Hunting and Fishing News & Blog Articles

President Donald J. Trump is a friend to Sportsmen and Women of our Country!

Howdy and welcome back to the “Straight Shot Blog”. I’ve enjoyed writing for Bowhunting.Net for a few decades now and it’s always great to be a part of archery history. Robert Hoague, the founder, was a true visionary and had the very first archery-only website on the world wide web – clear back in 1996. He is an archery pioneer and was the first to see the potential of this new medium. I told him that he had single-handedly invented an “electronic” campfire that was going 24/7 all over the world where bowhunters could gather and share stories, photos, successes, and failures in the field, and anecdotes. It has allowed me a place to share my adventures on the road performing instinctive archery exhibitions and share the places I go and folks I meet along the way. It’s also been a place where we have documented the stories of some of archery’s greatest living legends in their own words with the “Celebrity Interviews.”

Due to the Covid virus, I have been unable to perform my shows since March, which means I have missed walking out on stage and doing what I do. However, I have been fortunate to have been invited onto the National Board for Sportsmen for Trump.

I joined about 30 folks from across the United States to speak out on behalf of President Donald J. Trump and how he has been a friend to the Sportsmen and women of this country. I would add he’s also been a firm supporter of the Second Amendment. If you notice, the President puts the spotlight on the criminal and not the gun.

Back Up, You’re Ripping My Head Off!

After bucks shed their velvet they want to engage with other area bucks … and show them how tough they are. There are several ways for them to do this, but my personal favorite is when they spar with other bucks. Sparring is practice fighting. And there are times when that fighting practice heats up and the fight gets serious.

A few years ago on opening day of bow season, two nearby bucks locked horns and it got rough. The older buck pushed his foe off balance and, using his thicker antlers, yanked the other buck right off his feet and slammed him on the ground, back down, with his white belly straight up … and promptly gored him brutally.

The bucks have been mixing it up this year, too. This morning, before daylight, several deer shadows took shape where I was watching from a ground blind. After daylight, a buck humped his back up and stiff-legged toward another buck.

He lowered his antlers down to where the other bucks antlers were and began pushing on his antlers as well as his body. As much as anything, that stiff-legged buck wanted to take over the exact place the other buck was standing. Then they locked horns very briefly and pushed and twisted.

Frank Addington Jr.’s Straight Shot Blog is Back on Bowhunting.Net

Howdy! It’s been a while since I’ve written my regular “Straight Shot” column or conducted a “Straight Talk Celebrity Interview”. Recently I talked with Collin Cottrell and decided it was time to bring the column back and so we will resume this as a regular featured blog on Bowhunting.Net.

I can’t remember the last time I checked in, so let me catch you up on how things have been going. I hope that you and your family and friends are well. 2020 started out as my 35th year on stage doing “Frank Addington’s Amazing Archery”. For new readers, I’ve done instinctive archery shows since the 1980s. I grew up in the archery business, my parents own and operate Addington’s Bowhunter Shop in Winfield, WV. My family and I live in South Texas. Both my sons shoot archery and have been on stage with me.

My parents are both avid bowhunters. They’ve bowhunted together their entire marriage, which has now been 58 years! My mom took her 20th bear with a bow at age 72! They continue bowhunting and running the business together. They were wonderful parents and made sure I always had a bow to shoot and a place to shoot it.

I started archery in 1971 at the age of 4. I shot competition archery, bowhunted, and shot on my family’s ranges from an early age. As fate would have it a few role models came along that greatly influenced me. Rev. Stacy Groscup was a major hero, role model, and family friend. His father Baptized my father when he was born. As a kid, I tossed targets for Stacy and when I turned 18 he tossed a Pepsi can into mid-air and challenged me to hit it. I did and that very day he put me on stage.

Fred Bear was another family friend that had a big impact on me. Fred knew how to promote archery and so from him I was inspired on how to present archery to the general public and get them interested in becoming active. Fred was a great man and I learned a great deal from him.

