If you’re still hunting and trying to fill a buck tag, remember: Afternoon hunts are best in late season. Deer move from their beds to a cornfield or beans or a thicket or a weedy pasture or a bait pile--anywhere they can find last scraps of food. When you hunt a food source, the wind can’t blow back toward a bedding cover or a travel lane out, and it can’t swirl out into a field where the does will pop out first. Set up downwind of a trail or funnel where your scent will blow back into a dead zone in the timber where no deer will hopefully come out. If just one doe winds you and starts blowing, you [...]

A friend texted from camp in Oklahoma one day last October: Guy shot a nice buck, but coyotes found it before we did, meat half gone. Another text from him two days later: Coyotes got another buck, this one in less than an hour and during middle of day…just like on the blog. A month earlier here on my Big Deer website, I had blogged about how coyotes were seemingly finding and devouring bowshot deer at an alarming rate. I asked people to share any such predator stories they had. Hunters from North Carolina to New York to Kansas wrote and confirmed that the new coyote dilemma is very real. Two examples: ---a buddy of mine arrowed a 160 class [...]