Thursday, December 17, 2015

Ranging Your Distance Can Make the Difference

When lining up your shot, one of the first things you should think of is, “How far is that animal?” The fact is distance is everything, and if you are off, then your shot will be too. Fortunately, we have variety of rangefinders available to help us judge distances.

Choose Wisely

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There are many brands of rangefinders out there to choose from, but the type is really what’s important. From long-range spotting scopes with built in rangefinders to angle-compensating rangefinders for bow hunters, the choices are immense. The goal is to pick one that best suits your needs.

For example, if you’re primarily a bow hunter, then why would you need a rangefinder with 1,000-yard capabilities? It doesn’t make much sense. Instead, since many times you will be hunting from an elevated position, a rangefinder with angle-compensation technology built in makes more sense.

You may also weigh heavily on the price of a rangefinder. Prices can start as low as $150, but quickly rise close to $1,000 or more. You will often get what you pay for, as is any hunting equipment, but find the price range that fits your budget, yet provides all the capabilities you need.

Deer Hunting | Phases of The Rut

The True Rut and Every Phase and Aspect It Entails

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Without question it alone is every deer hunter’s chance, young or old, bow or gun, traditional or compound, committed or not, when the “rut” is in full swing anyone is likely to have a big buck in their sites!

But the term “rut” is perhaps the loosest and at times most incorrect term used in association with deer hunting.

Camouflage Clothing | How to Match Your Hunt

Matching Your Camouflage Clothing to Your Hunting Conditions

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The correct clothing choice can make or break a hunt, and not just because of how warm or cool it keeps you. Your camouflage clothing should allow you to disappear into the surrounding environment, making you as close to invisible to your game animal as possible. However, many of the hunters we know probably have a set ofcamouflage clothing that they wear for hunting regardless of where they go or what conditions they’re hunting in. Maybe we’ve even been guilty of it ourselves from time to time.

Camouflage Clothing | Bone Collector

For illustration purposes, let’s say you typically hunt in an area dominated by hardwoods, and yourcamouflage clothing
sports patterns to match it, like Realtree Xtra. That’s great! But then plans change, so you switch stands and are in a dark conifer forest. Suddenly your hardwood pattern doesn’t blend in as well. Or maybe it snows a couple inches overnight, covering the forest in white. If you plan any kind of stalking hunt, you’re going to stick out like wearing a Cubs shirt at a White Sox game.

Pop Up Blinds │ Another Tool in your Tool Box

Increase your Success │ Add a Pop Up blind to your Arsenal

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It seems like every year there are new items on the market that are available for the avid outdoorsmen and women to help them be more successful when the take trips afield. From new scopes, bows to outdoor clothing and camouflage it seems like there is always something new. The world of pop up blinds is no exceptions.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past six years, you have probably noticed that pop or portable hunting blinds have started to become extremely popular among today’s hunters. Portable hunting blinds provide today’s hunter with ability to hunt many different situations, terrain and conditions where it otherwise may have proven difficult. Available in many different sizes, shapes and camouflage patters, it’s safe to say that pop up blinds have been a game changer.

Gaining Access | Permission to Hunt

Hunting Land Acquisition | The First Step

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Hunting properties can be expensive, as well as hunt clubs. There is no doubt that deer hunting your own tract of land, or leasing large amount of land with numerous hunters in a club is a great way to experience hunting success. Of course, there are also ways to gain permission to hunt prime tracts of land. Not only is it possible, hunters do it every year and have great success. Here is how you can too.

The first step is to narrow down where you want to hunt. Your county GIS maps can provide insight on who owns the tracts of deer hunting land and the acreage of each property. Keep in mind that you are not purchasing the property so there is no need to be picky. Also, the larger the tract the better, but many quality deer can be managed and killed on small out-of-the-way properties. Don’t make the mistake of overlooking honey holes due to lack of acreage.

