My friend Don Kisky, co-host of Whitetail Freaks TV Show on Outdoor Channel, uses his March shed antler hunts to do one thing: learn every main and secondary deer trail on his hunting property. On a shed hunt, he cuts every trail (new and old) and follows it to find where that path comes and goes; where it crisscrosses another trail; how and where a trail cuts through cover and bends around obstacles. Everything about a deer trail, Don learns it. That helps him kill giant bucks the next fall. For example, one November day as Don was sneaking into a stand, he  looked up and spotted a monster buck boring straight at him. He scanned the area and remembered [...]

A hunter who wishes to remain anonymous sent this story and picture. Mike: A guy looking for sheds found this buck yesterday on a farm in Illinois. I had hunted that farm and that buck for 2 years. The deer was still lying in the woods for days because the DNR had not shown up yet to look things over and issue the shed hunter a salvage tag for the rack. The dead buck is not 200 yards from a field that is visible from a remote back road. The last day of gun season was in December, and surprisingly the coyotes have not torn into the deer yet. The shed hunter didn’t move the buck, but said it looked [...]

Cody emailed the other day: “Mike, haven't found any sheds yet, but a guy doing drives with us the other week shot what appeared to be a doe but when we got to the deer it was obviously a young buck that had already dropped his antlers.” This is no big deal, an honest mistake, and most state laws about late season hunting take this possibility into account. But I use the anecdote to point out that bucks seems to be dropping their antlers earlier than usual in many areas, including here in the Virginia Piedmont. Lots more bone will fall off the bucks’ heads in the more usual shedding weeks of January, which is when late antlerless seasons are [...]