Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2015 i Outdoor Life

SHAKE IT OFF/ Central Montana / 9:31 a.m. Most days in deer country are spent waiting. Hunters will watch and wait for an animal—any animal—to show itself. Often, nothing ever does. This was the sort of morning photographer Don Jones was having. “It was just a miserable day,” Jones says, recalling the damp weather. It was drizzling when he first drove past this bedded buck; one hour and no other deer later, the 10-point was still there. This time, he parked. “When any animal stands up in the rain, chances are it’s going to shake. I want to make the story behind this photo sound exciting, but sometimes it’s just about a moment in time in an otherwise slow day.”…

DID YOU KNOW? Chukar partridge, native to Pakistan and the Himalayan foothills, were introduced to the U.S. in 1893. It is literally a running joke: The first time you hunt chukar, it’s for fun. After that, it’s for revenge. That’s because these “devil birds” lead you a merry chase up the nasty hills they inhabit. You will follow, clawing, slipping, and sliding, only to watch them fly downhill before you’re close enough for a shot you’d be too out of breath to make anyway. These aren’t your game-farm chukar. The wild ones dwell alongside bighorn sheep, one indication of how rough the country can get. Dry, scabby, rubble-strewn hills are home to chukar. Add their favorite food, cheatgrass, and they couldn’t be happier. Alectoris chukar eats the seeds of this…

The whitetail rut, like a first date or the kickoff of college football, is a feverishly anticipated but ultimately fleeting event on the serious deer hunter’s calendar. We dream of it, eventually dive into it, and then before we know it, we’re mourning its passing. And with this tight time frame comes significant pressure to make the most of those few precious days of whitetail magic. As if the time constraints weren’t enough, tack on all of those early-morning wakeups, painfully long sits, and cold temperatures, and things can get pretty stressful. Luckily, nonhunters have devised a handy set of tricks that are perfect for tackling just such a problem. They’re called “life hacks.” Life hacking, as defined by the collective wisdom of Wikipedia, is the use of “any trick,…

Ah, the 28-gauge. Until recently it was kept alive largely by competitive skeet shooters, but hunters across our nation have learned what the 28 can do—and it’s a lot. The 28 goes way back—Parker Brothers made 28s as early as 1899; they also made 14-gauge guns. In fact, the 28 was but one of several gauges in that range. There were 24-, 32-, and 36-gauge guns made during the late 1800s and into the 20th century as well. Only the 28 survives. One reason for this is that despite violating some of the basic theories of shotshell construction, the 28 performs like a champ. Famed British gunmaker W.W. Greener’s theory of the “square load” states that for maximum efficiency, the height of the shot column should not exceed the internal…

Most shotgunners are adequately equipped to break targets that fl y through the air. Aft er all, trap, skeet, and sporting clays presentations all rely on the same principles—you must swing through the target, shoot at the right time, and follow through. The angle, speed, and distance to the target changes, but the basic physics doesn’t. However, there is one target that breaks all the rules—the rabbit. Bounding across uneven ground, changing speeds, and alternating between straight-line rolls and spasmodic arches, the infamous rabbit can be the bane of even the best shooters. It doesn’t follow a patt ern, and it can make you look like a fool so quickly and so absolutely that more than one shooter has waited until the disc stopped rolling to take vengeance on the…

THE SOUND OF sizable branches snapping in an adjacent stand of oak and beech trees raised the hackles on Jeff Grab’s neck. Something big was heading his way and he just knew it had to be a bear. He was posted at the top of a ravine, which was an obvious black bear escape route, while other members of his hunting party pushed a thick tangle of mountain laurel nearby . They knew the bears were in there, as evidenced by the piles of fresh scat and tufts of fur found on tunnel-like trails leading in and out of the half-mile tract. But how to get them out? “The trick to driving bears out of thick bedding cover is to first play the wind,” says Grab, a New England construction…

EYE-POPPING PRICE TAGS Not everyone is interested in binoculars that cost as much as $2,650 [“Binocular Test 2015,” September 2015]. Do you think the majority of your readers can afford these sorts of prices? Not in my neck of the woods, they can’t. I’ll be 80 soon. I’ve hunted for years, and I don’t find it necessary to blow $2,650 on a bino. Same goes for most of your gun reviews. Are you only writing for the big shots these days? P.S.: I bet you won’t print this, because it’s the truth. Darrell Grover Crystal, MI BIG PLAYERS GONE MISSING I saw that OL had tested binocular gear and anxiously opened the September edition only to be disappointed. Where were Nikon and Swarovski? Who the heck are Minox and…

