Bowhunterの November/December 2022 - Whitetail Special の目次

The story of this buck I named “Hollywood” started with a single trail-camera picture in 2020. It was a good year for my brothers and me, and we had all tagged out. But when we got the first picture of this deer, we immediately turned our attention to the fall of 2021. The farm that Hollywood called home is great 150-acre mixture of thick timber, creekbottoms, CRP, food plots, and ag fields. In the summer of 2021, we focused on strategically placing food plots and stand locations just for Hollywood. When we finally got our trail cameras out in early July, we couldn’t believe our eyes when he was the first deer to show up! Hollywood, along with four or five other bucks in his bachelor group, were living on…

WHEN IT COMES TO bowhunting trophy whitetails, there’s no other time during the season that can quite compare to the rut. Of course, the number one reason for this is that even the most mature bucks often become more active in daylight, which makes them more susceptible to ambush. A past Midwestern bowhunt is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. I’d climbed up to my treestand about 10 minutes before daylight on a chilly November morning. Although I was eager to grab my rattling antlers and let go with a sequence right at first light, I decided to wait until about a half-hour after daylight…and, man, am I glad I did! Within a few minutes of finishing that sequence, I heard a loud and deep grunt emanate from…

THE HUNT FOR THIS DEER BEGAN IN 1973, when my Uncle Bob and Aunt Pat purchased an 80-acre parcel of land “up north” in central Wisconsin. Every October, Uncle Bob, along with my dad, grandpa, and other family members and friends would set out in search of a buck they’d call “The Big Kahuna.” This was back in the days before trail cameras and nicknaming deer. My family wasn’t looking for any deer in particular; they were just looking for a buck to bring home that might earn them top honors as the biggest buck taken that season by participating family members. Some years, it would be a 10-pointer; other years it would be a button buck; and still some years the trophy might go unawarded for lack of shooting…

WHY DIDN’T I become a golf writer? Why am I not spending my time in a beautiful clubhouse, strolling across green, manicured fairways and enjoying fine meals after a day of leisurely searching the woods for my golf ball? Despite being a tragically unskilled golfer, those illogical thoughts have crossed my mind countless times over my 40-year history of bowhunting. I’ve asked myself those questions as I belly-crawled for four hours in a drizzling rain, trying to get within bow range of seven bedded mule deer bucks. Those thoughts came to mind when the floatplane landed on Earn Lake in the Yukon as I began my eighth moose hunt, still looking for my first moose. And, as I was in my seventh hour of climbing the mountains of British Columbia…

“ALMOST HEAVEN, WEST VIRGINIA” — there really isn’t any other way to describe my home state. I love almost being lost in time here. I live in Monroe County, which is a primarily agricultural county located in the southern part of West Virginia. We do not have a single stoplight in the entire county. The running joke is there’s more head of cattle than people, and personally, I hope that never changes. It has rolling hills and valleys, creeks, but also the mighty Peters Mountain. That’s where I grew up and learned to hunt, trap, and fish. Peters is steep, rugged, and full of limestone, greenbriers, and mountain laurel. Bowhunting this mountain is very difficult. There aren’t many pinch-points or ridges that bottleneck, the wind is constantly shifting, and there…

Q I READ Dr. Dave Samuel’s explanation of why “Slingshot,” the buck in Curt Wells’ October 2022 article had an extra antler sticking out of his forehead. Could Dave explain how droptines and double main beams occur in whitetails? Craig S., via e-mail A THERE IS NO QUESTION that older bucks tend to develop droptines more readily than young bucks, and usually genetics is involved. The genes for droptines (and sticker points and extra points) tend to be expressed when bucks get older. The fact that we don’t see many bucks with droptines in the wild is because we kill lots of younger bucks before they can manifest their full potential. Some biologists believe that almost half of all bucks have some genes for nontypical points that would become visible…

I WANT TO PREFACE THIS STORY with a shout-out to public lands. We are all fortunate to have this resource in our great country. I’m also very grateful to private landowners who contribute much to wildlife habitat, but pubic land gives all of us an opportunity to pursue our hunting passion. My favorite days are spent wandering the wooded hills and swampy forests of Northern Wisconsin, a place with so much public land to enjoy exploring. My bowhunting career started in my early teens, when my brother and I found my dad’s old Bear bow in our basement. The flame was lit immediately, and before long we were both shooting Dad’s bow with borrowed arrows. Amazingly, I remember both of us killing deer our second year into it — I…

I was set up along a field edge, right where the uncut milo transitioned into lush winter wheat. On several occasions I’d watched from a distance as deer emerged from the milo and fed out into the wheat. Several times I had set up a few hundred yards away near a community scrape where I captured photos of a couple of big, mature bucks, but the deer never seemed to make it down that far before the end of shooting light. Today, however, I decided to take a chance and move farther out into the open, closer to where the deer emerged from their beds. With a Dave Smith 3-D buck decoy positioned about 30 yards out in the ankle-deep winter wheat, I tucked myself into the first row of…