BIG DEER friends and fans Zach and Ellie filed this field report: Hey Mike, the sheds are dropping in Southern Illinois around DuQuoin and the fish are biting! Awesome outdoor couple. Great bass Ellie! After this brutal winter, everybody needs to get outside and have some fun like this. The woods are fine this time of year.
Another finding reported at the Southeast Deer Study Group 2014: Researchers say adult bucks traveled 55 yards farther away from hunting stands on average at the end of the season vs. the beginning of the season. This further confirms something I have been blogging about and saying on TV for years: Mature bucks can learn your habits and pattern you. As the season progresses they see, smell and hear where you walk into the woods…where you climb into trees…where you walk out at midmorning or after dark… Then they skirt those stand locations to avoid you. I did a “Top 10 Tactics” episode of BIG DEER TV on Sportsman last year, and this strategy was #6: Change It Up. Say [...]
Saw this on Whitetail Overload’s Facebook page. One of the craziest photos I have ever seen, and I have seen a lot of crazy deer photos in my day. This was obviously caused by some sort of injury to the deer and the rack (hit by car I would suspect) but how that beam (black because the velvet dried hard on it) grew down and through the deer’s mouth defies explanation. There is always something new and unusual to see in the whitetail world.
This respected group holds an annual conference whereby biologists, managers and researchers present their recent findings on deer biology and management. The 2014 meetings just wrapped in Georgia. I followed QDMA Tweets from the conference, #SEDSG. Some science hot off the press: • Researchers at Auburn University found that bucks both young and old react negatively to hunting pressure in the same way. They also found that bucks are 4 times more likely to come to a food plot in daylight on opening day as later in the season. • Troubling finding #1: EHD disease continues to expand northward in the U.S. and further outbreaks are expected. Furthermore, new strains of EHD are showing up and problematic because individual deer [...]
As I blog this, I look out the window at 10 inches of snow on the ground. It’s 19 degrees…and this is Virginia. I saw where snow is on the ground in 40 of 50 states. In the Midwest and Northeast it’s particularly cold and snowy, and has been for months. No doubt the whitetails there are under tremendous stress, having trouble finding food under deep snow, and fighting to maintain body heat that is critical to their survival. We hunters wonder and worry: How are the herds doing? Two scientists from frozen regions weigh in. "After a tough winter that had a (negative) impact on deer numbers in 2013, this certainly isn't what any of us had hoped for," [...]