A Cool Video of Tim Wells Bowhunting for Texas Rattlesnakes

The Slock Master Tim Wells and team take you on a bowhunting extravaganza for deadly Texas rattlesnakes. You’ll see Tim sneak up on a fat Texas rattler and put an arrow in it. Then Tim shows you how to skin it and prepare the delicious rattlesnake meat.

Also included in this action-packed bowhunting video is Tim’s daughter and casino in deutschland, Sydnie Wells, home from college, and she downs a big wild turkey Tom. Cameraman Dakota gets his first gobbler. And Tim slocks a wild hog.

It is an absolute pleasure to see them. Young bucks that are special in some way, compared to their peers. They’re the ones that have wider antlers, or have more than 8 points, have longer tines than the others, or their antlers are noticeably heftier. Or weigh a bit more and have longer bodies.

I call them, “Bucks of the future.”

Yesterday one of my trail cameras had some cool pics of just such a buck. He is a 1 1/2 year old buck; with wider antlers than most his age. His rack is slightly bulkier too.

My game camera picked him up as he walked out of the trees and picked up a scent that got his attention.

Deer Scouting With A Trail Camera

Deer Scouting with Trail Cameras is a mixed bag. Sometimes the pictures are clear and have deer or other wild animals in them. Sometimes the images are blurry and the deer, etc. in the unclear pictures look awful. Other times something bumps your camera and changes the area where you are taking pictures.

But, all in all, disregarding any pictures that are no good, trail cameras are a swell way for you to learn what is in the area you have the camera pointing at. The pictures we are looking at today are from the same area as the previous trail camera pictures were.

Here are two does. They both are moving through the camera area from east to west.

Later on, a doe comes through west to east and a little bit closer to the camera.

A spike buck was our next visitor. It appears to be walking toward the stob that some of the deer in the previous pictures were checking out.

Garmin Xero A1i Auto-Ranging Digital Bow Sight

Gone is the problem of correctly judging yardage when that big buck steps out during bow season. Enter the Garmin Xero A1 Auto-ranging Digital Bow Sight. An LED bow sight with built-in rangefinding capability.

Take the guesswork out of targeting game this year with the Garmin Xero A1 Auto-ranging Digital Bow Sight. This LED bow sight slottica casino from Garmen has built-in rangefinding capability! The Xero A1 sets the pin for your shot, even if it is an angle-compensated distance. It precisely measures from where you are to your target up to 100 yards away (300 for reflective targets).

In addition to eliminating the estimating required for angled shots and in-between distances, this system also lets you see your target, unobstructed by the physical pins found on a traditional bow sight. Operated by a single button, this sight lets hunters silently range the target at rest or a full draw.

The versatile design of the Garmin Xero A1 lets bowhunters choose red or green LED pin color and preferred pin setup, offering single pin, multiple pins, or manual pin selection. These LED pins automatically adjust the brightness to conditions, ensuring a clear pin in any hunting condition. The Xero A1i also allows you to save pin settings for various bow configurations for instant readiness in different shooting or hunting situations. This bow sight also saves data from shots, such as bow level at release, bow impulse duration, and more, to help you improve your shooting performance.

This advanced design also works with Garmin’s Laser Locate feature on compatible Garmin GPS devices (not included) to know exactly where the target was when the shot or range was taken. Uses 2 AAA lithium batteries (not included). Pin size: Red: .007″ and above, Green: .009″ and above. Anti-reflective and water-resistant coatings on lens. IPX7 water resistance rating. Available in right or left-hand configuration. Wt: 14.7 oz. The sight includes mount, screws, protective carry bag, grip tape, micro-USB cable, and manual.

Follow These Tips To Have More Shed Hunting Success!

I’ll never forget the sight. More of an excuse to get my kids out of the house than anything, our “shed hunting” trip didn’t last long. But… it didn’t need to either. Barely peeking out of a fresh crust of snow, two tiny tines were reaching out toward the sky. I hollered loudly for my dad and sons… similar to how I get everyone’s attention when the first morel mushroom of the season has been found. “Guys… check it out, my first shed…” The boys, both quite young, were less than impressed, but my dad thought it was pretty cool. A small fork horn shed, from a buck, we passed all season long. With a bit of fresh blood and hair on the pedicle, I could tell it hadn’t been off for long. I think God wanted me to become a shed hunter because he certainly blessed me with the gift of that shed antler. As soon as I touched it I felt something primal. Man has been obsessed with antlers for countless generations, and being the first human to hold this antler felt amazing. Ever since then, I’ve tried to learn as much as I could to become a better shed hunter.

