September 9, 2025 • 16 mins
This week, Tony discusses how often the wind messes with our hunt plans, and what we can do about it to ensure we don't miss a single sit this season.
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 everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast,
which has brought to you by first Light. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about the reality
of dealing with the wind and how many hunters get
it wrong, especially in the early season when they're just
getting going a tink about the primary ways you know
that we spook deer. You know, we might get busted
looking at our phones and not really thinking about our movement.
(00:44):
Or we might you know, have a noisy ladder stand
that pops and squeaks when we move, But mostly we
just get winded. It's the reality of white tail hunting.
And if you can't figure out how to beat their noses,
you can't really figure out how to beat them. I
think it's that simple, even though it's not all that sense.
That's also what I'm going to talk about right now.
(01:10):
A few weeks ago, I sweated my way through northeastern
Nebraska while hanging stands and putting up blinds for a
rut hunt. A cameraman is a guy who looks like
he climbs mountains, and it turns out he does. Over
the last years, so my daughters and I have gotten
pretty into rock climbing documentaries and the idea that we
too might someday, I don't know, go to a climbing
(01:30):
gym where it's very safe and very climate controlled, and
maybe try the kindergarten training wheels on type of climbing
that isn't the real thing, but would make us feel
a little bit like it kind of was. So I
asked this guy a lot of questions, and I learned
a hell of a lot about rock climbing from him.
One thing he explained to me was how long it
took to successfully climb certain routes, which meant getting all
(01:52):
the way to the top without falling. I know that
sounds pretty self evident, but he explained to me how
often he falls, and how often a certain pitch or
certain route will just get under your skin and force
you to figure out each handhold and foothold, even if
it takes you ten years to master it. It was
super interesting and our conversation was top of mine when
I stared up at another crooked ass tree in another
(02:15):
spot in the Nebraska Sandhills and tried to not only
envision my route up the tree, but how the hell
i'd find two spots big and straight enough to hang
a hunter stand and a camera stand. Hanging double sets
in that area is a weird mixture of physical acrobatics
and mental acrobatics. It's so easy to get wrong. And
the big hang up I had, besides how unfriendly the
(02:36):
trees are in that region, was how often i'd make
a big concession win wise. This is something that's kind
of keeping me up at night because not only do
I need to go down there and try to shoot
a big one on film, I need Steve Vanella and
one of his buddies to have a really good hunt
down there too. There aren't enough setups one guy could
get up in the span of four or five days
to cover all wind options in all the spots I
(02:58):
wanted to hunt. So the voice in my head that
talks me through this shit would go like this, Well,
if you set up here, you can hunt a perfect
south wind, but you're screwed. If a colt front hits
and it comes out of the north, a west wind's
pretty rough too. Then I'd look at another tree and
the voice would say, well, if you set up here,
you can hunt a perfect north wind, But if a
warm front hits and it comes out of the south,
(03:19):
you're screwed. A west wind is rough.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Two.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
The thing about that region, and a hell of a
lot of the Midwest, is that it's all gritted out
in sections, or at least it was a long time ago.
The roads framed out are in just like square miles,
with each following the cardinal directions. The fence lines on
a lot of the properties, and certainly the one I
was on, follow those same directions. This means that the
deer off I'm going to travel north, south or east west,
(03:44):
and that means that a whole lot of the wind
you might get during the rut is going to favor
them heavily while keeping you in the danger zone. Besides
the reality of crooked ass trees, this is also why
I went with ground blinds more than I intended to.
