Tag: đặt h

A variety of circumstances led to these encounters. Two men were training bear dogs at the time. (Wolf attacks aren’t uncommon in such scenarios, when dogs stray far from their owners to chase a bear trail.) Two more stumbled across wolf packs crowding around fresh deer kills. The fifth story comes from a dry lakebed, where Jim Paquette was looking for Indigenous artifacts when a wolf chased a deer past him. When the wolf saw the Paquette, it turned its attention to him instead.

All five outdoorsmen agreed that, since wolves are not a hunted species in the UP (even though they have surpassed recovery numbers), the predators have learned to not fear humans. These encounters happened over the course of several years, but the stories are still relevant to hunters headed for wolf country today.

Jordan Farmer: When Wolves Killed Duke

“Our dogs were running a bear when I noticed one of my young dogs (Duke) had stopped,” Jordan, an Upper Peninsula resident, says. “[He was] about six-tenths of a mile into a swamp. As I approached where my GPS showed him, I was greeted by two wolves eating the guts out of him.

“I yelled to scare the wolves off, but that only got their attention and then they approached me. As they came closer, I grabbed sticks and threw them at the wolves. When that did not scare them, I took a dog leash and started hitting trees and the ground with it. The wolves still came closer, getting within 10 to 15 feet from me.”

At that point, Farmer says that he climbed a nearby tree to avoid being attacked by the wolves. After the pack eventually left, Farmer climbed down to check on his dog. All that remained were its head and shoulders.

“This was the day I realized it is no longer safe to be in the woods unarmed, and that every time I release one of my dogs it may be the last time I see them alive,” Farmer says. “There is no safety in these woods anymore. I have been face-to-face with bear, bobcat, mountain lion, and every other animal in the woods, but I have never felt so scared of an animal until the day that I lost Duke.

“After incidents like these, we are told time and time again by the DNR to try and hunt where there are no wolves. Well, that is nowhere in the UP. The wolf has taken over every corner and crevice. There is no longer a piece of land you can go to escape the presence of wolves.”

Read Next: When Wolves Kill Man’s Best Friend

Darrell Jonet: Treed By Three Young Wolves

Darrell Jonet was also training his bear dogs when he was treed by wolves. Jonet’s dogs were on a bear’s trail when he heard wolves howling on the sides of a deep valley the hounds were in. Darrell immediately became concerned about the safety of his prized hunting dogs, so he ran toward where he last heard the hounds, hooting and hollering as he ran to call the dogs to him. At the same time, he was hoping the sounds he made would scare the wolves away.

In this case, the noise Jonet made had the opposite effect. The wolves honed in on it.

“I was in some hardwoods about 400 yards from the road when I saw the wolves running toward me about 80 yards away,” Jonet says. “They were coming right to me as though they were my dogs responding to my calls. They had to know I was a person. When they saw me, they kept coming.

“Not knowing what else to do, I found a tree and climbed it. Three wolves that looked like they were adolescents came right to the tree I was in and looked up at me. They were followed by an adult wolf that I think was a female.

“You could see a path through the ferns that I had made when running. The female turned and followed that path. Then an adult male arrived that had the hair up on his neck like he was agitated. He stayed back away from the tree and left after a short time.”

Jonet had his cell phone with him. He used it to call a fellow hound hunter for advice. The trio of young wolves remained at the base of the tree Jonet was in, listening to the conversation for about five minutes.

The wolves did not show any aggression by growling or snarling, but they did not show any fear either. It was strange behavior that frightened Jonet.

“I’ve spent my whole life in the woods and I’ve never been scared before,” he says. “Those wolves really scared me. There were some tense moments.”

The wolves eventually lost interest and wandered off. After they had been gone about five minutes, Jonet climbed down from the tree and slowly made his way back to his truck, keeping an eye out for trees he knew he could climb in case he had to do so again.

Rory Mattson: Stumbling Into a Wolf Kill

In early October, Delta County Conservation District forester Rory Mattson was walking along a new logging road to see if it needed any modifications. He saw wolf tracks in the road’s soft sand and thought it would be nice to see the animals that made those tracks. He got more than he bargained for when he came around a corner.

“The first thing I saw was blood all over,” Mattson said. “Then I noticed a good-sized doe with a wolf standing over it and another wolf nearby. They were in full growl and snarl mode.

“’Okay, they are going to protect this kill,’ I thought to myself, ‘so I am going to get out of here.’ I think I only backed up a couple of steps when I heard growling behind me. I turned around and there’s a big male 50 feet away. I’m guessing he would have weighed 140 to 150 pounds. He was standing in the road with a smaller wolf.”

Now, Mattson’s only option was to cut through the woods. Mattson was wearing a denim shirt that was unbuttoned with a tee shirt underneath. He extended the unbuttoned shirt to the sides to make himself look bigger and started yelling at the big wolf, but those actions had no effect.

As Mattson moved toward the woods, the wolf moved with him and even approached closer. Then Mattson saw some old sticks of pulpwood in the ditch next to the road that were 10 feet long. He lunged to grab one of the pieces of wood to use as a weapon. When he did that, the wolf closed the distance between them to about 15 feet.

