00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.
00:00:20
Speaker 2: Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. I’m your host, Tony Peterson, and this week I’m giving you your yearly reminder that gun hunting, like gun hunters, usually ends in unfilled tags and what you should do to not suffer the same fate as your orange clad brethren. All right, before I jump into this one, I have to let you know that meat Eater is running a mega, super huge Black Friday sale right now. And I know, I know you’re sick of hearing about sales, but trust me, that’s not.
00:00:51
Speaker 3: Going to stop us.
00:00:52
Speaker 2: So you might as well go buy some deeply discounted stuff, stuff like the Origin hoodie and pants, which you can get at fifty percent, or the Furnace hoodie, which I wear a lot because it’s one of my favorite pieces, at twenty percent off. Our white tail kits are up to forty percent off, meat eat or apparel up to fifty percent off, and a hell of a lot more good stuff like multie cameras up to forty five percent off, Krispy boots at twenty percent off, much much more. Head to the meat Eater dot com and check it out now. If you don’t, then Mark won’t have the budget to go count butterflies for his latest twenty six part series on pollinators, and I won’t have the budget to go hunt public land white tails like a real man. All right, Enough of that, It’s gun season throughout much of the country, and that means that most hunters of any time, any given point of the year are going to be in the woods right now. The deer gonna be scared shitless, and on average, about twenty to thirty percent of hunters will.
00:01:45
Speaker 3: Fill their tags.
00:01:46
Speaker 2: The rest won’t, and they’ll be sad about it. And since I don’t want you guys to be sad, it’s time to talk about how to fill those rifle and shotgun tags even when the going gets really, really tough. This will probably come as a surprise to almost no one who ever listens to this podcast, but I don’t really love gun hunting. Now, you know what, that’s too simple of a take on it. I love hunting a lot of stuff with guns. I just don’t really love participating in the general gun deer season. In most places. This is due to a lot of reasons, but the one that probably sits at the top of the list most often is that I don’t like to cross my fingers and hope a deer comes by. The thing I love about deer hunting is figuring out where they like to walk and then sneaking in there to see if I’m right. I’m often not right, but when I am, it’s a feeling that is worth chasing from season to season and state to state. With general gun seasons, the natural movement goes largely out the window. Now, sure, if you have a badass spot with little to no pressure and it’s big enough, you can certainly witness plenty of normal day to day deer stuff. If you don’t, you won’t, at least not quite in the way most of us would like. I say all of that, and now I’m going to say this. The general firearms season is also an interesting opportunity to learn about deer and to try to play the game of figuring out where they will go. The times that I’ve killed bucks with a rifle or hell, even a muzzloader have almost always felt like the bucks that I’ve killed with a bow on public land, and like those bow hunts for pressure deer. You know where this gets super duper hard is that not only do you have to go take a flyer on some sits, you have to employ the other rock solid but sucks a lot tactic of putting in tons of hours watching squirrels and praying to the deer gods to show you just one. This is generally too much to ask for most hunters, so they won’t do it. But if you want to kill good bucks somewhat consistently and you’re not secretly one of Elon Musk’s forty seven kids, you have to do the work. There’s just no way around this without lots of money and time. Now, I’ve talked a lot about how I think most firearms hunters would benefit greatly from just doubling their hunting locations from one to two. I don’t mean whole parcels of land. I just mean going from you know, one ladder stand to two ladder stands. This is a good way to get your fixed with an old stand by where you can see a lot and you know some years you’re gonna shoot one from it. But when the movement dies down to a trickle on that big view stand that’s easy to get to goes totally cold.
00:04:17
Speaker 3: Having another one is just a great option. You know.
