The MeatEater

Think of the piece of public hunting ground closest to your house. You know, that property 15 minutes from town that has multiple trucks in the parking lot every weekend throughout deer season. As you drive by, you probably think to yourself, “How could that property possibly be worth hunting? There’s probably a ladder stand chained to every other tree. Surely if I’m willing to drive a little further from town, I’ll find a secluded honey hole, seldom explored by other hunters.”

The truth is, with the ease and convenience of GPS hunting apps, everybody else is e-scouting those honey holes and making their own plans for November. Modern public land hunting has changed, and it pays to go against the grain, which includes hunting overlooked spots.

Back to that local and “mediocre” property. These spots can be low-hanging fruit. With any luck, the hunting pressure at your local public stomping ground may be more recreational, which leaves space for dedicated hunters to explore. The deer living on this kind of highly pressured ground know where to go when the season begins, and they’re probably used to having humans around.

Hunting pressure is fairly predictable, and hunters are likely hitting the same spots each year: those with convenient access points, easy walking, or picturesque turkey woods. But if your local public ground doesn’t look like good deer country, you should be excited. Deer need food and security cover to survive, and believe it or not, they can thrive on more than just acorns and ag. If you need more convincing, look at all the giant urban bucks that are killed each year. That spot close to your house doesn’t need to scream “deer habitat” to hold them.

Since that local public is essentially in your backyard, you should scout it frequently. Take your dog hiking during the offseason and explore every nook and cranny. One quick walk-through of the property won’t cut it. Get familiar with the terrain and plan to make plenty of notes and waypoints. Cover steep terrain, the back side of a swamp or cattail slough, the thicket with poor visibility and no shooting lanes, or that hard-to-reach corner. If the property is 200 acres in size, you’re looking for the 5-acre chunk that’s more productive than the remaining 195 acres combined.

The truth is, you likely won’t have much time to scout that awesome far-away spot. If you’re fortunate to have access to hunting land near your home, you’ll have way more time to scout. The more scouting you do, the more productive you’ll be during hunting season. Focus your scouting efforts near home and expand your radius over time.

Even if you don’t find the holy grail of hunting spots, maybe you find a spot that’s a solid 5 out of 10. The reality is, if you’re only able to hunt weekends, you’re probably restricted to 10 days of unimpeded deer hunting. And that’s only if everything goes according to plan. Identify a spot close to home, and you might pull off a few weeknight hunts. Even if your newfound area doesn’t incite dreams of giant whitetails, you have zero chance of shooting a deer from the couch. More intentional time in the field gives you more opportunities.

If you’re a busy guy or gal with tons of after-work responsibility, maybe the proximity of this spot affords you a quick observation hunt. During your scouting missions, find a spot just outside the core deer-holding area that you can access with low impact. You only need an hour or two for a worthwhile hunt. You can be a lot more productive with a workweek hunting spot in your back pocket. It never fails, that awesome cold front always happens mid-week, leaving you daydreaming at your desk. That quick-hunt option can give you a real shot without having to use vacation days.

You should be realistic about what to expect from these spots and pleasantly surprised when you see more or bigger deer than you anticipated. If you can get used to hunting unorthodox spots that don’t scream deer country, you’ll open up a lot more opportunities for yourself. Who knows, your new best spot might have been under your nose all along.

Researchers were capturing fish on a recently restored floodplain in Mississippi last month when they tangled with an absolute brute: a 7-foot 10-inch alligator gar with a whopping girth of 55 inches.

Solomon R. David, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota and a highly regarded gar expert, was leading the scientific effort on October 20th with students and several staffers for The Nature Conservancy, including Scott Lemmons. His team had received guidance from US Fish & Wildlife Service Fisheries Biologist Kayla Kimmel. The researchers were capturing, measuring, and tagging gar on Loch Leven, a floodplain lake of the Mississippi River that had been reconnected thanks to support from The Nature Conservancy and the Farm Bill. The project is especially important for alligator gar conservation, as dams and levees along the Mississippi River Basin have cut off the slow-growing species from spawning habitat.