Turkey Hunting | The Thanksgiving Bird

Fall Turkey Hunting V.S. Spring Turkey Hunting

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Fall seems more appropriate for a turkey on the table right? But it’s hard to beat thunder and feathers coming your way on a nice spring day. Some would beg to argue at that. The fall techniques to turkey hunting can get the ticker going just as much as that thundering tom.

The two most common fall turkey hunting techniques are worthy of trying and going out if you have never hunted turkeys in fall before. They are the scatter and call technique and the very spring similar roost-call technique. There are some big differences from the spring however. Turkeys tend to flock up this time of year which means a lot of eyes to beat instead of one or two. Hens also tend to be more vocal.

Hunt the Wind | Using His Greatest Strength to Your Advantage

How to Hunt the Wind | Getting Down Wind of Down Wind

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Hunting the wind is something most hunters think they understand but, in reality, have a misconception about how to do so effectively. It seems simple, right? The wind is blowing in a certain direction so logic tells us to simply set up on the down wind side of where the deer are going to be. This is all well and good until we consider the fact that a mature deer uses the exact same logic we use to hunt him to stay alive. Hunting the wind effectively means more than simply setting up on the down wind side. It means setting up down wind of the down wind side. The sooner you realize this the sooner your odds will improve as a hunter.

Deer Hunting | The Advantage of Being a Weekend Warrior

Why being a weekend warrior is better than deer hunting every day!

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A good majority of you Bone Collector fans, both guys and gals are deer hunting nuts. Your passion lies in the outdoors, and you place yourself in it every day you can. Unfortunately that is only Saturday and Sunday if you’re lucky! You’re at a disadvantage…how can you compete with the success of Micheal, Nick, and T-Bonewhen they have a week to hunt and you only get two days. It may not seem like it but being a weekend warrior is not a total lost. In some situations it’s a complete advantage!

Once November rolls around hunters are hard pressed to get in the stand with any and all time available. That often means Saturday and Sunday, then it’s back to work with a grueling 5 day wait! This wait however might be the one thing that’s allowing you to kill big deer over those more fortunate.

Deer Hunting Bows and Guns | Do You Need to Choose One?

Balancing Weapons While Deer Hunting

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As with all things in life, there are some people who are adamant about something they believe in. One group will swear up and down about how their approach is better than anybody else’s, and another group will promise that the opposite is true. This also happens in deer hunting circles. Though there is often overlap between the two, some deer hunters swear by using guns, while others will only use their bows. Is one of these opposing groups correct? Let’s look at the pros and cons of each approach.

Guns – The Modern Method

Most deer hunting enthusiasts grew up with a strong deer camp tradition. Typically, hunters gather together for rifle or shotgun season more so than bow hunting season. This is probably because most gun seasons are short-lived – often no more than a couple weeks. Meanwhile, most bow hunting seasons often last several months, from early fall to mid-winter.

Deer Hunting | Keeping a Hunting Journal Can Lead to Success

What Can You Learn From Hunting Journals?

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Some adults flinch at the thought of keeping a journal. No, we’re not talking about a middle school journal where students record their angry feelings (do kids even do that anymore?). We’re talking about a true deer hunting journal, where you can record observations of deer activity, weather conditions, harvests, etc. We’ll get to why this is all important in a little bit.

But to first help illustrate this point, try thinking back to last year alone – do you remember the temperature, wind speed/direction, and moon phase on any given hunt? What about where the deer were coming from and what their behavior was? Can you recall when you noticed the first scrape or rub of the season? I bet the details are already a little hazy, to say nothing about the years before that. If you keep ahunting journal, you can easily recall these details from even decades ago. But first, why would you need to know this information at some point in the future?

Early Season Archery | Finding, Patterning, and Harvesting Mature Whitetails

Opening Day Hunting Strategy | How To Be Successful Your First Night In The Stand

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Have you ever known the guy who seemed to be tagged out almost every year by mid October, if not opening day? How could he be so lucky? You put just as much work in during the off-season, so you should have the same success, right? Food plots, glassing fields, and even hanging your stands as early as spring to not alert the mature deer of your presence close to the hunting season; you bust your hump all summer long yet none of it seems to put a buck within bow range during the early archery season on a consistent basis. Maybe he knows something you don’t know, or maybe he really is just that lucky, but chances are, he’s learned from years of experience that early season archery has almost nothing to do with luck. Chances are, he’s discovered the secret to finding, patterning, and harvesting mature whitetails on opening day has everything to do with and patience.

