Latest Featured Hunting Articles


	Colorado Mule Deer Hunt: You Must See Them First! Rifle, Colorado, has always produced big bucks from backcountry pockets; the tough part is getting them out of that pocket. When hunters come to town, the first question they ask locals is, "Where did Rifle get its name?" Although no one knows for sure, the consensus is the name originated with an old cowboy that had left his rifle leaning against a tree near a local creek. Once he realized the gun was missing he always referred to the area as "Rifle" and the name stuck.
	Horse Trails & Elk Tales Do-it-yourself horseback hunt for elk in the vast and remote Muskwa-Kechika wilderness in northern British Columbia. Pitching camps along the way, saddling and packing the horses, crossing rivers and mountain passes, bugling and calling elk, protecting the venison from marauding grizzlies, and then making our way back along uncertain trails back to civilization.
	Archery Elk Hunt: A Chase to the End Jesse Raddon grew up in a family with a long tradition of taking trophy animals that made the record books. Evidently, it was within his genetic makeup to continue the tradition and at just 18 years old there were few hunters twice his age that had experienced anywhere close to a similar number of hours in the field. Part of the legacy is due to family tradition; one member would hunt while the others guide, scout, and assist. Black powder and archery were the family weapons of choice and when hunting elk that meant they would be afield during the rut.
	Sweat the Small Stuff: Whitetail Hunting Primer-Part 3 This article was originally written without this 3rd installment. I got to thinking about it and thought perhaps another short installment on rifles, optics and sighting in might be helpful as well. I happen to be a certified gun nut. I admit to it and enjoy my interest in rifles to no end. Does a serious and successful deer hunter need to be a gun nut? Well, of course not! But I do think that perhaps some tips from a serious gun person could be a bit helpful, especially for those starting out.
	Deer Hunting: Myths, Fallacies & Fantasies - Part 3 I firmly believe in the effectiveness of rattling antlers to attract deer, especially bucks, but I'm often told that rattling only works during the first half of November when the animals are actively rutting because that's when the bucks fight. Wrong on both counts.
	Deer Hunting: Myths, Fallacies & Fantasies - Part 2 The scraping behavior of whitetails is one of the most extensively studied and discussed aspects of deer. And often also the most misunderstood. The scrape marks the heart of a buck's territory, a buck makes scrapes to attract does, only whitetailed deer bucks make scrapes, bucks visit scrapes often, the track in a scrape indicates the size of the buck it belongs to and the number of scrapes are a gauge of the buck population in the immediate area.
	Deer Hunting: Myths, Fallacies & Fantasies - Part 1 In the course of the past quarter century or so, we've turned our store of deer hunting lore upside down with new knowledge and insights into deer biology and behavior and, in the process we've debunked and discarded many of the old left-over truisms. We no longer determine the age of a deer by counting its tines and we no longer talk about bucks gathering harems of does.
	Elk Hunting: Patience, Patience, Patience... After ten years of being patient my quest for an elk began to require more persistence than patience but with any luck persistence, patience and preparation would finally come together this fall. Those are the positive thoughts that an archery elk hunter's dreams are made of. Luckily for the dreaming elk hunter, the Colorado Archery season is positioned on the calendar to coincide with the time that a bull elk's hormones change from 'hanging out with the boys' to solo aggression.
	Pigging Out: Wild Hog Hunting My doctor denies it exists, but I know I have it. I am even fairly certain that most big game hunters share the excess anxiety and unspent energy brought about by PSSS, or post season stress syndrome. Other than occasionally venturing to the woods to change out trail camera cards or batteries, this time of year brings about little contact with the ungulates that were the focus of most of my time, energy and thoughts over the fall and winter. I am left with a giant void in my schedule and a burning desire to fill it with a similar activity. Bring on the hogs!
	Accurizing Your Firearm: Part 5 - Managing Recoil We've come a long way since the grit-your-teeth-and-take-it-like-a-man school of shooting, but there are still shooters out there who scorn recoil reducers as something weaklings and wimps use because they're afraid of a bit of pain. Sadly, these people just don't get the point - recoil reducers have nothing to do with machismo and everything to do with accuracy. No matter to what degree you fine tune your firearm, you will never shoot it well if you need to grit your teeth when you touch off a shot.
