Whitetail365: The Deer Hunting Blog From Field & Stream

The season runs through January 31st around here, and right now the deer are up and moving about as often as David E. Petzal writes a check to Save the Children. This has always been the toughest time of the year to see whitetails, at least in my woods.  As Leonard Lee Rue III writes in The Deer of North America,  “...where the deer’s endocrine system has had a chance to adapt to the cold, the animals are geared to be sedentary. They key to their survival is their inactivity.”

And they can really afford to be sedentary these days, what with temperatures 20 degrees and more above normal. It was 67 degrees yesterday. It’s supposed to hit 70 today. This kind of winter hunting calls for special precautions. Such as sunblock.

Tepid, non-committal reviews of Bill Heavey’s new book, “If You Didn’t Bring Jerky, What Did I Just Eat? Misadventures in Hunting, Fishing and the Wilds of Suburbia,” continue to trickle in, proof that a lot of critics have not read it all that closely.

“Best Book Title” of 2007 – Entertainment Weekly. Nothing abut the author or subject, of course, just the title. (Hey, it’s a start.)

“In Heavey's often off-kilter humor, he is the unwashed sporting public. He frequently places himself (as a witless klutz) at the crux of a story and isn't hesitant to provide a refreshing laugh at his own expense.” – Gary Garth, Louisville Courier-Journal. (Hey, unwashed and witless. Beat that, Ernest Hemingway.)

“Sure to bring a smile to even the grumpiest person in the land.” – Gene Mueller, The Washington Times. (The guy has obviously never met David E. Petzal.)

“Bill Heavey's humor columns make dandy bookmarks.That's a compliment.” - Candus Thomson, Baltimore Sun. (Makes you wonder what she'd say for an insult).

“When you read his stories, many of them are about you, and most are the stories you were too ashamed to tell anyone about.” – Tom Remington, Black Bear Blog. (In certain contexts, “shameless” could be, you know, a good thing.)

Order your copy today and treat yourself to that warm feeling of superiority you get when reading about somebody even unluckier than you.

I have never owned nor operated a trail camera. Three reasons: One is philosophic: The use of digital technology has always seemed antithetical to the deeper pleasures of hunting – to the act of immersing yourself in the landscape to the point that, in writer Barry Lopez’s wonderful description, you “have the land around you like clothing.” One is practical: I hunt almost exclusively in places where a trail camera would likely be stolen within hours of being placed. One is technical: I have a greater chance of being named president-for-life of Uzbekistan than I do in figuring out the damn things. Anything involving the words “download” or “user-friendly computer interface,” I have decided, is code for “everybody can do it but you.”

What I do have is a rake, or sometimes the edge of my shoe. Any time I’m particularly interested in the deer traffic on a given trail, I simply rake or scrape away the leaves down to the dirt along a short section. When I next return, I’ll inspect that section for prints. No batteries, and both the rake and the human foot are widely available.

Okay, this is where it gets complicated. Small prints, I have reason to believe, indicate small deer. Larger prints, by the same token (see previous sentence) indicate larger deer, which may or may not include bucks. Really big prints mean what passed was almost certainly a buck. I know this is going out on a limb, especially since I have no digital images to document my theory. But I shall hold to it until proven wrong.

If you have trail cam images of large bucks attempting to pass their prints off as tiny ones by wearing special footgear, please post them here.

I check the weather on the Web about eight times a day, usually www.weather.com, sometimes www.weatherunderground.com, although it has a more cluttered layout. I do this whether I’m able to hunt that day or not. I like to know what I’m missing. First I check wind direction, then speed. I can hunt almost any wind (if you detect the defensive smugness of a guy who owns no hunting land but compensates by rubbing his extreme mobility in your face, you’re reading me perfectly). Like most of us, I like some wind - say, 2-6 m.p.h. - better than none to keep scent from “pooling.” And I know the local deer don’t move much when it blows more than 10 m.p.h.

