Big Deer Blog

If you carry a pee bottle into your deer stand, there’s a less messy and more sanitary, albeit more expensive, way. The Travel John features a unisex “spill guard” attached to a plastic bag that contains a fabric LIQSORB pouch. Pee into the bag and the polymer pouch immediately turns the urine into an odorless, biodegradable gel that won’t spill on your hands or clothes or in your daypack as you hike out. When you get home, simply throw the bag into the trash. I tested several Travel Johns and they work as advertised. After peeing, I immediately turned each bag upside down, and not a drop spilled or leaked. Each bag is reusable. Depending on how much coffee you [...]

Thanks to Midwest Whitetails @thwackem for posting this beautiful picture: Donny Kay with his rare melanistic buck. Killed near Boone, IA. This is just the second black-phase buck shot by a hunter that I have posted in all my years of blogging (here’s the other one). I did some research and found that a deer w/melanism-- their bodies produce too much of the hair, skin and retina pigment known as melanin – are definitely the rarest of the rare whitetails. A black deer is certainly more uncommon than a brown-and-white piebald, and even rarer than the odd albino. Biologists say that a melanic buck is usually not solid black. There are gray and brown/black color phases with white bellies and [...]