Wired To Hunt

Some of my first hunting experiences occurred at a deer camp. Looking back, that camp persisted on nostalgia and the culture it fostered in a rural Mississippi community. Occasionally, someone would shoot a big buck, and I don’t mean big for the pine hills of Mississippi. They would have been big...

Few things substitute experience and time in the field. While it can be tempting to think a new piece of gear can help you level up, it rarely works that way. As a gear editor and reviewer, I’ve used some of the best hunting gear money can buy, and I can tell you that no single piece of equipment...

When I was first starting out deer hunting, signature hats were all of the rage. I don’t mean like the flat-brim craze that you see in the western hunting crowd these days. I mean goofy styles that could set you apart from your bow-toting brethren. This has a lot to do with Chuck Adams. If you’re...

Other than the rut, opening day of deer season is one of the most anticipated times of the year. Then, once opening day plans fail, temps stay hot, and deer activity seems non-existent, it becomes one of the most hated. When we don’t immediately notch a tag or shoot that buck that’s been on camera...

I know it seems a bit crazy for a dude living in Montana to expend so much energy on hunting white-tailed deer in Wisconsin. All I can say is, “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.” But I have more reasons than that. I’ve been hunting there since I was 11. I have an incredible...

Summer scouting, especially in the deep South, is my least favorite time to be in the woods. I’ll think of any excuse not to deal with the humidity, cottonmouths, and an endless string of spiderwebs. During the summer months, the woods and air are thicker than they’ll be all year. As much as I...

There are three things you can do better to be more consistently successful on public land. Number one, improve your e-scouting. It might sound counterintuitive, but to be better at e-scouting, you have to put dirt under your boots. By combining e-scouting on the maps with seeing it in person, you...

To pattern deer is to create a world for them in which human intrusion is minimal and leaves them largely unbothered. Or, you can play the scarcity game while running a stealth scouting pattern. The former option is available to anyone who controls a decent chunk of land and can grow deer. The...

After driving throughout the night, the sun illuminated a landscape that I'd seen only on a computer screen. The digital images of Google Earth displayed an open prairie laced with thin ribbons of trees along infrequent drainages. I was having serious doubts going into this hunt—and that's an...

Last October, I had the opportunity to hunt and harvest my second melanistic white-tailed deer on our family ranch in Central Texas. Our tracking and census process on the ranch is a meticulous one. We run trail cameras year-round and study every image in August and September to conduct an accurate...

A week ago, a buddy of mine sent me a picture of twin fawns lying on the forest floor. While scouring the woods for morels, he stumbled onto the pair. They couldn’t have been more than a few days old. These encounters are happening all over the whitetail’s range right now. If you’re lucky enough to...

Christopher “CJ” Alexander, whose name graced headlines in December after photos of him posing with an 18-point buck he harvested drew skepticism, has officially been indicted on 23 total charges, the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, on behalf of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, announced...

As much as I love hunting gear and testing it, there’s no correlation between new purchases and killing a Boone and Crockett caliber deer. Unless maybe that purchase happens to be a large farm in Iowa. Otherwise, anything you can get in stores can’t guarantee you a big buck, or any deer for that...

There are a lot of reasons bowhunters lose deer. Very few of those reasons stem from true equipment issues. Most of the time, it’s just us doing our jobs poorly because our brains can’t handle the moment of truth (or we rush through the blood-trailing process). While the talk about broadhead...

Here’s the truth about these "best of" articles: the only honest answer is, "It depends." Are these cartridges really the best deer-killing cartridges in existence? It depends. It depends on where you’re hunting, your experience with firearms, what rifles you already own, how much money you can...

Humans, and by default, hunters, are walking contradictions. If you ask the average hunter if he supports anti-hunting groups lobbying to remove opportunities from any subset of hunters, you’ll hear all about how horrible they are. Ask that same hunter if he supports removing opportunities for...

A hunter in Ohio took down a massive 12-point whitetail in October of this year, and recently released scoring indicates it’s one for the record books. Scorers with Buckmasters Whitetail Trophy Records (BTR) measured Jason Thomas’s enormous typical buck at 208 ⅝”, which makes it the new Buckmasters...

White-tailed deer are ubiquitous in North America. It seems like half of the country heads out into the woods to pursue the enigmatic species every fall and winter, to experience the great outdoors and fill their freezers. But there’s one subspecies of whitetail very few hunters know about, in a...

In my home state of Minnesota, the firearm season opens the first weekend of November. This means that for many years, bowhunters relinquished the woods to the orange army within the first few days of the month. When I was younger, that bothered me a lot. I wanted to hunt the rut, but it just wasn’t...

Spend much time at deer camp, and you’ll probably hear a hunter blame wonky antlers, piebald coloration, and other genetic abnormalities on inbreeding. But the science says incestuous mating usually isn’t to blame, and inbreeding is a nearly insignificant concern for whitetail hunters. Astronomical...