Hunters have an undeniable fascination with giant antlered, big-bodied bucks. If you've decided to take on the challenge of understanding mature bucks, you're in danger of becoming addicted and obsessed. However, studying mature bucks can also increase your fun in the woods.
Mature bucks are king in the big woods. They live in constant survival mode due to hunting pressure, predators, and the drive to carry on their bloodline. It's no wonder that...

4 Tips to Locate Mature Buck Home Ranges in the Offseason

There’s a saying for folks who work in marketing that goes something like this: the minute you sign a new client is the minute you start to lose them. This general rule applies to hunting spots as well. The minute you get permission to hunt a property is the minute you start to lose that property.
Unless you’re the title holder to a piece of deer ground, the grip you hold on permission is tenuous at best. Farmers pass away, leaving their ground...

Lost Your Hunting Access? No Need to Panic

Too much hunting media preaches a conservative approach to whitetail hunting that just doesn’t work for most hunters. This message has largely dominated the conversation around hunting mature whitetails. Minimize pressure, hunt the fringes, wait for the stars to align—the same jargon that’s been recycled every hunting season and convinced hunters to hold out for bigger bucks that just aren’t coming.
It’s a top-down message that says, “If you work...

Calculate Your Hunting Days Now to Avoid Throwaway Sits

Growing up in southeastern Minnesota, I thought we had the laziest hunters. During gun season, the amount of trucks creeping along gravel roads with the windows down was a sure sign of a road hunt in progress. It never made sense to me to take the hunt out of the hunt and shoot one from the ditch, but I naively thought it was a local issue.
I thought a lot of things about the average hunter from my home state when I was young, and it wasn’t until...

Why Are So Many Deer Hunters So Lazy?

I've spent a substantial amount of time hunting whitetails in the big woods. Understanding scrapes has, without a doubt, led me to more consistent encounters than any other hunting tactic.
Their basic framework is an open patch of dirt with an overhanging licking branch. The size of a scrape might tell you that many deer use it. A scrape with more depth and a foul smell is a telltale sign that a mature buck frequents it. Its location could tell...

Which Scrapes Matter During Offseason Scouting

A few years ago, we redid our basement floor. According to my wife, since there were new floors going in, we also needed new furniture and a fresh coat of paint on the walls. While she was right, I mostly felt like my time in the boat throwing topwaters for smallies was disappearing a little more with each one of her wishes.
While we flirted with divorce a few times during that lower-level house overhaul, what really struck me as interesting was...

Why Some Deer Mean So Much To Us, And Others Just Don’t

Hunting is a sport of continually changing variables, with every decision you make compounding on the next and altering the outcome of the day. The uncertainty is what makes hunting so exciting. The best hunts are usually days when success is completely inconceivable, and when you least expect it, things take a turn for the better.
But as we all know too well, more often than not, Murphy is bound to show up and hand you a low blow. The ones that...

5 Archery Tips That Might Just Save Your Next Hunt

Yes, I know. Hunter success rates depend on filled tags, but I’m not simply reducing success to dead deer. The playing field is anything but level for deer hunters. From weekend warriors on the local WMA to those who have clawed their way into privately managed honey holes, the circumstances are different. Everyone is also at a different point in their hunting career. A one-size-fits-all blueprint for success just doesn’t work.
If this past...

Why Success in the Deer Woods Doesn’t Always Include a Punched Tag

This time of year should be a time of reflection on last deer season. While you might turn your attention to shed hunting and winter scouting, it’s reality check time for those lofty goals you set in October. Did you tag your “target” buck? Check out that new piece of ground? How many deer did you miss? When you did drag a deer back to the truck, were you winded and gasping for air?
This last one, which pertains to your hunting fitness, should be...

How to Start Training for Deer Season Now

When it comes to buyer’s remorse, we tend to think of junk. Like paying good money for something that just doesn’t deliver on its marketing promise or maybe breaks right out of the box. Cheap hunting gear, and unfortunately some not-so-cheap hunting gear, is not immune to this frustrating issue.
There’s a sneakier and probably more damaging category of gear that should concern hunters, as well. This includes products that function just fine, but...

