December 17, 2024 • 18 mins
On this week's show, Tony explains how he tricks himself into spending more time where whitetails live so that he can learn about deer movement in a way that transcends specific hunting spots.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wired un Foundation's podcast, which
is brought to you by first Light. I'm her host,
Tony Peterson, and this episode is all about going where
you really don't care about deer so that you can
learn all about deer. This is a weird one and
(00:41):
you might think it's I don't know, maybe not the
best advice for how to learn deer, but I think
it's pretty good. So what am I going to talk about, Well,
going into the woods and not looking for deer specifically.
The more I go look for other things and other
critters and find other reasons to be out there, the
more I pick up on deer hunting movements and how
they use the lance gape. That's the basis for this
(01:01):
whole show, so buckle up. There are a lot of
sayings about being books smart versus being street smart, and
I love all of them mostly, and I'm not proud
of this, but I'm gonna say it anyway, because my
wife is very BookSmart. I, on the other hand, am not.
(01:23):
I doubt you'd say I'm very street smart either, But
that's beside the point. The truth is there is a
lot you can learn from books and from consuming content.
I hope that's true anyway, because otherwise my professional career
has mostly been a sham, which, come to think of it,
might be true. The reality, though, is that there are
academic pursuits and then there's experience. Academics are great for
(01:48):
giving you facts and the processes upon which you might
learn some facts. It teaches your mind to work out problems,
or at least parts of problems, and that's important. Still
largely be about this, Maybe it still is. I don't know.
I haven't been there in a while. It wasn't necessarily
to directly prepare you for a career in a certain field,
(02:09):
although that was and is a component of higher education.
But the heart of it was to teach us, like
how to think, how to think better. Maybe, and it
works too, but using your brain can only take you
so far. You also have to engage with tasks and
problems and sort them out in real time. And in person.
Let me give you an example from a recent conversation
(02:30):
I had with a woman who was trying real hard
to kill a buck on public land. Her dilemma is this,
she found a concentration of sign on a chunk of
ground in Kansas, where she lives. The concentration is accessible
from two different parking areas. Both require a walk of
about a mile, and one takes her low through a
thick river bottom and the other takes her high up
(02:52):
on a ridgetop. She maintains that both the ridgetop and
the creek bottom have deer in them, so getting in
is almost impossible without spooking deer. That to her is
a major problem, a problem she was looking for an
academic solution to which doesn't exist. You can't really outthink
a problem like that, You just can't. You kind of
(03:15):
just got to go into the creek bottom hunt see
what happens. Or you have to go on the ridgetop hunt,
see what happens. Then you have to figure out what
went wrong and experiment to see if you can solve
for the problems or not. Does that sound a little
too simple, Because hunting is simple, my friends, But simple
(03:35):
doesn't always mean easy. In fact, it often doesn't, and
that kind of sucks. Look at this another way. Do
you want to look better naked? Of course you do.
And while I understand that was an extremely creepy way
to frame this point up, I used it. And that's
that if you want to look better naked, you need
(03:55):
to exercise more and eat fewer bowls of ice cream,
size a lot and eat kind of shitty, or you
can exercise a little and eat really clean, or some
version of both. But the truth is that putting on
muscle and losing weight tends to solve the problem of
looking good in your birthday suit. But that's not easy.
In fact, it's real hard. You won't suddenly find yourself
(04:17):
looking fine by reading a book. You'll get there by
exercising and eating a certain way and figuring out how
to keep yourself moving in the right direction even when
you don't want to. You want to kill a Kansas
book on public land, it's simple, go find some sign
and hunt it. But of course you have the question
of access, and the question of hunting pressure, and the
(04:38):
question of your own time and how much of it
you have, and the question of what direction the wind's
going to be blowing on the morning you can hunt,
and the temperature, and on and on and on and on. Academically,
this stuff's pretty easy. But you won't know what those
ridgetop deer are really going to do until you hunt
it and figure it out in person. Do you know
(04:59):
where the real problem in all this lies? We love
leaning towards the academic side of things. It's easier to
watch a YouTube video on scouting than it is to
go scout. It's easier to read an article on how
to kill a mature buck in the cattails than it
is to go find one living in the cattails and
then hunt him until you kill him. It's easier to
(05:20):
write off a concentration of deer on a chunk of
public land in Kansas because you just know you'll bust
them going in than it is to go in on
one of your precious hunting days for a trial and
error morning or evening sit. But what's better for you
as a hunter? We all know the answer, just like
(05:41):
we know what too much ice cream and couch time
does to us physically. Look, it sucks, but it's true.
