June 17, 2025 • 17 mins
On this week's show, Tony explains how most of us hunt off of memories while hoping for success, instead of working toward our deer goals all summer long.
Connect with Tony Peterson and MeatEater
Tony Peterson on Instagram and Facebook
MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips
MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube
Shop MeatEater Merch
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
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, everybody, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast,
which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about how to
change your future as a deer hunter and ensure that
you'll have a successful season. We all know that we
love those get rich quick hunting products, we love the rut,
We'll love anything that'll give us an advantage because deer
(00:41):
hunting is hard, it's not impossible, and we're all just
kind of chasing rabbits with antlers around, hoping we get
lucky in fill a tag.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Well, not everyone.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
There are a lot of people out there who kind
of manifest their own deer destiny and it's no accident
that they succeed when most hunters fail.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
That's kind of like a power.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
That's in us all, at least to some extent, and
it's what I'm going to talk about right now. A
few weeks ago, the stars aligned and myself and three
buddies made a guy's trip happen. While one of them
had to leave early in the trip to go attend
a bachelor party, another had to show up late because
(01:20):
he has a lot of work to do. So it
actually shook out really well because at any given point
of that trip, I only had two other people in
my boat. When you're tossing top waters with a bunch
of treble hooks on them for smallmouth or fake kermits
for large mouth, three dudes in one boat is more
than enough. We had originally tried to make a Florida
(01:41):
fishing trip happen last winter, But anyone who has kids
and friends and jobs in life and all that other
stuff understands that at some point you just lose any
easy chance to get together with your buddies and do
something cool for four or five days. It's pretty wild.
And I know you young fellas listening to this won't
believe it'll happen to you, but it will any hooters.
(02:02):
We timed our trip well, and the smallies were just
coming up to spawn and the large mouth were just
wrapping up a wave of spawning. So depending on the wind,
whether and how busy the lakes were. We fished for
smallies on the rocks or large mouths in the weeds.
The large mouth were already guarding fry and hanging around
the bluegill beds that looked like craters on the moon,
although they're just a bit too uniform in size. The
(02:24):
small mouth were just on shallow, hungry males up making
beds or forming little wolf packs to chase minnows, while
the big females were holding tight to boulders and docks.
It was easy fishing and changed by the day. Finding
some fish anywhere that seemed fishy wasn't terribly difficult, but
we were on the hunt for big ones, and so
(02:46):
we catered our strategy to them. It was a blast,
and I didn't think much of our success until I
showed some pictures to a woman at the gym who
asked me often why she doesn't and her family doesn't
catch bigger fish at their lake Kevin. Now, when she
saw the bass we caught, she said, you're so lucky
at fishing. We never get that lucky boy. Have I
(03:08):
heard that a time or two in my life, and
it's representative of a common outdoor mindset, those who succeed
are lucky, those who don't aren't. This is a comforting
thought for a lot of folks because it means that
at some point the fates will break their way and
it'll be their turn to be lucky. But that totally
discounts the reality of nature of predators and their prey,
(03:31):
and the truth that the outdoors can definitely deliver you
some good fortune, but it mostly won't until you give
it what is necessary to be. You know where you
need to be when you need to be there. When
it comes to catching a five pound large mouth on
a bright pick frog and the lily pads and emerging
wild rice, it's mostly a matter of making a lot
(03:52):
of long casts in areas where they should be when
they are looking up to eat. If it's pretty cold
or pretty windy and you look around and you and
see a whole bunch of dragonflies cruising around, you might
not get too many blow ups.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
The fish could be there.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
The fish could be there, but they might not be
eating kermits a whole lot. You might have the right
location but your timing is off. Or you might go
out and fish that sweet spawning bay with the beaver
dams and the floating bogs and only catch a few
northerns even though the sun's shining, it's dead calm, and
the dragonflies are just buzzing all over. So now you've
(04:27):
got the right timing in the wrong spot. Now think
about this with white tails. Scratch that, Think about this
with a really good buck, the kind of buck we
all want to shoot, who represents a class of deer
that is rare enough in our neck of the woods
to be a trophy. Not only do you need to
be in the right spot at the right time, you
(04:47):
also need that to happen on one of the moments
when he puts himself in a position to be in
the wrong place at the wrong time. I know that's
kind of saying the same thing, but kind of not.
On any given day that you can hunt, he probably
won't do that, And if he does, he has a
pretty good chance of winding you, or spotting you up
in your tree, or just taking a trail you didn't expect.
