Ep. 1065: What Would Mike Rex Do?

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your guide to the whitetail woods. 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, Mark Kenyon. Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast.

00:00:22
Speaker 2: This week on the show, we are running Ohio Big Buck Hunter Mike Rex through our what would you do gauntlet to see how exactly he would handle some of the trickiest deer hunting scenarios I can throw at him. All right, welcome back to the Wired to Hunt podcast brought to you by Moultrie. Today we’ve got another one of our what would you do episodes. The idea for these is to take a serious deer hunter, an experienced deer hunter, and present him with a series of difficult tricky, challenging, hypothetical deer hunting scenarios, and then see exactly how he would handle them, what they would do, why they would do it, what the thought process would be. That is the game plan here today. And my guest is Mike Rex. He is a diehard deer hunter from Southern Ohio. By some tallies I’ve seen, he’s killed more than 60 record buck bucks. He is doing it down in the big woods, big hilly country of Southern Ohio. And in addition to that, he’s also doing some great work when it comes to actual deer hunting conservation and policy as he’s the chairman of the Ohio, what is it called? The Ohio Wildlife Council. He’s a part of this eight member governor appointed panel that reviews all of the different proposed rules and regulations from Ohio’s division of wildlife. So he’s doing important work in addition to being a great deer hunter too. So the game plan today is to walk him through these tough scenarios and see what he would do and how he would do it. It’s going to be a great opportunity for all of us to learn from a serious DIY deer hunter and a great communicator. So I’m looking forward to this one. Quick heads up before you go. Before we get to that interview, we have just recently launched a new Q & A article series over on the MeatEater website. So if you have a deer hunting question that you would like us to answer, myself or Tony Peterson or any one of the other deer hunters over on the meat eater staff or across our crew of people, you can send that question. You can send your challenge or your tricky hypothetical hunting scenario to this email address. It is wired to hunt, all words, wired to hunt at themeateater.com. Send in your questions. And then every week, we’re going to try to have somebody writing a response to your question over on the MeatEater website. So you can check it out at TheMeatEater.com. The first one of those that I’ve seen is Tony Peterson tackling someone’s question about the age-old debate between fixed blades and mechanical blade broadheads. So check that out at the MeatEater website. Send your questions to WiredHunt at TheMeatEater.com. And now without any further ado, my chat with Mike Rexx.

00:03:19
Speaker 3: Enjoy.

00:03:24
Speaker 4: All right.

00:03:24
Speaker 2: With me now on the line is Mike Rex. Welcome to the show, Mike.

00:03:29
Speaker 4: Thank you.

00:03:32
Speaker 2: I appreciate you being here for this. I know you’ve got a lot on your hands these days. You are… Working on important Ohio deer hunting policy and various things with your role there, with the state helping out. It’s great that you’re doing that. I appreciate you doing that. But I want to pull you away from conservation, deer hunting policy, regulations, all that kind of stuff, and force you into the tough task. Of talking deer hunting scenarios and tactics. Are you game for that?

00:04:10
Speaker 3: I’m up. Okay.

00:04:12
Speaker 2: So I kind of prepared you for this. You sort of know what you’re getting yourself into. But I’m about to throw you into the what would you do gauntlet. And so in short, again, I’m going to kind of paint a picture for you. of a hypothetical deer hunting scenario. And these are scenarios that I think would fit your world of hunting things you’ve encountered before things you’ve thought about before. And I’m going to ask you to explain, you know, what would you do? How would you do it? Why would you do it? And then we’ll kind of go from there with each one of these. Some, some of these are like really tricky, nasty ones. Some of these are just common challenges that every one of us have faced. And we sat in our tree stand thinking, Oh God, what should I do right now? And we are paralyzed by it. Um, Everything like that is game and on the table. So are you prepared to set off on that path?

00:05:03
Speaker 4: As prepared as I’ll ever be.

00:05:05
Speaker 2: All right. Well, then we’re just going to get started right out the gate with a preseason scenario. Okay.

00:05:13
Speaker 3: Okay.

00:05:14
Speaker 2: I’m curious about two different scenarios of how you might scout out a situation and prepare for a hunting scenario. I know I’ve heard you in the past talk about how you’ve had some evolution in how you think about bedding areas versus food sources and the importance of that in developing your strategy. So first, a bedding-related scenario. Imagine you are walking the woods. It is late winter, early spring, right? So green-up has not happened yet. The snow, if there was any, has melted. You can see the woods beautifully. You’re in that kind of hilly rolling timber ground. That’s so common there in Southern Ohio. And as you are walking, we’re going to say over Creek crossing, you catch a big set of tracks in the mud and you’re able to follow those tracks a little ways up the hillside. And you see, there’s this kind of faint trail that leads to a knob. And on that knob is the, is the, there’s the dream scenario. There’s a match set of sheds. It looks like it’s just sitting in a bed. match set of giant antlers. This is a buck that would right away put them at the top of your list. And I know you’re the kind of guy who likes to know the buck you’re after. So imagine this is all just happened. You found the match set of a buck that’s sure to be right at the top.

00:06:33
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:06:34
Speaker 2: What do you do over the next hour? Now that you have found this bed, the spring bed, you found these antlers, you’ve learned some very important stuff. What do you do over the next hour to to learn more or to take advantage of what has just happened?

00:06:50
Speaker 3: So the first thing that I would consider is that it’s been my experience that deer, especially mature deer, have in this part of the country, not all, but a lot of them have specific ranges. So where they are in March is not necessarily where they’re going to be in September.

00:07:14
Speaker 4: I had one deer in particular that.

00:07:16
Speaker 3: I killed on some public property in 2018 that literally had the same pattern for three years in a row. We would get trail camera photos of him in an area that I personally wasn’t allowed to hunt, but one of my best friends hunted and this guy works a lot and I do a lot of things to help him. And so I would run his trail cameras for him and we would get pictures of this deer in September and October in the area that he was hunting. Then Later on in the season, in the fall, November, even into December, we’d get pictures of him in.

00:07:50
Speaker 4: Another area about a mile away.

00:07:52
Speaker 3: And then my son actually found sheds off of him in, excuse me, in February, another mile south of there. And so this deer, I mean, I don’t want to say migrated, but, and this deer also interesting when I killed him, I was talking to another friend of mine who owns some ground, like in a straight line, 4.9 miles from where I killed the deer. And I’m talking to this friend of mine and I’m like, hey, you see any good deer this year? Oh man, I had this great deer on my property. He was there in the middle of October, got him for like a week and then he was gone. We haven’t seen him since. It was the same buck I killed. And he was 4.9 miles away. So what the deer are doing in February, March, and April is not necessarily what they’re doing. And food sources change, cover changes, just all kinds of different reasons. They seem to have like a, a spring-summer pattern, and they seem to have like a fall-winter pattern.

00:08:44
Speaker 4: Not all deer, but a lot of them do.

00:08:46
Speaker 3: And so finding those sheds would be awfully exciting because, hey, I know, hey, good chance there’s going to be a really good deer somewhere in this area next year. But as far as what that bed and those sheds mean to me, not much unless I was going to hunt him next March, which, you know what I’m saying, really wouldn’t apply.

00:09:02
Speaker 2: All right. That makes a lot of sense. Would this be any different then? If I were to say that we were not finding a set of antlers or bedding area, but instead we just found a habitat feature that seemed very interesting to you. So let’s talk about, again, same time of year. You’re out scouting a new area and you come across a thicket, a thick, nasty, I don’t know. I’m going to imagine maybe this is possible down by you. Let’s say there’s like an old ground. old, old cutover and it’s still relatively young. And there’s actually some like natural crab apple trees or some kind of mass producing tree that’s, that’s popping up in there and producing some kind of fruit, some kind of mass there. Okay. So you find this, this cluster of thick, nasty stuff up on a ridge top and there’s mast and you can see that last year it likely produced a lot. You can see where deer have been kicking up the ground underneath it, and you’re hoping, oh, man, this fall, hopefully this is going to produce fruit again. This could be a great food source. Now tell me about how you spend the next hour. Is this at all different?

00:10:17
Speaker 3: Okay. Uh, yeah, a little bit, but let me, let me kind of go back a second and talk about, uh, thick cover. So I started bow hunting 1978. Um, I started deer hunting 1978 and in those days, and even through the eighties in this part of the country, when you, where you would find deer was in reverting pasture, old farms that were growing back and the thickest stuff, rabbit cover. We called it grouse cover back then. We used to have grouse in this area. We don’t have many anymore. I have seen a change in where our deer bed and how they use cover. So in the 70s and the 80s, when I first started hunting, we were the apex predator. We were the only thing they really had to worry about were humans. Today, we are inundated with coyotes and bobcats. We are no longer the apex predator. We are just one of a handful of apex predators. And we’re only in the woods for a short period of time. Coyotes and bobcats are badgering them 24-7 year round. And so one of the things I’ve discovered recently, and this was an epiphany for lack of a better word, is that our deer do not bed, especially our mature deer, do not bed in the thickest cover available. I used to think that way. My strategy for years was, okay, I can figure out where they’re feeding pretty easily, but it’s difficult to figure out where they’re coming from, especially.

00:11:39
Speaker 4: If you’re hunting big woods.

00:11:41
Speaker 3: And I could get off topic here too, but people like to talk about, well, I didn’t hunt there today because the wind was wrong.

00:11:47
Speaker 4: This is in big woods country, big hill.

