USA Whitetail Deer Hunting

Tips for hunting the American whitetail

Wide-Open Whitetails

About a decade ago, a major firearms company invited a pile of hunting writers to hunt deer in eastern Colorado. A few minor hills rise from the endless plains, but the landscape is dominated by grama-grass pastures pocked with prickly pear and yucca. Along the rivers and creeks grow typical prairie trees – mostly cottonwoods, willows and alders – but since water actually flows only occasionally, trees don’t interrupt the view very often. Over toward Kansas more cornfields appear, but these are almost as sparse as the lines of cottonwoods.

The deer in question were both mule deer and whitetails. The whitetail part of the mix still surprises many hunters and is even a novelty to some hunting writers.

This particular bunch was primarily from east of the Mississippi. These men had taken quite a few whitetails in their lives, in states as diverse as Vermont, Missouri and Alabama, and rightfully thought they knew how to find and kill a buck.

So the outfitter, Tom Tietz, gave a talk that first night about how high-plains whitetails often behaved differently than woodland whitetails. Mostly, Tom said, the big bucks tend to hang out in more open areas, rather than the thick stuff mature bucks prefer in country with lots of trees.

I sat at the rear of the room during Tom’s speech, so could watch the boys as they listened. More than a few raised their eyebrows, and one literally snorted (though quite softly). Here was a youngish outfitter telling a bunch of “experts” that they didn’t know much about hunting white-tailed deer!

Tom was, of course, correct. In even the best high plains habitat, deer are spread relatively thinly. While a few big, lush river bottoms, such as those along the Missouri and Platte Rivers, can support deer populations almost as dense as those of Alabama, in the dry hills there are only a few deer per square mile. Since about half are mule deer, finding a whitetail (especially a mature buck) can take some looking.

Consequently, the next morning, the hunters and their guides were spread widely across eastern Colorado. Those hunters not with Tom himself soon asserted themselves over “guides” who were mostly real estate agents, automobile dealers and other self-employed locals who’d agreed to handle the hunting writers for a few days. So when nationally known hunting writers took a look at eastern Colorado and said they’d be damned if they’d look for a whitetail in a cattle pasture, that instead they wanted a tree stand up that cottonwood along that creek over there – well, the guides went along.

By the end of the first day, several writers were grumbling. They’d been given to understand that there would be many good bucks in this country, and here they’d been watching prime whitetail habitat for an entire day and seen only a very few does and fawns.

In the meantime I’d been assigned to hunt one of the bigger drainages around but didn’t expect to see any big bucks right along the bottom. I’d grown up hunting similar country in Montana, so my guide took a nap in his Suburban instead of following me around. I knew that in nice weather (such as we were experiencing in mid-October), the bigger bucks would be far up the side draws, a long way from the thick stuff.

This is because thick stuff is rare on the plains, so every weekend-hunter who’s read about “Finding Monster Bucks!” heads there. It doesn’t take long for the big deer to figure this out and head for the hills. So I hiked the hills along the edges of the timbered creek bottom, glassing carefully along draws filled with high grass and low rose bushes. Eventually I found a good buck, bedded down maybe 100 yards away, who rose the instant he saw me looking his way and ran up the draw.

The rifle was a Browning A-Bolt 7mm Remington Magnum, shooting the then-new Fail Safe bullet, and I knew a 160 grainer would penetrate all the way through a 250-pound deer from almost any angle. This was such a buck, a 5x5 with short tines but a wide spread, and so fat his butt jiggled at each bound.

He ran up the draw almost directly away, so I aimed at the front edge of his right hip, intending to drive the bullet into his left shoulder. Just as the rifle went bang, the buck ran behind the one willow-bush in the bottom of the draw, and one of the half-inch branches tipped over, cleanly cut by the wonder bullet. The buck never hesitated, and before I could once more send him my regards, he was over the ridge and gone. As expected, no blood showed up in the dry grass.

Son of a blooming buck!

Well, that’s the way it goes sometimes. Notable was the fact that when jumped the buck headed for open country, rather than the “safety” of the river bottom. I’d expected that, because unless extreme weather or the rut forces bucks to enter the brush and timber along the bottoms, the majority of mature high-plains whitetails try to escape by zipping up a coulee and across-country, rather than into the low stuff where every hunter has been hounding them all fall.

The eastern hunters didn’t take my story seriously. Oh, they could believe I’d missed a buck, all right, but they dismissed his hiding place and escape route as an aberration. They went back to sitting tree stands along creek bottoms and complaining about the lack of bucks.

The next night a blizzard came in, raging across the plains. By the next morning most highways were drifted over, and very few of our group of hunters could even get to their areas. Mine was close to town, however, so we locked the hubs and ventured forth.

