Buck Manager | Buck Manager

More Than One or Two Ways to Bag Your Buck

Rifles and archery equipment are the two of the most widely used tools for hunting white-tailed deer, but there is an alternative to both that many of you may have never considered. That’s right, handguns! Handguns add another element to deer hunting that is somewhere between rifle and bow hunting, especially when using traditional pistols not specifically designed for white-tailed deer hunting. These types of handguns demand close-range interaction between the hunter and game and also require hunter skill in their use.

Using a handgun to bag a white-tailed deer brings along some of the challenges that archery hunters face, mainly trying to get as close as possible to a deer without them detecting you. The 8 point, 5 1/2 year old buck pictured here was harvested using a .45 caliber Ruger P97DC at 15 yards while he was trailing a hot doe during the breeding season.

“I was sitting in a ground blind when a doe stepped out at about 85 yards. She was crossing an opening and I figured she was just traveling through. However, once she got about 30 yards away from the brush, I saw a mature buck following her, so it looked that the breeding season was still underway in the area. Based on the direction she way traveling I knew if she’d continue to work my way that I’d have a potential shot. The doe continued down the brush line and kept feeding towards me, and the mature buck was ever-so-slowly closing the gap between both her and I.

The doe kept feeding in my direction and the buck was following suit, without much hesitation. The two deer were closing the distance. When the buck was about 20 yards out, it looked like he was going to come even closer, as the doe was only about 10 yards from me, so I was going to let him keep coming. When he was at 15 yards, I knew it was time to make my move. I aimed right for the lungs and slowly squeezed the trigger — the shot connected! The buck lurched forward ran full-out for about 60 yards before I saw him collapse in some brush.

The whole time there was a 10 point, 2 1/2 year old buck standing 25 yards in front of me. The mature 8 point buck was hoping to gain breeding rights to the doe in estrus, but from a deer management standpoint I’m hoping the young 10 point buck will do what big boy wanted to do. This harvest made for a great hunting experience, put some meat on the table and hopefully resulted in overall herd improvement. This was my first big game animal of any species with a pistol, and he’s a nice whitetail buck. Can’t wait to get back out and try it again.”

Proper Harvest Essential for Good Deer Management

Harvest really is a key management tool required to manage white-tailed deer populations. However, remember that successful management must also involve proper habitat management. The basic strategy for deer population mangaement, which involves harvest, consist of the following:

1. Deer numbers must be maintained at or below the carrying capacity of the property to maintain excellent body condition and maximum antler growth. It’s kind of like cows in a pasture. You can have more, but body condition and overall health will suffer.

2. The desired sex ratio must be achieved for proper recruitment levels and desired harvest quotas. Maintaining too many does will require harvesting many deer each year. Too few does and recruitment may not be adequate to replace deer harvested.

3). The harvest rate of bucks must be established to attain the desired age structure of bucks available for harvest (which includes spikes and other culls as part of the buck harvest quota). A lower harvest rate keeps more bucks in the older age classes.

Varmint Hunting Like a Fox

Controlling varmints should be a part of the overall management scheme to better manage the deer herd found on your property. Varmints, specifically coyotes, are the biggest threat to fawn recruitment on most lands throughout the United States. However, we may really want to keep an eye out for them if they are getting this smart!

Big Whitetail Bucks of 2007

With the 2007 deer hunting season well under way and even over in some areas, here are some of the big bucks hunters have bagged from across the United States.

If you have a photo of a big buck, or any buck for that matter, that you want to submit, send any information and/or story to me. I will keep updating the list with new additions as photos are received and bucks are harvested.

Oh, and the state from where the bucks were taken is below each photo. Enjoy!

268 4/8 B&C – Maryland

190″ Gross B&C – Texas

Maryland

Oklahoma

Unknown

North Dakota

220 B&C – Indiana

210 B&C Gross – Illinois

Fulton County, Georgia

25 point – Missouri

22 point – Tennessee

22 point – Wisconsin

16 point – Missouri

Texas

Deer Hunting: Work Not Done After the Shot

It’s time for on-the-ground deer management and that means taking advantage of hunting season. Three cheers to all who elected to use the days following Thanksgiving to be seated in their stands deer hunting rather than corralled with strangers outside retail stores to save a dime. Deer season’s busiest weekend dropped tons of meat all across Texas. You may have bagged a nice buck or a good-eating doe, but now what?

