Number of antlered bucks (1.5 years and older) harvested in the 2015 season: Texas 290,590 Michigan 191,608 Wisconsin 152,701 Georgia 142,346 Pennsylvania 137,580 Number of does harvested in 2015: Texas 157,247 Georgia 220,503 Pennsylvania 178,233 Alabama 171,123 Wisconsin 159,034 Source: QDMA Whitetail Report 2017
Mature bucks feeling the rut not only thrash trees with their antlers in November, they also see and veer over to smell, lick and rack other rubs that rival males have made. In Iowa one November day, Brian LaRue looked up and saw a monster coming. Sixty yards out the 22-pointer stopped and mauled a sapling, then looked toward Brian’s tree and lugged on in. The hunter drilled the 222-inch non-typical with an arrow. “I’m convinced he saw the big rub on the other side of my stand and was making a straight line for it,” Brian says. That’s the rub behind Brian and his beast in the picture above. My buddy Luke Strommen read that post and got to [...]
Pick up a deer trail and follow it for a half-mile or more, until you come to a thick and obvious bedding area. In late winter that might be a brushy southern exposure that gets midday sunlight, or the east side of a grassy ridge or swamp where deer hunker out of a northwest wind. Last hunting season if you were smart, you would have stopped, tested the wind and worked the outer fringes of such a sanctuary so as not to spook deer. But now, plow right in. Montana artist and shed-hunting fanatic Dick Idol told me one time that he finds 60 percent of his sheds in and around thick covers where mature bucks hide in late winter. [...]
Last March Quinten Saunders of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, found this incredible antler and knew he had a special deer to hunt in the fall. Some 8 months later Quinten, who bills himself as an “extreme outdoorsman and hunting guide,” shot the beast. Posting on Instagram he said: Well on Nov. 22 the chase for this mass monster came to an end…look for me and the story of this true Saskatchewan whitetail in Big Game Illustrated and the Big Buck magazines. Just so you know both those Canadian publications are very popular with deer hunters north of the border. Hard to tell what a rack like that will score, but who cares! The overall mass measurements will be off the charts, [...]
Hi Mike: My wife, Lyla, harvested this buck with her muzzleloader near Osceola, Iowa on December 22, 2016 at 3:30 pm. The deer known as "The Freak" has 26 scorable points, an inside spread of nearly 24 inches and main beams 27 inches plus. He was 6 1/2 years old. The Freak lived most of his life on a 4,300-acre farm located 10 miles south of our farm and managed by Steve Snow. Every year in mid-October the deer would come back to our farm, except for 2016, when our first picture of him was on Nov. 2. The Freak remained in velvet last year, we believe, because he was wounded by a neighboring bowhunter the previous year. This is [...]