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1 month ago | 
themeateater.com | Jordan Sillars |Alex Gyllstrom |Patrick Durkin
Texas game wardens announced yesterday that 22 suspects have been charged with 1,200 violations related to illegal whitetail smuggling and black-market wildlife trade. The smuggling operation encompassed three deer breeding facilities, ten release sites, one deer management pen, and three illegal, unregistered facilities.
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2 months ago | 
themeateater.com | Tony Peterson |Alex Gyllstrom
Last winter, at least in the Upper Midwest where I live, was dreamy. If you’re not passionate about sledding or building snowmen, it was dreamy anyway. We didn’t get any real snow to speak of, and for me, that meant I had a lot of time to work on my small deer properties. Every other week, I drove across the river into Wisconsin to work on my ground. I got a lot done, but that opportunity was an outlier and not the rule. This year, real winter returned.
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Nov 13, 2024 | 
themeateater.com | Matthew Every |Jordan Sillars |Adam Moore |Alex Gyllstrom
Today, hunters may be more over-scoped than ever—especially in the US. The long-range craze has made us all reach for scopes with big objective lenses and power levels exceeding 18X. Manufacturers have answered, making big, heavy hunting scopes with adjustable turrets and first-focal-plane reticles. The thing is, you don’t always need a big scope to go hunting, and you don’t need all of that zoom. The more complicated your scope is, the more it can actually get in the way.
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Oct 28, 2024 | 
themeateater.com | Tony Peterson |Alex Gyllstrom |Mark Haslam
According to my wife, I’m a late bloomer with a lot of things. She’s not wrong, but one that she doesn’t care about but which bothers me a lot, is that I’m just starting to really incorporate decoys into my deer hunting strategy. I’ve spent so much time hunting public land and other pressured places, which often lack a good class of mature bucks, that it just never really resonated with me. I did manage to lure in a cruising Nebraska buck several years ago on some public dirt.
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Oct 11, 2024 | 
themeateater.com | Tony Peterson |Dylan Tramp |Alex Gyllstrom
A few weeks ago, a friend from Iowa who has access to some primo private ground made an off-hand comment about how you can’t find big bucks anymore on public dirt. It was an interesting take for two reasons. The first was, I know he has never whitetail hunted on public land. Ever. The second was that if you think you can’t find big bucks on public land in Iowa, you’re not trying very hard.
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Oct 3, 2024 | 
themeateater.com | Adam Moore |Alex Gyllstrom |Mark Kenyon
Getting invited to deer camp, especially a good one, should be savored like an expensive bottle of bourbon. For DIYers who do their best to door knock or hunt the closest public lands, these invites can offer good, low-stakes hunting opportunities. At the very least, they can offer a break from the usual grind and a chance to feel the freezer. Deer camps typically have preset stands or manicured food plots, so there’s not a ton of guesswork involved.
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Sep 19, 2024 | 
themeateater.com | Tony Peterson |Mark Kenyon |Alex Gyllstrom
Hunting with Steve Rinella sucks, but blood trailing with him does not. There’s a level of pressure to hunting with a guy who started the company you work for. If you’re ever tasked with finding a concentration of public land deer, and then putting your boss’s boss on them, you’ll see what I mean. But when a bad hit happens, you’ll want a guy like him on the trail.
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Jul 2, 2024 | 
themeateater.com | Steve Schwartz |Tony Hansen |Alex Gyllstrom |Adam Moore
Deer camps embody some of the best things about hunting, especially community. Some of my favorite hunting memories include my grandfather’s hunting camp, where I rabbit hunted, learned how to deer hunt, and heard my first turkey gobble. Aside from hunting and work days, members of the camp often gathered for fish fries, cookouts, and community events. Hunters killed big bucks every year, and every now and then, someone would kill a really big deer.
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Jun 14, 2024 | 
themeateater.com | Dylan Tramp |Tony Hansen |Alex Gyllstrom |Tony Peterson
As bowhunters, we strive to be ethical, lethal, and humane. To accomplish this, our bows need to be tuned to ensure accurate and repeatable arrow flight. Unfortunately, this tends to be an intimidating hurdle for novice bowhunters. When you begin your tuning journey, you may become frustrated, view bow tuning as a form of black magic, or accuse the bow of being a lemon. Fortunately, a little tinkering and learning basic tuning principles will go a long way.
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Jun 13, 2024 | 
themeateater.com | Alex Gyllstrom |Tony Peterson |Adam Moore
In high school, I had hunting access to a decent-sized (80-acre) family property. I can count on both hands how many sits didn’t involve deer. My dad, grandfather, and I all killed multiple good bucks out there. Deer did deer things, and we knew that if we put time in during the rut, we’d probably get a crack at a decent buck. But what made it so great were the adjoining properties, which had zero hunting pressure.
