May 20, 2025 • 17 mins
This week, Tony tackles an increasingly common scenario - hunting small properties in areas with lots of hunting pressure.
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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):
Everyone, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which
is brought to you by First Light. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and today's show is all about small properties
in areas of high hunting pressure. This episode comes from
the deepest, darkest corners of my hunting heart. I don't know,
maybe that's too dramatic for a deer hunting podcast, but
(00:42):
if I had to drop a scenario that sucks to
hunt in, it would be small properties with lots of pressure. Now,
that might not be more difficult overall than a big
wood scenario with a really low deer density, but it
can definitely be real tough. There are ways to make
it happen, though, which is what I'm going to talk
about right now. Where I currently live in the suburbs
(01:05):
of the Twin Cities feels like there are just way
way too many people for a guy like me, because
well there are and that really sucks. The density of
people happens for different reasons, and I'd be willing to
bet that most of you find folks who listen to
this podcast would happily lean toward living with fewer people
around than more. Of course, that also involves what you
(01:29):
just know and are comfortable with. My wife loves it
here because it's all she has ever known, and even
if she hated it, she's pot committed now and would
never admit that there are just too many freaking people
and just not enough of nature. And there is also
the reality of getting older and realizing that the more
people you have to interact with, the more you just
realize that a lot of them are like energy vampires.
(01:52):
You know, not all of them, but you know what
I mean. I learned a valuable lesson on this from
Zach Over at the Hunting Public one time when I
asked him about checking dms on social media. His response
was something to the gist of, there just isn't enough
time in the world for that shit. And it's also
generally a good way to get into a conversation with
people who want something from you or want to tell
(02:14):
you how horrible you are, so you end up just
tightening the circle a bit, and you leave the whole
thing on red, which is an impulse I can relate
to on a level I can scarcely describe. And even
though I'm bitching about where I live, and you know
the relatively large yards we have in this area and
the available parks and rivers and streams and lakes to fish,
(02:35):
there are people who have it a hell of a
lot worse. You've probably seen a few of those super
huge apartment complexes scattered throughout the world that look like
absolute dystopian nightmares. There's one in Johannesburg, South Africa that
is a fifty five story building that holds about three
thousand residents. Think about that for a second. The entire
(02:56):
town I grew up in had a population of about
twenty two hundred people. There's a building in Hong Kong
which currently houses about four thousand people, and one in
Brazil that contains eleven hundred and sixty apartments and about
five thousand people, which means that the building is so
big and so full of residents that it has its
(03:16):
own postal code. Now the winner of where I really
wouldn't want to live, Although as a country it's more
appealing than a few of the others. Is located in Geneva, Switzerland.
Technically it consists of two buildings, but for the sake
of a deer hunting podcast, it doesn't matter at all.
We can just let that slide. This complex houses over
six thousand people in twenty seven hundred and eighty units,
(03:39):
with a population density that mirrors Manhattan, New York. It's
hard to wrap our minds around living in a building
with people on all sides of us, and true rush
hour traffic in the hallways and stairwells and elevators, just
people walking. That's a rock hard Nope, they're my friends.
But it's also just the reality of some places with
(04:01):
lots of people, and it's easy to judge when you're
a long ways off from having to consider such living conditions.
Not having enough space to be left alone is a
real issue for a lot of people, and in fact,
when we really want to punish bad people in society,
we put them in small cells with strangers and make
them stay inside for most of every day. Fundamentally, we
(04:22):
just need space. We want it, but we can't always
get what we want, can we. Mike Jagger, I think
about that a lot as I hunt some really small
properties here in the suburbs and across the river in Wisconsin,
a lot of us hunt small properties and it's well huh,
less fun than hunting big properties. This only gets more
true with a couple other qualifiers, like whether you share
(04:44):
the property with other hunters, or where you hunt just
doesn't have a great deer density. Now, if you have
to deal with both on a small property, I'd say
maybe it's time, I don't know, have to go pick
up that new set of golf clubs. But I should
also say that when you get to load deer density areas,
you often get to areas that not tons of people
want to live, So you usually have a situation where
(05:05):
you at least have plenty of ground to work with.
The place is that lots of people want to live,
will often have small parcels worth hunting because of decent
deer densities, But you also have a higher hunter density.
Now there is something to differentiate here, because it matters.