Ten-degree temperatures, 30-mph winds and lots of snow make even pig-fat whitetail bucks uncomfortable, and several had drifted into the thick river bottom. An hour after dawn, I killed a good 5x5 with a 150-yard offhand shot as it rose out of its bed to get a better look at the idiot hiking through horizontal snow. My hunting partner Gary Clancy killed a heavy-antlered 4x4 by tracking it down, less than 200 yards from where my buck fell. By the time we gathered Gary’s buck and mine for hero photos, the sun had come out, the wind had died to a normal prairie breeze, and the temperature had climbed to above freezing.

Of course, the eastern boys took our bucks as hard evidence that they’d been hunting the right places all along, and nothing Tom or Gary or I said could change their minds. By midday the sun and warm breeze started melting the snow, and very rapidly. Of course, the bucks we’d found in the river bottoms that morning dispersed into the hills again.

Luckily, some of the less-unhappy hunters were willing to take mule deer. This freed some of the insurance agent/guides to go back to their offices, where clients were impatiently waiting to sign hot whole-life policies. Tom Tietz himself could therefore take more hunters, and he did not let them hunt the way they wanted to.

Soon more whitetail bucks started falling, including a good 4x5 killed in a jumble of badlands draws. On the next-to-last day, the most skeptical of the eastern boys missed a shot at a huge buck that Tom found bedded along a cutbank in a cow pasture. All the whitetail bucks already taken were very nice, with antlers scoring between 130 and 150 Boone & Crockett points. The buck this guy missed was much bigger. After that he shut completely up, ending up taking a small buck on the last day. Who knows what might have happened if he’d taken Tom’s advice earlier?

So the eastern boys went home humbled – but not necessarily wiser. I read some of their articles about the hunt, and many were constructed around the thesis that whitetails have recently “invaded” the western plains. Like the myth that whitetails always prefer thick cover, this could have been put to rest by a little research. (Most hunting magazines, however, are not into historical research, generally preferring catchy themes such as “Whitetails Invade the Dakotas!” or “The Three Phases of the Rut!”.)

The fact is that whitetails were indigenous to almost the entire continent – including the high plains and southwestern deserts – long before Europeans bumped into the East Coast. Lewis and Clark, two centuries ago this very year, ate about as many whitetails as elk and buffalo as they journeyed across the Dakotas and Montana.

The Corps of Discovery kept many records of its trip, published in various books long before the current Lewis and Clark fad, all detailing the presence of the whitetail across much of the West. Here they were sometimes called “Virginia” or “common” deer (to differentiate whitetails from the mule deer, which Lewis and Clark discovered and named) but were also often called the “long-tailed fallow deer,” as they somewhat resembled the fallow deer of Europe. Somehow the biological record in these volumes (and those of subsequent nineteenth-century explorers) has escaped many whitetail hunters.

The myth of whitetails invading the high plains apparently began when whitetails were almost wiped out by the soldiers, cattlemen, miners and homesteaders who infiltrated the region in the late 1800s. These typically whacked away at whatever wild meat they could. Back then most drinking water on the high plains came directly from a river, rather than water towers or a plastic bottle purchased at the nearest 7-11 store. Hence most travelers were forced to follow the major rivers. For more information on whitetails, see our Missouri Whitetail Deer Hunting page for more information.

Later, steamboats and railroads followed the same rivers, and homesteaders naturally first took up claims along permanent watercourses. So the whitetails that lived along the streams got hammered and in some states disappeared entirely. Kansas, apparently, was without any whitetails for several decades.

In the twentieth century, a few deer started coming back, some naturally and some through transplanting by game departments. The Dust Bowl days of the 1930s slowed down this comeback, both because of the lack of water and because of many hungry, jobless people. But the 1940s brought an end to the drought and the Depression, and since many able-bodied hunters spent time elsewhere during World War II, the deer did what whitetails naturally do: They reproduced like crazy.

Soon whitetails were found in areas where they hadn’t been seen in the memory of most living humans. We have already noted the lack of historical enthusiasm among many hunting magazines, and the same can be said of most people. In the 1970s and 1980s, I even became acquainted with older citizens from eastern Montana who complained bitterly about whitetails “taking over” the countryside from their beloved mule deer. These citizens were unhappy that whitetails (unlike mule deer) rarely stood still while a hunter eased the muzzle of his .30-06 out the window of a pickup. They also claimed that whitetails drove mule deer from the country, because whitetails were “more aggressive.”

What had actually happened, by and large, is that mule deer came back first. This was partly because mule deer do better when dealing with dry country, the sort created by the Dust Bowl. Many had hung on in patches of breaks and badlands, where the two-wheel-drive pickup trucks of the day rarely traveled. As a result there were more mule deer to begin reproducing when conditions changed during the war. Eventually these started spilling into easier country, where they could get whacked during a drive-by.

