Ep. 834: Breaking Down My 2024 October Michigan Bow Kill and Tactics You Can Use Later This Season

This week on the show I'm breaking down how I killed my first Michigan buck of the year and three specific takeaways that can help you kill a buck this season, no matter the time of year.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. This week on
the show, I'm going to be breaking down how I
just killed my mid October Michigan buck and the tactics
I use that can help you now and through the
rest of the season to tag your own deer. All right,

(00:45):
welcome back to the Wire to Hunt podcast. We are
here with a special, emergency, impromptu, unexpected just you and
me show because this isn't something I usually do, but
when the time is right, when the iron is hot,
when things are happening, I want to jump in and

(01:05):
give you the latest information, the most recent updates and
stories that are fresh off the presses. And this one
is very hot because I just killed a buck mid October.
October to lol, as they say, was not so slow
for me this year. And what I want to do
for you here today is to walk you through exactly

(01:26):
how I killed this deer, the things I did in
the off season, the plan I put together the conditions
that I waited for to make my strike, and the
very specific set of circumstances that led to one of
the most intense deer hunts of my entire life. This was,
I guess, without giving too much weight right now, this

(01:48):
was one of those very rare times when you put
a specific hunting plant together, like a very detailed I'm
going to do it here, I'm going to do it
at this point. This is what the deer is gonna do,
this is where I'm gonna be, this is how it's
all gonna work out. And then have it actually worked
that way. I mean, I oftentimes have plans like that,

(02:10):
but you know, nine point nine times out of ten
doesn't work out well. This time it worked almost exactly
to a t. So I want to share with you
exactly how that happened and then kind of take a
step back and try to make this relatable and useful
for all of you and talking through a couple of
the takeaways, a couple of the things that I did
here and that I think we're reinforced for me as

(02:32):
lessons that can help you. In mid October, in late October,
all the way through November. I want to give you
some specific ideas that can help you have more success
this hunting season, no matter when you're listening. So that
is the game plan. That's what we're doing here. And
it's just like I said, gonna be pretty casual. I'm

(02:52):
going to walk you through. This stuff is fresh on
my mind because this all just happened last night and
I'm I'm excited. I'm feeling very thankful. Maybe haven't had
quite enough time to process it, but that's what I'm
gonna be doing here today. I'm gonna be processing live
on the air with you guys, and we'll see, we'll

(03:14):
see what comes out of this. So this story is
a shorter story in some ways than others you've heard
because this is not a three or four year hunt.
This isn't like the Wide nine hunt that was four
years of history with one specific deer, which, by the way,
if you haven't watched that film yet, it's on the
Mediator YouTube channel. Doing a shameless plug here, but check

(03:34):
out the four year Hunt for the Wide nine at
the Mediator YouTube channel. I really think you guys will
enjoy that. It's like a forty minute film dives deep
into that story, lots ups and downs, This was not
that kind of hunt, because this is a location that
I just started hunting this year, and this deer was
killed on my very first time hunting this spot, so

(03:59):
very different than the Wide nine story. But I will
rewind the clock a little bit because this hunt started
this past summer. Some of this stuff I mentioned earlier
in the year kind of prepping you guys, and when
we talked through our goals, hopes and hit lists podcasts
in the summer, I shared some of this, but I'm
going to give you the full recap now, just in
case you didn't hear that. So earlier this year, I

(04:21):
lost access to a property that I hunted last year.
That property got sold. It was a nice farm, a
pretty good size. I you know, had kind of depended
on that one as a really great kind of plan
B type spot to spend some time. And so coming
into this summer, I knew I again had to find
more access, and so I just kind of came into

(04:42):
this year going back, I guess to my roots. I
kind of wanted to get back to what I did
ten fifteen years ago when I just remember, you know,
I was I don't know, like twenties, mid twenties, and
anytime I ran into someone who maybe had some land,
I would, you know, bring up deer hunting and just
happen to see if there might be an opportunity there.
I was knocking on doors, I was asking around, I
was talking to family and friends, and I just want

(05:05):
to get a little bit more of that happening. So
this year, talk to a number of different people, just
asking around, seeing if there was anyone who maybe I
hadn't known of in the past that had a little
bit of land they might be willing to share access to.
And to make a long story short, I did pick
up some new spots. I picked up some stuff in
Illinois as we talked about, and then picked up several

(05:25):
spots in Michigan as well. And I think the main
takeaway here with the access thing is to never turn
your nose up on a spot, to never judge a
book by its cover. Because one of the parcels that
I got access to didn't have a whole lot going
for it. It was mostly just a big farm field.

(05:47):
And I remember when I got permission on this piece,
I pulled up the maps and I looked at everything,
and some of these spots just feels, you know, not
a great chance to kill a mature buck in that
kind of spot. So I thought, Okay, you know, I'll
shoot some dos there, help out this farmer, do you
know my management duties. But I don't know if this
will be a spot I'm gonna, you know, get a
crack at an older deer. But one of these spots,

(06:10):
when I looked at that aerial, you could see that
it butted up to a really impressive looking swamp, a
good swamp system, a place that I'd kind of driven
around in the past, was aware of, had always wanted
to get access somewhere around this swamp, and this property
butted up to it and had a little bit of
cover on the backside of it. Something like four acres

(06:31):
is what I kind of was able to measure. The
area of actual color. This is grass brushy stuff, some
autumn olive, some scrubby willows that kind of stuff, some buckthorn,
so good cover, but a very small amount of it,
and then cornfield for ninety seven percent of the property.

(06:53):
What it had going for it again was it butts
up into this great big swamp, which is you know
in places like Michigan where there's a lot of hunting pressure.
It's always going to be different depending on where you're at.
But for me in southern Michigan, the sanctuaries oftentimes are swamps, wet,
big nasty, thick stuff that other hunters typically don't want
to go into. That's where deer can get a little

(07:14):
bit of age on them in my area. You know,
in Wisconsin it might be big, hilly, nasty topography. In Iowa,
maybe it's a big open crp field. There's no trees
around and so hunters can't hunt traditionally there. Whatever it is,
finding those sanctuaries is huge, and so I knew even
though this is a very small huntable area, it was

(07:35):
next to a really good looking sanctuary. So I kind
of flagged that as hey, this is still worth a
checkout even though it's pretty small. So late in the
summer I went out there. I did a speed scout.
I walked the outside edge of the field. I walked
that back section to cover. I marked and the scrapes
that I found or spots looked like they would be
historically scrapes where you can still kind of see the

(07:57):
remnant opening underneath these overhanging branches. I marked the major
trails leaving the swamp heading into my section and heading
into the cornfield, and I did notice a couple things
that I really liked. Two spots in particular stood out.
One of them was this little cluster of oaks on
this transition between the swamp and the corn and so

(08:19):
in this cluster of oaks, it's maybe an acre, but big,
healthy looking white oak trees. And one of these awesome
scrapes right at the hell convergence of two or three
different trails. So I marked that. I found a tree
that would be downwind of the typical winds. I thought
about how I would access it, and I put a
camera on this scrape in that spot, set that up,

(08:41):
moved on, continuing on to a different part of this
little four acre piece. I found another spot that was
very interesting, And here was a ditch that came out
of the swamp and stopped right before it got to
the cornfield. And I thought to myself, when I looked
at that, where that ditch and is like a full,
you know, a water filled ditch. And I saw that,
and it was pretty wide, and it did not look