I mentioned on a recent episode of the show that
the turkeys we have been hunting here started out on
(05:27):
a feeder pattern in the backyards of a new development.
It was maddening, and I've seen that movie before. I'm
guessing that people feeding them they're mostly hunters, but probably
some are just nature lovers who like to watch birds,
deer and whatever. Who knows. But the pattern that became
evident pretty quickly was that on a Tuesday morning, when
everyone was at work, those birds could hang out under
(05:48):
those feeders for hours and they didn't have to move,
and they mostly didn't. But when people started to come
home from work, the birds would bump off the development
back into the property. I could hunt. On weekends when
people were home all day, the hunting was usually really,
really good. For the same reason. Even those half dumb
yardbirds up here don't really like hanging out at a
(06:10):
bird feeder when someone is mowing the yard, so they
are more callable because they're just much more at play.
The lesson here is one that I think that matters
a lot, which is there is a way to figure
out all of this stuff. I could declare those birds unkillable,
because for a lot of days they seem to be
that way, but they aren't, And finding those windows in
(06:32):
which they are is a big difference maker. It's no
different than if you put in minimal work on public land,
white tails, and only hunt weekend afternoons. You might be
pretty quick to look for an excuse as to why
it's so hard, but the truth is that you're probably
just not doing what it takes. The deer are there
and they can be shot by you, but not the
way you're hunting. I've talked about this a lot, and
(06:55):
when it comes to small properties, this all seems amplified
and more frustrating because of the limited options. Even sharing
a property with one other person can feel like a
bit too much, which I'm acutely aware of because every
small property I've ever hunted that I didn't own has
had someone else on it. If that person isn't as
careful as you are, then your level set to their skills,
(07:19):
you're at a disadvantage. It's that simple, because the deer
will react to their pressure the most. Not all hope
is lost, though, my little ombres, because you can do
some things to help out your cause. For starters, look
for your advantages. A small property is easy to scout,
but I say that, and I should also say this.
(07:39):
Small properties can feel like you know them very well,
and you can still miss some things. The spot that
I killed my Minnesota buck last year is twenty five acres,
with about ten or twelve being actually realistically huntable. The
area he was in when I shot him as a
small woodlot that has a pond in it, just a
hub for activity on that property, and what I learned
last year is that they approach it from a litany
(08:01):
of different directions, but usually pass through one specific spot.
The reasons for that vary. There seems to be a
dough betting group on the neighbors, which is obviously a
big draw for bucks, but also makes it pretty easy
to predict dough movement. It's a huge win. There are
(08:28):
also three other ways they approach, all from different properties,
which makes sense because they certainly aren't going to spend
their whole lives on a twenty five acre piece. The
way they approach from other properties and how to set
up for them makes a small piece seem a little
bigger because if you play it right, you can work
different wind directions to keon basically the same area. That's
(08:50):
something that matters a lot when you're relegated to smaller
parcels maximizing your opportunities. This also allows you to distribute
your personal hunting pressure a little more evenly, even though
that might not seem like the case if you're still
hunting only a five acre area on a small property,
but it's way way better than either just hunting the
(09:10):
same stand over and over, or only hunting one stand
when the conditions seem to be perfect for it. Now,
if you took a quick two minute walk from that
spot to the east side of that property, you'd find
a strip of pines mixed with a few oak trees.
It's basically a pass through spot that connects one of
the larger woodlots in the area, one that I can't hunt,
by the way to another decent sized woodlot, also one
(09:32):
that I can't hunt. Those pass through spots are the
ticket when you're on small properties, especially if you share
a property with other hunters. The pressure on the good
spots will be high, but a pass through spot seems
to be a lower odd situation overall, but will stay
somewhat consistent even when you overhunt the other areas on
the same parcel or your neighbors overhunt all the bordering properties.
