Adam at Hickory Creek in Kansas got some video of this cool buck with his DLC Covert Scouting Camera. This is a still image from that footage. I’ll name that giant for them right now: “High & Tight.” Love the look of that rack!
Wisconsin is the latest major whitetail state to allow crossbows during the regular archery season, which opens September 13. A crossbow license costs $24 for a resident and $160 for an out-of-stater. Up until 10 years ago, this would have been big news, and it would have caused a firestorm amongst bowhunters, many pro-crossbow and a fierce minority anti-crossbow. But when Governor Scott Walker signed the crossbow bill late last year and the Wisconsin Assembly passed it on a 91-0 vote, there was hardly a whimper. Crossbows are here to stay in most archery seasons across the U.S. and people, some begrudgingly, have come to accept that. We have a lot of hard-core bowhunters from Wisconsin on the blog, and we have [...]
Thirty years ago American hunters freely crossed the border to hunt for big deer in Mexico. Just across the Rio Grande from Laredo, Texas, American hunters had huge leases, and on those ranches they grew and shot trophy whitetails, notably huge, wide-racked 10- and 12-point typicals. Farther west, Americans crossed at Nogales, Arizona or flew into Hermosillo to hunt the state of Sonora for giant desert mule deer, and Coues whitetails in the mountains. From the 1970s through the 1990s, Mexico was a deer hunter’s paradise: Cheap to travel there, lease land, stay in a hacienda on a ranch for a few weeks each January (when the weather is perfect and the bucks rut) and shoot big deer. Then came the drug wars [...]
This group of bucks is hanging in a woods somewhere here in Virginia. I know the area, that right buck is going to be a shooter come bow season in October. Good lesson here: As you watch and study trail-camera images of a buck group in late summer, study the makeup of that group (in this case a 6-point, a small 8-point and the larger 8-point shooter) because it is very likely that those bucks will keep traveling together throughout September into early October. Then say you're on stand on the bow opener. If you see one of those little bucks coming through the woods, stand up, grab your bow and get ready. All the bucks and the shooter are probably following, and hopefully the big boy will pass within shooting range.
The bullet that has killed more deer than other turned 75 years old in 2014. Serious gun writers with more knowledge of ballistic coefficients and terminal performance than me say that the iconic Remington Core-Lokt produces good accuracy in most center-fire rifles and “typically sheds considerable weight during expansion and penetration, which quickens the death of an animal.” While I might not have as much ballistics knowledge as those gun writers, I have more field and hunting experience than most of them. I have shot dozens and dozens of whitetails and mule deer (and one blacktail) over the years with 140- to 180-grain Core-Lokts, both the soft-point and pointed-soft-points. The shock and knockdown power of these bullets are impressive. They kill [...]