Working in the outdoor industry has allowed me many cool opportunities. I’ve had a chance to work with most of the big celebrity’s in the industry and learned a lot from them along the way. Recently when talking about spring content, I suggested shed hunting. I know for a fact I’m not the only one out there who is interested in learning more about this sport. Shed hunting is becoming an international obsession, and for good reason. Everyone can be involved, and it can be as challenging or easy and one makes it. Not only are shed antlers from all sorts of animals worth a lot of money, but hunting for them is a great way to involve the family, and as I did with my kids — I get everyone outdoors for some fresh air and exercise. I also like the scouting opportunity and the chance to plan future stand locations.

The first rule to remember when shed hunting is that the greatest chance of finding shed antlers will happen in areas that bucks were frequenting during the “shedding” season. Depending on latitude, the shedding season usually begins anywhere from December through April. Usually in my home state of Michigan bucks shed sometime in January or February. Strangely enough, many hardcore shed addicts that I have spoken to have pointed out that some bucks will shed within a day or two on the calendar each consecutive year. (I thought that was interesting) To best identify when bucks have shed, some hunters still run trail cameras. Others simply do a lot of glassing and long-range observation. One of the trickiest parts about shed hunting is self-discipline. Some overzealous shed hunters hit the woods to scour bedding areas a bit too early each winter and end up sending antlered  bucks running to all four corners of the wind. When an antlered buck hits the highway in the winter, there’s no telling where those sheds will fall. Adversely, the longer a hunter waits to look for sheds, the greater the chances of them being chewed up by rodents. Me personally, I like to wait until March. Most decent-sized antlered bucks have shed by then, and the chances that the antlers are still intact are pretty high.

I take an inside out approach to shed hunting, by first starting to look at winter food sources. In my experience, the greatest chances of finding a shed antler are where the hungry bucks had to aggressively dig and paw for food. I then walk the trails hoping to catch an antler or two that got knocked off by brush, or at fence jumps. After that, I scour bedding areas. I have also heard and noticed for myself that big bucks will drop their antlers near each other. Due to the unbalance on a bucks head with only one giant antler, the buck will soon become annoyed and work to get the other side to drop. Younger bucks don’t try to shed as much because the weight difference of only one antler isn’t as noticeable to them with small antlers.

As with anything, when you talk to a few people, you’ll likely hear a few different opinions. Here’s what a few other passionate hunters have to say about shed hunting.

Here’s how a whitetail deer eye works!

This is the short story of deer vision. To understand how a deer sees you need to dissect a whitetail’s eyeball, and that’s just what we are going to do. I located an organ donor at my deer processor and am dissected an eye that we’ve all seen thousands of times. However, I’m guessing that you have never seen a deer eye from this perspective.

An eye brings in light reflected from objects and changes the light into electrical signals that are sent to the brain via the optic nerve to be interpreted as images. How that is accomplished varies between mammals.

The specialized eyes are a deer’s second layer of defense.

With a deer eye, the light is brought in through a pupil. The iris is a collection of radial muscles that open and close the pupil opening. A cornea covers the pupil opening. The cornea is the clear outermost layer of the eyeball. It is where your contact lens would sit.

The unique aspect of a deer’s pupil is that unlike ours it is elliptical (a slit) rather than round. They have a cat-eye design. Because of this fact, the pupil can open extremely wide to let in lots of light. In a deer, it actually extends the entire width of the eye. This wide pupil is part of the reason why a deer can see so well at night.

Here’s 5 Common Turkey Hunting Mistakes That We Make

Wild turkey gobblers can be great at outsmarting us. Turkey hunters often give gobblers too much credit in the smarts department. Usually, when a turkey eludes us, we did something that was not so smart and gave him the advantage. Here are five common turkey hunting mistakes you should avoid making to give you a better chance of bagging that ol’ longbeard this season!