(09:58):
This is one of the hardest things to over come
when you're in this situation, because a lot of times
where you can find a I don't know, fifteen to
forty acre piece to hunt, there will be a lot
of other small fifteen to forty acre pieces around, and
if there are, and there are enough people around, plenty
of them will get hunted. When I winter scout small parcels,
(10:20):
which I do a lot just to see what I'm missing,
I'm almost always amazed at how many blinds and stands
I can see when I walk the perimeters. All of
that is good data because it can answer some of
the questions you might have, like why when the wind
seemed perfect for one of your setups, you just couldn't
buy a deer sighting there. It could simply be because
one of the neighbors is posted up in a way
(10:42):
that cuts you off. A response to that is what
we do on public a lot, which is to hunt
when the neighbor isn't likely to be there. I saw
this on a twenty nine acre chunk I used to
own in Minnesota that had hunters on all sides. Weekends sucked,
rout hunting most sucked. Opening weeks sucked. There were just
(11:02):
too many people in the woods at those times, and
it definitely suppressed deer movement for me. But if I
was going to see a decent buck or at least
have a chance to arrow a door or two, that
timeframe around the end of September to mid October was
pretty good. Then the late season it got pretty good again.
I know that's not what most of us want to hear,
because we want to hunt when it's supposed to be
(11:23):
the best. But all of this stuff is relative to me.
The best hunting is when I have as few people
as possible to compete with, while the odds of a
deer going through feel like they're as high as they're
going to get, which pretty much walk in lockstep if
you get my drift. So the rut might sound great,
but I can have maybe a more peaceful hunt in
(11:44):
the beginning of October, and potentially I have higher odds
of seeing some deer. Now, well, that's a better hunt
on paper, even when it shouldn't be. Now, what I've
talked about so far is mostly the reality of hunting
a place where you don't have a lot of control
over the land. If you own some ground or you
have the ability to work on some dirt, you just
have some more options. I have a thirty acre piece
(12:05):
I bought in Wisconsin about ten years ago that I
just love. Over the years, I've expanded a little kill
plot to be an actual food plot, although it's a
really shitty food plot compared to what most people think
of food plots. The good news is the deer up
there don't have a lot of great food options, so
their standards are pretty low. Is that plot good for
killing big deer? No, that has not been the case,
(12:27):
but it has been good for some deer, and it's
definitely a stopping off point for them. It also allows
me to position them and play the wind very well,
and having planted some apple trees around there and opened
up some wild apple trees to some more sun, hasn't
hurt the spot at all, although I can't say it's
helped me kill a single deer yet. And I did
put in a little pond last year too, and while
(12:47):
that didn't kill us any deer either, I guess it
doesn't hurt. This again boils down to making the most
of what you have to work with. But I'll tell
you something I have learned about that property. It is
very easy for me to def to hunting that plot
over and over, and the deer figure that out pretty quickly.
When I do, it's with my daughters because it's a
(13:08):
really good strategy for killing a few doughs and running
into some dinks. But the cumulative pressure of just us
in there definitely pushes some of the deer to other
spots of that property. This creates another pass through situation,
mostly because again, deer aren't going to spend their whole
lives on thirty acres. But one thing I have noticed
is that some bucks and some dough groups will call
(13:29):
it home pretty consistently. If I don't go wandering through,
they're a ton. Now, this is the last point I
want to make on here, and I think it's a
good one. I'm generally most confident in my hunting when
I find sign and figure out how to work it.
A pounded trail means a hell of a lot more
to me than some trail camera images, just like finding
an awesome rubline does. But when it comes to small
(13:51):
properties where I'm trying to be cognizant of my presence
because I know how quickly I can put the deer down,
trail cameras provide a huge advantage. Not only can you
monitor those pass through spots to see what you can
do about setting up for deer in those areas, but
you can often figure out how deer use your property
in a way that you just wouldn't be able to
without cameras. On that thirty I have over in Wisconsin,
(14:14):
I usually run maybe four or five cameras all summer
and fall, and often through the winter. The camera on
the plot shows the most action until the camera in
the far corner does, but often when the bucks are moving,
they'll walk by more than one camera in a single day.
That information is crazy valuable to me. And it's not
just the bucks either, the doze too. When I see
(14:37):
how they use a property, I can use that to
my advantage in a major way. So not only does
this show me when that buck is on his feet,
and when it shows me if he was in one
spot at five thirty and the next one at six o'clock,
or if the does were there in the morning and
they came back in the evening, and from what direction
(14:57):
you could start to understand a picture of deer usage
on a small piece that can play into your hunting
strategy in a major way, in a way that's easier
than if you have a larger property. So there's an
advantage there, and you can also start to easily gather
year over year data on that small property. In particular,
I always get an influx of bucks in the end
(15:19):
of September on that place. I don't actually know why,
but I know it's true. I think it might be
due to the neighbors just putting more pressure on them
than I do, and then those deer seek out a
little sanctuary. But I also think it might be something else.
