10 Big-Buck Lessons Learned from Last Fall

“The pre-rut sucked this year, scopes can get bumped, aggressive rut strategies pay off, why you should always listen to farmers, and more takeaways from the 2022 deer season

Deer season 2022 seemed to be the year of the snake bite for me — at least at first. I played cat-and-mouse with a big Kentucky 10-pointer from early September through Halloween. Not only did I not see him in 20-plus sits, but I didn’t see any other bucks, either, save for a forkhorn or two and a couple of spikes. In fact, I might have hunted more days without seeing a deer during the first half of the 2022 season than I ever have before.

Boy, did that change. Kentucky’s rifle season opened Nov. 12, cold and snowy, and my son, Anse, and I spent another morning watching empty hardwoods. But good things were on the horizon. The weather settled, the sun popped out, and we saw the first deer at about noon — a big doe trotting through the timber 70 yards away.

It was a parade after that. Anse shot a nice 8-pointer that chased a doe past our box blind at 2 p.m. The next morning, right after daybreak, I killed the big 10-pointer I’d been after all season. I shot him from a box blind with a rifle, but he walked right under both of the stands where I’d bowhunted him all fall.

Four days later, I killed a 13-pointer in Tennessee that’s one of my biggest bucks to date. We shifted our attention to Texas in December, where I shot a mature 8-pointer early in the month, and my wife, Michelle, killed a 151-inch 10-pointer — her best buck ever — on New Year’s Eve.

The slow days were easy to forget after a streak like that.

The lesson from it all is one I seem to relearn every deer season: Persistent hunting in the right spot kills big whitetails. Slumps and hot streaks are mostly in your head, and you’ll have them both if you’re spending the time required in the woods.

That lesson is free. But here are 10 more; five from me and five from fellow deer blogger Mike Hanback. — W.B.”

The full article can be found here.

Photo Credit: Original Author

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