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Luke Kelly was hunting a 300-acre family farm in north-central Mississippi on Oct. 8 when the buck he was hunting stepped out. Luke’s dad, Larry, has three years’ worth of trail camera photos of this buck, whose unmistakable mass and tall tines made him instantly recognizable. Fifteen-year-old Luke normally waits until gun season to fill his deer tag, but this year he decided to start crossbow hunting.

“That buck would disappear every November during gun season, so I knew we had to get him earlier in the year during bow season,” Larry tells Outdoor Life because Luke, a high school freshman, is in class. “We had photos of him coming to the food plot during the day for two weeks before Luke got him. He needed to get into that blind that night for a chance.”

The wind wasn’t ideal and Luke was late getting to the blind, but Larry was positive it was worth the risk. His hunch proved correct.

“The buck walked into the food plot just eight yards from Luke,” Larry says. “The deer was close, but never offered Luke a good shot. Then he started walking away across the field.”

Luke ranged the buck, but his rangefinder crapped out after giving a 50-yard reading. Luke judged the deer had walked another 10 yards and settled his 60-yard reticle on the buck. The deer was quartering away when he pressed the trigger.

The Kellys found part of his arrow—broken off below the fletching—and a bit of blood. They searched for 30 minutes until Larry decided they needed a veteran tracking dog, and backed out. After phoning a few friends, he got in touch with Eddie Moorman of Grenada, who arrived 30 minutes later with his experienced blood-tracking dog, Cash.

“That dog was all business,” says Larry. “He knew exactly what he was there to do.”

Cash kept circling the area where the arrow had been found. But he had trouble picking up a good trail and identifying which direction the buck had gone.

Just as Larry started searching in a different direction, he heard hollering and yelling from Moorman. Sure enough, Cash had located the dead buck about two hours after Luke had shot and just 70 yards away from the hit site.

Related: Tracking Dog Secrets That Will Help You Find Your Buck

“The deer didn’t go far,” Larry says. “But there was no blood, no exit hole from the arrow. The broadhead lodged up inside the buck’s chest, so there was almost no blood to trail. But it died very quickly.”

Although Luke has killed plenty of deer for a kid his age, this buck was his biggest to date and the first deer he’d taken with a crossbow. The buck itself is remarkable. While it has 10 points, it could qualify as an 8-pointer if the two short ones measure less than an inch when it’s officially scored.

An official Boone and Crockett Club measurer taped the rack at green gross score of 179 4/8 inches, and a net score of 170 6/8 inches. It’ll be tight after the mandatory 60-day drying period, but if the buck scores 170 or above, it’ll make the Boone and Crockett All-Time record book (it will still qualify for an award if it scores above 160; you can read more about B&C’s minimum entry scores here.) Interestingly, there is only a single buck on the B&C record books for Grenada County, Mississippi. That buck, a typical taken in 2007, scored 167 3/8 inches. That means Luke could be looking at a county record.

Read Next: 16-Year-Old Pennsylvania Hunter Sets a Women’s Crossbow State Record

“Everything just worked out perfectly for Luke,” says Larry. “And thank God for Cash.”

Erika Lincoln had just removed her hunting boots when her husband spotted the bull. She was sitting in the passenger seat of Chris’ truck, having just tugged on her cowboy boots and writing off yet another archery elk season as a bust. It was the last day to archery hunt in Montana and it looked like she would go another year without notching her tag. Erika had been archery hunting for five years and had yet to harvest a single animal.

The pair were driving down a dirt road on Oct. 15, away from their campsite on public land in west-central Montana, when Chris stopped to glass. It was a last-ditch effort after multiple unsuccessful weekends in the same spot, this latest one a four-day trip.

“My husband has the eyes for the critters. He jokingly said ‘Hey, wanna finally shoot a bull?’ And I said ‘Ha ha, very funny,’” Erika tells Outdoor Life. “But he said ‘No seriously, get out of the truck, there’s a bull right there.’ I didn’t even see the head, just the body.”

The bull was a thousand yards away, so Erika and Chris started sneaking in its direction—Erika now in her square-toed cowboy boots. The elk had been bedded in a bowl up a small rise from the road but as the pair moved closer, the bull got up to move out of the sun and bedded in a shaded spot out of Erika’s line of sight. But they kept creeping in and eventually they had eyes on him.

“The bull had started to doze off,” Erika says, laughing. “So he looked very surprised. At 40 yards I drew back, and he looked up like ‘Oh, crap, a human,’ and I drove him with a nice lung shot. He went down pretty quick, he made it maybe 100 yards.”

Erika didn’t actually see the size of the rack—with its 14 points, busted tips, and broken tine—until she came around a corner. That’s when she realized it was a bull she had hunted last year. She had come within 6 yards of the bull but didn’t have a good angle and had to pass on him.

“I popped past the trees and saw that huge head,” she says. “With my heart condition, if I get excited or nervous, I flip into AFIB. So I have to hold my breath for a couple seconds to right my heart rhythm.”

By AFIB, Erika means atrial fibrillation, a type of abnormal heartbeat. For her, the most complicated part of hunting is doing so while battling chronic illness. At 37, she’s dealt with chronic illness for 22 years. She has lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, hypophosphatasia, glaucoma, a rare heart condition, and other roadblocks that complicate her ability to hunt comfortably and safely.

“I can make it 50 to 100 yards before I start to see spots, so I have to stop and catch my breath and let my heart right itself,” she says. “It was dark by the time we processed the elk and put everything in packs to walk out, and the walk out was nothing but tall grass and shrubs. I have glaucoma, so I really can’t see in the dark. So walking out in the dark was super fun, with over 100 pounds on our backs.”

Erika receives chemotherapy drugs to treat her lupus, a side effect of which was Bell’s Palsy, causing half her face to droop. The medication also lowered her immune system, so she ended up with shingles, which also impacted her vision. These complications make already-difficult parts of Western bowhunting—stalking, drawing, aiming steadily, focusing in on a pin, managing adrenaline, and packing a big game animal out—all the harder.

