00:00:01
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.
00:00:20
Speaker 2: Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I’m your host, Tony Peterson, and today’s episode is all about how a lot of hunters seem to think they can get things perfect or almost perfect during their deer hunts, and how that just never really happens and it’s actually not necessary. I’m becoming more and more convinced that the reason hunting is so hard for most of us is because the delta between what we expect on our hunts and what we actually get is too huge to overcome. It breaks in our little hairless monkey brains, and we don’t know how to react. We keep chasing the idea of the perfect hunt or the perfect setup and it just doesn’t really exist. Well, actually it does exist, it just doesn’t come around that often. Learning to live with that is honestly the key to figuring this thing out enough to have consistency and success, which is what I’m going to talk about right now. Have you ever heard the phrase don’t let perfect be the enemy of good? That phrase is often attributed to Voltaire, a French philosopher who I don’t remember anything about other than having to read some of his stuff in a seventeenth century literature course I had in college, which was a long time ago. That statement, which actually started out as the best is the enemy of the good, but in French, which I don’t speak, it’s somehow morphed into what we commonly say today. Now, the saying might not come up a lot in your daily life, but the sentiment probably does. We are force fed the look of perfection all the time, so much so that we revel in seeing people make mistakes. And in a lot of industries, if you really want to stand out, you should actually not shy away from all of your mistakes. That has been a pretty good thing for my career, to be honest, because I make a lot of mistakes and it never felt right to hide them all, to project an image of a hunter and a person that just isn’t real. It’s easy to think perfection is or near perfection is Anyway, I recently saw a podcast interview with a fellow who is well known in the white tail space who said something to the effect of three and a half year old bucks or the dumbest deer in the woods. If you give me an hour, I’ll kill a deer of that age. Now, to the poorly informed, that might hint at perfection on that dude’s part, but I’d say it’s more of being totally delusional due to hunting candyland for thirty years. No one who hunts public land in Pennsylvania would make that statement with a straight face, unless they are the kind of person who eats crans for the nutritional value and who boofs monster energy drinks because it takes too long for them to hit by ingesting them how they are intended to be consumed.
00:02:52
Speaker 3: Perfection doesn’t exist in people.
00:02:54
Speaker 2: I was reminded of this recently well watching videos of past bass Master tournaments like a totally cool and normal guy does, and I saw a recap of Attorney that I think was on Santi Cooper down in South Carolina from about ten years ago. One of the anglers who got a lot of screen time in that tournament is a fellow named Kevin Van Dam. To anyone with even a passing interest in bass fishing, that name is probably familiar to the walleye fisherman and worse, the non fisherman in the audience. I’ll give you a quick rundown a KVD. He’s a Michigan born fella who had a thirty plus year career in tournament fishing, which if you look at his bass Master stats alone, tell a story of someone who is without question, one of the best, and if not the best. He fished three hundred and fourteen tournaments and made the Classic twenty eight times. He won that four times, which has him breathing some rarefied air. He also racked up twenty five first place finishes in tournaments against the best of the best. He had sixteen seconds and eighteen thirds. Out of those three hundred and fourteen tournaments. He finished in the top ten one hundred and twelve times. Over the course of those tournaments, he brought almost twelve thousand pounds of bass to the scales, and he won almost six and a half million bucks. I have a good buddy who followed KVD for a day on a tournament down in Oklahoma just to watch him, which is a thing in those tournaments, and he said that he’s never seen anyone who could cast farther or more accurately. And this is coming from a guy who won over one hundred grand last summer fishing alone, so he knows his stuff. In the tournament that I watched, KVD caught a giant on a crank bait. I don’t remember if it was eight or ten pounds, but even for down South, it was just a huge, large mouth. What blew my mind was that when he went to remove both sets of treble hooks, he absent mindedly pulled way harder on the crank bait than he probably should have, and he buried one of the hooks into the palm of his hand. It was such a dumb moved witness I couldn’t belie leave it. But it was also understandable because we all do dumb stuff.
00:05:05
Speaker 3: Even the guys.
