00:00:00 Speaker 1: What's up, y'all. I'm Casey and I'm Tyler and this is another Big Buck breakdown from the Element podcast, brought to you by Exodus Trail Cameras. All right, so now on the phone, we've got Zack Farrenball from the Hunt in Public. Dude, you sound tired. I'm finally catching out by Okay. I was up for about twenty four hours the night that I got the buck in Pennsylvania, so I was behind front a little bit there, but finally starting to catch up and just getting work done so I can get back out there. Yeah, yeah, that you know. We just talked to one of your counterparts, Aaron Warburton, and uh, he's kind of in the same boat. He's like, I'm just working, you know, just trying to get back out there. So it's like, you know, it's a battle. Yeah, it's constant battle. That's a but that's life for most guys. You know, they're working so they can go take time and go hunting this time of year and getting into the rut and that kind of thing and so um. But you recently had some success on a pretty cool buck and a pretty cool state man, Like you don't see a ton of bucks that size coming from p A and I know the ones that the people that are killing them are being pretty hush about it because they do exist there. But uh, tell us a little bit about what happened, man, Well, I was, Yeah, it was a rare situation where really the first place that I walked into when I got to Pennsylvania and I had kind of been doing some road scouting with Greg and on that first day and just kind of checking out the area, getting a field for things, and we finally decided to walk into a spot right out of the gate. We're seeing a good sign and kind of backtrack the sign to the spot where I had originally pinned, you know, ten or so days before the hunt, just you know, map scouting from home, and got back onto the ridge where we're hoping to find deer. And it was a probably about an eight hundred yards long ridge from where it ran into private and got into like like kind of a fescue field up on top, all the way to where it played out at the bottom was about eight hundred yards. On one side of the ridge, there was just a select cut with some um, you know, tall vegetation growing up, but also you know kind of that, you know, young growth, re growth coming back from the cut, but there was also some mature oaks in there that were dropping a ton of acorns, mostly red oak. And then the other side of the ridge split right now in the middle hadn't been cut, so um, you know, we kind of just scattered our way back in there and saw a really really good buck sign right at the gate first spot we were in, so you know, I was like, man, I feel like as big of a ridge as this is, this is we can just keep hunting it until um, you know, basically we've been signed drives up or we get one. And I don't do that very often, but I would say once every year, every couple of years, there's a spot that just it just makes sense to me and I just can't let it go. It's happened, oh, probably three or four times in my life. I've just found a spot that I you know, no matter what I'm like, I just I just know it's going to play out here. A lot of times I do a lot of bouncing around. I talk about that often. Um in my you know, my strategy, off and bounce and cover a bunch of ground. But here it just looks good and compared to what everybody else was seeing, you know, as the public Man challenge, So we had multiple groups outcome thing and compared to what everybody's seeing, it just continue to confirm that I should just keep hunting here. So ultimately we weren't really seeing much as far as actually seeing deer just because of hutting off the ground. You know a lot of times you can't see very far in general, but just the nature of that forest being select cut and then um, even the you know, uncut stuff was still pretty thick. Visibility was low. We weren't seeing many deer, but we were just seeing tons and tons of fresh bucks. And I mean every time we go in there, it's like there's something new, there's some new clue, whether it be a fresh rub or a fresh scrape or um, just big buck tracks in general that were smoking fresh. You know, we were seeing um all this sign right after rainy days for the first several days, so it's like, you know, it's fresh. You know they're in here somehow, we're just barely missing them. Just kept you know what I would call full court press in this place and just hunting at you know, is hitting different little pockets every day, just trying something new, you know, never hunting the same exact spot, and just continuing to learn about it. And as kind of the week progressed, I was squeezing in on the center of where I really thought these deer were and we ended up going in and the I guess it was a day before we shot the buff, and Aaron and I were running a little bit late, which kind of helped us in a in a weird way where we were kind of walking down a logging road at first light, and but that kind of put us in the middle of where these gears were really spending the majority of other daylight time, and at the time we weren't totally sure where that's where they were, but this confirmed it. We saw a nice buck and I think it's the one that I ended up shooting. I'm not positive, I never will be, but um, it looked like a pretty good buck and he was following a dough and he skirted around us, but he wasn't very far from us and we never bumped him. We heard him grunting moving around us, and either him or another buck but heard grunting around us, so kind of confirmed that they were in this cut well the following morning and I went back in there and of course saw