(09:03):
like something that deer would want to jump over if
they didn't have to. I immediately thought, this is a
travel pinch. This is a spot where deer going to
funnel around the ditch and be pressed up alongside this cornfield.
I then saw buck, thorn, tree, bush orrub whatever you
technically want to call it. It was leaning right out
next to that ditch that had a big old opening

(09:25):
underneath it where you could just tell for years deer
had been making scrapes underneath that. And then as I
had approached that, I had also bumped a buck that
was bedded out on these little two fingers of timber
that extended that timber. It's more like brushy shrubs and
very small scruby trees, but there was two fingers that
extended alongside either side of the ditch, going in towards

(09:47):
that swampy section. And as I walked past that, I
bumped what looked like a decent buck off the end
of one of those points. So all of that is
telling me, all right, there's some bedding here, there's this
pinch here, there's a standing corn behind, there's an obviously
well used annual scrape right here. All of it made
my spidery senses tingled big time. So again I thought, okay,

(10:09):
this is an absolute great hunting location. I like what
I see here. You could see deer using this in October,
coming out to feed from that swamp, heading out into
the corn. I thought, you know, also during the rut,
there's gonna be does coming out and feeding here. This
ditch might pinch a little bit of that movement in
front of me. Problem was, as I searched around, as

(10:31):
I looked around this whole area, there was no tree
as you'd get up into. There was no options whatsoever
within shooting range, even really outside of shooting range unless
you got like sixty seventy yards away to get a
saddle or a tree stand somewhere. So I remember standing
there this summer thinking, what the heck do you do?

(10:53):
How would I make this work? And maybe in the
past I would have just moved on. I would have said, Eh,
can't hunt it, No tree, can't do it. But I
remember thinking, like, this is a spot you have to
be and there's got to be a way to make
it work. So I first thought maybe I could hide
in the ditch, like maybe I can get down and
stand in the water, or stand on the bank and

(11:14):
hide underneath those underneath the weeds and wait for deer
to come by. Maybe I could shoot from that position.
But then I got to thinking, the only way to
hunt this area would be with a wind pushing from
that ditch out into the field. Otherwise, if you have
a wind blowing somewhere else, it's blowing into where all
this deer coming from. Just wouldn't work. So I then
thought I could probably hide in the corn. And this

(11:37):
was a really key thing for me, was realizing that
I can use that standing corn basically as a blind. Right,
you see a lot of people who own land putting
pop up blinds or haybal blinds or even tower blinds
in or right behind standing corn. Like some people will
even have a cornfield, they'll mow some of it down
and then they'll have their pop up blind right inside

(11:58):
the standing corn. Well, I can't do that, but I
could basically use the standing corn like a blind. I
could hide in it, just stand in it, or crouch
down in it. So I walked out there about twenty
five thirty yards from where I wanted to be able
to shoot to, and I started looking around and fortunately,
maybe not for the farmer, but for me as a hunter,
a lot of that corn had been eaten by deer,

(12:20):
so there was a lot of it knocked down, so
there was it almost was like someone came in and
mowed some of this stuff down, because it was pretty
good openings. So I found a spot where I was
back far enough that I was right on the edge
of the standing corn and then had this kind of
knockdown corn in front of me, and I just marked
a waypoint on Onyx and said, all right, this is
the spot that has the most lanes to different places
that I think deer might come through. It has me

(12:43):
within shooting range of that ditch funnel and I can
see that scrape. So I marked it and said, all right,
I'm gonna come back at some point, and this is
gonna be the spot to hunt if I want to
hunt the ditch. So that's where I left things. I
had a camera on that scrape. I marked the way point,
finished my little quick spout scouting, walk through there, and

(13:04):
pieced out. I was done. That takes me to I
don't know, sometime in August, late August, and pictures started
rolling in on those two cameras that I had and
ended up being pretty promising. There was a handful of
nice deer, nothing giant but some bucks that or maybe two,

(13:24):
maybe three, maybe four, and then finally this crazy big
browtime buck just like crazy big brow times, like eye
popping ten eleven I don't know at the time, maybe
twelve inch long brow times is what it looked like
to me when looking at those first velvet photos. So
super exciting. I've never had a buck like that anywhere

(13:45):
I could hunt, and showed my kids the pictures. An Ever,
my oldest wanted to call them tall brows. So this
dear right away stood out. And fortunately, over the rest
of the summer, late August and September, that deer showed
up somewhat consistently, not over and over and over again,
but enough to know he was in the area. He

(14:06):
was using this cornfield, and he called this zone home
at least. So fast forward, as the season is approaching,
I'm continuing to monitor these cameras. I'm monitoring different properties
I have to hunt. I do some drives around these
various neighborhoods, just trying to see if there's any deer
in the field, just trying to get a sense of

(14:28):
what else is out there, and slowly start putting together
a game plan. The approach that I am taking this
year is to be a little bit more spread out,
to try to keep tabs and what deer are around
to collect collect collect information through cameras, through long distance glassing,

(14:48):
through the occasional observation stand type hunt, and sometimes doing
a quick drive through or walk through, and trying to
scout a little bit on foot and hunt the properties
that have a potentially active deer. So I'm not going
to overhunt any one particular property after one particular deer.

(15:09):
I'm a little bit more open to what I'm targeting
this year. Last year is very much wide nine. This
year there's a handful of different deer, some spots here
in southern Michigan, some spots up in northern Michigan, and
I'm going to go where the iron seems hot and
where the conditions seem right. So in this case, there's
a few things that had to be lined up for
me to want to hunt this particular small property. I

(15:33):
knew I would not be ill hunted a lot, because
again it's small and you could burn it out pretty quickly.
There's one or two spots. There really was nowhere else
you could hunt on this piece, and so I was
looking to make very targeted strikes, so waiting for the
right moment and then give it a shot and then
back out for a while and maybe give it one

(15:53):
more shot. But this wasn't a place that I could
hunt over and over and over and bump around here
and try this spot and try this spot and try
that spot, to wait until I felt pretty darn confident.
So I was number one infrequent hunting in this particular location.
That doesn't mean I'm not going to hunt other places,
but for this spot, it's got to be the right time,
the right moment for a deer that I actually want

(16:13):
to take a crack at. The one main deer that
I want to take a crack aut on this property
was for sure, that tall browtime buck. There was another
eight pointer who looked like maybe he was four, with
short brow times that I thought, if that deer hangs
out here a lot, I might be interested in that one.
But the tall browbuck was there the most, probably maybe

(16:35):
of any of the other deer I was seeing across
those two different camera locations. He was showing up somewhat frequently. Now,
in order to hunt him, I mentioned any of those
right conditions. A couple things. I needed some kind of
wind that was not blowing into the swamp. I could
get away with maybe a straight north or a straight south,
a parallel it, or I could get something that's blowing

(16:57):
like northwest or southwest coming out of the swamp, but
I couldn't have anything going into the swamp. So that
was a key thing. Secondly, as I started seeing pictures
rolling of this deer, I was getting a basic sense
of the fact that he spent a decent amount of
time in this zone, and he was showing up on
the edges of daylight. In a few times in daylight,

(17:20):
I had mooring pictures of him coming into bed before
the sum was up, and then I had a couple
days where he came out before dark in the evening,
so he's bedded somewhere on this side of the swamp.
I knew that my cameras would just telling me a
slice of the story. So if I got two pictures
of him around daylight or close to daylight, he was