So how do you engage in this simple concept that
it's hard? To implement so that you can be a
stone cold deer killer, whether you're trying to figure things
out in Kansas or South Carolina or Pennsylvania or wherever
we find the discipline to do it. Or you trick yourself.
(06:03):
I mean that I trick myself all the time. I
don't want to go too deep into this because I'm
a squirrel writer and not a psychologist. But one of
the things people ask me fairly often is how I
run so much without wanting to kill myself. The jokes
on them, though, because running is actually what keeps the
bad thoughts at bay, and it's amazing for that task.
(06:25):
But it's also not about wanting to run. I don't
want to do that. I dread it every time, just
as I like it when I'm done every time. But
I have to get myself to do it. So I
set a goal and I tell anyone and everyone I
can about that goal. That holds me a little accountable
(06:45):
with my circle of friends and family who really don't
want to hear about my running, just like my podcast audience.
But the main reason is that a yearly mile goal
is weirdly important to me. I hate not hitting it,
so it keeps me honest with myself, even though I'm
just playing a trick on myself. The minute that one
(07:05):
goal ends for the year, which this year is running
eight hundred miles, I'll set a new goal for the
new year. It gives me great pleasure to meet that goal,
even though I know the task of running isn't going
to end for me. It's not even really going to
change when I meet it. I just have to have
it otherwise I won't run as much as I should.
(07:26):
When it comes to deer hunting, we all know we
should scout more. We really should, but it's also very
easy to not scout as much as we should because
to most of us, scouting isn't as fun as hunting
or about ten thousand other things we could do. So
we fill in the blanks with trail cameras and we
consume content, or we hang out with our hunting buddies
(07:47):
just to talk about deer hunting whatever. But we need
experience out there, and that is a never ending journey.
Just like getting in shape. You can have the goal
of getting to your high school weight or benching two
hundred and fifty pounds or running a half marathon. That's
all great, but the minute you hit your goal, you
better figure out another one, or it's more likely that
(08:08):
you're just borrowing that accomplishment. Yeah you did it, that's great,
but if you go back to not doing anything, it's
kind of a hollow victory. With hunting, the way that
(08:28):
I trick myself into learning about deer is to find
as many reasons as possible to be out there. Some
of them are easy. You all know that I absolutely
love pheasant hunting, and as I record this podcast, I
have a young lab sleeping next to me who has
no skin left on her lips, or most of her nose,
or parts of her cheeks and around her eyes. The
(08:49):
cattails have literally worn her face off and she loves it,
and so do I. I don't need an excuse to pheasant hunt,
and many many times each season I'll drive seven hours
round trip in a single day to hunt for a
couple of roosters. I love it for many reasons, but
one side benefit to it is I learn a ton
about deer when I follow a black lab around where
(09:11):
the roosters like to hang out. Recently, I filmed a
pheasant show on a few different parcels of public land
in western Minnesota, and on one of those days it
was very windy, like twenty to thirty mile per hour
winds all day long. That meant that the roosters were
cagy as hell, and if they got up into that
wind and I wasn't ready, they were also pretty safe
(09:33):
because those are birds I will shoot behind, mostly, particularly
if they make the good decision to swing to my right.
But that wind did something else. When you're filming a
show like that, you're always looking for moments to talk
to the camera, to drop some sweet knowledge or just
explain what's going on. On a day when the wind
is just ripping across the landscape, you don't want to
(09:54):
just stop anywhere to talk because the sound of it
will go right into your microphone and ruin your talking points.
So as we followed Sadie through the cattails, I found
myself naturally stopping when we would hit a spot that
was out of the wind. The thing about this is
in that country, which is super flat and doesn't have
very many trees, there are a lot of spots that
(10:15):
are not out of the wind. It's rare to suddenly
realize you're standing in a little zone that's very calm.