In that county in particular, even though baiting has been
banned for two years, a lot of the residents just bait.
It's ingrained in the deer hunting culture, and I often
have summer bucks patterned really well, only to have them
(15:42):
totally disappear right before the opener, which isn't always a
sign of nearby baiting, but often is. I think a
lot of the neighbors hit it hard around opener, and
then they slack off with a baiting a couple weeks
into the season before ramping up again closer to the
rut and the rifle season. I think that the deer
that show up in my place are back on a
more natural food pattern, and that brings them through my
(16:04):
plot into my apple trees and very likely the random
oaks scattered throughout the piece. That could be wrong doesn't
really matter because the trail cameras show me that year
over year, a good time to be there is the
end of September. Small property hunting teaches you a lot
about deer, but more about how to hunt parcels where
you just don't have much room to roam. It's not
(16:25):
as fun as having a couple of sections all to yourself,
but it's reality and only becoming more so as we
make more people and build more McMansions where farms once dominated.
It's just the direction we are headed. So for a
lot of us, mastering the small property thing is a
good idea. It's also a good idea to come back
next week because I'm going to talk about a topic
that I didn't really care about much until a few
(16:47):
years ago, and now because of my daughters, it's important.
And that topic is crossbows. Whether you hate them, you're
going to want to listen, whether you love them, you're
going to listen. Really just listen, because I'm going to
go through my process of how I came to start
using them for my daughters and what I've learned about
hunting with them. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson.
(17:09):
This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which
has brought to you by First Light. As always, thank
you so much for your support. I can't tell you
how much it means to us here at meat Eater.
If you want some more content, maybe you want to
listen to Brent's This Country Life podcast. Maybe you want
to watch Mark Hunt and Blacktails up in Alaska Entertainment education,
(17:30):
we have it all. Maybe just want to read some
articles about dog training, which we're covering like crazy lately.
Whatever them meeteater dot com. We drop new content every day,
tons of good stuff. Go check it out, and again,
thank you so much
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):
Everyone, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which
is brought to you by First Light. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and today's show is all about small properties
in areas of high hunting pressure. This episode comes from
the deepest, darkest corners of my hunting heart. I don't know,
maybe that's too dramatic for a deer hunting podcast, but
(00:42):
if I had to drop a scenario that sucks to
hunt in, it would be small properties with lots of pressure. Now,
that might not be more difficult overall than a big
wood scenario with a really low deer density, but it
can definitely be real tough. There are ways to make
it happen, though, which is what I'm going to talk
about right now. Where I currently live in the suburbs
(01:05):
of the Twin Cities feels like there are just way
way too many people for a guy like me, because
well there are and that really sucks. The density of
people happens for different reasons, and I'd be willing to
bet that most of you find folks who listen to
this podcast would happily lean toward living with fewer people
around than more. Of course, that also involves what you
(01:29):
just know and are comfortable with. My wife loves it
here because it's all she has ever known, and even
if she hated it, she's pot committed now and would
never admit that there are just too many freaking people
and just not enough of nature. And there is also
the reality of getting older and realizing that the more
people you have to interact with, the more you just
realize that a lot of them are like energy vampires.
(01:52):
You know, not all of them, but you know what
I mean. I learned a valuable lesson on this from
Zach Over at the Hunting Public one time when I
asked him about checking dms on social media. His response
was something to the gist of, there just isn't enough
time in the world for that shit. And it's also
generally a good way to get into a conversation with
people who want something from you or want to tell
(02:14):
you how horrible you are, so you end up just
tightening the circle a bit, and you leave the whole
thing on red, which is an impulse I can relate
to on a level I can scarcely describe. And even
though I'm bitching about where I live, and you know
the relatively large yards we have in this area and
the available parks and rivers and streams and lakes to fish,
(02:35):
there are people who have it a hell of a
lot worse. You've probably seen a few of those super
huge apartment complexes scattered throughout the world that look like
absolute dystopian nightmares. There's one in Johannesburg, South Africa that
is a fifty five story building that holds about three
thousand residents. Think about that for a second. The entire
(02:56):
town I grew up in had a population of about
twenty two hundred people. There's a building in Hong Kong
which currently houses about four thousand people, and one in
Brazil that contains eleven hundred and sixty apartments and about
five thousand people, which means that the building is so
big and so full of residents that it has its
(03:16):
own postal code. Now the winner of where I really
wouldn't want to live, Although as a country it's more
appealing than a few of the others. Is located in Geneva, Switzerland.