To capture alligator gar, David’s team uses a special, braided gillnet that reduces mortality. After setting the net, the team watches the floats it’s attached to and immediately pulls the net whenever there’s movement. On the morning of the 20th, David told MeatEater that his team captured a five-and-a-half-foot alligator gar, a six-footer, and even, a seven-footer. Then chaos struck.

“I’m starting to bring up the net, and I just see this gigantic head,” David said. “I knew when I saw it rising from the depths that it was one of the biggest and widest alligator gar I have ever seen.”

David and three other folks used the “burrito method”—wrapping the net around the gar and using it to hoist it—to get the fish into the boat. David said the fish’s flopping was particularly strong as it hadn’t been tired out from a fight, as fish fought on hook and line often are.

“Once we get it in the boat, the fish thrashes, and this thing’s head smacks me in the face, shattering my sunglasses,” David said. “It knocked all four of us down.”

Instead of bringing the heavy fish ashore to conduct measurements, David and his team took measurements while they could with the fish still in the boat. Then they took a genetic sample and tagged it. The fish was seven feet, 10 inches long. More impressively, it had an estimated girth of 55 inches. David estimated its weight at around 300 pounds.

For comparison, the IGFA All-Tackle World Record came in at 283 pounds. That fish was 8 feet, 4 inches long, but may have had a smaller girth than the gar David documented this fall. The biggest gar ever recorded was an 8-foot, 5-incher inadvertently netted by a commercial fisherman in 2011. That fish weighed 327 pounds with a 47-inch girth.

David says that finding such a big gar, which could be anywhere between 50 and 90 years old, at the site of a recent restoration project is a good sign for the broader conservation of the species. “It’s exciting to see that there are giants still left after what we’ve done to these river systems. And it reiterates the importance of these critical ecosystems,” he said. “It’s important that we continue to conserve and restore these floodplain habitats. Seeing these giant fish using them suggests that the restoration projects are effective.”

To release the fish, David said that he and his team had to tilt the boat over to get it back into the water. It swam away safely. “It was just unbelievable,” he concluded. “For someone who has studied these fish for decades, it really was the fish of a lifetime.”

Want to hear more about gar from Solomon David? Check out this recent episode of the MeatEater Podcast.

Hosts Spencer Neuharth, Steven Rinella, and Ryan Callaghan interview angler Sean Konrad about his myriad of world record catches, play another thrilling round of MeatEater Price is Right, and chat with Steve Powell of North America Diving Dogs about training pups for the pier.

Watch the live stream on the MeatEater Podcast Network YouTube channel.

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Never give up. Brent's got two good examples on this episode where that old saying was put to the test. It's great advice, but there comes a time when other responsibilities may take precedence. Knowing the difference between the two is just as important. Harness up! It's time for MeatEater's "This Country Life" podcast.

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Father and son John and Hayden Lowe were charged late last month with several counts of animal cruelty and obstruction of justice after allegedly shooting two pet dogs while hunting from treestands on private land in LaPorte, Indiana, then attempting to cover up the crime.

On Saturday, October 21st, the owner of the two dogs–a beagle named Josie and a chocolate lab named Bear–noticed that the beagle’s GPS collar had stopped sending signals. She went to the collar’s last recorded location on the property next to hers and found Josie’s body. The dog had been killed by an arrow. According to the charging documents filed by the LaPorte County prosecutor, the police later determined that the entrance wound of the arrow was high up on the dog’s body, indicating that it had been shot from above.

Trying to find out more, the dog’s owner contacted another hunter in the area after seeing his social media posts, and the police interviewed this hunter to investigate further. He had been in a nearby treestand that morning and had seen the dogs heading into the property. He heard the dogs moving through the forest before they yelped in distress and fell silent. Critically, this witness never heard the animals bark.

Climbing down from the stand to investigate, the hunter then found 58-year-old John Lowe, along with his 22-year-old son Hayden, who was dragging a chocolate lab down a fire lane between the properties. John said the dogs had charged Hayden aggressively, causing John to kill them, and now the pair were looking for a place to discard the dog. However, John Lowe also asked the other hunter not to tell anyone, adding that he, quote, “took care of a problem for both of us.”