	Accurizing Your Firearm: Part 4 - Triggers The instructor who told soldiers in training to keep pulling back on the trigger until the gun went off must have fired one too many relics from WWI. It's good advice if you happen to be shooting a mass produced, military rifle that dates back almost three quarters of a century-those guns were made quickly and they were expected to do duty even after they'd been tromped into the muck of the trenches for a week. Nobody cared much about the tightness of the group they would punch at a 100 yards; the important thing was that, in the face of the enemy, the guns would fire.
	Finding Coyotes I live far enough north that when mid-winter rolls around the amount of daylight available to hunt coyotes can be less than eight hours. That means I need to be spending my daylight hours hunting, not scouting for someplace to hunt. But any coyote hunter worth his skinning knife will tell you that to be successful, you have to hunt where the coyotes are. The more coyotes, the greater your success will be. The key then is to have a scouting method that finds concentrated amounts of coyotes - fast.
	Sweat the Small Stuff: Whitetail Hunting Primer - Part 2 Continuing from the first article that primarily covered how to find the right spot for your deer hunt. If we chose wisely and set up correctly it's simply a matter of time before game will pass by. When it finally does, you have little time to wonder or be surprised. You must simply react and do it as quickly as possible. No, this doesn't mean we jump up, raise our gun and release the safety right now. It does mean we need to formulate a game plan (pun intended) immediately, however. Make sure your movements won't be seen as you ready your rifle and make sure you do not slide your safety off until you know you want to shoot and also you figure it will (the safety) not be heard.
	Accurizing Your Firearm: Part 3 - Finding the Right Load Based on the range work, free floating the barrel did tighten up the grouping of the production grade pre-2006 Winchester Model 70 to some degree, but not nearly as much as I had hoped it would. In going over the results with a few of the other shooters after the session, the common verdict was that, while the gun was probably capable of better performance, it just didn't like what I was feeding it.
	Sweat the Small Stuff: Whitetail Hunting Primer-Part 1 There have been hundreds of books written on the subject of hunting whitetails. In no way am I about to give anyone a thorough lesson that will make you a complete whitetail hunter. After all, I am still learning myself. I have been hunting deer for over 40 years, but must admit to having lost most or all of 12-15 seasons while I was a pilot in the U.S. Army from the late '70s through the late '90s.
	Accurizing Your Firearm: Part 2 - Abed and Afloat In the first part of this series, we took a production line pre-2006 Winchester Model 70 out of the box, cleaned it up a bit, mounted a 3x9 scope on it and subsequently took it to the range for a bit of paper punching. Now you can't knock a consistent group of under three inches at 100 yards, but you'd expect better than that if it had been a custom gun. And I just knew the Winchester could be tweaked to custom gun performance with a bit of effort and investment.
	The Adrenal Gland Lots of big elk owe their continued existence to a small piece of human tissue, the adrenal gland. Our guide takes us through a week of archery hunting where adrenalin overload causes a number of misadventures for his hunter. Although the elk are plentiful and respond without hesitation to cow calls, our hunter's reaction to the big bulls that come way too close, ranges from pure, muscle locking paralysis to a black out caused when a fire breathing bull comes storming into close range. Hunting experience and shooting skills are left far behind as our hunter falls victim to his own adrenalin.
	Accurizing Your Firearm: Part I - Optics When it comes to accuracy in big game rifles, there are two extremes. On the one hand are the hunters who go to a neighborhood sandpit the day before their hunting trip, set up a cardboard box at 25 paces and blast off a half a dozen shots. If the majority of the bullets hit the box, then the rifle is deemed satisfactory for yet another season.
	4 Tips for Hunting Late Season Moose We don't often hear about hunting moose in the late season. An undeniable romance focuses on calling and attracting bulls during the peak of the rut; but what about when all that hormone-driven activity subsides? Where do the moose go and what do they do? More to the point, how do we hunt them in the late season? Allow me to share the events of a late season moose hunt and offer four tips that helped me close a tag last fall. Whether we're talking about Shiras, Canada, or Alaska/Yukon moose, for much of the year bulls are reclusive by nature.
	Hunting the Mule Deer Rut After a four-year wait, my wife Heather and I finally drew coveted deer tags. Not just any tags mind you; these permits would allow us to hunt on a military base from November 26 through 28 of 2009. So what's the big deal you ask? This annual event is a management hunt designed to cull deer, but more importantly it would allow us to hunt the early stages of the mule deer rut. Each hunter is given three tags, all of which may be used for either mule deer or whitetailed deer, and only one has be used on an antlerless deer. Now, where else can a person harvest two mule deer bucks?