Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting Best state or province to shoot a 300 pound whitetail?

No doubt that mulies run bigger than whitetails. I worked for an outfitter out there for a couple seasons and we saw some real monsters. On the Air Force Academy I once saw a few bucks running together and I'm pretty sure a couple of them would have gone 300 or more... Couldn't hunt them then and there but my trigger finger went to twitchin'....

In my opinion a muley is a lot easier to actually get. We used to take a day off every once in awhile and borrow the horses and spotting one and riding around behind him and doing a bit of climbing and crawling and we usually got our buck. It wasn't rocket science but it WAS hard work.

I rode a mountain bred appaloosa and he had absolutely NO fear of blood or bloody carcasses and we could load a mulie on him and me too and he just grunted going uphill but he always brought home the bacon. I miss that horse. He picked me out the first day I went to that ranch and I never rode any horse but him. I trusted my life to him almost daily and never had a doubt he'd get me through. I think he was half mountain goat.... LOL

Sorry guys.... I'm rambling....

$bob$

LDH: I hear that in CO, a resident is lucky to draw a deer permit these days...don't know how true that is. Have not been there in awhile.

That thing's a pickup truck with antlers!

Bob

Yeah.... I asked a buddy in CO about this recently and he basically told me the same thing...

I guess that's why so many of us from the south just stay here to hunt. We can hunt deer with a rifle from mid October until Mid February and if we hunt muzzleloader and/or bow we can get anoter month and a half... We're spoiled...

Granted our deer aren't as big or as plentiful as some areas but we have all we need and great weather to boot.

Bob

hookem: Yup that's the math...about a 10% success ratio and that is for ANY deer; for a buck it's much lower. If a guy wants to see a lot of deer, pick and choose bucks, Maine is not the place to go. Draw a line across northern Maine, NH, Vermont and the Adirondacks and the hunting is much the same....big, empty woods with low deer densities and "pockets" of deer activity.

Contemplating all this and experiencing it myself is why I consider the Benoits and others like them among the best deer hunters on the continent...they are consistently successful under these very difficult conditions, on bucks dressing 180 to over 250 pounds. But they are not the only one's.

Guys who live there, like JDK, who know the woods, work hard, and are good trackers and woodsmen(rare today)are successful more often than not...but these guys are not married to tree stands, are not "afraid" of getting lost, and understand that a big buck during rut will cover a lot of country, does not follow a "pattern", and know how to hunt them....they take off after them.

This is counterintuitive to someone used to stand hunting in areas of high deer densities, but it works. For example I would bet $10 bucks that JDK might well have killed that 260 pound buck that got bumped into another hunter(unusual up there and just bad luck) because it seems he had snow and a buck distracted by a hot doe....given enough time I bet he would have at least seen him at one point in time during the day.

Of course all this is a lot of work and over the top for someone new to the country. It's the reason I believe very strongly that deer hunting in northern Maine is tougher than anything else I have personally run into, continent wide. IME even central Canada is "easier".

Bob,
Just curious what is the reason for such a low deer density in the upper northeastern states? What would help the deer, some timber clear cutting, controlled burns, etc.?

I an say that I've hunted deer in 8 states and that hunting in the south is the hardest I've done and that is because there just aren't that many deer and there is very little agriculture to give them high quality nourishment. Urban sprawl isn't a huge factor.

Hunting deer in Florida has been the toughest for me. We have so much brush/palmettos that even a very large buck with a head full of antlers can easily sneak by you or disappear right in front of your eyes by just hunkering down.

The easiest was Illinois/Indiana... Lots and lots of deer and plenty of big bucks and they weren't so dang spooky.

The state that seemed the easiest to me at first was Colorado because I saw so many deer on a regular basis but actually shooting one was a horse of a different color.

I've never been in the NorthEast so I can't answer that one but then I'm not the Bob you were asking....

Bob

Not Bob but here are some excerpts from the University of Maine Study on deer and deer habitat in northern Maine. I think it is pretty much spot on. You have to remember that we, on average, get over 110 inches of snow each year (133 in 2013) and deer spend up to 4-5 months in yards.

�Fifty percent of the mature forest area (soft, mixed, and hardwood) was harvested during 1975-2007 in areas within a 1.25 mile buffer outside of protected Deer Wintering Areas (DWAs).

�Nearly all DWAs had harvesting activity within their boundaries; 91% had at least 1 heavy harvest area; 23% of the mature forest area within DWAs was harvested in this period.

�Remnant patches of wintering area are extensively fragmented in Maine and may help explain why deer have declined in areas with severe winters within the Northern Forest region.

�The broad-scale conversion of mature forest to regenerating forest in areas surrounding zoned DWAs� may be indicative of declines in extent of deer wintering habitat throughout the Northern Forest region.�

StrayDog: JDK covered it.

I don't know precise reasons but tough winters have a lot to do with it. There is a lot of logging activity and I guess it affects wintering habitat, which is hyper critical in the northern forests and really what determines deer survival up here. Our herds are really only as good as the winter habitat.

In some areas of NH, like up around Pittsburg, late in the seasons, you can actually see the migration routes as deer come out of the back country headed for wintering grounds near Mt Shatney; same mid state around Groton where I have hunted. Those deer are very single minded in their destinations and will not leave those winter areas until spring.


What would help? I dunno....maybe fewer coyotes, more winter habitat, more second growth and edge habitat(?) milder winters? It's just tough country and does not have the fertility of farm country and winters take their toll.


LDhunter notice I said the "toughest" that I have personally hunted but I have not hunted the south, and know by looking at it that the cover is pretty dense there, too...although I suspect you boys just have more deer than we do..

I know Northern MN, Northern Wisconsin and the UP of Michigan has some big ones up there...biggest one I ever took was south of International Falls, north of Hibbing... weighed about 350 lbs on the hoof...field cleaned at 265 lbs...

that was the 1984 season, but we took some big ones up there every year...pretty much always over 200 lbs..

Four years in a row I took bucks in IL along the Miss. river that all weighed over 200 pounds field dressed (I put them all on a scale). None would have had a live weight of 300. All killed before or early in the rut. Also took two deer in the same area post rut that dressed in the 180's. Rut takes a lot off them. Two did display the long bodies mentioned by others. Here are some pictures.
212 pounds

225 pounds, old deer

210 pounds


206 pounds

Canada is good mule deer country. Growing up in sw Alberta the biggest deer by a fair margin I saw was a mule deer buck.
Some very bigboddied mulies anywhere in BC plus big antlered bucks in Saskatchewan.
Just saying

We have had a few (very few) bucks in the upper Great Plains that have dressed at 220+ lbs, so probably close to 300 live weight. Not a common animal

This buck dressed right about 200 lbs