You can get a little bit bigger margin of error
with ground blinds and wind, and that matters when you're
working with razor thin margins. To begin with, the way
(04:06):
that a lot of deer hunters approach this, at least
if they are on private land, is to have some
stands that are good for various winds and let the
wind direction of the day decide it for them. I
grew up hunting this way, and I can remember pretty
vividly my dad turning on the weather channel on TV
mind you, to check the predicted wind for the evening
or the following morning. Then we decide on who would
(04:27):
sit where based on the limited amount of stands that
we had available. As you can imagine, we weren't exactly
stacking up booners at that point in my life. We
would also go mobile sometimes, either to hang a new
set or just sit on the ground if we had
the itch or the wind was doing something funky like
blowing out of the east. Now maybe I only pay
attention to this because my job depends on it, but
(04:48):
I feel like at least fifty percent of the time
I have a chance to hunt, the weather makes it really,
really difficult. This goes for white tails, but just about
every critter out there, you know from elk and you
know mule's on down de peasants. In small game, it's
the nature of nature and it often sucks. But with
white tails we aren't entirely hopeless when it comes to
(05:09):
win and what our options are. For starters, you can
go by yourself a big old box blind and keep
yourself mostly out of the wind, but that's not fool proof.
You can buy a box blind and point an ozonics
unit out of the downwind facing window, and you're going
to increase your margin for error by quite a bit.
Not everyone wants to do that though, or has the means.
Ground blinds just to pop up hub style ones, as
(05:31):
I mentioned, can be a hedge against the win to
some degree. And again, if you use an ozonics unit
point out out of the blind in the right direction,
you can do pretty well on fooling a deer's number
one defense. But that means you have to hunt out
of ground blind and that isn't that much fun for
a lot of folks. So what do you do? Well?
You can spray down, do whatever you need to, but
(05:52):
you still need to play the win, and that's just
kind of how it goes. You can also try to
figure out how to get an advantage with the win
how to use it in a way where the deer,
you know, kind of think they have the wind in
their favor, but they don't. And that's a tight window
thing that I've talked about a lot. But once you
figure it out, it works really well. This is because
(06:13):
wil ad deer's nose is nearly perfect when it comes
to sniffing out big predators like you and I. It
doesn't work if they aren't generally directly downwind, or at
least in a spot where your scent stream flows no shit. Right, Well,
I want to talk about this part of the equation,
but not yet. Before that, I want to get into
my thought process for those Nebraska setups and what that
(06:33):
might mean for you. So let's take two of the
stands I'm most excited about. They both sit on really
good pinch points along the same river. They are both
on the same bank of that river, and on paper
might seem like they'd only work for the same wind directions.
But because a lot of rivers don't flow perfectly straight,
(06:54):
one of the stands is ideal for a south wind.
The bucks that cruise that spot will almost inevita passed
by within range of that setup and not get my wind,
because they'd have to be out in the middle of
the river to catch me. But if the wind isn't
pretty much straight out of the south, that spot is
going to become a real problem real fast. Now the
other stand set up, you know, it's maybe four hundred
(07:15):
yards downstream, so it essentially covers a lot of the
same deer travel because a cruising buck can cover a
quarter of a mile pretty quickly during the rut. But
the way that stand is set up, a south wind
will be a bad idea and a north wind will
be perfect. West for both of them is a maybe,
depending on how much the west favors the north or
(07:35):
the south. It's hard for me to imagine a situation
where either stand would be a good choice other than
maybe a dead calm day, which is unlikely in Nebraska.
So essentially I have two setups on the same river
to cover the same travel that are good for opposite winds,
And that's you know, how it pretty much goes. It's
(07:56):
twice the work, but also means that when the rut hits,
we are highly likely to be able to hunt that
travel route and not have to risk it or sit
something out. I remember reading an article years ago, probably
(08:18):
in Bowhunter magazine, from a guy who said that if
you found a really good spot, he'd set up four
stands so that he could hunt any wind direction. Now
I don't know anyone who is going to do that,
but thinking about it from that perspective, or at least
of having two setups to key off the same travel
or same pattern, it's not a bad idea. This is
also maybe the best argument out there for considering a
(08:40):
mobile strategy. But it's not enough to just buy a
saddle and some lightweight sticks. You also have to have
the mobile strategy mindset, which is often kind of misunderstood.
Let me give you an example from my last season
to sort of frame this up. When I was down
to the wire in North Dakota, I figured my best
bet was to hunt a cattle tank for any whitetail
buck that might come in for a drink or a
(09:03):
bite of something a little more lush due to the
tanks runoff in that very, very dry land. The problem
was that there was literally no good stand trees within
shooting range, and really not a whole lot of covered
to set up blind it. Now, I tried to sit
on the ground and cover a likely approach rout, but
that didn't work very well because what I thought was
a likely approach rout turned out to not be the case.
