Mexico in December, Mike Whelan, Brent Deal, Jeff Van Well and Enrique Molina

We had a great start to hunting Coues deer in Mexico this year. A lot of the ranches we are hunting  look very dry and the cattle on them look like they are going to have a hard time unless they get some real good winter rains. But the Coues deer looked like they were in great shape and had a good year on horn growth. I filmed a couple of hunts and out of three guys we took two really nice bucks. Jeff Van Well’s buck pretty much set the bar real high. It has a few extra points but is really a straight 3×3, that grosses about 125 B&C. Jeff really is good with a camera and I was able to film the entire hunt, it is one of the largest Coues deer I have filmed being taken. A bit later Brent went out on his own and shot a totally unique 11 point 119 inch toad! It all made for a great hunt.

Some notes from the hunt: I did see a what I thought was a huge number of deer for what the ranchers say has been a very dry year. These sightings also included a very high number of does with twin fawns. Seemed odd to see this on such dry year. We did see a bit of rut activity but most of the bucks we saw were still in groups. More in January, good luck on your hunts.

Kyler Barton, Joe Barton, Tim Tanner and John McClendon,

My daughter Kyler really enjoys hunting. She started hunting big game when she was 10 years old.The first tag she drew was a mule deer doe tag. That was a lot of fun to see my daughter glass for deer. It was incredibly impressive for me to watch as she shot her deer with a Remington 270 at 246 yards. It was her very first kill and she took it with one shot!  Then to be able to dress out the deer with her younger brother and her great uncle, what a great memory it made. As a father at the time, I thought this might be the best hunt ever, to be outdoors with my daughter and having the time of our lives.

This year 2009 she drew a junior’s deer tag and a bull elk tag. Her elk hunt was a great from the start, we scouted for four days and hunted for five. On this hunt she really got to experience what it means to say, early to rise and late to bed. Every day she met great people and made new friends. It just happened that we camped next to John McClendon and he had finished his hunt by the fifth day. John offered to go with us and call bulls for Kyler and we accepted his offer. The morning of the fifth day, after about a one mile walk in the dark, we found ourselves surrounded by bugling bulls. John was going to do the calling, Tim was running the video camera and I would be with Kyler as her coach. Kyler and I set up with her rifle on a bipod, Tim set the video camera up and John started to call. It wasn’t long and a nice 6×6 came to within 50 yards and Kyler made a perfect shot, she was tickled and so were we. Tim captured all the action on film for a lifetime memory, it was a great experience for all.

I will tell you it is hard to beat a day hunting with your kids! A big thanks to Tim Tanner and John McClendon for helping us out on Kyler’s  first elk hunt and also for hauling out the bull.

Joe Barton

Robert Barnes and John Mcclendon.

I wanted to do a short recap of my Arizona elk hunt with John McClendon. I was fortunate enough to draw an early rifle elk hunt for the northern part of Arizona. This area is known for producing giant bull elk and I was very excited. The trick in this unit was to find one with all his antlers intact. The weather was unusually warm for the first few days of the hunt. This probably had some affect on the rutting activity in the area. The rut was much slower than usual for this time of year. John has hunted the unit for many years and said it was definitely a strange year, as far as rut activity went. What bulls did bugle, quickly quieted up after sunrise. Without John’s experience and calling ability it could have been an extremely tough hunt. I have killed a number of mature bulls in the past and have done some calling on my own but I was amazed at John’s ability to call and mimic elk sounds. Several days into the hunt John was able to call this nice bull out of some thick cover, with all his antlers intact. I was able to put a 200 grain Nosler Accubond from my 8 MM Remington Mag. in the right place. I just wanted to thank John and McClendon’s guide service one more time for the excellent bull and the great hunt that I had in Arizona.

