Big Deer Blog

I was talking with a colleague the other day and he asked, “So Hanback, when’s your next trip over my man?” “Over where?” ”To Africa man!” he roared. I explained that I had never been on safari and had never really wanted to go all that much. He looked at me like I was the village idiot. “Ah, there is nothing like it,” he opined, a touch of British high-brow creeping into his voice. “I was bitten by the bug several years ago and I hardly want to hunt anywhere else.” The guy is not alone. Have you noticed all the safari stories in magazines and African hunts on TV lately? Facebook and the Internet are packed with pictures/posts of hunters with  African game [...]

I was out in western Oklahoma filming for a few days this week and snapped this picture of my friends Scott and Joni Sanderford. Back in January some quail hunters found this massive 8-pointer dead on their ranch, decomposing in a creek bottom near an alfalfa field. This is a mystery buck that I figure was 5 years old when he perished. Where had he been living...where did he come from? Scott and Joni are out and about on their ranch every day, feeding stock, fixing fence, driving around, doing whatever is needed to keep the ranch up and running. Each August Scott, a die-hard bowhunter, sets out lots of trail cameras, takes thousands of images and finds 3 or 4 good bucks that he and Joni will hunt in the fall. One of his [...]

From this QDMA article: 1 p.m. to 10 p.m. – Peak hours for fawn births to occur among 147 pregnant does studied by Dr. John Kilgo and others with the USDA Forest Service Southern Research Station. Though fawns were born around the clock, 63% of births were concentrated in afternoon and early evening. 4 – Number of pregnant does out of 28 (14 percent) being tracked by North Carolina State researchers that were found dead at the site where tracking devices indicated they were giving birth. Evidence suggested all 4 were killed by coyotes, which may have taken advantage of the does’ vulnerable state during birth, killing both the mother and fawn. The study took place at Fort Bragg and [...]

For 95% of America’s whitetail hunters, especially those of you who hunt on public land, the answer is YES. Trouble is, too many young and/or inexperienced hunters watch too much television. A great-looking 8- or 10-pointer steps out and some guy or gal whispers into the camera, Nice buck, but he needs another year…or he’ll be shooter in a year or two… BTW, I hate that overused saying, He needs another year... Anyhow, the young hunter plays off what the TV “expert” says and does, and passes up a 120- to 140-class buck that he or she should have shot. I was glad to see my friend Lindsay Thomas of the QDMA put the right perspective on it. The QDMA sometimes gets a [...]