Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2021 - Full Draw i North American Whitetail

Americans have a can-do attitude. Sensis, a marketing agency focused on cross-cultural integration, presented a challenge to develop a live animal test for Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) under the direction of the United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service. The challenge ended in April, and teams are reviewing ideas from innovators, researchers and scientists for up to $170,000 in awarded prizes. This novel outreach expands on the thinking groups across the nation currently working on CWD detection in live animals before they visually show signs of infection. According to Cyril Gay, the national program leader for the Animal Health National Program and lead for the transmissible spongiform encephalopathies research programs at USDA-Agricultural Research Service, a test indicating early detection is needed. “Today, two official diagnostic tests for CWD are…

The dog days of summer are in full swing, and you’re kicked back in the recliner, toying with the idea of buying a new compound bow. You’ve thumbed through a few magazines and read plenty of ink on the websites of your favorite bow builders. You took things a step further and watched some marketing videos and commercials, but you still have questions. Compound bows have a vocabulary all their own, and if you don’t savvy the lingo, making an informed buying decision won’t be easy. Don’t panic. We’ve put together a quick lesson in compound bow terminology for you! AXLE-TO-AXLE Commonly misunderstood, axle-to-axle length is not the length from the top of the top cam to the bottom of the bottom cam. This measurement is the bow’s overall length.…

If there was one enduring lesson from the pandemic year, it was that family matters. For New York bowhunter Phillip Pless that was never more true than last fall, when he took to the deer woods again with his mind full of whitetails and the people that mattered most in his life. A disabled veteran from Newfane, New York who served in the United States Navy, Phillip saw all levels of family become an important part of a hunt last fall that ended with him tagging the new state record non-typical buck from the Empire State. Hunting on a small farm barely 10 miles from Lake Ontario, Phillip’s wife, his extended family, and even a late grandfather he never met all played a key role in a hunt that has…

It was October 9, 2020, the day before the Wisconsin Youth Hunt. I wanted to get home from work in time to check my deer cameras. I hoped I could find out what the deer activity looked like on my property in Iowa County, so I could decide where to hunt Saturday morning with my youngest son. I had one trail camera on a ridge, overlooking a new trail I discovered the past summer. Another camera was overlooking a pond. The camera near the pond had captured video footage of some nice bucks drinking water. The camera on the ridge, set on video mode, captured footage at 9:45 p.m. on October 8, that really got my attention! The video showed a giant buck with incredible tine length and mass. I…

“He hit my rubbing posts and the mock scrapes twice yesterday,” said my Nebraska buddy and mega-whitetail mind Terron Bauer. “He came through on the north side of the river about an hour after sunup and then, at some point, crossed the river and came through the south-side funnel about 2:00 p.m. That’s two days in a row he’s done the same thing. I need to kill him before he finds a hot doe and locks her down.” When I hung up the phone, I was shaking. I was happy for my friend, of course, and felt confident he’d get the job done. What gave me the jitters were the photos of the deer from Terron’s Spartan cellular trail cameras, which I scrolled through on my iPhone while my buddy…

While the use of cellular trail cameras is legal in many areas, regulations restrict their use on certain lands. Note that not every state allows for their use, especially in the western U.S. Here’s how some states currently look at the practice. ARIZONA: Banned use of live-action cameras in 2018; followed that with a ban on all trail cameras in December 2020. MONTANA: Banned trail cameras in 2010; later amended the regulation to apply only to cameras linked to cell phones. NEVADA: Banned use of all trail cameras on public lands at certain times of the year. UTAH: Gov. Spencer J. Cox signed HB0295 into law in spring 2021, which instructs the Division of Wildlife Resources Wildlife Board to make rules and regulations for trail camera usage.…

Today, the amount of information available to the average hunter or manager through print, television and social media is staggering! Yet, much of this flood of information leads one to believe that deer management can be reduced to a handful of steps. The basics you always hear about are as follows: 1. Plant food plots, 2. Provide supplemental feed (where legal), 3. Shoot does, and 4. Protect yearling bucks. In reality, whitetails are complex animals that live and survive under a host of highly variable climatic and habitat conditions. As such, there is no such thing as a “cookbook” management plan. Rather, deer management is site-specific, and the successful management plan must account for the needs and deficiencies for that particular location. This month’s column deals with just one of…

Over 25 years ago, back in the summer of 1996, North American Whitetail editor Gordon Whittington made a simple country boy’s dream come true when he published my first article in the August issue of this magazine. I’ve had articles published in these pages every year since and recently reflected back on my experiences over the last quarter century as both a deer hunter and as an outdoor writer. As I think back to my early articles, I have to cringe. Some of my ideas at that time have undergone a total transformation, as I have matured as a deer hunter and become much more proficient at my craft. Here is an interesting figure that I think clearly shines a light on this. As of 2020, I’ve hunted whitetails for…

Hunting whitetails has always been my obsession. From drawing pictures of perfect tree stand setups, to imaginary deer hunts with my nerf gun as a kid, my life revolves around it. I try to learn as much as I can about whitetails. I’m always curious to find out what makes mature bucks active, or where big bucks spend their time. Questions about deer race through my head on a daily basis. I grew up hunting in central Pennsylvania, where there are vast public lands. This increased my skills and further fueled my obsession for chasing mature whitetails. Pennsylvania is a state with a dense hunter population, roughly 850,000. That makes scouting and waiting on the right conditions even more important in chasing mature deer. This is key because you may…

I’m not sure where exactly to start with this story. I’m still in the, “Oh my gosh” stages of my excitement. This is a story that was a few years in the making, and it involved the biggest buck of my life. I’m still in shock, and for a long time afterward, I was left speechless! I called the buck “Miles” because he was a traveler. He was the most un-patternable deer I’ve ever chased. He would move from one farm to the next, and a few hours later he would be back again. You would never see him moving in the daylight during the hunting seasons. Ever. When he was 2 1/2 years old, Miles’ rack would score approximately 130 inches, and he was already mostly nocturnal. In 2018,…

I can hardly believe 35mm trail cameras were the ticket when I started bowhunting 19 years ago. I vividly recall the huge anticipation each time I visited Walgreens and dropped off a roll of film to have photos developed. Today, those memories seem so quaint. Back then, if someone had told me I’d one day have a smartphone, and that scouting cameras would transmit images and even videos directly to my phone, I would’ve laughed. If they’d also told me I’d be able to manage camera settings through a phone app, I’d have laughed even louder. Early-model digital trail cameras were just hitting the market when I was 12 years old. But their trigger speeds were molasses slow. I eventually got one that took five seconds to trigger a photo…