Deer & Deer Hunting is written and edited for serious, year-round hunting enthusiasts, focusing on hunting techniques, deer biology and behavior, deer management, habitat requirements, the natural history of deer and hunting ethics
“ THE ONLY WAY TO BE TRULY SATISFIED IS TO DO WHAT YOU BELIEVE IS GREAT WORK . AND THE ONLY WAY TO DO GREAT WORK IS TO LOVE WHAT YOU DO . IF YOU HAVEN’T FOUND IT YET , KEEP LOOKING AND DON’T SETTLE . HAVE THE COURAGE TO FOLLOW YOUR HEART AND INTUITION . ” - MERCE CARDUS It takes guts to give up everything you know to start over. But it takes something else — vision, imaginaion,creativity, inventiveness, among other things — to kick-start an industry. That’s exactly what the founders of this magazine had … in spades. The first issue of Deer & Deer Hunting appeared 40 years ago this month, but history will show that its roots trace back to a 1960s hunting camp who…
I read with interest the “Tasty Myths” editorial (January 2017). Here is my view for whatever it’s worth. I’ve found that the further into the cold season (winter) the more “gamey” venison tastes. My first P&Y buck field dressed 240 and was shot on November 1. He was still in great shape, not having gone through the chase and breeding phases of the rut. Thick layers of fat on his body. The meat was excellent. I feel the same buck one month later would not have been so tasty. As you know, they can lose up to 30 percent of their body weight. I’ve eaten roadkill all my life and now won’t bother to pick up a road-killed deer after about mid-February, buck or doe. Yes, a late-winter deer would…
Big changes have come to Deer & Deer Hunting-TV this year. The show has moved to Pursuit Channel and is the anchor of the new “Deer & Deer Hunting Saturday Night Deer Camp.” This is a carefully selected block of great white-tailed deer hunting shows, anchored by the 13th season of legendary D&DH-TV. Hosts Dan Schmidt, Gordy Krahn, Steve Bartylla and Mark Kayser will be highlighted on exciting hunts while providing great information on various hunting topics. The iconic show will be joined by Destination Whitetail and Land of Whitetail, two of hunting’s most popular series, also produced by F+W Outdoors, parent company of Deer & Deer Hunting. D&DH-TV along with Destination Whitetail, Land of Whitetail and other D&DH web shows can also be found at Deer-Hunter.TV Deer-Hunter.TV, and…
National interest in white-tailed deer hunting began building during the 1950s, as modern wildlife management techniques took hold. Regulated seasons, bag limits and aggressive forest management allowed herds to build and spread across areas that were devoid of whitetails. Sportsmen took notice and deer hunter numbers increased dramatically throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. In the 1960s, a group of Wisconsin hunters formed a camp and called themselves “The Stump Sitters.” They were not only passionate about hunting, they craved more information about the animals they pursued. They soon attracted like-minded individuals and, by 1973, were large enough that they incorporated. Their mission was simply to learn more about deer and share these insights with each other. “Before Al Hofacker and I started the Stump Sitters Whitetail Study Group, we…
Without warning, the cedar limb I was perched on, 16 feet or so above a well-used deer trail, snapped with a loud crack. Deer scattered in all directions and down I went. As usual, I was working alone in northern Michigan’s Petrel Grade deeryard. It was January 1968, and I had undertaken a study to evaluate the aggressive behavior of white-tailed deer at winter cuttings. I already had well over 100 deer individually marked with numbered snare-type collars, but few were mature bucks. My goal was to selectively capture more bucks using a tranquilizer loaded capture gun and mark them with ear tags and individually recognizable collars. This was a fairly easy task given the heavily used deer trails leading to a plentiful supply of felled cedar browse at a…
The phone rang just after dinner. One of our favorite clients had finally arrowed Ol’ Whatever They Called Him, the 160-class buck he had been watching for the past three years. He had hit the buck “a little back” and the hunter was despondent. “Would you bring Radar and give me a hand tracking him?” I said sure, and we grabbed our tracking dog and headed out the door, after calling the game warden to give him a heads up. He returned the favor by reminding us that our client and his neighbor to the south were at war with each other and the neighbor would not take kindly to any line crossing. Wow, a 160-inch buck lying out there somewhere and no chance of recovering him if he went…
