Help Deer Refuel After the Rut

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Bucks expend a great deal of energy during the fall preparing for and participating in the rut. Depending on the buck:doe ratio, activities like scraping, rubbing, fighting, seeking and chasing can stretch over weeks or even months, and during this time bucks spend less time feeding than normal. Even in well managed herds with balanced …

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The Dwindling Doe Harvest

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The year was 1999. We were on the cusp of a new century. The Yankees won the World Series for the 25th time. The Denver Broncos won the Super Bowl for the second time, and more importantly from a deer management perspective, hunters shot more antlerless deer than antlered bucks for the first time. That …

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Find Your Buck Harvest Sweet Spot

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Prescribed fire brings a bonus to hunters in the South, where dense forest cover dominates most landscapes: Fire helps us find sheds. Most sheds in my personal collection are blackened by fire, and it was in a newly burned area that I enjoyed a successful morning of shed hunting a couple of years ago, finding …

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Michigan Study Shows APRs Can Provide Deer Management Benefits

| By Lindsay Thomas Jr. and Kip Adams
For decades, the percentage of 1½-year-old or “yearling” bucks in the national harvest has been declining. Where yearlings once made up nearly 70 percent of the national buck harvest, today that number is around 34 percent and holding. However, yearling buck harvest remains high in some areas, and hunters in many areas are working to …

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Public Land: A Young Buck’s Death Sentence?

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You hear it commonly from all ranks of hunters, no matter their experience level. It’s the kind of thing grizzled veterans exclaim loud enough at the local coffee shop everyone within earshot catches it, or millenials openly share in a social media post that randomly pops up in your feed. Either way, the sentiment is …

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