(09:25):
And while we saw a lot of deer, a hell
of a lot of them saw us, and even more
of them smelled us. I looked at every tree in
about three acres and every spot on the ground that
might allow us to play the wind and not get caught.
Now I ended up sitting in a spot that really sucked,
and it required me to mostly lie on my back
for most of the sit but it was really the
best option and it worked. It wasn't comfortable or overly enjoyable,
(09:49):
but it was the only way to play the wind
in that spot. And really, all the best tree standards,
sal gear, all the best scent killing products and all
that jazz just couldn't overcome the reality of having to
tuck in on the ground and cross my fingers because
it was just only going to work that way. And
this happens to me a lot, and it might be
because I'm going into more situations to set up on
(10:09):
the fly than a lot of hunters, But there is
a big time private land lesson here as well. But
this goes back to the mobile mindset thing. Think about
all of the data we have on weather and how
you can look at your individual stand site and see
exactly how the wind should be. Think about how often
you go in and realize it's not quite right. You
(10:30):
could push it, but that might be trouble. It often is,
especially if you're not hunting a place with a lot
of elevation to force very specific deer movement. The flatter
it is, the harder this stuff is, generally, but a
lot of people are scared to sit on the ground
or call an audible in the moment, and then they
push it with a setup because they reckon that being
in a tree is better than being on the ground,
(10:52):
which is kind of like how a lot of hunters
think that no matter what, hunting private land always trump's
hunting public. It doesn't. And when you learn that lesson,
it's like a whole new world of hunting opportunities opens
up before you. The best way to go about this
is to be prepared. I keep a go box in
my truck that has a saddle and sticks and whatever
(11:12):
I need to go mobile at any time. This is
a no brainer if you have the gear, because if
you pull up into the ditch along your farm and
the wind is not what you need, you can switch
gears and still be in the game. But I also
keep the stuff that's necessary to sit on the ground
in my go box too, And if I'm walking into
some place this kind of a question mark, I generally
(11:33):
have pruner's, a saw, and a cushion and off in
a gilly suit style jacket tucked into my pack. Those
few pieces of gear have saved a lot of my
private land hunts and have killed me some deer. The
thing about this is if you don't have an easy
option to play the wind better, it probably won't try.
And this is just the best way to get busted.
And if you haven't done this at least a few
(11:54):
dozen times in your deer hunting career, keep hunting. You're
gonna get there. I'd say maybe a parallel point worth
making here is to expect the wind to work against you. Now,
maybe that seems crazy, but it's so often true, and
it's not often super evident until you get settled into
your spot and realize that the wind is just not
doing what you expected. If that's the case, you have
(12:17):
to make the call on whether it's likely to switch
or likely to settle down to a non factor type
of level, or whether you need to just get down
and go for plan be. My general rule for how
to play the last one is how much faith I
have in the spot, and when I think I can
hunt it again. If it might not be for a
couple of weeks, I might just push it because it
might be worth it to just see. If I have
(12:40):
a few days in a row to hunt and I
really believe the spot could produce, I'm just not going
to risk blowing it out. The bad part about this
is that you have to see how it plays out
to really know. Hell, this might be the most important
thing to recognize about all of this. How does the
wind in your area act? You know, it's kind of
just like what kind of deer are you really hunting?
(13:00):
Do they look up in the trees all the time
or never? Are they jumpy as hell or as kind
of oblivious? Now with the wind, in some places, it'll
blow all night, just as fiercely as in the day.
