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
Included in the most recent Boone and Crockett Club listings is the new #3 all-time nontypical whitetail from Illinois, the Brewster Buck. It is actually considered to be the biggest buck ever killed by a hunter. B&C records allow for entry of deer that were picked up in the wild, etc. The Famous Hole-in-the-Horn Buck, for example, was found dead by some railroad tracks. According to B&C, this is just the biggest free-ranging whitetail ever killed by a hunter. Luke Brewster and his buddies nicknamed this buck Mufasa, and on a November morning in 2018, Brewster was in the right place at the right time when the buck stepped into bow range. The buck was estimated to be 7-1/2 years old when it was shot. Its rack has 39 scorable…
CONNECT & WATCH OUR 4 SHOWS WWW.DEERANDDEERHUNTING.COM DEER & DEER HUNTING • MODERN HUNTER • DDH PROPERTIES • DEERTOPIA SOCIAL MEDIA, WEBSITES/STREAMING APPS FACEBOOK: WWW.FACEBOOK.COM/DEERHUNTINGMAG YOUTUBE: WWW.YOUTUBE.COM/DDHONLINE INSTAGRAM: WWW.INSTAGRAM.COM/DEERANDDEERHUNTING PURSUITUP: WWW.PURSUITUPTV.COM/DEER-AND-DEER-HUNTING/ WAYPOINT TV: WWW.WAYPOINTTV.COM/DEER-AND-DEER-HUNTING WILDTV: WWW.WILDTV.CA/PROGRAM/DEERDEER RUMBLE: WWW.RUMBLE.COM/C/DEERANDDEEERHUNTING TWITTER: @DEERHUNTINGMAG PINTEREST: WWW.PINTEREST.COM/DEERHUNTINGMAG/ BROADCAST TELEVISION PURSUIT CHANNEL - SATURDAY NIGHT DEER CAMP WILD TV • WAYPOINT TV STEWART HOOVER Congrats to DDH fan Stewart Hoover on his incredible 12-point buck from this past season! He was hunting the last day of Ohio’s muzzleloader season when this buck stepped into range, and he made the shot. Way to go, Stewart! WHAT’S NEW ON FACEBOOK? WOULD YOU EVER HUNT FROM A TREE SADDLE? BRANDON MCKENZIE Yes, depends on location and the type of forest… there is a reason they’re big in the central…
Asour feeling overcame me as I walked the perimeter of the enormous center-pivot Nebraska cornfield. A 30-minute walk in the frigid pre-dawn darkness awaited, allowing for plenty of time to replay the previous evening’s hunt in my mind. The buck was working a licking branch about 80 yards from my stand when I raised the rolling block muzzleloader and buried the stock into my cheekbone. Leaning into the tree trunk, I squeezed the trigger and saw the familiar puff of smoke through the zero-power scope before the recoil forced my eyes to blink. The buck whirled and sprinted for the North Platte riverbottom. The sun was dipping below the horizon as I climbed down from my stand and walked toward the buck’s scrape. Much to my dismay, I couldn’t find…
If I had the gumption to tally them all up, I could look through my collection of deer hunting journals and count up for you the number of days I have hunted whitetails across my life. As I approach season number 53 of pursuing the greatest big game animal of all, I suspect the number of days in the field would be substantial indeed. Truth be told, that count would be the best measure of all for tracking the impact that white-tailed deer have had on my life. There is not a day I would give back. And thanks to my journals, there is not a day I will ever forget. Of course, these journals document successes. But they also document days and decisions (and as whitetail hunters, we know…
The young whitetail buck, so young it had spindly antlers, was shot from an unusual location. It became a deer camp legend … and only a deer camp legend … because the circumstances of its creation were not a story for home or social gatherings. Yet I know I — and the circumstances surrounding it — existed. Many years after the fact, I saw a black-and-white photograph of it that my father, the youngest man in his deer hunting camp of that era, had taken. I saw that photo only once. Then it was put back in a shoebox in a drawer of the writing desk that was in my father’s office and forgotten. Years after that, when my father had died and his personal sporting goods and related items,…
Because whitetails are seasonal, short-day breeders, the timing of deer births is critically important for the species’ survival. Regardless of the environment, in the Northern hemisphere, whitetails are adapted to conceive at the proper time each autumn, so that fawns are born during spring (about 200 days later) when weather, food and cover conditions are favorable for maximum fawn survival. Given the importance of this schedule, reliable environmental cues are required to trigger the reproductive process in a timely fashion. Among whitetails, this cue is decreasing photoperiod — the ratio of daylight to darkness. Without fail, shortening periods of daylight in autumn cause physiological changes responsible for the whitetail’s breeding cycle. If not for the infallible photoperiod cue, timing of the rut and fawn birth dates would fluctuate wildly from…
