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Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your guide to the White Tail 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.
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Speaker 2: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. This week on the show, I’m breaking down my twenty twenty five Iowa rut hunt and detailing for you the decisions I made, the tactics I used, and the mindset I had that ultimately led to me having what I believe white possibly might be my very best rut hunt ever. All right, welcome back to the Wired to Hunt podcast, brought to you by First Light and their Camera for Conservation Initiative. And today it’s just you and me, another solo episode, and I am doing a couple day after breakdown of my twenty twenty five rut cation to Iowa. I’ve done this before. I’ve broken down specific hunts, especially ones that turned out well. They don’t always turn out well, but this one did. I’ve got a successful rut hunting deer story for you today, and really an epic trip. As I mentioned in the introduction, as I drove home from this trip, a couple days ago, I thought to myself, this is probably my most enjoyable rut hunt ever. This was my best rut cation to date. And so what I want to do today for you is explain to you exactly why that was. Explain to you exactly how this hunt came together, why it was so successful, and maybe more importantly, why it was so enjoyable. So I’m going to break down day by day where I sat, why I sat there, how these things set up, what were the tactics I ed use, what kinds of things did I see, what didn’t I see what worked, what didn’t work, and everything else that went on around it, Because, as I just alluded to a second ago, what was going on around this hunt maybe was just as important, or possibly more important than what was actually going on in the tree. And I’ll explain that to you more as we go along here. And you know, a lot of what made this trip so successful, what I think made this trip so special in many ways, can be attributed back to some lessons that I learned from the last time I hunted in Iowa. That was back in twenty twenty one, and some of you might remember I recorded a podcast the very day after that hunt ended, in which I did something very similar to what I’m doing here today. I just broke down the hunt, what happened day by day, what I did, what my decisions were, how it all went, and what I learned from it. And that was a raw podcast. That was a podcast that I was I was feeling it on that day, after it had been a rough hunt. Things ended poorly. A bunch of stuff happened throughout the week but ultimately didn’t fill my tag, and that next day I was driving to another trip I recorded this podcast, and after that I realized that there was something wrong with my hunting life. There was something missing or something I guess it’s still hard to put words to it exactly, but my why maybe had gotten off course and I had lost the fun in my hunting. And eventually, over the next year or two, if you’ve listened to if you listen to the podcast back then, you heard me kind of trying to work through that and trying to make sense of my hunting journey and where I was and why I was doing what I was doing and how I was doing things. And what I ultimately realized was that I had lost the fun in deer hunting because I was so obsessed with success, conventional views of success. I was so obsessed with killed the big buck. I was so obsessed with being a good deer hunter, and all of that led to me missing out on all the other good things around hunting that make it so special. An appreciation for the beautiful scenery, spending time with your family out there, prioritizing trips with your friends, participating in the fun camaraderie stuff that goes on around to hunt, going for a track job with a buddy during the middle of the day, or going out to lunch or breakfast after the morning hunt, or hanging out with friends afterwards, or whatever it is. I was so single mindedly focused on doing everything I could to kill that big, giant buck that everything else was pushed off to the side. And that was really epitomized by that Iowa trip. So what I want to do for you to set the stage for today’s conversation is I want to give you a chance to listen to me back then four years ago, twenty twenty one, Mark Kenyon, just after my last Iowa hunt. I want you to hear how I was feeling at the end of that trip and I think that will provide a very interesting contrast to what you’re about to hear from twenty twenty five Mark Kenyon. So here’s that excerpt from the end of my podcast breaking down my twenty twenty one Iowa hunt. I’m honestly, I’ll go back and say I’m embarrassed, like I’ll tell you, like just honestly, just being brutally honest with you. This is embarrassing. It’s embarrassing that I missed a buck. It’s embarrassing that I didn’t kill a deer. It’s embarrassing I spent seven days in the best place in the world and couldn’t get it done. It’s embarrassing that, you know, me, Clay, Tony, and Spencer were all on this hunt for the show, and Tony killed, Spencer killed, Clay killed. Who’s the one guy that didn’t kill the son of a gun that hosts the Wired Dunt bog Gas this great big whitetail podcast. I’m supposed to be the guy that’s supposed to get this done and then I don’t. So all of those things have been in my brain and man, it sucks. But the one thing when I climbed out of the tree, last night. I just said, I freaking gave it my all. I mean, I just did everything I could. I did not take a break. I did not take an easy route every time I thought, man, I gotta make an adjustment, every time I thought, I gotta take a long way, every time I thought I gotta go harder, longer. Whatever I did it, I give every damn little bit of myself. And I am whooped and tired, and you know, that’s just how it goes sometimes. So I am going to try to sleep easy tonight in some kind of way, knowing that I left it on the court, left it all on the field, and that that is just how it goes sometimes. That’s right, that’s life, all right. So as you heard there, I was down the dumps. I was frustrated. I was upset, and much of it was because I was upset with myself for my performance in the field, how I actually executed in the moment, whether or not I killed a big buck, and if I had success right. But as I alluded to a couple minutes ago, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my discontent with the hunt actually had a whole lot to do with all the other things going on, because during that hunt, you just know, I had a bunch of other buddies down there hunting the same area. I had two local friends who lived in the area who were hunting. My good buddy Josh was in town hunting as well, and some other local friends were there too. So everybody was enjoying their Iowa trip. They were going out and having a good time in the evenings, meeting up, having dinner, stuff like that. They were getting together for a late breakfast or lunch in the middle of the day. They were sometimes hunting together. You know, they’ve got some ground blind set up in some spots that multiple multiple people can hunt together and have a good time. They were doing all those things, and I was not allowing myself to because I thought, you know, a really good di y deer hunter isn’t gonna sit some ground blind