00:11:50
Speaker 3: Country, okay? Well, how do you know which direction the deer is coming from? How do you know where he’s at to know that it was a bad wind? If I was hunting an agricultural area where there was a five acre woodlot surrounded by a thousand acres of soybeans, yeah, he’s coming out of that woodlot or he’s coming out of that drainage ditch or whatever. But when you’re hunting big expanses of habitat, you have no idea where he’s coming from. So to say it’s a good wind or a bad wind, you can, don’t get me wrong, you can use wind to your advantage, especially up on the ridge caps. It’s very difficult to do down in the hollows because the wind swirls so bad. But I’m not saying you can’t use wind to your advantage, but as far as saying, well, you know, this is, I’m not gonna hunt this stand today because the wind’s bad. How do you know where he’s coming from? Or you can figure out where he’s going to, but how do you know where he’s coming from? and getting back to the habitat and the cover. So it’s been my experience in the last few years, since I’ve really started paying attention, that our deer, especially our older deer, tend to bed up high. Now, all things being equal, if it’s wide open up high and it’s, you know what I mean, not wide open down in the bottom, they’re going to bed in the bottom. But if everything’s the same, they tend to bed high up on the ridges. They tend to bed close to features like fallen tree, treetop, bush, something that provides a little bit of cover, but yet they can see approaching danger, they can hear approaching danger, and then hopefully they can smell approaching danger. So just the cover or thick cover isn’t as attractive to deer as it maybe used to be or as I once thought it was. But to get back to your point about finding great sign in an area, Yeah, obviously, if I found something like that, a bunch of buck sign, lots of rubs, lots of scrapes, where it looks like two or three bucks of a similar age class were inhabiting that area and they were vying for dominance. Because when you see, when you find lots of buck sign in an area, that’s almost always a sign of competition. That’s bucks trying to make statements to each other. Hey, I’m here. You know, they’re leaving lots of sign. And so that’s always an encouraging sign. Obviously, there’s no way of knowing if those bucks survived the hunting season or not. But I’ve also found that when you find places like that, deer tend to rub and scrape in the same areas year after year after year. I mean, it’s, I don’t know why it’s the topography, it’s the way the wind blows, the thermal currents, it’s all, there’s probably a lot of things that factor into it. But I don’t know if you’re a turkey hunter, but turkeys are the same way. Our turkeys tend to roost in the same areas year after year after year. something to do with the trees, the wind, you know, they like pine boughs. A lot of times pine grows, the pine branches come straight out, give them some security and whatever, and deer the same way. So they tend to rub and scrape and leave lots of sign and inhabit the same areas. Now it changes from year to year, but a lot of times it’s very similar. I’ve seen this pattern over, you know, 40, 46 years of doing this stuff. So anyway, I would take notes of that area and I would absolutely… you know, consider it next year and say, Hey, there were a couple of bucks in this area last year that, you know, that looked like they were, you know, they were, they were trying to compete with each other and hopefully a few of them survive.

00:14:57
Speaker 4: Does that, I don’t know if that answers your question or not.

00:14:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, that, that does. Let me, let me position it just a little bit differently. Now let’s say that you were actually in season hunting now. All right.

00:15:11
Speaker 4: Okay.

00:15:11
Speaker 2: And so for whatever reason, this is a new property. It’s a new permission or a new lease you picked up or whatever it might be. And you have not actually been able to see all of it. And on this particular day, you’re working your way to go hunt in this region and you pass through this new terrain that we just described. And so for whatever reason, you hadn’t seen this before. This is the first time you spotted this stuff. It’s in season. It’s October. We’ll say early October. And you’ve got, you know, you either have a stand with you or you could go out there and hunt, you know, later that day, let’s say. Now, How do you kind of analyze the situation and take advantage of it based on what we discussed?

00:15:53
Speaker 4: Okay.

00:15:54
Speaker 3: So my strategy in this hill country and these unglaciated hills, I’m a big proponent of hunting saddles, especially in the fall of the year. A lot of our bucks aren’t necessarily paralleling the ridges. They’re going up and over, up and over. They’re trying to cross as many doe trails as they possibly can. And so saddles usually are the easiest path of resistance. It’s the easiest form to get from point A to point B. So if I would find something like that, the first thing I would look for, especially if I was going to set up and hunt that afternoon, I’d try to get as high up on the ridge as I possibly can.

00:16:27
Speaker 4: Because again, down.

00:16:29
Speaker 3: In the valleys, so for example, if ridges run east and west and north and south, and they go all different directions, a west wind comes over top of them, hits the top of the ridge, and it’s like a tornado. I think I used to write for North American whitetail magazine. The very first article I published in 1993 was entitled, whichever way the wind blows.

00:16:48
Speaker 4: And I talked about that very fact in that the.

00:16:51
Speaker 3: First thing you do to prove it to yourself is build a, build a campfire in a hollow and tell me how many times you got to move because the smoke’s in your eyes because the wind is just constantly changing. And the same thing with thermal currents. So warm air rises and cool air sinks. So you say, okay, uh, It’s cool. It’s usually coolest. Let’s say for a morning hunt, it’s usually coolest right at dawn. So cool air is sinking down in the bottom. Then all of a sudden the sun comes up. It’s the forest floor. Temperature starts to rise. Thermal currents change 180 degrees. What are you going to do? You’re going to get down and go get it? I mean, so… That’s what makes it fun. And the deer, especially the older deer, they figure this out. And so they move with those advantages. They move usually with some type of wind in their face, at least partially right for them.

00:17:36
Speaker 4: Not always.

00:17:36
Speaker 3: I mean, if they only had a favorable wind and that’s the only way they move, they’d have to circumvent the globe.

00:17:42
Speaker 4: You know what I mean?

00:17:42
Speaker 3: They’d never be able to go backwards. But they absolutely, whenever possible, will use that. And so to your point, what I would do is I would try to, I would seek out a saddle or point coming off of a ridge. A lot of times they like to do that. They’ll go up and then they’ll go out off a point and drop down. A place where I can see better, or I mean, at least from my vantage point. Also, I’m a real big proponent of the right tree. So, you know, I’m not a big climbing tree stand guy. One, because you can’t, can only climb straight trunk trees. And especially I’m, because I’m mostly a bow hunter. And so You know, to get, you got to get really high in a climbing tree stand to have any kind of cover whatsoever. I’m a very big proponent of hang on tree stands, which they make them today, which you can hang them just about as fast as you can climb in a tree. But I like to break up my human outline as much as possible. So I’m, first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to look around for the right tree or, or excuse me, I’m going to identify where I think the most logical place for me to encounter that deer is, which again is usually a saddle or something like a saddle.

00:18:48
Speaker 4: And I’m going to find the right tree.

00:18:50
Speaker 3: I’m not going to find the right tree that’s necessarily right on top of where I think these deer are going to come, but where I can see approaching. Now, if I only have one day to hunt, I might go in a little closer. But if I’ve got the whole rest of the season to hunt, I may go pick out a tree that just allows me to observe, just to kick back and watch. And a lot of times you can learn a lot about how the deer are using the topography, how they’re using the land by just watching.

00:19:15
Speaker 4: You don’t necessarily… you.

00:19:16
Speaker 3: Know, kill them on the first time you kill them by kind of sitting back and seeing exactly how these deer are using this terrain.

00:19:21
Speaker 4: How do they get from here to there?

00:19:36
Speaker 2: So I’ve been in this scenario a number of times where I come across something, you know, maybe, maybe it’s just like this. Sometimes it’s a little bit different, but you’re, you’re considering you know how do i set up on this spot and we’ll we’ll call the spot the x right that saddle just looks dynamite and then you’re trying to find that tree right and and you mentioned there’s a bunch of different things you’re looking for right you you want some good cover you would like to be within range of that x uh you also would like hopefully to be positioned well so the wind is going to work to your advantage um maybe you want to have those sight lines like you mentioned to see and learn more. Oftentimes, you never get the perfect combination of all those things, right? And so you’re stuck debating, okay, do I take tree A, which has good cover? I’m just going to make this up as we go. Okay, tree A has good cover, and it is rock solid from a wind perspective. There’s no way anything’s going to wind you. But it is just perfect. barely out of range, like at the very farthest extent of your bow range. I don’t know what that is for you, but let’s just say it’s at that farthest extent where you’re like, gosh, I really don’t want to take this shot at this range, but maybe I could, or maybe I have to grunt him in an extra five yards or something. So that’s tree A. Tree B is picture perfect, 20 yards from the X, beautiful shooting lanes right to it. If a deer comes to the X, he is dead nuts on the ground. but it’s, you know, slightly sketchier from a wind perspective. Like maybe deer could wind you one time out of four and it doesn’t have as much cover. Do you take tree a that’s bulletproof, but a hard shot or tree B, which is a little sketchy, but perfect for the X. What do you do?

00:21:30
Speaker 3: I take tree C and tree C is tree C is out of the way. So I don’t take tree a because, and I, I have three sons that like to hunt as much as I do. And one of the lessons that I really tried to instill in them as they were growing up as deer hunters is you would much rather have that deer walk off and have an opportunity to hunt him tomorrow than you would just get an arrow going in his direction and hope that it hits where you want it to hit. So many people, they see a good deer or any deer, they see something they want and they just got to get a bullet or an arrow going in that direction. And had they waited 30 seconds, the ideal shot may have materialized. It might not have materialized to the deer could have turned and walk the other direction, but you’d rather have the deer turn and walk the other direction. Then you would make a bad hit on the deer and can’t find it. So tree is out of the question because if I can’t guarantee a clean kill, you know, a good shot, I’m going to let it go. And I’ve done that many, many times. I have let lots of deer walk that I think some other people would have tried. Uh, but I don’t do that. And I, and I really was very, uh, stirring with my kids about that growing up that, Hey, we don’t do that.

00:22:38
Speaker 4: We’d rather hunt them tomorrow.

00:22:40
Speaker 3: Now the tree B and I, you got to refresh my memory here real quick, but tree B is the one that’s not necessarily in the right spot.

00:22:47
Speaker 4: And what are the other issues with tree B?

00:22:49
Speaker 2: Tree B has a great shot to the X. You’re only 20 yards from the X, but it is not as much cover and maybe 25% of the deer passing through could wind you.

00:22:59
Speaker 3: Yeah. Okay.

00:22:59
Speaker 4: So that’s the other issue.

00:23:01
Speaker 3: So Tree B can make the hill steeper for you because if that deer busts you coming there because conditions were wrong or you didn’t put yourself in the best possible spot to shoot him, then your chances of encountering him there again go way down. So I would rather hunt tree C way off in the distance and just observe and figure out some other option than I would hunt a tree that is going to give me the best chance of a really good shot. or at a tree that’s going to take a chance, not a chance, they all have a chance, but has a higher probability of spooking him. Because if you spook him, then the hill just got really steep. Because the older deer, especially, I mean, the deer that I like to hunt, they don’t get to be that way by making mistakes.