1. Returning to the Same Gobbler Every Morning
It’s really tempting; you know that he’s there, you know he’s probably going to gobble and you know what he’s going to do after he flys down off the roost. The thing is, you’ve been there and watched this show four days in a row, and you haven’t even been close to getting a bead on him. You need to let this relationship cool for a few days, maybe longer. Let this turkey do his thing for a while (maybe some of his girlfriends will sneak off and leave him), and after a week or so, you can show up refreshed and ready to take up the battle once more. Hunting the same turkey every day can get boring, and the season is too short for that. Strikeout and find a new gobbler to talk to — who knows, you may find a hot two-year-old that comes running in when you cluck one time.

2. Worrying About Your Calling
So you can’t turkey calls like Ben Lee or Ray Eye, that’s ok, the turkeys don’t care anyway. All that’s required to call in a gobbler is the ability to make a reasonable imitation of a hen yelp—that’s it. Sure, it’s nice to make fancy purrs, cackles, and clucks — and they can help for drawing in a stubborn tom—but the fact is, if a gobbler is ready to respond to a call and approach what he thinks is a hen, it doesn’t take calling-contest-level turkey talk to fool him. If he gobbles, answer with a few yelps; if he gobbles back at you, yelp again, then shut up, get your gun up and be ready. This may be all it takes.

3. Complaining About the Season Being Too Early or Too Late
I think this happens in almost every state. When your state game department sets the spring season, odds are good that at least half of the state’s turkey hunters will complain about it. “The season is too late!”, “By the time we get to hunt, they’re all gobbled out!” You’ll hear this all season, mostly from unsuccessful hunters. Maybe we should give the biologists that set our season dates a little leeway. Most turkey biologists will tell you that turkeys go through a couple of different cycles of gobbling activity, and the idea is to get as many hens bred as possible during the first peak of activity. This will hopefully give you a good hatch and continue the population. The season is often set during the second peak of gobbling so that hunters can get on vocal birds while a lot of the hens are on the nest. The point is, it’s spring; the turkeys are out there doing their thing, stop complaining about season dates and go hunting; the turkeys don’t have a calendar, anyway.

Photo by @jtaylor_creative

The All-New 2020 PSE NOCK ON EVO NTN 33 Bow Featuring John Dudley

In the span of the 50 years since Pete Shepley began Precision Shooting Equipment, Shepley’s company PSE Archery has been responsible for more breakthrough innovations in modern compound bows and archery equipment than any other single manufacturer in the archery and bowhunting industries.

For 2020, PSE Archery has joined with bowhunter and archer John Dudley of Nock On Archery. John is widely known for his social media following, the #NockOnNation, his podcast, and online videos about archery technique, shooting instruction, bow tuning, and gear selection and setup.

At the ATA Archery Trade Show in January, PSE announced Dudley’s custom design innovations on the new 2020 NOCK ON® EVO® NTN 33. This latest PSE bow is custom-designed by John Dudley in conjunction with PSE’s R&D and manufacturing facility.

Here’s a first look at PSE’S NOCK ON EVO NTN 33 that features John Dudley’s custom innovations.

These advancements include John Dudley’s innovative D.T. Rest Mount that totally cancels movement of the arrow rest when the arrow is launched. It eliminates even the slightest movement of the rest.

Silent Knight is the revolutionary new Arrow Vane from Flex-Fletch Products

As a life-long bow and arrow shooter, and a dedicated whitetail deer and wild turkey bowhunter, I’m always interested in new gear, and particularly in completely new products that will help me shoot better, more accurately, and be more consistent. At the ATA Archery Trade Show in January, my friend Vince Grundman from Flex-Fletch Products showed me a new twist on the popular arrow vane for fletching arrows. It’s called the Silent Knight vane. It is very impressive and it definitely can help us shoot better, more accurately, and be more consistent as bowhunters.