The Future of the Sport │ Introducing Youth to Deer Hunting

Passing it down │ Handing down the deer hunting tradition

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As deer hunters, the world we live in today is much different than the world of that many of us knew as children. There were no cell phones, dial up internet and video games were non-existent (Unless you count Atari). Most importantly, many that grew up during those generations where involved in the outdoors either through deer hunting, fishing or some other activity. In many cases, those of us that grew during these days were exposed to deer hunting through a family member such as a parent or grandparent.

As Whitetail hunters, we may take for granted that we had those figures in our lives that connected us with the outdoors. Those who connect children with the outdoors through deer hunting, whether they realize it or not, are creating the future of the sport and conservation. Unfortunately, those outdoor mentors are becoming fewer and fewer, and today’s bows and arrows are being replaced with video game controllers.

Whitetail Biology | Aging Deer in the Field

How to Age Whitetail Deer on the Hoof

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At some point or another, a whitetail hunter will face a dilemma in the woods or fields. A deer steps out into one of your shooting lanes. It’s a buck – great. It has decent-sized antlers, but is it a truly mature deer? Shoot or Don’t Shoot? That’s the split-second decision that can haunt a person for years. Do you risk shooting an immature deer that could go another year or two, or do you risk walking away from a potentially great buck?

Sure, you can accurately get a deer’s age by examining its teeth from the lower jaw. But how many deer will let you play dentist before you decide to shoot? If the answer is anything north of zero, you may be hunting in a petting zoo, which I believe is frowned upon in most states. Thankfully with today’s information sharing and increased interest in quality deer management, there are several fairly reliable ways you can estimate whitetail ages in the field. Using certain characteristics of the body and with a little practice, you can estimate an age class with reasonably high confidence. Naturally, an age class guess will vary from one hunter to the next. But as long as you’re consistent with your own approach, it shouldn’t make much of a difference in the long run.

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Bow Hunting Tactics | How to Ambush Early Season Whitetails

Bow Hunting Early Season Whitetails

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Every hunter is fascinated with and loves to hunt the rut. And why not? With unpredictable old bucks chasing does, it’s an exciting time to be in the woods. However, it’s also a very unpredictable time to be in the whitetail woods. On the other side of the spectrum, hunting early season whitetails is a different ball game.

Early season whitetails tend to still be on a summer feeding schedule, and are often much easier to pattern than rut-crazed deer later in the fall. They’ll often stroll out into food plots or agricultural fields earlier in the afternoon than normal to feed. Bucks may still be traveling in bachelor groups, which may increase your chances of following your target buck. Plus, most hunters tend to ignore early season bow hunting, perhaps because of the heat, bugs, or just plain misunderstanding.

Deer Hunting | Scent Control Techniques for Early Season Bow Hunting

Improve Your Scent Control When Deer Hunting With These 4 Scent Control Basics.

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You have heard it time and time again, both scent control and hunting the wind have been drilled into your head. As of now you have formed either one of two opinions. You either completely agree and feel scent control is vital when deer hunting, or you could care less and think you will get away with it. Given your opinion, one could make an assumption of whether or not you’re a bow hunter or firearms hunter. The bow hunters experience the importance of scent control on those muggy, mosquito filled afternoon hunts of early fall, when deer could smell the coffee you had that morning from a mile away. On the other hand, a firearms hunter may sit comfortably in a box blind, drinking coffee with 30 deer in a cut corn field, with not a moment of attention paid to scent control. The big difference is obviously humidity which is a big deal for a deer’s nose. For all the bow hunters eagerly awaiting to jump into that muggy humid stand for 4 hours, make it worth your while using these scent control techniques!

