Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting How many guys hunt NW blacktails?

I am curious how many people have hunted them and if you ever hunted Eastern Whitetails yes their is difference?

Sitka blacktails, Columbia blacktails, eastern whitetails, western whitetails, Couse whitetails, muledeer -- all species and subspecies have differing behaviors. One of the great features that makes hunting fun... .

Dennis

The only deer I have hunted is blacktails. Killed about... 22 of them I think now. But who's counting.

I may be hunting a primo mule deer tag this year. I have the points, it's just whether I want to do it this year or not. To be honest- I'm a little skeered <grin>! I know how to kill a blacktail every year... not so sure I know how to kill a mule deer in the sage & juniper.

Wow, JO's count had increased by 6 in a year, lots of Oregon tags.

Easy when you shoot into bushes.

I've hunted blacktails every year since I started hunting except for two. Hunted muleys those years. Never hunted a white tail.

I have hunted here in Oregon, of course for blacktails. Several good sized ones taken. 175lb, 210 lb and one about 235 pounds. ( all well fed suburban deer, fatten'd up by California transplants feeding them in the backyards..)

I've also hunted whitetails in Minnesota, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Virginia and No Carolina.

Blacktails are definitely more challenging..

I haven't hunted outside of Oregon, but from what I see on TV I'd have to say Blacktails are more challenging mainly because we don't have feeders set up in front of heated shooting stands every 100 yards.

Zing!! Now there's a can of worms!

Blacktails, here in the Willamette Valley, tend to move around, depending on the season/water and food dependent. So, be ready for them to disappear, once you find them.

I agree, access is the key issue. As forests have been turned to clear-cuts, the deer like the early-successional stages. Then, after while, the brushy mess grows together and chokes out the light and food. Finding open land to hunt (non-private) is also a huge issue.

The main thing is stealth and patience. They're not magical. Just learn their pattern and don't move much; or, walk around like a hiker and they won't fear you.

Good hunting!... Ken

I have hunted several deer species, and there is definitely a difference. Blacktail in California, Oregon and Washington; mule deer all over the West; and whitetail in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

What is harder depends on where you can get access...jim

I hunt blacktail at over 4500' elevation. I'll be up there this year in all likelyhood. I'm not very good at it, but at least there are mature bucks to hunt.

Think I've about 50 blacktail racks in the rafters (two buck annual limit).
Look forward every single year to the pursuit.
This year especially due to the sheds found recently on new turf we hunt!

This one looks like a Booner.






Hello Baltz.
I've spent quite a bit of time in LaPine.
Got family there.
Taken some pretty damn nice muleys there over the years as well.

I have hunted them on and off for about 40 years. I have never hunted White tails so I was curious. I have tried to hunt a specific buck a couple of times and have never been able to pattern them. I have kept charts and weather and wind patterns ect. I got one but not where I expected to see him go figure. I have never had the experience of hunting on farm land only Timber company. So I was just wondering how they compared. Because I think hunting big BT bucks very difficult I have seen mule deer and shot them in the same area but Black tails just seem to ghost away some times.

I have hunted blacktails all my life. I think that they are one of the hardest animals to hunt. It is easy to kill a smaller buck 2 or 3pt getting an old mature buck is very difficult at least here in western washington. I am not sure if it is there habits that make it difficult or the amount of brush terrain that keeps them out of site most of the time maybe a little of both but I think that ghost is a good way to describe them.

It's been many moons since I hunted them in the Willamette Valley (1975). I started hunting mulies in Eastern Oregon and got used to spot and stalk. The terrain in Western Oregon makes hunting them a unique challenge. The vegetation is very dense and they appear/disappear in a wink. Move very slowly, stop often and glass.

I grew up hunting whitetails in Texas and Oklahoma. Now I hunt blacktails in western Washington. People say a blacktail doe is about as spooky as a whitetail buck, a blacktail buck is about as spooky as a trophy whitetail buck, and a trophy blacktail is off the scale. That pretty well squares up with my experience.

Access and pressure are a huge part of the equation. Blacktails on public land are extremely difficult to hunt because the logging roads go deep into the woods and there aren't enough game wardens to catch all the poachers. But that all changes if you can find a spot that's remote enough, or if you can get access to private land that poachers don't touch. In some places, pressure from native hunters is a problem, but those are easy to avoid. Deer on tree farms don't usually get very big because the forage quality is poor. That said, I've seen HUGE deer in the middle of some of the smaller towns here, where they live on apples, strawberries and lawn clippings.

I'm too impatient to sit and look out over a clearcut, so I slip through the woods and still hunt. Opinion on the best guns for the job is open to debate. I've had luck with magnum revolvers and peep-sighted lever guns, but I prefer a scoped 308. It will slip a bullet through a hole in the brush, which I've done more than once. All things considered, good binoculars are probably more important than your choice of weapon.


Okie John

Piggy-backing on your post, John,, 'cuz it's the same situation down here, in OR,,,

A .308, loaded with a small pill, at lower velocities, is quite effective.

I recently read a biologist paper that claimed evidence was that Mule Deer derived from Blacktails, I always thought id was the other way around from back in my animal science days. At anyrate, I have hunted all species in the US and find that ALL the big daddy shooters are just as tough as the next. They dont get big and mature by being dumb, no matter the species in my experience,land and area might be different and make a tougher hunt then the other is all.

Roger that. All of the most experienced deer hunters I know -- and by that I mean hunters who have hunted tonnage of mulie, whitetails and blacktail -- are virtually unanimous in their belief that a trophy blacktail is generally the toughest animal of the bunch to hunt. My own experience suppports that theory.

That may be one reason I have some very nice trophy whitetails and mulies on the wall -- but no wallhanger blacktails... to date.

Of course, if anyone in NW Calif. or SW Oregon wants to help me out with that, I'd love to discuss the options.

A Wyoming Game & Fish officer told me once that in his experience, he was generally surprised at how successful California hunters seemed to be while hunting in his state.
I have a hunch it is because we hunt blacktails in July and August in 100 degree heat in dry, brushy, vertical country.
When they get to hunt somewhere else in October, it almost feels like we are doing something wrong.