The Beginner's Guide to Hunting Deer for Food (Beginner's Guide To... (Storey))

This is a decent introduction to hunting deer for the non-hunter.The first 1/4 of the book is spent explaining deer behavior and society. Important to any hunter, you must understand the prey. Mr. Landers does a good job of explaining relevant details of deer, and in particular relating those details to hunting strategies. I found this section to be the most valuable and interesting of the book.The next 1/4 of the book is spent discussing weapons - rifle, shotgun and bow, with a brief introduction to each of them, pros/cons of various choices, information about how a person would go about making a decision, an appropriate warning about bow hunting (I agree, not for a first-time hunter), and finally a rifle recommendation (which I also agree with) - get a .308 with a pre-mounted and sighted-in scope. One problem is Mr. Landers' recommendation of a fouling shot and his explanation of why it matters - while not incorrect, he's missed the real issue here (my background is long-distance shooting, and I have a lot of experience). For a competitive shooter, with a precision (expensive) gun, using hand-loaded ammunition, they will note a difference in shot-location between a clean and a dirty barrel (and it's not clean vs. 1 shot, it's more like clean vs. 5-20 shots). The rest of us will not. HOWEVER, the real issue is cold-bore vs. warm/hot bore. At a gun range, firing a string of shots, you develop a hot-bore zero. That means your scope reticle (crosshair) ends up aligned with the bullets fired from a warm barrel. Give your barrel a couple of hours to cool, and fire it again, and you will notice that the bullet is "off" - you missed by some margin. This is not really a miss - it is your cold-bore zero. On my Remington 700, in .308 at 100 yards, my cold-bore zero is 1 inch left and 1/2 inch down from my hot bore zero. That means, on my first shot of the day, I will consistently "miss" the bullseye by that same amount (the bullet will impact roughly 1 inch left and 1/2 inch low of where I aimed). The second shot is closer to where I aimed. Somewhere between the third to fifith shot, the barrel warms enough to settle on the hot-bore zero, so that I can't tell the difference, and the rounds land right where I am aiming. This is a much more significant issue than clean vs. dirty bore and really starts making a difference at distances of 300 yards. As to the fouling shot recommendation, I'd recommend as an alternative to just run a clean patch through your barrel and wipe the oil out before you hit the field. If you don't shoot that day it just takes a few seconds to re-oil the barrel in the evening.The next section deals with tactics and there are some good recomendations here. This is where my next issue arises and you see the author's bias for local hunting (extremely local, as in his backyard) appears. Most of us do not have access to property where we can shoot deer, so there's some information that just doesn't matter. That being said, most of the information is relevant and the tactics useful to all hunters.The next sections are on taking the shot and following up, with good introductory info tracking, waiting, what can go wrong (and how to handle those situations), and ethics.Finally, in the last section deals with field dressing and here's where the bias for local hunting again appears, with more impact. Shooting a deer in your backyard and being able to get it into your kitchen within a few minutes is one thing. It's another thing to be 5 miles from trailhead, in the field, doing it. This section is not well-enough illustrated or explained for a first-timer. I've field-dressed game and found some of the explanation to be a little confusing, and as many others have pointed out, the lack of illustrations is a drawback. I recommend that Mr. Landers add a lot more drawings to this section (field dressing and processing) and include information about wrapping the meat for travel back to trailhead assuming we are some distance out, if another editon is in the works.I'll note that there is a lot of good information in this book and this is the FIRST book I've read on hunting deer, so it may deserve more stars if comparisons to other books are made. I recommend it (with the above caveats).

For a novice hunter, this book will serve as a pretty good introduction to the basics of deer hunting and understanding their behavior.From what I've read about Mr. Landers' locavore deer hunting class, this seems to be a written version of that class -- heavy on the evolution, physiology, psychology, and behavior of deer, with some of his own experiences, which are somewhat helpful. The first three chapters are dedicated to understanding deer, their anatomy and biology, and deer evolution. The next few are on possible weapons and tactics for hunting, then on where to aim. The last are devoted to the kill and post-kill, including field dressing, butchering, and cooking your kill.As far as some of the other items the book promises, it under-delivers. Specifically, you won't find specific information about "learning your local regulations" or "finding good places to hunt," other than advice to check your state's rules and regulations, then check out public parks, wildlife refuges, military bases, etc. for public hunting. Granted, the laws vary from state to state (including which weapons are permitted and when), but for a book that promises this, I think a few paragraphs for each state would have been helpful -- even if it was as an appendix.Also, I think a few reviews (or recommendations) of specific guns or bows would have been helpful for a new hunter, rather than descriptions of the various kinds of weaponry that could be used in deer hunting.Mr. Landers does offer a pretty good description of how to field dress a deer, but I think it would have been better to have this section equipped with step-by-step photographs, rather than the occasional drawing. In fact, there are only two drawings accompanying the field dress section: one showing where incisions should be made, the other showing where to cut around the deer's colon. There's a series of three drawings accompanying the butchering chapter, which are decent, but again -- you'll probably find yourself Googling actual photographs, or buying another book with more specifics on how to butcher your deer. I've seen better step-by-step drawings in free printouts that some states offer, so I was pretty disappointed that more detail wasn't shown to this section. After all, once you get past the reality of taking an animal's life, I think the biggest setback a potential hunter has is the difficult task of butchering his prey.Lastly, as far as recipes, I only counted nine. For a book dedicated to "hunting deer for food," I was expecting there'd be a bit more than that. Plus, he confesses that he doesn't care much for offal, so no recipes are dedicated to cooking deer organ meet -- which, in my opinion, should have been included, regardless of his own preferences. Chef Fergus Henderson published a few good venison organ meat recipes in Field & Stream in 2004 (Google "adventures in venison") for venison heart, liver, and kidneys, so check that out if you'd rather not waste these tasty viscera.Bottom line: if you're looking for some background on the species, and some introductory material on deer behavior, this book will serve as an excellent resource for that, but for more recipes, regulations, and hunting locales (which the book promises), you'll need to find a secondary source. Fortunately these secondary sources should be easy to find online for free, so you'll still probably consider the $11 or so you spent on the book money well spent.

Looking to take up deer hunting and decided to start my learning with this text. I'm glad I did. Probably not a great book for the experienced hunter, but for a total beginner, it was very comprehensive and made the whole process seem achievable and much less intimidating. Deer behaviours, choosing a proper rifle/weapon and calibre, tracking, shooting, field dressing and butchering...there's even a few recipes. This covers it all, pasture to plate.