00:05:05
Speaker 2: Who are the best of the best at whatever they do still make mistakes like that. He had to have an observer come over to his boat and do that method of hook removal, which involves looping some heavy braid around the hook and doing a very quick yank to free it. That’s a move I’ve done a few times on myself, most memorably with a dry fly stuck into my hand one day on a little stream in southern Minnesota, and I can say that it is both effective and generally not that much fun. It’s better than cutting them out with a utility knife for pushing them all the way through to pinch the barb, though, both of which I’ve done, and I don’t recommend seeing KVD do that move with that crankbait and then move on to go catch a whole bunch of fish and collect a giant paycheck for fishing that would equal the entire yearly salary of someone considered lower middle class here in the Midwest. Reminded me of what makes people good at fishing, and then of course hunting. They just move on from their mistakes and they keep trying. They don’t stress too hard when they make mistakes because they accept them as a part of the whole deal. Now, what does this have to do with you and I and deer hunting. Well, a lot, and some of it is obvious and some of it probably is not. The obvious lesson is the one I just stated, which is that you’re gonna screw up a lot, but how you move on from those mistakes is really what matters. The less obvious reality here is that a lot of us become so scared of making a mistake that we don’t even try until every possible advantage that we can get is fully realized, and even then it mostly doesn’t work. Let me give you an example here that I think sort of highlights this. When I hunted Nebraska last year with Steve and his buddy on that big old ranch down there. I had to find the spots that cruising bucks would travel through, pretty simple rut stuff, but the trouble was that the amount of available stand trees wasn’t great. I see this a lot in my life. If I hunt someplace where the stand trees are plentiful, like northern Wisconsin, the deer usually aren’t play and they are usually very wary of a two hundred pound camel blob in a tree. In areas with few trees, the deer don’t get hunted out of them as often, and they often don’t look up as much. But you have to settle for the trees you can make work and sit on the ground If there are no workable trees where you want to hunt. Steve, coming from Michigan and who has mostly taken a break from bow hunting white tails for a couple decades now, has the mindset of a lot of hunters that you have to get pretty high up in a tree to kill them.
00:07:27
Speaker 3: I feel that.
00:07:28
Speaker 2: Way in some places, like over in Wisconsin, unless I’m in a really good multi trunk tree or a pine tree that offers real cover. But in Nebraska, those ranch deer weren’t the smartest deer in the herd, and they don’t get hunted out of trees a whole lot. We didn’t need to be twenty two feet up. We just needed to be up as far as we could get, which in most of the cases I found was probably in like the twelve to sixteen foot range. I just wasn’t going to find the perfect pinch point that also had the perfect tree and perfect access, But that didn’t matter because we didn’t need it. We needed the spot first, which is the most important thing. Access that’s always important too, but not crazy important since you know that specifically was a rout hunt where the bucks could show up at any time and they were covering a lot of ground.
00:08:14
Speaker 3: Now I wanted perfect trees. I just didn’t get them.
00:08:16
Speaker 2: I got trees I could work with, and in some spots no trees I could work with, which led me to using blinds. I knew we would make some concessions on our setups, but that is how it goes almost everywhere I hunt. Very rarely do I find a spot that I fully believe in that also has unbelievable access and the kind of trees that allow you to set up twenty yards down wind with a low likelihood of getting picked off. I spent a lot of time this past spring hunting turkeys on public land, and I can tell you something. The minute you walk into an unfamiliar piece of ground and try to kill something that you know has been hunted hard for a month, you realize that you’re not even going to get in.
00:09:03
Speaker 3: The ballpark up perfect.
00:09:05
Speaker 2: You’d kill for a good enough spot, and even then you’ll have something that works against you. Four days I walked into random chunks of public land in central Wisconsin to try to call in a gobbler, and for days I didn’t do that. I did find one spot that had a lot of sign and some hens that were vocal, but I had to cross two rivers to get there, and it was in a floodplain with stagnant water everywhere, so the mosquitoes were damn near biblical and they drove me out after seven hours, honestly, just couldn’t take it anymore, and having left my thermosil at home, I felt like it was my first day on the job. Those birds were there because they felt no one with an ounce of brains would sit in there and try to kill them. White Tail hunting goes like that a lot too, But even when you do things right and really make good decisions, you’ll mostly get your knackers kicked in. That’s how it goes, and I think we mostly know that. So I see a lot of hunters sort of fall into a few different camps. Some folks will claim, you know, they don’t care what they shoot, or if they do shoot one, they’ll say they’re not into it for the antlers or whatever. But I think most of that is a coping mechanism to soften the blow of the almost inevitable failure that we all run into out there. I don’t know too many hunters who actually don’t want to shoot some deer, let alone big bucks. We have other hunters who strive to be tacticians but kind of get locked into the paralysis by analysis mentality, which if you know anything about any of the other whitetail hunters here at Meat Eater can clue hint who might just fall into that category. To them, it’s a thinking man’s game, which white tail hunting is, but it also just is partly instinct. Look, this isn’t physics, where eventually the right math will explain the forces of nature. A lot of this can be reasoned out to some extent, but there are far too many variables to factor in to ever make it truly predictable, at least if you don’t hunt a place where the deer are essentially being grown to be killed. This type of is low key obsessed with perfection and keeps them