Technically it consists of two buildings, but for the sake
of a deer hunting podcast, it doesn't matter at all.
We can just let that slide. This complex houses over
six thousand people in twenty seven hundred and eighty units,
(03:39):
with a population density that mirrors Manhattan, New York. It's
hard to wrap our minds around living in a building
with people on all sides of us, and true rush
hour traffic in the hallways and stairwells and elevators, just
people walking. That's a rock hard Nope, they're my friends.
But it's also just the reality of some places with
(04:01):
lots of people, and it's easy to judge when you're
a long ways off from having to consider such living conditions.
Not having enough space to be left alone is a
real issue for a lot of people, and in fact,
when we really want to punish bad people in society,
we put them in small cells with strangers and make
them stay inside for most of every day. Fundamentally, we
(04:22):
just need space. We want it, but we can't always
get what we want, can we. Mike Jagger, I think
about that a lot as I hunt some really small
properties here in the suburbs and across the river in Wisconsin,
a lot of us hunt small properties and it's well huh,
less fun than hunting big properties. This only gets more
true with a couple other qualifiers, like whether you share
(04:44):
the property with other hunters, or where you hunt just
doesn't have a great deer density. Now, if you have
to deal with both on a small property, I'd say
maybe it's time, I don't know, have to go pick
up that new set of golf clubs. But I should
also say that when you get to load deer density areas,
you often get to areas that not tons of people
want to live, So you usually have a situation where
(05:05):
you at least have plenty of ground to work with.
The place is that lots of people want to live,
will often have small parcels worth hunting because of decent
deer densities, But you also have a higher hunter density.
Now there is something to differentiate here, because it matters.
I mentioned on a recent episode of the show that
the turkeys we have been hunting here started out on
(05:27):
a feeder pattern in the backyards of a new development.
It was maddening, and I've seen that movie before. I'm
guessing that people feeding them they're mostly hunters, but probably
some are just nature lovers who like to watch birds,
deer and whatever. Who knows. But the pattern that became
evident pretty quickly was that on a Tuesday morning, when
everyone was at work, those birds could hang out under
(05:48):
those feeders for hours and they didn't have to move,
and they mostly didn't. But when people started to come
home from work, the birds would bump off the development
back into the property. I could hunt. On weekends when
people were home all day, the hunting was usually really,
really good. For the same reason. Even those half dumb
yardbirds up here don't really like hanging out at a
(06:10):
bird feeder when someone is mowing the yard, so they
are more callable because they're just much more at play.
The lesson here is one that I think that matters
a lot, which is there is a way to figure
out all of this stuff. I could declare those birds unkillable,
because for a lot of days they seem to be
that way, but they aren't, And finding those windows in
(06:32):
which they are is a big difference maker. It's no
different than if you put in minimal work on public land,
white tails, and only hunt weekend afternoons. You might be
pretty quick to look for an excuse as to why
it's so hard, but the truth is that you're probably
just not doing what it takes. The deer are there
and they can be shot by you, but not the
way you're hunting. I've talked about this a lot, and
(06:55):
when it comes to small properties, this all seems amplified
and more frustrating because of the limited options. Even sharing
a property with one other person can feel like a
bit too much, which I'm acutely aware of because every
small property I've ever hunted that I didn't own has
had someone else on it. If that person isn't as
careful as you are, then your level set to their skills,
(07:19):
you're at a disadvantage. It's that simple, because the deer
will react to their pressure the most. Not all hope
is lost, though, my little ombres, because you can do
some things to help out your cause. For starters, look
for your advantages. A small property is easy to scout,
but I say that, and I should also say this.
(07:39):
Small properties can feel like you know them very well,
and you can still miss some things. The spot that
I killed my Minnesota buck last year is twenty five acres,
with about ten or twelve being actually realistically huntable. The
area he was in when I shot him as a
small woodlot that has a pond in it, just a
hub for activity on that property, and what I learned
last year is that they approach it from a litany
(08:01):
of different directions, but usually pass through one specific spot.
