Showing results by author "John E. Phillips" in All Categories

Yes, you can catch and eat crappie during the fall and winter months. Often, at many places, you’ll catch more and bigger crappies in the fall and winter than you do in the spring and summer. To learn where to find and how to catch cooler weather speckled sides, we’ve interviewed a wide variety of some of the nation’s best tournament crappie fishermen and guides.

How do you know if the land you hunt has a trophy deer on it? Wildlife manager Bob Zaiglin, of Uvalde, Texas and Jim Crumley, the father of modern-day hunting camouflage, tells you how to find out. GPS can make finding and taking that trophy buck easier. This hunting guide will teach you how to hunt big bucks where no one else can find them, how to call deer, and how to become versatile as a deer hunter, so that if one deer tactic doesn't work, another one will.

This turkey hunting audiobook, read by John Davenport, has entertaining chapters like: "How to Miss a Turkey", "Hunting with a Guide", and "The Turkey and the New York Lady". You'll learn about all the subspecies of turkey across North America, how to use a turkey call, how to scout before turkey season, how to find a turkey to hunt, and what hunting gear you'll need to put the odds in your favor to take a wily gobbler.

Often just one tip or tactic makes the difference in whether you take an elk home to dinner or have to hike back to the truck by yourself. In John E. Phillips’ latest elk book, Elk: Keys to 25 Hunters’ Success, you’ll learn from successful elk hunters the strategies they use to find and take elk.

Using a black magic marker and a gray work jumpsuit, Jim Crumley of Buchanan, Virginia, drastically changed the nature and purpose of hunting camouflage when he created the first sportsman’s camouflage - Trebark. Throughout his life, Crumley has been a constant student of how to bowhunt better, and his desire to learn new and better techniques for bowhunting was one of the reasons he created Trebark camouflage. In this hunting guide, he shares the wisdom that he’s learned throughout his lifetime about how to be a hunter, how to find a deer lease, how to scout for deer, and more.

In the outdoor world, the elk is the teacher; the hunter is the student. The bull elk, a stunning symbol of strength and power, is one of the most-elusive animals to hunt. The best way to learn how to hunt elk is to learn from the pros who have to take and film elk every year, like the Hunter's Specialties' Pros who produce elk videos every year for Hunter's Specialties' videos and TV shows. Wayne Carlton of Montrose, Colorado, has been hunting and guiding for elk for more than three decades.

In this book, you'll hear about 14 different hunters who either have gained permission or leased properties as small as six acres to as much as 250 acres, and they consistently take older-age-class bucks off these little lands. Thanks to some new types of maps available, often you can find the properties you want to hunt and then lease or obtain permission to hunt them without leaving home. If you're tired of paying high prices to join leases where you see few if any older-age-class bucks, this book is for you!

The quickest, easiest (if there is an easy way), and safest way to find and take that bull elk of a lifetime will be to hunt with a guide. Chad Schearer, a longtime Montana guide and TV personality, told me, “My hunter is my gun. If I get to the elk, and my hunter isn’t with me, then we don’t take the elk. My job is not only to find the elk but also to help the hunter get to the elk and make the experience as enjoyable as I can for him.” That’s the kind of fella with whom I want to go elk hunting.

To be more successful as a deer hunter, learn all you can about the animal, the wind, the temperature and the techniques required to get in close. In this book, you'll hear about some of the best hunters in the nation who know how to hunt deer close, including one of the greatest archers who ever lived, Howard Hill. John E. Phillips shares his own deer stories and hunting tips from 50 years of experience.

If you could sit down and interview some of the best pro bass fishermen in the world, what would you want them to tell you to help you improve your bass fishing skills? In this book, How to Bass Fish Like a Pro, Kevin VanDam will explain how he catches bass consistently and how he fishes all 12 months of the year. Denny Brauer will tell you the ways he hates to fish, how he picks the best fishing lures for different water and weather conditions, and will give you his best fishing tips for hot weather. And much more!

To become a "PhD Whitetail", a whitetail deer has to have gone to school on hunters. He knows when to move, where to move, and how to move to avoid detection. Most deer hunters rely on luck to occasionally have the opportunity to see a PhD buck. But the professional hunters in this book have spent their lifetimes finding these bucks-with-doctorates and putting themselves in position to take these monster bucks using hunting strategies that few of us employ. The men who have learned their lesson from the PhD deer are videographers, producers, TV hosts, and/or professional hunters.

A mule deer hunter never can know everything about hunting these animals because they live in over 18 states, Canada, and Mexico, and all types of terrains, including the mountains, the plains, and in deserts and creek bottoms. They’re hunted with bows, rifles, sniper rifles, and black-powder rifles. This audiobook tells how more than 30 mule-deer hunting disciples find and take mule deer at different times of the seasons.

Anyone who tells you that he or she knows everything there is to know about hunting elk will lie to you about something else. That’s why I’ve written this book, Elk: Keys to 23 More Hunters’ Success, and included more information to follow my highly-successful earlier book, Elk: Keys to 25 Hunters’ Success. The first two men in this new book, Ronnie Strickland and Will Primos, have a combined total of 78 years of elk hunting experience, often calling in several bulls in numerous states for other hunters each year. Not all these bulls have been taken.

Because river systems are so unpredictable, I’ve felt the best way to get the most useful information on how to fish rivers for crappie is to talk to numbers of anglers all over the nation to learn their best tactics. In this book, I’ve gleaned crappie-fishing wisdom from three dozen crappie anglers and guides from a dozen states, who consistently catch crappie at all times of the year. The tournament crappie fishermen in this book fish most of the country at different times of the year on various river systems and lakes.

If you want to become the best you can be, find someone who's already become the best at what you want to do and follow his or her instructions. This is what I've done in my new book, Bass Pros' Season by Season Tactics. In this book, I've chosen some of the best bass fishermen to give you advice on how to find and catch bass during each period of a bass fish's life.

I’ve interviewed some of the best crappie fishermen in the nation for my new audiobook, Catch Crappie All Year: Fishing a Single Pole, Using No Boat and Farming Crappie to learn how, where, and when to catch the most crappie with or without a boat while single-pole fishing.

I've learned so much on how hunters find trophy bucks, what they do to put themselves into positions to take those trophy bucks, and which hunters have the best chances of taking older, mature bucks. This audiobook is a celebration of the men and women who’ve taken their bucks of a lifetime.

Depth Finders: You need the latest and greatest depth finders available, since they’re the brains of a bass boat with maps, GPS, side scanning, down scanning, and forward scanning features that enable you to see underwater structures and fish 100-feet away with a 360-degree view. Today’s competitive bass anglers may have four or five depth finders located on the consoles and the bows of their boats.

After more than 45 years of turkey-hunting experience with some of the best callers and hunters in the nation, author John E. Phillips developed The Turkey Hunter’s Bible to be a complete reference on how to find, call, take, clean, and prepare the wild turkey for the table. The author has taken several birds of each subspecies of wild turkey in the continental United States and Mexico. But more importantly, he’s hunted with some of the greatest turkey hunters who ever have lived.

You easily can take a turkey if you don't make any mistakes, but you have to know what the deadly sins of turkey hunting are to keep you from making those mistakes. If you understand how to hunt a turkey, you're far more likely to take a gobbler than if you just know how to call a turkey. Of course, calling is important, and if you want to learn to call a turkey, Preston Pittman will teach you how to call turkeys with box calls, friction calls, diaphragm calls, and other turkey sounds.