White-tailed deer are a prey species. Their sight, hearing and sense of smell are especially adapted to evade predators, human hunters included. While the whitetail’s ability to hear and smell potential danger is probably most critical for survival purposes, I’ve been impressed by their ability to detect even the slightest bit of potentially dangerous...
White-tailed deer are one of the most prolific deer species on Earth. Aside from being able to adapt to a wide variety of habitat conditions and environmental pressures, they can breed at a young age, produce more than one offspring per year and give birth at the most favorable time of the year.
Hey everybody, check this out. It is one of the coolest videos I’ve seen come across my desk in a while. Jeff Enns posted this on YouTube a while ago, but we first saw it now. He writes: “Here is a mule deer buck that I have trail cam videos and videos of in...
The season is over for whitetail hunters across the country. Whether you let a crossbow arrow fly to put meat in the freezer or antlers on the ground doesn’t matter much any more. But your work is far from over. In fact, it never really stops if you want to stack the odds in your...
White-tailed deer tend to grow antlers that are fairly well-balanced. That is, one side looks pretty much like the other. Keep in mind, however, that no two antlers are ever exactly alike, although their similarities from side to side, or even from one buck to the next, are sometimes striking. Nevertheless, deer antlers are...
It’s a calm, cold winter afternoon just before dark and you’re in the stand, sitting exactly where you want to be during the peak of the whitetail rut. Just upwind of you is a lush food plot that is beginning to fill up with does, and you’re certain that the old bucks are going...
The rut is one of the most anticipated times of the hunting season in Alabama. However, the timing of this can vary greatly depending on where you hunt within the state. Generally speaking, this period of the season is when most mature bucks are more vulnerable to harvest due to an increased activity level....
Hunters expect wildlife managers to determine how many deer there are in an area, and biologists strive to do so. Common approaches to examine deer population size and trends include harvest data reconstruction, pellet and track counts, and browse, camera, aerial, infrared and thermal-imaging surveys. By John J. Ozoga Probably one of the most...
Culling is the selective removal of presumably inferior deer in order to improve the quality of the remaining population. Among whitetails, the culling harvest strategy generally involves targeting those bucks with inferior antlers for removal to improve overall antler quality of those left to do the breeding and for harvest at an older age....
If you’ve noticed that some bucks seem to be casting their antlers early this year, you’re not wrong. “The overall health of the buck affects when it casts its antlers,” said Dr. Grant Woods, a deer biologist and host of the popular Growing Deer series (Growingdeer.com). “Factors like prolonged cold temperatures or an injury...