another fresh buck track, really big track that was sinking deep in some really hard kind of gravel. Almost he was just so heavy he was digging in there, and I think, feeling really good. It's like, man, we're right behind these things, like they got to be close. And ended up hearing the deer kind of go up and around us that morning, we never laying eyes on them. So that evening we went back in and honestly, we were looking back on it. We were gonna we were planning on playing it too safe. We were like, oh, we'll go up to the top and kind of get on the edge of the transition of the the cut and the you know, uncut forest, and we'll sit up on top and we'll kind of wait to get super aggressive till tomorrow, which was which was Saturday, and it was going to be a temperature drop, like a big, big cold front. But from that point on Friday afternoon until I don't know until the basically Sunday, the temperature was going to be just constantly dropping, staying standing down low in the fifties. So it was kind of the beginning of the front. Coming in. We had a little bit of wind, and we got up there to where we were hoping to two hunt, which was pretty dang far from where, like I said, this is a big eight yard ridge. It was pretty far from where we had hunted in the morning and heard that deer and saw that big track, which again, looking back on it, I mean it was kind of silly to leave that spot in the first place. But we got up to the top and we bumped into well, we could see up ahead of us, this other hunter, so we just backed off before we got too close to him, you know, and circled all the way back down around at the end of the ridge where we had hunted that morning, and got closer to where we thought we heard a deer and saw fresh track and ended up it's essentially just having it all kind of click in that moment where we got up in a little bit higher up on the ridge and we had been that morning, and we started to find some big beds on the logging road where there was some tall grass, and you saw these big beds, saw a lot of cross trails. But I started, like I said, it was clicking that he's deer using these big oak trees and going from oak tree to oak tree. But then they're also using the path of the least resistance on this log trail. So right in front of us there was this big x. There was multiple trails and multiple logging roads that came together right in one spot. Intend and I just basically plopped down in the logging road using tall grasses or cover, and we were about twenty yards from that intersecting trail, and there's all kinds of good fresh tracks on it. We can hear acorns dropping all around us and really behind us on the down you know, down wind and down the hill where our thermals were pulling. There really weren't that many oaks, so we assumed if you were moving around, they'd be up in front of us kind of using that cross like. Sure enough, it gets to be about well. And at this point too, because of having to make that adjustment from moving around that other guy, you know, we were running a little late. So this was oh, I don't know, probably oh an hour before dark. We got finally settled in, and about a half hour after sitting there, we heard a deer moving and it sounds like it pretty much just got up or not moved far from you know where it was originally bedded, and it moved down from our left and got right above that logging road. Seemed like it was just about to step into our shooting lane. My heart's my heart's up. I don't know what it is, necessarily, but you know, it sounds like one deer, assuming it's a buck, and heart rates going up, and I'm about to feel like I'm about to draw all you know, about to see this thing. And I thought I even caught a glimpse of a time, and then all of a sudden it stopped and nothing and nothing happened. It didn't take a step, I mean, I'm not kidding, not a single step. And I couldn't hear it crunch and acorns. I couldn't hear it doing anything. But like I said, I mean, it's it's for sure inside of forty yards. I think it was probably inside of thirty yards. And the whole time, in my head, I keep thinking, man, I bet you that's just a buck that just walked and neither bedded or there's just straight up standing there looking at the intersection of these trails, just waiting to hear or see another deer to confirm that it's time for him to come out of the cover, because I mean, like I said, we're inside a ball range of this thing. We can't see him, and eventually I just got to the point where it's like, man, I don't know that he's gonna make a move until he sees something. And we're running low on time, so maybe ten minutes left, I decided, and and Ted me are sitting beside each other, and it's just so calm that, like we can't even talk because this thing is right here and I don't want to blow it by trying to communicate, so which is rare for me. You know, usually I'm talking my crazy. I've even been noticing some comments of like I wish that would just be quiet and whatever. You know, I talk a lot, but I was struggling and talk to Ted because I was like I want to, I want to, you know, basically, I wanted to tell him like I think the things still here, and eventually just like breathe the words I think it's still right there, and he breathed back and said me too. So I decided to grunt. I grunted a couple of times, just nothing major, just you know, kind of your general grunts and started scraping the ground. You know, one of the advantages of hunting off the ground is that you can make very realistic calling sounds, you know, versus you know, if you're to stay in you don't have as much