from taking risks and trying things that have higher failure rate than they find acceptable. This is the reason why so many people who figured out how to grow big dear also happen to have backgrounds in engineering. That mind is built to solve problems and find easy solutions to the big questions. And if the big question is how do I kill one hundred and eighty inch deer every year. One solution is to figure out how to get enough money to buy enough land that can be turned into a deer paradise with tightly controlled pressure. That doesn’t necessarily make them better hunters, but it does make them wildly successful, and it certainly removes a lot of the variables that conspire against most hunters to take a perfect plan and turn it into grade A dog shit. I think acknowledging that you’ll mostly get things somewhat wrong, and that you’ll miss, and you’ll get winded, and you’ll bump your target buck on the way in, and whatever else that can go wrong, just eventually will I think that’s the best setup we can take to moving ourselves into a spot where we become better hunters. If you know you’ll get winded sometimes, but you hunt anyway, you’re going to level up somehow. Not only will you figure out how to not get winded as often, you’ll find out that some of your fears were overblown, and that making a mistake, even when you know you’ll probably make it’s not the end of the world. This is also a good way to condition ourselves to try things that have a higher risk, higher reward ratio, which I think is super important now. You don’t want to be overly cavalier and your hunting strategies, but trying things you don’t think will work, or putting yourself in a position where you’re more likely to get busted or less likely to see a mature buck will change you, probably for the better. You don’t learn a whole lot about yourself or the deer if you only hunt the first week of November when the weather is perfect. You’ll certainly kill some deer, or at least you’ll get your shot, but you won’t learn much. We all know that’s a good strategy, but it leaves out a whole lot of weeks you could be hunting. It’s also true that even if you did only hunt the first week of November, you’d likely have years where you didn’t shoot one. Sometimes you go out and everything seems perfect and you get your ass handed to you. Anyway, that’s the kind of thing that keeps a lot of people from trying, because it shatters the illusion of what are solved for this problem really is. This is the danger in striving for or expecting a near perfect hunt. When you don’t get it, which you mostly won’t, Then how you react and keep moving forward matters a whole lot, and that’s a problem a lot of hunters have because they don’t handle that well. I know that because I’m one of those hunters. But I’ve also learned that it’s also an absolute truth in my outdoor life that that’s the outcome more often than not. The only way to deal with it for me personally is just keep going out. The more I do that, the more those mistakes become less meaningful as I stack up the hours and the eventual encounters with deer that happen because of me. Just keep it on, and even then, when I do get things right and earn the perfect shot opportunity, I often don’t deliver a perfect shot. The reason bow hunting white tailed deer is so damn rewarding is that if we are all being really honest about it, it’s really freaking hard. It only gets harder the more we expect it to go a certain way, because it rarely does. Now I guess I should wrap this up by saying you can also go too far in the wrong direction. Here with accepting mistakes and trying risky hunting strategies, the game has to be played a certain way, and if you try to color outside the lines too much, you’re gonna fail. This is why when someone comes out and they have the method for killing deer that is new and novel, I generally feel a giant amount of skepticism. The deer are beatable. But in the parameters of our game laws, in our reality of the hunting situations we find ourselves in, there are just ways to go about it that will work over a long enough timeline. It’s generally is not going to be some kind of new bed hunting strategy or stocking them with gilli suits or whatever. It’ll usually just be planting your butt into a stand over and over, or maybe in a ground line you know, when the wind is blowing just good enough and the odds aren’t zero that he’ll move, which is almost any time you’re out there if you.
00:14:59
Speaker 3: Don’t leave that.
00:15:00
Speaker 2: Consider that Kevin van dam hook to the hand moment during that tournament, almost no one and maybe honestly no one, is better at fishing fast than him get He made a dumb in the moment decision that cost him time and could have cost him a better finish. Given that truth, what are the odds that some random accountant or plumber or car salesman or whatever is going into the woods with a plan so good that it’s going to work out easily, just like it’s supposed to. That’s not how it works, but it’s also worth the effort. And if you accept your mistakes and your inability to reach perfection, you’ll end up in a place where you give yourself a little more grace, You move on from the mess ups a little quicker, and you realize that what it takes to kill Big.
00:15:42
Speaker 3: Bucks is not a perfect plan.
00:15:44
Speaker 2: It’s a plan with some flaws in it, executed by a flawed human over enough attempts to eventually have the whole thing coal less into the moment when you shine your light down the blood trail and catch sight of a white belly. That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson. This has been the way to Hunt Foundation’s podcast. As always, thank you so much for your support. I know you have a ton of different platforms fighting for your attention. I get it, the market saturated, the industry saturated. So we truly appreciate it that you guys listen to us, that you watch our films, read the articles, and support us.
00:16:19
Speaker 3: It means the world to us.
00:16:20
Speaker 2: If you want more hunting content, you can go to the mediater dot com and you can find articles, you can find podcasts, you can find films, all kinds of stuff. You’ll find the latest news on conservation issues and corner crossing and everything that might be relevant to you as an outdoorsman. Go check it out at the mediater dot com and once again, thank you for all of your support.
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