Episode Transcript
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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 is brought to you by First Light. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson. In today's episode is all about understanding the
subtle and not so subtle changes in the deer woods
and how this can help you kill more mature bucks.
All right, all right, all right. This is a fun
one for me because it taps into something I deal
with in the deer woods all year long. It's probably
(00:41):
the thing that holds me back more than anything. Change
in its many, many forms. It happens throughout the season,
it happens from year to year, and it happens whether
we consent to it or not. It's just the reality
of the world, and the best hunters I know learn
how to deal with it in a positive way, which
is what this episode is all about. A couple of
(01:03):
weeks ago, I was in the gym just picking up
heavy stuff and putting it down like a dozen or
so other gym goers who are all really just trying
to look a little better naked. I guess when I
picked up my phone to choose another song to listen to.
This is probably crazy, and I almost hesitate to say it,
but I sort of feel that music influences my entire
life now in the context of lifting weights. This is
(01:25):
pretty easy to understand for a fellow wired like me.
I probably wouldn't see those sick gains with a Z
if I spent my gym time listening to Whitney Houston's
greatest hits, or I don't know, some band like Coldplay
or something. I need heavy music laced with lots of anger,
lots of drop D guitar riffs, and just something that
shakes your guts loose a little. My affinity toward music
(01:48):
goes way beyond the obvious spots, though, to the point
where I'm pretty superstitious about the music I played before
a hunt and after. Sometimes the vibes are just wrong,
and when you get into the woods, that sticks with you,
and the dear no show so for days at a time,
and you just have to switch things up. Sometimes you
play something with a nice tribal drum beat, go out
and arrow a deer, and then get to listen to
(02:08):
something celebratory on the way back. My girls and I
did this recently, where we drove out to Pearl Jam's
song WMA and we left the woods with a dead
spike and filters. Hey man, nice shot blasting away, which
has become our tradition when the blood trail ends in
hugs and not question marks. I freaking love music, and
I know a lot of you do too, so I'm
(02:29):
always looking for something new, which brings me back to
that gym session. I went to my phone and saw
that my YouTube algorithm had fed me a band called
dead frog Face. I try to listen to a few
new songs or a few new bands every day, and
the name of that band gave me the push I
needed to listen because I just like dead frog Face.
It was a song called bad and boy was it good,
(02:51):
you know, like outlaw country type of good if you're
wondering the genre now. I listened to that song and
a few of their other songs all day long, and
I had the feeling, you know, that really really good
feeling of having found another band that will make this
suburb life a little more tolerable. That night, I thought
about one of their songs and I decided to look
up the lyrics, but there were none. There's no information
(03:12):
on dead frog face anywhere, no wiki, not a you
know a band member list, nothing. I got a weird
feeling before heading to Spotify to see if they were
on there, and that's where I read the band description
and figured out that it's all AI. I felt well,
not great about it. I'm not a great negotiator, so
(03:33):
it kind of reminded me of having to sell something
or go back and forth with my boss on a
raise and then realizing that I could have done much better,
like I got outwitted, outplayed or whatever. It instantly made
me not want to listen to that band ever again,
and I've mostly stopped. But you know what, that shit
isn't going away. This thing I do here where I
(03:55):
write these scripts and then I read them for you
by the week, this is going to go away too.
Probably in the not too distant future, you'll be able
to dial up your own Foundation style podcasts, but they'll
be customizable to your region, to your hunting style, to
your sense of humor, to whatever, and what sucks is
they'll probably be really good. I'm positive that most of
(04:16):
us at a certain age view this new reality with
some level of disdain and suspicion. But you know what,
it doesn't matter. This change is coming and it doesn't
care about our feelings or the fact that it could
take our jobs in an instant. It just is the
next thing, and after that there'll be something else. That
whole experience got me thinking about change and what it
means to us. Most humans are pretty resistant to change
(04:39):
because we are generally pessimistic at heart. This manifests itself
in the deer woods in a million different ways. One
that I bitch about a lot is the talk which
has weirdly died down some lately on too many people
in the woods, the elkwoods, the deer woods, the whatever woods.
The people complaining the most really want two things. They
(05:02):
want easier hunting, which is really the hunting they think
they can remember having before everyone else showed up and
ruined it for them. In some ways, they can complain
enough and get a result on that front, but it
won't change the fact that more and more residents are
also being pushed into the fewer spots that are left
to hunt. The change that's happening in the woods right now,
that's a big one, and it's one that is just
(05:24):
like we are all collectively losing ground to development and
people who have the means to tie up land financially,
and that means that unless we figure out how to
create more public ground, we are all kind of in
the same boat here. Now, another big change that's happening
right now that affects an awful lot of us is
one like crossbow inclusion. Fight at all you want, my friends,
(05:45):
but over a long enough timeline, the battle is already decided.
