Each issue of North American Whitetail brings you effective techniques for outsmarting monster bucks. You'll learn the success secrets of North America's most accomplished, most knowledgeable whitetail hunters - riflemen and bowhunters alike.
Perhaps we editors and writers of whitetail content should have just quit trying long ago. Seriously, I don’t know that there’s a good new way to describe this phenomenon or call attention to it. The part of the whitetail’s life cycle we call “the rut” has been the focus of magazine content for several decades now. And whether it’s in cover copy, feature titles, article text or photo captions, we’ve probably written about it in every way imaginable. We all quickly stepped beyond such pedestrian lines as “Rut Secrets,” “Rut Timing” and “Rut Strategies” to: “Rut Frenzy” “Rut Bonanza” “Rut Remedies” “Rut Redemption” “Rut Revolution” “Rut Madness” “Rut Revival” “Rut Rules” And so on . . . and so on . . . and so on, often followed by exclamation…
Tune in every Wednesday at 8:00 p.m. ET on Sportsman Channel for new episodes of NAW TV presented by Wild Tree Nursery: WEEK OF OCT. 19-25 “Bar J Showdown”: Dr. James Kroll and Rob Hughes hunt Texas’ Bar J Ranch with their Browning rifles. Meanwhile, the importance of patience in land management is the subject of our “Build Your Own Deer Factory.” We close out with a profile of a great Maine non-typical. WEEK OF OCT. 26-NOV. 1 “Bucks of the Texas Gulf”: Dr. James Kroll and Rob Hughes rifle hunt the diverse lower coast of Texas at La Lupita Ranch. In “Build Your Own Deer Factory,” we tell how to learn from management mistakes. We also give tips for hunting from the ground in this week’s “On Target,” and…
In 2009, here at the Institute for White-tailed Deer Management & Research in East Texas we began a significant study on the role water plays in deer health. As part of this project, graduate student Ryan Cantrell completed a landmark master’s research study on the use of artificial water sources. Little did Ryan or I know that only two years later we’d see drought not experienced since the 1950s. But despite those extraordinary conditions, I’m confident what the study showed then still holds true for whitetails in general. As a teenager, I learned deer hunting from my biology teacher Victor Rippy and my uncle Spencer Johnson. My father had come back from World War II, shot up and having little further interest in killing, so these two men became my…
Well over a century has passed since Maine began earning an envi able reputation in the whitetail world From the earliest days of recreational hunting, it’s been a favorite destination of New Englanders and others who enjoy the pursuit of veni son and antlers in wild woods. Even now the states remote north ern and eastern counties remain places of high adventure but low deer numbers in most areas, in fact, there are fewer than five per square mile. But southern and central Maine have become much more heavily populated in recent years, with some districts now holding up to 35 deer per square mile. Such densities have led to increased human-deer interaction and a call for reducing the herd. In response to this population boom, for 2020 the Maine…
Most of us have a distinct memory of harvesting of our first whitetail buck, and it usually includes the gun or bow we used that day. The memory of these two firsts takes me down memory lane to the hunt in South Texas on December 25, 1990. My father’s friend Ray had invited us on a deer hunt in Jim Hogg County, between the towns of Hebbronville and Falfurrias. Because the terrain we hunted contained an assortment of plants and animals that would bite, stick or sting you, we elected to hunt from a high-rack truck, hoping to catch a mature buck trailing a hot doe across a sendero . The rifle I’d brought along was a Savage 99E chambered in .243 Win. and topped with a Leupold VXI 3-9x40…
Every year the anticipation of another deer season gets us all excited. But as is true with most other hunters, I have lim ited time to be in the field here in eastern Kansas. Trying to balance family, work and deer hunting isn’t always easy. Last bow season, I had even more lim itations on my hunting time than usual, due to a work project four weekends long and set to start at the end of October. The year before, I’d also failed to fill my antler tag. Although we didn’t accomplish all the work we wanted to before bow season, we were able to get some preparation done. So on Oct. 2 I took to the field after work. On my way to the property, I ran into a…
