00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired2Hunt 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.
00:00:20
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, welcome to the Wired2Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. I’m your host, Tony Peterson, and today’s episode is all about morning hunts and the mistakes that keep us from killing mature bucks when that alarm goes off super early. It is whitetail week here at MeatEater, and here’s the deal. If you head on over to TheMeatEater.com, you’ll see that you can sign up through your email, and I know you hate that as much as I do, but if you do go do that, you will be entered into the ultimate whitetail giveaway. You don’t even have to buy anything to be entered as long as you sign up through one of our sites. But if you do go buy some stuff, you’ll have a much better chance of winning that prize package that’s worth, get this, over $ 23, 000.
00:01:01
Speaker 3: That’s no joke.
00:01:04
Speaker 2: Also, pay attention to the meat eater socials, and you’ll see daily incentives around buying some sweet gear like the Faze Chalice Fleece Jacket or maybe the FHF Fob, which is the best.
00:01:13
Speaker 3: Vinyl harness I’ve ever used.
00:01:15
Speaker 2: And you can earn extra bonus entries in the giveaway by buying that stuff. Someone’s going to win that prize package, so maybe it’ll be you.
00:01:22
Speaker 3: Now, here’s the deal.
00:01:25
Speaker 2: I’m done selling you stuff, and I’m going to tell you about this podcast. You might not think you need to learn about morning hunts. You might be like, ah, I’ve been morning hunting forever.
00:01:34
Speaker 3: Right.
00:01:35
Speaker 2: Everybody who’s hunting whitetails hunts morning some, but there are a lot of mistakes that people make with those early alarm hunts, and there’s a lot of mistakes around not hunting or not hunting correctly in the mornings. I’m going to talk about that all right now because I think it’s, I don’t know, kind of maybe one of the more valuable lessons in deer hunting. And I think a lot of people kind of look over it. So I’m going to get into that right now. If you’re lucky enough to live until you’ve made 90 laps around the sun, you will have slept for about 30 years of your life. If you’re lucky anyway, because sleep is real important. If you don’t get enough of it, you don’t usually function very well. For starters, your attention suffers. Your reaction time gets slower because your brain takes longer to detect stimuli and direct instructions to your muscles. Your decision-making gets worse. Your emotions get harder to regulate. Your memory even suffers. And it’s not just your brain that experiences negative effects from being tired, either. We experience a whole slew of physical issues when we don’t get enough Zs. There is a lot of research on this topic, you know, for obvious reasons, but we still don’t really know why sleep exists in the first place. We just know that it does, and that the brain essentially needs to be taken offline for a certain amount of time in every 24-hour period. Do you know who isn’t always super fun to be around when they don’t get enough sleep? 14-year-old girls, which has been pretty evident with my daughters and their freshman year schedules, which have them up at 6 a.m.
00:03:06
Speaker 3: Sharp every school day.
00:03:08
Speaker 2: Do you know who else doesn’t do well when they are really tired? I don’t know, pretty much all of us who don’t have raging cocaine addictions. If I had to describe myself and my willingness to wake up early and enjoy life, I’d say that’s not what I am as a person. I do get up early a lot, because that’s when the turkeys gobble and the big smallmouth like to eat and the deer like to walk around in the woods. But I’m rarely super excited when the alarm goes off and I’ve only been in dreamland for a few hours. Now, back when I was a drinking man, this was a lot worse. Like, a lot worse for me. When I quit drinking, my morning hunting experiences got a lot better. Take from that what you will, dear listener. But the truth is that morning hunting is just generally harder for most of us to get behind than afternoon sits, at least when it’s not prime time for rutting activity. It’s easy to talk ourselves out of hunting in the mornings, and honestly a whole lot of the hunting advice out there in the deer world will tell you that you are a super smart hunter if you don’t hunt mornings for a good portion of the season.
00:04:07
Speaker 3: Listen.
