and today it’s possible to buy a budget rifle that shoots extremely well. That doesn’t mean, however, you need to give up on your old gun. In fact, there are a number of ways to improve that existing rifle to eke out every bit of accuracy possible. If you have an old, familiar rifle that you love to use, then why not give it an upgrade? Chances are you know the gun well, and with…

Food sources change in desirability during their various stages of maturation. When hunting over them, you should time your hunts for the phase when they’re most desirable. While it’s impossible to cover the most desirable stage of all preferred deer foods in one article, the following generally applies to greenery: • Seedlings - extremely tender and most easily digestible. When thick enough to make a meal, they can be highly desirable. • Young, rapidly growing - extremely tender, easily digestible and offer the highest nutrient content. This is the sweet spot for most greenery in terms of drawing power. • More mature, but still growing – cell walls are thickening and hardening, making them more difficult to digest, and nutrients are dropping. Deer will often still eat greenery in this…

The pitter-patter on the tin roof told me this could be a perfect day to stay in camp and catch up on some much needed sleep. But when you have only so many days to hunt bucks you don’t want to waste precious hours dozing in front of a warm fire. So without thinking about it any further, I jumped out of bed, dressed and opened the door to the cabin. There was a storm brewing all right, complete with high winds and sporadic rain showers. A nasty day awaited me indeed! I stepped back inside and laced up my rubber-bottomed boots. Then I gathered up my rain gear and after gulping down a quick breakfast, snatched up my .30-06 and headed back outside, leaving my buddies alone and still…

If you don’t already have a vacuum sealer then you’re behind the curve, because freezing your deer meat and other game will be so incredibly easy you’ll wonder why you didn’t get a sealer earlier. Weston’s new Vacuum Sealer Pro 1100 has a compact design so it won’t take up much space on your counter and stores easily. Among the features on the Pro 1100 are a rear-mounted bag roll holder and cutter along with a side-mount vacuum port for use with canisters. If you can fruits, vegetables, fish or meat, this is a heck of an addition to the sealer. Adjustable settings along with a digital display give you control over the sealing time. The 680-watt Pro 1100 sealer is commercial grade and also has an extra large sealing…

1 Sitka Core Series Sitka Gear has taken yet another step with its new next-to-skin line called the Core Series. The apparel incorporates Polygiene, a permanent odor-controlling treatment that uses silver salts. Core Series will come in three weights so you can be ready for any weather option or activity. It will be available in small to 3XL sizes and, depending on the specific item, available in Gore OptiFade Open Country, Concealment Elevated II or Concealment Waterfowl camo patterns, along with Dirt, Forest, Coyote and Pyrite patterns. Info: www.SitkaGear.com 2 Federal Ballistics App Federal Premium Ammunition has a new mobile Ballistics App compatible with Apple and Android smartphones and tablets. Whether you’re at home, on the range or in the field, you can check specifics for…

Hunting cold fronts is easy. All you have to do is watch the weather and wait for the bottom to fall out of temperatures. Unfortunately, you have to endure that same temp drop that inspires bucks to get up and move early. I rarely go out of my way to talk about what makes this or that product special, but I’m making an exception in this case. The Heater Body Suit completely removes the discomfort of hunting when temperatures bottom out. First and foremost, it keeps you warm, period. So much so that they offer a money back guarantee if you get cold. The next big advantage is in odor control. Because I know that as soon as I’ve attached my Hunters Safety Systems vest to the tree that I’ll…

Given the fact that I had two different dogs brought out to help me track this buck, I had a great opportunity to learn more about using our canine friends to help find wounded deer. That said, the biggest lesson I learned from this experience was that it’s better to be safe and call in a dog ASAP if you have any concerns at all about the blood trail, rather than wait until after you’ve tried tracking yourself. Tracking dogs operate much better in areas that have not been trampled by multiple people. The sooner you get a dog on the track the better, too, but I was surprised to hear that some dogs can track a deer nearly 48 hours after a shot. Another surprising revelation was that rain…