Mattson waved the cumbersome piece of pulp between he and the wolf as best he could to try to keep the predator at bay as he backed up. When he backed into a balsam tree that was 16 inches in diameter that had limbs he knew he could climb, Mattson threw the wood toward the wolf and climbed the tree to a height of about 10 feet.

“When I looked down, the big wolf was at the base of the tree growling,” Mattson says. He didn’t stay there long though. He only stayed at the base of the tree for 30 seconds, then was gone. From the tree, I could see the wolf still standing over the deer carcass. It hadn’t moved the entire time.”

After about 30 minutes, it started to get dark. Not wanting to get ambushed in the dark, Mattson decided to head for his truck. He jumped to the ground, grabbed the stick of pulp and angled through the woods away from the kill to the road. When nothing followed him for 200 yards, he took off running for his truck and made it with no problem.

“I’m sure the aggressive behavior of the wolves was all about the kill,” Mattson says. “I noticed that they had eaten some of the deer, but I probably interrupted their meal. The doe hadn’t been dead long.

“I didn’t see any fear in the eyes of that adult male. He definitely was not afraid of me. Having that stick in my hands helped. Otherwise, he might have bit me.

“I’m going to carry my pistol with me from now on,” Mattson says. “If I would have had a gun with me at the time, I would have fired a warning shot to try to scare the wolf away. If that wouldn’t have worked, I would have shot him.”

Tim Olsen: Wolves After Dark

It was October 15 when Tim Olsen bumped into wolves on a fresh kill after dark. He had planned on bowhunting for deer that day, but heavy rain canceled those plans. When the rain let up after dark, he decided to check the card in the camera by his stand to see what deer had been there. After changing the card in the camera, Olsen made a wrong turn on the way back to his ATV.

“Wolves had a deer down in the 4-wheeler trail,” Olsen says. “As soon as my light hit them, they started growling and snapping their chops at me. I never thought I would make it out of there.”

Olsen saw three wolves. They were all lying down, feeding on the deer they killed. He said a white wolf was on the left, facing to the right. A calico-colored canine was on the right facing left and a “giant” black wolf was between the other two facing Olsen.

“I was hollering, swinging my arms and throwing branches at them to try to keep them away from me,” Olsen says. “At the same time, I was backing away from them. The black one kept trying to get on the right side of me. I think he was trying to get behind me.

“My biggest concern was to stay on my feet. If I would have fallen down, I would have been in real trouble. That was the most scared I’ve been in my life.”

Jim Paquette: Caught Up in a Deer Chase

Jim Paquette was searching a dry lakebed for artifacts in early June when he saw wolf tracks chasing deer tracks. At one point, Paquette put his backpack down, leaned his walking stick against it and took out a digital camera to photograph tracks of the wolves. A short time later, a big doe suddenly appeared running from the woods right toward him. The whitetail was breathing heavily, with its mouth open and saliva streaming out of its mouth.

In spite of the fact that Paquette was standing in the open, the obviously stressed doe ran right by him. Based on the tracks Paquette saw, he figured the doe was being chased by wolves. Sure enough, a wolf soon appeared from the same place the deer had come from.

Realizing what a unique opportunity it was to see a wolf, Paquette took advantage of the opportunity to snap a photo of the predator. He wasn’t sure how long it would hang around after it saw him. The time stamp on that image after the wolf crossed the driftwood along the edge of the woods was 10:20 a.m.

To Paquette’s surprise, the wolf approached him. The animal was obviously in predator mode after chasing the deer. Paquette took a second photo of the wolf 16 seconds after the first.

“The wolf came right at me,” Paquette says. “He had his ears pinned back and he was looking right at me. Once I realized the wolf was coming at me, I thought about grabbing my walking stick. That was the only thing I had to protect myself from the wolf.

“The stick was leaning against my knapsack and I would have to move toward the wolf to get it, so that’s what I did. I ran toward the wolf to get the stick. That aggressive move on my part caused the wolf to change his actions. He started running parallel to me instead of continuing toward me.”

Paquette took a third photo of the wolf eight seconds after the second one, when it was paralleling him. Seconds later, the wolf charged directly at Paquette.

Read Next: Do Wolves Attack Humans?

“I started to scream at the top of my lungs and wave my arms wildly as it attacked,” Paquette says. “My screaming and aggressive arm motions stopped the wolf’s charge just as it approached within a matter of feet, and it then turned and ran back again.”

Paquette snapped a fourth photo of the wolf as it trotted away from him. The time stamp on that image was 10:21. At that point, the wolf clearly knew Paquette was not a deer.

“The wolf ran back some distance and began to walk back and forth pacing, all the time looking right at me. I took a fifth picture then. Suddenly, the wolf turned and charged me once again, coming at me at a trot. I started screaming and swearing and wildly waving my arms again. This time it stopped its charge a greater distance away.

“It then turned and trotted back toward the tree line, but it stopped on the beach and paced back and forth while looking directly at me. I then took the sixth and last photo, but I kept screaming and waving my arms trying to keep it from charging. Finally, it walked back over the driftwood and disappeared into the trees.”

