Big Deer Blog

In October 2008 I first blogged about a giant whitetail that was living in the city limits of East Sioux Falls. Somebody posted a Youtube video of him (I don’t see it online now) and it caused mild hysteria amongst hunters and non-hunters alike. At the time people figured the buck was the walking state record non-typical for South Dakota. He was a 12x14 and people figured he might score 250! The monster would come and go between the city limits and private lands, where people have tried to hunt him. Rumors flew like they always do with a noticeably Big Deer—“somebody poached him...no, he’s still out there…he got hit by a car…” For the last 7 years I’ve tracked this [...]

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The Quality Deer Management’s 2015 Whitetail Report is now available online. Amid all the interesting data, this: Looking at the age structure of the national buck harvest, yearling bucks (1.5-year-olds) are steadily declining as a percentage of the annual harvest, while the kill of bucks 3.5 years or older is steadily climbing. The national buck harvest may soon include a higher percentage of mature bucks than yearlings. That is a good trend that has been a long time coming. The days of seeing a young spike and thinking, If I don’t shoot him the next guy will… might finally be coming to an end. It shows that more whitetail hunters than ever are choosing to let small, immature bucks walk [...]

I saw this great picture yesterday and it reminded me of the visit I made to Milo’s house in  Saskatchewan one day in November 2013. It had always been a goal of mine to see the world-record typical buck in person, and hear the story from Milo himself. Here are excerpts and snippets of what he told me; my entire interview with Milo aired on BIG DEER TV last fall: It was 1993, and the big buck had been seen several times, “he was known around town.” On Monday night it snowed, and the next day a guy saw the buck go into patch of willows. He got Milo and a small group of hunters, and “we devised a plan to push [...]

Here’s an off-the-wall tactic to try one day this November, courtesy of my friend Eliot Strommen (Luke’s dad) who hunts strictly w/a longbow out on the Milk River, Montana. It’s similar to rattling, but w/a twist. Eliot glasses for a mature, rut-crazed buck crossing an alfalfa field, swaggering alone or trailing a doe. He then eases into the timber downwind of the deer, glides lightly through the woods and creeps as close as he dares to a spot where the buck can hear him. He sets up behind a tree, picks up a stick and starts cracking trees and whipping brush, making all sorts of racket. For the interesting next step, he picks up his right foot and paws one, two, three….then [...]