White-tailed deer living on the fertile farmlands of the Midwest enjoy mild climate, excellent year-round nutrition and low deer densities with minimal social stress. These superb living conditions permit both sexes to exhibit an advanced rate of physical and behavioral maturity, and many achieve puberty when six to eight months old. One-half, or in some cases more, of doe fawns commonly breed on the intensively farmed lands of Illinois, Ohio, Iowa and southern Michigan. Although a few of them might breed during late November, peak breeding for doe fawns normally occurs between December 10 and 15, while some might even breed in January and February. In other words, most doe fawns breed after intense hunting pressure has removed 70 percent to 90 percent of the adult bucks. Certainly, if some…

It seems so easy: Set up on the edge of a field, meadow or other open area and watch for deer. Maybe they’ll come out to feed. A galloping doe might lead a rutting buck past your post. Perhaps other hunters will push a whitetail within range. But is field hunting all that easy? More than just plopping down and waiting just anywhere, it takes smart strategy to successfully hunt fields during gun season. Site choice, stand placement and hunting techniques make the difference between failure and a notched tag. Across deer range, fields provide essential whitetail habitat, and are a fact of hunting life. I grew up in Midwestern farm country and still chase whitetails across Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, the Dakotas and Nebraska. Agricultural fields – from 5-acre hay…

Some states allow direct baiting and some do not. Other states allow feeding deer, but not hunting over bait. If you live in a state where baiting or feeding is legal you’ve an effective avenue for reconnecting with lost bucks – even if they visit only under the safety of darkness. Even if you will not or cannot hunt directly over feed it’s a great way to create a starting point for more effective scouting. I’ve used feed (hunting over bait’s illegal here, but feeding’s not) as starting points for “back-pushing” cameras, moving them farther and farther from the food source while attempting to learn where a buck comes from before or goes to after feeding, and especially for tracking bucks atop fresh snow across large tracts of public lands.…

The top-rated Deer & Deer Hunting TV returns to NBC Sports for its 11th action-packed season with a great lineup of shows. Veteran hunters Dan Schmidt, Gordy Krahn, Mark Kayser and Steve Bartylla provide outstanding insights based on their decades of hunting experiences. Deer & Deer Hunting TV has one goal: To help you better understand deer behavior and hunting tactics so you can be more successful this season. Shows include tips for creating and managing habitat, patterning deer without being patterned, how to hunt smarter but not harder, hunting from ground blinds, the science of scrapes, the mentality of mature bucks, turning hunting pressure into a positive, attainable deer management and more. Shows air on Monday nights, so check your local listings for NBC Sports and tune in! SHOPDEERHUNTING.COM…

Timing hunts for optimal success on heavily pressured public grounds is even more important than when hunting utopian settings. Human pressure is a big suppressor of daylight deer movement. Though deer most often do move within the tight confines of cover where they feel safe on otherwise pummeled grounds during daylight, getting them out of that comfort zone takes some serious incentives. Adverse weather conditions and the rut can help achieve that. In fact, if it wasn’t for these factors hunters wouldn’t stand a fighting chance. In the case of the buck in the beginning of this article, I waited for a cold morning during the early chase phase to go after him. If I’d gone in before testosterone levels and weather conditions were inspiring a later arrival to his…

I learned the hard way that filming your own hunts can be a challenge, but it can still be done. If you’re interested in trying your hand with a camera, my first advice would be to learn from my mistake and never let your filming keep you from making a good shot. That said, there are some tools that can help make self-filming a little easier. First off, I’d recommend using a “zoom controller,” which is a small remote that’s plugged into your camera and then fastened to the end of your fluid head arm. This allows you to control the power, recording, zoom and focus at your fingertips, rather than having to reach up to tinker with the actual camera. You might also want to consider using Point of…