It’s not hard to read between the lines here. Of course, no hunter is glad to see dogs making a ruckus near their spot in the deer woods, but to kill those dogs is downright diabolical.

The Lowes then dragged both dogs to a separate property, hiding them in the woods, and proceeded to destroy Josie’s GPS collar. The Lowes appear to be many things, but criminal masterminds, they are not.

Police soon interviewed John Lowe, and his statement was full of contradictions: he said the dogs had charged him, not his son (as he had claimed to the hunter witness). He said the dogs had been barking and snapping aggressively, even though the witness heard no barking. He couldn’t explain why he hadn’t contacted the police or animal control about the aggressive dogs, or how the dogs could have threatened him and his son while they were up in tree stands. He said he wasn’t motivated to kill the dogs to prevent them from scaring deer away, but he did admit to dragging the bodies off the property to conceal them.

Neither of the Lowes have a prior history of criminal activity or hunting violations, and their trial is set to start on January 14th of next year.

MeatEater spoke with Captain Derek Allen of the LaPorte County Sheriff’s Office, who said the incident had deeply dismayed the tight-knit community. “I had a coach at a youth athletic event approach me twice in two weeks to express his ongoing shock.” He went on to say that hunters and other participants in the outdoors, like farmers and dog walkers in the area, typically have respect for and trust in each other.

On top of the cruelty of the crime is the absolute gift this kind of thing is for anti-hunters. Shooting dogs from treestands is exactly the kind of cartoon-villain behavior that gives hunters a bad name with the general public, and animal rights groups work hard to convince the world that all hunters are this cruel.

So if you’ve had success in the deer woods this season and are inviting your non-hunting friends over for some venison diplomacy, maybe invite a few more people. That way, we can do all we can to counteract the influence of the Lowes and hunters like them.

Feature image via La Porte County Sheriff's Office Facebook.

Paul Hutchinson's suicide was his final act of cowardice. He saved himself the pain of facing his community, not to mention Danni’s family. Meanwhile, his actions introduced a whole new level of pain and confusion to those who knew him and cared about him. Those people have been left to grapple with questions without the opportunity to ever have them answered. In this episode, we talk to Paul's family, friends, coworkers, and hunting partners to ask whether there was any indication in Paul's character or behavior that he'd killed an innocent girl nearly 30 years ago. We also talk with investigators and a forensic psychologist to determine the likelihood that Paul committed that horrible atrocity and then went on to live a normal, crime-free life. Was Danni Paul's only victim? Or will law enforcement find a string of crimes in the same areas he traveled to hunt turkeys, waterfowl, and big game?

Want more Blood Trails? Check out this episode's Case File.

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In this episode of Spike Camp, Rich Froning discusses his recent rifle elk hunt, and recaps the trip with Scott and Watkins. Watkins goes through his first hunting experience and discusses how his training held up to the challenge the mountains provided.

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This week on the show I’m breaking down my 2025 rutcation to Iowa and sharing with you the decisions I made, the tactics I used, and the mindset I had that ultimately led to this being quite possibly my best rut hunt ever.

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This fall, Nick Schmitz, of Grand Forks, North Dakota, killed an absolutely massive bighorn sheep that stands to set the new state record. The story of his hunt began when he drew one of the most coveted tags in North America: a North Dakota bighorn sheep tag, of which North Dakota Game and Fish (NDGF) allocated only eight for the 2025 season.

“I had gotten a call from Game and Fish and wasn’t able to answer,” Schmitz told MeatEater. “Brett Wiedmann left me a message telling me to call him back ASAP. I was worried I’d done something wrong, even though I didn’t think I had. But when I called him back, he got right to the point and said I’d just drawn the hardest tag to draw in North America.”

In 2025, 21,221 hunters applied for the tag, making the draw rate 0.03%. Filled with “crazy excitement,” Shmitz soon called David Suda, a buddy he’d originally met back in high school. Suda happened to be one of the few people familiar with North Dakota bighorn, having shot the current state record after drawing the once-in-a-lifetime tag himself in 2020. Since then, Suda had heard of another massive ram in Western North Dakota.