00:04:08
Speaker 2: There are situations where it is easier to kill a big buck if you don’t hunt mornings in their early season. But if you’re listening to this podcast, you probably don’t hunt in those situations. That is advice for people who have land locked up, who manage for big bucks, and who can confidently wait to take their shot when the dates and the weather line up. For most of us, following that advice will actually make it harder to kill big bucks. Just like a hell of a lot of the advice out there that has, you know, sort of become standard. Maybe you don’t believe me, but let me ask you, if you don’t believe me, have you ever put in real effort to figure out if that advice is good for you or not? I mean, not hunting is going to give you a very predictable result, but is that making it easier for you to kill running bucks later?
00:04:52
Speaker 3: Probably not.
00:04:53
Speaker 2: And it’s definitely not making it easier to kill early and mid-season bucks. I’ve said so much on this topic though already and in past podcasts. I don’t want to belabor it anymore. I want to talk about how to make morning hunts easier and more productive. And the first thing I’d say was that when I started taking care of myself, morning hunts got easier. I mentioned the quitting drinking thing already, but also just trying to figure out how to help myself sleep better. There are ways to do that that no one wants to hear. So I’m going to skip that too.
00:05:22
Speaker 3: Be healthy. It’ll help.
00:05:23
Speaker 2: That’s all I’m going to say. You can take care of yourself in other ways though. For starters, think about how often you run behind during morning hunts or really anything that has you getting up, you know, when the sun won’t rise for a few hours. Because your brain’s a little slow. It’s easy to make little mistakes and forget stuff. Instead of trying to force yourself to go to bed at 7.30, like you’re a child or you’re 108 years old, take the time when you’re awake to square away what you’ll need for the morning. I’ve started making sure that my pack is truly packed, like dialed, with every.
00:05:58
Speaker 3: Single thing I need for the hunt. And then I do more.
00:06:02
Speaker 2: The coffee maker gets primed and loaded the night before. So as soon as I wake up, I can make some of that delicious java that keeps me going. Depending on how long I plan to sit or be out in the woods, if I’m going to switch stands throughout the day, I’ll get all my food in order. Make sandwiches, pack snacks, whatever. It’s all in a Ziploc in the fridge so I can grab it and go. My hunting gear is usually all loaded in my truck and ready to go as well. Or it’s laid out in the garage waiting to be loaded. I have a tote that I keep in my truck with a whole bunch of extra stuff too. You know, stuff like bow hangers and lifelines and flashlights, and just about anything extra I might need on any hunt. This is huge for a couple of reasons. The most obvious is that if I forget something in my pack, it’s more than likely in my truck. But there’s also the peace of mind of knowing that if I get to where I want to hunt, and there are three trucks in the parking area or the wind is out of the north when it was forecasted to be out of the south, I can pivot quickly to plan B and I’ll have all the stuff I need. Or, you know, maybe I go drive out to one of my private spots and one of the other hunters is already where I want to go. And so I have to slip into a natural ground blind instead of a stand that I wanted to hunt, knowing exactly where my pruners and saw are because I might not have brought them for that tree stand hunt that I set up in August. Or, you know, knowing that I have an extra cushion in my truck, that can make that whole transition pretty seamless. The lesson here, and I can’t stress this enough, is to do everything you can ahead of time to make morning hunts as easy as possible. This is a habit I’ve picked up over a lot of years of making my life harder than it needed to be by either being lazy or not thinking things through as well. You know, just kind of living like a caveman with a smartphone, I guess. Now, a good way to look at this is just to kind of do a little self-reflection. What stresses you out the most about your morning hunts? If it’s forgetting crucial pieces of gear, then I just gave you your solution. If it’s running late, you can get a lot of the things ready the night before and give yourself a little breathing room. But that doesn’t entirely address the stress of knowing that the sun is going to come up and it’s not going to wait on you because you need to stop for gas or you slept through your first two alarms or whatever. Or that you figured, wrongly, that it would take 20 minutes to drive out to the lease and 10 minutes to get to your stand. This is one of the hardest things to do for a lot of people. But building in a cushion of time is so important. The thing that derails the enjoyment of a lot of morning hunts is having to really rush things. It points your momentum in a bad direction and can very easily cause you to miss an opportunity at a buck. I’m to the point now with mornings where I’ll do all of the math I need, you know, in order to figure out when I have to get up and when I have to be on the road and walking out of camp or whatever. And then I tack on like an extra 30 minutes. I do this at home and I do this when I’m living out of a camp while hunting public land somewhere. I don’t want to feel rushed and I want to be able to take my time to drink my coffee and think through my plan and just sort of rise to the occasion.