that his friends set up for him. No, he’s gonna do it all himself. He’s gonna hunt from his saddle, and he’s gonna show the world that he’s a great deer hunter himself. I wasn’t going out for lunch with all the friends, because a really good deer hunter should hunt every single possible minute and should never take a break and should do everything he can to possibly, you know, kill that big deer. So I’m gonna hunt from dawn till dusk and no sacrifice, no time off, got to be out there. And there’s just all these different examples of stuff like that. I refuse to enjoy the hunt because I had to kill a big deer, and then ultimately my friends had a great time. I had a miserable experience. They all ended up killing deer and I didn’t. And I started to think that maybe there’s a connection there too. Not only was I making myself miserable, but maybe because I was miserable, I wasn’t hunting as successfully as well. So all of these things, as I mentioned, led to some changes in my hunting style, led to some changes to how I’m prioritizing my hunts and my decisions, and ultimately led me to decide that when I ever returned to Iowa for another hunt, I was going to do things differently. And that’s the trip that just wrapped up. So let’s get into this trip. To kick things off, I did a scouting and shed hunting trip in the spring this year to this region of Iowa. I was going back to hunt in the same region where I had in the past, where my good buddies have some land and live close by, and wanted to spend time there in the preseason to enjoy the whole scope of things. So for the first time ever, I actually invited my family to come out and join me for one of these trips. I had my wife and my two boys come out or a spring shed hunting trip. Got to go there with my buddies and their families. Got to, you know, just have a good time out there, got to walk, got to, you know, show the kids some antlers. They got to find some antlers, be a part of the process. See these places where I was gonna hunt. Just had fun and we ended up finding some antlers, and I got to learn a couple of these properties a little bit more too. Now the two spots I was going to hunt this year would be one new spot one spot that I hunted last time around. Both of these properties are spots either owned or leased by my friends. A major major element to this year’s hunt is the incredible generosity of my buddies, two friends in particular, who have just been so kind and generous with providing, you know, me somewhere to stay, providing somewhere for me to hunt, having spots you know, well set up, well managed, well taken care of that. They have been you know, very open and generous with myself and some of our other buddies and letting us share these properties with them. So huge, huge, huge thank you to my pales Ross and Peter for being great friends over so many years and now being so generous with their hunting spots. They’ve got these incredible spots here in Iowa that they’ve shared with myself and several of our other friends, and we’ve all had so much fun because of that. This week being a terrific example of that. So we did the group shed hunt, came back on this summer, did some work on these properties, helping out, hanging some stands, doing some scouting, doing some velvet footage, putting up trail cameras the whole nine yards. Again, just a really great excuse to get together with my best hunting buddies and see some deer, get amped up for the hunting season, establish what deer might be in the area. Want some really good deer near my buddy Peter’s property that I was excited to hunt got some really great velvet footage that some of you might have seen on Instagram. But coming into the fall, we then started looking at trail camera pictures and again, and this is like a fun group activity because we’re all kind of hunting together. We’re sharing all of our cell cam pictures and texting each other when different bucks show up and talk about how old do you think this one is, or what do you think about this deer? Or have you seen this deer in the past, and going back and forth and just having fun with it, not obsessing over, you know, we have to kill this one deer, but just enjoying it and just getting excited about it. Ultimately, a couple of weeks before I was going to go to hunt, we decided we we’re having a hard time keeping track of what deer was what. So I went and spent a couple hours one night finding each different individual buck on all of their properties and building like a Google image or like a Google folder for each one. This is my inner nerd coming out, So we basically had a folder that had pictures of each buck so we could then say, okay, yeah, yeah, this buck is the one with a funky G four that curls in and here’s four different pictures of him, and this way we kind of were able to make sense of each individual deer. And then we decided, yeah, we’re going to put names on these deer, so we know how to, you know, talk about them, but we’re gonna do it in kind of a stupid way and in a long, roundabout way. We ended up deciding to theme all the names of the deer this year around types of bread. So really dumb, but ended up being very funny because now we’ve got deer like sour dough, pumper nickel, french bagette, hamburger, bun, pancake, Kirkland signature, just a bunch of ridiculous names that every time you say them you laugh to yourself about how dumb it is. And that ended up making the whole thing pretty funny too. So we’ve got this whole list of deer that have been showing up on these properties. They’re named after types of bread. I think that very well sets the theme for the trip because there was a lot of ridiculousness. It was a lot of fun and a lot of laughs, and it seemed appropriate that when we talk about any one of these bucks, we don’t take ourselves too seriously and doing it because we’re referencing Ah Man, We’re gonna go in there and try to hunt hamburger bun. So that was how the hunt began. Day one. I drove up on Halloween and was going to be staying at my buddy’s place. He’s got a house out there on one of these properties that he shares with all of our hunting buddies, so we can all camp out there, hang out, have fun in the evening, and have somewhere to sleep. So got to the clubhouse. Ross was gonna hunt with me on day one. We were going to go in for a hunt in one of these ground blinds that he had set up that, you know, four years ago I would have said, no, I can’t do that. That seems, you know, not DII enough or something. But this hunt, this time, the goal was to just enjoy the whole experience, and that’s something I probably should have set up at the beginning. My plan here, my goal here for this hunt was not that I had to kill some big giant buck, not that I had to prove myself and hunting any particular way. My goal was simply to enjoy the Iowa experience to its fullest. And what does that mean? That meant number one, having a really good time with my good buddies. Number two, that meant letting myself enjoy the week without the pressure and expectations of having to kill a giant buck. I did not go into this having some kind of arbitrary well it’s got to be this big kind of thing. I did not go into this believing, well, I got to kill this one deer. It was just let’s go there, let’s see Iowa at its best. Right when you go to Iowa, you want to be able to see some mature