00:23:45
Speaker 4: I mean, a lot of the ones that made the mistakes are dead.

00:23:47
Speaker 3: And so when a buck gets to be four, five, six, seven years old, man, they become like a different kind of creature. And it’s something else I’ve learned about bucks that age. So I hunted a deer years ago. I just talked about this on another podcast not long ago, so I won’t go deep into this story, but I hunted a deer that was eight and a half years old that I had a pinch point, a funnel that was just, you couldn’t draw it out any better. And over the years, we killed a pile, I say we, my sons and I, killed a room full of really nice bucks in this funnel because it was perfect. It was an inside corner, it was a corner of a field, and the inside corner pointed had a steep drainage. So he had a real steep ravine in the woods and an inside corner and about a 70 yard wide gap in between the two with two perfect trees on either side. So, and it faced north and south. So anything with an N in it, you hunted at the S. Anything with an S in it, you hunted the N. And any deer that was over here that wanted to go there and any deer that was over there wanted to go here.

00:24:43
Speaker 4: It’s just perfect, right?

00:24:44
Speaker 3: This buck, this particular buck, I had two encounters with him there in the fall of 2013, the year that I killed him. And he would not pass through that cut if he could not smell what was out in front of him. He just wouldn’t do it. And so he just knew. I mean, he would walk all the way around it, way out of his way. So I don’t know if you’ve ever trapped before, but when you trap, you don’t want to force an animal to step right on your pan. You don’t want to force him to step right here. You want to suggest that he steps. You want to make it easier for him to step there. But if you make him step there, he’ll walk around it. Big bucks are the same way. If they got to go through there and conditions are not right for them to know that it’s safe to pass through there, I’m not saying they’re not superhuman or not super whatever you want to call them, but a lot of them just won’t do it. And they won’t do it because they’ve learned through trial and error that I’m not making any moves unless I’m sure that it’s safe to go that way. And that buck that I wound up killing him on November the 16th and it was blind lock, what happened was a doe… came under my stand with her tail up and he followed her under the tree and it cost him his life, which women often do.

00:25:55
Speaker 2: Right.

00:25:56
Speaker 4: But, uh, but he, uh, it’s great.

00:25:58
Speaker 2: It’s great when they do that for the deer though.

00:26:00
Speaker 4: Exactly.

00:26:01
Speaker 3: But it was, I mean, that was the only way he was going to pass through there without perfect conditions. And so, um, I would, I would, from, from your scenario, I would get somewhere where I could observe that area. And then I would, from there, I would start maybe going out the spokes and I’d start trying to figure out, Hey, what’s the best way to encounter these deer in a better scenario that to the best of my ability, it’s as good as it gets. Now, don’t get me wrong. If I’m out of state and it’s two days left in the season, I’m going to roll the dice on tree B if I only have a day or two to hunt. But if I’ve got four and a half months to hunt, I’m not going to make that hill any steeper for me. I’m a very conservative bow hunter. Some guys are real aggressive and they can make that work. That’s not worked well for me. What’s worked well for me is being patient, being conservative. All right.

00:26:50
Speaker 2: So I want to build off that a little bit because you mentioned something that reminded me of another one of my kind of PTSD deer hunting moments, um, where you, you set up in a spot that you believe is rock solid as you described. Uh, and you believe that you’re in this dynamite location, the bucks gotta come through. Um, but let’s say it’s a morning hunt, October 31st, we’ll say. So, you know, that pre-rut action is really ramping up. Beautiful cold morning. You moved into a spot you felt really good about. And now like an hour and a half after daylight, your wind like starts getting wonky and it starts getting worse and worse. And maybe like a third of the time it’s blowing in a spot you do not want it to blow. And, you know, you have probably had that creeping sense of dread and, as the wind starts getting worse and worse, like, oh gosh, please don’t do that. Let that be a one-time thing. And then five minutes later, it does it again. And five minutes later, it does it again. Yeah. This happens. It’s an hour and a half after daylight now. Like I mentioned, about a third of the time, it’s blowing where you do not want it to go.

00:27:57
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:27:59
Speaker 2: What do you do in that situation? Do you stick it out and roll the dice and say, ah, you know, hope for the best? Or do you bail?

00:28:05
Speaker 4: No, I bail. I bail every time.

00:28:07
Speaker 3: And let me tell you, we were talking about how do I pass the time in a tree stand earlier today. So, My favorite thing to do in a tree stand is I grab like milkweed pods or the tuft of a cattail and I sit in stands and I watch. I turn those floaters loose and I watch. And it’s really fascinating to see what they do and what they do on their way down.

00:28:28
Speaker 4: I mean, they’re going this way, they’re going this way. And then all of a sudden they’re going back that way.

00:28:32
Speaker 3: And it’s, I mean, it changes in between where we are and the ground and it’s constantly changing. So the scenario you just described is most hunts, I mean, that’s most of the time. And so again, I’m very conservative. I, I’m, I mean, I’m semi-retired even before I was semi-retired. I can hunt every day of the season if I want to. So I have a really huge advantage over a lot of guys. Um, but I’m, I earned that right by retiring. So anyway, I worked for a long time at a very hard job, but anyway, so I, uh, uh, I’m real conservative. And if the wind looks bad or if deer are winding me, you know, if a doe’s winding me off in the distance, I almost always get down. Because again, it just makes that hill steeper for me. It makes my chances of killing that buck two days from now exponentially harder. So because my, now again, if I was traveling, I’m out of state, I got four days, I might stick it out.

00:29:26
Speaker 4: You know what I’m saying?

00:29:26
Speaker 3: It’s peak rut, deer moving. You know, when that doe leaves, you know, a lot of times… If you ever watch big bucks or mature bucks out in the field, a doe will snort and run off and a big buck will just stand there where every other deer will scatter, but he’ll just stand there and he does that because he really only trusts his nose and his eyes and his ears he he doesn’t put a lot of stock in i mean not that he thought that he ignores other deer but he’s way more concerned about you know he’s not going to take off running in a direction arbitrarily and not know that that’s the direction of the of the problem you know i’m saying so A lot of times, if I’m hunting around here and I’ve got lots of time, when it starts doing that wonky thing that you’re talking about, I get down.

00:30:12
Speaker 2: How would you get down? Do you wait until a certain time when you think things are going to slow down a little bit, or do you get down immediately? Do you wait a certain number of minutes after seeing the last deer pass through? And then one last one. Do you do, do you do like the slow creeping, like trying to be very quiet, trying to be slow, not spook anything to get down, but knowing that will take you longer? Or do you do the, I’m going to rip the bandaid off and just get this sucker out, or I’m going to get off the tree and get to a new spot as fast as I possibly can, even though it may make some noise, I want to get somewhere quickly.

00:30:49
Speaker 3: No, my, my philosophy or strategy there is I try to get down when everything’s gone. The last thing I want to do is have any deer watch me climb down out of the tree. Because if you get busted, and this has happened to me a million times, you get busted by an old doe two or three hunts in a row, she becomes a squirrel hunter. She comes in, she’s like, you know, where’s the, he was there yesterday, you know, that kind of stuff. So I don’t, I’m not a big proponent of hunting right over food sources, like food plots, apple trees, I don’t care, feed or whatever you want to say. I’m not a big proponent of hunting right over it. And the reason I’m not a big proponent of hunting right now is because deer come and they stay.

00:31:28
Speaker 4: They’re not passing through.

00:31:30
Speaker 3: I like to be in areas where deer are just passing through so I can get down. If you hunt over a food source very consistently, especially in the evening, it’s almost impossible to get out of there without spooking everything because the deer come, when do they come to feed? They come to feed right about the time you’re going to get down. And so you only get to do that a handful of times. And then, then every, you know, you’ve tipped every deer in the neighborhood of what you’re doing. And so I’ve had people say to me before, as far as food sources go, what kind of food? I look for it. It’s important, but I use it more to figure out where they’re traveling to, and then I try to get in between or away from that, basically.

00:32:09
Speaker 2: Okay. Let’s pivot a little bit here. We’ve kind of gone down this line quite a bit. Let’s shift to something a little bit different. I’ve heard you say once that possibly the greatest hindrance— to you would be if somebody would ever take away your trail cameras.

00:32:27
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh.

00:32:27
Speaker 2: Trail cameras have become a huge part of your hunting strategy.

00:32:31
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:32:32
Speaker 2: So imagine, imagine we’re talking today on August 18th. Imagine that I told you today that from this point forward this year, you may not use any of your cell cameras. You may not use any trail cameras at all.

00:32:45
Speaker 3: Yep.

00:32:46
Speaker 2: What would you do between now and the season opener to re-prepare yourself given this new fact of life, which is no cameras this year. So pre-season is what I’m interested in first over the next, you know, month. And then, and then after that, I’d like to hear what would be different in season.

00:33:04
Speaker 3: Well, I would do nothing different to prepare other than what I’ve already done. I mean, I’ve already, I rented a bulldozer back in June and I opened up 10.3 acres of secondary growth timber into food plots. I mean, I’ve done a lot. I mean, it’s a year round process for me. So I’m involved in it all year. I would do nothing different to prepare. I live in an area, there’s not a lot of agriculture and there’s not a lot of feed or not a feed, not a lot of fields. And so the reason that trail cameras are so important to me is they’ve enabled me to find deer that I’m interested in. And then on top of that, they, as I’ve gotten older, and again, I’ve been doing this since 78.

00:33:43
Speaker 4: So what’s it 48 years.

00:33:44
Speaker 3: They’ve enabled me to have a level of confidence to sit comfortably longer. If I’m, if I’m confident that, Hey, I know there’s a deer inhabiting this area that I’m interested in. It doesn’t have to be the biggest buck in the woods. It’s just one that I’m interested in hunting. I can sit there longer if I’m not sure, like, like I used to hunt. So a little bit of history about me, you may or may not know this, but I, I, I killed my first Pope and young in like 89, I think, 88, 89. I killed my first Buckeye Big Buck in 91. And I killed another one in 97. Then I killed another one in 99. And then from 99 through just a few years ago, I killed one every year. And the only thing that really changed was these cameras, these cell cameras, my ability to find them.