Hunting is a clean and simple exercise. It’s squeezing the trigger and making an accurate shot that adds time to the back end of any trip into the woods. First order of business is to field-dress the animal and, if temperatures are mild as they have been lately, cool the meat. In surprisingly short time, heat can manifest itself in a host of undesireable effects on fresh venison.

“If it’s 70 degrees outside,” said Michael Cruz, of Pete’s Fine Meats on Richmond, “I wouldn’t leave a deer (undressed) for more than an hour.”

Handle With Care

Whether you prefer to hang your deer from trees or leave them on the ground for unzipping, be careful and patient throughout the process. Elementary as it sounds, keep the fingers of the hand that isn’t holding the knife away from the hand that is. Even with an extremely sharp blade, pressure must be applied during certain aspects of the field-dressing job, and you’ll be working in a slippery environment. Move slowly and carefully avoid a painful slice.

According to Cruz, one of the most wasteful hunter mistakes is poor field-care that contaminates good meat with other things inside the animal. There’s no need to be graphic here. If you don’t understand the message or the procedure, ask someone who does to observe and instruct.

Some things within a deer are supposed to be cut in preparing it for the professional’s blade and paper, and some are not. Confusing the two taints immediately upon contact; processors have to discard everything that’s suspect, then hack away a little more, before they can package remaining venison for consumption.

Also unnecessarily wasteful is sloppy shot placement. At a range inside 200 yards with good lighting through a properly sighted, scoped rifle, there is no reason to miss the intended mark by more than a couple of inches. I made this point in another column recently after hearing a “professional hunter” on video proclaim that we’re ready for the field when we can hit a dinner plate at 100 yards.

In addition to being woefully disrespectful to the animal, such casual marksmanship also ruins prime meat. Bullet strikes too high may rip through backstraps. Hits too far aft rupture some of those aforementioned bits and pieces that can ruin an otherwise prime piece of meat.

Incidentally, if you don’t know where to settle the crosshairs on a deer, you can learn quickly from Mike Kasberg’s Aim for Success laminated poster, just $7 plus incidentals at his Web site. I’d like to see each of his aim points lowered a couple of inches, frankly, but cannot argue with the placements so long as the bullet hits where the rifle is pointed.

Cool It Down

For the sake of argument here, we’ll presume a clean shot and prompt, careful field dressing. Next logical stop for most hunters would be the processor, but Cruz suggested otherwise.

“Once it’s gutted out, put it on ice right away and keep it there for a couple of days,” Cruz said. “Let it bleed out. That keeps the meat tender and nice and colorful.”

Hanging a deer in a cooler for the same length of time before processing, said Cruz, who has 46 years in the meat business, tends to dry it out.

Texas hunters have the option on most ranches of adding a wild hog to the meat locker. Same ranch, same temperature — but different strategy.

“With hogs, you want to do everything (in the field) in about half the time as for deer,” Cruz said. The “other white meat” apparently is that much more fragile than venison.

Larger hogs produce bigger, thicker chops, said Cruz, which some hunters prefer, but the meat of a smaller pig is more tender and a better complement to venison when mixed in sausage. Of equal size, sows make better eating than boars.

Basic cutting and wrapping for deer and hogs costs less than $50 at Pete’s, but extra services and special processing, such as smoking the meat or having some of it made into jerky, can jack up a tab in a hurry. Wherever you process your venison and wild pork, be sure to ask in advance exactly how much you’ll pay for what you want.

Texas deer hunters have much to be thankful for this time of year. A herd of nearly 4 million whitetails comes to mind, as do winters cool enough to keep venison from spoiling quickly but not so cold as to be bitterly uncomfortable while we wait for a big buck to step clear. Read about sausage making tips.

Doug Pike covers the outdoors for the Houston Chronicle and hosts Inside the Outdoors from 6-9 a.m. Saturdays on 790 AM. doug.pike@chron.com