bucks. You want to see some running activity, you want to see some fun stuff that maybe you’re not normally gonna see, you know back home in Michigan, where there’s not as many mature bucks. So I wanted to not rush things. I wanted to see the show and do the fun, dumb stuff that all my buddies get to do. But I would never let myself so hunt the groundblines, hunt the box blinds, go in for lunch, do some drives looking for deer, do all the fun stuff that’s not just sitting in a tree and making myself miserable. So that was the goal. We started out with this first night hunt in this really nice little corn food plot, tucked into the timber. They’re standing corn corn behind us. There’s some knockdown corn in front of us. Our ground blind tucked into that corn, just a dynamite setup and sat there that night just having a blast. Me and Ross were telling stories, laughing probably too loud. Ended up seeing a bunch of deer come in towards that last hour of daylight, including a really nice three year old buck, that buck that we called Kirkland after the Costco bread and super nice three year old deer I think a nine pointer with a little sticker off his G two on one side, and got to just watch that deer out in front. That was one deer that we’d agreed like, hey, he’s a young one, he’ll be great some other year. I would love for that deer to be around for Ross and other people to hunt in the future. So that was a deer I wasn’t going to go after, and I was perfectly fine with that. So we got to watch Kirkland feeding around in front of us and kind of nose around some does The setup here was the wind was in our face blowing back into that standing corn. There’s betting to our west. So what we imagine happening was that there would be bucks and does on these ridge points, and the would come off of these points feed into that cornfield, and hopefully some of these bucks would cruise through checking the does, and that’s basically what happened. We saw a handful of young bucks that really nice three year old and that was the night. A day two we decided to go back in and actually hunt that same spot one more time because it had actually been blowing up on trail camera. The big mature bucks had been hitting this corn plot in the mornings, especially actually coming back in late morning and checking for doughs and hitting this scrape tree that was out there, and so we thought, well, let’s give it one morning hunt. It’s a small corn plot that the part that was actually knocked down was probably you know, quarter acre maybe, so it’s not like a destination food source. There were some big cornfields way to the north quarter mile up there maybe, so in this particular location, it’s usually a late morning thing because they’re slowly transitioning back from those big fields. So the idea was, let’s get in there early before those deer get back. Let’s get set up in this groundb line. Hopefully the trickle back in as they head to bed, and then you get those bucks doing the same because this is a secluded food plot. This is not like a wide open, open food source. This is a back in the cover, a little Heidi hoole spot. So I end up doing that and see a decent handful of deer and some young bucks again but not the big guys, but just a very fun hunt. And this is something that came up over and over again on this trip and something different than a lot of my hunts, just because the priority on this trip and for you know a lot of my friends when we do these group hunts out there has been enjoying each other’s company. The you know, sometimes the priority isn’t on everybody hunting in their own spots so that everybody can kill a big deer. Sometimes, like in this case, my buddy Ross was sacrificing one of his own hunts to instead sit with me, just to enjoy it with me and you know, get to share some stories and get to see the deer together and maybe he could you know, get to be there watch me kill a deer, all that kind of stuff. So that made for a really fun hunt and it was something that we ended up doing later that day. We came in at midday, had coffee, had lunch. My friend, another friend from Michigan, Dustin, actually drove all the way out from Michigan. Speaking of sacrificing hunting time, he came out to camp even without an Iowa tag. He drove all the way from Michigan to come out and spend three four days with us, just to be there for the deer camp, just to be there to tag along for a few hunts and have some fun and see the show. So Dustin and I went and hunted on another one of these properties. We hunted another blind overlooking a really cool kind of a larger interior food source, surrounded by again these like high fields with big ridges all around them that dropped down to some thick, nasty bottoms. So the deer, I’ll bet around these outside points. The does come from those bottoms up into feet into the upper fields. You’ve got bucks that are then cruising the edges of these ridges, and then the evenings they pop up and check those fields for doughs. So the evening was hunting one of these blinds overlooking this other interior food source, and at this point, day two, I’m just gonna kind of want to get a lay of the land, see what stuff looks like, and also just get a sense of what’s happening. So some observation type sits was what I was trying to do with these, And this one in particular was exciting because even though on this property Pete’s property, there weren’t a whole lot of mature bucks showing up anymore on camera the last month or so, the standing corn was getting combined right then, so when the corn comes out oftentimes that shakes things up. You start to see new deer, or the deer that are there are more visible in daylight because they’re forced to be in the timber or in the open now. So we hunted this blind. Actually put my Dave smith Buck decoy out in front of me just in case we could get something in sight and rattle or call him in, and me and Dustin just had a great time again telling stories, watching things, catching up on life. Ultimately, we saw two of the better bucks on this property, but both of them were like three maybe four at the oldest and none of them came in range, but very fun hunt saw a bunch of deer. There was some chasing, There was actually some rattling success. I rattled and one of those nice bucks when we called sourdough, and then another younger buck actually came running in as I was rattling, but they stopped at about one hundred and fifty yards out. They ran for maybe three hundred got to like one hundred hundred and fifty and then just kind of moved off, cruising in two different directions. Fun hunt no success that day. Dig three. Now we’re getting into the point where I’m starting to get a little bit more serious. Those early hunts were low impact, observation type sits. I really didn’t want to force things too early. Like I said, I wanted to enjoy the Iowa show. It would be a little bit disappointing probably to show up and kill on the very first day and be done. So I didn’t mind that I was kind of hunting this outside in kind of way. But day three, decide, Okay, it’s time to get a little bit more serious and punge in there. And so I moved into one of the better spots on that first property. This is a really cool location that uses terrain to funnel deer in and around a bunch of dough betting. So you’re you’re layering, like the two core principles