And Tuesday a bill was introduced in the House Natural Resources Committee that aims to put more ducks in the marsh and in the sky. The HEN Act would provide up to $1.5 million annually for the construction and maintenance of hen houses, wire-and-straw cylinders that can greatly boost the nesting success of ducks. The bill — the acronym stands for Habitat Enhancement Now — sponsored by Rep. Michelle Fischbach (R-MN) and co-sponsored by Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA), would also provide up to $1.5 million annually for incentives to boost duck brooding habitat in California’s rice belt.

The hen-house portion of the bill could contribute to an initiative led by Delta Waterfowl to produce another one million birds annually for the benefit of hunters and wildlife watchers, says John Devney, chief policy officer for Delta Waterfowl.

“There’s been a lot of great work out there conserving habitat, delivered by Ducks Unlimited, Pheasants Forever, our federal partners, and state and provincial agencies,” says Devney. “But as robust as the funding streams are for those habitat programs, we recognize that we can’t have as many ducks as we’d like in an environment of declining wetland resources and declining nesting cover and declining nest success. So instead of trying to reprioritize dollars going to the high and good uses of habitat, we wanted to create a funding mechanism to do a little more of these intensive treatments that we know have big results and significant outcomes in terms of ducks produced.”

That includes hen houses, which when placed in areas with high mallard density, can boost nest success by 60 percent.

Devney notes that the species that benefits most from hen houses is the mallard.

“We’re talking almost all mallards, simply because mallards have the most elastic breeding strategy,” he says. “Pintails and gadwalls don’t climb into hen houses. There’s a reason that mallards are the most abundant duck in North America. It’s because they have more pliability in terms of their nesting strategy, and these physical structures give them an alternative from nesting in the grass or in the bush, as they often do in the prairie and Canadian Parklands regions.”

According to the legislation, up to $1.5 million in federal funds overseen by the Secretary of the Interior would be available annually through 2027 for competitive grants to “build, strategically place, and maintain Hen Houses for the purpose of improving waterfowl nesting success rates.”

Another $1.5 million would be available annually through 2027 to private landowners “to establish nesting cover, create or restore brood ponds and provide brood water… to enhance production of mallards, gadwalls and other breeding ducks in California.”

Devney says the waterfowl production bottleneck in much of the Golden State is brood survival.

“When conditions are right, and the flooded rice fields in California are growing up and choked with emergent vegetation at the time that duck broods are coming off, production can be impressive,” he says. “But if you get a mismatch of timing, then those flooded fields aren’t available and broods are in irrigation ditches with every predator in the free world picking them off, whether a heron or an osprey or a hawk or a red fox. This funding would create incentives for landowners to maybe shift their water management timing or invest in peripheral cover for brooding ducks.”

Devney says the HENS Act would provide a small amount of public funding to amplify Delta Waterfowl’s “Million Duck Campaign,” which intends to add a million ducks to every fall flight by investing in habitat, predator control, and hen houses.

“Our research is pretty solid that if we can build 110,000 hen houses across the most productive parts of the Prairie Potholes and Canadian parklands, we can add a million mallards to the flyway every year,” says Devney. “Internally, we’re well on our way to developing a $250 million endowment that will fund this initiative perpetually, and this is an important recognition that the effort has the support of Congress.”

Duck Stamp Modernization Act Signed into Law

Meanwhile, the Duck Stamp Modernization Act, which passed the Senate unanimously in July and passed the House last week on a 403-20 vote, was signed this morning by President Biden.

The bill allows hunters and federal duck stamp buyers to purchase their physical stamp at a local post office or other brick-and-mortar location. But it also allows hunters to buy an electronic duck stamp, and to immediately satisfy the legal requirement to have that federal license in the field.

“Once the President signs the bill into law, we will immediately transition to working with the Fish and Wildlife Service to ensure this legislation is implemented for the 2024 to 2025 hunting season,” says Taylor Schmitz, director of federal relations for the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation. “Implementing the Duck Stamp Modernization Act and other legislation is where the rubber meets the road. Our hope is that FWS can implement this legislation by the time the 2024 to 2025 federal duck stamp goes on sale in June 2024 so waterfowl hunters can fully take advantage of a 21^st century e-stamp process. In terms of implementing legislation, this should be a simple one.”

Read Next: 2023 Waterfowl Survey Results Show Sliding Mallard Numbers, Resurgence of Pintails

Schmitz noted that natural resource legislation is one of the rare bipartisan bright spots in this Congress.

“There have only been 27 bills signed into law in the first half of the 118^th Congress,” he says. “Two of which, or seven percent, have been priorities for our community. That includes the Duck Stamp Modernization Act and the Protecting Hunting Heritage and Education Act, which provided the fix to hunter education funding. To put that in perspective, in the same time frame during the last divided Congress [the 116^th Congress], there were 105 bills signed into law in the first session.”

Ziegler had seen that deer on the property several times over the years, and he had some trail cam photos of it. He also had a chance to kill the deer on Nov. 5, during a spur-of-the moment afternoon hunt and missed a broadside shot at 20 yards with a recurve.

