Bowhunter -julkaisun November/December 2023 - Whitetail -irtonumeron sisällysluettelo

IT wasn't until the final morning of my eight-day Kansas hunt in November, a hunt I had spent nine years anticipating, that I fully grasped what had transpired over the previous days. I had dreamed of this hunt every year since I started bowhunting and couldn’t have felt more torn in my feelings. At one end of the spectrum, I had just experienced the best whitetail bowhunting action of my life. At the other end, it appeared I would be going home empty-handed from arguably one of the best whitetail states in the country. How was I supposed to go home and explain to my peers I hadn’t even drawn my bow in the Sunflower State? This had been a three-generation hunt with my dad, Jason Wells, and my grandfather,…

Three bucks meandering down trails bordering the bedding area had passed within 20 yards of my perch atop the ladder stand, all within five minutes. The sun in the west shined above the horizon, 30 minutes prior to sunset, as I scanned the riverbottom brush for bucks. Movement north of a slow-moving, cattail-choked creek, caught my eye. The huge-bodied buck moved steadily along the edge of a mowed field, surely in search of does on this chilly evening in late November. I blew a doe bleat call, followed by a grunt. With no indication of the buck hearing me, I increased the volume of the next two grunts. At 200 yards and with a breeze rustling the plentiful cottonwood leaves, I doubted he could even hear me. Then he stopped…

Q DOES THE MOON PHASE matter during the rut? A Yes, it does. When the moon is full, deer don’t move a lot in the daylight. I started hunting by the Moon Chart, and I’m a believer in it. (Gregory Stanton, Facebook) Sometimes you have to follow the “science of your eyes” when it comes to hunting. The science may contradict what you are witnessing in the field, but you must follow your gut. If something is working for you and you’re objective about what is happening, then go with it. Confidence is everything. A No. When they’re rutting, they’re rutting. (Bill Travis Crites, Facebook) Bill makes a great point here. The gestation period of whitetails is fixed at around 200 days. In northern latitudes, fawns must be born in…

“WHERE DID YOU COME FROM? WHERE DID YOU Go?”LYRICS FROM THE FOLK SONG “COTTON EYE JOE” IT’S HARD TO KNOW where to start on our story with the buck we call “Cotton Eyed Joe,” because while we only knew of him for the span of two weeks, he’s the type of deer that you spend all your efforts trying to catch up to, whether you know he exists or not. He’s the type of buck that has made me brave single-digit temps, sit all day in a treestand, and put in extra time during the summer in preparation for the fall season. The type of buck that you always dream will show up — even when you know the odds are not in your favor. We may have only known…

THIS WAS my second trip to the ranch. On the first trip, we set up six ground blinds, two treestands, and numerous trail cameras on tanks that we suspected held big bucks. We did this in hopes that the deer would get used to the blinds and come in close enough to ensure a high-percentage shot when we came back in January, which was now. In spite of that, here I was sitting in a blind that we popped up just yesterday afternoon, right after we arrived on the ranch for an eight-day hunt. That’s the beauty of trail cameras. Even though we thought this tank was too large to hunt effectively, we found that some big bucks were drinking on one end of the tank, and I was going…

When I was 12, my grandpa took me deer hunting with him for the first time. Since that day, I have always been obsessed with hunting deer — especially with a bow. I love the challenge that bowhunting presents, and as I have grown older, my addiction for these wonderful animals has only worsened. And, I’ve become obsessed with targeting specific, mature whitetail bucks. These journeys can last multiple seasons, and they can really take a toll on you. My 2022 Kansas whitetail season was no different, as I was focused on a deer that I had nicknamed “Locus” in 2021. In 2021, I was not targeting Locus, even though he was already very impressive at what we figured was a 4.5 or 5.5-year-old buck. The reason was, I had…

THIS WISCONSIN BOWHUNTER had high hopes for the ’22 bow season. Having drawn both a Wyoming mule deer tag and a Montana elk tag, I headed out west on August 27 to prepare for the September 1 opener. But when we arrived in Wyoming, we were met with temps near 100 degrees, and the weather outlook called for more of the same — not the best hunting weather, to say the least. While we hunted hard over the next 10 days, we couldn’t find any mature bucks; only small bucks and does, and a lot of moose. So, we shifted gears and headed for Montana in hopes of getting into the elk. But the high temperatures followed us to Big Sky Country — the day we arrived it was 93…