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Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.
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Speaker 2: Hey everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast. I’m your host, Tony Peterson, and this week I’m talking about giving ourselves a reality check when it comes to deer hunting in big box and how that might not always make us better deer hunters, but it certainly will make our hunting for deer better. This time of year mostly sucks to be a deer hunter, but it’s okay. There are things we can do. And one of those is something that occurred to me recently while trying to plan out my hunt schedule for this fall. The different deer hunts I want to do are all not based around how big of a buck I think I can kill, but how realistic I need to be about six sess and what that would look like in the realm of making me happy wherever I am. Now, this might, like, I don’t know, sound like a weird way of justifying my own brand of trophy hunting or something. But it’s just a condition you get into when you hunt enough. It’s also something I’m going to talk about right now. Every summer I drive down to southwestern Wisconsin to fish a tournament with a buddy of mine. It’s a frog only deal that I’ve talked about before, you know, but for those of you who don’t know, it just means you can only use spro frogs or in other words, the tackle selection. You know, it’s pretty simple, you know, maybe a pick a brown one or a green one, or a white one, or a yellow cerment maybe op for popping frogs, or one of their frogs that has a couple of small Colorado spinner blades and not rubber legs. But no matter what, it’s just frogs all the way down. I love that tournament because it’s so simple. It’s not easy. It’s really tough, especially because it’s a team tournament with a heavy local angler. Reality, and fishing against someone on their home water is always a challenge, let alone lots of someone who pair up and fish their home waters together. Now, the first year we fished it, which according to the trophy on the shelf behind me, was in twenty twenty, we won, and that day we just had a really solid large mouth opportunity just like kind of stacked up in this backwater lake. It had the right duck weed and deadfall combination, a little bit of current to keep it from getting stagnant, and about a trillion bait fish schooled up in there. It’s different down south, but here in the North Country, if you can scraunge up a whole bunch of fish that are anywhere between three and four pounds, you can almost always get paid in a tournament, and if it really goes well, you can take first, like we did that year. But after that year it’s been a different story. Last year we had an area with some pretty decent fish in it, but we weren’t the only ones to find them. We also had a couple of big fish shake off, which is something that happens when you fish the slop, just like you’re eventually going to miss some bucks if you hunt the rut long enough. I don’t care who you are. Now. In a tournament like that, you start with eight hours to fish. You’re constantly looking at the time and trying to factor in how to use it to the best of your abilities. You generally start out the morning you know with the idea that you’re fishing to win, because well you are. But as the morning progresses, you start to realize that winning is looking less realistic by the cast. Now, if you have a few decent fishing alive, well that hope stays alive. But when it’s fifteen inch fish after fifteen inch fish, you start to acknowledge that your odds aren’t looking great. Oftentimes you either go swing for the fences in a big fish area, or you try to piece together something that will get you a check, even if it doesn’t get you the first place trophy. Now I can’t speak for all anglers, but for me, the reality of my odds of winning and what success really looks like to me change almost by the hour, and sometimes almost by the cast. It’s not unlike how I view deer hunting these days. I always go into the season and planning to kill the biggest deer I believe to be really possible in whatever state a property I’m hunting. But that might last a week, it might last seven weeks until the rut wraps up, or on some trips, it might not last the first full day of scouting when I realized the deer density is super low, or the weather is going to be a huge challenge, or I figure out that the hunting pressure is a lot higher than I anticipated. This happens in weird ways too. They’re mostly unique to my job, but also probably not as different from a lot of folks as it might seem at first. A couple of years ago, I drew an eye with deer tech, and I set out to kill one on public land. What I didn’t see coming, but that changed the whole arc of my trip, was that my cameraman is just really uncomfortable with the tree stand game. Now, if your primary plan hinges on hang and bang mobile hunts to be right on top of the action, and you suddenly realize it’s not even a feasible option and you better figure out how to shoot something from the ground, that changes literally everything. The odds of waiting out a one thirty plus deer drop like a headshot goose. That situation might never affect you, but a couple of sick kids in lay October or November, Mike, Or you might have a boss who decides ringing every last bit of your soul out to increase the quarter four profits is far more important than you sitting in a tree for a week during the rut, So you don’t walk into that office with a hatchet and an unhealthy dose of homicidal rage, where if you hear one more person mentioned margins or EBITA or scalability or total addressable market, you’re going to start hacking away at the C suite team. Things change, and one of the hardest parts about life is how difficult it is to accept and adapt to those changes. A buddy of mine works in it, and he’s real successful, and we recently had a post peasant hunt conversation about social media and technology in our modern world, and we both agreed that we both hate quite a bit of the technology that governs our lives these days. But then he said something. He said, we