00:34:31
Speaker 4: Before I would go.

00:34:32
Speaker 3: Into an area, find a lot of sign like we were just talking about, find scrapes. I, hey, this area last year was really good. The first week in November, they use it this way. I’ll go sit there. And don’t get me wrong, that was fun. And there’s something to be said for that surprise factor. You know what I’m saying? And I’ll be honest also, as a hunter, I’m 62 years old. I’m kind of really coming full circle. I’ve got a good friend of mine, Eddie Salter. He’s a big turkey hunting and deer hunting buddy of mine. He told me a few years ago, he said, Rex, he said, you’ve lost the blood in your eye. And what he means is I… I’m okay with eating a tag. I’m more, way more interested in the process today than I used to be. You know, when I was a younger man, I really wanted to, my goals were, you know, this, I’m interested in this deer. I’m interested in this class of buck or whatever.

00:35:22
Speaker 4: Today, I’m more interested in the process. So that being said.

00:35:26
Speaker 3: If trail cameras were taken away from me, because I don’t have a lot of agricultural places to glass, I’m not going to go sit in a tree and invade the woods because that’s too intrusive.

00:35:42
Speaker 4: You know what I’m saying? I’m not going to do that either.

00:35:44
Speaker 3: I would probably go back, not probably, I would absolutely go back to history. I would say, okay, you know, I know that certain times of year, these deer use this area a lot. They have since 1984. I know that. And I know this, and I know this is a good tree, and this has historically been a good tree. But my My consistency killing really what most people consider decent bucks would suffer.

00:36:10
Speaker 4: There’s no question it would suffer.

00:36:11
Speaker 3: That’s the one tool that would, and I’m not saying that’s bad. That’s a bad thing, but I wouldn’t have as much consistent success.

00:36:25
Speaker 2: It’s hard to. hard to blame you for that. They are a great tool. Uh, so get, so given that fact, I’m going to be kind to you and I’m going to give you back some cameras.

00:36:34
Speaker 3: Okay. All right.

00:36:36
Speaker 2: So I’m going to give you four cell cameras back to use, but because I’m a little bit of a, a conniver, I’m going to say you can’t hunt your old properties. You have to hunt a new place.

00:36:49
Speaker 3: Got it. Got it.

00:36:50
Speaker 2: So you get your four cameras back, but you have to hunt a new farm. To make it simple, I’m going to say it’s 100-acre square, and I’m going to imagine something similar to what you might hunt, which would be the rolling hills, mostly timber, and maybe a couple of these small openings that could be a food plot, that kind of thing. So 100 acres, let’s say there’s a couple acres worth of scattered small fields, otherwise timber, some creek bottoms, stuff like that. You have four cell cameras. Walk me through how you would deploy four cell cameras on a property such as this to try to either figure out the property or figure out a deer or whatever your goal would be with these cameras. Talk to me how you would set them up between now, August 18th, and then how you might or might not change that as the season progresses.

00:37:43
Speaker 3: Okay, so the first thing I would go look for are preferred food. I would go, are there oaks? Are there white oaks? Did the white oaks produce this year? That’s the first thing I would look for. I’d look for obviously well-worn trails or heavily used areas or areas that have signed from last year, that kind of stuff.

00:38:03
Speaker 4: I would go in and scout it.

00:38:05
Speaker 3: I would take those four cameras and I would put them in the four areas that seem to have or have had the most deer activity, which by the way, is not necessarily the best place to kill a big buck. but it’s the best place to initially learn how the deer are using the property and how they travel from point A to point B, that kind of stuff. So that would be the very first thing I do. Then if I got a picture of something I was interested in, then I would hone in on that spot or that area. And especially if it was a food source, if it was an old fence line oak that was dry and old, because You know, an older oak tree produces not necessarily a sweeter nut, but a nut that’s usually more palatable to a deer than a younger oak tree. And so if it were a grove of old mature white oaks and they’re dropping pretty good, I wouldn’t hunt right there in those oaks, but I would hunt out the spokes leading to those oaks. I would figure out how the deer are getting to them. That way, when they get there, they congregate. If I don’t kill that buck on the first night, I can slip out. I have I have several friends or a couple of buddies that are, that are really just sold on. They, they hunt, they’re very mobile and their, their philosophy is one guy in particular, his philosophy is that the very first time that you hunt a stand is statistically your best chance of, killing whatever you’re interested in, statistically. So he’s always in a different tree. I argue that, but how do you know that deer don’t do the same thing every day? So how do you know that three days from now he didn’t come by that tree? So I kind of disagree with that. But statistically, if you’re just going to play the odds, it is a smart thing to do. But what I would do is I would, if I got a picture of something I’m interested in, then I would go to that camera, And I’d take those other three cameras and I’d get away from it.

00:39:52
Speaker 4: And I’d try to get a.

00:39:52
Speaker 3: Picture of him somewhere else. And then it would start to connect the dots. And I’d say, okay, well, he’s coming here to feed. And I got a picture of him over here. So not every day, but he’s probably coming from somewhere over there. Then I would pick a logical spot to hang a stand. Okay.

00:40:09
Speaker 2: A follow-up. Let’s imagine this has happened. You’ve kind of zeroed in. You’ve found a buck. Yeah. kind of tightened the web around him. And now you’ve set a stand and you start hunting. You’ve put together a plan. The season’s rolling on. Let’s say, you know, I know you guys usually open the end of September down there in Ohio. So let’s say we’re in that end of September, early October time period. And let’s say you finally got, you got the conditions you really wanted for this time of year. So we’re going to say maybe a little bit of a cool front moving through. You’ve got the right wind to hunt one of these locations that you really like. And it’s the morning of, okay? And you’re going to hunt that evening. The morning of, you pull up your cell phone app, your camera app of choice, and you see that that target buck that you were interested in actually daylighted last night right at the end of daylight. In a totally different place, not the location you wanted to hunt, not the place that you thought was like the spot to be an unexpected place. What do you do on your hunt tonight? Do you go hunt the spot that you had said, oh, this is the place that I should hunt because of A, B and C, or do you chase that cell phone picture of where he was last night?

00:41:31
Speaker 3: That’s a great question. Um, you know, I’ve never thought of it, but, but trying to put myself in that scenario. I think I would go to plan A, the spot that I intended to. And I think I would sit there all day. I’m a big proponent of all day sits when times are right. Less intrusion coming and going. I’ve encountered big bucks in the middle of the day before. It’s grueling.

00:42:00
Speaker 4: And as I’ve gotten older, it’s harder to do.

00:42:02
Speaker 3: But I’ve done it. I’ve done it for weeks on end before. Just go into a spot that I feel confident in. And just get in there. And now I’m not a big proponent of going in in the dark because I want to see what I’m spooking.

00:42:14
Speaker 4: A lot of guys like to get an hour before daylight.

00:42:16
Speaker 3: And sometimes if, like if I’m hunting public ground and I need to get, you know, somewhere off the beaten path for whatever reason, I’ll leave real early.

00:42:25
Speaker 4: I’ll, you know, go out in the dark way before daylight.

00:42:27
Speaker 3: But if it’s a place that I feel pretty secure in, it’s just me hunting or me and my friends or whatever, my kids, I’ll wait till it starts to crack daylight to go to that stand. Because I want to be able to, I mean, every deer sounds like a Boone and Crockett running off in the dark.

00:42:41
Speaker 4: You know what I mean?

00:42:41
Speaker 3: But you don’t know. It could have been three does, you know, it’s hard to say what it is. And so, so I like to slip in at first light and then I like to sit there as long as I possibly can. I’ll bring a backpack and I’ll pack a sandwich and some food and whatever. And I might get down for, 10 or 15 minutes in the middle of the day because I’m a 62-year-old guy and I got to, but I will sit there as long as I can through the day. And I think I would go with that plan unless that daylight picture was like way far away, you know, and the chances of him getting back to the other area are slim. But if the first place looked like the best place to kill him, I probably would go there anyway. And I just sit there the entire day and hope to catch him, you know, sometime in daylight coming or going.

00:43:39
Speaker 2: And so you would do that even in the early season you will do all day sits outside of the rut oh no.

00:43:44
Speaker 3: No no no i should i i apologize i didn’t mean to say that no no i would not do that in the early season in the early season it’s almost exclusively an afternoon hunt although i killed the biggest buck of my life behind me here on a morning hunt but uh It’s a whole lot easier to figure out in the early season where they’re feeding than it is where they’re bedding. And so I like to get there long before they go to feed. But in the early season, I pretty much only hunt in the afternoon. I’m not saying I wouldn’t. Again, if I’m out of state, I only got four or five days to hunt. Every hour is better than no hour. But because I have so much time, my strategy is usually in the early season, afternoon hunt, rut. any dime all day, post rut, late season, afternoon hunt again, because easier to figure out where they’re feeding in the early season and the late season. And then during the rut, they’re just traveling. They’re just moving around. So that’s kind of how I would do that.

00:44:43
Speaker 4: Okay.

00:44:44
Speaker 2: You mentioned that you prefer heading in during daylight for a morning sit. I remember hearing you say that somewhere else too. And I wanted to ask you about that. Let’s imagine that you are heading in for a morning hunt We’ll say it’s during this general rut time frame when you’re going to do those morning hunts. It’s at that gray hour, you’re walking in and you come around a corner and bam, there he is. The buck that you’re after standing 50 yards away, sees you, spins around, bounds away. You’re relatively close to where you were planning hunting that day and you’re going to hunt let’s say that like amazing pinch point you talked about earlier, right? This place that man, they’re going to come through, but now you just bumped in. You’re kind of close to that spot. What do you do in that scenario?

00:45:32
Speaker 3: I’m like, okay, so I’m going to tell you a real world, uh, event and I would not have done this, but.

00:45:39
Speaker 4: I’m going to tell you how it worked out.

00:45:41
Speaker 3: So, so, so, so several years ago, uh, a good friend of mine owns some property here close by had some friends of his come from out of state, come from North Carolina to hunt on his property. These are buddies of his. And it was their first time on his property. So this friend of mine was out in the Dakotas hunting pheasants when these guys showed up.