The reasons for that vary. There seems to be a
dough betting group on the neighbors, which is obviously a
big draw for bucks, but also makes it pretty easy
to predict dough movement. It's a huge win. There are
(08:28):
also three other ways they approach, all from different properties,
which makes sense because they certainly aren't going to spend
their whole lives on a twenty five acre piece. The
way they approach from other properties and how to set
up for them makes a small piece seem a little
bigger because if you play it right, you can work
different wind directions to keon basically the same area. That's
(08:50):
something that matters a lot when you're relegated to smaller
parcels maximizing your opportunities. This also allows you to distribute
your personal hunting pressure a little more evenly, even though
that might not seem like the case if you're still
hunting only a five acre area on a small property,
but it's way way better than either just hunting the
(09:10):
same stand over and over, or only hunting one stand
when the conditions seem to be perfect for it. Now,
if you took a quick two minute walk from that
spot to the east side of that property, you'd find
a strip of pines mixed with a few oak trees.
It's basically a pass through spot that connects one of
the larger woodlots in the area, one that I can't hunt,
by the way to another decent sized woodlot, also one
(09:32):
that I can't hunt. Those pass through spots are the
ticket when you're on small properties, especially if you share
a property with other hunters. The pressure on the good
spots will be high, but a pass through spot seems
to be a lower odd situation overall, but will stay
somewhat consistent even when you overhunt the other areas on
the same parcel or your neighbors overhunt all the bordering properties.
(09:58):
This is one of the hardest things to over come
when you're in this situation, because a lot of times
where you can find a I don't know, fifteen to
forty acre piece to hunt, there will be a lot
of other small fifteen to forty acre pieces around, and
if there are, and there are enough people around, plenty
of them will get hunted. When I winter scout small parcels,
(10:20):
which I do a lot just to see what I'm missing,
I'm almost always amazed at how many blinds and stands
I can see when I walk the perimeters. All of
that is good data because it can answer some of
the questions you might have, like why when the wind
seemed perfect for one of your setups, you just couldn't
buy a deer sighting there. It could simply be because
one of the neighbors is posted up in a way
(10:42):
that cuts you off. A response to that is what
we do on public a lot, which is to hunt
when the neighbor isn't likely to be there. I saw
this on a twenty nine acre chunk I used to
own in Minnesota that had hunters on all sides. Weekends sucked,
rout hunting most sucked. Opening weeks sucked. There were just
(11:02):
too many people in the woods at those times, and
it definitely suppressed deer movement for me. But if I
was going to see a decent buck or at least
have a chance to arrow a door or two, that
timeframe around the end of September to mid October was
pretty good. Then the late season it got pretty good again.
I know that's not what most of us want to hear,
because we want to hunt when it's supposed to be
(11:23):
the best. But all of this stuff is relative to me.
The best hunting is when I have as few people
as possible to compete with, while the odds of a
deer going through feel like they're as high as they're
going to get, which pretty much walk in lockstep if
you get my drift. So the rut might sound great,
but I can have maybe a more peaceful hunt in
(11:44):
the beginning of October, and potentially I have higher odds
of seeing some deer. Now, well, that's a better hunt
on paper, even when it shouldn't be. Now, what I've
talked about so far is mostly the reality of hunting
a place where you don't have a lot of control
over the land. If you own some ground or you
have the ability to work on some dirt, you just
have some more options. I have a thirty acre piece
(12:05):
I bought in Wisconsin about ten years ago that I
just love. Over the years, I've expanded a little kill
plot to be an actual food plot, although it's a
really shitty food plot compared to what most people think
of food plots. The good news is the deer up
there don't have a lot of great food options, so
their standards are pretty low. Is that plot good for
killing big deer? No, that has not been the case,
(12:27):
but it has been good for some deer, and it's
definitely a stopping off point for them. It also allows
me to position them and play the wind very well,
and having planted some apple trees around there and opened
up some wild apple trees to some more sun, hasn't
hurt the spot at all, although I can't say it's
helped me kill a single deer yet. And I did
put in a little pond last year too, and while
(12:47):
that didn't kill us any deer either, I guess it
doesn't hurt. This again boils down to making the most
of what you have to work with. But I'll tell
you something I have learned about that property. It is
very easy for me to def to hunting that plot
over and over, and the deer figure that out pretty quickly.