I don't know how many times I stopped in a
spot like that and started to talk to the camera,
only to notice that Sadie was real birdie and that
I better get ready, or that we jump deer bedded
right next to us. It happened multiple times in one day. Now,
(10:38):
of course they want to lay up in a spot
that's calm, but why Well, for starters, it's more comfortable,
it's warmer, that's a no brainer. But what else, Well,
if you betted down just about anywhere in a dry
cattail slew that's getting pounded by the wind, the noise
factor is going to be very high. Sure you have
(10:58):
the wind to use to your advantage, but you lose
the hearing advantage. Now, why would you do that when
you could hole up somewhere that would keep you warm
and you could not only smell approaching danger, but have
a better chance to hear it. If you were a
prey animal like say, I don't know, a deer or
a pheasant, hearing that danger and keeping track of it
and the thick stuff is important, could literally save your life.
(11:21):
With deer, that allows them the chance to know exactly
where the danger is and whether they can sit tight
and let it pass, or they need to get the
hell out of dodge. That is a huge, huge advantage
for them. Now what good does that do anyone as
a hunter? Well, if I lived around those cat tail
sleus and was planning on deer hunting the next day,
but the forecast called for ripping winds, I could do
(11:44):
one of two things. I could not hunt because it's
too windy and I think my chances are low. Or
I could beat them to a spot I know they
should be out of the wind, or at least where
they should be going. Maybe this example is a bridge
too far for your per It's all hunting specifics, that's
fair enough. I've talked about this before, but I think
(12:04):
it's worth mentioning there are other reasons to be out there.
Rabbit hunting puts me on more deer betting and staging
areas than any kind of hunting I do, even sometimes
deer hunting. The good thing about this is that rabbit
hunting is fun to begin with. But where rabbits take
you is to the spots deer like to go when
they don't want to be found. And even more than
that is rabbit hunting takes you to the spots where
(12:26):
bucks tend to go where they don't want to be found.
A day spent pushing fence lines and homesteads and brush
piles and whatever else is a day that is going
to be fun but also teach you a lot about deer.
Squirrel hunting does that too, but it won't take you
to the betting areas and often the staging areas quite
like rabbit hunting will do. But it'll take you to
(12:47):
the ridges where deer feet in october under oak trees.
It'll take you into the valley you think you can't
hunt because the wind will be swirling too much, and
it'll show you all the rubs and deer sign in
that unhuntable spot and maybe chuck. Maybe while you're toting
a seventeen or a twenty two around there, you'll realize
you're standing right in a spot where the wind is
actually predictable and favorable, even in that valley you thought
(13:10):
you couldn't hunt. I know a lot of you are
listening to this and going, yeah, I'm not going to
go brush busting for bunnies on my deer leaves. I'm
not going to push the deer out fair enough, go
bunny hunting somewhere else then, or go in February if
the season's still open. You don't want to shoot some
squirrels for the crockpot right now in the place you
(13:30):
deer hunt, then go somewhere else. Find a spot to
go where you don't care about the deer. You'll see
how they use the landscape there too. If it's public,
you might just find something in a spot you never
intended a deer hunt, because you're out there looking around
for something that is not a deer. People often ask
me how I find so many random public land places
(13:53):
to hunt, and the answer is often that I just
like to do lots of stuff. I like to hunt
a lot of different critters. I also just like to
walk through the woods, and often I like to walk
through the woods and just look for deer. I grew
up doing this, and I had a conversation with Zach
Ferrenbau the hunting public about it not too long ago.
I honestly don't remember if we had this conversation on
a podcast or if it was just a personal phone call,
(14:15):
but it doesn't matter. We got on this topic of
finding deer and he said that he goes into the
woods just to look for them all year long. While
I was growing up, that was one of my favorite
things to do, and I still find myself going into
some of the parks around my house and doing the
exact same thing, even though I'll never hunt those deer.
It's just fun to slip up to the edge of
(14:36):
a CRP field half an hour before dark and try
to spot one, just as it's fun to get off
of the normal trails and see where the deer travel
and where the bucks leave their sign. This kind of
thing fills your database with useful info, you information that
stretches way beyond only the places we hunt, because, as
I've said before, you might think you have the whole
(14:59):
white world where you want it with your hunting ground,
but ownership changes, permission can slip away. That secret honey
hole of public land you've found might suddenly show up
on everyone's radar. Counting on a property to always be
there is a bad idea, even if you own it,
(15:19):
because the neighbors can turn over, or CWD can pop up,
and the sharpshooters can suddenly knock down the herd or whatever.