of hunting, the rut into one spot. So if you can imagine this is an area with with a bunch of different ridges and points all extending down to the spottom, so it’s like a ridge. And then imagine almost like three big ridges, like an E pointing down into the bottom right and at the top of that E. If you imagine, like I guess, it’s more like an M because the m’s pointing down right at the top middle of that M. All three of those points kind of come together in this spot, and I was sitting in that spot. There’s a little bit of a saddle. Three of these points all kind of come together up at the top here. And in addition to that, my buddy who had owns this property had cut some paths through all the thick stuff too. So there’s a mode trail down one of the points. There’s a mode trail that leads to another point, and there’s a mode trail that cuts down into a ditch where there’s a crossing leading over to the other point, and then at the hub of this wheel in the middle of this he has a scrape tree that, as I showed up and saw, was just pounded by deer with bucks making scrapes there. So really a dynamite set and a location that you know, you could see deer cruising through and visiting at any point in the day. And then off one of those points within sight, not the one I’m sitting on the top of that m, is where that corn plot was that I hunted on day one, so I could see some of that from where I was at. So I can see to this little heidihole food plot, I can see down to the bottom of the down at the bottom where you know, that’s like this low area where it’s really hard to hunt because of swirling winds, But that’s like where a whole lot of travel converges too, So I could see down there and call to anything. But up high on the m at the top of that hub, I can have that safe wind and still take advantage of a lot of that. So I get in there early in the morning. Just as I’m almost done getting set up, I hear and a buck comes walking right in underneath me to that scrape tree. I had taken my bino harness off because I was putting on my main jacket and doing that, I hung the binos up off to my side. So that buck walked in when I didn’t have access to my binoculars, but just with bare eyes and it was dark still, I could just see this huge frame and he just destroyed that scrape tree, and I could smell him. You could smell the rut musk stink on this deer, so that was an exciting start. Had a second buck coming behind him. This one was maybe like one hundred hundred and ten inch buck, and he looked dinky compared to that first one, so knew there was a good one in the area. Knew that, you know, the two best bucks on this particular property were in the zone. They had been showing up on camera a lot in recent days. The buck that had been at that corn plot most often the last week was this deer we called Hamburger Bun, and he’s just a giant ten pointer with a split brow tye and a big hook kind of flyer off off his I guess it’d be his right side looked like one hundred and sixty class buck, big bodied, and I got to think, and that might have been the deer that came in before daylight, just based on the way the frame looked. So I was excited as it became daylight and right away just buck after buck cruising through, and it seemed like I was on the X. Like almost every buck that came through would cruise up one of these points and go through that hub of the wheel right in front of me, or a couple times just for fun, like I saw a two year old or a three year old buck, I would do a little grunt and they would come and that would suck them in right to there. So I felt like unbelievably confident in the spot. I think I saw six or seven different bucks that morning, maybe two year olds, three year olds, year and a half olds. Just an awesome Iowa morning, the kind of morning you dream of. Cold crisp, a lot of deer moving, a lot of deer in range. Got to watch a bunch of NICs. Like I said, young bucks just ripping up that scrape fifteen yards in front of me. Very enjoyable. I came in. I hunted till I guess twelve thirty or so on that day, and again this is where I think what I tried to do on this trip differently than other years was that I tried to balance hunting hard still and putting in the time and being out there, but at the same time still trying to enjoy yourself and be a part of the camaraderie side of things. So I told myself I wasn’t gonna hunt every day all day. I was gonna take some days, coming at midday and enjoy the thing whateverbody else. So on this particular day, hunt until twelve thirty snuck in. It was a spot where I had the right access to be able to exit without spooking anything. So I thought, Okay, this is a perfect time where I can slip out the back door. Nothing will know I’m gone, nothing will know I’m coming and going. Went back to the clubhouse, had coffee and lunch with the guys, had a good laugh, enjoyed ourselves for an hour and a half, and then I grabbed my gear, snuck back in, was back out there by two thirty or so. Get back in that same tree. I all just get everything all set up and then look way down there in the bottom of this creek, bottom down there, and I see something moving around. Pull up my bi and I see a dough, see another dough, and then I see antlers. Pretty quickly, I see it’s a big buck, and then I realized it’s Hamburger Bun, the number one deer, and he’s back there bumping around this dough. I watched him for a while and she eventually takes him up off the other side, up the ridge, on the opposite of my kind of ridge top. I’m on and off out of sight. Very exciting though, to see the number one buck, the big guy with a dough in the area. The afternoon progresses and other young bucks are bumping around down there, and then I see another set of big anilers pulp my bios zoom in there. Assume it’s the same buck, but it’s actually the number two deer. It’s the other really big deer in the area. And this is a deer that did not have a brand name at first. This deer originally was called nutkicker because my buddy originally said this was a deer that they thought we should not shoot. And so the joke was that, you know, if you shoot this buck, it’s a nut kicker. So at first he was calling it that deer. But by the time this got around, my buddy got to the point where, actually, and hey, we’re supposed to be having fun. Kind of back to my same thing. My own journey is a journey that I think my buddy who owns this property has been going through himself in many ways to not be so stressed out about big deer, not be so stressed about whether or not you kill the big one, but instead sharing the good times of the people, enjoying the process, enjoying these friendships that form around hunting. And so in doing that, you know, he has made the incredibly generous choice to share this property with myself and some of the of our other friends. And also you know realize like, hey, every deer doesn’t have to get five or six, Like it’s okay if we shoot a really good four year old or something like that. And so this deer ended up being one of those deer that was like, maybe he needs another year. But at the same time, gosh, he’s a giant. This would be an incredible deer for one of these guys to shoot. Go ahead, shoot him. So the name was changed to Nutbread Sticking with our bread. The very ridiculous. I realized that. So Nutbread is down there following a dough, and I’m texting