Dan Branagan

Dan Branagan was born and raised in Michigan and pursued everything that Michigan had to offer while developing his hunting and tracking skills during various archery, muzzleloader, shotgun, and rifle seasons and then further honed these skills while attending graduate school in Iowa. In 1995, Dan moved to Idaho and since that time has enjoyed hunting elk and mule deer every year, while focusing exclusively on DIY hunting. While living out West, he has additionally taken many other big game animals including Shiras moose, whitetail deer, antelope, mountain lion, and bear. Through observing big game animals year-round while scouting and hunting, Dan has gained an intricate knowledge of Western big game animals and has developed novel scouting, hunting, and recovery strategies. Hunting the West takes specialized gear, extensive planning, and is expensive whether you live in the West or are coming from elsewhere. Buying and reading Dan's hunting books may be considered an important part of your hunting preparation and a low-cost option to maximize your chances at hunting success!

In 2020, Dan published a book focused on mule deer hunting titled: So You Want To Hunt The West For Mule Deer: Now What?. An important emphasis of that book is understanding the complex fall transitional patterns which mule deer undergo throughout the fall. New tactics to successfully hunt mule deer are explained in detail including Spot and Stalk hunting in Primary Spotting and Secondary Kill locations and additionally includes novel strategies for Move and Spot hunting. This knowledge is paramount for finding mature mule deer bucks in the vast terrain of the West!

In 2022, based on advanced hunting knowledge gained through keeping and maintaining detailed records, Dan published a book titled: So You Want To Hunt The West For Mule Deer: Scouting and Hunting Journal. Unique features of this journal include novel page design with prefilled data fields developed for the unique challenges of Western hunting allowing easy incorporation of mapping GPS waypoints into the journal entry. This journal is an invaluable tool to improve success in order to consistently harvest big game trophies!

In 2022, Dan published a book focused on elk hunting titled: So You Want To Hunt The West For Elk: Low Elevation Hotspots. By hunting smart and concentrating your efforts in low elevation hotspots, you can harvest a trophy bull elk in areas often overlooked by the majority of hunters, since they do not know the rapid ongoing changes in elk behavior and elk redistribution. Reading this book will forever transform your views about finding, hunting, and recovering bull elk in the changing environment of the Rocky Mountains of the West, where there are too many elk in not the right places!