Things change. Going out and wandering around, whether you're looking
for a rooster or a bunny, or just a little
quiet time out of the house because you have a
wife and two thirteen year old daughters. It's good for
the soul and it's good for your hunting skills. You
(15:42):
get to find sign and analyze it in a low
pressure situation, or really a no pressure situation. You get
to jump deer and figure out why they were there.
Maybe you get to watch a few filter through the
woods or hop over a fence, or maybe you find
a couple of dead heads in the overgrown creek bottom
and four years down the road you shoot one in
the guts and you're having an al of a time
(16:04):
finding him. So you pull up on X and you
take a look around and you think, hmm, maybe he
made it all the way to the river and I
should go walk it, and you find him. The focus
on hunting content is often about how you can develop
your skills on a very specific piece of ground, But
developing your skills so they transcend specific spots is so
(16:25):
much better. Just as it's better to be book smart
and street smart. To have the academic side of the
hunting thing locked down is great, but you really want
to take it somewhere you need that experience. It's easy
to do on paper, but hard to do in real life.
So figure out a reason. Trick yourself into a bunny
hunt with the buddies. Take a twenty two out for
(16:46):
a long walk on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Try to
sneak up on a few squirrels. Go to the park
an hour before dark and see if you can lay
eyes on any deer. Do the stuff that gets you
out there and you'll gain valuable deer hunting experience. Do that,
you'll get better and come back next week because I'm
going to talk about Christmas and how it relates to
(17:06):
hunting gear. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson.
This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which
is brought to you by First Light. I want to
thank you so much for all your support. We're just
about to wrap this year up and truly, honestly, without question,
we wouldn't be able to do any of this without you,
So thank you for that. Your support means the world
(17:28):
to us. If you need some more hunting content, you know,
and maybe you want to read a few articles, find
a recipe to cook something up for Christmas dinner. Or
New Year's Maybe a appetizer or something on New Year's Eve.
I don't know. Maybe you just need to listen to
some new podcasts, or you want to watch a few
hunting shows like the episode we just dropped where I
hunted Bear and Dear with my daughter. You can go
(17:50):
to them meat eater dot com and check it out.
So much good content there. Go there, and again, thank
you for everything.
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.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wired un Foundation's podcast, which
is brought to you by first Light. I'm her host,
Tony Peterson, and this episode is all about going where
you really don't care about deer so that you can
learn all about deer. This is a weird one and
(00:41):
you might think it's I don't know, maybe not the
best advice for how to learn deer, but I think
it's pretty good. So what am I going to talk about, Well,
going into the woods and not looking for deer specifically.
The more I go look for other things and other
critters and find other reasons to be out there, the
more I pick up on deer hunting movements and how
they use the lance gape. That's the basis for this
(01:01):
whole show, so buckle up. There are a lot of
sayings about being books smart versus being street smart, and
I love all of them mostly, and I'm not proud
of this, but I'm gonna say it anyway, because my
wife is very BookSmart. I, on the other hand, am not.
(01:23):
I doubt you'd say I'm very street smart either, But
that's beside the point. The truth is there is a
lot you can learn from books and from consuming content.
I hope that's true anyway, because otherwise my professional career
has mostly been a sham, which, come to think of it,
might be true. The reality, though, is that there are
academic pursuits and then there's experience. Academics are great for
(01:48):
giving you facts and the processes upon which you might
learn some facts. It teaches your mind to work out problems,
or at least parts of problems, and that's important. Still
largely be about this, Maybe it still is. I don't know.
I haven't been there in a while. It wasn't necessarily
to directly prepare you for a career in a certain field,
(02:09):
although that was and is a component of higher education.
But the heart of it was to teach us, like
how to think, how to think better. Maybe, and it
works too, but using your brain can only take you
so far. You also have to engage with tasks and
problems and sort them out in real time. And in person.