Eventually the mule deer population started dropping, due to several factors, and whitetails started multiplying. Hunters found more whitetails in river bottoms, and the mule deer ended up in the steeper hills, country where they thrive.

However, this was not due to “aggressive” whitetail bucks driving mule deer away. There’s rarely a fight during any confrontation between whitetail and mule deer bucks (just as bucks of either species really don’t fight all that often, even among themselves). Instead, the showdown is normally resolved by the buck with larger antlers chasing off the buck with smaller antlers. Because mule deer tend to have larger antlers, they often chase off whitetails.

I have seen this time and again where both species exist, a common coincidence on the high plains. In no case, however, does the “defeated” buck leave for the next county, hanging his head in shame. He just runs into the next patch of trees, or the next juniper draw.

No, the high plains were not invaded by whitetails. They just reclaimed their normal place, though sometimes farther back in the hills than they used to be in Lewis and Clark’s day. There’s more water and food back there, for one thing, due to stock dams, deep-water wells and center-pivot irrigation.

High-plains whitetails, like whitetails everywhere, make the best of their surroundings, and are just as good as other whitetails at figuring out hunters. When looking for a mature buck in the wide-open spaces, I generally look at any small thing breaking up the flatlands. Over the last three decades, I’ve found them bedded under a single juniper tree, in the taller grass along a four-strand barbwire fence, next to a farmer’s rock pile in the middle of a wheat field, and in the bottom of a shallow “washout” in the middle of a mile-wide coulee that contained only shin-high wild rose bushes. Sometimes you can find their antlers poking out of such sparse stuff, but sometimes you just have to get out and jump them up, shooting them “on the fly” as my old hunting partner Ben Burshia put it.

This has gone out of style in modern whitetail hunting, though older hunting books were full of notions on how to hit running whitetails. While ranges on the high plains may be longer than in New England forests, the deer are just as big and really not all that hard to kill with the right rifle (see sidebar).

My first really mature plains buck was the one bedded under the lone juniper. This tree grew on the rim of an otherwise barren hillside, near the head of a long coulee in northeastern Montana. In many ways it was an archetypal high-plains hiding place, since just a few hundred yards down the draw a lot more cover grew, in particular a big patch of cattails surrounding a stock pond.

But this buck chose the juniper and was unlucky enough to be there when I came over the ridge directly opposite him, around 100 yards away. The buck got nervous and started running, and I led him a little too far with my .270 Winchester, hitting him behind the right ear. This caused the buck to roll like a shotgunned rabbit into the bottom of draw – and his left antler to flop down alongside his head. He was not exceptional, just a good 5x5 with about an 18-inch spread, but he confirmed a lot of what I’d been learning about mature whitetails in open country. His antlers are still my favorite pair of “rattling horns” today and have suckered in a number of other whitetail bucks.

Whitetails are fast runners but not long-distance runners. They cannot, for instance, run 25 miles per hour for 5 miles or more, like a pronghorn. So even if you miss a buck (or don’t get a shot), plains deer can often be followed up, particularly early in most rifle seasons when the weather is warm and the bucks are wrapped up like hot dogs in prerut fat.

Sometimes they will run most of a mile, but with good optics these can often be followed with glass, and the precise place where they stop can be stalked. But just as often a buck will run only until he’s out of sight, say over the nearest ridge into another draw, and stand there watching his back-trail. This is exactly how many whitetail bucks act in timber, but on the plains we can see them – and often fool them by not precisely following their trail.

It has always astounded me how many open-country hunters trudge right to the exact spot where a deer crossed a ridge. This is exactly where the animal expects you to show up. Instead, head downwind a ways and come over the ridge from another angle – and vewwy, vewwy carefuwwy, as that noted hunter Elmer Fudd puts it. If you crawl across a ridge 100 yards downwind from where a whitetail buck crossed, you can often get a prone shot at him as he stands in the next coulee.

Of course, the rut helps just as much on the plains as anywhere else. In the morning and evening, bucks will be out looking for or following does. Some hunters think this makes them too vulnerable in open country. Maybe, especially the younger bucks. I, on the other hand, am perfectly willing to take advantage of any weakness on the part of a big whitetail buck.

In reality, the habits of mature high-plains whitetail bucks closely resemble those of mule deer. They will even “invade” the breaks and badlands when trying to avoid hunters. Which is why truly careful hunters, who know how to use optics and flat-shooting rifles, often do just as well on prairie whitetails as they do on mule deer. Such hunters also usually do far better than any hunter who assumes that all whitetails everywhere behave exactly the same. If you are looking to hunt black bear in the US, see our USA Black Bear Hunting page to learn more.

By John Barsness

This article and many more like it can be found by Successful Hunter Magazine. Visit them at www.successfulhunter.com