(05:10):
So instead of walking by at twenty yards, he passes
by at forty five, and then you try to grind
him in and he doesn't have the best reaction, or
you miss or whatever. When you acknowledge how hard this
shit is, it's easy to want to believe that it's
all just luck. For most of us, that's a comfortable
blanket to wrap ourselves in because it removes most of
(05:30):
our personal agency and protects our egos. I like that,
and I bet you do too. I honestly think this
is one of the reasons there's been such a harsh
reaction to non residents in the last ten years. Has
crowding increased in some areas, for sure, no question. But
we've also been shown that some folks can show up
in our backyards and kill big deer and we can't
(05:53):
do it, and that doesn't sit well with a lot
of us. So there must be a reason. And this
social contagent thing creeps in and we decide that no
one can do it because there are too many people trying.
So the best bet is to kick some people out
who are powerless. That's far more comfortable for a lot
of us than admitting we aren't very good at this
thing that we love, especially when we know that some
(06:15):
people can go to where we hunt and kill the
big deer that we can't. That sucks, but it happens
to all of us. But we do have agency over ourselves,
and we have the means to make a good hunt
happen instead of singing back and crossing your fingers, you know,
and thinking maybe this'll be our year.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
Now.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
I know I sound like a judge prick here, but
let me tell you something. I can have a pity
party with the best of them. I mean, try being
friends with Andy may all fall. You get pictures from
him of giant deer from someplace public, and there's always
like a quick text with it that's like, well, I
only had three days to haunt two states that I've
never been to, so I killed these two one sixties
(06:56):
quickly and went home. It's honestly kind of disgusting. I
also know, from spending time with him and a hell
of a lot more really good hunters, that it's not
just luck to put those deer in.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
Front of Andy and these other guys.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
He knows what it takes to make something good happen,
and he does that no matter where he's hunting. At home,
that means tons of scouting, boots on the ground, scouting,
(07:30):
not just trail camera work, but getting out there to
learn about deer and the places they call home is
what he's doing on the road. It's tons of digital scouting,
which is immediately ground truth whenever he gets to where
he's going. It's a near constant quest for up to
the minute intel. Now pay attention to that, because this
(07:51):
is a mindset thing, and it's something I personally struggle
with every season. In fact, I think my biggest weakness
as a white tail hunter is this.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
I like to hunt off of memories. A lot of
us do.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
We had a good encounter last season around Halloween in
this spot, so we go back there this year. It
might work, but it probably won't because something major will
have changed. Crop rotations, hunting pressure, wind direction, general weather,
hard mass, soft mass, a pack of coyote, you're setting
up shops somewhere new, you name it. The variables are endless.
(08:26):
You might get a repeat, but you should try to
figure out how likely that is. I think about it
this way. When I have some good encounter, public or private,
and I'm inclined to go try to repeat that pattern
the following season, I try to remind myself of what
went into having that good encounter in the first place.
(08:46):
If it was a public land hunt, it's almost a
guarantee that some sighting or some mid day scouting session
put me in a spot that was just humming with potential,
which means that I did some level of work to
make it happen. When I hunt on memories, I'm mostly
counting on the scouting or sightings of some other season
(09:08):
to make something happen now. And when it comes to
pressure deer anyway, old data is generally not very good.
This is where things get tricky because we can easily
fool ourselves when we are running the mind game of
where to hunt, and when we think, well, I haven't
been in the woods in two weeks, so this spot
(09:29):
should be primed for deer activity because the pressure has
been super low.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
But what does that mean?
Speaker 2 (09:35):
What if you only hunt forty acres, so you mitigated
some of the pressure on a piece of ground that's
four hundred yards by four hundred yards. That's great, But
what about the rest of that deer's home range around
where you hunt. Where I'm going with this is that
we often talk ourselves into a plan because it's easy
and not necessarily the best way to achieve our goals.
(09:58):
I see this at the gym a lot, with people
who month after month walk on the treadmill and play solitaire.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Look, that's great, but I know.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
A couple of them well because they are my neighbors,
and they often complain about not getting fitter, not getting skinnier,
even though they go to the gym quite a bit.
But if you don't get your heart rate up and
really get moving, you're not going to get the results
you want. It's one of those simple but not simple things.
You could literally move into the gym and eat like
shit and not really exercise a whole lot and never
(10:28):
see results in spite of literally living in a gym.