00:45:57
Speaker 4: So he called me, he said, hey, Mike, can you go out to my.

00:45:59
Speaker 3: Place and show these guys, just show them the boundaries and, you know, where they can, and maybe give them some pointers of, you know, this place, that place or whatever.

00:46:05
Speaker 4: And I said, oh, absolutely.

00:46:06
Speaker 3: So I met these guys out there, two real nice fellows from North Carolina. And as a matter of fact, if you’d like, I’ll send you a picture of this. You can put this picture up on the podcast. So the one guy goes out this big Oak flat and with a climbing tree stand, cause there are a couple of scrapes out there that we saw when we were walking around when I was showing them the, the, the property. And he climbs up a tree, a straight trunk tree. And I don’t know how far into the hunt, but it went long into the hunt. Two bucks meet out in front of him or they’re coming at each other and they’re both giants. I mean, well, the one he winds up killing is a Miss Boone and Crockett by an eighth of an inch.

00:46:45
Speaker 4: Great big buck. And then both of them are really big bucks.

00:46:47
Speaker 3: And this guy had, I think the condition is called IBS or some kind of intestinal deal where when it hits him, he’s got, you know, they’re just, so anyway, this happens out in front of him. And he, and he, he told me, he said, Mike, I had to make a decision. And he said, I just made the decision then. And I think some people might’ve just went in their pan, but he’s like, ah, so he click, click, click. He comes down out of the tree and He spooks the deer. They run off in opposite directions. He runs 30 yards from his tree, takes care of his business. Now, if that’s you or me or most other people, we grab our climbing tree stand and we walk down the ridge a ways, right?

00:47:26
Speaker 4: He goes right back to the same tree. Click, click, click, click, click, goes back up.

00:47:30
Speaker 3: And about, I don’t know, half hour, hour later, one of the giant bucks comes back from the direction it had run off, walks over top of the toilet paper, passes in front of him and he kills it at like 20 yards. I mean, that’s an example. I don’t know if you believe in God or not, but when the good Lord wants it to happen, you can’t stop it.

00:47:50
Speaker 2: You take that miracle and run.

00:47:52
Speaker 4: Yeah, that’s it. That’s it.

00:47:53
Speaker 3: So that’s a real life situation. I have had the scenario happen that you described. I have spooked my target buck on my way to my stand before, and I have turned around and walked out. I have said, you know what? I’ve already encountered him here. My chances of encountering him later in this area are not good. And so let’s just let it cool down and, and maybe hunt him, you know, in a week or three days, five days, whatever.

00:48:19
Speaker 4: Wait for condition.

00:48:20
Speaker 3: Here’s the other thing. I think just because you spook a deer in an area, they do not vacate that area. I mean, they, they encounter predators every day, all day. If they, if they didn’t go every place that a coyote or bobcat spooked, they got no place to go.

00:48:32
Speaker 2: Right.

00:48:32
Speaker 3: So they’re not they’re not like I’m never going back there again because I encountered this guy. But if there’s a lot of human scent there and it’s consistent in the same.

00:48:41
Speaker 4: Spot every day, every day, I think that they they learn that, hey.

00:48:44
Speaker 3: That sense only here, usually in the daylight and safer to pass through here after dark and all that stuff.

00:48:51
Speaker 2: Well, here’s another variation on something like that. Instead of spooking him while walking into your stand, let’s say you’re in the stand. And it’s November 10th and it’s, it’s pumping. Like there’s deer all over the place. Bucks are running. It’s one of those special mornings when everything’s going the way you want to happen. And you just have that feeling like he could show up any second. Today’s the day. And sure enough. I don’t know, 9.30 in the morning, here comes a doe trotting down through the pipe, you know, right down the pipe the way you want her to come in, and then there he is, bird-dogging her right behind her, you know, the steam coming out of his nose, the whole thing.

00:49:33
Speaker 3: It’s what we all dream about, yeah.

00:49:35
Speaker 2: It’s what we all dream about, except… When he rolls through at 28 yards, you send an arrow and it’s a clean miss. Clean miss and that buck boogers out of there so fast and hard. You would have thought that a bomb went off, but he’s gone. Now you’re sitting there in the wake of that. The woods are now silent. There’s not a living creature seemingly in miles.

00:49:59
Speaker 3: Except for you cussing.

00:50:01
Speaker 2: Yes, except for you. What do you do now?

00:50:04
Speaker 3: Okay, so I have a real life scenario or real life situation where that happened to me. So, and I think I told, I’m kind of running out of material here. I keep telling the same stories, but anyway, but this, this, this was, so in my career, whatever life as a bow hunter, I’ve seen two deer from a tree stand that were exceptional. And when I say exceptional, one of them’s this one over my shoulder here. And the other one was, and I’m, Yeah, but anyway, it was in October of 1998. And this buck was, he was the biggest typical buck I’ve ever seen from a tree stand. And one of the biggest bucks I’ve ever seen anywhere, even in a pen. I mean, this thing was just tremendous.

00:50:48
Speaker 4: Really, really, really big buck.

00:50:50
Speaker 3: But anyway, I had him, this was before range finders. I had him at a scrape that I had stepped off that was 21 yards from the base of my tree.

00:51:01
Speaker 4: Perfect scenario.

00:51:03
Speaker 3: I saw him coming from a ways off and I like to shoot, when I could, I like to shoot sitting down, you know, bend at the waist and all that stuff. But if I don’t have to stand up, I don’t like it. It’s just more movement. This deer was so big. I saw him coming from a distance that I just, and he got about 75 yards out and I stood up. I don’t know why. I think I just, you know, I just was irrational because he was so big. And I stood up very slowly, but I had lacrosse boots on with my pants tucked down in a lacrosse boot. I was in an API baby grand twister tree stand. And when I got three quarters standing, the lip of my boot caught that seat and it just went kapink. And he’s 75 yards out, all of a sudden kapink. And man, he starts looking up and scanning. I’m, pardon my French, but I’m shaking like a dog passing bones. You know what I mean? I’m just, this is a really good deer.

00:51:51
Speaker 4: Biggest buck I.

00:51:51
Speaker 3: Had ever seen in my life up to that point. And he looked around and all of a sudden, nothing. He didn’t see anything. He wagged his tail. He walked right down to that scrape. And his head was in the licking branch. He was doing that stuff with their forehead glands. And he was standing perfectly. I mean, you could not have scripted it any better. I had one pin on my bow out to 30 yards. I drew back. I think in the way my memory replays it, I centered that pin.

00:52:18
Speaker 4: In the middle of the boiler room. I touched my release.

00:52:22
Speaker 3: He mule kicked, which is what you like to see, and he ran off with his tail down, which they rarely do unless they’re.

00:52:30
Speaker 4: Hit, right?

00:52:32
Speaker 3: I remember thinking, I just killed the biggest typical buck anybody’s ever seen a picture of. And I’ve made the cover of North American Whitetail Magazine. I’m going to, you know, all this, this is unbelievable. I mean, and I was so confident in my shot. And I got down out of the tree and I walked over to where he was standing and my arrow was in the ground, clean as a whistle. I never, I was, the only thing I can tell you is, is that I was so excited for lack of a better word that I don’t say I blacked out, but I’m going to say that I don’t know what happened because everything I thought happened was perfect and I missed him. And I can’t tell you if I shot over him or under him. And why did he run off with his tail down? You know? So The scenario applies to your question is, I remember thinking, man, I’m gonna stay out of there for two weeks.

00:53:23
Speaker 4: And he saw it. And then I thought, wait a minute.

00:53:25
Speaker 3: He didn’t see me. He heard something.

00:53:29
Speaker 4: Hell, tree branch could have fell, right? He heard something.

00:53:31
Speaker 3: He didn’t feel anything. He just got out of dodge. And so I went right back to that stand the next night. And actually two nights later, I saw him. He didn’t come down to that’s great, but there was a flat, like slightly above me and off to my left. And I watched him go down that flat and freshen scrapes. So he had passed through there again just two days later after being shot at, now shot at with a bow, but still. So to answer your question, if that happened to me, all bets are off during the rut. That buck, I don’t know how much he was paying attention to where he was anyway. He was bird-dogging that doe. Now, if it would have been early season, first week of the season, and he comes through real cautious and I spook him, But if he was bird, dog, and a doe, I think I’d go right back there tomorrow.

00:54:18
Speaker 2: Now, what about when you get home that night after the hunt? How do you process missing that opportunity? How do you analyze? How do you try to make sure, you know, I don’t know. Do you try to make sure it was you or the bow, or do you shoot your bow a bunch? What about that part of this?

00:54:38
Speaker 3: Real quick, you’ve spent a lot of time doing this, haven’t you, thinking about this?

00:54:41
Speaker 4: Because I can tell some of this stuff’s happened to you, right?

00:54:42
Speaker 3: So, yeah.

00:54:43
Speaker 2: Too many of these things happen. Yeah, exactly. This one included.

00:54:48
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, exactly.

00:54:49
Speaker 4: Yeah, you’re speaking from experience, I can tell.

00:54:53
Speaker 2: Yes.

00:54:54
Speaker 3: So you said you’re a turkey hunter. I tell people this all the time. I’m a really avid turkey hunter. I turkey hunt every day of the season. I don’t shoot turkey. I mean, I’ve killed a handful of turkeys, but I just like to go with people. I love to hear them gobble. I love to be a part of the process. So I hunt every day. I never run out of tags because I’m not shooting them. But I’m out there every day chasing them. So you’re calling it turkey hunting. and you miss it or you screw it up or whatever. That’s okay, let’s go over two ridges that way and get on another one. If you have one encounter a year with a buck that you really want, you’ve had a good year, just one encounter. So a really big buck, a buck of a lifetime, that’s life altering. You may never get that opportunity again. So how do you process that? It’s hard.

00:55:36
Speaker 4: You try to learn.

