Reflections of a Die-Hard Bowhunter

By Mike Rex

The author poses with a wall full of impressive Buckeye bow bucks taken over the years, including his 2005 megabuck that scored 218 6/8 non-typical and graced the January cover of North American Whitetail.

 

When I first took an interest in deer hunting, if I learned about a veteran hunter’s technique for harvesting big deer, I would usually take it to heart. After all, he was the expert and if it worked for him, then why not me? After I had a few seasons under my belt, the realization began to sink in that there’s never a “never” and never an “always” in the whitetail woods. If I was going to increase my luck, I knew that I would have to adopt some basic principles that applied to my particular situation.

Over the last 30 years, I’ve developed a strategy through trial and error that, combined with a little luck, has helped to keep my taxidermist busy. These are a few of the things I’ve learned that have helped me get close to a handful of mature whitetails in the area I hunt. Not everything I do is necessarily in line with “conventional wisdom,” and some of my techniques may not apply to every area that whitetails roam, but these strategies certainly have helped me on occasion.

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