It's not the time there that matters, it's how you
use that time. And the same rules apply to the
White Tail Woods in season and odd of season. If
you go out and glass from the same spot over
and over because it's where you have the best chance
to see a bachelor group, that's great, but over time
(10:51):
it can tip from being a net benefit to being
net neutral or if they are onto your game or
the conditions change, a net negative alone doesn't mean anything,
and to figure out how to do it in a
way that will inform your choices for the season and
not potentially hurt your chances. And then you use that
information to set yourself up to be where the deer
(11:12):
should be early in the season, which is when the
summer glassing juice is easiest to squeeze out of your hunts.
Of course, most of us aren't glassing a whole lot
now that trail cameras are pretty cheap and easy to use,
which is maybe the biggest component of us wishing for
a good hunt instead of actively trying to make one happen.
When we get pictures of that one forty who lives
(11:33):
in the section that our land is in, it tells
us many things, some of which are true and some
of which are lies. For starters, we know he's in there,
in the area somewhere. That's huge, It's true, it's important.
There's something about knowing you're around a deer you'd really
like to shoot that just helps sharpen the blade, so
to speak. You're less likely to be sloppy, more likely
(11:56):
to go in early and sit as long as possible,
more likely to try to be quieter and pay attention more.
All good stuff, really, But that picture or pictures, even
if you know he shows up every week or every
couple of weeks, they also lie to us, or they
allow us to lie to ourselves. We tend to use
(12:16):
the images to fill in a whole lot of blanks
and decide that he'll show up on the retisan and
he's no longer nocturnal, or we think that we can
rattle him in during late October when the mornings are
cold and the whole thing is about to snap like
a top rubber band. Yet we don't know anything about
that deer really, like those small moths coming out of
their wintering holes, spawning on a big boulder and two
(12:38):
feet of water, then backing out to stage and recover
in five or six feet of water where there's cabbage
starting to grow and the minnows are thick, and then
eventually moving to the mid lake rock piles and points
and sand drops for the summertime. Bulk up deer have
a purpose to their daily movements, their weekly movements, and
whether you know they're going to give you a chance
(13:01):
or not, all of that's tied in there.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Now.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
That buck that you got the pictures of, he has
multiple bedding sites he uses. He's feeding on all kinds
of different brows and masts and crops and whatever he
has access to. He has trails, he likes to take
when the wind is out of the southwest, and trails
he'll only take when it comes from the north. He
knows all of the deer in his neighborhood, and he
knows a hell of a lot about when you come
(13:23):
into the woods and when you leave. He can learn
about you after you leave, and most likely does when
he walks past your camera. He's giving you a single
data point, and it might be very valuable. Probably is,
but it's not enough to build a real plan on.
You need to see him if you can, even in
June or July. That's a start, But also finding his
(13:45):
tracks or getting a picture of him in two different
locations in a week, or finding an area with huge
rubs absolutely shredded in mid October. Then you start to
understand his routine and the routine of big Bucks in
your area. You start to be able to predict where
he might actually show up and win at least have
a pretty educated guess. And when you can do that,
(14:08):
you stop wishing, at least to some extent, and you
start manifesting your own destiny. Now I realize I'm dumbing
this way down, but I'm also not dear are creatures
of habit just like us, and they leave evidence of
their presence, just like us. Their job is to avoid us.
Our job is to find them. They're generally better at
their job than we are at ours, but we can
(14:29):
get better at ours. We never will, though, if we
take a mostly passive approach to figuring out their day
to day activities. This is something that can be accomplished
in multiple ways, but there's one that works for me
pretty well. When I go into the woods, I try
to get myself to pay attention.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
And be curious.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
I'm heading to Wisconsin to hang some cameras this weekend,
and I know it'll be a buggy and thick and
generally gross mess out there, but I also know it
has rained a lot lately, so finding big tracks is
a real possibility. Instead of just marching in to hang
cameras on trees that I've hung cameras on before and
then getting out, I'm going to force myself to pay
attention to the trails and the tracks and the beds
(15:09):
and anything else that can help me sort of put
the whole thing together over there. To me, that's literally
the difference between walking slowly on the treadmill for forty
five minutes or running for forty five minutes. You could
do either with the same amount of time, but one
is definitely more beneficial. So I guess my question to you,
find folks is how are you going to stop wishing
(15:30):
for a good hunt this season and try to make
one happen? Do you have anything planned in the next
couple of weeks that will put you on the right
path forward? What's your scouting plan for this summer? Do
you have a plan? How about your stand hanging plan?