The locals refer to the corridors sliced through the thick Texas underbrush as senderos, a Spanish word for path or trail. A few are natural, but most are man-made. For the deer hunter, navigating these cuts through the near impenetrable mesquite, prickly pear cactus and spreading brush is about the best way to fill a tag near Refugio, Texas, where Mellon Creek Outfitters has 100,000 free-ranging acres of working cattle ranch just north of Corpus Christie. There are a relative handful of open fields on this ranch, a little agriculture and several winding streams. Mostly, though, it’s mesquite and other brush entangled into a solid wall from the ground to chest height. As you get closer to the salt water bays that front the Gulf of Mexico, you find large…

Alfalfa and hayfields make for great deer hunting. Whitetails use them for feeding and traveling. Even in November or below the snow, these fields offer green sprouts and feed, which whitetails crave. Cut cornfields attract deer for the cornucopia of waste grain available as food before the stalks are plowed under. Cut soybeans run a close second, but they’re not as nice to look at as golden yellow corn stubble. Greening winter wheat fields lure whitetails with tender sprouts. Although we are losing valuable CRP grassland to the plow because of lucrative grain prices, there are still good acres of this grassland, and lots of places with open areas in fallow or prairie status. When deer want some seclusion, there’s nothing like a lonely, abandoned pasture with a few brushy…

The problem with public-lands deer hunting is the public. If you discover a stand site has gone cold after weeks of relatively reliable appearances by a particular buck, you can safely bet outside disturbances are at fault. It’s the nature of the beast. Working harder and smarter helps you avoid these situations. • Hike farther or climb higher – people are lazy by nature. • Paddle across deep or treacherous water barriers – canoes and kayaks make it easy to leave the masses behind. • Look for ugly places others turn their noses up at – woodlots adjacent to highways or behind administrative buildings don’t attract attention and can hold big bucks. • Avoid the obvious – such as a field full of easily observable does. • Burrow into nasty-thick,…

There are so many different reasons why we enjoy hunting: the solitude of sitting in a ground blind or treestand; the thrill at seeing a trophy buck appear in front of you lined up for a clean broadside shot; the close proximity to other types of wildlife. But one thing we all have in common is the desire to stock our freezers with venison, one of the few truly organic and free-range meats still available. Hunters appreciate the authentic field to table experience, and those who take the time to learn how to process their deer have the ability to control the meat quality from harvest to freezer. Deer processing can be intimidating, especially if you are doing it for the first time. While books and other resources are plentiful,…

Discover the meaning of extreme versatility with the Viking Solutions Tilt-N-Go. This cool hunting accessory is an efficient, convenient handcart for transporting deer and also attaches to the back of your truck or ATV. Wheels are included so you can convert the Tilt-N-Go to a handcart to haul deer during the season or other items around your camp or home without extra strain. Or remove the wheels, attach the Tilt-N-Go to your truck or ATV, and then load your deer, cooler or other items to hit the road! Tilt-N-Go features a 300-pound capacity and is 17.5 inches wide by 48.25 inches long. Product # SKU T8940 www.ShopDeerHunting.com…

Before we start let’s define torque as it directly relates to shooting a bow. Torque’s any force or pressure applied to the bow riser before, during or after the shot, causing arrows to impact anywhere other than where they were directed. Torque generally originates from the archer himself, but is occasionally a function of poor bow design. Examples of archer-induced torque include gripping the bow tightly during release due to nervous tension (in the field) or apprehension of losing control of the bow after release (on the range). The former is a common function of performance anxiety, the latter bad habits, which should be quashed during the off-season. The problem in either case is death gripping your bow and is seldom applied consistently shot to shot, twisting the riser off…

Over the course of a lifetime chasing whitetails, hunting spots come and go: You move far away and must find a new place to hunt; the land changes and the deer leave; the property switches hands and your access evaporates. Losing a piece of good hunting ground is painful and sobering for the whitetail hunter who works hard, takes good care of his or her family, but just doesn’t have enough left over to buy his own tract of hunting paradise. We were in such a situation. I had hunted a nice spread of central Minnesota woods and swamps for years with a couple of friends who owned the ground. But growing families, with children and grandchildren coming of hunting age, had really put the squeeze on the hunter-per-acres ratio,…