Let me give you an example from a recent conversation
(02:30):
I had with a woman who was trying real hard
to kill a buck on public land. Her dilemma is this,
she found a concentration of sign on a chunk of
ground in Kansas, where she lives. The concentration is accessible
from two different parking areas. Both require a walk of
about a mile, and one takes her low through a
thick river bottom and the other takes her high up
(02:52):
on a ridgetop. She maintains that both the ridgetop and
the creek bottom have deer in them, so getting in
is almost impossible without spooking deer. That to her is
a major problem, a problem she was looking for an
academic solution to which doesn't exist. You can't really outthink
a problem like that, You just can't. You kind of
(03:15):
just got to go into the creek bottom hunt see
what happens. Or you have to go on the ridgetop hunt,
see what happens. Then you have to figure out what
went wrong and experiment to see if you can solve
for the problems or not. Does that sound a little
too simple, Because hunting is simple, my friends, But simple
(03:35):
doesn't always mean easy. In fact, it often doesn't, and
that kind of sucks. Look at this another way. Do
you want to look better naked? Of course you do.
And while I understand that was an extremely creepy way
to frame this point up, I used it. And that's
that if you want to look better naked, you need
(03:55):
to exercise more and eat fewer bowls of ice cream,
size a lot and eat kind of shitty, or you
can exercise a little and eat really clean, or some
version of both. But the truth is that putting on
muscle and losing weight tends to solve the problem of
looking good in your birthday suit. But that's not easy.
In fact, it's real hard. You won't suddenly find yourself
(04:17):
looking fine by reading a book. You'll get there by
exercising and eating a certain way and figuring out how
to keep yourself moving in the right direction even when
you don't want to. You want to kill a Kansas
book on public land, it's simple, go find some sign
and hunt it. But of course you have the question
of access, and the question of hunting pressure, and the
(04:38):
question of your own time and how much of it
you have, and the question of what direction the wind's
going to be blowing on the morning you can hunt,
and the temperature, and on and on and on and on. Academically,
this stuff's pretty easy. But you won't know what those
ridgetop deer are really going to do until you hunt
it and figure it out in person. Do you know
(04:59):
where the real problem in all this lies? We love
leaning towards the academic side of things. It's easier to
watch a YouTube video on scouting than it is to
go scout. It's easier to read an article on how
to kill a mature buck in the cattails than it
is to go find one living in the cattails and
then hunt him until you kill him. It's easier to
(05:20):
write off a concentration of deer on a chunk of
public land in Kansas because you just know you'll bust
them going in than it is to go in on
one of your precious hunting days for a trial and
error morning or evening sit. But what's better for you
as a hunter? We all know the answer, just like
(05:41):
we know what too much ice cream and couch time
does to us physically. Look, it sucks, but it's true.
So how do you engage in this simple concept that
it's hard? To implement so that you can be a
stone cold deer killer, whether you're trying to figure things
out in Kansas or South Carolina or Pennsylvania or wherever
we find the discipline to do it. Or you trick yourself.
(06:03):
I mean that I trick myself all the time. I
don't want to go too deep into this because I'm
a squirrel writer and not a psychologist. But one of
the things people ask me fairly often is how I
run so much without wanting to kill myself. The jokes
on them, though, because running is actually what keeps the
bad thoughts at bay, and it's amazing for that task.
(06:25):
But it's also not about wanting to run. I don't
want to do that. I dread it every time, just
as I like it when I'm done every time. But
I have to get myself to do it. So I
set a goal and I tell anyone and everyone I
can about that goal. That holds me a little accountable
(06:45):
with my circle of friends and family who really don't
want to hear about my running, just like my podcast audience.
But the main reason is that a yearly mile goal
is weirdly important to me. I hate not hitting it,
so it keeps me honest with myself, even though I'm
just playing a trick on myself. The minute that one
(07:05):
goal ends for the year, which this year is running
eight hundred miles, I'll set a new goal for the
new year. It gives me great pleasure to meet that goal,
even though I know the task of running isn't going
to end for me. It's not even really going to
change when I meet it. I just have to have
it otherwise I won't run as much as I should.
(07:26):
When it comes to deer hunting, we all know we
should scout more. We really should, but it's also very
easy to not scout as much as we should because
to most of us, scouting isn't as fun as hunting
or about ten thousand other things we could do. So
we fill in the blanks with trail cameras and we
consume content, or we hang out with our hunting buddies
(07:47):
just to talk about deer hunting whatever. But we need
experience out there, and that is a never ending journey.
