A Kentucky elk tag was the last thing on my mind in May of 2020. For over 20 years I’d been unsuccessfully applying for one of the handful of tags, first solo, then together with my wife and kids. Honestly, we’d been snubbed so many times that I had quit...
Has your Momma ever given you that look with the lowered eyebrow and clenched jaw that said, "Get yourself in line or else?" Yeah, most everyone has experienced that at some point. It's called non-verbal communication. It can be paired with any given emotion, but we seem to remember the...
Wait for him to stop. Let him turn broadside. Are you steady? Are you on him? Don’t take the shot unless you feel completely comfortable. That was the advice from my mentors when I first got into hunting. And I’ve said the same to people I've mentored myself. Careful shot...
Feral hogs are one of the country’s great ecological disasters. Few pests are more difficult to control, or more immediately detrimental to native ecosystems. In fact, some biologists consider hogs to be the most destructive invasive species on the planet. Though their spread across the United States has been slowed...
When I moved on from squirrels to hunting deer with my dad in the 1970s, there were about 200,000 whitetails in Virginia. Today, we’ve got five times that many. In the 1980s and ’90s, we went from “if it’s brown it’s down” to the “big buck” era. Whitetail management was...
Is there really such a thing as a “tough” game animal? After all, a bullet or arrow through the vitals will do the job on anything, from squirrels to elephants, right? That’s true. But equally true is that some critters, due to the size of their vitals, thickness of hide,...
In my formative deer hunting years, I’d park an extra quarter mile from my hunting area, throw a climbing stand on my back, and hike all the way to my tree. Often as not I’d spook a deer somewhere along the way. Back in those days, too, I’d sometimes listen...
Scott Bestul was looking forward to an evening hunt in southern Minnesota. It was a 25-degree November afternoon with snow on the ground, and Bestul — a 40-year veteran of the deer woods and longtime whitetails columnist for Field & Stream — knew it was likely to be a good...
The Grand Slam Club — later to become Grand Slam Club/Ovis — was founded in 1956 by Bob Housholder. It was a time of rising popularity for conservation, and records preservation was part of that initiative. One of his goals was to document those who bagged all North American trophies...
Big buck stories and rut reports aside, what's been going on in the whitetail world this fall? Here's a quick roundup of the latest headlines. A man in Boone County, Kentucky, is accused of poaching a giant non-typical buck scoring 230 6/8. Conservation officers with the Kentucky Department of Fish...
The best holiday gifts are those that blend right in under the tree, thanks of course to a perfect camouflage pattern. This year we’ve pooled our resources to come up with a wish list of gear that’s sure to please the hunter on your list. And if you want to...
The story of “The Tree Buck” began in the summer of 2019, when Ohio deer hunter Kaitlyn Warner first received trail-camera photos of him. “I sent a picture to a good friend in Florida, and he stated that it looked like a tree was growing on top of his head,”...