“I have to buy a different type of scope with a firedot, because my eyes can’t focus on the center of the crosshairs anymore,” she explains. “But … I’m a one-and-done kind of person who won’t shoot unless I’m sure. So I’ve had to change some things to accommodate my health.”

Read Next: Where to Shoot an Elk With a Bow

Erika swears she couldn’t have shot, broken down, and packed out such an impressive bull without her husband’s help, so she credits him with most of the work. But she has also put a lot of time and effort into archery hunting, despite the many obstacles that have stood in her way, making this notched tag all the sweeter.

“I used to be able to go miles and miles,” she says. “I looked at my pedometer at the end of the day after we were done packing him out. We had gone eight miles. For me, that’s a lot. But we did it. We made it.”

đăWhen she settled into her blind on Oct. 8, Trisha Lucius knew the big buck was nearby. The giant deer she’d been hunting had reappeared on trail camera just the evening before.

“We knew the buck was on the farm for a couple years, but we only had photos of him at night,” Trisha tells Outdoor Life.

Trisha, a factory worker who lives in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, has been hunting the small family farm in Wyandot County for a couple years with her husband, Brian. While hunting out of the same blind last year, Trisha spotted the big buck—nicknamed Brutus for his sheer size—hundreds of yards away in another field. She’d never seen him up close until this month.

Trisha and Brian had built the small box blind overlooking soybean fields and patchy timber, and that’s where Trisha was hunting when a doe appeared. Around 7 p.m., she spotted Brutus walking right toward her.

“He was coming from a bean field into the timber. He’d take three or four steps, stop, then move again,” Trisha says. “When he started walking [again], I was ready. [I was] expecting him to stop again so I could shoot.”

The buck did just that, finally stopping at 20 yards and never taking his eyes off the doe in front of the blind. Trisha held behind the buck’s shoulder and squeezed the trigger.

“I heard the arrow hit him, and I saw his back legs kick up,” says Trisha. “The buck and doe each ran different ways, and I immediately called my husband and told him I shot Brutus.”

She thought she’d heard the buck crash, but she waited in the blind for about 45 minutes until Brian arrived with her brother, Michael Daring, in tow. She climbed out of the blind and the trio walked into the field together.

“We had flashlights and found the arrow, but not much blood,” said Trisha. “Brian asked if he was sure I shot him [well] because we didn’t find much blood in the woods for about 20 yards. Then the blood trail got better and better, and we found the buck dead less than 100 yards from where my arrow hit him.”

Overjoyed, the three worked together to field dress the buck, then contacted Toby and Lori Hughes, an official scorer for Buckmasters of Ohio. Using the Buckmasters scoring system, which differs slightly from the more traditional Boone and Crockett Club scoring method (for one, Buckmasters does not put such a premium on symmetry). According to Lori Hughes, the buck has a standard 5×5 with a total of 17 points, heavy main beams measuring 28 inches long, and a spread of 20 4/8 inches.

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The buck’s total Buckmaster’s score of 210 inches qualifies it as the new No. 1 women’s crossbow buck in the Buckmaster’s record book, according to Hughes. The buck ranks as No. 4 overall in the irregular crossbow buck category.

“This is a buck of a lifetime!” Trisha wrote in a Facebook post the day after her hunt. “I would like to thank my husband Brian Lucius for getting me into hunting and showing me everything I need to know.”

When Megan Gray isn’t running the court as a point guard for the Hendrix College women’s basketball team or studying to complete her biology degree, she’s chasing oversized trout in Arkansas’ famous waters. Gray was wade-fishing for trout with her boyfriend, Oliver Naumann, Sunday in the Little Red River when she hooked into a potential record-setting brookie.

It was cold and the pair weren’t having any luck in their first spot, so they moved upriver near a dam and started catching small rainbows. After about 30 minutes of fishing, Naumann told Gray he thought he could see a huge brook trout in shallow, air-clear water.

“I waded over to Oliver, and we could see the fish holding in current down about two or three feet,” Gray tells Outdoor Life. “I thought, dang, I better try to catch that one, because it was big and brook trout there are not common.”

She changed over to an unweighted orange egg pattern fly and tried to tempt the trout.

“I cast and cast and cast, but the fish didn’t act interested at all,” Gray says. “I thought it might have been asleep. But on about my eighth cast to it, the egg fly just disappeared, the fish then moved, and took off. I started screaming and yelling for Oliver to get the landing net.”

Gray fought the trout close to the net in Naumann’s hand. But the fish took off again. She battled the brookie back toward Naumann a second time and he netted it.

At that moment, well-known White River guide Duane Hada was walking past on his way to another area of the Little Red River. He was accompanied by a retired Arkansas Game and Fish Commission employee. They stopped to watch the unfolding action.

“They were awestruck at the size of the brook trout,” Gray says. “They knew it was unusual for giant brook trout to be in that river, and they believed it was a state-record fish.”

That part of the Little Red River is catch-and-release only, so Gray couldn’t weigh the trout. None of the anglers had a measuring tape, but by holding the fish against his rod, Hada calculated the brookie Gray had caught was 17.38 inches long. They estimated the fish’s girth at 15.38 inches and that it weighed 5.5 pound pounds.

The current Arkansas brook trout record is 5 pounds, which means Gray’s trout would have been a new state record if it hadn’t been released.

Gray and Naumann shot photos of Gray posing with the trout in the net, which her dad posted to Facebook. There’s no question it’s a brook trout, and a huge one by any standard.

“After I unhooked it and let it go, it just held stationary in the river current on bottom for a while,” Gray says. “I watched it, then looked away, looked back, and it was gone.”

Read Next: Giant Colorado Brook Trout Breaks 75-Year-Old State Record

Gray is a veteran fly angler and learned the sport from her father, Michael. She caught her first fish on the fly at the age of five. Since then, she’s caught rainbows up to 12 pounds and brown trout to 15 pounds—all from Arkansas rivers with fly fishing tackle.

“I felt good about releasing that big brook trout,” she says. “I’m glad that someone else may catch it, too.

The most important factor impacting whitetail rutting activity isn’t the weather or moon phase. It’s not barometric pressure. It’s not even photoperiod. The biggest factor that dictates where deer move and how they behave is, in fact, hunting pressure.