with my friend and just confirmeding, like, are you sure this is the deer? You want me to shootes again? I shoot him, shoot himbsolutely. So I ca to him as he’s coming up, let me take it back. He’s following this dough up the hill. Then the dough breaks off of him and he does not follow the dough for some reason. Now he’s on his own, kind of angling in my general direction, but looks like he’s going to move off down this point in the other direction. So I give him a grunt and that turns him and he starts coming my way. This is like a one hundred and fifty something to one hundred and sixty type, big, huge, clean typical, but taller and tighter than the other one. And this dear kind of follows the opposite ridge from me all the way up from like two hundred and fifty yards away all the way to seventy yards gets to this point where this ditch crossing is that all these other bucks had dropped down and come up right to my hub. I watched probably three or four other bucks do this thing. They get to this very same point where Nutbred is, then they drop down the ditch and cross and end up at the scrape tree right in front of me. So I’ve got everything righty. I’m holding my bow. He’s at seventy yards and walking down to that ditch crossing like he’s gonna just pop up right to me. And it’s this mode trail. Once you drop him to the ditch, it’s like a mode path that like delivers deer right to you. It’s it’s a dynamite set up. But as he starts to drop, he hears something behind him, turns around and there’s a dough above him, and that spins him. He goes up there, chases the dough and he’s out of my life. But incredible evening having seen both of those bucks, both the two biggest bucks in this property, both of them, you know, incredible to see in person, and one of them came pretty darn close. So great day, great setup. This this terrific terrain funnel that’s also surrounded by dough betting and dough feeding just within sight too, So kind of the dream rut scenario. So the next day, I said, I’m going right back in there. Day four, I’m hunting this location again, and if it’s good again, I probably should just stay the whole day. So I slipped the under the next day, it’s a slower start, but around nine something nine thirty or so, I see what looks like a deer running straight down into the bottom ahead of me from the opposite side. So I just had a quick glimpse of what looked like a deer, maybe a buck, sprinting down into the bottom. I pull up my bios, can’t see anything, so I say to myself, well, I was thinking about maybe doing some rattling in the late morning. This is as good a time as any. Let’s rattle and see if whatever ran down there will come up my way. So I grabbed my antlers, turn around to rattle away from the direction of where I saw those deer, because I don’t want them to see the flash of the antlers. I’m rattling. And as I’m rattling, I look back over my shoulder down towards the bottom, and I see a deer running like charging up at me out of the bottom, and it’s a huge framed buck, and I realize it’s Hamburger bun. The number one deer is charging up out of the bottom, and so you know, in that moment you kind of freak out. You trying to hang up the antlers, trying to grab your bow, trying to turned around, just pure amazing white tail chaos. He charges up from three hundred yards down at the bottom, all the way up the opposite ridge, exactly in the same path that Nutbread took the day before, and he gets all the way to seventy yards right to that same ditch crossing, and then stops and stares over at my ridge and just just looks like a monster, and he’s looking for the fight. And he just sits there and stares and looks and looks and looks and looks, and then finally he didn’t see the other bucks, and so he turned around start walking away. I tried to give him a call or two, but he wasn’t having it. He just started trotting back the way he was going. So he runs back down the hill, runs up my point, and then does like a big circle and circles downwind of me, eventually going out site. But I was a little worried in the back of my mind, like, oh crap, he probably circled down wind of me, out of sight, maybe winded me, probably winded me. Maybe that’s the end of the day, Like maybe that’s the end of this buck encounter. He’s gonna catch on to me and be out of here. So super exciting encounter, but sort of disappointing that, you know, it didn’t ultimately come together on the good news though, is that we ended up getting a trail camera picture of him like six hours later in daylight on that property. Still, so I was like, all right, he’s still around, he didn’t spook. Game is still on. That night goes on, I do the all day sit see some more deer, but but no more big deer. That’s day four, great encounter. Day five wind switch. Can’t hunt this area that I’ve been hunting the first handful of days. Now we’ve got easterly winds. We’ve got to go to a brand new place. I’m gonna still hunt the same property because we very quickly kind of found that this particular property where hamburger bun was where way more mature deer. We’re hanging out the other property where sour dough or pancake, where those deer were there was you know, those deer were like three year olds and we really were not getting any of the older so we had got on camera in the summer still around it all. My buddy Pete, who had been hunting there had not been seeing anything mature, but on this other property it seemed to be really lights out, so that’s where we focused. So day four no sorry, day five with a southeasterly wind, we had to relocate to a different side of the farm. And this is another really good setup. It’s another one of those like ideal rut locations that’s worth discussing I think in some detail here because it’s something that if you can replicate like it will work. This is the kind of spot that absolutely will work if you have bucks in the area that you want to get a crack at. This kind of setup is perfect. So if you can imagine this property has like two big blocks of cover. You’ve got imagine like one big bowl like a big circle, and then another big like rectangle of cover underneath it, and separating these two is like a big crp field that pushes in. So this big grassy field goes in between. So you’ve got this big bowl on top and you’ve got this big rectangle cover beneath it, and the cerp field pushes and separates the two right in the middle, except at the very end of it that timber there’s a small sea of timber that connects the two. So imagine a big circle at the top, a sea of timber that then the letters I mean, like the letter C, that curves down and then connects this big rectangle cover at the end. So that creates a pinch point in the end, and that letter C of timber is created by this point, this topographic feature that has big bluffs, and so you’ve got this high point that then drops off to a low valley beneath it where a creek bottom is. So where we were set up was at the head of that pinch, right by that big bowl. So there’s a big circle which is basically timber that then gets low on the bottom and on the edges of that is dough betting all around it, and then the pinch right there leading to the bottom. So we were sitting at that pinch next to do all this dough betting that connects to a bunch of dough betting at the other side of the funnel, and then our wind blew off that