(17:41):
probably coming out more often than not, just different spots
that I can't monitor. So what I knew I wanted
to do was was wait until I had that right
set of winds and then a trigger, which for me
usually is a cold from some kind. I want some
cooler weather coming in. I want a weather change, ideally,
you know, ten plus degrees, fifteen plus degrees of a

(18:04):
temperature drop. That's something I really want to see. If
I see that in October, I'm I'm interested in taking
a more aggressive swing on one of my spots. So
I needed that. Another key thing with this particular spot
is that I had to walk through a standing cornfield
all the way to get to this location. And then

(18:24):
I needed, you know, sneak in standing corn and set
up close to where these deer or some of these
deer are probably betted right So I remember thinking to myself, like,
this is gonna be very hard to pull off if
it's a very dry and very still. I need some
wind cover or I need rain cover to be able
to move through all this standing corn and get set

(18:44):
up in the corn without alerting deer that maybe are
better right off those little points that wouldn't be that
far away. These bucks could have been bedded sixty yards away,
maybe from where I'd be trying to set up. So
as I was watching the forecast, I need wind direction.
I wanted the cold front. I wanted wind or rain,

(19:04):
so I could stealthily move in there. And then finally,
like I mentioned, I would love it if I had
photos that told me again he's you know, give me
some confidence that he's still in the zone. And so
that's what I ended up getting. All of these things,
these stars all aligned here. Just recently, the evening of
October thirteenth, I had the cold front moved through. Temperatures

(19:27):
dropped from I think the seventies on Friday all the
way down to fifties and high forties by Sunday. I
had a west northwest wind, so this wind was blowing
away from the cover and down, allowing me to basically
walk with the wind in my face, just kind of

(19:50):
quartering across my face and into my face, straight from
the road all the way through the standing corn. And
then it had been raining for the last day and half,
so everything was wet, everything was quiet, and there was
a little bit of a breeze, so I could sneak
in there completely silent, nothing would hear me. I could
head in there with a wind blowing across my face
and down, so deer might still feel comfortable coming out

(20:12):
to this field. If a buck wanted some degree of
wind across his face. He could still smell something as
he came out to feed, but he certainly wouldn't smell me.
This cold weather, I thought, would give me a trigger
to get him moving a little bit earlier than usual.
And I had two pictures of him moving in daylight
in the prior ten days, and then I had some
other shots of him coming into bed in that general

(20:34):
zone that ten day window two right around daylight. So
again it's just telling me, I'm I'm probably close to
his bedroom, and now I have this cold front that
I think will get him out here to this food source,
likely a little bit earlier in the day than maybe
he would on others. I've got one of the best
food sources on the edge of this big swamp, so

(20:55):
I believe that there's probably a lot of deer. They're
in a head towards this standing corner field. There's bean
fields in the other area, but those are mostly harvested.
There had not been a freshly cut corn field. That
sometimes is the kind of thing that gets deer flocking
to it, So you know there's a good chance these
deer were feeding the corn. Saw a lot of deer
on cameras doing that. This would be the trigger I

(21:18):
thought that could make it all happen. So based on
all that, the ditch standing corn spot was where it
was going to be. Those were the conditions I was
waiting for, and that's why I was so ideal. I

(21:40):
rushed home from visiting with my family in western Michigan,
got home Sunday afternoon, grabbed my gear, took a cent
freeze shower, slipped out there, walked straight down the rows
of the standing corn right to my pre marked location
on my map, and tried to just hum grew down

(22:00):
in the corn, and I remember getting situated in there.
I brought a little matt to kneel on to keep
my knees from getting soaking wet. The whole time. I
remember really trying to be careful about setting up in
the right position, because when you're hunting on the ground,
it's harder to move. It's harder to adjust sometimes than
when you're in a tree right because you just might

(22:21):
not be able to move as much because you're at
ground level with deer. You are at the mercy of
where the deers show up, so you know when you're
up in a tree, they're usually not going to see
you hopefully not at first. So you can move around,
you can readjust you can fix things in the moment,
but you kind of need to have everything fixed just
right on the ground, or at least I want to
try to set it up that way. And I remember

(22:43):
last year I had to hunt on the ground again
without a blind, just hiding in grass. Last year in Nebraska,
it was a similar situation where I knew this is
the spot I had to be to intercept the deer,
but there was no trees, and so when I got there,
just like I did last night, I spent a lot
of time thinking through, Okay, where exactly do I think
these deer might come through? How exactly do I need

(23:05):
to be positioned with my body to be able to
be abd drawback and shoot. I don't want to have
to reposition my body if I don't have to. How
do I best take advantage of cover here on the
ground so that I can hopefully hide down here but
still have some shooting lanes. So all that stuff was
going through my mind last night too. I was using
standing corn right behind me, but I didn't want to
be deep into the standing corn because I wanted to

(23:27):
be able to shoot in front of me and to
the side of me. So I got to the spot
as I mentioned, where there was this push down corn
from the deer feeding already, but there's still some patches
of standing corn here and there. So I kind of
adjusted my location just a little bit to where things
have been changed since the summer. And what I had
was some open push down corn to my right where

(23:50):
it was almost like a quarter acre or a half acre,
almost like food plot looking thing because of the corn
being pushed down. So I knew if any deer came
from the north of me, I could turn and make
an adjustment and take a crack at the deer over there.
If he came north of me from a spot I
wasn't expecting, I would have options. If he came right
out in front of me off one of those two

(24:11):
little brushy fingers and got pinched by the ditch, I
would have a perfect twenty five yard shot right in
front of me, and then I could see the buckthorn
shrub where that big scrape was. Now, I didn't have
a perfect shot to it, but I could likely get
a shot at him as he approached it, or maybe
if I had to make a slight move I could

(24:33):
get a shot, but I didn't want to get any
farther up, any closer to that, which would have given
me a more clear shot to there, but would have
exposed me even more. And that was like the challenge
was trying to get that balance of being able to
stay hidden while also having shot opportunities. So I spent

(24:54):
I don't know, ten fifteen minutes thinking this through and
making tiny adjustments like let's move one yard over here. Okay,
is this right now? I'm gonna move two yards over here. No,
I gotta take advantage of these three cornstalks here. So
really was trying to get that just right, got myself situated,
tried to map out exactly where the best place to

(25:15):
put all my different things where it would be. Again,
it's these little tiny things that many times don't matter,
but sometimes they make all the difference. So I try
to be very thoughtful about all the possibilities. This is
a really key thing that I've talked about a lot.
So I'm beating the dead horse maybe, But every time

(25:37):
I get set up in a location, I try to
walk through every possible scenario and think through can I
draw if a deer comes here? Can I move in
a position if a deer is over there? What will
I do if a deer comes out from behind me? Where?
You know? What? If I miss and I need to
grab another arrow, where's my quiver position? Can I reach

(25:59):
the quiver easily? Can I do it quietly without a
deer noticing? If I need my grunt to Where's that
going to be? If I need to reposition and shoot
up into this open area to the north, what will
I do? Do I have anything in my way that's
going to keep me from being able to make that move?
Is my backpack in the spot that's going to get
in my way? If I have to move to shoot
over by the scrape, etc. Etc. All of those scenarios

(26:21):
went through my mind in that first fifteen minutes as
I sat through and thought through how I want to
position myself here. I get all that done. I'm on
my knees, kind of hunkered down with some scattered standing
corn and then broken down corn in front of me,
effectively giving me a natural ground blowe as best as possible.