Do you feel it's too early to care about that
stuff because the hit list isn't even close to being
ready yet. Are you going to wait till August and
then go put up your usual sets for the year
(15:51):
while you haunt on memories? If so, ask yourself this,
how well has that worked for me in the past.
If it's worked pretty well, great, You know what isn't
broke doesn't need much fixing. But what if it didn't work?
How will you take agency over your deer hunting success
this fall by doing something?
Speaker 3 (16:07):
Now?
Speaker 2 (16:08):
I know this kind of sucks to hear because hunting
is supposed to be fun and not tons of work.
But fun comes in many forms. It's pretty satisfying to
glass up a good one right now, even if the
mosquitoes are bonkers and there are a lot of fish
to be caught. It's pretty satisfying to hang a few
cameras earlier than you need to, and to start getting
pictures of some bucks doing their thing in different spots,
which means that you'll be able to slip in some
(16:29):
rainy summer day to hang a set or three in
those new locations.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
It's pretty fun to get.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Active with this stuff so that you're really learning about
the deer and what they do, because that can tamp
down the season long second guessing and give you confidence
in your decisions.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
Don't look at it like work. Look at it like.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
It's just a necessary part of the process that will
literally set you apart from most of the competition, because
you know what, most of those big bucks out there
are counting on you to hunt like everyone else, and
when you don't, you start to run into them more frequently,
and that is when you can really level up as
a white tail hunter, which is what we all want.
So do that and come back next week, because I'm
(17:05):
going to talk about summer scouting mistakes that most folks
make and how to avoid them. That's it for this episode.
I'm Tony Peterson and this has been the Wire to
Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light.
As always, thank you so much for your support for listening,
for reading the articles, for watching the shows, everything. We
truly appreciate it. Here at meat Eater. If you want
(17:27):
more hunting content, you know where to go. We put
up new articles, we put up new shows, we put
up new podcasts, just tons of new content every single
day over at the meeedeater dot com.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
Go check it out
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, everybody, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast,
which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about how to
change your future as a deer hunter and ensure that
you'll have a successful season. We all know that we
love those get rich quick hunting products, we love the rut,
We'll love anything that'll give us an advantage because deer
(00:41):
hunting is hard, it's not impossible, and we're all just
kind of chasing rabbits with antlers around, hoping we get
lucky in fill a tag.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Well, not everyone.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
There are a lot of people out there who kind
of manifest their own deer destiny and it's no accident
that they succeed when most hunters fail.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
That's kind of like a power.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
That's in us all, at least to some extent, and
it's what I'm going to talk about right now. A
few weeks ago, the stars aligned and myself and three
buddies made a guy's trip happen. While one of them
had to leave early in the trip to go attend
a bachelor party, another had to show up late because
(01:20):
he has a lot of work to do. So it
actually shook out really well because at any given point
of that trip, I only had two other people in
my boat. When you're tossing top waters with a bunch
of treble hooks on them for smallmouth or fake kermits
for large mouth, three dudes in one boat is more
than enough. We had originally tried to make a Florida
(01:41):
fishing trip happen last winter, But anyone who has kids
and friends and jobs in life and all that other
stuff understands that at some point you just lose any
easy chance to get together with your buddies and do
something cool for four or five days. It's pretty wild.
And I know you young fellas listening to this won't
believe it'll happen to you, but it will any hooters.
(02:02):
We timed our trip well, and the smallies were just
coming up to spawn and the large mouth were just
wrapping up a wave of spawning. So depending on the wind,
whether and how busy the lakes were. We fished for
smallies on the rocks or large mouths in the weeds.
The large mouth were already guarding fry and hanging around
the bluegill beds that looked like craters on the moon,
although they're just a bit too uniform in size. The
(02:24):
small mouth were just on shallow, hungry males up making
beds or forming little wolf packs to chase minnows, while
the big females were holding tight to boulders and docks.