bluff out over the creek bottom behind us, so the wind was perfect, nothing could smell us. We were in between we were in a funnel in between two betting areas, and then we were also right next to a set of dough betting areas and could see more dough betting around us to call to. So it’s got everything you could possibly ask for for a rut sit. It ended up being a kind of slow morning, if I recall, that then led to kind of the affirming information we needed in the late morning. So very slow early. But then late morning we saw a handful of younger bucks and then a pile of doughs. I can’t remember exactly how many, but maybe nine or ten different doughs, and five or six of them ended up betting like right around us, you know, within sight of us. And so what that told me was that, hey, maybe this doesn’t work out right now this morning, but eventually a good deer has to come through. Her bucks will cruise through here because they are forced to buy this terrain and buy this cover. This is the connecting point to get between these two big dough hot spots. And our wind is bulletproof, so if you spend enough time here good things will happen. That’s what I kept telling myself. We sat there till midday, did not see a mature buck, but saw the doughs that we needed. Some young bucks actually pushed out most of those doughs. We didn’t have to spook them getting out of there. We left midday, went and got lunch. One of the other guys in our camp had shot a buck, so we got to go check that out and have some good times just helping with you hanging the deer up, weighing the deer, standing around gawking at it, telling stories, all that kind of good stuff. So that was another fun thing that was going on. But it is day five, so you got to make sure you’re still taking advantage of your hunting time. So we ended up going to a new location for the evening because again the southeast wind was tough for the original best spots. So here’s another situation where there is a ground blind that’s set up next to a sanctuary of sorts that doesn’t get hunted, that has tons of bucks historically, and it’s a spot that my buddies have access to a neighboring property. It’s just a field, but they’ve set up a ground blind on the edge of this, and then when you put a buck decoy out in that field, sometimes you can pull bucks off of the neighboring property out into your field and get a shot out. This is a spot that I had the opportunity to hunt last time, and I said no to it because again, it wasn’t like up to my hunt, my imagined hunt quality standards or whatever it was. So I didn’t go. And instead some of my other friends went and they had a grand old time. One of my buddies shot a great buck and had all sorts of fun. So this time around was like, dang, I wanna hunt the blind. Who cares? It’s a good time and we you know, usually multiple people will go hunt and you just kind of shoot the bowl the whole time, and it’s a very fun place because you can see a lot of deer and then you maybe get bucks out there in the field to come to your decoy, so you get to watch all that. So you know, dang it, I’m gonna experience that finally this year. So we did it, got out there, two of my buddies sat with me. Again, this is not your typical hardcore DIY saddle hunter kind of set up. This is instead three goobers sitting in a box blind, laughing and telling stories for much of the day. But at the same time we saw a bunch of deer, got to see some cool interactions with the decoy, and just had a really good time. Ultimately we saw a couple of nice three year olds, but nothing that we were gonna shoot. Nothing came close enough that we wanted to shoot. And so that was the end of day five. Day six, new wind, north wind. I decided to go back to that first property Hamburger, Bond and nut Bread were and again hunt terrain. But with a north wind, I couldn’t hunt that hub of the m as I described it earlier. I had instead go to the bottom ridge of the m where you could blow your wind off that ridge over another one of these big creek bottoms got down there. This is deep in the property. This is hard to get to. I had to get in there very early in the morning, and I was gonna have to stay there all day, very windy day. I don’t know if you remember. This would been like November fifth or sixth or somewhere in that ballpark, and it was like twenty thirty mile an hour winds. So I was blowing in that tree all day. It was kind of a tough long sit. Didn’t see a whole lot. Saw a young buck come in early, and then a couple doze, and then two forty five. I look over my right shoulder. The one place that my wind will get me in trouble, like this spot’s bulletproof, right in the edge of this bluff blowing out over the back behind you. But the wind cuts just a little bit where some deer could travel on the edge of this bluff, and that, of course, is where this deer comes from. I see feet, I see legs approaching me through a pine tree. Pull up my binoculars and I can see big antlers and this is one of the shooters, a deer we called pumper nickel, and pumper Nickel stops at like thirty yards and it’s just like staring at me. And I drop a milk weed and see that the milkweed is going right to him. So I realized, like I’m busted. He’s smelling me right now. I sat here all day long, and then the one time you see a buck, of course, he has to come to the one like five degree area where I’m vulnerable from a win position, and he does. He wins me, he spins around. He doesn’t like spook spook, but he does turn and just kind of like trots away. And that was the day. That was day six. It was one maybe point in the trip where I was starting to feel like, uh oh, this is not this is not going my way, and we’re running out of time. And was trying to stick to that positive message that I’ve been sharing with you here today, like just have fun with it, see what happens. But I will tell you that this point I was getting a little bit nervous. I guess a little background for you. I hunted Iowa in twenty twelve and killed a buck, but when I went and returned in twenty fifteen, I missed a giant like a one hundred and sixty five inch buck. Missed a buck in twenty fifteen. Then I came back in twenty twenty one in the trip that I’ve been telling you about last time around, and that’s I missed a giant eight pointer on the last day of that hunt. So it’s twenty twenty five. Now it has been thirteen years since I filled the tag in Iowa. And my buddies have been giving me a hard time about it. The joke has been that I’m the buckless non resident. I’m the only guy who I’m the only non resident who can’t kill buck in Iowa, apparently. And so now it’s day six again things don’t go my way, and I’m starting to feel like I might be the buckless non resident forever. So there’s a lot of joking and laughing about that. And you know, I should point out that every one of these nights, everyone comes back to the clubhouse, and so there’s like the group of us that are hunting, and then there’s some other local friends in the area that all come to get together, and so just a lot of fun and camaraderie and giving each other a hard time and telling stories. So that’s all going on, while I’m also, you know, slowly getting a little bit more nervous that, geez, is this going to be a whole bunch of close but not close enough hunts again? Which leads to day seven. And day seven we have that southeast