Deer & Deer Hunting is written and edited for serious, year-round hunting enthusiasts, focusing on hunting techniques, deer biology and behavior, deer management, habitat requirements, the natural history of deer and hunting ethics
The spark that lit my dad’s passion for deer hunting happened long ago and in a subtle way that’s probably common among American hunters. But subtlety was never lost in the big picture. Not for Dad, anyway. Even decades later, he remembered it like it happened yesterday. He retold the story earlier this year, and even though I had heard it many times before, I listened with wide-eyed enthusiasm. It was Saturday morning, Nov. 22, 1958. Opening day of the annual gun-deer season. Unseasonably warm morning. A thick fog blanketed the landscape. “It was my first time deer hunting,” Dad said. “I didn’t know where to go or what to do, but they told me to just walk down this edge and find a place to sit. I could barely…
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In the M. Night Shyamalan thriller “The Sixth Sense,” 9-year-old Cole Sear, played by Haley Joel Osment, can see dead people. The hit movie came to mind while viewing a post on the Michigan Deer Hunters Facebook page (Facebook.com/Miwhitetailhunter) submitted in early November of 2022, the height of the rut for whitetails in the Great Lakes State. The post displayed two game camera photos: the first showing a dead buck laying on the ground after being shot by a Michigan hunter and the second of another buck checking out the kill site mere hours later. What information, if any, did the living buck gain by investigating the spot where the other buck had taken its last breath? And more generally, how do deer react upon finding a kill site? At…
Back in 1980s and early 1990s, I was traveling the country whitetail hunting for months with both bows and guns. North to south, east to west, the basic premise was the same – keep your impact on the land as low as possible, hunting only when everything’s perfect, or nearly so. I was counseled to hunt the property from the outside in, avoiding sanctuary areas like they were guarded by claymores, to never set up near a bedding thicket, and whatever you I did, don’t spend a lot of time walking around. All of this went against my very nature. Growing up hunting public land in the wide-open West, where covering lots of ground to locate elk herds and pockets of mule deer and prairie whitetails was essential, sitting back…
Most hunters, when they head to the woods, have some sort of expectation or goal in mind regarding that deer hunt. Some may have a need to fill their freezer and any legal deer they see will be at risk, or they might be selecting a hunting location specifically to harvest a doe. Other hunters may be laser focused on a mature buck they’ve been following on their trail cameras for the past six months. They then decide to set up on the main trail between the two camera locations where they regularly see him. In addition to hunting goals and expectations, most landowners today have management goals that drive many of the decisions they make throughout the hunting season. Usually, these management goals involve protecting young bucks and ensuring…
Deer hunter success is affected by several factors. Paramount among these is deer density. All else being equal, success will be proportional to deer abundance. But all else is rarely equal. Also affecting success are effort, bag limit, method, skill, weather, tackle, terrain and other factors. The purpose of this article is not to discuss all of these, but to explore the relation of hunter selection and archery tackle to success rates. MECHANICS OF SELECTION Bowhunter success rates are strongly affected by the degree that bowhunters select for a specific deer or antler condition. For a variety of reasons, when given the opportunity, most hunters will select an adult over a fawn or an antlered buck over a doe. Selection implies having a choice. Most bowhunting seasons have allowed the…