What that means to us as individuals varies a lot.
Some folks will jump ship instantly for an easier weapon,
some will hold out for a while, and a small
percentage will avoid it entirely. But over time, the change
keeps going one way, and it isn't the way that
it was before they really became a part of the conversation.
(06:08):
Change is happening all the time, on a huge scale
and at a subtle, almost imperceptible scale. It's always happening,
and the more you can recognize it for what it
is and react to it for what you think it
will be the better your season will go. So what
does this all mean. We'll think about it this way.
If you don't know what has changed, you won't know
(06:30):
how to react. I think this is a huge problem
with hunters in general, and a huge reason why so
many folks ride a dead program year after year. Let
me give you an example from my life. Recently, I
spent some time up in the north Woods, Wisconsin hunting
public land. Some spots are brand new to me this year,
while others I've hunted for almost a decade now. One
(06:51):
spot in particular, I've killed a few of my best
bucks on. It's a parcel. I took one of my
daughters in for a rut hunt last year and got
oh so close to a really great deer. Now. I
went into that property this spring the scout and have
been in there maybe parts of six days this season.
Last year, it was covered in buck sign and when
I say covered, I mean covered more than I've ever
(07:13):
seen up there or almost anywhere. It felt like I
was in Iowa on private land. Honestly, while my first
hunt there this season, I walked into a creek bottom
that I haven't hunted in a few years and was
absolutely struck by how thick it was. It was like
when you haven't seen someone in ten years and you
think about how much they've aged, and then you quickly
realize that they are thinking the same thing about you,
(07:36):
But it doesn't register quite the same way. That property
was logged right before I started hunting it. So it
has gone through major changes in the last decade, and
it's at the right level of thickness to soak up
a whole bunch of deer who would rather hide in
the thick shit than the generally far more open public
land around it. The access roads have become largely blocked too,
(07:57):
with falling trees and just overgone brush, and that has
changed the game in there as well. That change might
seem welcome, because now you have a high concentration of
deer in a small ish spot. That's huge, But hunting
it is a hell of a lot different than it
used to be. It's not like I can brush hog
(08:25):
access trails to stand trees in there, and with no
trail cameras and no tree trimming for shooting lanes and whatnot,
it has become a really challenging spot. But I can
look at it like it's not what it used to
be and be sad about that, or I can just
try to figure out how to use it to my advantage.
Now that's what I'm going to do this season, and
I can safely say so far it's totally kicking my ass.
(08:47):
But there is a lot of season left, and I
think the bucks will keep moving in there as the
rut gets closer, and I'm going to just try to
use that to my advantage. In fact, I almost killed
the maturre doo in there recently, which is a huge
win in that part of the world for me, and
the whole reason I almost killed her is because the
oak trees in this tiny spot between swamps were just
raining down the good stuff. She was betted in the
(09:09):
thick shit that's almost impossible to hunt. But on the
edge of that, I found some of the best here today,
gone tomorrow food you can find in early October. And
if I hadn't screwed it up by making just a
bit too much noise when I tried to draw on her,
she'd likely be in my freezer instead of well wherever
she is right now, probably cleaning up the last of
(09:29):
the acorns while I sit at the stupid desk believe
you me. I'm going to file away that encounter for
future hunts, and at some point that's going to be
a dead program too, most likely. But for now, all
of those changes, they are forcing me as a hunter
to scout more and do a few more observation sits
and just react to a new world in the same
old place, if that makes any sense. The thing about
(09:51):
change is that you're going to be forced to deal
with it, whether you want to or not. We see
this with weather all the time. I spent all last
bitching about south winds and how my stand setups for
north and west winds were mostly worthless for most of
the season. Then you know what happened. The fricking wind
just kept right on blowing from the south, and this
(10:12):
year there has been more east in it than usual,
which is kind of like a Mike Tyson upper cut.
To your delegates, a simple wind change means one of
a few things for us. We choose to not hunt
because we have no good setup, or at least one
that's not good enough for that wind, you know, probably
the most common reaction there. Or we hunt a setup
(10:32):
that we talk ourselves into because we want to go
out even though we know that it'll probably be a
train wreck, or we grab a mobile setup and head
out to make something happen in the less than ideal conditions.
You know, that cause a lot of other folks to
just stay away or settle. It really is that simple,
and we all know what the best approach probably is.
(10:52):
It's so easy to not take the best approach, though.
