Big Deer Blog

Mike, I got over 30 trail cam pictures of this buck throughout the summer, but those pics were all at night. So after not seeing him feeding on our family farm during the first week of bow season, I decided to change things up. Fortunately I had permission to hunt a property across the road. My hope was that I could catch him crossing that property during shooting light on his way to my land. I took my climber and set up about 15 yards off a lane that connected two corn fields. The wind was perfect, and I figured the element of surprise would be in my favor. Sure enough, on October 10, he walked down the lane at [...]

From Alex in VA: “Hey Mike, not a big buck picture, but a HUGE bear for Virginia! Thought you might appreciate it since it was killed in VA. 674 lbs., killed by DJ Lacks in Lunenburg County, VA on 12/11/12. Love your blog and show!” I figure the guy on the left is 6 foot, look how much bigger the bear is!

From usnews.com: A day before President Barack Obama is scheduled to release Vice President Joe Biden's recommendations to curb gun violence in the United States, the National Rifle Association told U.S. News and World Report that they have seen membership grow by 250,000 in the month since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. "I would say that every time President Obama opens his mouth and Sen. [Dianne] Feinstein opens her mouth and they talk about gun bans and restricting the rights of law abiding Americans, people pay attention to that and sign up," says Andrew Arulanandam, the NRA's public affairs director. I worked for the NRA for a decade and am a Life Member. Are you a [...]

Mike: I hunt in North Florida and I have a cam picture of a whitetail doe with a large snout. I cannot find a lot of info on this subject except that it is believed to be a bacterial infection (that causes the nose swelling). Is the meat safe to eat? Does the deer need to be taken out of the herd? Thanks, Marcus I have posted on this weird topic several times; BIG DEER is amassing the best Internet database on big-nose deer. Here’s the best biological info we have to date, from Kevin Keel, a wildlife pathologist at at the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study in Athens, Georgia: Mike: I have a series of these cases from all over the country. The lesion that [...]

Thanks to Mike from Iowa for this great guest blog: On November 2, I drove to the new farm with my wife and spent the weekend hunting the small chunk of ground that our little cabin sits on. The previous hunting season had produced very few deer sightings, and over the course of the summer we hadn't gotten pictures of any bucks that I considered shooters. My confidence in this farm was low, but after doing a lot of TSI work and improving all the food plots over the off season, I had high hopes that things would change for the better. I am still trying to work things out on this property, and I bumped several deer on the way in to [...]