(26:44):
And as soon as I get kind of settled, I
hear a deer sneeze, like that kind of sneeze cough sound,
that if you've been out there in the woods long enough,
you've heard that plenty. You can identify it right away.
That's a deer. And it sounded really close. So I'm
laying down almost just hunkered down as low as I could,
because this deer was close. And that was kind of

(27:04):
the name of the game of this hunt is that
stuff would just appear very close. You know, there would
be no deer, and then there would be a deer
thirty five yards away. There would be nothing, and then
there'd be a deer twenty five yards away. Again, it's
it's a breeze and it's rainy, so you can't hear
almost anything or at least very minimal walking sounds. So

(27:25):
the hunt begins with a little buck coming out of
one of these little brushy fingers, walks alongside that dish,
comes right at me and walks within ten yards seven yards,
and I remember just trying to melt into the ground
so he wouldn't see me. And he gets right up

(27:45):
on top of me and then gets into the row
of corn that I'm in and looks straight down the
row and I'm right in the middle of the row,
and he kind of like jolts notices there's a lump
on the ground and bounds away. He doesn't blow, but
he kind of bounds off and then walks away. So
I consider myself lucky that he didn't totally freak out.
But I knew that's like a chink in my armor.

(28:08):
So I then readjusted my location again and again micro adjustment.
I just realized, I need to set myself up so
if any deer comes into a row, I'm not right
in the middle of that row. I need to use
the row of corn to be to break up my outline.
So there were some dead corn stocks that were kind
of pushed in different places, and I just leaned one

(28:30):
of those in along the side of me, so it
breaks up my outline a little bit more. And then
I slid up twelve inches so that the row of
corn is on either side of me, or at least
on my right side. So instead of my body being
right in the middle of a row, I now have
like half my body in one row half my body
in the other row. And if a deer were to
walk through that looking down the rows, now they're just

(28:52):
seeing a little bit of a clump sticking out from
one row of corn and a little clump sticking out
the other but not one big ball that ends up
hang off when I don't know. Ten minutes later, another
buck comes out, does the same thing. Another young deer,
and he comes through right a five yards five to
ten yards again very close, and this time he kind

(29:14):
of walks through eyeballs my area, but doesn't freak and
just walks past into the main standing corn behind me.
Disappears feeding fast forward another our ish and another deer
comes out. This one's a doe. She comes out from
the left side of the ditch and near that scrape.

(29:36):
She actually was standing in the scrape, and then she
comes walking right towards me and walks again to five
yards right into my face, and she's like on top
of me, notices me at five yards and same deal.
She kind of like boogers like, sees me, gets a
little weird, bounds off, stops, turns, stares at me for

(29:57):
a while, stares at me, stares at me, stares at me,
and then couldn't figure it out, turns around slowly walks away.
At this point I thought, hey, you're getting away with it.
This is good news. You haven't had a deer blow
the whole thing up. That's the good news. Bad news

(30:18):
is you're like you're playing with fire, having this many
deer come this close to you. It's bound to blow
up in your face, is I remember I was having
this conversation with myself in my head, like, yikes, this
might not work out because there's too many deer that
are coming right to you. It just seemed like it
was a matter of time until something was gonna just

(30:40):
start blowing and blowing and blowing. Or if a bunch
of deer came out and started feeding and then one
of them gets close. If you know, if you get
a dozen deer all of a sudden running away, that's
going to make a commotion. You can only get away
with so much of that before I'm mature. Buck is
going to know something's going on. But as I was
thinking that, and I remember thinking like, gosh, I don't
know if this is gonna work. I glanced to my

(31:02):
left and I saw antlers in that scrape, and I
pull up my binoculars and can get a better look
through like the brush and the stalks that are there,
and I realize it's him. Tall Brows is right there,
twenty five thirty yards in the scrape there in shooting range,

(31:24):
but behind stuff, I can't get a clear shot. So
that's a holy crap kind of moment. It's not even
six o'clock yet and he's already out there. It had
rained earlier in the day. It actually had been sprinkling
a little bit while I was out there. Now it'd
cleared up, barometric pressure is rising, it's twenty degrees cooler
than it was a day and a half ago. Picture

(31:46):
perfect conditions as far as I'm concerned, and bam, there
he is. But I'm on the ground, hiding in half
stalks of corn, twenty five to thirty yards away from him,
and he's just right there. I never heard him coming.
I didn't see him coming. I have no ability to
move into position to do anything different. He's just there.

(32:08):
So I just remember at this moment thinking to myself, Okay,
don't panic, just wait, wait it out. And so as
soon as he kind of turned his head, I waited
there for a while. At this point I could see
his eye like kind of right in my direction, so
I couldn't move. As soon as he turned his head,
I slowly reached over and grab my bow, and I fortunately,

(32:29):
as I described, I had it everything positioned in the
right kind of spot that I should be able to
make something happen without a lot of moving. So I'm
able to reach over the bow, grab the bow, slowly
pull the bow up. I'm low on my knees because
I've been hunkered down because that dough had just passed
through not very long ago. So I was like crouch,
really low. I wasn't like a pie on my knees.

(32:49):
I was down low on my knees, and I can't
shoot from this position like where he is, can't see
his vitals. All I can see is the top of
his head. So as soon as he turns around or
turns away his head a little bit again, I rise
up higher onto my knees. So I go from like
down on my knees, like my butt on the back

(33:11):
of my legs, to now all the way up my knees,
and I can see him better. But I can now
see that there's still too much corn and brush in
front of his vitals. Now I can see like his
chest up to his head and neck can't move. I'm there,
I have the bow ready. I'm thinking, Okay, how do
I maneuver into a shot, And then he spins and

(33:31):
looks at me, like his head just kind of turns
and just staring at like right in my general direction.
It wasn't like, uh oh, I nailed you, but it
was something got his attention, and in my head, I'm worried,
did he just nail me? Did he bust me? Now?
What follows is a collection of different variations of the

(33:57):
same thing, happening again and again over the course of
thirty minutes. And it's honestly all of a blur in
my head. So I can't remember which one of these
things happen in which order, but I'll give you the
basic gist of what happens over the next thirty minutes.
He's twenty five to thirty yards away. He's staring at me.
I'm holding my bow up, you know, clipped on, but

(34:19):
not drawn back. I'm thinking he's seeing me. I freeze
in that position for three to five minutes. He finally relaxes,
turns back, looks away, begins if I recall right. He
begins to work the licking branch in the scrape. As
soon as he does that, and I can see that
his left eye is not looking at me. I try

(34:41):
to make a move to get into another lane where
I might people get a shot, and then I realize
I'm gonna have to stand to actually pull this off here.
So as soon as he's up in those branches really
well distracted, I stand up and start to move into
a position to get a shot. And then he spins
head around and looks right at me again, and then

(35:04):
thinking for sure I'm busted. Game over, and I just
stand there and I remember thinking like, don't breathe don't
look him in the eyes, had closed my eyes. I
just try to do anything to stay calm, cool and collected.
And that lasted another like three four minutes, just frozen,

(35:26):
just waiting any second out he's gonna bust. And then
he puts his head down and I'm just about to
start moving again, trying to take another half step again.
I'm standing up twenty five issu yards twenty five to
thirty yards away from when I think it's a four
year old, big old Michigan buck in this scrape. There's
just like one row of corn that was not knocked

(35:48):
down on the edge there that's blocking him, and then
some brush. I just need to kind of move to
the side a couple steps to get where I thought
i'd be alc he puts his head down. I start
to move again, and then I hear clock clock, and
then I realized what I couldn't see behind that one
rowf standing corn and brush is that there was a
second buck there with him. So they start to spar.