But in a lot of places it'll die down hard
around sunset and it won't really get a lot of
steam going until a few hours into the morning. You know,
(13:22):
you've already had some shooting light pass. That North Dakota
hunt I mentioned early is always an interesting one for
me because the general area is almost always windy, but
being tucked into a deep river valley where the sun
will hide behind the cliffs long before you need to
climb down, means the wind often goes from one extreme
to the other in a pretty short time window. That
(13:42):
almost never happens quite the same in my home state hunts,
but it's important to know because, depending on seasonal timing,
I might not worry too much if the wind isn't
great until the last hour, because I know most of
the deer won't show up before that, so to muddy
the waters even further. The truth of this matter is
that you won't know how good or how bad your
strategy is until you see it through.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Now.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
The good news here, although I guess it's not really
good news, is that we often see it through out
of a lack of options, and that will show us
at least one outcome when the wind isn't perfect. And
when you do that, pay attention. If you don't see
much or anything, or you do spook some deer. It's
hard to argue with those data points. Next time, don't
(14:23):
push it, try something else, and when you do, pay
attention to how plan B shook out. Did it allow
you to tuck into the standing corn, to sit in
a fence row and have some action when your tree
stands are totally out of play that's important? Or did
it force you to throw up a mobile set somewhere
else and show you some other deer movement that you
didn't expect, Because that stuff is important too, and it
(14:43):
really helps you feel less helpful when the wind is
an ideal and you don't have another pre hung set
to go to. I realize this might sound like advice
coming from big properties where lots of setups are possible,
but this is in my experience at least crazy important
small parcels. Not blowing out your whole thirty acres is
a good thing if you want to enjoy your whole
(15:05):
season there. Anyway, as we get into the seasons across
the country, think about the win and how it will
inevitably be wrong for you quite a bit, and what
you're going to do about that. Then come back next
week because I'm going to talk about bad habits in
the white tail woods and how they cost us big
Bucks all the time. That's it for this week. I'm
(15:26):
Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast.
Thank you so much for listening and for all your support.
Maybe you're getting ready to drive across the country to
go hunt some meal deer, antelope, or something. Maybe you
just need something new to listen to on your way
to work. Go to the mediater dot com. Check out
all of the podcasts we have. You can listen to
(15:46):
a hell of a lot of hours of fresh content
every single week. If you want to watch some hunts,
maybe you want to read an article, maybe find a
new recipe for some grouse or something this fall. Whatever
the mediator dot com has you ever there as well,
go check it out, and again, thank you so much
for your support.
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 to Hunt Foundation's podcast,
which has brought to you by first Light. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about the reality
of dealing with the wind and how many hunters get
it wrong, especially in the early season when they're just
getting going a tink about the primary ways you know
that we spook deer. You know, we might get busted
looking at our phones and not really thinking about our movement.
(00:44):
Or we might you know, have a noisy ladder stand
that pops and squeaks when we move, But mostly we
just get winded. It's the reality of white tail hunting.
And if you can't figure out how to beat their noses,
you can't really figure out how to beat them. I
think it's that simple, even though it's not all that sense.
That's also what I'm going to talk about right now.
(01:10):
A few weeks ago, I sweated my way through northeastern
Nebraska while hanging stands and putting up blinds for a
rut hunt. A cameraman is a guy who looks like
he climbs mountains, and it turns out he does. Over
the last years, so my daughters and I have gotten
pretty into rock climbing documentaries and the idea that we
too might someday, I don't know, go to a climbing
(01:30):
gym where it's very safe and very climate controlled, and
maybe try the kindergarten training wheels on type of climbing
that isn't the real thing, but would make us feel
a little bit like it kind of was. So I
asked this guy a lot of questions, and I learned
a hell of a lot about rock climbing from him.