Deer Hunting | Why Do Your Summer Bucks Disappear in the Fall?

Big Velvet Bucks Tease You all Summer, Then Disappear…So Where Did They Go?

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On January 7^th, 1918 famed illusionist Harry Houdini performed on of the greatest deceptions, the “Vanishing Elephant”. While making a 5-ton, 8 foot tall elephant suddenly vanish before thousands of spectators might appear as one of the greatest disappearing acts, but it does not compare to what big bucks pull at the end of summer. Instead of that one time illusion, the big velvet bucks of summer like to build suspense. They fire you up all summer long by becoming extremely visible in daylight hours during the months of august and July. They appear every afternoon like clockwork on trial cameras and in the bean fields, just too suddenly drop off the map once deer hunting commences in September and October. So where did they go?

Increasing Food and Cover │ The Long Term Benefits of Timber Stand Improvement

Set the Dinner Table│ What TSI Can Do For You

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If y

Timber Stand | Bone Collector

ou have been deer hunting long enough, you have probably stumbled upon the phrase TSI somewhere in your readings or conversations. Timber Stand Improvement or “TSI” is the practice of improving the quality of forested habitats for wildlife habitat and forest production. TSI can be completed in a manner of different ways, depending on the conditions and goals of those completing project, and can be one of the best habitat improvement projects you complete on your farm especially if you enjoy hunting whitetails and turkeys. While TSI is fairly well known among the deer hunting community as a beneficial practice, this article will focus in on specifics of what TSI can provide to both you as a deer hunter and wildlife we enjoy chasing.

White-tailed Deer Management | Sanctuaries for Deer on Your Property

Cover, Food, and Protection in a Sanctuary for Deer on your property

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North to south, and east to west there are considerable threats to the deer herd. Among these growing concerns, the top two are hunter access and deer habitat loss. Land to hunt on is hard to come by for hunters, and a good chunk of “decent hunting” public land is sometimes even harder. This means higher hunter densities on the land that can be hunted, putting a lot of pressure on deer. To add to this the land itself is dwindling. Habitat loss, number two on the threat list, has considerably effected today’s deer herd. Increased agricultural lands, less forests, and declines in CRP/early successional habitat are all taking a big toll. These two threats alone spell disaster for a deer, leaving them to seek only one place…a sanctuary. The keywords here are cover, food, diversity, and protection for deer. All can be incorporated into the term “sanctuary” which is a section of your property that you do not hunt, or even walk/drive through for the simple fact of leaving it strictly for the deer.

Kind of sounds like a waste of property, right? Wrong.

Trail Camera Location | Where to Hang Trail Cameras for the Best Pictures

Trail Camera Strategy | How to Pattern Deer with Trail Cameras

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Since its creation, the trail or game camera has totally changed the way we hunt. Not only can they be used to identify the bucks roaming the woods in areas we hunt, but we can use them to pick up on travel patterns specific bucks are using at different times of the year that often lead to his demise. But what if you aren’t getting the bucks on camera you were hoping for? Are they even still around? While trail cameras play a major role in how we plan to hunt certain deer, they don’t always tell the whole story. By choosing the right camera and adapting our trail camera placement and strategy to several factors that change with the environment and time of year, we have gotten better trail camera pictures of mature bucks in areas we hunt.

Bachelor Groups | What We Can Learn From Them

The Secrets Behind Whitetail Bachelor Groups

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If you’ve ever lived in a rural area, you’ve likely seen folks pulled over on the side of a gravel road once dusk approaches on a summer night. Often they have a spotting scope or binoculars stuck out the window. Heck, maybe that person glassing the fields was even you. If it wasn’t you, you may have wondered what they were looking at.

The answer? Bachelor groups. No, not a rowdy group of human males (although you may find them in a field occasionally too). Whitetail bachelor groups consist of male deer from a variety of ages. In populations with healthy and diverse age structures, older deer may form exclusive bachelor groups, and younger deer may form separate ones. These groups band together in spring and summer, and continue to feed, sleep, and groom each other until late summer. They likely form as a method of additional protection. The more sets of eyes, ears, and noses watching out, the safer the group is from predation.

