Two people saw this on Facebook the other day and shared: Mike, know how you love snakes, ha ha… One of the creepiest, freakiest pictures I have ever seen. Is that a den or what? What kind of evil serpents are those? If I stumbled across this in the woods that would be the end of me, no doubt.
Saw this on Facebook the other day; interesting and one heck of an accomplishment: This is the deer my husband harvested last year with his atlatl and 7-ft darts! He threw out of that window in our 101 year-old barn… 13-yard hurl and it was a heart shot! According to Wikipedia, the atlatl, or spear-thrower, is a tool that uses leverage to achieve greater velocity in dart-throwing… The spear-thrower is believed to have been in use by Homo sapiens since the Upper Paleolithic (around 30,000 years ago). It was used by early Native Americans as well. It seems to have been introduced to America during the immigration across the Bering Land Bridge, and despite the later introduction of the bow [...]
It will be a few months till deer season and the new big-buck stories start rolling in. Until then, enjoy these giants from the Big Deer archives.--MH Mike: October 27, 2007 my dad, a friend and I hunted until 8:15 am. We all had plans for the day so we ended early. I decided to walk around the perimeter of my 47 acres just to see if anything was around. I have an old Christmas tree farm in Illinois, about 45 minutes from St. Louis. I had walked about 300 yards when I saw this massive rack lying under a pine tree. I kept walking 3 feet past the buck and, nocked an arrow, slowly walked 3 steps backwards and drew. As [...]
Jay Graber saw our recent post and picture of “Does Flying Around” and sent this. Fascinating! Mike: That picture is from the book Hunting Wildlife with Camera and Flashlight by George Shiras, a pioneer in nighttime wildlife photography. Peter White, his son-in-law, had a summer home on Whitefish Lake in the UP where some of the photos were taken. Early 1900s. My great-grandparents were the caretakers of that camp. My grandmother's (Ingrid Rundquist) cat was caught in a few of the pictures too and are in the book. Pretty cool, huh? Funny, after all of these years that I've had these books (volumes I and II) with the rich family history, I never tied the century gap together with today's [...]
Mike: Why do some bucks have chocolate antlers and others white racks? Seems like dark antlers are slightly more common on bigger bucks, am I right?—Tim from MN Whitetail biologist Mickey Hellickson told me in an email one time: Antler coloration is determined by several things, including: (1) buck age (older, more dominant bucks make many more rubs on trees than younger bucks, therefore their antlers tend to be darker; (2) bark coloration of the predominant rubbing trees in a region; (3) genetics (some strains of bucks have light racks in their DNA while other have dark); (4) time of year (early in the fall “new” antlers are darker; later in the season antlers that have been exposed to sun and light [...]