00:55:37
Speaker 3: So I think what separates really, above average hunters, what I call above average, a person that consistently gets, you know, what he’s after year after year after year that doesn’t cheat. I think what separates those people from a lot of other people is they learn from their mistakes. You know, they don’t, boy, I’ll never do that again. You know, and so, and there’s no shortcut for that. A lot of times you just got to get out there and do it and make that mistake and see what happened and learn from your mistakes. So the people that consistently, you know, are on good deer year after year after year, most of them are also students of the game, you know, they pay attention to what they did wrong. So to answer your question, that’s, I know it’s a long answer. To answer your question, if I go back and process, I would think about, you know, what went wrong? How did I miss? What caused me to miss? And what would I do differently next time? Or is there a better tree? Is there, you know, what, you know, what could I do differently? Or what could I have done differently to have a better outcome? I think that’s what I do. And then I’d also be sick to my stomach all night and probably the next two days.

00:56:37
Speaker 4: You know, I mean, it’s just, it’s just life altering.

00:56:40
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:56:40
Speaker 2: Yes. I, uh, no, all too well. I have not, uh, I’m sure missed a buck quite of the caliber you described, but, um, every one of them felt life altering to me in the moment.

00:56:53
Speaker 3: Yeah. So, so real quick, getting back to something you said earlier, we were talking about earlier about taking good shots. So I am, I’m not a world-class Archer.

00:57:01
Speaker 4: I mean, I think I’m okay.

00:57:02
Speaker 3: Cause I’ve been shooting for a long time, but I’m not, I know, I know guys that shoot circles around me at the range and I’m not, you know, the most gifted athlete.

00:57:10
Speaker 4: I’m not doing everything else.

00:57:11
Speaker 3: But one thing, I have a really good track record and I should, there’s wood, don’t attack some wood, but I have a really good track record of not wounding deer. And my kids do for the most part too. Now, when they were younger, they wounded some deer, but for the most part, because we only take chip shots. So when you’re, especially if you’re a bow hunter like me, and I’ve killed deer with a gun, but I’m primarily a bow hunter. Deer have cat-like reflexes and the speed of sound is three times faster than the arrow. And so I did a lot of video work for years and years and years. I was a camera guy for HS Outdoors and I filmed for a lot of different TV shows and I filmed a lot of deer jumping the string. I mean, like they hunker down. I’ve also filmed a lot of deer that never flinched. And so the farther away a deer gets from you, when you’re shooting an arrow, either a crossbow, bow, whatever, you’re shooting an arrow at them. All kinds of bad things can happen. This is not really the case with a gun. The bullet gets there before the sound does. But when you’re shooting an arrow or a crossbow bolt at deer, you start getting out at 30, 40 yards, 50, 60 yards. There’s a lot of people that can make that shot all day, every day. But what they can’t anticipate is, is the deer going to move or not? I said this in another podcast here recently about people say, well, Rex, you got to learn how to read the mood of a deer. I can’t read the mood of my wife. I don’t know what that joke’s been told before. But anyway, you can’t read them. So for me, we’ve had great success with being able to recover deer that we shoot at. Because we would rather let them walk off and hunt them again tomorrow than we would, again, so many people, and myself included early in my hunting career, you see a big buck or any buck or any deer, any animal that you want, you get in a hurry because, oh my gosh, he could be leaving me. He could be leaving me. I just, I got to get an arrow going in that direction. And if you’d have just waited, yeah, he just waited, he might’ve walked off. But if you’d have just waited, he might’ve given you that 18-yard quartering away shot that Stevie Wonder could make. And so that’s kind of my philosophy on that.

00:59:24
Speaker 4: So sorry about getting off track there.

00:59:26
Speaker 2: I think it’s such a great point, though. And it’s a similar epiphany I had a handful of years ago. I came to the same conclusion. It was that I would rather have fewer shot opportunities because I’ve shrunk in my range, but also fewer bad things happen. I would much rather reduce the negative than increase maybe a few more shots at animals, but then increasing the chances of those things going wrong. Couldn’t agree with you more. I’m right there with you. So let’s jump to another scenario that’s kind of tied to this in a certain way. These scenarios where you feel like your moment, your chance is fleeting and it’s here and it’s about to go out the window. So again, let’s put us in that early November time period. Again, because a lot of us are out there that time period that we look at that as the Super Bowl of our season. And your buck shows up. you’re in this spot. Uh, we’re going to say we’re back in the timber. Um, it’s one of your better locations. It’s an evening hunt and there he is, but he’s out of range and he’s not seemingly coming towards you. He’s kind of paralleling you, um, moving kind of off and away in a scenario like that. You mentioned earlier, you talked about, you know, not wanting to educate him for next time around. Um, But is there a scenario like this where you would do something like call, rattle, anything to try to pull them in and paint me that picture of how you would do that?

01:01:04
Speaker 3: Okay. So. I’m personally not a big proponent of rattling. I’m not saying it doesn’t work. I have a buddy of mine, it’s a rattlesnake. I mean, he kills all kinds of big deer rattling, but sometimes I tell him, how do you know deer wasn’t just coming anyway?

01:01:16
Speaker 4: You know what I mean? Because he rattles so much.

01:01:18
Speaker 3: But me personally, my experience, a couple of things about rattling. So I’m almost always hunting from a tree and I don’t think it’s natural for deer to be fighting up in a tree.

01:01:27
Speaker 2: And so- Haven’t seen it yet.

01:01:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, I also don’t have, I mean, I got to wear glasses when I hunt. Again, I’m 60 years, I worked around loud machinery most of my life. I listened to ACDC, you know, I got really bad hearing. So I don’t hear well and I don’t see well compared to some people. And so when I rattle, I have rattled in deer before, but they almost always see me before I see them. I almost always rattle them in and they’re looking at me. And so I pretty much abandoned rattling. Now grunting, I don’t carry a grunt tube with me, but I will try to like doe bleat with my natural voice.

01:02:01
Speaker 4: You got nothing to lose, right?

01:02:03
Speaker 3: And I have occasionally, I have turned deer, I’ve had deer that are leaving me that I didn’t get a good look at, I wanted a better look at, that I’ve doe-bleeded at with my natural voice, got them to, I always do it if I need them to stop, if they’re walking and I want them to stop, you know, I’ll use a map, you know, do something to get them to, what was that? You know what I mean? And that’s, and you got to be at full draw or whatever, you got to be ready to go. But you’ve got nothing to lose if the deer is walking away from you.

01:02:28
Speaker 4: You know what I’m saying?

01:02:29
Speaker 3: You’re probably not going to spook him. I would not hit like a guttural grunt because I learned this years ago. Some deer are lovers. Some deer are fighters. Some deer, just because he’s got a big set of antlers doesn’t mean he’s aggressive. And so you hit him with a real guttural grunt that he may be intimidated by. So it’ll just cause him to go faster in the opposite direction. I’ve never seen a deer get offended by a doe bleed, you know, or not offended, but I’ve never seen him get alarmed or, or, or, or in any way turned off by a doe bleed. So you’ve got nothing to lose. So yeah, I would absolutely do that. If a deer was leaving me for sure.

01:03:04
Speaker 2: I hate to put you on the spot here, but, but what is the doe bleed? Can you, can you share with us this doe bleed? What would that sound like?

01:03:11
Speaker 3: It’s instead of a, a buck grunt is more of a real deep. Okay. A doe bleed is just a meh, meh. Almost sounds like a lamb kind of meh. If you ever listen to does when they’re with their, their yearling map map, it’s kind of a real short little step. It’s not real loud and it’s just, it’s not intimidating at all. But if you’ve heard bucks grunt, you know, during the fall, when they come by you, they sound, you know, it’s real guttural for lack of a better word, deep and guttural. So it’s more of a higher pitch short, just a map, map, something like that.

01:03:42
Speaker 4: Nothing to lose.

01:03:55
Speaker 2: So speaking of nothing to lose one last scenario here before we’re going to get into this little rapid fire set of final questions for you.

01:04:04
Speaker 3: Gotcha.

01:04:04
Speaker 2: Imagine that this is the last evening of the Ohio archery season for gun season opens up.

01:04:13
Speaker 1: Yeah.

01:04:13
Speaker 2: Okay. Yeah. And you still have not killed your target buck and your target buck on this given year happens to be, you know, could rival your biggest ever. So this isn’t just like any target buck. This is like maybe the buck of your life.

01:04:27
Speaker 3: Gotcha.

01:04:27
Speaker 2: The night before gun season, you know, any of us that have hunted any amount of time, we know what happens on the opening day of gun season. Do you have anything unique that you would do on that last hunt before gun season? Do you have a mindset of, well, you know, might as well try it because tomorrow everything goes to hell in a handbasket or not? What would you do in that scenario?

01:04:54
Speaker 3: You know, I think I would be conservative in that I wouldn’t want to do anything to help get him killed the next morning. I would kind of bet on the deer. So most of the deer that my sons and I are interested in are older deer.

01:05:13
Speaker 4: Which means they’re veterans. You know what I mean?

01:05:15
Speaker 3: They’ve made it through multiple gun seasons to get to this point.

01:05:18
Speaker 4: So a lot of times you got to bet on the deer. You know, you got to bet.

01:05:21
Speaker 3: He made it this far. He made it five years, six years, whatever. He can do three more days. You know, now I understand there is that dread, you know, that fear. But I think that I would be conservative and I would do everything in my power. I mean, if there was a good scenario where I thought I could, you know, get within, excuse me, range of him, I would absolutely hunt him. But if it was, uh, I would not get like aggressive. I would not try to do something that I wouldn’t have done earlier. Just like a hail Mary. You know what I’m saying? Because I’m not able to bump him out of the area where he’s relatively safe and get him killed. So I’m going to give you an example of where something like that costs me a deer. So I told you, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more into the experience. So three years ago, and I’ll send you pictures of this deer also in the sheds. And so I got into, uh, it got to be a little more important to me as to where I killed the deer as opposed to, you know, weapon and all that stuff. And so I got on a good deer on public property on the Wayne National Forest. I got on this deer the day before gun season. I just threw up some cameras. What it was, my sons owned some ground that bordered National Forest. And I went to that property and I threw up some cameras and I got a picture of this deer. And he wasn’t the best deer I’ve ever hunted, but he was a good deer.

01:06:37
Speaker 4: He was a 150 class deer.

01:06:40
Speaker 3: You know, public land deer, which is a really nice deer for anywhere in the country.

01:06:43
Speaker 4: And so.

