A built-in walk-in cooler at your home or hunt shack is a great convenience, a luxury really. The only potential downside I can see is that once it’s set and hooked up, it’s there. You must go get your gutted deer, drive them to the cooler and hang them up. No big deal for whitetail hunters east of the Mississippi. First time I saw the Koola Buck I got to thinking: While you could assemble and set it at your home or deer camp and run it throughout the season, you could also take it to the deer or other animals you hunt. For Western hunters especially, I can see real value in hauling this collapsible, portable cooler into a  backcountry camp, [...]

I wrote this article several years ago, back when I was writing a ton of deer-hunting  stuff for Outdoor Life the magazine. I really miss my old writing days—I graduated college cum laude w/a degree in English, and magazine writing is what I trained to do—but the opportunities to write regularly and well for print mags these days is limited. It’s mostly online writing now, which is fine, but it’s not the same. Anyhow, here are 3 of the sometimes humorous, bone-headed and serious hunting mistakes I wrote about in that article. Click here and read the rest. Muzzle Break The Mistake: One day on the plains, a high-profile hunter (who wishes to remain anonymous) shot over the back of a 160-inch [...]

In October 2008 I first blogged about a giant whitetail that was living in the city limits of East Sioux Falls. Somebody posted a Youtube video of him (I don’t see it online now) and it caused mild hysteria amongst hunters and non-hunters alike. At the time people figured the buck was the walking state record non-typical for South Dakota. He was a 12x14 and people figured he might score 250! The monster would come and go between the city limits and private lands, where people have tried to hunt him. Rumors flew like they always do with a noticeably Big Deer—“somebody poached him...no, he’s still out there…he got hit by a car…” For the last 7 years I’ve tracked this [...]

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The Quality Deer Management’s 2015 Whitetail Report is now available online. Amid all the interesting data, this: Looking at the age structure of the national buck harvest, yearling bucks (1.5-year-olds) are steadily declining as a percentage of the annual harvest, while the kill of bucks 3.5 years or older is steadily climbing. The national buck harvest may soon include a higher percentage of mature bucks than yearlings. That is a good trend that has been a long time coming. The days of seeing a young spike and thinking, If I don’t shoot him the next guy will… might finally be coming to an end. It shows that more whitetail hunters than ever are choosing to let small, immature bucks walk [...]