Danny sent this image with the message, "First buck with potential this year." Yes, and he's got a good 6 weeks to grow more bone. Anxious to see how that split brow ends up. Send me your camera images as you get them so we can share and get fired up for the season. I'll keep the location of the bucks your secret, I promise.
We talk a lot about moon phases on BIG DEER Blog because I believe the moons in the fall especially the full one in November sparks big bucks to move and hence is a great week to hunt. My ongoing interest in the moon turned up this: Today’s full moon, which coincides with the summer solstice, is a rare and once-in-a-lifetime event. The last time the full moon lined up with the longest day of the year was back in June 1967. Today there will be approximately 17 hours of light. This Full Strawberry Moon gets its name from the Algonquin tribes, who took it as a signal to gather strawberries and ripening fruit. As far as fish and game [...]
I wrote this in a magazine article many years ago: …anybody who kills a deer and then has the gall to complain about the work when the animal is down will never hunt with me again. If you are doing it right, gutting a buck and then wrestling it around and over logs, up and down hills, through creeks and mud, all the while sweating a river and stumbling and bumbling and cussing back to your truck is strangely fun and invigorating, whether it takes you 20 minutes or 2 hours or all day. The work was a lot harder back in the day. I didn’t have an ATV, and so I had to drag my deer, sometimes a mile [...]
Don’t let the ticks and snakes keep you from finding new spots to hunt this fall. It’s time to get out there and start scouting. Lather on the DEET, put on snake boots and get a leg up on those other guys who are playing golf or kicked back on a beach or in the A/C somewhere. Let’s say you hunt a 250-acre woodland. You’ve probably hunted only 50 to 75 of those acres over the years, if that. You figure other guys roam the ridges and hollows beyond your stand. Or maybe you’ve just gotten in a rut and hunted the same spots. You bust some does every year and a buck every once in a while, so why [...]
Some fellows in a hunt club in Michigan wrote and asked: Mike: How often should we mow our food plots? We generally mow ours down to 8-10" tall, approximately once a month in the summer. Also, how often should we apply herbicides? We've only applied once a year in the past, but it seems that is not enough to control the grasses and weeds on some of the plots. I reached out to the land-management experts at Biolgic, and they said: How often to mow is on a case by case, plot by plot basis. We try and limit our clover fields to around a 25% bloom. In other words, when the bloom is on we mow or clip off [...]