One thing he explained to me was how long it
took to successfully climb certain routes, which meant getting all
(01:52):
the way to the top without falling. I know that
sounds pretty self evident, but he explained to me how
often he falls, and how often a certain pitch or
certain route will just get under your skin and force
you to figure out each handhold and foothold, even if
it takes you ten years to master it. It was
super interesting and our conversation was top of mine when
I stared up at another crooked ass tree in another
(02:15):
spot in the Nebraska Sandhills and tried to not only
envision my route up the tree, but how the hell
i'd find two spots big and straight enough to hang
a hunter stand and a camera stand. Hanging double sets
in that area is a weird mixture of physical acrobatics
and mental acrobatics. It's so easy to get wrong. And
the big hang up I had, besides how unfriendly the
(02:36):
trees are in that region, was how often i'd make
a big concession win wise. This is something that's kind
of keeping me up at night because not only do
I need to go down there and try to shoot
a big one on film, I need Steve Vanella and
one of his buddies to have a really good hunt
down there too. There aren't enough setups one guy could
get up in the span of four or five days
to cover all wind options in all the spots I
(02:58):
wanted to hunt. So the voice in my head that
talks me through this shit would go like this, Well,
if you set up here, you can hunt a perfect
south wind, but you're screwed. If a colt front hits
and it comes out of the north, a west wind's
pretty rough too. Then I'd look at another tree and
the voice would say, well, if you set up here,
you can hunt a perfect north wind, But if a
warm front hits and it comes out of the south,
(03:19):
you're screwed. A west wind is rough.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Two.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
The thing about that region, and a hell of a
lot of the Midwest, is that it's all gritted out
in sections, or at least it was a long time ago.
The roads framed out are in just like square miles,
with each following the cardinal directions. The fence lines on
a lot of the properties, and certainly the one I
was on, follow those same directions. This means that the
deer off I'm going to travel north, south or east west,
(03:44):
and that means that a whole lot of the wind
you might get during the rut is going to favor
them heavily while keeping you in the danger zone. Besides
the reality of crooked ass trees, this is also why
I went with ground blinds more than I intended to.
You can get a little bit bigger margin of error
with ground blinds and wind, and that matters when you're
working with razor thin margins. To begin with, the way
(04:06):
that a lot of deer hunters approach this, at least
if they are on private land, is to have some
stands that are good for various winds and let the
wind direction of the day decide it for them. I
grew up hunting this way, and I can remember pretty
vividly my dad turning on the weather channel on TV
mind you, to check the predicted wind for the evening
or the following morning. Then we decide on who would
(04:27):
sit where based on the limited amount of stands that
we had available. As you can imagine, we weren't exactly
stacking up booners at that point in my life. We
would also go mobile sometimes, either to hang a new
set or just sit on the ground if we had
the itch or the wind was doing something funky like
blowing out of the east. Now maybe I only pay
attention to this because my job depends on it, but
(04:48):
I feel like at least fifty percent of the time
I have a chance to hunt, the weather makes it really,
really difficult. This goes for white tails, but just about
every critter out there, you know from elk and you
know mule's on down de peasants. In small game, it's
the nature of nature and it often sucks. But with
white tails we aren't entirely hopeless when it comes to
(05:09):
win and what our options are. For starters, you can
go by yourself a big old box blind and keep
yourself mostly out of the wind, but that's not fool proof.
You can buy a box blind and point an ozonics
unit out of the downwind facing window, and you're going
to increase your margin for error by quite a bit.
Not everyone wants to do that though, or has the means.
Ground blinds just to pop up hub style ones, as
(05:31):
I mentioned, can be a hedge against the win to
some degree. And again, if you use an ozonics unit
point out out of the blind in the right direction,
you can do pretty well on fooling a deer's number
one defense. But that means you have to hunt out
of ground blind and that isn't that much fun for
a lot of folks. So what do you do? Well?
You can spray down, do whatever you need to, but
(05:52):
you still need to play the win, and that's just
kind of how it goes. You can also try to
figure out how to get an advantage with the win
how to use it in a way where the deer,
you know, kind of think they have the wind in
their favor, but they don't. And that's a tight window
thing that I've talked about a lot. But once you
figure it out, it works really well. This is because
(06:13):
wil ad deer's nose is nearly perfect when it comes
to sniffing out big predators like you and I. It
doesn't work if they aren't generally directly downwind, or at
least in a spot where your scent stream flows no shit. Right, Well,
I want to talk about this part of the equation,
but not yet. Before that, I want to get into
my thought process for those Nebraska setups and what that
(06:33):
might mean for you. So let's take two of the
stands I'm most excited about. They both sit on really
good pinch points along the same river. They are both
on the same bank of that river, and on paper
might seem like they'd only work for the same wind directions.
But because a lot of rivers don't flow perfectly straight,
(06:54):
one of the stands is ideal for a south wind.