(36:09):
I start to take steps towards him into the side.
I get to a spot where I think of an opening,
but now he's spun in that other bucks in front
of me. I can't shoot. I think I'm gonna have
an open if he spins around. They release, He looks up,
looks right at me. I'm frozen again for one, two,
three minutes. I'm not exactly sure for how long. Frozen

(36:31):
there for a while, he stands in that position forever.
I'm just waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting thinkingly. Anytime now he's
gonna bust, but he doesn't. He turns. The other deer
kind of turns back, moves off. Then this buck turns
and starts heading back to the ditch. This is when
I think, Okay, he's gonna walk towards the ditch. I'm

(36:52):
gonna have a shot opportunity. He's behind brush. I remember
two times there was two different times in this encounter
where I think thought like, you probably could get a shot.
One of them was when there was that corn in
the way. There was some like corn leaves that were
only thing blocking the vitals, and I remember thinking like,

(37:14):
if you you could get an arrow through there, probably,
but I didn't want to do it, like I did
not want to didn't want to push it, didn't want
to have something go wrong. But I remember having a
moment where I thought that might be a shot, but no.
And then the second opportunity was when he starts walking
away and the brush was just too tall, but it
was barely too tall. It was like, you know, two

(37:37):
inches above where I two to three inches two inches
something like that above where I would have wanted to
be shooting. So I thought, gosh, if you just aim
a couple inches beneath that through that grass, you know
your arrow could punch right through that just fine. Maybe.
But then I said, no, you're not going to take
a maybe shot like that. So he keeps he's walking
now with that, he's about to get to the ditch
and right there it looks like the brush goes down

(37:59):
and it looks like I can see like his head.
Then his neck gets more open. I begin to draw.
I'm just beginning, and he drops like the ditch. The
bank of the ditch lowered sooner than I realized, and
so now he gets down low and I can't see
the vitals at all now, but he stops and stares
at me. He's right there, pinned on me, and I

(38:20):
just remember at this point again, I'm holding the ball,
I'm clipped on. I had been in the process of
almost starting to draw, and again frozen looking at me,
and I remember thinking, and it's such a stupid thing,
but I was almost like trying to line up the
riser of my bow in front of my face, thinking
somehow that the riser the bow in front of my

(38:41):
face would somehow hide me. And at this point I
started to kind of shake. You can just tell, like
the adrenaline the whole thing. I remember seeing my arrow
shaking on the end and this big silver fixed blade
broadhead just kind of bouncing, and in my head, I'm like,
you need to calm down, you need to just get
control of that thing. You don't want this shaking silver

(39:03):
thing to be the deal that ends this whole encounter.
But I also had another thought at this moment. Was
at this moment or somewhere within this final piece, I
remember thinking, this is it, Like you're busted. There's no
way this deer is not going to get out of here.
Just enjoy it. And that was an interesting thing. I
don't think I've ever had a moment when I was

(39:25):
in a moment of truth encounter with a deer where
I thought to myself, Ah, this isn't gonna happen, But
just enjoy the fact that you're this close to this deer,
and I should bring I should, I should take note
of this because this was a not this is not
a film hunt. This is the first hunt I've had
this year that was not filmed for me to or
this is just a me hunt. This is just for

(39:46):
fun hunt. And you know, something I tried to think
about as I drove out there that day and walked
in that day was to just try to really like
wallow in the experience, like really soak it in. Don't
let anything stress you out, don't worry if you know,
you get buggered, if deer figure you out, if it's

(40:09):
a if it doesn't work out, that's fine. Just enjoy
like you're out there. Just soaking in the scenery, enjoying
watching deer, just have fun. I remember thinking that the
whole time, and it was happening. It was an intense hunt,
like even before this buck showed up, all these close
encounters with deer, it was just there wasn't a whole
lot of time to sit around and think or to

(40:29):
sit around and relax. I was kind of in action
from the beginning, but I did remember thinking several times like, man,
that's pretty great, Like this is why you do this.
You're in a beautiful place, You're you're super excited. That's
another thing that I should point out. This is the
first hunt of this year where I had like full blown,

(40:51):
you know, buck killing day vibes. And if you've hunted
deer long enough, you know what I'm talking about here.
When you have the conditions, the circumstances, the time of year,
the intel, the something that makes you think, like when
you're going into the woods on that day, like it
should happen. It can absolutely happen. Those are my very

(41:11):
favorite days to hunt. When it is like a targeted
hunt where you really have a really strong intuition in
set of reasons that this should work. That's how I
felt yesterday, and that just colors everything different, like you've
got extra nerves. I'm allgittery when I'm getting ready at
the house, texting my hunting buddies, like, oh man, first

(41:33):
day where I'm really feeling the vibes. I'm really feeling it,
and that's just that's a great thing. I love that
about the fall. You get a handful of days like
that where you're just amped, and this is one of those.
So I've got that going on while also trying to
just enjoy it for what it is. And the hunt
kind of checked all the boxes because it was in
the action, and then the buck I'm after shows up.

(41:56):
I had this crazy encounter and now I've tried multiple
times to try to get a shot at him. Every
time I move, he moves. Every time he moves, I
adjust whenever he's not looking, and I just can't line
it up quite right. Now. He's staring at me. I'm
hiding behind my bow riser. My silver broad head is
shaking in the wind. They're shaking, you know, on the rest,

(42:17):
and I'm just thinking he's gonna blow out of here.
There's no way that you're not busted. What a cool encounter,
and then this stinking buck turns instead of running away,
walks back to the scrape. He gets back to that scrape,
and I'm thinking, geez again. As he's doing that, I'm

(42:39):
having to be frozen because he's in the open and
his face is like his eye is looking at me.
And now I'm like exposed. I'm not hiding behind corn anymore.
I'm standing because I had walked right. I walked on
the edge of that corn to try to get a
better shot. But then he'd moved again. So now my
window of cover or my wall of that I was

(43:00):
using to get closer to him and try to find
lane through, now that's gone because he walked to the
other side, so he's coming across. Now I'm feeling even
more exposed, so I can't move to get a better shot.
Goes back to the scrape. I'm blocked from a shot again.
Now that second buck comes back out, he kind of
circled behind this tall browtime buck. He's walking towards me

(43:21):
for the ninth time. I'm thinking this whole thing's not
going to fall apart, but that buck doesn't see me.
He moves off to the side. To make a long
story short. The tall brow buck stands underneath the scrape.
I make another step to get this last bit of
brush out of the way, about to draw. He turns
walks back to the ditch, and this is my window,

(43:45):
Like I now know, okay, if he crosses here, if
he gets to the ditch, I have one window, which
is just before he starts dropping down that bank. There
was a little bit of an opening right before he dropped.
As he starts approaching that he is angle just enough
that I don't think he can see me draw. I
draw back. He gets right there, I stop him. Shoot.

