I implore you to read your state hunting regulations booklet this and every season. You’ll keep up to date on any and all rule changes, especially as pertain to Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD). I’ll be hunting mule deer in Montana in a few weeks, so reading this new guidance from the state was eye-opening: Scent usage: If you intend to use scents to either mask human odor or as an attractant for deer and elk, you should be aware that the Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission adopted regulations in 2021 on which ones you can use. You are safest if you use artificial scents, but you can also use scents certified by the Responsible Hunting Scent Association. You can identify [...]

You scout and glass a couple of small bucks, a decent 8-pointer and a shooter 10 coming to a bean field like clockwork in the evenings. Will those bucks, and especially the 10-point, be around when bow season opens in a few weeks?   That bachelor’s club will start to break up in mid-September, but a few of the bucks may still run together into October. In what is known as the “fall shuffle,” some of the bucks will shift a mile or more to winter range while some of them—maybe that big 10--will stay right there, close to where you’re spotting them now. Keep glassing the fields and edges, and hang a tree stand or 2 in the nearby [...]

I have been hunting whitetail deer for 40 years, and I cannot honestly say I have ever shot a buck on his scrape line. I might have, I just don’t know. I’m not even sure scrape lines exist. The more I hunt whitetails in different habitats and terrains across the country, the more I believe that scraping is more random and scattered than on some particular line of travel between food and bedding cover. That’s why I don’t scout for scrape lines anymore. From Halloween through November 15 or so, I look for a ridge, draw or creek bottom pocked with a dozen or so dark, stinky scrapes, with fresh rubs nearby.  I set a sit there a few days. [...]