00:04:20
Speaker 2: This is the thick stuff standard blind, and it’s the kind of location that drives a lot of hunters knots because they can’t see very much, but if they do see one, they’re probably gonna kill it. Most people won’t do this, and most people won’t even really consider a switch up. A lot of the gun hunters I know seem to resign themselves to sort of a lottery player status where they’re like, well maybe this year my numbers will get drawn, and they play the same numbers every year. I have a buddy like this who has a handful of rifle stands in a swamp he owns in Wisconsin. He and his dad used to somewhat frequently shoot good bucks, but that has dried up the last several years. But they still push that program even though it rarely works. Now this year I hunted his and I killed a really nice buck with a bow in a spot that, as far as I can tell, was full of bucks because of the presence of more wolves than usual. I’ll tell the full story on here someday, but suffice it to say I hung a stand after almost four full days of blanking, and then I saw three bucks and killed my biggest big woods buck in a hunt that would have been pretty sweet for Iowa, let alone a place with like eight deer per square mile. The deer just went where the wolves wouldn’t normally go, and then, once there and somewhat concentrated, the old rut carried on and provided me with one hell of a sit. The deer where you rifle hunt will respond in a similar fashion, although they’ll mostly button up their movements and stay in a place that, for whatever reason, you won’t go. We all kind of know this, but we do a couple of things to try to get around it. The first is that we hope that someone in our group or maybe the neighbors, when they do their annual deer drive at noon on day two of the season, will bump a deer past us. Does this work, Yes, someone eventually wins the but it’s probably not going to be you. The other thing we do is to try to justify doing what we want to do, which is not sit where we have no confidence, but instead to go sneak around and try to shoot one. Look, this comes from a place of heavy bias, but a good way to look at the deer thing is to always try to bowhunt them, no matter what weapon you’re carrying, or in other words, if it wouldn’t likely work very well if you were carrying a vertical bow, then it probably won’t work super well if you’re carrying a crossbow or a rifle or a shotgun fitted with the latest and greatest slug barrel. This is the move of a lot of people, and it’s entirely an attempt to make something happen, because sitting and waiting for something to happen is too much to ask for a good percentage of hunters, especially after opening day comes and goes. But imagine this. You’re a deer and in the week leading up to the gun season, a hell of a lot of two legged predators start to show up and poke around in your world. They make a lot of noise, they leave a lot of scent. They drive four wheelers into the clear cut, and they check their ladder stands, their presence becomes quickly known than the day before the opener, and certainly the hours before first light on the opener.
00:07:13
Speaker 3: There are hunters everywhere.
00:07:15
Speaker 2: Every cabin is bustling with activity, Trails that see light to know usage for about ninety percent of the year suddenly have ATVs and side by sides and hunters just walking. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist of a deer to figure out that the shit is about to go down. And when the first whisper of shooting light breaches at the horizon, at least in some places I’ve hunted, the guns start going off even before it’s legal shooting light. The deer will hear plenty of shots. The whole thing is just known, there’s really no other way to put it, and the deer do what the deer do, which is react to that known pressure. And as the weekend progresses and more activity ripples its way through the woods and deer drives start to happen, the whole thing just gels into place. In my experience, this literally might take a few hours or a day or two, but the deer tend to just figure it out as you would if your world was suddenly inundated with something that was only there to try to kill you, or a whole bunch of somethings. Now lucky for the deer. Most people are highly predictable, and they can play the odds and avoid them.
00:08:30
Speaker 3: Your job is to be less predictable.
00:08:32
Speaker 2: That’s a hard thing to do, so let me offer up a solution, or a few solutions, or I guess at least suggestions. The value of seeing a deer, whether it goes by natural or you bump it while sneaking along the ridge because a wander lust got the best of you, cannot be overstated. Just like when you’re hunting a low density area, any glimpse of any deer is a huge clue. You now know where they were, so they have to ask yourself, why why are they there? I’m talking dos fawns for kis and two hundred inch mega giants. Why were they where they were when you saw them or bump them? What does their presence tell you? I firmly believe deer choose their spots wisely, and when you stumble into one of those spots when they are under more pressure than they will be at any other time of the season, they’ve just told you a lot. Is this a location that you should post up at and wait them out for a day or two, or is it a location you know, kind of like when you catch a really big smallmouth on a drop off next to an island, which gives you a chance to run a pattern and see if it’s not just that that specific location is good, but a set of variables have come together in multiple locations to create the right spots all over the place. This stuff matters, just like it matters if one person in your group is covered in deer and everyone else is not seeing anything. Why is that person a lucky one? Is there a hot dough in there? Or are they in the stick of stuff on the farm? Or is the wind really good for their setup and not so much for anyone else. Try to figure that stuff out because it can help you make better decisions. And on that front, I shouldn’t need to say this, but I’m going to anyway. You’re hunting the hardest to kill deer of the season. If you don’t put in a good effort, you’ll fail. My buddy I mentioned earlier, who will not sit the stand I just killed out of, even though I left it for him, but will go into a couple of ladder stands that have been up for a long long time. He’s not a bad deer hunter. He kills a lot of good bucks and so do his sons. But he might make a decision to sit a stand weeks before it’s actually time, which means that the decision is made without factoring in the wind and the general weather conditions. That’s a huge issue. I don’t know too many bow hunters who ignore the wind completely unless they are lying because they have a sponsor contract for some kind of senn eliminated spray or some other wonder product. You can’t ignore the wind with white tails and it kill them very often. Anyway, this goes beyond just factoring in predicted wind direction. How let’s say your usual ladder standard box B lind setup just doesn’t produce and you decide you’re going to go find the deer and hunt them where they are.