The bucks that cruise that spot will almost inevita passed
by within range of that setup and not get my wind,
because they'd have to be out in the middle of
the river to catch me. But if the wind isn't
pretty much straight out of the south, that spot is
going to become a real problem real fast. Now the
other stand set up, you know, it's maybe four hundred
(07:15):
yards downstream, so it essentially covers a lot of the
same deer travel because a cruising buck can cover a
quarter of a mile pretty quickly during the rut. But
the way that stand is set up, a south wind
will be a bad idea and a north wind will
be perfect. West for both of them is a maybe,
depending on how much the west favors the north or
(07:35):
the south. It's hard for me to imagine a situation
where either stand would be a good choice other than
maybe a dead calm day, which is unlikely in Nebraska.
So essentially I have two setups on the same river
to cover the same travel that are good for opposite winds,
And that's you know, how it pretty much goes. It's
(07:56):
twice the work, but also means that when the rut hits,
we are highly likely to be able to hunt that
travel route and not have to risk it or sit
something out. I remember reading an article years ago, probably
(08:18):
in Bowhunter magazine, from a guy who said that if
you found a really good spot, he'd set up four
stands so that he could hunt any wind direction. Now
I don't know anyone who is going to do that,
but thinking about it from that perspective, or at least
of having two setups to key off the same travel
or same pattern, it's not a bad idea. This is
also maybe the best argument out there for considering a
(08:40):
mobile strategy. But it's not enough to just buy a
saddle and some lightweight sticks. You also have to have
the mobile strategy mindset, which is often kind of misunderstood.
Let me give you an example from my last season
to sort of frame this up. When I was down
to the wire in North Dakota, I figured my best
bet was to hunt a cattle tank for any whitetail
buck that might come in for a drink or a
(09:03):
bite of something a little more lush due to the
tanks runoff in that very, very dry land. The problem
was that there was literally no good stand trees within
shooting range, and really not a whole lot of covered
to set up blind it. Now, I tried to sit
on the ground and cover a likely approach rout, but
that didn't work very well because what I thought was
a likely approach rout turned out to not be the case.
(09:25):
And while we saw a lot of deer, a hell
of a lot of them saw us, and even more
of them smelled us. I looked at every tree in
about three acres and every spot on the ground that
might allow us to play the wind and not get caught.
Now I ended up sitting in a spot that really sucked,
and it required me to mostly lie on my back
for most of the sit but it was really the
best option and it worked. It wasn't comfortable or overly enjoyable,
(09:49):
but it was the only way to play the wind
in that spot. And really, all the best tree standards,
sal gear, all the best scent killing products and all
that jazz just couldn't overcome the reality of having to
tuck in on the ground and cross my fingers because
it was just only going to work that way. And
this happens to me a lot, and it might be
because I'm going into more situations to set up on
(10:09):
the fly than a lot of hunters, But there is
a big time private land lesson here as well. But
this goes back to the mobile mindset thing. Think about
all of the data we have on weather and how
you can look at your individual stand site and see
exactly how the wind should be. Think about how often
you go in and realize it's not quite right. You
(10:30):
could push it, but that might be trouble. It often is,
especially if you're not hunting a place with a lot
of elevation to force very specific deer movement. The flatter
it is, the harder this stuff is, generally, but a
lot of people are scared to sit on the ground
or call an audible in the moment, and then they
push it with a setup because they reckon that being
in a tree is better than being on the ground,
(10:52):
which is kind of like how a lot of hunters
think that no matter what, hunting private land always trump's
hunting public. It doesn't. And when you learn that lesson,
it's like a whole new world of hunting opportunities opens
up before you. The best way to go about this
is to be prepared. I keep a go box in
my truck that has a saddle and sticks and whatever
(11:12):
I need to go mobile at any time. This is
a no brainer if you have the gear, because if
you pull up into the ditch along your farm and
the wind is not what you need, you can switch
gears and still be in the game. But I also
keep the stuff that's necessary to sit on the ground
in my go box too, And if I'm walking into
some place this kind of a question mark, I generally
(11:33):
have pruner's, a saw, and a cushion and off in
a gilly suit style jacket tucked into my pack. Those
few pieces of gear have saved a lot of my
private land hunts and have killed me some deer. The
thing about this is if you don't have an easy
option to play the wind better, it probably won't try.