00:09:22
Speaker 3: If it’s a.
00:09:22
Speaker 2: Mad scramble from the moment the alarm goes off, I know that even if nothing else goes wrong, I’m not going to enjoy my morning as much because I’m going to be stressed. And stress can come in many forms while you’re deer hunting. Like if you have a not very well planned route to your stand or blind. If you’re taking a nicely mowed two track to your stand, things are probably going to be pretty simple. But if you’re hiking along a river bank for a half a mile before cutting up a bluff to reach a ridge top, that’s a different story. How familiar are you with the route? This is one that takes a little bit more to think about than most folks understand. I’ve walked into a lot of spots to hang stands or scout and then returned in the dark and the difficulty level.
00:10:05
Speaker 3: Is always way higher.
00:10:06
Speaker 2: I did this to myself last year in Nebraska while hunting with Steve and you can see a snippet of it in the new film that we just dropped. The stand that I shot my buck out of I got to by going across dry ground with a can-am in August. The river next to that stand looks shallow and sandy. You know, the kind of river I’ve walked through about a million times to get to deer. So I figured that would be an easy, safe access route. But looking shallow and being shallow are different things. I had icy cold water in my knee highs about seven seconds into that walk, which isn’t great when you’re planning to sit all day. I also realized that I’d never be able to make it to my stand on time by wading through a river and trying to use my headlamp to gauge the best sandbars to walk.
00:10:52
Speaker 3: On and avoid all the deeper holes.
00:10:54
Speaker 2: I ended up having to push my way through a bunch of streamside willows and other brush, which was loud and just not ideal.
00:11:01
Speaker 3: What I did, and what we do often with.
00:11:03
Speaker 2: The access routes, is just assume one thing without knowing for sure, and I’ll tell you something I’ve learned. A route is almost never easier than I assume it to be. It’s almost louder and sketchier and more time-consuming than my brain thinks it will be when I’m not actually walking it in the dark and trying to be quiet. Flagging tape or reflective tags, maybe the tracker feature.
00:11:26
Speaker 3: On your OnX app.
00:11:28
Speaker 2: Whatever you need to do to keep yourself on course, do that. It’s a huge deal. And you need to give yourself time. you will rarely regret getting to your stand and getting settled in a little earlier than you planned. But even when you get to your stand, your potential stressors don’t disappear. I know a lot of people who choose to hang sets in the dark, which to me is insane if you have the chance to hang them in the daylight ahead of your sit. In some situations, you just can’t though, like on certain pieces of public land where sets have to be pulled every night, which is a rule that really sucks but exists in some places.
00:12:04
Speaker 3: But if you’re hunting.
00:12:04
Speaker 2: Private ground, or public where you can leave a setup overnight, not doing that when you could is just crazy. Hanging a set in the dark, even when you’re familiar with the tree and the gear, is just a situation that’s ripe for mistakes. It can absolutely be done though. Hanging a set in the dark on a tree you’re not familiar with and with gear you aren’t super comfortable with is a great way to make yourself feel not very good about yourself and potentially cost yourself a buck. Again, Whatever you can take care of in the daylight, you know, without the stress of the clock ticking, is always the right move. And if you do this and everything else I’ve talked about, do you want to know what will happen?
00:12:47
Speaker 3: You’ll shoot more bucks. I mean that.
00:12:49
Speaker 2: We think we shouldn’t hunt mornings a lot, you know, throughout the season because we’ll spook our target deer and cost ourselves later. But if you do the work to hunt correctly, you’ll put yourself in a position to kill more bucks. This is because you’ll be meticulously planning your morning hunts. Not just the how of the hunt, but the why.