00:11:08
Speaker 3: That’s great. How are you going to hunt them?
00:11:11
Speaker 2: I can promise you one thing, because these companies talk to me a lot about it. But there aren’t a ton of saddles or six pound hang ons being sold to the gun hunting crowd. Bow hunters who gun hunter are a different story. But for some reason, we look at gun hunting as a largely not mobile scenario, unless the mobile style we bring to the table is walking around. If you have a thick ass creek bottom you think the deer will hole up in, or some other cottontail friendly rabbit location, you’re not likely to hunt it right if you walk up into it and sit on the ground, or you just try to still hunt through it. We keep trying to reinvent how to kill white tails, but we just aren’t likely to get past the reality of a really good ambush set up in some good old fashioned patience. We all know the saying about how your first sit on a stand is the best hit, because it’s generally true. I killed three pretty good bucks this year, and all three were on first sit stands. Two I had hung ahead of time, and one I hung for that particular evening. The last one is the most relevant to this rant because that’s what a lot of folks need to do to salvage a gun season when it’s at least twenty four hours old. So if you do follow this advice, and I hope you do, make a plan to actually truly hunt when you have a suspicion about where the deer have moved off to. If you need to scratch the itch and still hunter whatever, that’s fine. Pay attention to the deer you bump in the fresh sign you find, which will usually be just tracks and droppings, But then make a plan to go mobile if you can’t play the wind. Try to be really stealthy, and remember that you’ll probably mostly get it wrong when deer have hunkered down. The whole thing is a close quarters game with a small margin for error. Barring that unicorn hot dough situation, they’re just not going to move that much.
00:12:55
Speaker 3: But I do know one thing.
00:12:56
Speaker 2: A few times in my life when I’ve devoted serious time to hunting during the general gun season, I’ve killed good bucks that acted like bucks are supposed to. But they all did it in the thick cover.
00:13:06
Speaker 3: You know.
00:13:07
Speaker 2: Cattail slews swampy woods, overgrown home seats, places that are not only uninviting to us, but also allow them to know when we come into the cover with them.
00:13:18
Speaker 3: That’s a huge key to.
00:13:19
Speaker 2: This, and figuring out how to not crash your way through while effectively hunting the edge and looking in is probably the best way to either shoot one or spot one that you can shoot with a revised plan. Now I have to say this, even though I want you guys to buy lots of hunting products so I don’t have to go lay aside. But the mentality of a lot of struggling gun hunters isn’t to go look for the deer, but to double down on a spot and try to get them to come to them. This almost never works, but banging rattling antlers together or putting out a bunch of scent wix soaked with dopey is a lot easier than going to look for where the deer are Right now, Nearly all those products really only work when you put yourself in close PROCs to the right bucks, and then you just let them give you the last ten percent after you’ve done like ninety percent of the heavy lifting. The efficacy of those products on deer that are truly scared for their lives and are very unlikely to travel any distance to check out a fight or the scent of a potential mate is very low. If there is one thing that I truly believe about filling gun tags when the going gets tough, it’s that the best bet is to try to figure out how to get close to them while staying as undetected as possible, and then just putting in enough quiet time in those spots to see if you’re right. I know it’s not as fun as calling one in, but calling and calling without any response is a great way to not only never call them in, but to further burn out a standard is probably burned out already. So I’ll bring this thing full circle. Think about what you and your hunting party are likely to do this season, and how much of those sits in drives and still hunts are the same ones that you always do. Ask yourself how often they work and whether they should work given the weather, and as much as you know about the presence of deer and your hunting ground. If you’re not brimming with confidence, or you were and now a day later you’re not, the season isn’t over, even though a lot of your competition will mostly give up.
00:15:12
Speaker 3: Don’t be like them.
00:15:13
Speaker 2: Go find the deer and then hunt the deer like you truly believe you can kill one at any moment, because you can’t. Good luck out there, my friends. Stay safe and come back next week, because I’m going to talk about what I consider to be the most frustrating thing in modern hunting, which is the amount of money involved in how it has shaped us in a negative way.
00:15:33
Speaker 3: That’s it.
00:15:34
Speaker 2: I’m Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation’s podcast as always, Thank you so much for listening and for all your support.
00:15:39
Speaker 3: If you want some more.
00:15:40
Speaker 2: Hunting content, maybe some more podcasts, maybe a video or two. Maybe you need a new recipe, you know, cook up some backstraps on that deer you just killed. Whatever, go to the medeater dot com check it out.
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