That’s at least the case if you hunt busy public lands or pressured private lands, which most hunters do. It’s not like deer change their rut timing because of hunting pressure, but they will quickly adapt to avoid hunters—even in the heart of the rut.

Aaron Warbritton and the rest of the crew from The Hunting Public know this well. Each deer season they travel the country hunting public ground in a variety of states. Over the years they’ve developed strategies and learned lessons that can help any deer hunter on pressured land. You can listen to the full podcast interview with Warbritton below.

Don’t Underestimate the Last Week of October

Everyone loves to hunt the first and second weeks of November, because that’s when it’s common to see hot rut activity. But because those two weeks are so popular, hunting pressure spikes. That’s why the THP crew’s favorite time to hunt is the last week of October: There’s less hunting pressure.

Plus, during late October bucks are getting more active but they’re not traveling as far yet. So the scouting and trail cam data you acquired during the month is still useful. When the rut ramps up and there’s lots of pressure in the area, however, many of the deer patterns you witnessed in mid-October go out the window.

“Once the rut rolls around and does are actually coming into a heat, it throws things into a blender,” Warbritton says. “But man, late October bucks are still pretty predictable… We’ve killed the majority of our Iowa bucks in October.”

Find the Rut Activity Pockets

Regardless of when you hunt, you’ve got to find the key areas that deer will funnel to in order to avoid other hunters. Bucks will absolutely still chase and breed does, but they might not do it in an open hardwoods that has easy access and is loaded with a ton of hunters.

“They are just so good at finding the place where there is no human scent and no human presence,” Warbritton says. So he spends a lot of time patterning other hunters, not just focusing on where deer might be moving. Warbritton’s philosophy is that if there’s an area where people aren’t, that’s where the deer will be.

“If I go to an area that’s getting pounded with pressure, I may not even go out and hunt first thing,” he says. “I’ll just drive around and look for trucks and look for people. And when I find a place where there’s no people, I’ll go in there and sometimes it’s a complete rut frenzy.”

Think of it this way: If you’re able to access a secluded or overlooked spot without blowing out deer, you’ll have other hunters sending deer to you. That concentrates the deer in the area you’re hunting.

“It can be ridiculous action [when that happens],” Warbritton says.

Stay Mobile

Mobile hunting tactics and speed scouting are key to Warbritton’s success for hunting public land deer. The key to hunting this way is to find with a lot of fresh buck sign while not spooking bucks—or at least not spooking them too badly.

Focus on hot windy days for scouting into the wind. The goal is to learn the area, locate fresh sign, and pinpoint good access routes without bumping deer. Around Oct. 25 and 26, you can find super fresh buck sign like scrapes and rubs, Warbritton says.

“Anytime you’re running into dominant aggressive bucks that are leaving a lot of sign, those are the easiest ones to get on,” he says.

But if you do bump a buck, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Obviously there are situations where you don’t want to bump a buck, Warbrittons says. For example, if you’re hunting private land and there’s a buck using a known bedding area on that property, you don’t want to charge in there and bump him. However, gently bumping a buck on a large public land tract can give you valuable intel.

“If they don’t smell you and you just startle them a little bit while you’re walking into the wind, it’s not a big deal,” Warbritton says. “That deer is most likely going to see or hear you and bound off over the ridge and go to the next available cover. Because it’s the middle of the day, he doesn’t want to make any big moves. That’s what we see nine times out of ten with big bucks.”

Read Next: Best Deer Hunting Gear

When you bump a deer, stop and crouch to conceal yourself. Pay attention to where the buck goes and make sure you don’t bump him twice. Now you know where a good buck is spending time, and the direction that he feels comfortable escaping toward.

“We’ve tagged multiple bucks by bumping them and then killing them later that day or in the next two or three days,” Warbritton says. “We often end up killing the buck within 300 yards of where we initially bumped them.”

Bumping a buck by sight or sound is OK, but Warbritton cautions that if bucks smell you, “they got you.” Those bucks will often not return to the area. So always scout into the wind.

Understand How to Utilize Scrapes

Bucks commonly hit scrapes at night, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay attention to them. Warbritton will often hang cameras on scrapes that are easy to spot from trails or field edges simply as a way to identify shooter bucks in the area.

“Everyone and their dog is seeing these scrapes because they’re walking past them and it’s easy access,” Warbritton says. “We’ll often catch the buck that’s working that scrape at 3 or 4 a.m. and then we’ll back track him into the bedding area.”

He uses digital mapping and scouting to identify the likely bedding area. Sometimes that bedding area could be within 300 yards of the scrape or a half mile away. It all depends on the scenario. Once he’s got a good read on the likely bedding area, he might plan a hunt or hang more cameras—or both.

Scrapes are also great for bowhunting because they gets the buck to stop in a predictable location. This doesn’t mean that you should hunt over any random scrape you see in the woods. But if there’s a scrape near your target spot, you should set up to shoot it.

“The killing opportunities on big bucks is really good over a scrape, just because you’re putting them in a specific spot,” Warbritton says.

Read Next: How to Make and Hunt Mock Scrapes

Don’t Let Pressure Ruin Your Hunt

It’s easy to get discouraged when you pull up to a spot you hoped to hunt and find a parking lot full of trucks. When hunters see pressure, they often quit or mail in their hunt. But that’s the wrong attitude, Warbritton says. The key is to stay positive, scout harder, and find the spots where people aren’t. Plus, always remember the point of deer hunting in the first place.

“If your goal is to have success, that’s great, but manage your expectations,” Warbritton says. “You’re going to deal with other people, it’s public land. You’re just going out there to get away from the grind of your everyday life and have a good experience hunting.”

Keeping a good perspective isn’t just feel-good advice. It will actually keep you hunting harder and longer than if you were to let a few busted hunts get you down.

No matter where you’re hunting, focus on learning and gaining experience so that if your one good spot gets burned, you can go to your back up spots, or just investigate some new ground. The harder and longer you hunt, the more you’ll learn, and the easier time you’ll have avoiding hunting pressure. And remember, in some ways hunting pressure isn’t a bad thing.

If you’re hunting a big tract of public land, other hunters help you narrow down likely spots. Simply go where they’re not, Warbritton says.