“I just missed him, shooting low,” he says. “I got a good look at him though, and I couldn’t believe he’d grown so huge from the previous year when he was only a 10-pointer.”

So, six weeks to the day after missing the buck, Ziegler waited in the honeysuckle and hoped for another opportunity. He guessed right that morning and watched the deer jump a fence at150 yards before traveling his direction through the dip in the field.

At 15 yards, where the cattle trail split into two lanes, the buck turned down one of the trails. He offered Ziegler a close but challenging quartering-to shot.

“I figured I better take the opportunity to shoot because he was so close,” he says. “At that distance [with my compound] I can hit a snuff can.”

Ziegler drew, and released.

“He jumped and took off in an odd galloping, jumping run that made me nervous about the shot. He ran across the field and I lost sight of him. I thought I heard him fall, but I couldn’t be sure.”

Just to be safe, Ziegler sat in his stand for about three hours. Then he called his dad and several buddies, who all soon showed up to help look for his deer.

“There was no blood at all,” he explains. “The grass made it tough to see a trail, so we went to the last place I saw him, looked down into another gulley, and there he was. He traveled only about 80 yards before falling dead.”

Ziegler says his buck has 16 scoreable points with heavy palmation, and that it weighed around 230 pounds, says Ziegler. He rough scored the buck north of 170, but plans to have it measured by an official Pope and Young scorer.

Read Next: Minnesota Hunter Tags Triple-Beamed ‘Unicorn’ Buck

Ziegler also made an interesting discovery while caping out the buck: a .22 bullet lodged just below one of its antlers. He thinks a poacher must have shot the deer in the head, but the wound had healed so well that Ziegler says it was unnoticeable until he peeled back the hide.

“I’ve bowhunted since I was seven years old, and taken several dozen deer with my bow, including a 148-inch eight pointer last year,” he says. “But I still can’t believe I took this buck.”

What Is the Deadliest Animal in the World?

Mosquitoes Are the Deadliest Animal in the World

Mosquitoes are the deadliest animal in the world to humans by a large margin. This is because mosquitoes transmit malaria, which killed between 625,000 and 627,000 people in 2020, per data from the CDC and WHO. That figure was down from an estimated 780,000 fatalities in 2016. It dropped even more to 619,000 fatalities in 2021. Approximately half of the global population lives at risk of malaria. Large carnivores like tigers or crocodiles couldn’t keep up with that pace if they tried.

Unfortunately, humans (yes, biologically speaking, we’re animals) also kill hundreds of thousands of our own every year, whether on purpose or by accident. But reliable data on how deadly humans are is nearly impossible to track down, and anyone would be hard-pressed to argue that any of these animals are more capable of mass destruction than we are. Other runner-ups for the title of deadliest animal in the world include:

• Snakes kill 81,410 to 137,880 humans annually (WHO, 2023)
• Dogs kill 25,000 to 30,000 humans annually (Statista, 2022)
• Sandflies kill 24,200 humans annually (due to parasites that cause leishmaniasis, Global Burden of Disease Study, 2015)
• Freshwater snails kill 10,000 humans annually (due to burrowing parasitic larvae causing schistosomiasis, STAT, 2016)

Deer Are the Deadliest Animal in the U.S.

Before you reach for one of the best bear defense handguns, consider that the deadliest animal in the U.S. is actually an herbivorous game species. With the overwhelming prevalence of whitetail deer in urban and suburban parts of the country, deer-vehicle collisions and deer-caused accidents account for more than 400 human deaths a year, according to zoologist Dr. Michael Conover. In 2022 alone, insurance company AllState processed 1,378,542 deer-related auto claims.

Mosquito-borne malaria doesn’t pose nearly the same problem in the U.S. as it does in more tropical climates. But West Nile virus is becoming much more of a concern as climate change warms southern states, encouraging more mosquito breeding and survival. The first U.S.-born cases of malaria in 20 years showed up in Texas and Florida in July 2023. But in 2022, 93 people died from West Nile virus. In 2021, that number was 227. Human fatalities caused by large predator attacks don’t hold a candle to this disease or other types of animal fatalities in the U.S. Here are some other runners-up to deer for deadliest animals in the U.S.:

• Mosquitoes kill 120 humans annually (due to West Nile virus, CDC, 2023)
• Bees, wasps, and hornets kill 60 humans annually (due to anaphylaxis from stings, Elsevier, 2018)
• Dogs kill 30 to 50 humans annually (due to bites, National Institute of Medicine, 2022)
• Poisonous snakes kill up to 5 humans annually (CDC, 2021)
• Bears kill up to 5 humans annually (all species included, multiple sources, 2023)
• Poisonous spiders kill up to 3 humans annually (Cleveland Clinic, 2021)

Dogs Are the Deadliest Mammal in the World

As noted above, dogs kill more humans globally than any other mammal. But that doesn’t mean some large mammals don’t require an extra dose of caution, so you should brush up on how to survive a predator attack. Many large African mammals have also more than earned their reputation as “dangerous game,” and make up our entire list of runners-up for the deadliest mammals in the world:

• Elephants kill 500 humans annually (Britannica, 2014)
• Hippos kill 500 humans annually (Britannica, 2014)
• Lions kill 250 humans annually (USA Today, 2019)
• Cape buffalo 200 humans annually (USA Today, 2019)

Saw-Scaled Vipers Are the Deadliest Reptile in the World

As OL contributor Tim MacWelch pointed out in his story about the most dangerous snakes in the U.S., very few people die from the thousands of venomous snakebites that occur each year in North America. But on a global scale, the fatality rates are much higher, especially in places with limited access to healthcare — and far more dangerous snakes.