Bob Barnes

2009 was tough on us, on the archery elk hunt. Both Mike and Chris had great tags and hunted the whole two weeks. Chris shot a nice bull with his Mathews Swtichback XT and Shuttle T-Lock broadheads, and did it on the second to the last day of the hunt. Where we hunted there was not a lot of intense rutting, more like the bulls had a relaxed hunt. We videoed only one broken bull by the end of the hunt. Mike waited and waited, and tried to get on one really good 7×7 bull. We saw him, took some video of him at a distance but never got close enough for a shot. We did get some great video of bulls, mostly on water, some of those hunting shots for our DVDs are going to have to be Mike’s trophy this year.

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The McClendon family had a great time bow hunting for mule deer hunt this year. Travis and Levi shot really nice bucks using their new Mathew’s Reezen bows. These guys combined the new bows with their Shuttle T-Lock broadheads for two shots and two great bucks. They will bring the whole hunting story with more pictures soon.

Mike Whelan, 7-2009

Even though we have begun to get a little rain, it is still hotter than hell as I sit here at home in Arizona. Yesterday it was 105 degrees at three in the afternoon. It helps a little bit to look at some of the elk video we took almost three weeks ago on our first scouting trips for archery elk. It was a bit cooler and we got some spotty rain while we were scouting at a higher elevation in elk country. A good friend of mine Mike Miller and his brother Chris somehow managed to draw archery elk tags in one of the best elk units in Arizona. So we have started our scouting, hoping to find a good bull or two. This time of the year, along with glassing, you have to check waters. Traditionally we have looked for tracks around these waters, many of which are trick tanks. For those of you who are not familiar with trick tanks they are constructed water catchments, built by the Game and Fish Department to supply water to game and non-game animals when water is scarce or far from feed sources. Now days more and more hunters are using trail cameras to scout these waters. This year, I don’t think we went to one trick tank that did not have one or more cameras on it. We also use cameras and they do work remarkably well but I personally still like to look for tracks, sit the waters and glass the areas, to actually see what bulls are there. So far we have seen a couple hundred elk, filmed about forty bulls, saw one really good bull ( no footage) and found tracks of three other bulls that we would really like to see. For us that is a pretty good start for our 2009 archery elk hunts.

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Mike Whelan 5-2009 AK

I thought I would never be an addict but now I think of May and all I can see is hunting big black bear on the beaches, maybe add a little crabbing and then throw in some halibut fishing just for fun A good friend of mine Brent Bunger and I went on a six day black bear hunt with Dave Benitz of Petersburg, Alaska. We went the second and part of the third week in May this year. Our goal was to video and hunt a couple of good black bear. On the morning of the first day, an opportunity for a stalk happened very quickly, I hustled on to the beach after Dave, carting my Mathews DXT and decided to to try a stalk. Thirty or fourty minutes later I was thirty five yards from a good black bear. We had two cameras rolling when I managed to slip a Shuttle T-lock broadhead behind the bears front shoulder. He went about seventy yards and piled up just off of the beach. That left Brent with a whole week to play with about sixty black bear that we would see. Both Brent and I wore Advantage Max-1 camo, which works very well for us in the Southwest, although we did have some concerns how it would look on these beaches. We will let the video of Brent stalking some black bear show you how well it works. Brent must have hunted and passed on between ten to fifteen huge bear before he decided, on the last day we had to hunt, to pound a big black boar on a cold, rainy beach. What a great hunt, we single handedly put a dent in the dungeness crab population, caught six halibut, shot two bear and saw over sixty bear. It is hard to explain how much fun the hunt was. I guess the best way to explain it is to say that we already booked for next year. All these hunts and more will be on Bear Stalker 2, this bear hunting DVD, to be released May 2010.

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Coues Deer Hunting

I brought a little bit of coues whitetail video back from Mexico this year. I wish I had been carrying my bow when we ran into this buck. The closest I got was about twelve yards.  A lot of the coues bucks we saw were rutting very hard this year. This guy was determined that he wouldn’t leave if the doe stayed.

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