When I do, it's with my daughters because it's a
(13:08):
really good strategy for killing a few doughs and running
into some dinks. But the cumulative pressure of just us
in there definitely pushes some of the deer to other
spots of that property. This creates another pass through situation,
mostly because again, deer aren't going to spend their whole
lives on thirty acres. But one thing I have noticed
is that some bucks and some dough groups will call
(13:29):
it home pretty consistently. If I don't go wandering through,
they're a ton. Now, this is the last point I
want to make on here, and I think it's a
good one. I'm generally most confident in my hunting when
I find sign and figure out how to work it.
A pounded trail means a hell of a lot more
to me than some trail camera images, just like finding
an awesome rubline does. But when it comes to small
(13:51):
properties where I'm trying to be cognizant of my presence
because I know how quickly I can put the deer down,
trail cameras provide a huge advantage. Not only can you
monitor those pass through spots to see what you can
do about setting up for deer in those areas, but
you can often figure out how deer use your property
in a way that you just wouldn't be able to
without cameras. On that thirty I have over in Wisconsin,
(14:14):
I usually run maybe four or five cameras all summer
and fall, and often through the winter. The camera on
the plot shows the most action until the camera in
the far corner does, but often when the bucks are moving,
they'll walk by more than one camera in a single day.
That information is crazy valuable to me. And it's not
just the bucks either, the doze too. When I see
(14:37):
how they use a property, I can use that to
my advantage in a major way. So not only does
this show me when that buck is on his feet,
and when it shows me if he was in one
spot at five thirty and the next one at six o'clock,
or if the does were there in the morning and
they came back in the evening, and from what direction
(14:57):
you could start to understand a picture of deer usage
on a small piece that can play into your hunting
strategy in a major way, in a way that's easier
than if you have a larger property. So there's an
advantage there, and you can also start to easily gather
year over year data on that small property. In particular,
I always get an influx of bucks in the end
(15:19):
of September on that place. I don't actually know why,
but I know it's true. I think it might be
due to the neighbors just putting more pressure on them
than I do, and then those deer seek out a
little sanctuary. But I also think it might be something else.
In that county in particular, even though baiting has been
banned for two years, a lot of the residents just bait.
It's ingrained in the deer hunting culture, and I often
have summer bucks patterned really well, only to have them
(15:42):
totally disappear right before the opener, which isn't always a
sign of nearby baiting, but often is. I think a
lot of the neighbors hit it hard around opener, and
then they slack off with a baiting a couple weeks
into the season before ramping up again closer to the
rut and the rifle season. I think that the deer
that show up in my place are back on a
more natural food pattern, and that brings them through my
(16:04):
plot into my apple trees and very likely the random
oaks scattered throughout the piece. That could be wrong doesn't
really matter because the trail cameras show me that year
over year, a good time to be there is the
end of September. Small property hunting teaches you a lot
about deer, but more about how to hunt parcels where
you just don't have much room to roam. It's not
(16:25):
as fun as having a couple of sections all to yourself,
but it's reality and only becoming more so as we
make more people and build more McMansions where farms once dominated.
It's just the direction we are headed. So for a
lot of us, mastering the small property thing is a
good idea. It's also a good idea to come back
next week because I'm going to talk about a topic
that I didn't really care about much until a few
(16:47):
years ago, and now because of my daughters, it's important.
And that topic is crossbows. Whether you hate them, you're
going to want to listen, whether you love them, you're
going to listen. Really just listen, because I'm going to
go through my process of how I came to start
using them for my daughters and what I've learned about
hunting with them. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson.
(17:09):
This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which
has brought to you by First Light. As always, thank
you so much for your support. I can't tell you
how much it means to us here at meat Eater.
If you want some more content, maybe you want to
listen to Brent's This Country Life podcast. Maybe you want
to watch Mark Hunt and Blacktails up in Alaska Entertainment education,
(17:30):
we have it all. Maybe just want to read some
articles about dog training, which we're covering like crazy lately.
Whatever them meeteater dot com. We drop new content every day,
tons of good stuff. Go check it out, and again,
thank you so much
Host
Mark Kenyon
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