Just like getting in shape. You can have the goal
of getting to your high school weight or benching two
hundred and fifty pounds or running a half marathon. That's
all great, but the minute you hit your goal, you
better figure out another one, or it's more likely that
(08:08):
you're just borrowing that accomplishment. Yeah you did it, that's great,
but if you go back to not doing anything, it's
kind of a hollow victory. With hunting, the way that
(08:28):
I trick myself into learning about deer is to find
as many reasons as possible to be out there. Some
of them are easy. You all know that I absolutely
love pheasant hunting, and as I record this podcast, I
have a young lab sleeping next to me who has
no skin left on her lips, or most of her nose,
or parts of her cheeks and around her eyes. The
(08:49):
cattails have literally worn her face off and she loves it,
and so do I. I don't need an excuse to pheasant hunt,
and many many times each season I'll drive seven hours
round trip in a single day to hunt for a
couple of roosters. I love it for many reasons, but
one side benefit to it is I learn a ton
about deer when I follow a black lab around where
(09:11):
the roosters like to hang out. Recently, I filmed a
pheasant show on a few different parcels of public land
in western Minnesota, and on one of those days it
was very windy, like twenty to thirty mile per hour
winds all day long. That meant that the roosters were
cagy as hell, and if they got up into that
wind and I wasn't ready, they were also pretty safe
(09:33):
because those are birds I will shoot behind, mostly, particularly
if they make the good decision to swing to my right.
But that wind did something else. When you're filming a
show like that, you're always looking for moments to talk
to the camera, to drop some sweet knowledge or just
explain what's going on. On a day when the wind
is just ripping across the landscape, you don't want to
(09:54):
just stop anywhere to talk because the sound of it
will go right into your microphone and ruin your talking points.
So as we followed Sadie through the cattails, I found
myself naturally stopping when we would hit a spot that
was out of the wind. The thing about this is
in that country, which is super flat and doesn't have
very many trees, there are a lot of spots that
(10:15):
are not out of the wind. It's rare to suddenly
realize you're standing in a little zone that's very calm.
I don't know how many times I stopped in a
spot like that and started to talk to the camera,
only to notice that Sadie was real birdie and that
I better get ready, or that we jump deer bedded
right next to us. It happened multiple times in one day. Now,
(10:38):
of course they want to lay up in a spot
that's calm, but why Well, for starters, it's more comfortable,
it's warmer, that's a no brainer. But what else, Well,
if you betted down just about anywhere in a dry
cattail slew that's getting pounded by the wind, the noise
factor is going to be very high. Sure you have
(10:58):
the wind to use to your advantage, but you lose
the hearing advantage. Now, why would you do that when
you could hole up somewhere that would keep you warm
and you could not only smell approaching danger, but have
a better chance to hear it. If you were a
prey animal like say, I don't know, a deer or
a pheasant, hearing that danger and keeping track of it
and the thick stuff is important, could literally save your life.
(11:21):
With deer, that allows them the chance to know exactly
where the danger is and whether they can sit tight
and let it pass, or they need to get the
hell out of dodge. That is a huge, huge advantage
for them. Now what good does that do anyone as
a hunter? Well, if I lived around those cat tail
sleus and was planning on deer hunting the next day,
but the forecast called for ripping winds, I could do
(11:44):
one of two things. I could not hunt because it's
too windy and I think my chances are low. Or
I could beat them to a spot I know they
should be out of the wind, or at least where
they should be going. Maybe this example is a bridge
too far for your per It's all hunting specifics, that's
fair enough. I've talked about this before, but I think
(12:04):
it's worth mentioning there are other reasons to be out there.
Rabbit hunting puts me on more deer betting and staging
areas than any kind of hunting I do, even sometimes
deer hunting. The good thing about this is that rabbit
hunting is fun to begin with. But where rabbits take
you is to the spots deer like to go when
they don't want to be found. And even more than
that is rabbit hunting takes you to the spots where
(12:26):
bucks tend to go where they don't want to be found.
A day spent pushing fence lines and homesteads and brush
piles and whatever else is a day that is going
to be fun but also teach you a lot about deer.
Squirrel hunting does that too, but it won't take you
to the betting areas and often the staging areas quite
like rabbit hunting will do. But it'll take you to
(12:47):
the ridges where deer feet in october under oak trees.
