You’ve waited all year for this. It's the rut, baby! No matter which week in November you take off work, your No. 1 strategy is simple: Spend every minute you can in your best stands because you never know when a good buck will prowl by, or come running hot...
Realtree Fishing pro staffer Drew Gregory knows how to catch big bass, and he has the tournament wins and sponsorships to prove it. But you won’t find Gregory racing down the lake in a shiny new bass boat on tournament day. Instead, Gregory prefers to seek out his limit in...
“It feels like I’m breaking the law,” my dad used to say of Pennsylvania spring turkey hunting. Though it was legalized in 1968, it still felt unusual to be out there in the woods. You see, in the north-central mountains where I grew up, the fall turkey tradition ruled. In...
Look at the vital zone outlined on the average 3D deer target, and you’ll see an area that reinforces what most of us have been taught about aiming at a broadside deer: Hold behind the crease of the shoulder, slightly below centerline of the chest. Most of the time, if...
One morning in the Clearwater Mountains of Idaho, I watched two whitetail bucks skirting a hillside trail across a canyon. “Two hundred sixty yards,” my friend Bob said from below his rangefinder. “Buck in back is bigger.” I rested my .270 in the crotch of sticks and watched as the...
It wasn’t long ago that all a hunter had to consider when buying a riflescope was whether to get a fixed or variable power, a Duplex reticle or a fine crosshair. But optics — especially riflescopes — have evolved dramatically within the past decade. Tubes have gotten larger, glass and...
Just a few days ago, I slipped into a bedding area, climbed a tree, and settled in for the last few hours of daylight. Right after sunset, I watched as my No. 2 target buck rose from his bed a mere 50 yards away. That buck stayed within a few...
Years ago, when someone steered a truck towing a duck boat onto Interstate 55 during December or January, you knew where they were heading: the rice fields or flooded timber of Arkansas. But for about the past decade, many of those rigs have veered a bit northeast of the world’s...
You’re either bowhunting right now or will be in a few weeks. Between shooting your bow and scouting and hanging stands, you probably don’t have time to read and digest a long-winded text on deer hunting. But you probably are scrolling on your phone to pass the hours in a...
I’m often amazed at the people, deer hunters included, who tell me they just don’t like venison. That statement is usually followed by a qualifier: it’s tough; it’s gamy; it’s dry. And so on. I’ve eaten a lot of good deer meat. But I’ve eaten some really bad deer meat,...
My buddy shouted at me from 60 yards away, and it was just the type thing you hope to hear on the First of September. "Coming in hot behind you, to the right!" I twisted around on my bucket seat to catch sight of the dove coming over the barn...
One October I scouted the bends and points of a 400-acre stretch of the Milk River in northeastern Montana and located four good whitetail bucks, two of which would push 140 inches, about as good as the racks get out there. I hunted hard for four days from three lock-on...