hate it, meaning he and I because we’ve already aged out. It’s not for us, it’s for the younger generations. And I thought, Hm, my dad recently drove up to the lake to fish with us, and he used a paper map to navigate his way into the north Country. I thought about how judgmental I was of that. But that’s coming for me, and it sucks to realize now, when our hunting changes, we often don’t handle it well either. Here in Minnesota, we open our general gun season, you know, the Saturday of the first full weekend in November. That means, on some years, our gun season opens up in the first couple days of November and never really any later than like November ninth. The amount of bitching I do about this as well as a lot of people who would just like to bowhunt. The rut here is gross and totally fruitless. The gun crowd doesn’t want to hear it, and they don’t want to change the same type of thing plays out very often when anything new or different is introduced. We don’t like change, even if we also don’t like how things currently are. I guess it’s like the devil you know type of thing. But change is inevitable, and so are multiple reality checks throughout our deer seasons. I know a hunter who’s a really good dude but doesn’t put in a whole lot of effort, who had the kind of season last year that would drive a lesser man to the assisted suicide clinic. This guy has a really really good deer lease and so opportunities At one forty plus bucks, you know, they just usually happen if he puts in enough time. Sometimes they happen multiple times in the same week, sometimes with deer way bigger than one forty. He had some issues last year shooting a vertical bow, so he switched to a crossbow, and he had some issues with that. It wasn’t good, And honestly, I’d say there might be like a ten percent chance that pushes him to swear off deer hunting forever. That really won’t be known until this season, but I know one thing about it. He set his heart on a big one, had a shit ton of stuff go wrong, and had his heart broken by a couple big ones. Look, we’re all free to set our standards as we please, but we should also try to be realistic about who we are as hunters and what we are just willing to put in work wise, and why are specific goals for whatever bucks matter. This generally requires us to confront our own egos, which is very hard but important. It’s also important to understand whether our decisions are based on what we actually want to achieve in a season, or whether we are allowing someone else to have a safe for us. I very recently had a conversation with a fello at the gym whose wife had a Silence or Central shirt on. It’s not that often in the suburbs I see anyone wearing a shirt that advertises suppressors. So I figured they’d probably be interesting to have a little chat with, and they were, and eventually we got on a topic of bow hunting, which is pretty common in my world. He mentioned that he had bought his first bow last season and spent his fall hunting public land out of a saddle. He didn’t kill anything, but in his words, he could have shot a couple of spikers, but he wasn’t about to shoot a spiker. Now that’s a perfectly reasonable take, and who am I to argue with it, But I will anyway slightly or at least make a case for whacking that spiker, just purely on the details I know. I can say that hunting the public land around my house is pretty tough. We have nearly four million people living here, and the hell of a lot of them hunt. I also know that that fella has four kids, like young kids, so I’m filling into blanks here a little bit, but I would assume his time is probably somewhat limited shoot a spike, don’t shoot a spike, But ask yourself if you’re in the kind of situation where shooting a spike might not be a terrible idea. We are all on our own journeys, but I can tell you that one of the things that just consistently makes me happy is when I shoot a deer through the lungs and have a short blood trail and a whole lot of meat to put in my freezer. Other folks are out there for different reasons, and that’s great, but I see this kind of thing happen so often where people and by people, I almost always mean dudes, can’t reconcile the reality of their hunting success with who they think they are as a person. It’s kind of like if you happen to find yourself doom scrolling on Reddit or some other platform and you see a thread dedicated to street fights. The amount of people, and by people, I mean mostly dudes who think they can fight and then actually try is incredible. Not to be fair, alcohol is involved in nearly one of these scraps. And if there is one thing alcohol does, it’s convinced us we are something we are not, which is why getting tore up from the floor up is so damn fun, until, of course it’s not. The deer hunting equivalent of this is what keeps me in business. A lot of hunters out there, and by hunters, I mean dudes can’t quite understand why some folks can kill big bucks consistently and they can’t. This is the primary driver behind the sales of all those deer calls and scents and lures and decoys, and you know, it’s the primary reason why when baiting is legal, nearly everyone does it, and when it’s illegal, a lot of people still do it. We want the shortest, easiest route to success, and a whole lot of products promise that we want to be in the cool kids club, and that club is way more fun if everyone gets to shoot one fifties and not spikers on public land. But it doesn’t work that way, and the success ratios in most states show this pretty clearly. You know, up until crossbow started becoming standard in archery seasons, the success ratios in most states were reliable and just about static. Most real deviations from the norm either involved tightening up tag availability or opening things up to more tags. But even then, the numbers don’t change a whole lot. Usually most people just aren’t very successful at tier honey. But we don’t see those people on Instagram and model our personal standards around that. That’s probably a shame too, because if we focused more on how hard it is for most people to kill deer, we’d probably be a lot happier to see, you know, an