wind again, and so with the southeast wind, this is when we hunted that just picture perfect rout setup that blows your wind off over top of the creek at the sea, the sea pinch point I was telling you guys about, that’s the set that would work really well for the southeast wind. So this is a situation where we said, like, we have to just trust that even though we didn’t seen an good bucks last time, even though it seems like, you know, the southern part of the Farmers where we’ve seen everything, we gotta trust that this place, if you spend enough time here, it’s gonna work out because it is a pinch point between two amazing dough betting areas. You’re right next to one of those amazing dough betting areas and your wind blows off into never never Land, so nothing’s gonna bust you. It is so good when the wind’s right. Spend time there, good things will happen. That’s what I kept telling myself over and over again. So now we had that southeast wind, my buddy Ross is gonna hunt with me. He’s going to take a day off from hunting and sit with me again because this is just seems like a good spot, great time. Let’s have some fun together. Let’s get out there and sit in the tree. So we slip in there before daylight gets set up, and pretty quickly we’re seeing deer. We see a really nice buck chasing a dough way off in the distance. Down on that bottom there’s crop feels way down there that you can see from a farce. We see that going on. Then we see some young bucks cruising around in the bowl. That big northerly betting area I talked about. We can see some bucks cruising there. Then some does start moving in to bed around us, and it just feels like, you know, anytime no something good’s going to happen. And uh, you know, I just remember, like the sun is rising and the whole woods is like glowing and glittering blue skies, orange and yellow kind of just rattling leaves all around you. The sun’s kind of shimmering through. I think you guys know what I’m talking about. This is like that gorgeous early November mornings where you have the bluebirds, skies, the golden sun, the orange fall colors, the kind of like fog that’s in the air just a little bit that kind of like makes everything just seem like ethereal, almost like a magical scene around you. That’s what’s going on. I look over my right shoulder. I see antlers coming towards our way through that pinch. Pull my binos realize that’s a big buck. I tell Ross like, big buck coming, big buck coming. I hand him my phone so he can film. Then he says it’s him, and I realized, Holy smokes, this is the buck. This is hamburger bun. This is the number one deer, the one that I’ve had two other encounters with. And he’s coming right down the pipe. So I slowly get turned around. I grab my bow. He’s heading right down this pinch that just delivers deer right in front of you. If he follows this path and doesn’t, for some reason get turned around, he ends up walking right into like twenty yards, but there’s branches in my way here. He stops at twenty and looks like right up at the tree, and I’m thinking, oh, no, like we’re done. But he just kind of looks up in the general area. It doesn’t see anything that he isn’t like, and I thank goodness for just, you know, having a lot of cover in that tree. I guess because he doesn’t see anything that totally bogers him. And he turns and just starts walking across. Now he heads right to where me and Ross walked in. Again, there’s this one branch that’s running along the side of me, and along this one side you just can’t get a shot from the position I’m in, so I’m waiting for him to clear this branch. He gets to the spot where we walked in, so now he’s at our ground scent and I’m thinking like, oh no, he’s gonna hit our ground scent and this is gonna spook him. And he hits it, sniff, sniff, sniff, and here I think, goodness that I used I put nose jammer on my boots, you know, not trying to do a product plug here, but I do really think this thing helps. Smells that but doesn’t freak out, but then turns and starts walking straight away. And now I’m thinking like, oh geez, that’s it. He’s just gonna walk the other direction. But he instead just took like one step away from us or two steps away for us, and then stopped and then turned back. So now my shot opens up. He’s brought a slightly quartering away. Now he takes a step past that branch just blocking me. I’m able to draw back. I just remember thinking to myself like take your time, take your time, remember like centering my site picture in the peep site and then putting that pen right behind the shoulder. Pull him back and uh double lunged him. Perfect shot. He goes running off. I watch him go down. The celebration and ensues. And what made it so great, I think was that you know, my buddy was in the tree with me. We got to just you know, relive this story and high five and just celebrate the craziness of it all. It seems like in so many of these rut hunts, so many trips in general, at a certain point it starts to feel impossible. It starts to feel like, oh my gosh, this will never come together. Get you have close encounters, or maybe you never see anything, or maybe it seems that they’re always just out of range, or something always goes wrong, or you’re not seeing a good buck or whatever it might be. On so many of these trips, you get to a point where it seems like it’s never going to happen, Like it never could happen. This is such a hard thing to pull up. How could this ever work? But if you stick it out and keep doing the right things, enough and keep it fun. Often not always, but often, eventually something flips and all of a sudden, in a matter of seconds, it’s all changed and it finally does all fall into place. That’s what happened this time. Kill Hamburger Bond. We get to walk up on him. He’s an absolutely gorgeous, big old Iowa buck. It broke off that hook unfortunately, which it would have been just like a really unique cool buck, but one hundred and sixty class slammer Iowa whitetail, a deer that is one of my biggest bucks ever, but without a doubt, was a part of my most fun hunt ever, because you know, when I look at this hunt, there was a handful of things that stand out that made this trip so special, and much of it was not related to the fact that I killed a big, giant buck. That was a really nice side effect. I’m very glad that happened, but I still think I would look at this trip and still rate it as incredibly successful and fun even if I didn’t kill this deer because of everything else. I think one thing that I did much better this time than I’ve done in previous trips, especially to Iowa, is balance. I really want to focus on balancing the experience, and you know, at times hunting really hard, at times hunting all day, at times you know, putting in the putting in the serious hours, because right, that’s the name of the game in the rut is time in the field is grit is grit is toughness, is just being out there hunting hard. Right, So so you gotta do some of them. But the same time, I also want to not make the same mistakes that I had in the past, which was hunting so much that you don’t let yourself enjoy the rest of the experience. And so that’s why I came in for some lunches, That’s why I went out for breakfast one day. That’s why you know, I, you know, hunted the spots that maybe I want to hunt in the past. I hunted the tower blind I