How to Hang and Skin a Deer

As long as you’ve got a place to hang it and the muscle-power necessary to lift it, the hanging method is a clean and simple way to skin your big game animals. Unless you’re saving the cape or hide for taxidermy purposes, use the following procedure. Hang the animal by the neck or the base of the antlers, with the noose tucked up tightly behind the ears. You can also hang an animal upside down, by the gambrels. Everything is pretty much the same...

How Often do Whitetail and Mule Deer Hybridize?

As a scientist, it’s my job to be curious. I spend a lot of my time trying to figure out what makes animals tick and brainstorming ways that wildlife managers might be able to use that information to promote the critters we care about. Every now and then, I stumble across an idea that is pretty far outside what I am used to working on (or should be working on) but that captivates me nonetheless. Recently I’ve been shirking my normal work...

Deer Vision: How Whitetails See Color, Light, and Movement

Recent research into whitetail vision confirms what you’d expect from a crepuscular prey species: They see their best during the dim light of dawn and dusk. Bradley Cohen, the lead researcher in a 2014 University of Georgia (UGA) study, calls whitetails an “anti-predation machine.” For starters, their eyeballs are positioned in their head to provide 300- to 310-degree views of their surroundings, including about 65 degrees of binocular vision to...