“The outdoor shows feature the biggest bucks and wrap up the whole hunt in 30 minutes,” Zennie said. “They may not tell you it took two weeks of hard hunting to find that deer, or that they were hunting private land known for big bucks.”

The bottom line here is don’t pass up 16- or 17-inch bucks day after day, waiting for a 22-incher -- if no one’s ever seen a buck that big in the area.

• Do you know your gun? The practice of sighting-in your gun, knowing how to load it safely in the dark, and knowing exactly where a bullet’s going to hit at various distances all seem obvious. But of the guides I talked to, every one has seen the same thing over and over again.

Hunters don’t take the time to practice and get familiar with their weapon of choice and they muff the shot. Game over!

2. POOR GLASSING
More than anything else, glassing is the key to a successful hunt, but there are several wrong ways to do it.

• Narrowed search. If you spend all your time staring at clearings, waiting for a deer to materialize, you’re in for disappointment. Despite their size, mulies can use 2-foot high sagebrush or a four-foot dip in the terrain to become invisible.

“You have to visually pick through the brush, looking beneath every tree and behind every bush,” Denne said. “If you look just in open spots, you’ll leave thinking that nothing’s there.”

• Looking for whole deer? Many hunters don’t train themselves to look for anything other than a deer’s entire body. Study photographs of the animal before your hunt, particularly the details of its features. That will make it easier to identify the small parts you’re most likely to spot.

Look for ears, antlers, body lines, the white patch on the rump or on the head. Even eyes, noses and feet may be all a deer shows. But if you know what to look for, that will be enough.

• Looking too close. Bottom line, if you don’t have a spotting scope, you’ve come into the field without one vital piece of equipment. That can limit you in two ways.

First, you’ll tend to focus your glassing within a few hundred yards, instead of looking out a mile or more, where you can spot a buck and plan out a stalk.

Second, using a spotter can save you hours of time and effort, and even save your hunt. The last thing you want is to spend hours stalking a non-shooter buck -- or worse, a doe.

3. RUSHING THE STALK
Rarely do our hearts pound the way they do when a nice buck is centered in our binoculars and all we want to do is rush to a spot where it looks like we can take a shot. Unfortunately, if you let your excitement carry you away, you’re abandoning your best weapon: your brain.

• Failure to judge the buck. At one time or another, every hunter has experienced “ground shrinkage.” The monster buck they saw in their scopes somehow turned average after the shot. Most likely, they didn’t take the time to judge the buck accurately. The best indication of the size of the antlers is the buck’s ears.

But once again, knowing the area and the animal you’re hunting makes a difference.

“The ears on a big Rocky Mountain mule deer are going to measure 20 to 22 inches tip to tip when flared out straight,” Paul said. “Ears on the smaller desert bucks are likely to be 16 to 18 inches.”