hunted the box blinds. I went out and brought friends with me. Those things probably did not help me have a better chance of killing a deer, right, more scent in the air, more chance for movement. But dang it, we had so much fun. We had so many good laughs. The experience was so much better because of it. This was an opportunity to really enjoy the companionship of some of my best hunting buddies out there in an incredible place, chasing an incredible animal and getting to share that with a friend or a family member makes it so much sweeter. And I allowed myself to do that this time, and I think that made a huge difference that made this so so so enjoyable. I also had trust this time around. I tried to not make the mistake that I’ve made many times as a hunter, and that is to constantly second guess your decision making, constantly debate we should have been here or here there? Or there? Was this the right spot? Was that the right spot? I shouldn’t have done this because I at least know I’m a very analytical person. I’m constantly like hyper analyzing everything, and that can help me in many cases, but it can also hinder me because it can just lead to this constant decision making stress and worry over your tad decisions like then I put myself in the best possible place, or should I have moved there? Should I have rattled here and not rattled there? Whatever it might be. This time around, I tried to make a good decision and then trust that trust the decision, trust the spot, and then just release yourself from worrying after that, like, like, we made the decision, now let it be. It is what it is. Now just enjoy it. So I remember a couple different times, you know, where I start having that creeping feeling about geez, I should have done something different, or oh gee, should I do something different? And I would just remind myself that, hey, chill, you’re supposed to be enjoying this. Enjoy the experience. Like, take a deep breath, close your eyes, listen to the wind, Smell the fresh air, take a look at the sun shining through the leaves, and just like, enjoy this thing. Enjoy it. Stop stressing, just enjoy it. Trust what you did, let it play out. Handful of times, I think that really helped me. I think another thing is that I released myself from expectations. As I described on pass trips. When you go to Iowa or one of these other big buck states, you sometimes go into it thinking, well, it’s Iowa, or it’s Ohio or it’s Kansas. You got to shoot a giant. You see everybody’s shooting these big giant bucks on these Midwestern states, and so you start to think that that’s what you have to do too. So because of that, you put a lot of pressure on yourself. You pass a bunch of bucks maybe that you normally wouldn’t want to pass. You force yourself to do things maybe that you wouldn’t normally do because you got to shoot that giant. And so you’re so worried about shooting that giant that again, you don’t do the fun stuff. You don’t spend time with your friends, you don’t come in and do some stuff. Maybe maybe your buddy shoots a buck, and you don’t go on the blood trail because you don’t want to miss one possible minute in the tree. I’ve made that mistake in the past. I wasn’t going to do it this time. So I came in with modest expectations, my expectations, my goals. Like I’ve said earlier, it was not to kill a one to seventy. It was not that I had to kill a six year old. It was not that I had to kill the number one target deer. It was I want to have fun. I want to, you know, experience the full Iowa experience, and I’d like to shoot a mature buck. And that was it. And just let you know, let be whatever is going to be. And because of that, I had so much less pressure, so much less stress during this trip. I just really tried to enjoy it. And yet at the end I did start having some of that creeping worry come in. That’s hard not to have, at least a little bit. We did joke a lot about how I was going to be the buckless non resident forever and maybe I was just cursed, But at the same time, it wasn’t so serious and so worrisome that I was actually miserable. I have been actually miserable on some of these past hunts where I’m so obsessed with the outcome. I just need to enjoy the process. That’s what I was doing this time around, and it helped a ton. Ultimately. What it came down to, though, is I think because of the fact that I came in with those expectations, because of the fact that I balanced things, because of the fact that I trusted my decision making and didn’t stress too much. And then finally I prioritized my friends and the camaraderie and the whole experience of being there with these good buddies. Because I prioritized that over these other things. I just had a damn good time. We laughed so much. We have so many amazing stories to share it now, we have so many experiences that I’m going to look back on fondly forever. The buck almost comes in second to all that. But I do think that I ultimately had success and killed the deer because I was enjoying myself so much and was not as stressed and not as worried as I would have been past years, that I was able to just let the hunt come to me. I was able to trust in the process, and finally, when the things actually lined up, I was in the right place, trusting a spot where we had not seen a big buck yet, but trusting in the spot. I was hunting with a friend. We were having fun, and we trusted that eventually good things will happen if we keep it fun, if we keep doing the right things well enough, and sure enough, day seven, the fates aligned and things happened, and yeah, I killed a great deer too, which is a hell of a bonus, tremendous trip, the perfect opposite, like the mirror opposite of the last time I was here in Iowa. And I think a reflection of maybe some personal growth and some important lessons learned that I think helped me not only have success, but also enjoy this hunt and made this my best rut hunting vacation ever. So that’s how I killed this twenty twenty five Iowa Whytail. That’s how I had a terrific trip. I hope there’s something in there that you can relate to and that you can learn from. I think that that on the tactical side, you know, key things here would be trusting those pillars of the rut, not over complicating things, Trusting in funnels and pinch points and travel corridors, trusting in dough betting airs, and putting in the time in those places. Don’t let all the other stuff cloud or muddy your vision and your plans. If you’re hunting that kind of spot with safe wind and you put in the time in a place where there are the kinds of deer you want to shoot, that’s all you gotta do. And then finally make sure you’re enjoying the process along the way. And I know that’s what I talked about a lot here, but I think that has just been so so important to this whole thing. You do that all the rest falls into place. So I appreciate you joining me. Thank you for being here, Thank you for following my journey over all of these years. As I’ve had my ups and my downs, and my highs and my lows, and my twenty twenty one type hunts and my twenty twenty five type punts. I hope all of it has been helpful to you as you go through your own journey, and I appreciate you being here a part of it all. So best of luck on your upcoming hunts, and until next time, stay Wired to Hunt,
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