While it’s nearly impossible to get exact numbers on death rates from snake bites, saw-scaled vipers are thought to kill more people every year than all other snake species combined. They are part of what zoologists refer to as the Big Four of India’s venomous snakes, which are responsible for the overwhelming majority of snakebite deaths on the subcontinent. Here are some other deadly reptiles:

• Indian Spectacled cobras, Indian Common kraits, and Indian Russell’s vipers (the other three of the Big Four) kill tens of thousands of humans annually in India alone (PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, 2022)
• Crocodiles kill 1,000 humans annually (Statista, 2022)

Other Deadly, Poisonous, and Dangerous Animals

There are a lot of deadly species out there that humans rarely, if ever, interact with. In fact, some of the most venomous snakes and poisonous amphibians have never killed a single human because they live in places completely void of civilization. Other deadly species, like the marine creatures on this list, are only deadly because they happen to live and hunt near coastal areas where humans surf and swim. So consider this a list of honorable mentions for the deadliest animals in the world.

• Box jellyfish kill 20 to 40 humans annually in the Philippines alone (National Science Foundation, 2008)
• Sharks kill 6 humans annually on average (from unprovoked bites, International Shark Attack File, 2022)
• Komodo dragons have killed 5 humans (Phys.org, 2017)
• Golden poison frogs have no recorded deaths, but one frog contains enough poison to kill 10 humans (American Museum of Natural History)
• Inland taipans have no recorded deaths, but are widely considered the most venomous snake in the world (Australian Museum, 2022)

Deadliest Animal FAQs

Final Thoughts on the Deadliest Animal in the World

It might be shocking that some of the most deadly animals in the world are small insects you could crush with a slap. But insect-borne diseases continue to be a major health risk for much of the global population. Beyond the scary realm of insects and parasites, large predators like wolves, grizzly bears, lions, and tigers all give way to dogs and other humans as some of the deadliest mammals in the world, too. We’re not kidding when we say some of the deadliest creatures on the planet are probably in your own backyard.

It sounds like something out of a horror movie: a whitetail buck with hairy eyeballs. No joke. That’s what the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency discovered when a hunter reported a deer on the agency’s “Report Sick Deer” button of its website. The TWRA added the feature so hunters and citizens could report deer acting strangely, in an effort to curtail Chronic Wasting Disease and other diseases.

Lindsay Thomas with the National Deer Association gives a pretty harrowing account of this deer on the NDA site. Blood or weird stuff usually doesn’t bother me, but I have to admit that these photos freaked me out. I’m unsure if Wes Craven or M. Night Shyamalan could come up with this.

Read Next: Weird Deer

The deer was spotted in August 2020 near Farragut, a suburb of Knoxville in east Tennessee.

“The individual stated the deer was circling (in a street), had visible bleeding, lacked awareness of the people around it, and had something on its eyes,” wildlife biologist Sterling Daniels of TWRA said.

The deer was put down by local law enforcement and animal control, which saved the head for Daniels. He sent it to the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study (SCWDS) unit at the University of Georgia vet school to be tested for CWD and to see the eyeballs.

Read Next: The 8 Weirdest Whitetails You’ve Ever Seen

I’ve seen deer with disgusting infections and healed wounds, and the gross cutaneous fibromas more commonly known as deer warts. But man, these hairy eyeballs take the cake. Read more about the SCWDS findings on this unique deer.

Whatever you might think of this, I have no regrets. Since buying my new vehicle, I’ve come to find additional benefits I didn’t expect as I’ve tested it out for various hunting, fishing, and outdoor trips. I’d make the same choice again if I had it to do over. There may be other outdoorsmen like me, who have toyed with the idea of downsizing and could use the encouragement. And I’m here to tell you: Make the switch.

My 2000 Chevrolet Silverado is a great truck. I put 15 years and 205,000 miles on it (with no major mechanical problems) before turning the keys over to my son, Jake, when he turned 16. He has since passed it to his sister Laurel when she turned 16. And this year, on her 16th birthday, my daughter Julia will receive the keys.

That Chevy took me on many outdoor adventures. But when it came time for me to seek a new vehicle, I had new priorities in my shopping: affordability and fuel efficiency. Both priorities help me save money, but also I personally want to reduce my consumption of fossil fuels. You may disagree with me on the importance of fuel economy, and that’s fine—these are my personal vehicle priorities. We all have them. For many of us, a vehicle is a lifestyle statement. I’m at an age where I’m less concerned about signifying my lifestyle to other drivers on the highway than I am about my gas bill.