It'll take you into the valley you think you can't
hunt because the wind will be swirling too much, and
it'll show you all the rubs and deer sign in
that unhuntable spot and maybe chuck. Maybe while you're toting
a seventeen or a twenty two around there, you'll realize
you're standing right in a spot where the wind is
actually predictable and favorable, even in that valley you thought
(13:10):
you couldn't hunt. I know a lot of you are
listening to this and going, yeah, I'm not going to
go brush busting for bunnies on my deer leaves. I'm
not going to push the deer out fair enough, go
bunny hunting somewhere else then, or go in February if
the season's still open. You don't want to shoot some
squirrels for the crockpot right now in the place you
(13:30):
deer hunt, then go somewhere else. Find a spot to
go where you don't care about the deer. You'll see
how they use the landscape there too. If it's public,
you might just find something in a spot you never
intended a deer hunt, because you're out there looking around
for something that is not a deer. People often ask
me how I find so many random public land places
(13:53):
to hunt, and the answer is often that I just
like to do lots of stuff. I like to hunt
a lot of different critters. I also just like to
walk through the woods, and often I like to walk
through the woods and just look for deer. I grew
up doing this, and I had a conversation with Zach
Ferrenbau the hunting public about it not too long ago.
I honestly don't remember if we had this conversation on
a podcast or if it was just a personal phone call,
(14:15):
but it doesn't matter. We got on this topic of
finding deer and he said that he goes into the
woods just to look for them all year long. While
I was growing up, that was one of my favorite
things to do, and I still find myself going into
some of the parks around my house and doing the
exact same thing, even though I'll never hunt those deer.
It's just fun to slip up to the edge of
(14:36):
a CRP field half an hour before dark and try
to spot one, just as it's fun to get off
of the normal trails and see where the deer travel
and where the bucks leave their sign. This kind of
thing fills your database with useful info, you information that
stretches way beyond only the places we hunt, because, as
I've said before, you might think you have the whole
(14:59):
white world where you want it with your hunting ground,
but ownership changes, permission can slip away. That secret honey
hole of public land you've found might suddenly show up
on everyone's radar. Counting on a property to always be
there is a bad idea, even if you own it,
(15:19):
because the neighbors can turn over, or CWD can pop up,
and the sharpshooters can suddenly knock down the herd or whatever.
Things change. Going out and wandering around, whether you're looking
for a rooster or a bunny, or just a little
quiet time out of the house because you have a
wife and two thirteen year old daughters. It's good for
the soul and it's good for your hunting skills. You
(15:42):
get to find sign and analyze it in a low
pressure situation, or really a no pressure situation. You get
to jump deer and figure out why they were there.
Maybe you get to watch a few filter through the
woods or hop over a fence, or maybe you find
a couple of dead heads in the overgrown creek bottom
and four years down the road you shoot one in
the guts and you're having an al of a time
(16:04):
finding him. So you pull up on X and you
take a look around and you think, hmm, maybe he
made it all the way to the river and I
should go walk it, and you find him. The focus
on hunting content is often about how you can develop
your skills on a very specific piece of ground, But
developing your skills so they transcend specific spots is so
(16:25):
much better. Just as it's better to be book smart
and street smart. To have the academic side of the
hunting thing locked down is great, but you really want
to take it somewhere you need that experience. It's easy
to do on paper, but hard to do in real life.
So figure out a reason. Trick yourself into a bunny
hunt with the buddies. Take a twenty two out for
(16:46):
a long walk on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Try to
sneak up on a few squirrels. Go to the park
an hour before dark and see if you can lay
eyes on any deer. Do the stuff that gets you
out there and you'll gain valuable deer hunting experience. Do that,
you'll get better and come back next week because I'm
going to talk about Christmas and how it relates to
(17:06):
hunting gear. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson.
This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which
is brought to you by First Light. I want to
thank you so much for all your support. We're just
about to wrap this year up and truly, honestly, without question,
we wouldn't be able to do any of this without you,
So thank you for that. Your support means the world
(17:28):
to us. If you need some more hunting content, you know,
and maybe you want to read a few articles, find
a recipe to cook something up for Christmas dinner. Or
New Year's Maybe a appetizer or something on New Year's Eve.
I don't know. Maybe you just need to listen to
some new podcasts, or you want to watch a few
hunting shows like the episode we just dropped where I
hunted Bear and Dear with my daughter. You can go
(17:50):
to them meat eater dot com and check it out.
So much good content there. Go there, and again, thank
you for everything.
Host
Mark Kenyon
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