Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2024 - Hunting i North American Whitetail

In our Hunting Annual issue each August, we cover the latest gun-hunting gear available to whitetail hunters. During the 20-plus seasons North American Whitetail TV has been on the air, team NAW TV has hunted whitetails all across the continent with firearms, consistently delivering heart-pounding gun hunts for trophy whitetails to viewers. Looking back at the NAW TV archives, there are many gun hunts that we are fond of. For example, episode eight of season 15 featured our Editor Emeritus Gordon Whittington rifle hunting his home state of Texas. Although many Texas whitetail hunts have aired on NAW TV, how many do you remember resulting in a mature buck being taken through the window of an old, abandoned house? Interestingly enough, Gordon took a beautiful Texas buck with a rifle…

The whitetail’s ability to interpret its environment relies on three basic senses: olfaction, vision and auditory. The deer’s ability to detect danger through its nose is the animal’s superpower, so much so it is difficult to quantify. The outdoor industry is full of products designed to help hunters evade or fool the nose of their prey. The visual acumen of a deer is less powerful than their olfactory sense, but hundreds of products still exist to camouflage a hunter and a hunter’s equipment. We as hunters seem to focus so much of our attention on our prey’s nose and our prey’s eyes, making it easy to neglect a big buck’s ears. This is a huge mistake because, in my opinion, it’s the easiest sense to overcome! This may seem like…

“No, you didn’t! You didn’t kill him!” That was my first reaction to my friend Josh Kasinskas when he called to tell me he’d killed the monster buck he was after for two seasons. He had to clarify multiple times, “Dude, no, I’m serious. I just killed him.” I knew Josh didn’t go hunting that day, so I sat up straight in my chair and asked: “Where? How in the world did that happen?” Josh couldn’t find the words when attempting to describe his roller-coaster two-year chase for a 188 4/8-inch southwestern Wisconsin whitetail whose fate would end from Josh’s deck, just beyond his children’s trampoline. However, this was no see and shoot scenario with an unfamiliar buck. Josh had years of history with the deer. And just a day…

One more step . . . and deer snorts sound off in every direction. It’s the sound of spooked deer, and it’s the sound of nightmares. Nothing frightens or infuriates a deer hunter more than the loud, obnoxious sound of a whitetail buck or doe telling the world it picked you off. Without question, a hunter must consider all the survival senses of deer if he or she wishes to effectively punch tags. A whitetail uses its eyes, ears and nose to detect danger. That means your methods and routes of access must mitigate each of these three threats. Entry and exit routes, as well as methods of moving in and out of the field, must not allow deer to see, hear or smell a hunter. This requires extensive planning,…

Matt Goreschel had a big problem. The stone quarry where he hunted was being annexed into the city in 2019, and that would be the end of hunting there. Once that happened, it would be against the law to launch any projectile there, eliminating the option for either gun or bowhunting. Access to big Ohio bucks can come at a premium, so he needed to find a work around to the regulations or face searching for another place to enjoy his passion. Matt learned there was a process to gain an exemption and decided to go for it. But what sounded simple at first turned into a long and tedious process. There was nothing easy about his endeavor. The twists and turns as he worked his way through the system…

The old cliché, “You can’t kill ‘em from the couch,” is one that has infiltrated the mind of the hunting masses for decades, and it’s dead wrong. I hear it quoted dozens of times each season, and though not sure of its origin, I am sure of this: if we could travel back in time and stop it at the source, a lot of hunters would be more successful. Why? Because this motto being passed down through generations of hunters has kept many bucks alive by promoting uninformed hunting and overhunting — the death knells of harvesting whitetail. The fact is, you can and should do most of your killing from the couch; and if you want to become a high-IQ hunter that consistently does it, you need to flip…

In several ways, our collective obsession with trophy whitetails is a numbers game. “How much did your buck weigh?” “How many points did he have?” “How wide was he?” And of course, “What did he score?” Quantifying trophies is a practical way to convey what’s special about them. For the past 42 years, North American Whitetail has celebrated the highest-scoring bucks in history, whether they’re fresh kills brought to the check station or dusty skull mounts found in the back of a barn. These elite animals capture our imagination in a way others don’t. But as enjoyable as it is to admire the greatest deer of all time, those are hardly the only big whitetails worth celebrating. Nor are their stories necessarily the most useful, in terms of our own…

For most deer hunters, our decision to hunt began with the encouragement of family or friends. Most people who have grown up in a family of non-hunters will likely be non-hunters themselves. It is rather unusual to find a first-year hunter over 30 years of age who has taken up hunting without the encouragement of family or friends. Quebec hunter Olivier Coiteux is one of the hunters who has broken that mold. “I didn’t start hunting until 2020,” said the 34-year-old Insurance Broker from Quebec City, Quebec. “Nobody in my family was a hunter, but deer hunting caught my attention several years ago; it looked fun and exciting. At the time, I had learned all I knew about deer hunting from watching YouTube videos. The more I watched, the more…

The best whitetail hunters in the world can do all the prep work possible to stack the odds in their favor, only to have their target bucks shift and leave them puzzled. Mother Nature, hunting pressure and many other factors can quickly wreck your hunting strategies. As much as we like to strategize months in advance, we have to understand that big bucks will move to new areas immediately when there are major changes within their environment. Being a public-land hunter my entire life, I’ve been thrown many surprise curve balls when it comes to seeing bucks do things I’ve never expected or planned for. I used to have a plan A and a plan B for hunting whitetails. Nowadays, I try to plan for everything! Each season is different,…