Pickup trucks keep getting bigger in both physical size and, of course, price tag. It surprises me how difficult it is these day to find a modest-sized pickup, while it is more and more common to see pickups that are only slightly scaled down from a tractor trailer. The average weight of pickup trucks has increased more than 30 percent since I bought my Chevy in 2000. With that astounding size comes poor fuel economy.

Combining these features, one vehicle kept coming up in my searches: the Subaru Forester. Long story short, I’m now the owner of a Forester. And I love it. In fact, I feel like I made an even better decision than I thought I was making when I signed the papers. My hunting buddies raised a few eyebrows at first, but after a weekend in deer camp with me and my new vehicle, one of them christened it “The Deer Wagon.”

I’m not here to talk about brands. There are other crossovers and small vehicles that offer the benefits I want to share. I’m here to testify that opting for such a vehicle to save money and burn less fuel does not mean you give up your “hunting vehicle.” When people ask me why I bought the Deer Wagon, I tell them there are 32 reasons, and all of them are miles per gallon. But beyond the savings, I had a lot of concerns about how this crossover would adapt to a hunting lifestyle. Let’s see how those turned out.

Off-Road Warrior

The reason the Forester kept coming up in my search is its symmetrical all-wheel drive. It’s in four-wheel drive all the time. More than that, though, the Deer Wagon monitors traction in each wheel and, in slick conditions, redirects power to the wheels that are getting the most grip. Whether I’m on a slick, muddy road at the hunting club or a slick, icy road on the way to the Archery Trade Association show, I’m good to go. I’ve tested the Deer Wagon in serious mud, the kinds of holes and ruts where I would have paused the Silverado and engaged 4-wheel drive. I’ve found the Deer Wagon crawls right on through with no problem. So far, I’m confident it would handle all but the worst mudholes my Silverado could manage—as long as I’m smart about how I negotiate the mud and I’m not actually trying to get stuck. I get the sense that having a much lighter vehicle is a factor here. The Deer Wagon seems to be able to creep lightly where full-size pickups sink and plow. And believe it or not, the Deer Wagon actually has a higher ground clearance than my Silverado does. I bought a set of Falken Wildpeak A/T Trail tires that have performed extremely well off-road without impacting gas mileage or the highway ride.

Cargo Capacity

Yes, giving up the bed of my pickup was painful. It’s so nice to be able throw bloody, muddy, or bulky objects and gear into the bed of a pickup. To solve this problem, I bought an after-market trailer hitch, installed it myself on the Deer Wagon, and added a bumper rack that easily mounts on the trailer hitch. For travel to hunting camp, I strap coolers, stands, storage boxes and other bulky gear to the rack. Once I’m at camp, I use the rack to transport deer, fertilizer bags, muddy boots, and other gear around the woods. I also bought after-market rails for my roof rack that support more weight. It takes me about 10 minutes to load my Vibe fishing kayak on the roof and strap it down for the road.

No, I can’t haul a cord of firewood in the cargo area or on the bumper rack, but I can borrow or buy a trailer if I need one. And I could buy a fleet of trailers for the money I saved—and go on saving in gas mileage—by not buying a full-size pickup.

Surprising Stealth

Something I wasn’t expecting is how incredibly quiet the Deer Wagon is when driving along dirt roads on the way to the stand. In fact, my hunting partners and I noticed the Deer Wagon actually makes less noise than an electric hunting buggy, a vehicle that’s battery-powered for the express purpose of being quiet! Though the motor on the buggy is quiet, the rest of the vehicle makes all kinds of squeaks, rattles, and vibrations. Not the Deer Wagon. Its engine is barely audible when it’s moving slowly along woods roads—unlike the pickups my friends and family drive. So, when considering hunting pressure, the Deer Wagon is about as low-impact as it gets.

Nimble Turning Radius

Like most crossovers, my Deer Wagon has a super-short turning radius. It’s even easier to turn around than the electric hunting buggy. I’ve turned it around in narrow forest roads where you could never hope to rotate a full-sized pickup, and certainly not today’s behemoth crew cabs.

And on this note, though not an “outdoor” factor, let me share a special joy I never knew I was missing when I drove an extended-cab pickup: parking! No more heading way out in the desolate reaches of the Bass Pro Shops parking lot where you have room to maneuver into and out of a space. No more careful reading of height limits on parking decks or sweating through turns around concrete support columns. No more shifting 47 times from Reverse to Drive to Reverse to shuffle your way out from between other trucks that parked too close. Now, I smile every time I whip in and out of a parking space close to the building.

The Long Haul

The Deer Wagon is great off-road, but it’s also great on the highway. I love the smooth, quiet ride compared to my old pickup. Since my primary hunting areas are a minimum of three hours from home, this makes those drives much more pleasant—and less costly when it comes to fuel. Whether I’m hauling a deer out of the woods or hauling kids to school, I’m enjoying the ride. I never expected that to be possible in a vehicle that was also affordable and gets great gas mileage.

