Excellent guest blog and advice from Montana traditional archer Luke Strommen, a charter member of the Big Deer Hunt Team: To all the BIG DEER Bloggers: Here is story and a lesson I have learned. Hope it helps you find a big buck and shoot him this season. One time I spotted a gnarly 6x6 during my scouting and glassing routines in the summer.  The mature whitetail used his primary core area throughout July and August. I saw him many times and took some distant digital images of him from one of our tree stands. He would browse in an irrigated alfalfa field, and having completed his evening ritual, he’d sneak off to spend the night in a 20-acre corn [...]

The odd monstrous non-typical is walking in every state, but without question your odds of seeing one are best if you live in the Midwest, or own or lease ground there, or travel there to hunt. This region has the most soybeans and the best genetics for growing big, bad freaks. Some Midwestern states don’t allow gun hunting until after the November rut, and even then much of it is limited to slug or muzzleloader. This allows a good number of bucks to live past 4 or 5 years and begin to sprout antler junk.   You can hunt anywhere in the Midwest and have a fighting chance of encountering a freak, but your odds go up if you hunt [...]