3 Products That Might Just Make You A Worse Whitetail Hunter

Aside from in-season scouting, if I could only scout once per year, you can bet it’d be during the month of February. In fact, the weekend after my state’s deer season closes for the year, I’m blowing through all my hunting spots, trying to connect the dots and confirm or disprove any of my in-season inclinations.
Here in the South, some deer seasons run a couple weeks past Groundhog Day, and unlike the majority of deer country, the South isn’t...

3 Tips for Winter Scouting Whitetails Down South

It wasn’t that long ago when you never really heard about mature bucks the way you do now. Sure, maturity made it into the conversation sometimes when people talking about big bucks, but it wasn’t the reason for the season, so to speak.
Today, the whitetail-sphere is dominated by hit-listers with cute names and the idea that a buck is only worthy of an arrow if he’s mature. The reason we’ve gone this way is because pure trophy hunting is...

Why You Might Want to Forget About Mature Bucks and Just Hunt

The term “cull buck” used to be pretty common in deer hunting circles. Two types of hunters used it the most. In the first group, we had the aspiring land managers who truly believed that they could influence antler size by removing inferior bucks from the breeding pool. In the second camp, we had folks who wanted to avoid the perceived shame of shooting small bucks.
This was a hot topic back in the 1990s, which led quite a few legitimate deer...

Wild Deer Genetics & The Lost Cause Of Culling

I have a poor memory for a lot of reasons, but one recollection I have that is almost as crisp as the day it happened involves a pair of forky antlers lying in a buck bed. I’d been fighting the late-March ticks in north-central Minnesota for hours when I walked halfway up a grassy hillside and found my first matched set.
Even though they might break 20 inches if I measured them, which I won’t, it was a special moment. It had taken me years of...

How to Find More Matched Sets of Shed Antlers This Winter

Jason Thomas thought he’d killed a near-world record whitetail. His 2023 Ohio crossbow-killed deer was scored right after the hunt at 211 4/8 typical inches. The official score from Buckmasters Whitetail Trophy Records came in at 208 ⅝”, making it a new state record and the #2 buck in the world for the "perfect" category. Incredible. But from there, things got strange.
When Thomas submitted his deer to Ohio’s Buckeye Big Buck Club a...

It's Time to Re-Think Big Game Record Keeping

A couple of years ago, two buddies and I met up to chase cottontail rabbits around on a mild February weekend. It was mostly an effort to stave off cabin fever after a long Minnesota winter and to put a few bunnies in the cooler. As we moved from one chunk of public land to the next, we managed to move enough rabbits to keep things interesting.
We also, bumped a hell of a lot of a deer. Anyone who has small game hunted, especially for rabbits...

How Small Game Hunting Can Help You Kill More Mature Bucks

Winter scouting is like a free play. You get to go walk anywhere and everywhere you damn well please, knowing that your intrusion won’t affect your hunting. Nothing is off-limits. You can dive into the sanctuaries, the bedding areas, and any spot that piques your interest.
Yet, most hunters won’t head out this month to scout. Most of them won’t even think about deer until turkey season ends, or more likely, late summer when the bachelor groups...

January Is The Best Time To Winter Scout Mature Buck Sign

There are a lot of times in hunting when our eyes are a bit bigger than our stomachs. Just like when you overload your plate on Thanksgiving by stacking up every delicious side dish until you have something that could only be finished by a starving sumo wrestler, hunters often try to take on too much at one time. When you only have a couple of days to hunt and a vast swath of territory to cover, you can end up just like you do at the end of that...

Breaking Down the Big Woods

Have you ever stumbled upon a new deer hunting spot completely riddled with intersecting trails, rubs, and scrapes, yet despite many hunts, you’ve never been able to take a deer in that spot? The spot has all the right ingredients, your trail cameras light up with mature bucks, yet every hunt you throw at this spot, you come up short for one reason or another. If this sounds familiar, you might be falling right into the whitetail’s lap without...

The Whitetail Trap: Don’t Be Fooled

Hunters can always find an excuse not to go hunting. Waking up too late, not knowing where to go, or having to do something lame like go to work, some hunters will always find a reason not to head into the woods. Of course, it’s these same hunters who need something to blame for their lack of ambition when they end up with an empty freezer at the end of the season.
Some will fault the animals themselves, saying things about how the elk weren’t...

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