1934 YEAR NEW YORK NATIVE PETE RICKARD INTRODUCED INDIAN BUCK LURE, WHICH CONTAINED NO DEER URINE. 4 NUMBER OF STATES THAT HAVE BANNED THE USE OF DEER-URINE-BASED LURES (ALASKA, ARIZONA, VERMONT, VIRGINIA) $15 MILLION ANNUAL RETAIL SALES OF DEER-HUNTING SCENTS ACCORDING TO THE WALL STREET JOURNAL 1960 YEAR THE FIRST DEER-URINE-BASED SCENT IS MARKETED (BY GEORGE ROBBINS OF ROBBINS SCENTS ) 25 OZ APPROXIMATE AMOUNT OF URINE OUTPUT OF ONE PER DAY 66O,000 GALLONS AMOUNT OF DEER SCENT HUNTERS BUY ANNUALLY. THAT’S ENOUGH TO FILL AN OLYMPIC-SIZE SWIMMING POOL WHAT $44.99 BUYS YOU A 2 OZ. BOTTLE OF MRS. DOE PEE’S FRESH DOE IN ESTRUS OR A 25 OZ. BOTTLE OF WILD TURKEY RARE BREED BOURBON $4 Million Amount BuckStop Lure Company won in a defamation suit against TV…

WHETHER YOU CALL them cattails, bulrushes, reeds, or tules, this brand of tall, stiff, moisture-loving, and dense-growing plant abounds across much of whitetail range, especially as you head to the northland , out onto the prairies, and into the broad river valleys of the West. WHITETAILS LOVE THEM. Catt ails off er deer a secure place to elude hunting pressure. Even where other cover is available, whitetails in search of seclusion will dive into a catt ail marsh. And in many places—for instance, the wide-open spaces of western Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Nebraska, where I frequently hunt—once the corn has been harvested, catt ails oft en make up the only signifi cant cover available to late-season deer. Many hunters balk at the idea of hunting cattails. After all,…

I can fairly accurately divine the vintage of a hunter if his earliest memory of a deer isn’t a whopper buck or a special hunt. If someone tells me his first encounter with a whitetail was a track, I know I’m talking to a sort of pioneer, someone who was there at the beginning of the most remarkable comeback of a wildlife species in the history of the nation, if not the planet. In the beginning of the whitetail’s recovery, tracks were all we saw, cloven hoofprints pressed in the soft mud of a woodland trail or the dust of a field edge. Next there were sightings of deer, rare events that made the local paper and stirred coffee-shop conversation for weeks. It’s hard for a sportsman who grew up…

TIP Country boys, city girls. Hunt just outside town limits to waylay rural bucks lured by concentrations of urban does during the rut. I Last November I killed the biggest whitetail of my life: a North Woods 5x5 that probably never saw a cultivated field, barbed wire fence, or artificial feed in his life. But my success tagging that deer depended directly upon other deer in a far different setting: urban deer that live in my neighborhood, raid my garden, and even sleep in our dog kennel. Today’s urban or suburban deer hunter lives with an opportunity to study deer behavior that, a generation ago, was the exclusive domain of professional guides and biologists. I consider my backyard deer to be barometers on the hoof. Observe them, and you’ll become…

Bring the wrong video gear afield and you’ll end up with lousy footage and possibly a blown hunt. We tapped Michael Hunsucker and Shawn Luchtel of the Outdoor Channel’s Heartland Bowhunters to get the scoop on the best video gear for filming a hunt. In many ways, these guys have set the bar for shooting high-quality hunting footage, and they even teach classes for amateur and pro shooters to up their game. Here’s the gear they recommend for field photography, and why it works for them. 1. MAIN CAMERA Canon 70D $999; canon.com/cameras The Heartland guys shoot with DSLRs, and their footage is distinguishable because of it. But high-end DSLRs can cost more than a new rifle, and many don’t offer an autofocus video option (a must for anyone trying…

CALL OF THE WILD THE EASTERN SOUTH DAKOTA farm belt. Early 1960s. We didn’t have much, but we had family and fields, fried chicken, corn on the cob, and Elvis on the radio. Come autumn, pheasants and rabbits were big adventure. A flock or two of snow geese might drop in to grub among the stripped cornstalks, but most merely passed over, their high, wild cries the language of another place. Imagination was a boy’s best friend. With it he could turn Grandpa’s 2-acre tree lot into Teddy Roosevelt’s African jungle or Daniel Boone’s Kentucky wilderness. The fringe of young cottonwoods along the creek was the Amazon, the Zambezi, the Yukon. With homemade bows and broken BB guns, we hunted everything from elk to elephants, pronghorns to polar bears. But…

HAVE YOU EVER hunted in truly cold temperatures? And by “truly cold,” I mean ₋20 degrees Fahrenheit or below before factoring in the wind chill. There are many inexpensive yet effective ways to beat the cold. Here are some I’ve used to fend off plummeting temperatures and hunt comfortably all day. 1 BE CRAZY ABOUT CARDBOARD Placing a piece of cardboard underneath your feet will block out the cold and prevent it from burrowing through your boot sole. And I’ve learned through experience that even boots supposedly good down to ₋60 degrees Fahrenheit will let cold air in. You also can tear off strips of cardboard and stuff them in the cracks and holes of a box blind to keep frigid air from getting to you. 2 BRING BOOT BLANKETS…