“The quickest way to get on deer is to look at the people and see what they’re doing.”

Canadian news outlets have reported an unconfirmed account of a Chesapeake Bay Retriever named Pepper dying after being bitten by a juvenile great white shark off the coast of Medway Head in southern Nova Scotia on Wednesday. The dog was reportedly retrieving a sea duck at the time.

The hunter, who remained unidentified, relayed the shark attack in a written statement to SaltWire. He had been out for a few hours when he shot his second duck of the day, at roughly 9 a.m. Pepper had retrieved the first duck in calm waters earlier that morning without issue. But once she grabbed the second duck roughly 20 feet from the boat and turned to swim back, a shark “erupted from below her, lifting her into the air and then pushing her down under the surface,” the hunter wrote.

“It happened so quickly and was so shocking that even though I was looking right at her when it happened, I cannot say for certain what type of shark it was.”

Pepper resurfaced and made it back to the boat, where the hunter pulled her in. Her wounds were “grievous” and she died shortly thereafter.

While no further details about the incident have emerged, the hunter did get in touch with a shark researcher to report the incident.

“I hope this information can help people enjoying the ocean to make safe choices respecting the proximity of sharks in our waters,” he said.

According to Gaetan, the only shark that would have been in that area at this time of year is a Great white. It’s likely a juvenile based on the hunter’s estimate of its size: roughly 2.4 meters or just under 8 feet long.

“That dog was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Gaetan said. “The shark didn’t eat him. The shark only bit him and his dog bled out.”

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The hunter said that he’s never heard of a dog being attacked by a shark while retrieving ducks, and reiterated that this is what Chesapeake Bay Retrievers are born to do.

“I have been on the ocean hunting sea ducks for years, and I am familiar with many other local hunters that do the same,” he wrote. “When the ocean is calm and the ducks fall near the boat it is common practice to send a dog into the ocean to retrieve the waterfowl. This is what these dogs are bred and trained for.”

When the rut heats up, hunters tend to focus more on terrain than cover. We love to spend days on end hanging out in “rut funnels” waiting for bucks to chase past us. That’s a fine strategy, but better understanding how whitetails use their habitat during the rut can help you choose more productive stand setups and have more exciting hunts.

There might be no better person to talk about deer habitat—and how to kill bucks within their habitat—than Dr. Craig Harper, a professor of wildlife management and the extension wildlife specialist at the University of Tennessee. Harper is a certified wildlife biologist and a prescribed fire manager in multiple states. He’s published more than 200 peer-reviewed journal articles, extension publications, books, and manuals. But here’s the most important thing: He’s also a serious deer hunter, and he understands better than most how deer use habitat during the rut.

You can hear my full conversation with Harper in the podcast below, and use the following insights to tweak your hunting strategy this season.

Focus on the Right Cover During the Rut

We all like to see deer and rut activity. That means we often set up in open areas (like cut agricultural fields and big food plots) where we can watch lots of does, and hopefully have a buck run by. But rut activity often doesn’t happen out in the open.

“But it doesn’t have to be this way for hunters who change their tactics and spend more time in the woods instead of just around [fields or] food plots,” Harper says. “You can see your success go up when you [move into the woods]. It can be a hard habit to break, going up into that ladder stand or box blind overlooking a field. We are very visually oriented creatures… But deer like areas with limited visibility. They feel more comfortable [in cover] because they largely live by their nose.”

Also, areas with relatively thick vegetation (where visibility is limited) is where a majority of the deer are going to bed during the middle of the day. Harper says that targeting does that are moving around bedding cover in the mornings and evenings is a killer tactic.

“It’s a powerful thing to know where deer are bedded on your property,” he says. “Not hunting in—but hunting around—those areas can be extremely successful.”

Understand Bedding Areas

Harper knows what deer look for in a bedding area because he creates a lot of them. On ground he manages, he’ll create areas with horizontal cover by hinge cutting undesirable trees and by felling trees and creating dense cover with regenerating stems.

“You can’t see any farther than 10 to 20 yards in that area,” he says. “And we will do that in blocks of say two to twelve acres. They’re going to be attracted to those areas in a big way.”

Now, you’re not going to go out hinge cutting trees during the hunting season (at least you shouldn’t). But, identifying naturally occurring bedding areas and understanding how deer use them is key. Generally you’re looking for thicker cover and areas with a higher stem count. Remember that the thickness of the cover is relative to the area you hunt. Ideally, you want to identify key bedding areas on the property and hang trail cams around them.

“We don’t have just one of these areas on a property. We typically have several,” Harper says. “I want to be able to hunt different places with different winds, and you have options at that point. With camera data, you can have a pretty good idea of what [deer] are using.”

“It’s pretty common—and we’re seeing this on the camera data—for bucks to go from one of these bedding areas to the next, [and] to the next looking for does and doe groups in somewhat of a circuit.”

Read Next: Best Trail Cameras

Know That Lockdown Is Real

Most hunters dread the phase of the rut known as “lockdown.” It’s those few days just after the action is getting really hot when suddenly buck sightings rapidly decrease. Instead of looking for and chasing does now, bucks are breeding them, often disappearing from hunters’ setups and trail cameras. Harper says this is a real phenomenon.

“Bucks move a lot searching for does in estrus. But when they find one, they’re going to stick with [her],” he says. “They’ll typically breed a doe several times during a short period [of 12 to 48 hours] and when she is no longer receptive he’ll move on and look for another. So if the rut is somewhat synchronized and the majority of the does are coming into estrus during a relatively concise period, you’re going to see bucks with does during that period and their individual movements will [decrease]. During a day or two, that buck will just be with her and she’s not moving around helter-skelter.”

It’s important to understand that doe movements change when the animal is in estrus. She doesn’t travel with other does or her fawns at that point, Harper says. Movements will be different than the classic pattern of going from bedding area to feeding area and back to bedding area.

Unfortunately, you can’t predict the type of breeding cover a buck and doe will use. But in general, bucks and receptive does tend to head to thicker cover.

