Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2020 i Deer & Deer Hunting

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That’s most apparent in our admiration for white-tailed deer antlers. Although beauty is normally associated with symmetry, that’s only half-true when viewing huge bucks. My first brush with a really big buck came about 25 years ago when I was muzzleloading in Wisconsin’s North Woods. A fresh blanket of snow covered the huge aspen clear-cut I was hunting, and I was quietly plowing through the white stuff when something caught my eye. Antlers! Standing 175 yards in front of me was the biggest buck I had ever seen. He just stood there, staring at me as if I were some sort of alien. He must have known that my iron-sighted smokepole was no good beyond 100 yards. The buck stood…

For hunters in heavily pressured Northern areas, getting late-season opportunities at mature bucks is beyond difficult and teeters on impossible. The few bucks that survive months of intense bow- and gun-hunting pressure are more in tune with how to avoid hunters. Worse, they rarely move during daylight. REALITY Bitter cold decreases hunting competition dramatically. And as the days progress, diminished hunting pressure and the need to replenish body fat lost during the rut and an abbreviated late rut gradually prompts some bucks to move during daylight. You can capitalize on this if you’re willing to brave the cold. Many factors create realistic opportunities for the few mature bucks that make it through rifle/shotgun/muzzleloader buck seasons. Previous hunting pressure, food sources in your area, types of bedding-area terrain to which you…

Compound bows are complex machines that require TLC to keep them working right. An often-overlooked part of the process is storing your bow properly, whether for a weekend, a month or the off-season. My storage routine is pretty simple. Unless I’m flying and require a hard-sided bow case for protection against the baggage-handling gorillas that throw your checked luggage around with impunity, I store my bows in padded soft cases I can use to store them and transport them to the range or in the field. Sure, you can hang your bow from a peg on the wall, but I like keeping mine in soft cases where they will be protected from dust, dirt and ultraviolet rays. I can also stack my cases one on top of the other, where…

“There he is,” I said as we passed the red SUV in the pre-dawn darkness. “You have to give him credit,” Steve said. In fact, I gave him a lot of credit. The hunter, plainly visible in the dark just yards from the mountain road, wore a full blaze-orange outfit. His SUV was the same one parked in the same place where we had seen it going on five years. He always hunted very near the road, in the same place, camped out on a big, comfortable-looking folding chair. Once, two years earlier coming out of the woods and slightly off course after trailing a deer, I walked into his line of sight and quickly veered away, hoping not to anger him by my intrusion. He couldn’t have been nicer,…

I’d known the small water hole was about a quarter of the way up the ridge. Frankly, I knew the farm very well, but the water hole just wasn’t positioned right. It was on the opposite side of the crop-filled valley from where the bucks bedded, and they had water on that side, too. Why drop down a steep ridge, cross a bunch of open food, only to climb a quarter the way up the opposite side to get a drink, when a great water source was right near their beds? I’d pretty much ignored that side, as the big boys lived on the other ridge. Fast forward to late October the following season and I was just climbing up the stand I’d set on that pond. Just having strapped…

Thus far, our quest was unfulfilled. My son Noah and I were hunting Nebraska’s late-season January antlerless season: on a search for winter whitetail venison to top off the freezers with our annual meat. It wasn’t supposed to be this hard. After an unproductive first-evening hunt and a below-zero, early-morning sit with no action, a sunny afternoon afforded the opportunity to do some searching, scouting and still-hunting. It was then that we found the motherlode. The hotspot. The honeyhole. Working up a frozen creek that joined the Keya Paha River, we happened upon some open water. After another mile, three spring-fed rivulets revealed the source of such a rare commodity on the winter landscape. And we started seeing more deer tracks. Fresh deer tracks. There was plenty of brush and…

Late-season muzzleloading can be a lonely ordeal for many hunters, especially in the North. In most cases, muzzleloader seasons occur in December, when snowfall begins to accumulate and winter’s chill starts knocking on the door. This in and of itself can be challenging. Add to this the fact that deer are very wary by the end of the year, and it’s easy to see how the cards can be stacked against the late-season muzzleloading hunter. The best way to increase one’s chances when the end of the year rolls around is to have great late-season food sources. For most regions, forages like clover, chicory and alfalfa are great preferred foods for deer from green-up in the spring to late fall. Unfortunately, by Christmas, such forages are either stressed, buried under…

1 TENZING HANGTIME DAY PACK The Hangtime Backpack is specially designed to be hung next to the hunter and offers ease of access to specially designed pockets. The pack maintains its shape thanks to a rigid, EVA-molded shell, allowing one-handed access through the top or front to anything inside the 750-cubic-inch main compartment. Organized storage and access are facilitated by a variety of pockets and external MOLLE attachment points for extra gear. The pack also features six specialized storage compartments for an array of accessories. Within those are 15 specially-sized organization pockets for cell phone, game calls, optics, SD cards and more, amounting to 1,600 cubic inches of overall storage space for specific items. The exterior also has two quiver attachment points, a fold-out bow and gun carrying boot. The…

When I entered the wildlife profession as a private-lands biologist in the late 1970s, passing any buck was not common. At that time, folks were starting to direct more effort and money toward food plot development and supplemental feeding. But as time passed, hunters began passing a few bucks — particularly youngsters — and they began to recognize an increase in antler size. But when it came to 4- and 5-year old animals with exceptional racks, the buck stopped there. That was primarily because few hunters had been privileged to see bucks in their optimal antler-producing years. A CHANGE IN PHILOSOPHY As the percentage of mature bucks increased, becoming an apparent component of deer populations, Texas hunters became accustomed to seeing at least a few mature deer each year and…

It was the most fun I’ve ever had in about a half hour sit. The property was literally being overran with deer, to the point the habitat was screaming for mercy. It was either drop deer numbers hard through hunting or watch disease and starvation do it for us, with long-term devastation each day it continued. With two full quivers of SEVR-tipped Eastons and a pocket full of doe tags, my plan was to empty both quivers and fill the Feed The Hungry’s refrigerated semi in the nearby town before the sit was over. Truth be told, with five does down and a sixth sniffing an arrow at 30 yards, I decided to give myself a break for that day and stop at five filled doe tags in one sit.…

Being dedicated firearm enthusiasts, it’s safe to say that most of us routinely carry a defensive weapon — either as an extension of the CCW “privilege” our states so kindly grant us (yes, that’s sarcasm), or because we hew to the philosophy of “better to be judged by 12 than carried by six.” Whichever is the case, having a firearm discretely in our possession doesn’t always work out. Guns “print” — even snubbies and micros. This is a challenge for those who wish to carry where jobs or circumstance make it difficult. Yet with the recent chaos and upheaval that has saddled our country, it’s never been more important to have our firearms with us always. You’ve probably heard of bug out bags. Well, more important is a “get home…