Vern Evans
I’ve always been a big woods whitetail hunter. I grew up in New England, where deer hunting meant tracking, still hunting, and roving through endless miles of mixed hardwoods and thick pine forests looking to bag a ridge-running mountain buck. It’s one of my greatest passions and what I truly love to do.
So when I moved to Southwest Montana in my late 20s and discovered that the bulk of whitetail hunting there was isolated to wide-open river bottoms and agricultural fields — rather than the surrounding snow-capped mountains and rocky canyons that appealed to my big-woods sensibilities — I was sorely disappointed. Yet, there was another critter hiding among those picturesque peaks that my local friends assured me would give all the rugged hunting adventure I could ever ask for: the mule deer.
Truth be told, I wasn’t all that impressed with mule deer when I first saw them. They came sedately down to the river when I was fishing and strolled up the driveway to my cabin like demure livestock, as self-assured and unafraid as the cows I saw in the surrounding fields. While I thought they were beautiful and cool-looking animals, they just didn’t spark that same feeling of mystery and lust for adventure that their Eastern whitetail cousins had.
I honestly felt like I would miss my beloved big-woods whitetail bucks when hunting season rolled around, but I still decided to give these bulky, floppy-eared deer a try. Little did I know that by the time my first Western hunting season ended, mule deer would change me as a hunter forever.
The Wild Rovers
One of the interesting things about mule deer is that they’re a relatively new species. They evolved around the end of the Ice Age when whitetail deer from what is now the Eastern U.S. pushed past melting glaciers to meet and breed with the blacktails of the West Coast, creating a hybridized species of hardy, adaptable deer that soon populated the recently-formed Rocky Mountains. This makes the mule deer a purely North American big-game animal that has been shaped and forged by the rugged mountains, plains, and deserts of the West.
Because of the harshness of these environments, mule deer have more to worry about than your average Eastern whitetail. First, they are constantly harassed by predators like wolves, grizzly bears, and especially mountain lions. In Colorado, which has the highest mule deer population of any state at roughly 416,000 animals, it’s estimated that lions kill between 100,000 and 200,000 mule deer each year. This can make mule deer extremely cagey and hard to approach, as they are on constant alert, making them a significant challenge for hunters. It also makes them an incredibly fun and worthy opponent that pushes you and forces you to up your game.
As mule deer contend with brutal winters, scorching summers, sparse feed, and limited water sources, they have no choice but to be roaming foragers. They require large expanses of wilderness dotted with multiple food and water sources in order to survive.
Whitetails have an average home range of around 300 to 600 acres, where they will often spend their entire lives. Muleys, by contrast, have both summer and winter ranges. These deer can travel as far as 50 miles in just a few days to move from their summer to winter grounds. One particular herd in Wyoming migrates from the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in the northwest corner of the state all the way to southern Wyoming’s Red Desert every year. It’s a 480-mile round trip that makes this herd the farthest migrating big-game animal in the Lower 48.
The result of all this moving and adapting means that you can find mule deer in a variety of different terrains. From mountain forests and grass-rich bottomlands to boulder-strewn canyons and scrubby deserts, anywhere with sufficient forage and water is likely to hold a mule deer or two, so long as it’s the right time for them to be there.
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This last point is critical, as mule deer hunting is often a game of “here today and gone tomorrow.” In some ways, it’s similar to chasing migrating waterfowl or even herds of caribou. Once you find them, you often have a short window of time to fill your tag. For hunters who love to witness these migrations, and who enjoy exploring wild and beautiful country, the mule deer is the perfect beast.
A Hunter’s Deer
There’s a rugged romance to mule deer hunting. It reminds one of those long ago days before trail cams, tree stands, and target bucks infiltrated our hunting culture — a time when going out and harvesting an animal was done with a little know-how, a reliable rifle, and a good pair of boots.
While there are private ranch outfits and other scenarios (especially around agricultural areas) where it’s possible to pattern a single trophy mule deer buck, it’s an entirely different story on the vast public land tracts of the West. On public ground, a mule deer you see in the evening may be ten miles away by the next day. Setting up a stand and waiting for him to come back is pointless. To be a successful DIY mule deer hunter, you typically have to seek the deer out and go after them rather than sit around and wait for them to come to you.
