Guest post from Kansas bowhunter Connor Ossowski: After last season, having close encounters with bucks but none in bow range, I decided to spend this past year listening to podcasts, reading articles and learning about strategies on hunting mature buck bedding areas. I bumped this buck out of his bedding area back in September. This was to find his core area. I set a trail camera up near his bed and had multiple trail camera videos of him in October, always earlier and earlier in the evenings. On Friday October 25, I sat in the stand for the first time with a NE wind, 45 degrees, and slight mist after it had rained two days prior. I sat from 12 [...]

You don’t have to wait until gun season to get out of a tree and stalk. One November day bowhunter Don Kisky, Iowa expert and host of Whitetail Freaks on Outdoor Channel, left his Iowa farmhouse with 5 steps in his pocket and a small lock-on stand on his back. He’d been seeing little deer movement from his best stands the last few days, and it was time to change it up. “When bucks are locked down with does and breeding them or getting ready to, many of them aren't in their usual core areas anymore,” he says. “That’s why the woods seem to go dead in mid-November and your stands go cold. Many bucks and does are away from [...]