(44:09):
He's perfectly broadside. I am standing on the edge of
the cornfield twenty five yards away from him. Ish something
like that, and I hit him back. In my mind's
I it looked like I hit him back of the ribs,
mid body ish perfect up and down, but back and

(44:31):
on the shot. I remember two things. I remember, you know,
it was a situation where he walked right to the
edge of where I bill shoot him. If he took
another step, he dropped down the ditch. And then it's
just thick brush. I'd never get another shot. So the
whole thing was crazy and fast paced at that point,

(44:53):
and I just remember two things. I remember avoiding the shoulder,
and I had this situation last year where I hit
the wide nine and the shoulder, And I've been thinking
to myself about trying to get back off the shoulder
more than I used to. And it's funny, you know,
I am constantly trying to get better at this. I'm

(45:14):
constantly working to find ways to improve my shooting, to
improve my shot opportunities, to remove error. And you think
you've got to figure it out, and then something happens,
and the next year you're thinking, well, how do I
count for that error? And then you go out there
the next year and then you have some other thing
go wrong or something go right, and're like, Okay, I've
got it. And then the next year something goes wrong.
Oh well, how do I do with that challenge or

(45:35):
how do I fix that thing? And so as many
of you know, if you've been listening for a while,
you know that after last year, I wanted to switch
stuff up again, went to acquire the bow. I've reduced
my max range from forty yards to thirty yards because
I don't want to have bad shots happen. I don't
want to wound deer I don't want to miss deer.
I'd rather have fewer opportunities, but fewer shots go bad.

(45:59):
Switch to a single pin sight to reduce any possible
site picture issues. Switched to a fixed play broadhead so
that if I do click the shoulder again, I've got
a better chance of punching through. So I made all
these adjustments in part because of this bad shoulder situation
I had last year, which really hit me hard. And
then of course I overcompensate. I am paranoid about the shoulder.

(46:23):
I remember thinking off the shoulder, and I think what
I did is I went off the shoulder, and I
think I just pulled when I was moving back off
that shoulder, or I rushed it, or just made a
human error, and that happens, and maybe he took a
step forward. I'm not sure. I don't have film of it.
I can't look to see exactly what the deer did.

(46:46):
But no excuses. It was not a perfect shot. The
shot was back and he bounded off, ran maybe fifty yards,
stopped behind some bushes. I pulled up my bi nose
found him there, and then he took a handful of steps,
disappeared in a brush just before he got into the brush.
I remember thinking kind of a wildly walk, but it

(47:09):
was a walk, you know. And when you hit a
deer and you think the shot was back and then
you see him bound off stop and then walk away,
you know that is a telltale sign that you hit
that deer further back than you wanted, you know, liver
or stomach or intestines or something like that. So I
went from this thirty minute incredibly intense, like one of

(47:32):
the most intense face offs I've ever had with a deer,
very exciting situation. I get the one deer I'm in
there after like I had the targeted strike go exactly
the way I wanted it to, and then you know,
you have that super super high and then you see
that arrow hit and you know it's not quite right,
and then immediately you come back down to earth and
kind of crash down beneath earth, and you know, we've

(47:57):
all been there. I've been there my share times over
the years. I've had lots of great ones, I've had
lots of less than great ones, and this was one
of those where I thought, well, that's going to be
a dead deer, but it's not necessarily going to happen
right away. And so the smart thing to do, the
thing you know you have to do but it's not
fun to do, is you got to give that deer time.

(48:18):
So I waited there for a while and just watched
this little pocket to cover with my by notes for
a while, just in case, just in case, he walked
out of there, and I could see where it went,
but he didn't. And then I had one more dough
come out, and she saw me because I was still
just standing out there in the open now watching, and
she saw me, and she did start to blow, and

(48:38):
I remember thinking, all right, I probably just need to
get out of here before a lot of deer come out,
because one deer blowing is a thing, But if I
have a dozen deer that eventually come out here at
some point, and all these deer are alarming, and I
just didn't want to spook that buck any more than necessary,
So grab my stuff, slips straight out the cornfield. I
don't go to look for my arrow, I don't check

(49:00):
out the shot site, none of that stuff, because I
just knew the hit was back of where I wanted
to be. This deer needs to go overnight. The calculus
here is that a deer that has hit somewhere back there,
whether it's liver or stomach or intestine, whatever it is,
that deer usually needs eight to twelve hours to be safe.

(49:22):
And the problem is that if you let that deer,
if you leave that deer a long, what they're probably
gonna do is get to the first good cover, lay down.
They don't feel well, they lay down. If they're not pushed,
they'll stay there and they will die in their bed,
and you'll find them relatively close. If you push in
there too soon, what typically happens is that deer still

(49:43):
has enough energy to get out of their first bed
and then run off and they might cover a lot
of distance. And oftentimes a deer that's hit back a
little bit will not bleed very well, so you're not
gonna have much of a blood trail. YadA, YadA, YadA.
Long story short, I'm going to make sure that I
have a chance of finding that deer and not put
and let them go overnight, even though that's super stressful.

(50:05):
And to make a very long story short, you know, overnight,
stress about it, worry about it, think through all the scenarios,
think through everything as you do. And I'm very fortunate
that the next morning a friend and I were able
to go out there and maybe I don't know, between
seventy one hundred yards away found that buck and the

(50:28):
tall brow buck story is concluded. I scouted this property
one day, and I hunted it one day, and I
was able to kill the deer. It doesn't go that

(50:49):
way very often. It was like a very targeted strike
plan and it actually panned out that way. So I
count myself very fortunate that this time, the careful plan
actually the deer actually word or you know, follow the
script this time, So that doesn't happen all that often.
So I've wanted to try to think through, Okay, what
worked right here? What did I do right? And anytime

(51:09):
you kill a deer there's a certain element of luck,
so that's got to be admitted, Like anytime the deer
do the thing you need them to do, count yourself
lucky and just appreciate that. So that's number one. But
number two, let's talk through like the key things that
led to this actually panning out. A big thing was access.
A big thing was that I constantly am trying to

(51:32):
find new spots to hunt, and this year, after losing
a good spot. Try to make an extra effort to
do so, and picked up two three new spots in
southern Michigan, and that ended up leading to a great
deer down here. That wouldn't have happened if I had
not made the extra effort to just ask around, talk
to more people about this stuff. And I think an
important thing with this particular property is to remember that

(51:55):
you can't judge a book by its cover. Like we
all want the two hundred acre farm with mixed egg
and timber and swamps and topography and the whole nine yards.
That'd be great, but for most of us, that's just
not gonna happen. I mean, almost all the stuff I
hunt in Michigan is less than one hundred acres and

(52:15):
mostly fields, and none of it is ideal. Like almost
none of the properties that I have permission to hunt
would be spots i'd pick as like, oh that's a
slam dunk spot. It's usually well, this little zone looks
like it's Scott Promise, and this property maybe butts up
into something good. And this spot doesn't have a lot
going for but maybe it will slide under the radar.
You got to take what you can get, and you know,

(52:39):
don't judge it before you go out there and see
what's going on. And in this case, mostly just a
huge field, just a little area in the back where
there was grass brush, some scrubby trees. But it made
this really great little transition zone along the edge of
that swamp. And I'm just very glad that, you know too,

