Deer Hunting
Late-Season Buck Strategies
I am slap worn out from deer hunting this season. Nothing has gone right. The food plots were half-you-know-what with no rain early, then the first frost whacked them back. They never recovered. […]
Promote
Fishing
Pickwick Papermouths
Don’t expect to go to Pickwick Lake and see numbers of treetops, brush tops, standing timber and invisible cover that you can fish, because you won’t. […]
Hunting
Registration not a fact of gun purchase
In the last 30 days, I have fielded six questions from people who have either bought a gun from an individual, inherited a gun or were given a gun by someone. […]
Deer Hunting
Last-ditch efforts can pay dividends
It’s panic time in the deer woods. The palms of the hands go damp like they did on prom night. A chill runs down the back causing shivers to ripple up and down the spine. […]
Freshwater Fishing
Spillway Spectacular
“The colder the weather, the better the fishing gets” is the way professional angler Kent Driscoll describes the crappie fishing behind the dam at Ross Barnett Reservoir. […]
Inshore Fishing
Specks, reds still available in January
Anglers can catch plenty of good-sized speckled trout, redfish and an occasional flounder on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast after the bowl games have ended. […]
Hog Hunting
De-Hog Your Deer Club
Ben Boteler was spending his Saturday afternoon in January the way he does most Saturdays. He was in a deer stand on his hunt club at Willow Break located near the town of Redmon in Southwest Mississippi. The 3,800-acre club borders the Yazoo River and offers prime habitat for big deer. […]
Deer Hunting
Late is Great
Bob Mayo Jr. and I were resting on our horses following a December morning deer drive in the Bienville National Forest back in the early 1960s. Mayo’s pack of black-and-tans had just moved some deer south. […]
Hunting
That Old Black Magic
“If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows.” — Henry Ward Beecher […]
Fishing
Save gas and catch plenty trout
According to Capt. Tom Moore of the Strictly Too, docked at Point Cadet Marina near the Isle of Capri Casino Resort in Biloxi, most people overlook some of the best January speckled-trout fishing on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast while they’re searching for speckled trout. […]
Deer Hunting
40 Days of Bliss
OK, I confess. I was napping a little. Well, I was napping a lot. Yeah, I was asleep, but I was safely strapped into a 16-foot-tall ladder stand overlooking a harvested corn field with plenty of remaining cob litter as well as a green plot of ryegrass, wheat and kale.
The set-up was a perfect mix of natural habitat and best practices at supplemental food plotting.
I was in an ideal seat to watch deer action as the day closed out in the west. I knew this because a couple of weekends before I counted 11 deer file out of the adjacent woods at the dark-thirty timing, as they call it around here. Among the group were three bucks, but alas my binoculars were failing in the dying light. At least two of them bore multiple-tined racks, though.
The witness encouraged me to come back for another look without pressuring the stand location.
So when I shook off the dreaming at the sound of thrashing in the woods, I was not the least bit surprised to see two does bolt from cover at full throttle right across in front of me. As they a made an L-shaped run for the woods to my right and behind me about halfway there, a racked buck tore out of the woods pressing right into the hoof prints left by the two does. He was gaining on them fast and way too fast for a view in my rifle’s scope, much less to take a shot.
Deer Hunting
For best results, avoid taking culls
The debate is fully entrenched now. It crept in through the back door, but now it pops up all over the place. It certainly caught me off guard. In fact, I probably would never have seen the issue on the Mississippi deer hunting radar screen if a co-worker had not mentioned it to me.
Jason Pope burst into my office one day with an agitated look on his face.
“Have you been reading the deer hunting forum on the state wildlife web site lately?” he asked.
I confessed I had not.
“Well, what’s all this noise about cull bucks? I think these guys are just making up excuses for having ground-checked a buck finding it was a lot smaller than anticipated, and now they’re covering their tracks by calling them cull bucks.” […]