Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game Which medium big game animal is spookiest.

I'd second Okie John re mature Columbia blacktails in the PNW (not those pseudo blacktails in California!) We're talking real rain deer.

You can spend the money and tag a big mature mule deer or a large antlered whitetail-- but not a mature large antlered blacktail. There are few guides for rain country blacktails, not because of hunter disinterest nor the scarcity of bucks but because guiding for them is a recipe for failure. One of the best blacktail guides said in his Sportsman Show seminar that he counts any blacktail buck with at least three points on one side to be a trophy for his clients.

I live amid blacktails and hunt them plus mule deer and whitetails every Fall. Like Dancing Bear, my experience is that the blacktails are by far the hardest to tag. There is a reason why hordes of coastal hunters in WA, OR and BC don't bother to hunt blacktails where they live and go east over the mountains every Fall to hunt. Many never hunt their local blacktails. I went to a sport show seminar on deer hunting put on by a man from the coast, looking for blacktail info. He started by saying that all of his info was for hunting mule deer because the blacktails where he lived were so difficult to hunt that he did not bother. I slipped out the back.

Mountain lions? No question in my mind that they win the sneaky prize for North America. Oddly, they often don't act spooked or afraid when a human ever gets a rare look at one of them.