“One of the areas I like to target during this time is old fields and early successional areas because there is cover out there that the deer feel secure in, but at the same time they’re moving around and you can see them moving,” Harper says. “If you have vegetation that is, say, four to five feet tall, the deer feel comfortable out there and if you’re in a stand you can look out over the field and see them in that cover.”

This type of cover is much taller and more dense than the agricultural fields and food plots that hunters typically hunt over.

Manage Does Properly

There is one important management job hunters have in the fall: harvesting, or not harvesting, does. Hunters and deer managers have a variety of opinions on doe management and an even wider variety of methods for deciding how many does to harvest. Harper’s perspective here is pretty straightforward: “The condition of the deer and the condition of the habitat are what should tell you how many does to shoot.”

“As you process the deer, skin the deer, and of course gut it, collect data by sex and age class and measure some index of the fat. If there’s no fat on the backs of the does you shoot and there’s very little fat in the cavity, especially around the kidneys, that’s very telling,” Harper says. “And you couple that with what’s going on with the habitat. So if you’re seeing browse lines, if you have exclusion cages in your food plots and there’s lots of forage in the cage and nothing outside, then shazam, you need to lower the population and you need to do some additional habitat management.”

Other hunters commonly use trail camera photos to estimate the deer density in their area. Harper used to do it that, but after conducting enough research he realized there was no way to estimate the accuracy of that density estimation unless you are working with marked animals (like deer with ear tags, for example). In other words, there’s no way to tell how far off your estimate might be. Some deer managers argue that’s OK as long as you do the survey the same way each year. That will provide an index, Harper says, though it still does not truly tell you how many does you need to shoot.

Read Next: How to Hunt the Rut on Public Land, With Aaron Warbritton

As a general rule, with average deer habitat, taking one doe per 100 acres will not meaningfully decrease the population in your area, Harper says. If you’re trying to lower the population, then taking one doe per 75 to 50 acres is typically necessary. But if you’re overrun with deer and there’s extreme browsing pressure then you might need to shoot one doe per 25, or even 10, acres.

In any case, hunters in most places should harvest at least as many does as bucks they shoot in order to manage the buck-to-doe ratio.

If you want to keep the local deer population where it’s at, then there’s nothing wrong with shooting female fawns and yearling does, which are not as productive as mature does. Shooting young does allows you to maintain the population, help stabilize the buck-to-doe ratio, and harvest prime meat (since venison from young deer is more tender). Plus, it will improve your hunting in the years to come.

“As you get the buck-to-doe ratio closer to one-to-one,” says Harper, “the hunting excitement is just going to be increased during the rut.”

William Temple Hornaday must have been miserable. It was November tipping into December of 1886 when Hornaday and his crew of seven pushed into the cold, joyless, wind-chapped badlands of what is now Garfield County, Montana, on the gumbo divide between the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers. The group was on the payroll of the Smithsonian Institution—Hornaday was the Smithsonian’s chief taxidermist—and they were determined to find, kill, skin, and stuff the last remaining American buffalo, which in the previous 20 years had gone from astonishingly plentiful to rare to vanished as railroads and homesteaders shoved into Dakota and Montana territories.

Hornaday, whose first experiences in the West as a student of paleontology had delivered him fossilized evidence of species extinction, was sure buffalo would follow the arc of the dinosaurs, and he was determined to pursue rumors of the last dull-eyed herd that roamed the lonely headlands. Looking back, the expedition was exercising one of the curious paradoxes of hunting: killing animals in order to save a species.

Earlier this fall, I followed archival breadcrumbs to Hornaday’s camp. There’s no sign or marker to identify it, a half-mile off a seldom-traveled gravel road that drunkenly follows the spine of a dirt ridge. What’s left of the camp, after 137 years of wind and weather, is a shallow depression at the base of a rise of chalky shale and crumbled sandstone, an unremarkable grave surrounded by same-looking hoodoos and coulees. When state officials visited this place in 1991 for consideration as a historic site, they found a vintage tin that probably contained canned peaches along with slatted wood, maybe from the floor of a wagon, that Hornaday’s crew might have employed as a roof over their crude dugout. That’s all that remains of this place where you could argue one great American idea died and another was born.

The idea that died here was the notion that in fresh-faced America, we might have it all: productive human communities surrounded by a bountiful natural world. Hornaday was one of the earliest Americans to recognize that headlong settlement of the West was inevitably inconsistent with the existence of bison, and their requirement of large tracts of unfenced wild land. As a naturalist, Hornaday had witnessed the extinction of other victims of American progress: the passenger pigeon, the Audubon bighorn sheep, and the heath hen. He was sure that bison were next, and given their plummeting populations, he wasn’t far wrong.

If he couldn’t trade in live bison, Hornaday was determined to preserve the idea of the species, and brought enough borax and salt to cure several dozen buffalo hides and skulls. For six weeks in the coming winter of 1886, the hunters returned to their miserable dugout after forays into the adjacent badlands, coming back each night with one or two buffalo specimens, along with mule deer and pronghorn antelope. In all, the hunters killed 44 bison, including one of the largest bulls on record. It was the last wild bison hunt of any scale for the next 100 years.

Hornaday’s taxidermied bison resided for 60 years in the Smithsonian Institution’s great hall in D.C. They’re back home in Montana now, residents of the Western Art Gallery in Fort Benton, which is a quiet farming town north of Great Falls. But during Montana’s gold and land rushes, it was the stepping-off spot for Missouri River steamboats and the center of a rollicking frontier economy, fueled in part by buffalo hides and tongues.

The documentary filmmaker Ken Burns spent a good deal of the last decade in and around Fort Benton, collecting footage and perspectives for his latest PBS movie project, a two-part series called “American Buffalo” that aired last week and can now be streamed online.

Burns, whose previous documentary work has retold the stories of the Civil War, baseball, country music, Thomas Jefferson, and jazz, may be best known for his series on Lewis and Clark’s Voyage of Discovery. If every American generation rediscovers the Lewis and Clark expedition, Burns’ latest documentary is evidence that the same thing could be said of bison.

