When you’re out in the woods on a shed hunt, pick up a deer trail and follow it for a few hundred yards to a half-mile or more, until you come to a thick and obvious deer bedding area. In late winter that might be a brushy southern exposure that gets midday sunlight, or the east side of a grassy ridge or knoll where deer hunker out of a bitter northwest wind. Back in hunting season you would have stopped, tested the wind and worked the outer fringes of such a sanctuary so as not to spook any deer. But now, plow right in. Montana shed-hunting fanatic Dick Idol told me one time that he finds 60 percent of his [...]

Saw this on my Twitter @mikehanback: Fresh set of sheds from Kansas, insane mass! Yes, incredible mass, especially if these are from a wild deer! How many of you are shed-hunting...how many have you found? Send me your shed pictures and stories to post.

  Mike: A friend and I are obsessed w/shed hunting in Wisconsin and Minnesota. One year we found 2 sets that score 150+ and another half that came from a buck that would have been in the 170 to 180 range. These 5 sheds were found in a straight line from one another heading north to south from a cedar swamp to a ridge/valley habitat. We looked for days, but there was no sign of smaller bucks in the area. The large sheds we found were all distinctively similar--they look like grandfather, father, son and so on, with high brow tines and G2s and impressive main beams. This is probably due to genes in the area, but the odd thing [...]