It was easy fishing and changed by the day. Finding
some fish anywhere that seemed fishy wasn't terribly difficult, but
we were on the hunt for big ones, and so
(02:46):
we catered our strategy to them. It was a blast,
and I didn't think much of our success until I
showed some pictures to a woman at the gym who
asked me often why she doesn't and her family doesn't
catch bigger fish at their lake Kevin. Now, when she
saw the bass we caught, she said, you're so lucky
at fishing. We never get that lucky boy. Have I
(03:08):
heard that a time or two in my life, and
it's representative of a common outdoor mindset, those who succeed
are lucky, those who don't aren't. This is a comforting
thought for a lot of folks because it means that
at some point the fates will break their way and
it'll be their turn to be lucky. But that totally
discounts the reality of nature of predators and their prey,
(03:31):
and the truth that the outdoors can definitely deliver you
some good fortune, but it mostly won't until you give
it what is necessary to be. You know where you
need to be when you need to be there. When
it comes to catching a five pound large mouth on
a bright pick frog and the lily pads and emerging
wild rice, it's mostly a matter of making a lot
(03:52):
of long casts in areas where they should be when
they are looking up to eat. If it's pretty cold
or pretty windy and you look around and you and
see a whole bunch of dragonflies cruising around, you might
not get too many blow ups.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
The fish could be there.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
The fish could be there, but they might not be
eating kermits a whole lot. You might have the right
location but your timing is off. Or you might go
out and fish that sweet spawning bay with the beaver
dams and the floating bogs and only catch a few
northerns even though the sun's shining, it's dead calm, and
the dragonflies are just buzzing all over. So now you've
(04:27):
got the right timing in the wrong spot. Now think
about this with white tails. Scratch that, Think about this
with a really good buck, the kind of buck we
all want to shoot, who represents a class of deer
that is rare enough in our neck of the woods
to be a trophy. Not only do you need to
be in the right spot at the right time, you
(04:47):
also need that to happen on one of the moments
when he puts himself in a position to be in
the wrong place at the wrong time. I know that's
kind of saying the same thing, but kind of not.
On any given day that you can hunt, he probably
won't do that, And if he does, he has a
pretty good chance of winding you, or spotting you up
in your tree, or just taking a trail you didn't expect.
(05:10):
So instead of walking by at twenty yards, he passes
by at forty five, and then you try to grind
him in and he doesn't have the best reaction, or
you miss or whatever. When you acknowledge how hard this
shit is, it's easy to want to believe that it's
all just luck. For most of us, that's a comfortable
blanket to wrap ourselves in because it removes most of
(05:30):
our personal agency and protects our egos. I like that,
and I bet you do too. I honestly think this
is one of the reasons there's been such a harsh
reaction to non residents in the last ten years. Has
crowding increased in some areas, for sure, no question. But
we've also been shown that some folks can show up
in our backyards and kill big deer and we can't
(05:53):
do it, and that doesn't sit well with a lot
of us. So there must be a reason. And this
social contagent thing creeps in and we decide that no
one can do it because there are too many people trying.
So the best bet is to kick some people out
who are powerless. That's far more comfortable for a lot
of us than admitting we aren't very good at this
thing that we love, especially when we know that some
(06:15):
people can go to where we hunt and kill the
big deer that we can't. That sucks, but it happens
to all of us. But we do have agency over ourselves,
and we have the means to make a good hunt
happen instead of singing back and crossing your fingers, you know,
and thinking maybe this'll be our year.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
Now.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
I know I sound like a judge prick here, but
let me tell you something. I can have a pity
party with the best of them. I mean, try being
friends with Andy may all fall. You get pictures from
him of giant deer from someplace public, and there's always
like a quick text with it that's like, well, I
only had three days to haunt two states that I've
never been to, so I killed these two one sixties
(06:56):
quickly and went home. It's honestly kind of disgusting. I
also know, from spending time with him and a hell
of a lot more really good hunters, that it's not
just luck to put those deer in.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
Front of Andy and these other guys.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
He knows what it takes to make something good happen,
and he does that no matter where he's hunting. At home,
that means tons of scouting, boots on the ground, scouting,
(07:30):
not just trail camera work, but getting out there to
learn about deer and the places they call home is
what he's doing on the road. It's tons of digital scouting,
which is immediately ground truth whenever he gets to where
he's going. It's a near constant quest for up to
the minute intel. Now pay attention to that, because this
(07:51):
is a mindset thing, and it's something I personally struggle
with every season. In fact, I think my biggest weakness
as a white tail hunter is this.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
I like to hunt off of memories. A lot of
us do.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
We had a good encounter last season around Halloween in
this spot, so we go back there this year. It
might work, but it probably won't because something major will
have changed. Crop rotations, hunting pressure, wind direction, general weather,
hard mass, soft mass, a pack of coyote, you're setting
up shops somewhere new, you name it. The variables are endless.
