If you haven’t tagged out by now it’s gonna be tough. The first and second ruts are history. Other hunters have killed the easy bucks and spooked the survivors into hiding. You’ve got 2 options. Eat tag soup and pack it in until next fall, or bundle up, hang in the woods and try to pull an 8-pointer out of your stocking cap on one of the last days of the season. I reckon you’ll go for the latter, so I pulled together these tips to help you score at the tag-end of the season. Hunt Grains and Greens Thin and weary after weeks of rutting, does and bucks have got to eat, especially when it’s cold and snowy. Corn [...]

There are 2 reasons why I love to visit South Texas in January: the weather is wonderful, typically sunny and in the 60s or 70s, and there are plenty of bucks running around. On most ranches in Texas, those bucks are classified as either “trophy” or “management” deer. Trophies are bucks with 10- or 12-point racks that have the gaudy potential to grow and score 170 inches or more. The larger trophy bucks grow their racks, the more expensive they are to hunt. Ranchers and deer managers consider management bucks to be 4-year-old and older animals with limited antler potential. Typically, old bucks with 9 points or less that gross score less than 135 inches. These are the type of [...]

One muggy morning in early February I sat in box blind in south Alabama and waited for the sun to shine. At 6:30 I saw a doe. Two hours later a fawn straggled through. Nine hours later I caught movement in the growing dusk, a buck! His rack had 4 nice points on one side and a big fork on the left. Ugly, but he was mature and I was going to shoot him. Ugly was jittery and on the move. Eccck. At the sound of my mouth grunt the buck blew up, whirling and flipping off into a cedar patch, leaving me to gawk at thin air through the riflescope. Ah, a typical day in the Deep South. These [...]