00:13:10
Speaker 3: Why would the.
00:13:11
Speaker 2: Bucks filter through this oak flat in the morning? Well, maybe they’re spending their nights on the neighbor’s bean field. And even, you know, if they’re off the field at first light, which they are a lot of times, they’re not necessarily going to be back to bed until way later in the morning. If you can access that oak flat quietly from the backside, you know, away from the field and the wind is right, What’s the harm? The key, at least for me when trying to find quality morning spots this time of year, is to think about the food-to-bed pattern and then reverse what I mostly do for afternoon sits.
00:13:44
Speaker 3: I don’t mean in specific spots, though.
00:13:47
Speaker 2: I mean kind of in the distance I try to set up from the locations I believe they are starting from or will end up at. Think about this distance as a football field. 100 yards framed up by end zones. One end zone is a bedding area. The other is the destination food source. In the evening, I want to be close to a staging area.
00:14:07
Speaker 3: Off the food source.
00:14:09
Speaker 2: So I might post up in the timber on, say, the 15 or 20-yard line. I can see the end zone, but I’m not quite there yet. And I’m 80, 85 yards away from the bedding area in this weird unit of measurement that I’m doing, if it makes any sense. But in the morning, I want to go the other direction and be close to the bedding area.
00:14:28
Speaker 3: Not in it.
00:14:29
Speaker 2: But about the same distance I would be to catching deer staging in the afternoon. Because that same play, you know, I’m going to make it in the morning and that distance is just like a comfortable spot to be. I want to give myself a chance to get in way ahead of them, which helps by being closer to their final destination. And I don’t want to have to get out where they’re going to bed down. So you’re just playing that game. This is a thing that you have to think through, but it’s no different than finding a staging area at night. You know, and the rules will change during the rut, but I’m not talking about the rut here. Now, one of the main reasons people give for not hunting mornings right now is because the bucks are back to bed too early. But that’s just not universally true. And you can give yourself a real chance if you try to reverse engineer their travel and set up where they should end up after legal shooting light kicks in. This isn’t nearly as hard as it sounds, but it does take some work and some planning. It’s also something that a lot of folks won’t do. And they all have their reasons. For me, one of my favorite challenges in whitetail hunting is trying to figure out where to shoot a good one in the morning when the timing of the season says it probably won’t happen. I got into this habit when I started hunting public land a lot because most of my hunts were not rut hunts and I didn’t want to waste half of my sits. What I realized and what I took home with me to a lot of my private land hunts was that big bucks are definitely killable in the mornings. And it’s not really any more difficult to figure out than it is to try to kill them in the evenings. Which is to say, you know, it’s still pretty difficult, but also doable. There are creek and river crossings out there, you know, that offer perfect morning access and plenty of daylight activity. There’s water holes in the woods. There’s pinch points and terrain traps of all varieties. There are bucks that will bed early and then move when the thermals kick in at 9 or 10 in the morning. There are oak trees dropping, there’s browse popping, and there are all kinds of bucks who aren’t going to be tucked away in a bed all day long. You know, getting in there long before daylight hits, only to not move all day until after dark. Accept that for the truth, because it is true. And go try to find a way to intercept them long before the rut kicks in and the rest of the hunters set their alarms to go off super early.
00:16:44
Speaker 3: Do that.
00:16:45
Speaker 2: And then come back next week because I’m going to talk about how to break down the land and try to call your shots through e-scouting and why just generally scouting this time of year is way more important than most hunters think. That’s it for this episode. I’m Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast. Thank you so much for all your support, especially on a week like this where we have Whitetail Week going and we’re asking a lot of you.
00:17:09
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for that.
00:17:10
Speaker 2: If you need some new gear, you know where to go. If you need some new content, you know where to go. TheMeatEater.com. We drop new films, new podcasts, new articles almost every day of the week, all year long. There’s so much good content there. Go check it out. You’ll also see that we have Whitetail Week going on and there’s some cool incentives there to maybe go do a little shopping at TheMeteor.com.
00:17:32
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for everything.
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