(08:26):
You might get a repeat, but you should try to
figure out how likely that is. I think about it
this way. When I have some good encounter, public or private,
and I'm inclined to go try to repeat that pattern
the following season, I try to remind myself of what
went into having that good encounter in the first place.
(08:46):
If it was a public land hunt, it's almost a
guarantee that some sighting or some mid day scouting session
put me in a spot that was just humming with potential,
which means that I did some level of work to
make it happen. When I hunt on memories, I'm mostly
counting on the scouting or sightings of some other season
(09:08):
to make something happen now. And when it comes to
pressure deer anyway, old data is generally not very good.
This is where things get tricky because we can easily
fool ourselves when we are running the mind game of
where to hunt, and when we think, well, I haven't
been in the woods in two weeks, so this spot
(09:29):
should be primed for deer activity because the pressure has
been super low.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
But what does that mean?
Speaker 2 (09:35):
What if you only hunt forty acres, so you mitigated
some of the pressure on a piece of ground that's
four hundred yards by four hundred yards. That's great, But
what about the rest of that deer's home range around
where you hunt. Where I'm going with this is that
we often talk ourselves into a plan because it's easy
and not necessarily the best way to achieve our goals.
(09:58):
I see this at the gym a lot, with people
who month after month walk on the treadmill and play solitaire.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Look, that's great, but I know.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
A couple of them well because they are my neighbors,
and they often complain about not getting fitter, not getting skinnier,
even though they go to the gym quite a bit.
But if you don't get your heart rate up and
really get moving, you're not going to get the results
you want. It's one of those simple but not simple things.
You could literally move into the gym and eat like
shit and not really exercise a whole lot and never
(10:28):
see results in spite of literally living in a gym.
It's not the time there that matters, it's how you
use that time. And the same rules apply to the
White Tail Woods in season and odd of season. If
you go out and glass from the same spot over
and over because it's where you have the best chance
to see a bachelor group, that's great, but over time
(10:51):
it can tip from being a net benefit to being
net neutral or if they are onto your game or
the conditions change, a net negative alone doesn't mean anything,
and to figure out how to do it in a
way that will inform your choices for the season and
not potentially hurt your chances. And then you use that
information to set yourself up to be where the deer
(11:12):
should be early in the season, which is when the
summer glassing juice is easiest to squeeze out of your hunts.
Of course, most of us aren't glassing a whole lot
now that trail cameras are pretty cheap and easy to use,
which is maybe the biggest component of us wishing for
a good hunt instead of actively trying to make one happen.
When we get pictures of that one forty who lives
(11:33):
in the section that our land is in, it tells
us many things, some of which are true and some
of which are lies. For starters, we know he's in there,
in the area somewhere. That's huge, It's true, it's important.
There's something about knowing you're around a deer you'd really
like to shoot that just helps sharpen the blade, so
to speak. You're less likely to be sloppy, more likely
(11:56):
to go in early and sit as long as possible,
more likely to try to be quieter and pay attention more.
All good stuff, really, But that picture or pictures, even
if you know he shows up every week or every
couple of weeks, they also lie to us, or they
allow us to lie to ourselves. We tend to use
(12:16):
the images to fill in a whole lot of blanks
and decide that he'll show up on the retisan and
he's no longer nocturnal, or we think that we can
rattle him in during late October when the mornings are
cold and the whole thing is about to snap like
a top rubber band. Yet we don't know anything about
that deer really, like those small moths coming out of
their wintering holes, spawning on a big boulder and two
(12:38):
feet of water, then backing out to stage and recover
in five or six feet of water where there's cabbage
starting to grow and the minnows are thick, and then
eventually moving to the mid lake rock piles and points
and sand drops for the summertime. Bulk up deer have
a purpose to their daily movements, their weekly movements, and
whether you know they're going to give you a chance
(13:01):
or not, all of that's tied in there.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Now.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
That buck that you got the pictures of, he has
multiple bedding sites he uses. He's feeding on all kinds
of different brows and masts and crops and whatever he
has access to. He has trails, he likes to take
when the wind is out of the southwest, and trails
he'll only take when it comes from the north. He
knows all of the deer in his neighborhood, and he
knows a hell of a lot about when you come
(13:23):
into the woods and when you leave. He can learn
about you after you leave, and most likely does when
he walks past your camera. He's giving you a single
data point, and it might be very valuable. Probably is,
but it's not enough to build a real plan on.