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This can turn muley hunting hunting into a drawn-out game of walking and exploring, where you climb up steep mountainsides and crawl over rocks, following tracks and other sign through thick brush and dense timber. It often means hiking deep into the backcountry and studying big sections of terrain where you might spend hours and even days just watching the landscape and taking your opportunities as you find them. In short, it’s everything deer hunting should be.
Most mule deer aficionados choose the spot-and-stalk method, where you climb to the highest point you can find and then glass the surrounding terrain with binoculars and spotting scopes trying to find an approachable buck. It’s a style of hunting that requires immense patience. You search for food sources and bedding areas and then pick apart the hillsides and brushy valleys trying to make a deer appear before your eyes.
Other mule deer hunters choose to still hunt, tracking the deer through thick timber and snow. This method gets at the very core of hunting, as it requires you to move slowly and quietly through the forest shadows like a predator would, trying to spot a buck before it spots you and bounds away out of sight and out of reach.
Both methods require little equipment beyond a good pair of boots, a sharp knife, an accurate rifle, and a quality pack, which is essential. Because once you hike into good muley territory, there’s a good chance you could come out heavy.
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Hunters who do their homework and put in the miles will eventually get opportunities on mule deer. Unlike some other big-game species, which can have sparse or isolated populations, mule deer herds tend to be dense. Their populations do fluctuate, and mule deer have their own conservation challenges, including habitat loss, chronic wasting disease, and other isuses. But these habitual herd animals will often return to good food and water sources year after year, giving knowledgeable hunters some chances at success.
Looking at the numbers in Montana, Colorado, and Idaho, success rates for mule deer hunters seem relatively low, averaging around 10 to 18 percent. The bulk of that harvest comes from areas along migration routes, however, where 25 to 45 percent of hunters are actually successful. Outfitters and guides who set up in these areas, especially those with private land connections, can boast client success rates between 85 and 98 percent. This shows that once you find a lonely corner of land with mule deer in it, you’re likely to find a lot of them. And this is especially true during the rut.
Usually occurring between the second and third week of November in most places, the rut is when mule deer bucks give up their normally solo existence and begin keying in on does. Like whitetails, muley bucks are usually separated from does for most of the year, choosing to travel alone or in small bachelor groups. But once the rut begins and they start seeking out hot does, their habits change.
The rut doesn’t necessarily make them more receptive to calls or scents, like whitetails. But it does mean that so long as you find a few does and keep them in sight, it won’t be long before a buck comes along. Their focus on the doe is often so intense that they’ll ignore everything else around them — including hunters — and if you can avoid scaring off his ladies, you can sometimes make moves in plain sight of a rutty mule deer buck without spooking him off.
It’ll be a good buck, too. Even younger mule deer sport a branched set of antlers and a heavy body, and after spending so much time hiking and looking for them, every hard-earned muley buck feels like a trophy.
The Buck Stops Here
By the last week of my first season hunting mule deer, I was desperate. Those cheeky and seemingly un-spookable deer I had seen grazing along the roadsides and strolling nonchalantly across my front lawn during the summer had disappeared once autumn rolled around. In their place was a wary and flighty animal that seemed to bounce away and vanish into the terrain as soon as I scrambled after them. It was an intensely frustrating experience as the deer always seemed to be just out of my reach.
I had almost given up when, around last light on the last day of the Montana hunting season, I glassed a small group of deer feeding in a steep canyon. I grabbed my rifle and crawled up the near vertical canyon walls, popping my head over a small crest to see a doe and a nice 4X4 buck looking at me from 150 yards. Shouldering my rifle, I got the crosshairs on the buck’s shoulder and squeezed the trigger just as the deer started to bound away, dropping him in his tracks. As I walked up and held his antlers in my hands, I could tell something inside me was different.
Nowadays, when I happen across a nice whitetail buck while hunting in the West, I usually won’t even raise my gun. Whitetails will always hold a special place in my heart, but I am now and forever will be a muley man.
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