While you’re out mowing grass or working your land with a tractor or ATV, try this. Mow or bush-hog a strip of grass or a lane through a thicket right up to one or two of your favorite tree stands you’ve hunted for years. Keep those lanes trimmed all summer. Deer will find them and use them. One day this fall, an 8-pointer might walk smack down the strip to your stand. The trimmed lanes are great places to plant mini-plots. Scour old farm/weed fields and clear-cuts for hidden fruit trees, like apple or persimmon. Open up the trees by clearing away brush; prune a few limbs and pour some fertili ..read more

Pope and Young, America’s leading bowhunting organization, is excited to announce a new World Record Typical Whitetail Deer in Velvet and a new World Record Non-Typical Whitetail Deer in Velvet. Pope and Young convened a special panel to measure these potential World Records at a Measurers Workshop held in Regina, Saskatchewan on June 15th, and these two amazing bucks have been verified as new World Records in their respective categories. Jack McNaughton shot his Typical Whitetail in Velvet near the Smokey River in Alberta on August 31st, 2013. Jack’s buck has a verified final score of 182 4/8 ..read more

From Kansas to Virginia and north to Canada, 95 percent of the adult does will come into estrous and be bred from roughly November 5-20, regardless of moon phase, or weather for that matter. Biologists will tell you it’s been that way for years in the Northern two-thirds of the country, and will continue to be that way forever. So take off anytime from Halloween though Thanksgiving, and you’ll hunt rutting deer. And anytime you hunt rutting deer you are going to have a good time, with the potential to shoot a good buck. But I do believe that some days and weeks are better than others to take y ..read more

You can go out and glass fields on summer evenings, and poke around for deer tracks and stuff like you always have (yawn, boring). Or, you can think out of the box to find a huge buck to hunt in a few months (okay, perk up now and read on). Take a Hike Say you hunt a 400-acre block of woods, or maybe even a huge public area. You probably only hunt 100 of those acres, or maybe even just 50 of 75. You figure other people roam the ridges and hollows beyond your stand, so you stay put. Plus, you’ve likely gotten comfy and a bit lazy. You bust a buck in your old, familiar spot every once in a while ..read more

Several years ago, in hopes of reducing the spread of CWD, Virginia wildlife officials prohibited the use of minerals, and bait, to attract deer. Since I’ve been now forced to give up monitoring mineral licks, I’m making mock scrapes and setting trail cameras beside them. Several studies have shown that whitetail bucks will visit scrapes with fresh scent year-round, and especially in the summer months. The fake scrapes are good places (not as good as mineral licks, but the next best thing) to get images of bucks that will roam your area this fall. A mock scrape is not only scent-based, but als ..read more

I looked off my back porch the other morning and saw a single deer feeding on weed sprouts on our recently mowed lake berm. He was 300 yards away, and although I could not count tines with the naked eye, I could not miss the tall, thick, velvety beams. One glimpse through my binocular and it was clear this was going to be an above-average to exceptional deer for this part of the Virginia Piedmont. My excitement grew as I realized the rack had a good 6 more weeks to grow. How much bigger will those antlers get? June and July: Zoom Months for Antlers Velvet antler is the fastest-growing tissue i ..read more

ONE: Elevated Ridge Stand An elevated ridge that situated 100 yards or so from a field of corn, soybeans or alfalfa is one of my favorite spots for the pre-rut. Like most early-season setups, it is killer for the afternoons. But if access is good and the wind allows it, you might be able to sneak in and hunt the stand one morning too. If you have a flat of oak trees on your property that runs up a ridge from an ag field, jackpot. Does will come from back in the cover and move through in the afternoon on their way to the field. Some bucks will come and stage on the ridge in late afternoon befor ..read more

Scientists at the Mississippi State Deer Lab say velvet antlers grow rapidly, as much as ¾-inch a week for yearling bucks and 1 1/2 inches per week for adults during the peak growing season in June! Velvet antlers have a complex system of blood vessels which causes them to be hot to the touch. There is so much blood carrying protein and minerals to a buck’s antlers this time of year that even small antlers are easily detected by thermal imaging devices. Tiny hairs on the velvet stick out and make the antlers look thicker than they actually are. The hairs act as a radar system so a bu ..read more

Since July 1, 2023, the PA Game Commission has collected nearly 11,000 CWD samples from deer. Hunter harvested samples from last season made up the bulk of those with over 7,000. CWD was detected in a total of 291 of those hunter-harvested deer. To date, over 440 deer have tested positive for CWD in the 2023-2024 sampling year, up from 426 CWD-positive samples in 2022-23. “CWD surveillance is crucial to managing the disease,” said agency CWD Section Supervisor Andrea Korman. “CWD is a serious threat to deer and elk. Knowing where the disease is allows us to focus our efforts to keep more deer ..read more

I just ran across a study conducted by the University of Florida years ago. It found that in areas where hunting is permitted, whitetail does give birth to more male fawns than female fawns. Researchers examined the reproductive tracts of 380 legally harvested does from four tracts across Florida. Two of the areas were off limits to general hunting, and the other two WMAs were regularly hunted. More than 90 percent of the does in all the areas were pregnant, the research found. Males comprised 56 percent of the fetuses in the hunted areas but just 39 percent in the non-hunted areas. Additional ..read more