01:06:45
Speaker 3: Didn’t hunt him during the gun season, but I continued to put out more cameras, got more pictures of him. He made it through gun week that I started hunting him. My sons helped me. I had three different tree stands hung in three different scenarios. And I hunted that deer the last, there were 40, the last 49 days of the season, the last seven weeks of the season, I hunted him 48 evenings, not from the same place, but different places. And I encountered him one time in 48 sets and I was on February the 4th and it was out, he was out at about 80 yards and it took him 20 minutes to go 20 yards. You know what I mean? He’d take a step, he’d look around. So anyway, fast forward to the next year. So now I’m like, This deer is, you know, really what I really, really want to hunt this. I’d never hunted him in early season before because I didn’t know about him. Didn’t know how old he was, but I can tell you he was old. I’ll send you some pictures of him. We were able to identify him because he had actually been shot. He had a wound up high, like in the mystery zone up, you know, up above the vitals there. And it didn’t kill him, obviously. But he had a big white patch where you could see. And even after he shed, we could identify him by that white patch. And so the next year… Uh, I started immediately. I mean, I, I did some different things to try to, cause I knew more about the ground, how the deer were using the grounds. I sat there 48 evenings. So I had a really good idea of how the deer were using this, this topography, right? And that’s, you know, I’m 60 year old guy sitting up in 20 mile an hour winds and it’s two, you know, 10 degrees out. I mean, I was really, really, this deer energized me because I thought, man, if I can kill this deer late season on public ground, that’s a trophy.

01:08:23
Speaker 4: You know, that’s, that’s, that’s a trophy. It’s not the biggest antlers, but that’s a trophy.

01:08:27
Speaker 2: For sure.

01:08:28
Speaker 4: So anyway, the next year, man, I was ready to.

01:08:30
Speaker 3: Go and I had stuff, I had cameras up everywhere and I was getting his picture and he was still there and everything was great, but he became real sporadic.

01:08:38
Speaker 4: Like the year before I would get his picture fairly regularly.

01:08:41
Speaker 3: I mean, I would see more mountain bikers and hikers and stuff in this public ground than I saw deer, but he was still relatively consistent in a fairly, not a small area, but within a square mile or so, he was pretty regular in that area. And so the next year, There were a couple other bucks that I had seen the year before that were three-year-olds that became, it’s not a public crop, that became four-year-olds. And those four-year-olds, you know, they got the great big chest and their necks went up. And all of a sudden this buck that I was hunting got real sporadic. Like instead of getting his picture every three, four days, it was every seven, eight days, 10 days and real sporadic. And of course, the hunting pressure was pretty intense because it’s National Forest. And so the night before gun season comes in on a Monday, Sunday night, middle of the night, 2.30 in the morning, I get up to use the bathroom. I look at a trail camera, poof, he just walked by one of my trail cameras.

01:09:35
Speaker 4: And I got the idea. I said, hey, you know what?

01:09:37
Speaker 3: What I’m doing is not working because I’ve been hunting this deer now for a lot of weeks and weeks and weeks, and I’ve encountered him one time. So.

01:09:46
Speaker 4: let’s mix it up.

01:09:48
Speaker 3: Let’s, let’s go get in that stand. That’s in that area where, where I know he is. And maybe one of the pumpkin people, one of the orange army will push him to me, force movement, right? So the stand that I walked to was six tenths of a mile uphill, almost every step to get there through wide open hardwoods to get up in this saddle.

01:10:10
Speaker 4: So I immediately took a shower.

01:10:12
Speaker 3: In the middle of the night and I got, because about a half hour drive from my house, I got there, Well before, like at least an hour before daylight, maybe long before that. And it was real calm and it was real cold.

01:10:22
Speaker 4: And I got.

01:10:23
Speaker 3: Halfway back to the stand and it’s like I was walking on a bed of potato chips. It was just crispy, cold, below freezing, real calm, real still.

01:10:32
Speaker 4: And I said, Mike, this is a bad idea.

01:10:35
Speaker 3: This is bad. You’re going to bump this deer and you’re going to get him killed.

01:10:38
Speaker 4: You know what I mean?

01:10:39
Speaker 3: But then the other shoulder, you know, that’s angel and a devil on the other shoulder said, yeah.

01:10:43
Speaker 4: But you know what?

01:10:45
Speaker 3: You haven’t encountered him at all this season. And you know, so what you’re doing. And so I kept walking and I got in the dang stand and I climbed up and I got settled in. And as it started to crack daylight, it sounded like the Tet offensive. I mean, I mean, this is 10,000 acres of public property. You know what I’m saying? Yeah. Oh man, that doesn’t sound good. And right out the ridge for me, I heard right. I mean, maybe a half hour after daylight. Man, I really didn’t like that. later that afternoon, a guy, as I was leaving down in the bottom, a guy from Vermont wound up killing the deer. And I’m not saying that I pushed the deer to him, but I may have pushed the deer to him. So I, you know, I rolled the dice and I lost. And you know, that guy from Vermont, I just tipped my hat. You know, I said, look, I had a lot invested in him. He had nothing invested in him, but that doesn’t mean anything. He had just as much right to be there as I did. And you know, sometimes being lucky is better than being good. And so he just, you know, I mean, I was happy for him. I was disappointed, though, I will tell you that. But it was a situation where I took a chance, I got aggressive, and it cost me.

01:11:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, man, I can relate so much to those two voices going back and forth and back and forth in your mind. And the tough thing about that, though, is it just as well could have gone the other way, right?

01:12:03
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh, yeah.

01:12:04
Speaker 2: Taking that risk certainly could have worked. I mean, maybe you spooked him, but maybe you didn’t. Maybe he was just unlucky that day. That’s right. It’s so hard to live with those.

01:12:13
Speaker 3: It was a different tactic.

01:12:14
Speaker 4: I just tried something else.

01:12:15
Speaker 3: So another funny story about this, and I’ll send you this picture also if you want to put it up.

01:12:19
Speaker 4: So that deer shed the year before on March the 9th.

01:12:22
Speaker 3: And the reason I know that was he walked in front of one camera right at dark, had both sides of the antlers, and 600 yards away at 10 o’clock at night, he walked by another camera and he’d shed. So my sons and I, we’re avid shedders. My oldest sons are really good. really good shed. I mean, you know, some people have a knack for finding them and we’re all pretty good at it. My oldest son’s really good at it. So we’re like, this is going to be the easiest thing we’ve ever done because it’s wide open hardwoods. And he was there at six o’clock and he was there at 10 o’clock, you know, or whatever, midnight or whatever. So this is going to be simple. The sheds have to be somewhere in between here and here. So we meet out there, my three boys and I, the next morning, my one son’s got a dog.

01:12:59
Speaker 4: He brought his dog.

01:12:59
Speaker 3: It’s not a great shed dog, but it is a somewhat shed dog. And we start walking and we walk and we walk and we walk and we find a laundry, over a two week period, we find a laundry basket full of sheds and dead heads and deer I’ve never seen before and all kinds of old sheds, new sheds, because we’re scouring these woods and we can’t find them. And I’m like, this is the craziest thing ever. They’ve got to be right here. So long story short, I got to know this lady who has one of the top point scoring shed dogs in the country. And if you’ve never seen a good shed dog work, it’s a thing of beauty. I mean, it’s awesome to watch a really good shed dog. And I’ll send you this picture also. And she invited her friend who also has one of these dogs offspring. That’s one of the top shed dogs in the country. And those dogs found those sheds in like 20 minutes. It was the most humbling thing. Yeah. So what happened was, About a hundred yards from the back camera, there was a fallen tree and the deer had jumped over the trunk of the tree and his antlers went pink right into the treetops. So the antlers were in like where the treetops.

01:14:08
Speaker 4: Went like that.

01:14:09
Speaker 3: The antlers were laying like five feet apart right there. I had walked by them 15 times, but they were in those treetops and we couldn’t see them. But the dogs, of course, they work off their nose and their eyes and If you’ve ever had the opportunity to watch a good shed dog work, it’s a thing of beauty.

01:14:26
Speaker 4: It’s awesome.

01:14:27
Speaker 2: That’s amazing. I tried to have a good shed dog. I raised a dog and tried to train him on my own to become a shed dog. He became more of a deer turd eater dog than anything. He was a black lab.

01:14:40
Speaker 4: Yeah, these dogs were labs.

01:14:41
Speaker 2: I’ll send you the pictures.

01:14:42
Speaker 4: I’d love to see that.

01:14:49
Speaker 3: Sure.

01:14:49
Speaker 2: All right, Mike. I thoroughly enjoyed you talking us through this. Really, really interesting and helpful. I want to run you through a handful of what we call just like a quick rapid fire question. So just give me the first thought that comes to your mind after I give you these two options. Like a one word answer. We’re going to go through these really quick and then I have one last diabolical question for you and then I’ll let you go on with your day.

01:15:13
Speaker 4: No problem. Gotcha.

01:15:15
Speaker 2: All right. Here we go. Does the moon Matter or deer movement? Yes or no?

01:15:22
Speaker 3: No.

01:15:23
Speaker 2: Would you take a 50-yard shot at a whitetail with a bow? Yes or no?

01:15:27
Speaker 4: Absolutely not. With a bow, no.

01:15:31
Speaker 3: Yes.

01:15:32
Speaker 2: Okay. This next one, I kind of already know your answer, but we’ll see what you say anyways. If you could only have one of these for the rest of your hunts, and you mentioned you usually don’t use either one of these, but if it would be rattling antlers or grunt tube, and you had to pick one, which one would you take?

01:15:47
Speaker 4: Grunt tube.

01:15:49
Speaker 2: Expandable or fixed blade broadheads?

01:15:52
Speaker 4: It depends.

01:15:53
Speaker 3: If I was shooting a crossbow, expandable. If I’m shooting a vertical bow, fixed blade.

01:15:57
Speaker 2: Okay. Should you stop a moving buck before shooting with a bow? Yes or no?

01:16:05
Speaker 4: Every time. Sure want to try to, yep.

01:16:07
Speaker 3: And sometimes it spooks them, but I try not to take shots at moving targets if I can avoid it. All right.

