Innholdsfortegnelse for December/January - Winter 2024 i North American Whitetail

November 12th is one of my favorite days on the calendar to harvest a mature buck. Th e date has been very friendly to my success at notching my buck tag over the years; and if the weathe r cooperates, I always plan on sitting in the stand dark-to-dark. In 2019, the forecast for the 11th and 12th was li ke nothing I’d ever experienced here in southern Illinois on said date. Legal shooting light dawned with the thermometer reading 9 degrees F, a 15-mph northwest wind and a skiff of snow on the ground. The windch ill hovered around -8 F, and the task of surviving an all-day sit in the polar blast seemed nearly impossible as I climbed into my stand. A COMMON PROBLEM I have talked to…

You’ve worked your tail off all season. From pre-season prep through the much-anticipated hunts of October and November, you’ve dedicated yourself to taking a mature buck. Unfortunately, you haven’t got it done yet, and the rut passes with your tag in your pocket. Yet, he’s still out there. The one thing that will inevitably drive him from his haunts as winter weather arrives is his appetite for recovery. Across the Upper Midwest where winters are quite harsh and challenging, feeding to survive is a buck’s top priority; and as they get older, they seem to care less about who will see them out and more about surviving the coming winter. Late-season destination food sources likely offer you the very best chance at an old buck. His need to feed and…

Once deer season gets rolling, it can be hard to manage the many moving pieces, especially when things don’t go as planned. Work schedules, family obligations, weather anomalies, and other unforeseen variables can cause a dream season to fall apart. Like a spare roll of duct tape stashed under the back seat, every hunter needs some go-to fixes to get a season back on track on the fly! THE CULPRIT There are many reasons why a season may unravel, but the main culprit for deer hunters is mean ol’ Murphy — as in Murphy’s Law. Taming him and stopping the chaos is the only way to have success on such a wary animal. Just like with real duct tape, we need to manage our expectations as to what this short-term…

Once upon a time, I was offered a job as lead editor of a hunting magazine that isn’t North American Whitetail. The other magazine isn’t about whitetails at all, but rather a different big game animal. I’ll skip naming which one. At the time, I was very “short in the tooth” in my associate editor role at NAW, and it would still be several years before my predecessor, Gordon Whittington, announced his retirement and offered me the opportunity to take the reins of this 42-year-old publication. During the phone call when the idea was pitched for me to take on the new print publication, people I worked with — including some higher-ups — told me it would be great experience and an opportunity for growth. Realizing they were right and…

Oklahoma bowhunter Ethan Kile had only one buck on his mind going into the start of the 2023 deer season. And his obsession with that buck started in 2022, when Ethan’s uncle bought a new 40-acre property. “I was actually out mowing hay on it, when I noticed quite a bit of deer sign,” Ethan says. When his uncle granted permission to bowhunt the land, Ethan was eager to place a few cell cameras and feeders (legal in Oklahoma at the time of this writing) to see what was on the new parcel. “It’s basically just a big 40-acre bedding area,” Ethan says. “And it’s interspersed with a grove of trees. On Sept. 7, 2022, one of my cell cams went off on the new property, and that’s when I…

It’s my honest opinion that one of the leading causes of headaches amongst trophy whitetail hunters comes from weather. Think about it. During a season, it’s entirely possible that we could be forced to deal with a number of different weather conditions. These could include torrential rains, severe drought, extreme heat, brutal cold, heavy snow and finicky winds. Over the course of my hunting career, I’ve chased trophy whitetails in just about every conceivable type of weather condition — from downright oppressive heat and drought, to cold, knee-deep snow and pretty much everything in between. And making my task of taking a big deer even more difficult is the fact that the vast majority of those hunts involved having only five or six days to get the job done. CASE…

I’ve been asked to do the stories on a fairly good number of big whitetails over the years, but this one is extra special for me. The main reason for this is because it involves a man I consider a very good friend, and one who almost immediately began calling me “brother Greg” — for an obvious reason, I suppose. Mike Miller and I first met at the Archery Trade Show some years back. The show was being held in Indianapolis that year, which is not far from Mike’s home in Indiana. It took only a few minutes of conversation with this native Hoosier to realize that, when it came to the subject of mature whitetail bucks, he definitely knew his stuff. Mike took up the sport of archery when…

Three time zones. Three very different hunting tools. No stands, no blinds. And yet, against all odds, three colossal whitetails totaling over 600 inches of net typical antler score hit the ground — all in the span of just over a week. If ever we could say the planets aligned in trophy whitetail hunting, arguably it was Nov. 15-23, 1993. During that stunning flurry 30 years ago, the hunting community was rocked as never before or since. World-class typicals suddenly were popping up in rapid succession, and one of them was the biggest ever documented. To that point, within all of what we might call modern whitetail history, only a handful of bucks netting over 200 typical had been documented. The world record, per the Boone & Crockett scoring system,…

Avery and Kara Hinderliter, 9-year-old twin sisters from Indiana, each had a great youth season in 2023. The twins bagged big whitetails for their first-ever bucks during the state’s youth hunt in Posey County. On Sept. 22, the day before the two-day youth season began, Kara surprised her dad, Eric, by telling him that she wanted to give deer hunting a try. “Avery has always been into hunting, but I was really surprised when Kara said she wanted to go,” Eric explains. So, they got out the .350 Legend and went to work in the back yard. “In no time she was shooting one-inch groups at 60-70 yards. So I felt she was ready to go out the next day,” Eric adds. The hunt began the following afternoon for the…