QUIETER:
Whitetail deer hearing is acute to the nth degree. If noise is made, even the faintest sound, deer can hear it. Add to that their fraction of one second reaction time, plus the fact that they are always on alert and one step away from topping 40 mph it’s not puzzling that thousands of bowhunters experience their arrows miss. The new Silent Knight vanes are wholly designed to suffocate the sound of the arrow in flight. Silent Knight vanes use the very newest materials and incorporate unique design features, plus extensive product testing that results in spectacular arrow flight improvement that dramatically reduces misses.

*Independent sound studies prove that the Silent Knight vanes make just half the sound of any other vane, period.

FASTER: 
Remarkably, thanks to the aerodynamic shape of Silent Knight vanes, their thin tapered design and thoroughly smooth surface, arrows fletched with Silent Knight 3-inch vanes are a full 2-fps faster than the same arrows fletched with a 2-inch thermoformed vane!

DESIGNED FOR MORE:
The exclusive precision RIM molding manufacturing process makes Silent Knight vanes 30% thinner and with a much greater taper than the thermoformed vanes. And, the Sliqtra cured memory resin is much smoother (and more slippery) than other vanes. All of this contributes to the dramatic reduction of in-flight drag.

Introducing The 2020 Bowtech Revolt Bow

The new Revolt bow from the leading contemporary bow engineers at Bowtech Archery was crafted for today’s varied types of bowhunters.

Bowhunters who hunt the West for mule deer, elk, and antelope prefer a bow that is compact enough to carry through the Aspens and Pines and slip through thick brush in the high-country terrain out West.

Accordingly, the Revolt is a short bow with a 30-inch a2a (axle-to-axle) that has a dual cam with a chasm-like 7.25-inch brace height that is perfect for this country — and produces 335 fps IBO.

Also, it fits perfectly inside the popular ground blinds that are in use today all over the U.S.A. And, of course, it’s right at home in a treestand. It’s smooth enough on the draw that it doesn’t lurch away from the shooter’s hand when the cams break over.

But, the big story here is one of the more innovative features on any 2020 bow, Bowtech’s new DeadLock cam tuning and locking system that allows the cam to be adjusted. It slides back and forth on the axle slightly via a simple limb-mounted lock. When it’s tuned perfectly, another set screw is tightened down so the cam position is locked in on the axle and the bow stays tuned.

Lazyman Stands are high-quality and affordable

Donny Carmical knows how to build with fiberglass. Years ago he established a business building fiberglass swimming pools, waterproofing for waterfalls and koi ponds. Then, 20 years ago Donny came up with the idea that he could make a great deer stand out of fiberglass.

Originally, it was just a personal mission, however, after building a couple of dozen fiberglass blinds some friends asked him to sell them to the public. So he did. And the rest is history.

Now, 10 years later, and with thousands of his Lazyman Stands in the deer woods all across America, Donny and his family continue to hand-make every all-fiberglass, hunting stand from their manufacturing facility in Cabot, Arkansas.

A buck walks past a LAZY MAN blind that is sitting inside the edge of the treeline.

Pound for pound, dollar for dollar and feature for feature, LAZYMAN is the best hunting blind on the market. Select windows sizes are perfect fits for either bow or gun.

Hunters are the leading the way for wildlife conservation

Hunters get a lot from nature every season through new memories, insightful lessons, lasting friendships and – occasionally – delicious meat. Therefore, it’s fitting that we do a lot for wildlife through conservation, which we’ve been doing the past century.

Our Conservation History

Today, though, we have about 1 million elk and 34 million whitetails. This amazing turnaround came through legislation and cooperation between hunters, trappers, and anglers in conservation organizations.

American hunters are tied to a proud conservation heritage that began over 100 years ago to protect and manage the nation’s wildlife and waterfowl. That effort ended market hunting, which decimated deer, elk, pronghorn and buffalo herds; as well as bears, turkeys, swans, geese, and other once-vast populations.

By the early 1900s, less than 50,000 elk and 500,000 white-tailed deer remained in our country. Today, though, we have about 1 million elk and 34 million whitetails. This amazing turnaround came through legislation and cooperation between hunters, trappers, and anglers in conservation organizations.