(52:59):
things happened. Number One, I looked at the aerial of
this property, I thought, that's not a lot to hunt,
but it butts up into a great piece. And then
number two, when I went out there, just saw what
a tremendous transition that this was. So that was Number one,
taking advantage of a small property, or at least a
small part of a property that some people maybe would say,

(53:21):
I'm not worth hunting, there's like one good tree to hunt,
But I recognized an opportunity there. Number two being creative
with setups. As I mentioned earlier, you know, fifteen years ago,
I think I would have walked past this spot, and
maybe if I identified it as a good area, as
a good ambush location, with this ditch coming out and

(53:42):
the two fingers of brush going into the swamp, maybe
I would have seen, oh hey, this looks like a
great transition. Oh hey, this looks like there might be
bucks bedded off of those points, maybe in the swamp.
And oh hey, this ditch. I wonder maybe that ditch
would funnel deer moving up through along the edge of
the field. Maybe I would have picked out all of
those things that made this look good. I hopefully would
have identified that scrape, that overhanging branch where there'd be

(54:04):
a scrape in the fall. But I think fifteen or
twenty years ago, I might have looked at this and
then looked for trees and not found a good tree
for a tree stand, or not found a tree for
a saddle and then said, well, can't do it. Or
I would have looked for the next closest tree, and
I would have ended up seventy or eighty yards away
in a good tree, but not in the spot. But

(54:27):
what I've learned is that you don't need to have
the perfect tree. You don't need to have a tree
at all. You don't need a perfect blind, you don't
need to have some big, fancy, elaborate spot. If this
is the spot where you have the X, like the
X the spot in the spot, you gotta do whatever
it takes to be there because with a bow we're talking.

(54:51):
Two feet can be the difference, five yards can be
the difference. One little gap in the brush can be
all the difference you need. In so so, just having
the confidence to get creative with where you hunt and
be willing to hunt on the ground, or be willing
to hunt low in a scrubby tree, or be willing
to hunt really high in a bean pole tree, or

(55:12):
be just don't get hung up on the ideal. You know,
you hear all these different people on these podcasts. My
podcasts included who say, well, you want to have a
great you know, a great tree with cover all over,
and you want to be twenty feet up and lots
of branches around you, et cetera. And sure that'd be great,
but sometimes that's not going to be in the right spot.

(55:34):
And I've just seen now time and time again so
many times in the last decade or so, where if
I hadn't gotten creative and been willing to just risk it,
willing to be on the ground and hid in grass
or hide in brush or belly crawl across the field,
I would have never killed deer. I killed the deer
on the ground without a blind in Nebraska a few

(55:56):
years ago, like ten years ago. I did it again
last year in the grass, snuck into a spot where
there's no trees, ambushed them as if I was hunting
from a tree, but instead in a patch of grass,
had a belly crawl on the wide nine last year,
had a belly crawl across the field and sneak up
to a bucket called Junior a few years before that.
It just keeps on reinforcing the notion to me that

(56:22):
you have to learn when to go for it and
when you know. Sometimes it's when you see a buck
do something and you see it with your own eyes
and you think to yourself, well, there's a reason he
did that. That's the spot I needed to be. Well,
you need to do whatever it's going to take to
be able to hide your tail there and hunt that spot.
If it means laying on your belly, if it means

(56:42):
hiding in a ditch, if it means hiding in a
bush or being three feet up in a tree, whatever
you got to do, you got to be there. So
sometimes it's when you see a deer do a thing.
Sometimes you just know based on sign that's the spot.
Sometimes you actually see a deer bedded, and you gotta
go for when you have an opportunity lined up like this.

(57:04):
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Right,
we only have so many chances, we only get so
many hunts, and for too many years, fifteen twenty years ago,
I was so conservative. I was so worried about scaring deer.
I thought, man, if I screw up once, that mature
buck's gonna catch on to me and I'll never never
have another chance. But it's just not true most of

(57:26):
the time, even in heavily pressured areas. You know, I
talked about this a week or two ago with with
Jacob at Exodus. You know, these bucks that get to
four or five years old, they are in an area
for a reason. They made it to that age because
they believe this spot that they live is safe. So
if you take a swing and do one of these

(57:47):
aggressive things to be in the right spot at the
right moment, because everything's telling you to do that. Even
if you mess it up, you're probably gonna have another
chance somewhere maybe, but you would never have had that
chance if you didn't go for it. So there's a
big difference between being a deer watcher and a deer killer,
and if you want to get to the point where

(58:08):
you were actually closing the deal on some of these deer,
you just have to take the big swing. You have
to do the creative sit You have to take the
belly crawl or the hide in the corn or the
hide in the grass, or sneak up on the deer
that you saw betted, even though it's high risk, even
though probably seven times out of ten it's not going
to go well, three times out of ten, maybe it does,

(58:32):
and it's worth it. So many of the deer that
I've killed in recent years have been because I was
willing to say, damn it, I'm going to give it
a try. Probably not going to go well, but it might.
It's definitely not going to go well. If I sit
back here seventy yards away and just watch the whole time.
If you go for it, yeah, maybe you screwed up.

(58:53):
But if you do screw it up, you learn something
because you were actively trying to change the situation. You
were actively trying something new, and then maybe not, maybe
you do actually pull it off and you get to
enjoy that situation. So that's that was a huge takeaway
from this hunt for me being creative with my setup,
being willing to plan ahead and say, hey, there's not
a tree here, how can I make up for that?

(59:13):
How can I make this work? Still thinking about the
standing corn, finding a place I can hide in the corn.
That gave me some excuse me, gave me some lanes.
And then finally when I got in there and the
buck shows up, well, I don't have a shot. And
looking back at old mark, I think I would have
been afraid to move. At one point as a hunter,

(59:35):
I would have thought, Okay, I'm hidden here in the corn.
I need to just wait until he walks my way, hopefully,
and then I'll get a shot. And instead I knew, Hey,
you can get away with movement, even when you're close
to deer if you time it at the right moments.
And so I waited till he was looking the other way,
or he put his head down, or he put his
head up in the scrape, or he sparred with that deer,

(59:57):
or he moved and walked behind bushes. But every time
he gave me a one second window, I was standing up.
I was taking a step to the left. At one
point took like three or four steps with my bull
about to be drawn, like, you know, very aggressive right
in his wheelhouse movements. And yes, I was lucky that
there was some wind and that had been rained earlier
in the day so I could do that without him

(01:00:19):
hearing me. But if I hadn't done that, I don't
think I ever would have been able to get the
shot that I did. So I think that goes back
to knowing that, you know, when you have these windows,
when things are lined up, you do have to get aggressive,
be creative, you know, make your own stars. Like, don't
just wait for the stars to align. Make them align.