You need to see him if you can, even in
June or July. That's a start, But also finding his
(13:45):
tracks or getting a picture of him in two different
locations in a week, or finding an area with huge
rubs absolutely shredded in mid October. Then you start to
understand his routine and the routine of big Bucks in
your area. You start to be able to predict where
he might actually show up and win at least have
a pretty educated guess. And when you can do that,
(14:08):
you stop wishing, at least to some extent, and you
start manifesting your own destiny. Now I realize I'm dumbing
this way down, but I'm also not dear are creatures
of habit just like us, and they leave evidence of
their presence, just like us. Their job is to avoid us.
Our job is to find them. They're generally better at
their job than we are at ours, but we can
(14:29):
get better at ours. We never will, though, if we
take a mostly passive approach to figuring out their day
to day activities. This is something that can be accomplished
in multiple ways, but there's one that works for me
pretty well. When I go into the woods, I try
to get myself to pay attention.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
And be curious.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
I'm heading to Wisconsin to hang some cameras this weekend,
and I know it'll be a buggy and thick and
generally gross mess out there, but I also know it
has rained a lot lately, so finding big tracks is
a real possibility. Instead of just marching in to hang
cameras on trees that I've hung cameras on before and
then getting out, I'm going to force myself to pay
attention to the trails and the tracks and the beds
(15:09):
and anything else that can help me sort of put
the whole thing together over there. To me, that's literally
the difference between walking slowly on the treadmill for forty
five minutes or running for forty five minutes. You could
do either with the same amount of time, but one
is definitely more beneficial. So I guess my question to you,
find folks is how are you going to stop wishing
(15:30):
for a good hunt this season and try to make
one happen? Do you have anything planned in the next
couple of weeks that will put you on the right
path forward? What's your scouting plan for this summer? Do
you have a plan? How about your stand hanging plan?
Do you feel it's too early to care about that
stuff because the hit list isn't even close to being
ready yet. Are you going to wait till August and
then go put up your usual sets for the year
(15:51):
while you haunt on memories? If so, ask yourself this,
how well has that worked for me in the past.
If it's worked pretty well, great, You know what isn't
broke doesn't need much fixing. But what if it didn't work?
How will you take agency over your deer hunting success
this fall by doing something?
Speaker 3 (16:07):
Now?
Speaker 2 (16:08):
I know this kind of sucks to hear because hunting
is supposed to be fun and not tons of work.
But fun comes in many forms. It's pretty satisfying to
glass up a good one right now, even if the
mosquitoes are bonkers and there are a lot of fish
to be caught. It's pretty satisfying to hang a few
cameras earlier than you need to, and to start getting
pictures of some bucks doing their thing in different spots,
which means that you'll be able to slip in some
(16:29):
rainy summer day to hang a set or three in
those new locations.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
It's pretty fun to get.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Active with this stuff so that you're really learning about
the deer and what they do, because that can tamp
down the season long second guessing and give you confidence
in your decisions.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
Don't look at it like work. Look at it like.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
It's just a necessary part of the process that will
literally set you apart from most of the competition, because
you know what, most of those big bucks out there
are counting on you to hunt like everyone else, and
when you don't, you start to run into them more frequently,
and that is when you can really level up as
a white tail hunter, which is what we all want.
So do that and come back next week, because I'm
(17:05):
going to talk about summer scouting mistakes that most folks
make and how to avoid them. That's it for this episode.
I'm Tony Peterson and this has been the Wire to
Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light.
As always, thank you so much for your support for listening,
for reading the articles, for watching the shows, everything. We
truly appreciate it. Here at meat Eater. If you want
(17:27):
more hunting content, you know where to go. We put
up new articles, we put up new shows, we put
up new podcasts, just tons of new content every single
day over at the meeedeater dot com.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
Go check it out
Host
Mark Kenyon
Popular Podcasts
Cold Case Files: Miami
Joyce Sapp, 76; Bryan Herrera, 16; and Laurance Webb, 32—three Miami residents whose lives were stolen in brutal, unsolved homicides. Cold Case Files: Miami follows award‑winning radio host and City of Miami Police reserve officer Enrique Santos as he partners with the department’s Cold Case Homicide Unit, determined family members, and the advocates who spend their lives fighting for justice for the victims who can no longer fight for themselves.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.