I still have three buck tags burning a hole in my pocket from last season. For most hunters, unfilled licenses end up in the garbage. These folks curse their bad luck. They wallow in sorrow. They try to move on. But this achieves nothing.
In my mind, the best thing to do with uncut tags is to make tag soup. The trick is a matter of flipping your perspective on the past season and learning from it. Then you’ll be able to turn this winter’s tag...

Public land deer hunting is all the rage lately. It seems as if you can’t swing a tree saddle in a WMA parking lot without hitting at least a couple up-and-coming YouTube stars that hunt “beast” style. This focus on public ground, and the deer that call it home, is not relegated simply to hunting season anymore; it has bled into shed hunting as well.
I see this every year near my home in the Twin Cities and across the river in Wisconsin. It’s a...

I grabbed a shed antler from my coffee table this morning and watched as my black Lab’s tail began to wag. His hopeful eyes asked the same question that all whitetail hunters are wondering right now: Is it time to start shed hunting?
Shed antlers are a hot commodity in the outdoor world and competition for them is getting fiercer every year. If you’re looking to be as successful as possible, you don’t want to start searching for...

With whitetail seasons wrapping up across much of the country, one of the  questions I get most often is when to start the scouting process. This inquiry is most common among newer hunters.
Growing up in a traditional Northern Michigan deer hunting family, I was trained early on that the time for scouting was the weekend before the season opened. Or, sometimes, even the night before.
Scouting back then entailed trekking into the woods with a...

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
Big box stores like Cabela’s and Bass Pro Shops will pay premium prices for exceptional deer mounts.
Origin
Every time a...

After five months of dedication to the Back 40, every corner of the property is connected to a lesson. Luckily, there’s still one more chance to capitalize on everything learned this year.
Joining me for the final hunt of the season is Ryan Callaghan and his good friend Anna Borgman, a first-time hunter who grew up in a small town in Oregon. Anna is a part of a program called the Good Meat Project where she teaches butchering classes and promotes...

I remember the first time I ever knocked on a door for hunting permission. My hands were clammy, my voice was shaky and my speech was stumbled. I’m not entirely sure if the landowner denied my request because he didn’t want me hunting there, or if he simply couldn’t understand what I was trying to say. But I do know I learned an important lesson that day: getting hunting permission is hard.
Whether you’re a new hunter or...

Last January, with wind chills ratings across the country dropping as much as 60 degrees below zero, the polar vortex was all anyone could talk about. But many within the outdoors community were thinking about its effects on animals other than ourselves. In particular, the question on the minds of hunters was how exactly do deer survive these kinds of conditions?
Fortunately, whitetail deer are uniquely adapted to handle just about anything...

Having a good ground game is as important to a whitetail hunter as being able to kill deer from a tree. Versatility is your friend, and there are times of the year—like the late season—where one style can offer up an advantage over the other. If you’re looking to arrow a buzzer-beater buck, your best bet might be to go au naturel on the ground.
This is especially true if there’s snow in on the ground to blend in with. Couple that with the fact...

Long before Tom Heberlein was old enough to hunt deer, he watched for his father’s blue, snow-encrusted 1952 Ford pickup to return home from northern Wisconsin each November. It would usually be loaded with dead whitetails tucked among the Christmas trees they’d sell at the family’s gas station.
Heberlein never thought someone could be shocked or offended by the stiff legs, glazed eyes, and slit carcasses of dead deer. After all, his dad wasn’t...