(01:00:40):
That's a big thing. That's a really key thing. Make
the stars align for you. Don't wait for some happenstance,
make it happen. Finally, I think an important thing here
on this front was that it's October thirteenth. There's a
lot of people say you shouldn't be kill deer for

(01:01:01):
mature deer in mid October. It's the October lull. A
lot of folks that say, don't go out there and
mess spots up when there's no chance of good things happening.
But the truth of the matter is, and we've talked
about this a lot too but truth of the matter
is that buck activity, deer activity ramps up throughout the
month of October towards the rut. They just shift right,

(01:01:21):
So what they're doing in September and early October changes
as hunting pressure ramps up. Deer just to hunting pressure,
Deer just to changing food sources, right, You've got crops
coming out, they just to cover changing, you've got leaves
falling down. They are making all these changes. There's changes
in their habitat, there's changes to pressure, there's changes in
their physiology as they're getting ready to rut. So all

(01:01:43):
of that just means that deer are changing, So hunters
need to change with them. And if you can do that,
you can get on deer. I think if you plan
your hunts to account for that, or if you've got
a deer dialed in, or if you have an unpressured spot,
you can absolutely till still have success, especially when you

(01:02:05):
have these right conditions lined up. And so a big
thing for me over recent years has been if I
see that front come through, that gives a deer a
little bit extra incentive to get on his feet earlier,
I'm going to take a swing. Whether it's October eighth
or October thirteenth, or October nineteenth or twenty second, that
window can still be really good. So in this case,
our front came through like the thirteenth through the fifteenth,

(01:02:28):
and I when I saw the forecast, I said, all right,
that's going to be one of these swings. Now. I'll
also say that it's great to have a lot of
different options so that you don't only have one farm
or one spot you're hunting over and over. Right, So I,
because I had picked up new access, because I had
additional properties that I've slowly accumulated over the years, I

(01:02:48):
could hunt early October and then wait and hunt a
different spot mid October, and then I can come back
and hunt a different spot a little bit later October.
And I'm not burning out any one of those spots.
So it's not like the October law is going to
screw things up for me come the rut, because i
haven't been hammering one spot the whole month of October.
I've been spreading it out. Take a strike there, take

(01:03:10):
a strike there, Take a strike there. When the rut arrives,
no one of them is over pressured, no one of
them is ruined. But I've still been able to hunt,
and I've still been able to have opportunities all throughout
the month. So that's an important thing to remember if
you're listening to this on October seventeenth, you know, don't
be afraid to get after it. Take advantage if you

(01:03:31):
have a chance. But then also don't blindly hunt over
and over and over. If you have just one spot
to do it, Go hunt some public land, Go hunt
that new permission that you got that maybe doesn't look
that good, but who knows. And I think if you
can do those things, you've got a better chance of
just enjoying your hunting season, because that's so important to

(01:03:53):
be careful to avoid. We talk a lot, you listen
to a lot of really good hunters who oftentimes talk
about needing to time your hunts, wait for the right
moment to strike, don't overhunt, don't hammer these spots too much.
You know you can kill them from the couch. Some
people say, right, because if you're educating deer, you're not

(01:04:13):
gonna be able to kill them. And all of this
is true to a degree, and a lot of what
I've talked about with this deer, this particular hunt, would
you know point to me waiting and waiting and waiting.
This is the first time out hunted this property. But
make sure you still enjoy your season, have other places,
get out there, enjoy yourself. So if you have a

(01:04:36):
weekend in October, get out there. If you've got your
vacation in November, but then a warm front rolls through
and the conditions don't look good, don't worry about it.
Hunt have fun. Maybe it's not perfect, but you never know.
These are wild animals, these are wild places. The whole
reason this is so exciting is that it's unsure. We

(01:04:58):
do not know what's going to hap happen. There are
no guarantees, and that uncertainty and the mystery that comes
along with every single time we head into the woods.
That is a beautiful thing. That's what keeps me coming
back time and time again. And I'm betting that's the
case with you too. So that is my hunt. That's

(01:05:20):
how I killed this buck here in mid October in
southern Michigan. I'm very thankful for it. It was a
lot of fun. It was a very intense hunt. It
was a crazy thirty minutes. I actually had that camera
send pictures today all almost that entire encounter. So that

(01:05:40):
buck showed up, the time between when he first showed
up and when I got a shot at him was
about thirty minutes. And I can tell you that not
because I remember it happening in real time, but because
the pictures. I've got the first picture there, and I've
got pictures of him fighting with this other buck, and
then I have pictures of him running away, which is
pretty cool to see. So so yeah, just a really

(01:06:01):
special one that is different but incredibly memorable all the same.
And once again learning new lessons, having something's hammered home again,
and just thankful worked out. So that is it for
me here today. I'm hoping that you will take this
and maybe this will inspire you a little bit. Maybe

(01:06:23):
this will give you some new ideas. Maybe this will
give you that extra kicking the butt to get out
in the woods even if conditions aren't quite right or
whatever it might be. If you're listening in mid October
or late October, there are really good things available to
you right now. I should point out scrapes are going
to be ramping up over the coming week to ten days,

(01:06:45):
So if you are listening October seventeenth through like the
thirty first, and if you've got scrapes back in cover
that you know deer have historically hit, that is absolutely
a place where there will be bucks in the coming days.
This buck came to a scrape, and that was one
of the not the only reason I typically don't hunt
spots just because of a scrape. But if you can

(01:07:06):
have a scrape with a terrain or cover feature, with
the food source to bed type pattern or whatever it is,
you know, having that extra sweetener can be a key thing,
especially this time of year, almost well not almost more
than any other time of the year. This next seven
to ten days is your best time for deer to

(01:07:26):
be on those scrapes, so watch out for that. You know. Again,
as we get into the last week of October, this
is a great window because you have bucks that they're
testosterone is just about maxed out, but most dos aren't
in heat yet, So you've got bucks that are ready
to go, but can't find any ladies that are. So
they're amped up, they're frustrated. They're moving more in daylight

(01:07:49):
right now, but they're still sticking to their home range.
So if you have been studying a specific deer, if
you've got a pattern on a couple deer, this might
be your best window coming up because they'll still be
in your area, not running crazy yet, they're not randomly
cruising the landscape or chasing does across the landscape. They're
still going to be to a degree following those patterns

(01:08:09):
you've been learning about this past month or six weeks,
but you've got a good chance of it happening in daylight.
So I put a high priority on that last week
of October, and then once November hits, then we're rolling
into the rut. Assuming you don't live in the South
where there's some of these different rut windows, but if
you're in the northern half of the country, once November

(01:08:29):
first hits, for me at least, I'm thinking betting areas
and funnels and pinch points, anything that concentrates deer travel.
There's gonna be a lot of bucks moving on their
feet going from dough era dough betting ereic to dough
betting era, to dove food source to dough food source,
trying to find a dough ready to breed. You want
to be anywhere that's downwind of one of those dough

(01:08:50):
hot spots where movements funneled where movement is pinched down
to locations. Find those kinds of spots. Put in the time,
rind it out, yes, but also enjoy yourself. Do what
you need to do to make sure this is fun.
This should not feel like a grind, a job, misery entirely.

(01:09:12):
Like you know, some of this stuff, it takes hard work,
no doubt about it. But if you are not enjoying
yourself along the way, you're getting it wrong. You're missing out.
There's got to be a balance, There's got to be
a sweet spot there between really giving it you're all,
but then also making sure that you know you're enjoying

(01:09:33):
this incredible experience for one's worth. So you probably heard
me talk all about this. I won't belabor it anymore.
I'll leave you with that. I'm wishing you guys all
the absolute best from here on out. We're going to
have some really great interviews coming up giving you some
very you know, clear and actionable tips and tactics to
make sure that the next four weeks of your hunting

(01:09:54):
season are as jam packed and successful as they possibly can.
I appreciate you tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this
story and until next time, good luck out there, and
stay wired to hunt h m m m