“I have a bunch of buddies that work out there, and one of them sent a group chat a picture of this ram along the side of the road in the springtime,” Suda said. “So when Nick called and told me he’d drawn the tag, I told him the hunt was going to be something special.”

By opening day this fall, Schmitz had scouted his hunt area several times but hadn’t seen the giant ram. In the meantime, he and Suda ran into the hunter who’d bought the Governor’s Tag—and learned they were pursuing the same critter with the help of guides.

Schmitz was joined by Suda, his father, and his brother-in-law, Tim, on the hunt. That first morning, after parking the truck, they bumped a ram about 300 yards from the truck. It was snowing, and they couldn’t tell how big it was. They tried unsuccessfully to catch up to it.

The group switched spots and glassed up a group of sheep of seven or eight ewes and three or four rams. Tim, the brother-in-law, suggested pursuing one of the rams, but Suda encouraged Schmitz to hold out for a bigger one. It’s a good thing he did.

That evening, they went to another spot, which Schmitz describes as “good sheep country,” characterized by steep ridges. Suda had seen sheep there before. It was a difficult spot to reach, which Schmitz and Suda hoped kept some of the other hunters from being there. Suda, walking slightly ahead, spotted the ram first. Then Schmitz glassed it.

“He had 11 ewes to himself and seemed comfortable where he was at,” Schmitz said. “I was just looking at him and was amazed by the sheer mass. Out of all the rams we had seen, you could tell, like holy smokes, he had some serious mass to it…Suda turned to me and said, ‘this is the shooter.’ I kind of had a panic attack. I was bent over on my knees trying to control my breathing because the moment was just, boom, there.”

Schmitz soon got into position, using his brother-in-law Tim’s pack as a rest for his .270 Winchester rifle. He had a 345-yard shot. He got comfortable, dry-fired, then chambered a round. He took a shot with the ram quartering slightly away. Video footage shows it was a clean miss—just inches from the ram’s horns—but Schmitz didn’t realize it at the time, since the ram seemed to stumble on the shot. As the ram started jogging up hill and away, Schmitz fired another round, and then another.

“We didn’t know where he was being hit, but you could tell he was hurt at that point because he was slowing down,” Schmitz said. “Then he gave me a broadside shot, and I put the last round in my gun right into his shoulder.”

The ram went down, and Schmitz and his buddies started screaming and celebrating. Getting to the ram on the opposite ridge required a roundabout route in steep country, and by the time they got to it, it was dark. But they found the ram.

“My first reaction was, ‘Wow,’” Schmitz said. “Looking through the scope was one thing, but seeing the mass in person was unbelievable. It didn’t look real.”

Suda, too, was shocked by the ram’s horns. “I knew he was big from the pictures and the spotting scope, but he was way bigger when I got up to in person. I was blown away by his mass.”

That evening, Schmitz and Suda met up with Wiedmann, the NDGF biologist who primarily works with the state’s bighorn sheep population and coordinates with hunters who draw tags. Wiedmann told MeatEater that the state boasts trophy bighorn because of abundant forage and limited hunting opportunities. He’d been aware of the sheep Schmitz shot for several years.

“I first saw him when he was about 5 ½, and he just had such mass,” Wiedmann said. “I watched him year-over-year. I knew he was pretty nice, but when they dropped the tailgate to show me him, I was shocked. I was like, man, that ram is actually a monster.”

The ram was 10 ½ years old when Schmitz shot it. The horns had a length of 39 ⅞ inches, with base circumferences of 17 ⅜ inches. The ram green scored 197 6/8 inches, which stands to easily top Suda’s record sheep, which came in at 186 3/8 inches. For reference, the largest hunter-killed bighorn ram taped 209 1/8 points Boone and Crockett and was killed in South Dakota by Clayton Miller in 2018. After the 60-day drying period, Schmitz will get his trophy officially scored.

“I was blessed just to draw this tag and be able to go on this hunt. You’re one of the luckiest guys in the state just to be able to do that,” Schmitz said. “I knew I was going to be successful when I gave Suda a call and he said he would join and help out. I didn’t have any expectations of breaking a state record. That was all just bonus, man.”