eighty seven inch two year old step into the field, instead of being pissed that it isn’t one of our target bucks we have on camera that happens to spend ninety nine percent of his time on the land, we don’t get to hunt. This is all shit I’ve talked about a million times. It might not seem all that pressing right now, but I can tell you it’s always on my mind, and it flavors the way I do a lot of my off season planning. You see, we paint this picture about escouting and shed hunting and running cameras year round and all the things we are supposed to do. Is deer hunters as a means to an end. You do this and this and this and this, you kill mister big buck guy. Very simple connections there, my friends, And to some extent it’s kind of true, but for me it’s different. I know the more I eScout for a trip, the more likely I am to have realistic expectations. I’m more likely to have a better plan going in. And that doesn’t mean you know the plan is always going to work, but it means I’ll have a better idea if I feel it’s going to produce some encounters. Changes. Everything makes me feel better, makes me work harder. And the more I scout in person and the more I run cameras, the more I can go into next season with a good idea of what I can realistically accomplish and what I can realistically expect my success to look like. Think about that for a second, because it matters. Most of us these days put out some cameras in the summer, base our goals on what they show, and then mostly get disappointed in the fact that those bucks don’t play the game very well. The current model of deer hunting that is pushed from the industry on down is one of absentee scouting to build a hit list via digital means, and then picking and choosing the best times to hunt, you know, in order to encounter those target deer. That is a great and I mean a great way to disappoint yourself and discover a real disconnect between what is possible and what is plausible in your hunting look. We often focus on taking inventory of the deer herd to see who’s worthy of wearing our tags, but we don’t take inventory of ourselves very well. And that’s kind of a problem. And I’m not saying don’t do the buck inventory thing if that’s what blows the wind up your camo skirt. What I’m saying is, you know, think about your last season or your last ten seasons. Have you been happy with the results generally? If yes, carry on my wayward white tailor. But if you haven’t been generally happy, there’s a reason, maybe lots of them. Was the one season you were pretty happy because you happened to kill a one forty, then great if that’s what it takes, but only happens once a decade, you better put in a lot more work, learn about deer a lot more, or figure out how to get on a way better property. Were your best seasons, not necessarily the ones where you always killed a good one, but instead where you had really cool opportunities all season long, or at least encounters, there’s something there that should inform you how to scout, to set up, and what you should try to do once the season opens up. Were your worst seasons, the ones you held up for a target buck and pass smaller deer, then maybe it’s time to be realistic about your commitment to trophy hunting and why that matters so much. I’ll say this again for the folks in the back of the room, nobody cares what you shoot. They don’t. And if the only thing that would make you really happy this season is arrowing up open young buck in Georgia, where seeing a one point thirty is newsworthy, stick to it. But if you feel a sense of guilt or loss when you let that one hundred inch or walk during a killer morning during the rut, maybe it’s time to be realistic about your hunting. I guess I want to say one last thing to frame this up. Should also allow yourself to change with your conditions. Maybe when you got out of college and didn’t have a wife and kids and lots of time, you could target mature deer and kill them somewhat regularly. But if life changes and that free time disappears, there’s no shame in taking a step back and realizing that time kills big bucks, and without it, well you just mostly won’t target what you can realistically kill. If you need to, no one cares about it. And if that would make you happy and make your season seem like a success, that is a huge win. It’s also true that for most of us, lowering our standards some would actually get us into the woods more. I mean, think about how many times you didn’t want to hunt, or you talk to someone who wasn’t going to go simply because they didn’t, you know, have pictures of good bucks, or didn’t believe a good one would show up given the conditions. I can tell you that, you know, while that might be a good decision and the interest of purely killing a big buck at some point, it’s also certainly not going to make you a better hunter or make hunting a lot more enjoyable, since well you’re not hunting as much. I just like to think about this tough this time of year. It’s kind of like a low lift fix. It doesn’t mean much, but it’s something, and it’s nice to sort of get your head right on this stuff because that generally pushes us in a positive direction with our hunting. I don’t think that’s ever bad. And plus, what else are you going to do? Right now? That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation’s podcast. Thank you so much for listening and for all your support. You know, here at met eater right now, all we do is talk about how did we do last year as a business, And I can tell you one thing that keeps coming up. Without the audience, without you guys supporting us, we don’t have a business. We don’t have anything. So thank you so much for showing up for us, for listening to this podcast. Maybe you headed over and you checked out Jordan Siller’s Killer Blood Trails podcast, which is so good. He’s doing such a good job with that. If not, go check it out. If you need something else to entertain you, teach you a little bit about the outdoors, whatever, Go to the meeteater dot com New films, new articles, new podcasts, new all kinds of stuff dropping every day. Thank you.
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