The Upshot

Yes, there are disadvantages to giving up my Silverado. For one thing, the Deer Wagon is a little homely. One reviewer of the Subaru Forester described its appearance as “refreshingly dorky.” I won’t be cruising the strip on the weekends, but for this family man, there’s not a vehicle made that can help me there. I’ll wear “refreshingly dorky” and consider it a win, especially since I’m a debt-free dork.

I know there are plenty of hunters who love their pickups, will always love their pickups, and will never drive anything else. I’m not trying to convert you. I love my pickup too. If they made a decent one that cost what I paid for the Deer Wagon and got 32 mpg, I’d still drive one every day. But if you’re like me and share my priorities—savings and fuel economy—consider these other benefits of compact crossovers that I’ve discovered. You can downsize your loan payments and your fuel budget significantly and still own a great hunting vehicle.

Also, you’ll get a lot fewer invitations to help your friends move furniture.

Once an animal is located for a test, the team employs a variety of tactics to capture it: tranquilizer darts for moose, aerial nets and ground traps for wolves and deer—and, for some bears, a close encounter in their dens while they hibernate. Once the samples are collected, they’re sent to Aliota’s lab in Saint Paul where he hopes to identify which animals could act as “bridge species” and transmit the disease to others. Everyone on the collection team is fully vaccinated and boosted, and they are tested frequently to limit any transmission of the virus to the wildlife they’re sampling.

“If we consider that there are many species and they’re all intermingling to some extent, their patterns and their movements can exponentially increase the amount of transmission that could occur,” said E.J. Isaac, a fish and wildlife biologist on the reservation.

Viruses like SARS mutate in order to enter an animal’s cells and replicate before mutating again—enough to “have a key that fits in the human lock” that “allows it to leap back to humans through close contact with live animals,” according to the AP.

Read Next: First Possible Case of Deer Spreading COVID-19 to a Human Discovered in Canada

“We’ve known for a long time that deer and other wildlife, and even our pets can get and contract and carry SARS-CoV-2. The CDC currently states that the risk of pets spreading it to people is low,” Nick Pinizzotto, president and CEO of the National Deer Association, wrote in an email to Outdoor Life. “Still, the World Health Organization has recently stated that the introduction of SARS-CoV-2 to wildlife could result in the establishment of animal reservoirs, which is also important.”

With this possibility in mind, testing programs like the one in Grand Portage will likely expand in other places to include additional wildlife species. International organizations like the World Organization for Animal Health are urging countries around the world to prioritize COVID surveillance in animals, as experts say the threat posed by the virus doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.

“We are encroaching on animal habitats like we have never before in history,” said Aliota. “Spillover events from wild animals into humans are, unfortunately I think, going to increase in both frequency and scope.”

That’s why Parvin says she wants to change the narrative.

“I truly believe that panfishing has been looked at as the red-headed stepchild of freshwater fishing,” she says. “And I want to change that. I want people to be proud of catching big bluegill and crappie, and to share those catches just as proudly as they would a large bass.”

Reinventing the “Slab Lab”

Now, to be fair, Parvin will be the first to admit that she’s spent her fair share of time chasing black bass throughout the South. Born and raised in Montgomery, she now lives further north in Huntsville, where she and her father Dr. Dennis Olive have managed a private, 5-acre lake for the past 27 years or so. Nicknamed the “Slab Lab,” it all started with a dream to grow beefy, 10-plus-pound bass. But Parvin says that dream changed a few years back, when the pond experienced a major fish kill.

“We had a total loss. Trophy bass, bream, everything,” she says. “But things like that happen even in the best managed private water. Nature happens.”

Parvin and her father took this “total loss” in stride, however, and they decided to take the Slab Lab in a more experimental direction. To them, it represented a unique opportunity to “start from ground zero, make some course corrections,” and try to raise a healthy population of whopper bluegill.

The two reached out to American Sportfish, a fish hatchery and pond management company with locations in Alabama and Texas, and they asked about coppernose bluegill. A subspecies of the common bluegill, the fish are native to Florida and southeast Georgia, and according to American Sportfish, the coppernose “grows faster and eats pelleted feed more readily than the common bluegill.”

Feeling confident they had chosen the right species, Parvin and Olive ordered up 7,000 or so coppernose fingerlings and stocked them in the private lake. Then they started the years-long process of selectively culling, feeding, and experimenting to see if they couldn’t grow a bluegill for the record books.

Read Next: Sunfish vs Bluegill Identification Guide

Which brings up an important question that Parvin gets asked often these days: If you catch a world-record-sized fish that was grown and raised in a private lake, should it count as a world record? To this, Parvin responds that the International Game Fish Association makes the rules and sets the bar for world-record fish. And until the IGFA stops accepting entries that come from private water bodies (similar to how the Boone and Crockett Club doesn’t allow high-fenced or pen-raised deer in its record books), she’s not too concerned with other people’s approval.

“I’ll be honest,” Parvin says. “I wouldn’t give a rip if I never even got the world-record certified. It is what my dad and I have done in three-and-a-half years with these trophy coppernose that means everything to me.”