And this is just the best way to get busted.
And if you haven't done this at least a few
(11:54):
dozen times in your deer hunting career, keep hunting. You're
gonna get there. I'd say maybe a parallel point worth
making here is to expect the wind to work against you. Now,
maybe that seems crazy, but it's so often true, and
it's not often super evident until you get settled into
your spot and realize that the wind is just not
doing what you expected. If that's the case, you have
(12:17):
to make the call on whether it's likely to switch
or likely to settle down to a non factor type
of level, or whether you need to just get down
and go for plan be. My general rule for how
to play the last one is how much faith I
have in the spot, and when I think I can
hunt it again. If it might not be for a
couple of weeks, I might just push it because it
might be worth it to just see. If I have
(12:40):
a few days in a row to hunt and I
really believe the spot could produce, I'm just not going
to risk blowing it out. The bad part about this
is that you have to see how it plays out
to really know. Hell, this might be the most important
thing to recognize about all of this. How does the
wind in your area act? You know, it's kind of
just like what kind of deer are you really hunting?
(13:00):
Do they look up in the trees all the time
or never? Are they jumpy as hell or as kind
of oblivious? Now with the wind, in some places, it'll
blow all night, just as fiercely as in the day.
But in a lot of places it'll die down hard
around sunset and it won't really get a lot of
steam going until a few hours into the morning. You know,
(13:22):
you've already had some shooting light pass. That North Dakota
hunt I mentioned early is always an interesting one for
me because the general area is almost always windy, but
being tucked into a deep river valley where the sun
will hide behind the cliffs long before you need to
climb down, means the wind often goes from one extreme
to the other in a pretty short time window. That
(13:42):
almost never happens quite the same in my home state hunts,
but it's important to know because, depending on seasonal timing,
I might not worry too much if the wind isn't
great until the last hour, because I know most of
the deer won't show up before that, so to muddy
the waters even further. The truth of this matter is
that you won't know how good or how bad your
strategy is until you see it through.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Now.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
The good news here, although I guess it's not really
good news, is that we often see it through out
of a lack of options, and that will show us
at least one outcome when the wind isn't perfect. And
when you do that, pay attention. If you don't see
much or anything, or you do spook some deer. It's
hard to argue with those data points. Next time, don't
(14:23):
push it, try something else, and when you do, pay
attention to how plan B shook out. Did it allow
you to tuck into the standing corn, to sit in
a fence row and have some action when your tree
stands are totally out of play that's important? Or did
it force you to throw up a mobile set somewhere
else and show you some other deer movement that you
didn't expect, Because that stuff is important too, and it
(14:43):
really helps you feel less helpful when the wind is
an ideal and you don't have another pre hung set
to go to. I realize this might sound like advice
coming from big properties where lots of setups are possible,
but this is in my experience at least crazy important
small parcels. Not blowing out your whole thirty acres is
a good thing if you want to enjoy your whole
(15:05):
season there. Anyway, as we get into the seasons across
the country, think about the win and how it will
inevitably be wrong for you quite a bit, and what
you're going to do about that. Then come back next
week because I'm going to talk about bad habits in
the white tail woods and how they cost us big
Bucks all the time. That's it for this week. I'm
(15:26):
Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast.
Thank you so much for listening and for all your support.
Maybe you're getting ready to drive across the country to
go hunt some meal deer, antelope, or something. Maybe you
just need something new to listen to on your way
to work. Go to the mediater dot com. Check out
all of the podcasts we have. You can listen to
(15:46):
a hell of a lot of hours of fresh content
every single week. If you want to watch some hunts,
maybe you want to read an article, maybe find a
new recipe for some grouse or something this fall. Whatever
the mediator dot com has you ever there as well,
go check it out, and again, thank you so much
for your support.
Host
Mark Kenyon
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.