Don Higgins / Higgins Outdoors

Don Higgins / Higgins Outdoors Higgins Outdoors is a multi-faceted business offering a variety of services and products

I’m looking for a ranch in Texas to hunt with about a dozen friends next winter. It needs to be a first class establishm...
07/30/2025

I’m looking for a ranch in Texas to hunt with about a dozen friends next winter. It needs to be a first class establishment with a wide variety of native and exotic game and nice lodge with excellent food. Does anyone have any recommendations?

07/30/2025

Since it is velvet season, todays clip is of some velvet bucks from the summer of 2019. Both of the bigger bucks in this clip are on my wall today. The older buck with the flyer off his right G-2 I shot that fall at 6 1/2 years old. He is the buck I showed on the first video I posted a few days ago when he was a 3 1/2 year old. The other one is Mel at 3 1/2, the year before I shot him. These bucks were on their summer range, miles from my farm. Trail cameras and such are all fine and good but there is no substitute for time in the field as long as it is done right. By that, I mean not in a bedding area or sanctuary.

07/29/2025

As promised! This clip was filmed just a few minutes after yesterdays clip. I have carried a video camera on every hunt I have been on since December 1, 2004 and this is one of my favorite clips that I filmed in that 20 years. If you want to kill true giants, you gotta pass some really really good bucks. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesnt. In this case, it all fell together the next season. Smokey added 20 inches and I killed him on October 15, 2017. Gross score - 206 6/8"

07/28/2025

This clip is of Smokey from 2016, the year before I shot him. I passed him 5 times that year, all on video. I found his sheds later that winter and scored them at 186". At the time, he was the biggest buck I ever passed.

Tomorrow I will post another clip from this same encounter which was filmed right after this one. I consider that clip to be one of my best video clips ever taken.

07/27/2025

There is an interesting story about this buck. I filmed this clip on Halloween evening 2018. The buck rose from his bed in some really thick cover 60 yards from my stand at least a half hour before quitting time. I got some footage of him with good light but he was in thick brush and its hard to get a good look at him. As the woods started to get dark, he walked over right under me and eventually wandered out to the woods edge and out of sight. It was the second year I had layed eyes on this buck and had several trail camera photos of him. I'm guessing he is 4 1/2 years old here. A few weeks later he was killed during gun season 2.6 miles from where I filmed this video.

07/26/2025

I'm sure many of you are as fired up for fall as I am so to help us all bide our time, I am going to start posting a daily video clip of bucks I have passed over the years. These clips will be over the last decade or so and all will be of bucks that are no longer alive. Some of them are bucks I later killed but many I did not. These videos will all be unedited clips so some will be better quality than others. I hope you enjoy watching them as much as I enjoy reminiscing about past hunts.

This first buck is one that I called "The forked tine buck" for obvious reasons. I killed this one 3 years later when he was 6 1/2 years old. He is 3 1/2 in this video.

It’s almost time to plant those fall food plots. Do you have your Deadly Dozen from yet? It keeps the deer coming throu...
07/25/2025

It’s almost time to plant those fall food plots. Do you have your Deadly Dozen from yet? It keeps the deer coming through the entire hunting season and into the following spring. It’s hands down my favorite fall planted food plot.

I had lunch with a wise young man yesterday who shared some profound insight into the world of consistently successful b...
07/24/2025

I had lunch with a wise young man yesterday who shared some profound insight into the world of consistently successful big buck killers -

“A lot of people think about and talk about killing giant bucks every day but few actually work towards killing giant bucks every day”

Wes Delks - The Prodigy

Developed and tested in the real world, there is a reason more hunters and land managers plant seed blends every year. ...
07/23/2025

Developed and tested in the real world, there is a reason more hunters and land managers plant seed blends every year. Great products. Great customer support. Proven results.

Okay we’re good now. With 2.5” of rain over the past two days and more on the way, the food plots are in great shape. Th...
07/21/2025

Okay we’re good now. With 2.5” of rain over the past two days and more on the way, the food plots are in great shape. These recent rains have been perfectly timed for the corn pollination and the heat coming this week will be the final ingredient for a great crop. My deer will have plenty of Nutricrave corn 🌽 this winter. The soybeans are looking great also and the rain and heat will make them explode. Setting the stage for next years antler growth starts the year before by providing your herd with good nutrition during the winter months ahead of the antler growing season. The path to success starts long before it actually happens.

I had a neighbor send me this photo yesterday of a buck he saw while working not too far from my place. Much of my succe...
07/18/2025

I had a neighbor send me this photo yesterday of a buck he saw while working not too far from my place. Much of my success can be credited to my great neighbors. They all know what I do and how I make my living and are very respectful of that. I try to do the same by always looking out for their best interests as well and doing whatever I can for any of them. Life is a two-way street, look out for others the way you want them to be looking out for you. Last summer I noticed some significant deer damage to one of my neighbors corn fields where it adjoined my property. The neighbor didn’t say a word about it but I recognized the problem and as a result last season we shot more than double the number of deer that has ever been shot here. I will be monitoring my neighbors fields around my property every year for deer damage and adjusting my deer harvest accordingly. I’m not really interested in having a lot of deer, I’m just trying to allow the right ones, like this young buck, to survive to older age classes.

Oh yeah, about this buck … this yearling has a world of potential! Check out those brow tines. It’s fairly rare to see a yearling with brows this good. I sure hope he is alive five years from now.

The rope scrapes continue to pull in new bucks every day. Notice the bare dirt under the rope. I’ve found this to be ver...
07/17/2025

The rope scrapes continue to pull in new bucks every day. Notice the bare dirt under the rope. I’ve found this to be very important to get deer really hitting the ropes hard. This rope was hung in early April when things were just starting to green up. When I hung it, I had a small spray bottle with glyphosate and a residual herbicide that I used to spray a 4’ diameter circle under the rope. When I came back to hang my camera in July the ground was bare and deer were already hitting it. Creating a good rope scrape typically doesn’t happen overnight. The rope needs to be hung and weather and the ground needs to be bare for best results. I’m not saying that sometimes deer will hit them immediately but over the past decade I have fine tuned my approach and greatly improved the success.

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Gays, IL
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https://www.realworldwildlifeproducts.com/

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