So it’s worth asking, as America revisits its generational fascination with our national mammal, why haven’t we finished our business of recovering bison? Why can’t hunters pursue this iconic American mammal over broad Western wildlands, the same way we do elk and antelope? Why can’t wildlife watchers catch a glimpse of the russet beasts on a distant vista? Why do hunters ask, when they ask about bison at all, about the size of the pasture? Why do questions about fences and genetic purity dog bison hunts the way wolves follow wintering herds in the wild?

Our failure to recover bison is never as obvious as when we reflect on our successes. The wildlife conservation community recovered whitetail deer, and pronghorn antelope, wild turkeys, and American elk, not to mention smallmouth bass and sandhill cranes. We not only didn’t let Canada geese go extinct, but we preserved wetlands for them. If you need evidence of the success of professional wildlife management, consider that most of the world’s bird species are in steep declines. The notable exception: North American waterfowl and wetland birds that have abundant habitat and advocates, thanks to investments by hunters and wildlife agencies. Why don’t we talk about bison in those same self-congratulating terms?

It’s because, while there are now more bison on the American landscape than any time in the past 150 years, most wear ear tags, have extensive veterinary records, and are classified as livestock. Truly wild bison are as rare and remarkable today as they were in Hornaday’s time.

The Bison Range Is Gone (Maybe) Forever

“Hornaday was interested in stopping functional extinction, a species disappearing forever,” says Justin Spring, longtime head of records for the Boone and Crockett Club, which was formed in 1887, just a year before Hornaday’s expedition with the mission to “promote the conservation and management of wildlife.” Not long after our interview, Spring accepted the position as executive director of the Pope & Young Club. He stressed that he wasn’t speaking on behalf of either organization.

“But you could make the case that bison remain ecologically extinct,” says Spring, because their numbers and distribution aren’t robust enough for them to return to their historic role as a keystone species for an entire short-grass prairie ecosystem.

Spring’s downbeat assessment: “I’m not sure that bison are fully recoverable as wildlife. I’m not sure that we have enough habitat left for a functioning bison population. Where do we have contiguous, unobstructed landscapes that aren’t bisected by an interstate or a railroad? I think we have to realistically ask: Do we still have landscapes capable of sustaining the giant herds that were once here? I don’t think so.”

Alison Fox accepts that challenge. Fox is CEO of American Prairie, a Montana-based organization working to stitch together an acreage large enough to conserve one of the most endangered landscapes on earth: the short-grass prairie. American Prairie’s guiding vision is baked into a document developed by landscape ecologists called the Vermejo Statement, which posits that a contiguous block of at least 5 million acres on the Northern Plains is the minimum space required to make a measurable impact in native prairie restoration, with free-roaming bison as the main catalyst for ecological change.

Fox is quick to stress that American Prairie “is not a bison project,” but bison are critical agents of her group’s restoration efforts. “Their grazing patterns, their wallowing, how they use riparian systems, and how they die on the landscape—all have ecological impacts. We want them back on the landscape as that keystone species,” Fox says, to ultimately restore all native plants and animals to this chunk of the Great Plains. The group aims to rewild a 5,000-square-mile land base with the 1.1-million-acre federal Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge at its center. That’s the size of Connecticut, with only a few hundred human residents scattered on rural ranches and in towns along  U.S. Highway 2, the highway known as Montana’s Hi-Line that cuts through the town where I live.

“It’s American Prairie’s goal to assemble an additional 2.1 million acres of private and public land bases,” says Fox. “We’ve been at this for 20 years, and we’re at about 460,000 of the 2.1 million [acres] we ultimately want to assemble.”

American Prairie’s core holdings are north of the Missouri River, only about 50 air miles from Hornaday’s bison camp. Drive the two-lane highways of eastern Montana that connect the two sites, and you’ll see signs stapled to corner posts and ratchet-strapped to barns along the way. Silhouetted on the signs are images of a kid and adult, both in cowboy hats, and against the setting sun, the words “Save the Cowboy, Stop American Prairie Reserve.”

It’s a widely held belief that the outsiders buying ranchland and bringing in new ideas about how to live on and relate to the prairie are antithetical to eastern Montana’s rural traditions.

Much of the antagonism directed at American Prairie is from Montana’s cattle industry, which historically has resisted efforts to classify bison as wildlife. Instead, in Montana and most other Western states, bison are classified as livestock, which means they must be fenced, vaccinated, and can be bought and sold like beef cows, a designation that carries strains of Hornaday’s Sandy. American Prairie has successfully converted many of its BLM grazing leases from domestic cattle to bison, a move that caused a furor in the ranching community, legal action from Montana’s governor, and even a bill proposed in the state legislature that would have blocked non-profits from buying land.

Even domesticated bison are intolerable, it seems. But efforts to reclassify bison as wildlife, which would come under the management authority of the state’s Fish, Wildlife & Parks department, have been summarily rejected at almost every level. Reasons to keep bison as private property, instead of public wildlife, range from worries that free-ranging bison would wreck fences, might transmit the virulent disease brucellosis to cattle, and aren’t compatible with private property.

But those are concerns voiced mainly by farmers and ranchers. Most Montanans support the idea of free-ranging bison, according to a 2015 survey that found three-quarters of residents in favor of restoring wild bison populations.

As one of the state’s largest owners of bison, does American Prairie support the idea of bison as public wildlife, or as domestic livestock?

“We are focused on growing our own herd,” says Fox.” We have said publicly that if the state of Montana ever decided to start a population of bison somewhere outside of Yellowstone National Park, we would be an enthusiastic participant in that. But in the short and medium term we are very focused on growing our herd over the biggest landscape that we can.”

Free-Range Bison Hunting Is Rare

Don’t get the idea that bison are either mothballed in natural-history museums or waiting to die in commodity pastures. A number of states have figured out how to manage bison as wild, huntable resources. Utah conducts a pair of popular hunts, one in the Henry Mountains north of Lake Powell, the other in the remote, rugged Book Cliffs near the Colorado border. Wyoming distributes permits for wild bison hunts in Grand Teton National Park, and in South Dakota, drawing a Custer State Park bison hunting permit is a pinnacle achievement for a resident hunter. In Montana, the state’s FWP manages a hunt for wild bison that roam outside of Yellowstone National Park. Over the last several years, though, the number of hunting opportunities for Yellowstone Park bison have tipped toward American Indian tribes who claim treaty rights to hunt descendants of bison that escaped Hornaday’s pursuit and found refuge in the park.