Chasing a World-Record

As a retired doctor, Parvin’s father has more of a scientific background than she does. “He grows the fish and I catch ‘em. And that relationship works very well,” she jokes. But she also takes her role seriously and says that consistently catching big bluegill isn’t as easy as some would have you believe.

“As much as people like to argue with me that you can throw a bread ball and catch bream,” she says, “there is some technique when you’re trophy hunting for panfish. And lure selection is something I’ve really had to dial in when I’m targeting these 3-plus-pound bluegill.”

She adds that while she experiments frequently with color, profile, and the like, she hardly ever throws a lure smaller than two inches. This helps weed out some of the smaller bluegill, which are plentiful, since these fish thrive in the warm southern climate and spawn multiple times a year.

And there’s no doubt that the fish do well down here in the Heart of Dixie. The world-record bluegill is also the state record, and it came from a small lake near Birmingham, which is roughly 100 miles south of Huntsville. That fish, caught in 1950, weighed 4 pounds, 12 ounces. And unless they’ve kept it a secret, nobody in the South has touched the record since.

As for Parvin and her father, she says they are getting closer to beating the record every year. She has landed multiple fish in the three- to three-and-a-quarter-pound range in the last 12 months alone, and according to IGFA regulations, she only has to beat the current record by two ounces to make it official. So, for now, she’ll keep fishing the lake as she always has, just waiting for the right bluegill to bite.

“We truly believe that we have a four-pounder swimming in there,” Parvin says. “We just have to catch it.”

This is it –– the time whitetail watchers have been waiting for all summer. Antler velvet will peel sometime over the next few weeks in most areas of the country. Our fascination with antlers officially begins and from here on in it is all about wrapping your hands around a set of those beautiful horns.

Most bucks complete growing their antlers by mid-August. Antler tissue begins to mineralize and harden around that time and once the blood flow ceases and the tips of the antler harden, the peeling process begins. For some bucks it’s a drawn out process lasting a couple of days, others get the job done in an hour or two. For all it’s a messy process as the soft blood-filled skin is shredded and torn away from the hard bone.

This is a great time to get trail camera shots of peeling bucks. Lucky trail camera buffs sometimes get pics of bloody faced bucks working brush or using their hind hooves to work the soft peeling skin from their antlers. Most just pick up the change; one day he is in velvet, a day or two later he is hard horned. Most buck watchers will see some indication of antler peeling sometime between now and mid-September.

Deer antlers are one of the fastest growing tissues we know of. Whitetails are capable of growing an inch or more of antler in a 24-hour period. Antler growth is governed by photo-periodism, or the amount of daylight reaching a buck’s gland receptors. It’s all part of the fall breeding cycle: testosterone builds, antlers harden, dominance is established and does get bred. Ain’t it all grand?

Sometime around Labor Day. It’s when whitetail bucks shed the velvet from their antlers. Velvet peeling typically takes a day or two to complete and if you are lucky enough to catch a buck in mid-peel, as photographer Don Jones has done here, it is a pretty dramatic sight. Bloody red velvet hangs like Spanish moss on a live oak until it is torn completely off by hoof or bush.

Antler peeling is related to photoperiod or the amount of light transferred through a deer’s eye which then impacts the pineal gland located at the base of the brain.

Across most of deer country, peeling will be complete by late September and about 10 million or so bucks will then begin ramping up for the rut. Necks will swell, testosterone levels will rise, and antlers will be used to shred bushes and trees.

Within the next few weeks, game cameras across the country will be providing hunters with their first real look at what the bucks they have been watching all summer look like in hard horn.

This buck was photographed on a piece of private land in northwestern Montana (not fenced).

Photographer Don Jones found the buck as it fed with several other deer one evening during the first week of September of 2016.

“I saw that he was shedding,” says Jones, “but then noticed him walk away from the other deer with his head low to the ground.”

“It wasn’t until I saw him turn toward me that I noticed that he was chewing or choking on his own velvet. The buck was so absorbed in the velvet hanging in front of his face and in his mouth that he paid little attention to me.”

“I then noticed that the buck didn’t have the velvet stuck in his teeth or throat. He was just trying to eat it but it was still attached to the base of the antler. The more he pulled the more he bled and every so often he would stop chewing on the velvet so he could lap up the blood as it rolled down his face.”

“He sought the assistance of some down brush (logs/sticks), but finally had enough and took off running into cover. I found him a couple of days later with his antlers totally cleaned off.”

When she reported the attack to CPW, the victim described the mule deer as a young, fork-horned buck. She told officials that the buck went back to sparring with another young buck in her yard soon after the attack.

CPW officials investigated the scene later that day and found a bird feeder in the yard. The victim also explained that she regularly feeds the birds by hand and had thrown out bread earlier that day. This, along the fact that the attack occurred just outside someone’s front door, led officials to believe that the deer was associating people with food and had lost its fear of humans.

“I believe this is a good example of what happens when deer lose their natural fear of humans,” CPW Area Wildlife Manager Mike Brown said in the press release. “They become aggressive and dangerous. This is a good reminder that wild animals should always be treated as such, and that people need to give wildlife the space they need.”