Habitat Management | Create Deer Funnels on Your Property

Funnel Deer Traffic Using These Habitat Management Tactics

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A critical part of hunting on properties both big and small is choosing the correct location to hang a stand. Setting up in a good ambush location could mean the difference between a record-book whitetail in the back of your truck and a tag sandwich.

However, there aren’t always big enough trees nearby or the ability to set up a ground blind effectively along heavily used trail/creek crossings or fence gates. Maybe the deer consistently come out into your food plot just out of bow range, but you can’t move your stand closer. You also need to consider access to these sites. If you can’t sneak into and out of your set without spooking deer, you’ve already lost the game.

Venison Recipe | Venison Stuffed Zucchini

Summer Venison and Garden Recipe

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When gardens are thriving and producing vegetables faster than you can eat them, and that venison still in the freezer gives you the memory of last season, but excites you for the fast approaching next one. The long summer days are sure to bring on an appetite. This summer venison and garden recipe is sure to make use of the veggies from the garden and the venison still in the freezer.

Stuffed Zucchini Venison/Garden Recipe

Prep: 20 Minutes| Cook: 15-20 Minutes| Level: Easy

FULL BLOG

Scouting Velvet Bucks | The Secret to Filling Your Tag on the First Day

Early Season Success | How to Pattern Bucks with Trail Cameras and Pre-Season Scouting

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In the dead of winter, it seems like the cold and the snow will never go away, each day longer and more treacherous than the last. While a warm fire or a cup off hot coffee on a cold winter day will always have a place in our hearts, the warm sunny glow and giant velvet racks that emerge with the summer months are constantly on our minds! Before you know it, the leaves will turn from green to red and yellow, bringing on the most sacred of seasons. Take advantage of the summer while it lasts by scouting velvet bucks to improve your chances at some early season success.

The Deer Hunting Cooperative Conundrum | Common Deer Cooperative Mistakes

Crucial Cooperation | Maintaining a Deer Hunting Cooperative

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Most deer hunters are familiar with the concept of a deer hunting cooperative. In case you’re not, a deer hunting cooperative is usually comprised of many different hunters, whether they be landowners or lessees, and combine their efforts to achieve the goal of creating better deer hunting. Usually their properties are adjacent to one another. However, this is not a rule. The properties can be in a general area, but preferably the deer hunting cooperative members are managing the same deer herd. In order for this to happen, there must be a common ground. This is the deciding factor that, in reality, determines the success of the cooperative. Properly managed deer hunting cooperatives are so effective that some states have implemented cooperatives on public ground. Each member must follow the set guidelines for the betterment of the deer hunting cooperative. While a cooperative is the ideal way to combine efforts for deer hunting, there are many ways it can go awry. Here are just a few ways a pre-existing cooperative can spiral downwards or keep the idea of a future deer hunting cooperative from gaining a foothold.

Limiting Factors | Interpreting Your Property

Limiting Factors | Interpreting Your Property

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There are more wildlife and land management resources for the whitetail deer hunter nowadays than ever before. Luckily, many hunters have realized the importance of managing their property. There are ample products such as trail cameras and food plot seed that can give the deer hunter an edge. With all of the resources floating around, it seems that one can simply do anything mentioned in a magazine or hunting video and experience great results. While this is somewhat true, each property is different and it is important to understand what your property is lacking before beginning the process.

Deer Hunting Tips | Minimal Disturbance Entries and Exits to Deer Hunting Stand

Getting in and out of your deer hunting stand undetected using minimal disturbance routes

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It may be summer but 90% of you Bone Collector fans know exactly where you’ll be opening morning once deer season comes around. You know every specific deer hunting detail down to the time you will set the alarm to which stand you will be sitting in. What you don’t know is where the deer will be when you’re walking to that stand and out of it. Getting in and out of your stand undetected can be key to deer hunting success. But work in the off season installing minimal disturbance routes can get you there unseen and unheard.

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