It was the opening morning of the 1996 turkey season when I met my first public land knucklehead. I was 16 years old and barely old enough to drive, and I was hunting an area riddled with gobblers—and hunters. I drove past a parked truck and pulled to the side of the road a quarter mile away. After quietly shutting the truck door, I cranked out an impressive string of yelps and excited cuts. I waited.
My calls were met with silence, but I soon...

David, Travis, and I must have invited Mason to come duck hunting with us a dozen times in high school. Sure, he didn’t have the background or equipment, (though we would’ve gladly shared) but I always got the feeling he just didn’t want to muck around in the swamp.
More than a decade later, I got a message from Mason saying that he’d come across a hunting article written by his former video store colleague—me. He had bought a bow, a Cam Hanes...

Myths, lies and old wives’ tales loom large in the outdoor pursuits. Here at MeatEater, we’re dedicated to separating facts from bullsh*t, so we created this series to examine suspect yarns. If there’s a belief, rumor, or long-held assumption you’d like us to fact check, drop us a note at factchecker@themeateater.com. 
Claim
According to multiple Facebook pages, Cam Hanes shot a caribou-elk hybrid with his bow in Alaska.
“With DNA testing finally...

You’ve got questions. We’ve got answers (and if we don’t, we’ll make them up). Every day, fellow MeatEaters send us more than 100 emails regarding hunting, fishing, cooking, conservation, and more. So, we decided to publish a series dedicated to our favorite FAQs. This is Ask MeatEater.
Several years ago on a late-season muzzleloader hunt, I jumped a nice whitetail buck at close range in waist-high grass. As he bounded away, the deer made a 9...

If I could only have one set of binoculars for the rest of my life, I would carry 10x50s. This size has an excellent field of view, with enough magnification to get the detail needed to find an antler tip in the sage brush.
The range of binocular choices and manufactures are wide and the decision making process can appear complicated. But if you can be honest with yourself, picking your binoculars is damn simple. What do you do the most, how...

Hunters have been watching or reading about the mule deer’s decline for so long that some worry they’ll witness its end.
Writers and speakers often quote Professor Valerius Geist’s opening lines of Chapter 8 in his 1990 book “Mule Deer Country,” where he warned: “For all its current abundance, the mule deer, so different, so uniquely American, so young and promising, is nevertheless a species marked for extinction.”
Geist’s next two sentences...