01:16:14
Speaker 2: You can only scout… one of these seasons throughout the year. You can scout in that winter-spring time period, you can scout dead of the summer, or you can scout in-season. Which do you pick?

01:16:25
Speaker 4: In-season.

01:16:27
Speaker 3: Okay.

01:16:28
Speaker 2: Now I’m going to be diabolical. I am going to do the horrible, horrible thing of taking away your privilege to hunt. You can no longer hunt in the state of Ohio or any other state in America. Unless… Unless you kill a five-year-old or older buck this season. All right.

01:16:50
Speaker 4: So my life depends on it.

01:16:51
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:16:51
Speaker 4: Got it.

01:16:52
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly. Your life depends on killing a five-year-old or older buck.

01:16:55
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:16:56
Speaker 2: The bummer though, is that I’m only going to give you one day to do this.

01:17:00
Speaker 4: Oh man.

01:17:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know. Diabolical. Like I said. So what I would like you to do for me is pick the date. What day of the year are you going to pick for this very important hunt? And then describe for me the location that you will sit. This can either be like an actual place that you know of, or you can paint the picture of the perfect setup for this date. Either one will do. But I’d like to hear what date and why you’re picking this day of the year. And then what kind of setup and help us understand and understand why this is so good and why it would be perfect for that day on this very high stakes hunt.

01:17:36
Speaker 4: Okay.

01:17:36
Speaker 3: So before I answer that question, I want to go back to the very first question you asked me about moon phase. I don’t mean that moon phase is totally irrelevant, but I said it was. But what I really mean is I don’t pay attention to it because there’s so many other more important variables. So nature doesn’t leave anything to chance. And so if you look at the data of when deer move and don’t move, I’m way more concerned about, you know, temperature, which I know they got to braid and they got to, you know, they have short window dozer and heat.

01:18:04
Speaker 4: It can be 80 degrees. They’re still going to move around.

01:18:05
Speaker 3: But I think they move around more at night when it’s hot like that. but I pay attention more closely to other things. So I don’t mean to say that people pay attention to the moon are crazy. I just, it’s not something I plan my hunt around. I don’t plan my hunt around moon phase. And I know some people do, but I don’t. And again, because I’m so flexible hunting here close to my home, I pick the best days based on weather and all the other variables that go into it. Now, getting back to your scenario, five and a half year old deer. So a five and a half year old deer isn’t necessarily a high scoring buck, but he’s five and a half years old. So there’s two reasons that in this area that deer get to be five and a half years old. One, they wouldn’t make 120 on their best year. And so people will give them a pass.

01:18:49
Speaker 4: They just will.

01:18:50
Speaker 3: When he’s four and a half years old, they want that three and a half year old 150. So they’ll let that four and a half year old 115 go. And so those deer are pretty huntable because they’ve made mistakes, but they’ve gotten a pass. But a five year old 170, Or you know what I mean? Or that’s a different animal because everybody, everybody, nobody’s letting him walk. No one has let him walk. So he’s a different animal. So you’ve described two different animals. You’ve got the five-year-old great big rack. And then you got the five-year-old bully buck that wants to fight his own shadow and makes mistakes, but he’s alive because, you know, he busted off half of his antlers or who knows what. So let’s kind of narrow it down to that. You got to kill that five and a half year old giant buck. So if I nail it down to that, okay, so I’ve been the secretary of the Buckeye Big Buck Club for almost 25 years. So all the score sheets come to me and I look when these giants are being killed and there’s a pattern to it when they’re being killed. They’re being killed real early in the season on summer food patterns. They’re getting killed some during the rut and then they’re getting killed, some of them are getting killed late on food patterns again. But the majority of the 140 150 class bucks that make the Buckeye Big Buck Club typicals or 160 non-typicals are three and four year old bucks. They do the majority of the breeding. They’re also the ones that run out in front of cars and you know what I mean? Because they’re just rut crazed. When a deer gets to be five, six, seven, eight years old, he’s more concerned about survival than he is procreation. And so he wants to breed does, but he’s more concerned about living to see tomorrow. And so a lot of those deer get killed after the peak of the rut. And I can’t say this for sure. I mean, I can’t say this matter of factly, but I believe that it has something to do with when people hunt. Most of the hunters take vacation the first week of November, first 10 days of November. Then all of a sudden, this foreign predator that hasn’t been there all year, but it’s there for 10 days, two weeks, whatever the heck, it’s gone. And I think they learn pretty quickly that, hey, it’s safer to move. You know, it’s safer to move now from the 15th of November to the opening day of gun week, which is always the Monday after Thanksgiving here in Ohio. So if I had to pick first of November, first half, last half, I picked the last half. That’s the first thing I narrow it down to. Second half of November, less pressure. Now, in theory, some of those giant bucks have already been killed, right? So some of them are going to make mistakes earlier, whatever. So the longer you wait in the season, the fewer giant bucks there are on the landscape. But I personally, if I had to pick one or the other, I would pick the second half of November. And if you had to pick the perfect place, it would be in an area that obviously didn’t get a lot of hunting pressure, no matter what that is. I mean, it just, and of course, if you’re hunting public land, that’s nowhere. But if you’re hunting private land or hunting private ground, I would look for an unpressured area or a lesser pressured area that I believe harbored a buck. I have somewhere, I got a picture of them or some, sometime over the course of the year, I got a picture of a deer that I was interested there and I would hunt him the second half of November and I would hunt him. I wouldn’t do necessarily all, all day sets, but I do a lot of all day sets because I think he, he might be most likely to make a mistake at 10 o’clock in the morning, 11 o’clock in the morning, versus, you know, first light and last light when deer are historically most active. So I don’t know, did that narrow it down or do you need me to get even farther into the weeds?

01:22:39
Speaker 2: I’m going to make you do one more thing, which is describe the tree you’re going to sit in. Describe the perfect tree for one of the, you know, like November 20th or whatever it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:22:50
Speaker 3: So the perfect tree was the tree I was sitting in the day that I missed that giant buck in 1998. It’s a wolf. So when you go into a big hardwoods in this part of the state, so these unglaciated hills were almost all bald 100 years ago. People made their living off this land. And so they farmed with horses and plows. And so when the tractor came on the scene in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, it became only profitable to farm flat ground. So then the bottoms, and then the hillsides reverted back. And so a lot of times in a woods, you’ll find what I call a wolf oak or whatever. You’ll find an oak tree, which- It’s 150 years old. And it was an old shade tree back when there was cows in there when they were, or it was a fence line tree, you know, the divided two properties or whatever. And then you’ll look and a lot of the veneer oaks, the straight trunk trees will grow up around that because they all grew at the same time as those acorns dropped, those trees were all competing for sunlight. So they grew fast, tall to try to get ahead of each other. And they all grew at about the same rate. So those stick straight veneer trees, which have no cover that you got to get 35 feet up in to get out of their site plane. And then the higher you get up in the air, you know, then the kill zone shrinks, right?

01:23:59
Speaker 4: And also really distorts.

01:24:01
Speaker 3: This is, I shouldn’t say this because now they have, you know, range finders that adjust for this. But back when I was closer to your age and I used to climb into the ozone layer, it really distorts your depth perception of how close or how far away something is when you’re 35 feet up in the air. And now it gets you out of their sight and they’re playing a sight, but it also, it messes with you. So that tree that I was in in 1998 was an old Woolfolk and it went up about 15 feet and then it broke into three big trunks and I was cupped in the middle of those three big trunks. So no matter which direction a deer was coming from, I could be behind a big trunk.

01:24:41
Speaker 4: I could gather away. It was just perfect.

01:24:43
Speaker 3: But yet it wasn’t, I had plenty of room to draw. There was, you know, a couple of feet gap in between. It was almost like a natural box blind.

01:24:50
Speaker 4: You know what I’m saying?

01:24:51
Speaker 3: Without the box, without the lid on top of it. So that’s the ideal tree or any tree that breaks up your outline, any tree where you can get high enough and you got branches and twigs and say something else.

01:25:01
Speaker 4: The perfect tree has to be comfortable.

01:25:04
Speaker 3: If you are, so when I first started bow hunting, first year I killed 1980 with a bow, I was sitting on a tree branch.

01:25:10
Speaker 4: I climbed up the branches.

01:25:11
Speaker 3: I was sitting on a branch with a compound bow with no sights. So especially as I’ve gotten older, but even for younger guys, if you’re uncomfortable, you’ll start to, you’ll scheme, you’ll come up with a reason why you need to get down.

01:25:24
Speaker 4: But if you’re comfortable, you can sit longer.

01:25:26
Speaker 3: So if you’ve got the right clothes on, you know, it’s cold out, but you got plenty of clothes on, but yet they’re not restrictive.

01:25:30
Speaker 4: You can still move. You can do whatever.

01:25:33
Speaker 3: And so I’ve really, my hunting strategy in the last several years has been about sitting comfortably because that.

01:25:39
Speaker 4: Allows me to sit longer.

01:25:40
Speaker 3: And the longer I sit every minute, every second I’m in a tree stand, my chance goes up, right? They’re just, you’re just clicking off seconds until you get that encounter. And, and you’re, I believe in luck. The harder I try, the luckier I become that I believe in that. So that’s kind of my philosophy with deer hunting.

01:25:57
Speaker 2: I think that’s a perfect place to, uh, to wrap this up here.

01:26:00
Speaker 3: Uh, Thank you.

01:26:00
Speaker 2: A line that we can all keep in the back of our minds this coming season that I think will probably help us all. So, Mike, I have thoroughly enjoyed this. I am even more excited than I was beforehand for this upcoming season, which is so rapidly approaching. So thank you, Mike. I really appreciate your time.

01:26:19
Speaker 4: Thank you, Mark.

01:26:20
Speaker 3: I enjoyed it.

01:26:23
Speaker 2: All right, and that’s going to do it for us today. Thank you for joining me here today. Thanks for being along for this ride. Your hunting season might be opening any day now. And if that’s the case, good luck out there. Have a lot of fun. And if you’re not quite in that situation, it’s just going to be a matter of weeks, no matter where you live. So it’s almost here. It’s a beautiful time of year. And until then, thanks for being here and stay wired to hunt.