It should be noted that, with a few exceptions, a modern bison hunt isn’t the wide-ranging wilderness quest that Hornaday experienced. Justin Spring notes that the behavior and habitat requirements of bison make fair-chase hunting problematic.

“They’re a giant herd animal that we were basically able to eradicate from the back of a train,” says Spring, referring to the bison massacres of the steam-engine era. “You could argue that the most challenging thing about hunting them now is drawing a tag and finding a place to hunt them. But beyond some of those Utah hunts, it’s not your classic fair-chase hunt, like it is for going after a buck or a bull or a mountain sheep. Most hunters don’t have a strong desire to shoot a cow in a field.”

Many bison owners sell or donate hunts, both to manage populations and to help keep their herd wild. American Prairie raffles or donates several dozen hunts per year, and any internet search will turn up glorified pasture hunts for semi-wild bison on ranches from Texas to Alberta.

But despite—or maybe because of—these private efforts, it’s worth asking: Why haven’t bison joined the club of wild mammals whose populations are thriving thanks to managed public hunting? Where did our paradoxical hunt-animals-to-save-them go so wrong when it comes to bison?

Kit Fischer has some insights. The Director of Wildlife Programs for the National Wildlife Federation out of Missoula, Fischer spent nearly 15 years barnstorming rural Montana, trying to organize sportsmen around public bison restoration, specifically on the Charles M. Russell refuge, the 1.1-million acre chunk of federal land at the center of American Prairie’s bison restoration efforts. The collective efforts of the National Wildlife Federation and other conservation groups came close to a win with an environmental impact statement draft two years ago that would have been a precursor to restoration of bison on the CMR.

But the Department of the Interior abandoned the initiative when it appeared there was little appetite to push the measure through Congress, and Montana’s congressional delegation wasn’t interested in burning political capital on the deal. Closer to where bison live, county commissioners have passed resolutions banning bison translocations, and earlier this year Montana’s legislature passed a resolution opposing bison introduction on the CMR.

The issue has even ascended to the national level. Just last month, eastern Montana’s congressional representative, Matt Rosendale, attached a rider to the federal Farm Bill that prohibits funds to be used by the Secretary of the Interior “to facilitate or allow for the introduction of American bison on the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge.”

“Here is a federal wildlife refuge that contains some of the most intact prairie habitat, on a property specifically designated for wildlife, with periodic [presidential] administrations that are friendly to the idea of establishing a bison herd, and yet we’ve met resistance at every turn,” says Fischer. Besides conservative politicians, most of the resistance is from ranchers, who claim public bison would put them out of business.

But Fischer and other conservation leaders keep hearing from a community that isn’t so resistant to the idea of bison restoration: tribal nations whose cultural history is closely tied to bison.

“After years of pulling and dragging sportsmen along, we started working more with the tribes, who couldn’t be more thrilled about the concept of bison restoration,” says Fischer. Similarly, American Prairie is working with the Fort Belknap Tribes as partners in bison management on AP land that borders the reservation. And multi-tribal organization around the idea of restoration of America’s bison in Indian Country is gaining momentum.

The inclusion of tribes in bison restoration starts to address two strains of unfinished business with America’s Western expansion.

“You can’t talk about the eradication of the bison without talking about the eradication of the American Indian,” said one longtime bison conservationist. “I often get the feeling that we’re absolving our guilt over what we did to Indians by focusing so hard on bison. But you can’t really separate the two, which is why it’s right that the path to bison recovery should be led through tribal efforts.”

Two hundred miles east of the American Prairie properties, Robbie Magnan doesn’t concern himself with the politics of the past. Magnan is the head of the Fort Peck Tribes’ fish and game department and the director of the tribes’ bison program, which receives surplus animals from Yellowstone National Park, contains them in a disease-quarantine facility, and distributes them to other tribal nations, in exchange for keeping a few bison for its conservation herd.

“We actually have two herds,” says Magnan, looking out at a labyrinth of corrals that serve as intake facility for Yellowstone’s surplus bison. “One is our business herd, where we sell bison hunts to non-members. Then we have our cultural herd, which is managed to provide sustenance to our people through traditional ceremonies and providing food to our diabetes program.”

This irony of the original dispossessed inhabitants of Montana’s prairie selling bison hunts to non-Indians is one of the strange twists of the American buffalo story.

Tribal Conservation Might Be Our Last Best Hope

The renewed interest in bison by tribal nations, along with the ambitions of American Prairie and other private-land bison concerns, means that America’s most iconic animal—the bison was designated as our national mammal in 2016—might yet be ecologically recovered. That’s one of the take-aways from Ken Burns’ PBS documentary. He divides the story of America’s bison into two parts, the grim history and the hopeful future. That future might lie with the people who are most closely identified with the bison, America’s tribal members, who are increasingly not satisfied with waiting for others to decide the status of bison.

In June, the Blackfeet Nation released 25 descendants of a bison herd saved from slaughter over 100 years ago. The tribe plans to let the bison roam freely across the reservation, and it’s a good bet that within a few years their offspring will graze into neighboring Glacier National Park. They might also expand south into the extensive public lands of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex.

Two years ago the Chippewa Cree of the Rocky Boy reservation celebrated the return of bison to tribal lands in north-central Montana. Five of the 11 bison released were from American Prairie’s herd. The other six were from tribal herds elsewhere.

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Over east on the Fort Peck Reservation, with more than a decade in bison management, Mangan puts his department’s work into context.

“We didn’t have buffalo here for over 100 years, and we almost lost all the ceremonies that are connected to the buffalo,” says Mangan. “But now the buffalo are back and the ceremonies are coming back. With the ceremonies, we are seeing more interest in learning our language and remembering other aspects of our culture.”

Meat from bison is used in powwows and other ceremonies, and it’s also being used in tribal food programs as a way to reconnect with an animal that fed contemporary Native Americans’ ancestors but can also reduce the prevalence of diabetes in the community.