But the winds are so screwy where I hunt that I wonder why I check the forecast at all. My grounds are incised by steep ravines between narrow ridges, and I often set up in a saddle downwind of a crossing trail. (Incidentally, from the tracks I’ve seen in snow and wet leaves, the “expert” advice about deer being just like us and preferring the easiest route between points is just plain wrong. I see lots of evidence of deer taking the steepest route from one ridge to another. Maybe they read the magazines, too.)

Yesterday morning I set up 30 yards from a house. Although the forecast was for northwest wind, the air wafting steadily by my stand was from the southeast. Then, about 8 a.m., white smoke from a just-lit fire in the house’s woodstove began sluggishly puffing from the chimney. Obedient to the contrary rules of the universe, it came straight at me, swept along by the called-for northwest wind. There I sat, at nearly the same elevation at the chimney and just 90 feet away, watching my Wind Checker powder drifting in one direction and smoke going in the other.

I sat there until I realized the smoke was making me sick and then climbed down. I know that the forces at play in the atmosphere of this planet are unconcerned with indidivual humans, neither rewarding nor punishing us. But for just a second there, I wondered if I’d done something that really ticked them off.

If you know something I don't, please tell me.

Are you still short a couple of Christmas presents but afraid that if you go back to the mall you’ll lose it, put your head through a plate glass window, and start singing “Grandpa Got Run Over By A Reindeer” until the cops come? Relax, we’ve got you covered.

Bill Heavey’s “If You Didn’t Bring Jerky, What Did I Just Eat?” a selection of his less-offensive writing for Field & Stream, is proving so successful that some book stores are now ordering two copies at a time!  Thing is, they still might be sold out. Even Amazon’s running behind.

Not to worry! You can give the book without having the book. Just order it from your favorite book store or online seller, and present the person with the printable certificate below. And let the cops arrest somebody else for a change.

Unless you own your hunting grounds, you are probably using a portable stand, either a climber or a hang-on. I’m a climber guy. While I certainly haven’t tried them all, I have tried a bunch. Mine’s a Lone Wolf hand climber. (My intent here, incidentally, is not to start a whose-treestand-is-the-best debate. We  bowhunters seem particularly prone to silly equipment arguments. How else to explain that in virtually every archery chat room the majority of posters deem it necessary to list the make and model of their bows, arrows, and broadheads? If your identity as a hunter depends on whose name is on your stuff, you’ve got problems hunting can’t fix.)

I like a climber because you can go as high as you want (or as high as the tree will let you), and it’s a fairly simple arrangement. I confess, however, that even after years of using one, it usually takes me a fair amount of time to get both parts on and adjusted to the taper of the tree, to get my harness attached, and to inch-worm my way up to hunting height. Is there a better way?

The runaway bestselling collection by editor-at-large Bill Heavey continues to amaze even its publisher. "I think we already sold, like, two boxes of them," according to the intern at Grove/Atlantic Press who answered the phone. "Way beyond what anybody here projected, I can tell you that. I know his mom bought a bunch."

"If You Didn't Bring Jerky, What Did I Just Eat?" brings together some of Heavey's least-offensive material from the last decade. In an imperfect world, it may be the perfect Christmas gift. In addition to memorable misadventures from Cuba to Mongolia, Northern Virginia to the Bahamas, the baldest man ever to write for Field & Stream offers valuable tips on the following:

*How to convince your stepdaughter that you're not a mental patient in training.
*How to call in sick so that nobody questions you. (Hint: Diarrhea is a magical word.)
*Why, when heading out before dawn for an all-day hunt in the mountains with a group of guys you just met, you should remember to wear your pants.

Available wherever inferior books are sold, including online.

