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 [...]

I have hunted the great state of Maine exactly once. We covered hundreds of miles and explored the magical big woods for a week and saw two moose but not a single deer, not even a doe. We traveled around and filmed everything we saw and everybody we met, and put together a TV show. It was a hit, and the episode remains one of the most popular we have ever produced for Big Deer TV. Today’s guest blog is from Kevin McKenna, who hunts in Maine every year. Although Maine is one of the toughest places in America to kill a deer, especially a good buck, Kevin’s post has me longing to go back again, maybe next year. (Dan, [...]