“It’s a lean, healthy meat,” says Mangan, who offers that bison also have a spiritual sustenance for his Sioux and Assiniboine tribes. “There’s a creation story that buffalo were put on earth to keep us alive. The buffalo fed us when we were starving and gave us shelter when we were cold.”

But what that might look like on lands outside Indian reservations is a question that hasn’t been resolved. One model might be co-management of bison on national wildlife refuges, including the Charles M. Russell NWR. There’s a precedent. In 2021, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service transferred the National Bison Range to the Salish and Kootenai tribes of northwest Montana. The 19,000-acre Bison Range sits entirely within the boundaries of the Flathead Indian Reservation.

Tribes have been in contact with refuge managers elsewhere in Montana to discuss the future of bison restoration on public lands. Whether that might include BLM lands inside or outside the American Prairie holdings, is an open question.

What is clear is that tribes aren’t waiting to be asked to join the conversation about bison.

“Ever since the beginning, the buffalo has taken care of us,” says Fort Peck’s Mangan. “Now it’s our turn to take care of them.”

If it wasn’t for GPS collars, a length of climbing rope, and the help of two friends, New Mexico bird hunter Tyler Sladen would have lost his youngest bird dog Sunday night. While he was chasing Montezuma quail on U.S. Forest Service land this weekend, Sladen’s pup, an English Setter, fell down an abandoned mineshaft. After finally locating her, the three hunters pulled off a successful rope rescue, and the dog walked away without an injury.

“Tillo, she’s only seven months old and she fell down a 35-foot mineshaft … and there was nothing wrong with her,” Sladen tells Outdoor Life. “She’s back to 100 percent, and she did a 15-mile run last night at a normal pace. You would have never known it happened.”

A diehard uplander who prefers raptors over shotguns, Sladen was joined on Oct. 22 by two of his buddies from Alaska, Elijah and Brianna Barbour. Around 5 p.m. that evening, one of the dogs went on point and the group flushed a covey. Sladen’s goshawk, Jimmy, caught one of the birds, and Sladen figured he’d get his youngest dog, Tillo, into the mix. The last time he checked his GPS, the setter was only 100 yards away. But when he looked at his unit again, Tillo’s collar had disconnected.

“These collars only disconnect for two reasons: Either the dog is out of line of sight—i.e. down a well or over a rocky ridge—or the collar’s broken,” Sladen explains. “But when we walked toward the last signal, the Garmin reconnected, and that became even weirder.”

As he followed his handheld GPS unit, it showed Tillo was 50 yards away, then 30 yards, then 20. Eventually they got to within eight feet and the dog was still nowhere to be seen.

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Sladen called the local police but was told that since it was a dog and not a human, the hunters were on their own. Fortunately, he had a length of climbing rope in his truck along with the know-how to use it. (Sladen owns a nuisance wildlife removal company and has years of experience repelling.) He fashioned a makeshift harness known as a “swiss seat” and they walked back to the mineshaft, where Brianna, the lightest hunter in the group, volunteered to be lowered down.

“We sent her down wearing an upland vest, and when she kicked some rocks while climbing down, the dog picked up its head,” Sladen says. “Up until then the dog hadn’t moved and I was already telling myself we’re recovering a dead dog.”

When she reached the bottom of the 35-foot mineshaft, Brianna put Tillo in the bird bag, and they were pulled back up by the two men at the top. As soon as they cleared the sandy hole, the pup hopped out and started wagging her tail.

Sladen spoke with the Forest Service after the incident and shared coordinates for the old mineshaft, which the agency plans on covering. He says in the seven-plus years he’s hunted the area, he’s come across hundreds of abandoned mine shafts, but that most of those are covered up, filled in, or fenced off. He’s also pretty sure he’s walked within 15 yards of this particular shaft numerous times over the years. It’s just another reminder that there are plenty of ways for a bird dog to get hurt or trapped, and it pays to be prepared.

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“It really stresses the importance of GPS collars. We would have been looking around for her like she ran off, and you could’ve had a hundred people out there and never found her,” Sladen says. “It’s also a reminder that it never hurts to have a couple extra ropes in your truck. They don’t take up much space.”

On Oct. 23, the opening day of Maryland’s short black bear season, hunters harvested a total of 24 bears. The biggest was a 643-pound boar that set a new record for the heaviest bruin ever killed in the state. It was checked in by a hunter named Melissa, who preferred not to share her last name or the details behind the hunt.

“Melissa didn’t want publicity, but she’s from Garrett County, and she shot it about 8 a.m.,” Maryland DNR game mammal leader Jonathan Trudeau tells Outdoor Life. “I checked in the bear. She told me she shot it once with a .350 Legend rifle and it didn’t go far before falling.”

Melissa’s bear is far and away the biggest one ever taken in the state, according to Trudeau, who’s in charge of Maryland’s bear program. The previous record from 2007 weighed 615 pounds. That bear was also taken in Garrett County, which is one of only four counties where the state allows bear hunting. (Of the 24 bears harvested on opening day, all but five were killed in Garrett County.)

Last year, hunters took 103 bears during the six-day season, which is about average, Trudeau says. The biggest weighed 427 pounds.

“Maryland usually has 100 to 130 bears collected every six-day October season,” says Trudeau. “The current tally [for this season] as of Oct. 26 is 74 bears.”

He adds that Melissa’s 643-pound black bear was exceptionally large, since most of the state’s bears average around 300 pounds.

“This bear had been seen in trail camera photos, and coming into corn fields on private land,” Trudeau says. “Melissa didn’t know if she was going to mount the bear or make a rug with its hide. It was a giant bruin that’s going to take up a huge amount of wall space.”

Maryland issues black bear permits via a lottery system, and the DNR typically doles out around 950 tags each year. Trudeau says that 90 percent of those go to residents, and in a typical year they’ll have around 5,000 applicants in total. He adds that since the state’s bear population is growing, there’s a chance that more permits will be made available in the future.

“Maryland has a healthy population of about 2,000 black bears, and it’s a growing number with bears spreading to the east and south,” Trudeau says, “[We] have some mixing with black bears in neighboring states, which we’ve proved by tagging animals.”