Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting Toughest buck to kill??

I second this. I have many times gotten night time game camera pictures of some monsters that we never killed or even saw in daylight. Hell I never even got a daytime game cam photo of them. Some of the oldest and biggest whitetails where I hunt can become so nocturnal they are virtually impossible to kill by any legal means. They only move late at night and can get everything they need in a pretty compact area so they don't move around very much at all. And the woods are so thick here you can't move through them quietly enough to slip in close to his bedding area. These are the kind of bucks that you usually only saw get killed on deer drives using dogs back long ago. Even then they learned that game pretty well too and would often slip out of an area at the first sound of a dog bark or even a tailgate dropping open. Many a stander missed a shot opportunity back when we were running dogs because they didn't expect an old buck to slip out before the drive even really started.

I used to think that I was a pretty good sign reader and stand picker, but after opening morning here on public land, all bets are off. The big guys that make it through opening day aren’t where they were where someone could get an easy shot at them. A lot of the bigger bucks that I’ve tagged weren’t because I picked a great stand site, it was because some other hunter bumped them into me. On public land we have atv riders, berry pickers, leaf lookers, nature walkers, bird hunters and several months of archery season. Anything with antlers gets pretty paranoid post rut the third week of November.

Toughest for me were the bucks in the mountains of western VA (GW National forest) in years when there was a bumper crop of acorns.

They'd feed at night and lay up in the laurel thickets during the day, you couldn't go in after em, or at least sneak up on em. But if you were walking down the trail in the dark either before or after shooting hours, you'd be jumping deer right and left.

Never had the experience to hunt anything but blacktailed deer here in California I hunted the coast for what some would call true blacktailed deer and for the last 20 years have been hunting the central sierras. Where they class them as a mix between blacktailed and mule deer or the name California mule deer. I’ve been fortunate enough to harvest a few about 10 or so and the hunting can be quite hard especially as the years tick by. This is my personal best but have seen bigger up in those mountains. Hunting public land is no joke in California lots of hunting pressure and we don’t hunt the rut for these deer. Maybe one day I’ll have the chance to hunt whitetail or true mulely.

Big woods mature Whitetail buck in a high pressure state. Hard to pattern, large home areas and outside the rut, can be ghosts. More luck than anything to put the time in and be in the right place at the right time. They best way IMO to hunt these is still hunt by cutting a track in fresh snow ala Hal Blood.

Even then you have to really know the terrain features and the lay of the land to get close.

I have never hunted Blacktail deer, only Whitetail. But that one looks like a Dandy. I would be happy to have him on the wall. Welcome aboard.

Over the years i have hunted deer, Starting in 1950 till now, having never hunted Black Tail, but I have hunted all the other species mentioned here, the really old White Faced Mule Deer, of the high desert country are hard to get to and hard hunting.

South Texas Brush Country White Tail, old bucks 7-8 1/2 yr. old, oldest i have killed 12 yr. old bucks, are cagey, and you can't crawl threw the brush on your hands a knees where they live, they do come to water at night drink maybe 2-3 min. and leave they don't stop for corn or a protein feeder, or a hot doe they leave, I have seen one old big buck that only came to water every 4 th night. Takes a lot of time and skill to dig them out of the brush country. making a good shot is the easy part of hunting them. Rio7

Had the pleasure to hunt this one for 3 years the 2nd year I had him dead to rights at 20 yards for whatever reason my faithful knight muzzleloader hung fire the following summer I saw him in velvet in my hay field several times and that rifle season we finally connected . Constant trail cam photos of him haunted my dreams . I’ve killed a lot of nice bucks but this one tested my limits