I recently had a conversation with a good buddy of
mine who has a killer delease. I'm honestly super jealous
of him for it. Anyway, he knows that eventually that
lease is going to go away. He says as much often,
but recently I also said he'll probably just mostly fezan
hunt when the lease goes away, because it'll be too
(11:15):
hard to go hunt someplace that isn't as good. Now,
that's an understandable reaction, sort of, Well not really, but
I see where he's coming from. The thing is that
change is coming, It's plain as day now. Instead of
just waiting for it to change the arc of his
life as a deer hunter forever, a better bet would
be to start looking to hedge that loss somehow. Now.
(11:36):
That would be through tapping his network to find a
spot looking for another small lease to get to learn
scouting public land something. But he probably won't because he
doesn't have to yet. And that's a very understandable thing.
Most of us don't want to do extra work for
any reason, and I'm not being facetious there. I had
a cameraman earlier this summer mentioned to me that he
feels like he was born to be retired, and I
(11:58):
don't know if I've ever related to anything more. This
is a hard thing to do, but looking at change
like a negative by default is bad for all of us.
When I was fourteen, my dad and I lost our
two private hunting spots that were just awesome. It sucked
so much. Then we picked up a farm that I
still hunt to this day. And I can tell you
(12:19):
with certainty that you wouldn't be listening to me talk
about deer every week if that hadn't happened. It forced
me to be a mobile hunter before that was a thing,
and it put me in the woods so much. Another
time when change really really sucked for me was when
the company I was working for got bought out by
a private equity firm. When forty percent of the company
(12:39):
got let go, I wasn't in the lucky sixty percent,
and I realized that my dream of staying in the
hunting industry wasn't on nearly as firm of ground as
I thought. That forced me into the freelance world, where
I said screw it and put my mind toward figuring
out public land deer. That changed my life professionally, but
also resulted in me just finding out the exact kind
(13:00):
of hunting that I love more than anything else. It
was a horrible personal change that ended up turning positive,
but that transition wasn't quick or easy. So what's changing
in your world? I bet you feel like you have
less free time than you ever have. I bet you
feel like a lot of your time on stand isn't
being used in a way that makes you feel as
(13:21):
good as it should. I bet you're sick of the
new neighbors, or tired of never having a shooter on camera,
or a lot of things. The world and the deer
woods are in constant flux. We are in the October
low right now, which is a perceived change in deer
behavior where all the bucks go nocturnal and there's no
good reason to hunt right This change happens every year,
(13:43):
and those bucks are still out there, and they're still killable,
but they won't be killable if you don't hunt, or
you keep hunting, maybe the same old field edge stands.
You can see this change coming, just like a full
moon or the weather that the ten day forecast tells
you is coming. You can see the new development being
built next to your deer property. You can feel the
(14:04):
free time slipping away by the year as the kids
get more into sports and other activities, and for some reason,
our jobs become such an outsized part of our lives
instead of just being a means for us to trade
forty hours a week for a life that is tolerable enough.
Some of these changes are super predictable, some aren't. What
they all are are just challenges to overcome. You think
(14:26):
you can't kill a mature buck right now, Well what
are you going to do to make that happen? If
you're checking your cameras a few times a day and
nothing more, then you will never beat the lull. You
think the rut won't be as fun this year because
you have less time to hunt and there are a
couple of new hunters who have permission to trump around
on your favorite farm. Well that change might mean that
you have to be far more efficient with the time
(14:48):
that you do have. Maybe two or three all days
sits all you can get instead of a week of
you know, a morning sit here and an evening sit there.
So much of life is beyond our control, so it's
mostly about how we react to that stuff. It's easy
to bemoan what once was, like how you remember the
elk woods being devoid of other hunters while the bulls
(15:09):
screamed their heads off two hundred yards away from the trailhead.
But you don't get that world anymore unless you could
write a giant check. How do you go out there
and find them now that the change has happened. How
do you find the deer when the woods aren't what
you want them to be. That's the challenge for all
of us, and it's often just a matter of perspective.
The people who kill big bucks consistently, at least on
(15:32):
ground they can't tightly control. They look at that stuff
like just more variables to plug into the equation. They
work through them. They scout, they hunt as much as possible,
and just try to figure out what those changes mean
to the deer, because in the end that's what really
matters if you want to fill more tags, So think
about that. Think about coming back next week because I'm
(15:53):
going to talk about the value of buck sign and
what it means in the weeks leading up to the
pre rut. That's it for this episode. I'm Tony Peterson
and this has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast.
I want to thank you all for your support. You
show up for us every week, and I know you
don't hear this enough, but I mean this from my heart.
We would be nothing without you guys, So your support
(16:14):
is everything, So thank you for that. If you want
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