Wired To Hunt

They were definitely buck tracks. I was standing on a wide open hillside in the warm afternoon sun, looking down at the tracks and wondering if I even had a chance. We’d had good snow in the early season, but a warm front had come through the day before, pushing a sheet of rain ahead of it that...

When you think about the rut, still-hunting probably doesn’t pop into your head. All-day sits, setting up downwind of doe bedding, or hanging in a funnel usually top the list of rut-hunting tactics. If you’ve done your homework and put the time in, you’ll probably have a decent shot at shooting a...

When I first started saddle hunting I thought the money I spent on the gear bought me an instant level-up. If you’ve hung in a saddle for any amount of time, you know this isn’t the case. Sometimes too much freedom leads to paralysis or over analyzing, and this is especially true for saddle hunting...

The archery opener has come and gone, along with the entire month of October, and you still haven’t crossed paths with a mature buck. Turn the page to November, crisp mornings, cold fronts, and the rut brings the promise of crunching leaves and cruising bucks. Unfortunately, almost as quick as the...

I know it seems a bit crazy for a dude living in Montana to expend so much energy on hunting white-tailed deer in Wisconsin. All I can say is, “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.” But I have more reasons than that. I’ve been hunting there since I was 11. I have an incredible...

Summer scouting, especially in the deep South, is my least favorite time to be in the woods. I’ll think of any excuse not to deal with the humidity, cottonmouths, and an endless string of spiderwebs. During the summer months, the woods and air are thicker than they’ll be all year. As much as I...

There are three things you can do better to be more consistently successful on public land. Number one, improve your e-scouting. It might sound counterintuitive, but to be better at e-scouting, you have to put dirt under your boots. By combining e-scouting on the maps with seeing it in person, you...

To pattern deer is to create a world for them in which human intrusion is minimal and leaves them largely unbothered. Or, you can play the scarcity game while running a stealth scouting pattern. The former option is available to anyone who controls a decent chunk of land and can grow deer. The...

After driving throughout the night, the sun illuminated a landscape that I'd seen only on a computer screen. The digital images of Google Earth displayed an open prairie laced with thin ribbons of trees along infrequent drainages. I was having serious doubts going into this hunt—and that's an...

Last October, I had the opportunity to hunt and harvest my second melanistic white-tailed deer on our family ranch in Central Texas. Our tracking and census process on the ranch is a meticulous one. We run trail cameras year-round and study every image in August and September to conduct an accurate...

A week ago, a buddy of mine sent me a picture of twin fawns lying on the forest floor. While scouring the woods for morels, he stumbled onto the pair. They couldn’t have been more than a few days old. These encounters are happening all over the whitetail’s range right now. If you’re lucky enough to...

Christopher “CJ” Alexander, whose name graced headlines in December after photos of him posing with an 18-point buck he harvested drew skepticism, has officially been indicted on 23 total charges, the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, on behalf of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, announced...

As much as I love hunting gear and testing it, there’s no correlation between new purchases and killing a Boone and Crockett caliber deer. Unless maybe that purchase happens to be a large farm in Iowa. Otherwise, anything you can get in stores can’t guarantee you a big buck, or any deer for that...

There are a lot of reasons bowhunters lose deer. Very few of those reasons stem from true equipment issues. Most of the time, it’s just us doing our jobs poorly because our brains can’t handle the moment of truth (or we rush through the blood-trailing process). While the talk about broadhead...

Here’s the truth about these "best of" articles: the only honest answer is, "It depends." Are these cartridges really the best deer-killing cartridges in existence? It depends. It depends on where you’re hunting, your experience with firearms, what rifles you already own, how much money you can...

Humans, and by default, hunters, are walking contradictions. If you ask the average hunter if he supports anti-hunting groups lobbying to remove opportunities from any subset of hunters, you’ll hear all about how horrible they are. Ask that same hunter if he supports removing opportunities for...

A hunter in Ohio took down a massive 12-point whitetail in October of this year, and recently released scoring indicates it’s one for the record books. Scorers with Buckmasters Whitetail Trophy Records (BTR) measured Jason Thomas’s enormous typical buck at 208 ⅝”, which makes it the new Buckmasters...

White-tailed deer are ubiquitous in North America. It seems like half of the country heads out into the woods to pursue the enigmatic species every fall and winter, to experience the great outdoors and fill their freezers. But there’s one subspecies of whitetail very few hunters know about, in a...

In my home state of Minnesota, the firearm season opens the first weekend of November. This means that for many years, bowhunters relinquished the woods to the orange army within the first few days of the month. When I was younger, that bothered me a lot. I wanted to hunt the rut, but it just wasn’t...

Spend much time at deer camp, and you’ll probably hear a hunter blame wonky antlers, piebald coloration, and other genetic abnormalities on inbreeding. But the science says incestuous mating usually isn’t to blame, and inbreeding is a nearly insignificant concern for whitetail hunters. Astronomical...