Catching Up With Deer Hunting Author Duncan Dobie

For the past year, Duncan Dobie has probably been the busiest whitetail writer in the country. Yet after endless hours of work and completing two mammoth projects, he’s ready for more.

By Brian Lovett

In Summer and Fall 2011, Duncan Dobie wrote and coordinated Hunting Mature Whitetails the Lakosky Way, a gorgeous hardcover book that details the humble beginnings and incredible success of America’s favorite hunting couple, Lee and Tiffany Lakosky. Most folks would be ready for a break after that, but not Dobie. He immediately set into his next project: the soon-to-be-available Legendary Whitetails III: Stories and Photos of 40 More of the Greatest Bucks of All Time.

“With the Lakosky book, it was sort of a learning process, and it evolved as we got more into it,” Dobie said. “Coming up with an outline was the first priority: how they hunted, a little history, how they got started in the industry, why they’re so popular, how they manage property and set up stands.

“That’s one of the things that makes me so proud is there’s so much information in there from an expert.”

Legendary Whitetails III required a different mindset.

“I was already familiar with a lot of the stories in the book and had worked on some of them firsthand with a lot of the hunters who had killed some of those record deer,” he said.

 Although Hunting Mature Whitetails the Lakosky Way and Legendary Whitetails III might seem different on the surface, Dobie said they share many similarities. Legendary focuses mostly on record deer killed during the big-buck boom of the past 10 years. The Lakoskys growth and maturation as hunters also occurred during that period.

“It’s almost parallel success,” Dobie said. “Lee started out in very modest circumstances, hunting in Minnesota for many years. … He sort of expanded his horizons by going to big-buck locales and finding big deer (he and Tiffany) could hunt. Meanwhile, the whole big-deer industry was sort of evolving, with folks getting more into leasing and nutrition. So this big-buck boom sort of evolved with them because it was a time when so many exciting things were happening. It’s still going on now.”

What’s next for Dobie? More deer projects, of course — and a prediction about where the next world-record whitetail might be shot.

“My two picks would be Iowa or Kansas,” he said. “I’d almost have to say Iowa because they protect their herd pretty well, it’s very difficult to get a nonresident tag, they have a long bow season and a short shotgun season, and the quality of deer that come out of that state year after year is amazing.”

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