We got our first snow the  other day, so I knocked off work early. Real early, shortly after brushing my  teeth. I figured they’d be moving mid-day and was, for once, right. There I  was, trudging through the still-falling flakes towards the side of a hill  where trails converge when I practically bumped into a doe and offspring  coming the other way. For once, I saw the deer first. But only by about three  seconds. They were 15 yards off and bopping along as casual as can be. Then  they caught sight of me. No telling what I looked like to them through the  mini-blizzard (an especially furious little storm cell was passing through at  the moment). Mama snorkeled her head all around and took a few steps closer.  She was more curious rather than frightened, and I wondered if my reputation had preceded me.

Had  I approached my stand as all the magazines tell you to: hunting from the  moment the car door shuts, an arrow nocked and ready?

Was I  already scoping out shooting lanes and picking a spot on the animal to aim at? 

You bet I was. And the really surprising thing was that the special friends I had brought along on this hunt--the Pope, Jessica Alba, and the head of the CIA--all had the good sense to remain absolutely still.

Of course I wasn’t prepared. My arrows were all  safe in their quiver. My release was carefully secured around a limb of the  bow. I was more prepared to compete on American Idol than I was to arrow a  deer. Somewhere, I thought I heard the sound of Chuck Adams laughing. 

They stood for about 10 seconds--curiosity itself. A whiff was  all they needed to answer their questions. They swapped ends and vanished into  the brush.

I thought over my options, climbed the nearest tree,  and sat still as a Buddha for three hours. During that time I caught sight of  another doe group, five of them, who must have been watching the whole time from  their beds on a hilltop, which I ranged at 219 yards through the woods. 

Neither they nor I moved there till dark, at which point I  climbed down. I count no day afield a defeat. I was honing one of the skills  essential to our kind: Treading that fine line between hunting really hard and making a complete idiot of yourself. 

I’ve spent a fair amount of time in two spots this year: the woods and our nation’s airports. I’ve seen a good many deer and many more people. There are two things that must of us fixate upon that I’ve hardly seen at all: super bucks and super models.

There’s a reason for this, of course. Both are scarce as hen’s teeth, freaks of nature. But if you look at the covers of magazines pitched at hunters, or at women interested in fashion, you’re going to see one or the other. I’m starting to think there’s something wrong with this picture.

A recent school holiday too warm for deer movement, which meant that I had Emma until noon, when she was due to go over to her mother’s.

My daughter would have been happy as a cockroach stuck inside a Twinkie to watch videos all day. Sometimes, however, a parent’s duty is to provoke the storm to get to the sunshine on the other side. When I turned off the TV, the hysteria called to mind Britney Spears being cut off at a bar. “I don’t wanna go to the woods!” she wailed. “It’s boring!” I nodded, then gave her a choice: She could put on her clothes herself or I would put them on her. Well, her socks hurt her feet, and her shoes hurt her feet, and her pants had a seam in the wrong place that might have been drawing blood by the howls she emitted. When she ran out of clothes, she switched to general health, claiming she was sick and that her “hair hurt.” By the time I bundled her into the car, her face was splotchy with a 7-year-old’s rage.

The good thing about my daughter is that her anger often subsides as quickly as it arrives. Driving along, we were soon tallying the reddest fall maple foliage in the history of the world. A small hawk buzzed us as we exited the car to look for deer sign in a nearby park. “Whoa!” Emma breathed. “Awesome!” Thirty yards into the brush, Emma exclaimed “Daddy, poop!” over a pile of fresh droppings. Suddenly she was on board. “Let me go first,” she said, whacking a way through the prickers with her stick. Being the same size as a deer, she was soon leaving me in her leave duff as she rocketed down deer tunnels.

Before long, she had found prints, rubs, and a couple of fresh scrapes. She insisted on leading the entire time, except when she ran out of gas 200 yards from the car. I put her on my shoulders and told her she’d done great. “Does this mean I can have the M&Ms in your office drawer?” she asked.

“How’d you know about those?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said distractedly. “Can I?”

“You can have some of them,” I said.

We drove home singing a geography song she’s learning in school.

You may be wondering: Does taking a day in season to go scouting with your daughter in a park where weapons are prohibited count as “hunting”?

The answer is “Yes.” It also counts as something far more important.