ability, at least easy ability to really make dear sounds. I really I've heard a lot of deer making scrapes in my life, and it's a very distinct noise, and I just try to mimic that. It's just a whi you know, what they're when they're puffing the ground, tearing up that scrape on the ground. And that's what I did. Um And just like I said, we're out it a couple of times, kind of soft nothing nothing really happened for a couple of minutes, and to be honest, I started I started getting impatient. I kind of started moving a little bit like if you're watching the video, if you ever watched the video, I like him starting to check the wind, like I'm moving a little bit more than I probably should have. But luckily he just couldn't see anything either. Well, after a couple of minutes, he started kind of huffing and puffing up in there and making a rub You could hear him. You can hear him making some weird noises with his mouth, not necessarily grunting, but just going and kind of coughing and rubbing. And you'd see a tree moving up there, and I went out to buck, assuming it's a decent one, you know, And it was. It was getting I mean, it was, it was. It was darker than what you would think for the time that it was. You know, there was still you know, legal time left, like a good chunk of it, like probably six seven minutes, but the way that the sun was going down behind us, it just made it so hard to like look into that backlit stuff, you know what I mean. And that deer was right up there. He jumped down into the logging road and he had his head down and from my angle, I couldn't even see what the deer was. But I mean, it's again, it's doing. It's a buff and he's grunting and he's now on the logging road with us at twenty yards. But just the way that he jumped down and he got low and from my angle I just couldn't see. So he starts grunting and he starts walking ride at us, like, well, I better draw my bow, I guess, because now he's like seventeen yards and closing, you know. So I just calmly drew my bow back anchored and just kept watching this thing continue to walk right at us. Now again, I literally have no idea what this deer is. I don't know if he's a dirty pointer or if he's a you know, big old buck. And I keeps walking, keeps walking, keeps walking, gets the three yards away from me ted and he pops his head up and I was like, oh yep, And he was slightly quartering too, and I didn't feel confident at that moment. I mean, I'm not saying that I wouldn't do it in the right situation, but in that moment, it feels super confident in the quartering too, just because low light and there's a little bit of grass, because I was staying low and I couldn't tell exactly where I wanted to put that pin. But then he took a half step back and gave me a straight on frontal shot, and I settled my pen and at three yards it shot him and down the hill. What's that? Which pen? Did you settle? All of them? That? I just did. I really just did my best to like center and then hold it and really just you know, follow through with it. And so one of the first episodes we ever did was with Zach actually and um, you know, despite bad phone service, we were able to kind of have some kind of a relationship together over the last few years. The thing is about having a good friend is that you get to brag when you shoot a big buck and so off the air, I actually talked to that quite a bit about the Illinois buck that I shot recently. Uh that is a frankly a giant and I've just been super blessed to have that happen. But you know, a big part of that story is the fact that we were able to have a route of travel to and from that scrape by using excess trail cameras. So we had to lift too there that we put over that scrape this summer, and we were able to see that those deer were coming in in a particular direction that I was able to set up to know that deer would be coming by me and giving me a broadside shot. So it was very effective for me. I was able to shoot a big buck. And you can go check out that on YouTube as well. We've got a video of it, so go check it out and also check out Excess outdoor gear dot com to see more of their Trull camera lineup. He ran down the hill and ended up hitting one long liver and it wasn't it wasn't exactly the best shot that I've ever made, and not overly proud of it. But the shot, but you know, as far as the hunt in the situation, it it just it was something that you know, that shot I'll say, I will say this, I guess that shot is a shot I talked about often, and I think if you have the right arrow set up and you know that's the right situation, I you know, it's one of those controversial things. I think that frontal shot on anything in the right situation is totally ethical. I just missed the mark, just like you could at any you know, any old broadside shots. I just slightly missed and and we still got the buck. I just wish it would have been a little bit a little bit more efficient than that, because you know, it's just not the ideal situation. But um, you know shooting, I shoot a super heavy arrow, single bevel broadhead, and you know, I think that if you've got a deer inside of like I always say, about sixty seventeen yards in the end, you know, if you've got a good pin on them, I think that that shots and okay, shots taken. It's a totally cool shot. Now at thirty yards, I'm not shooting to be here in the chest. Yeah, not the way. You know, there's just too many factors that can happen. But yeah, that's I'm not out there for sure. That's when they're gonna be yea yep. And I'm you know, I'm not I'm not necessarily promoting it for everybody to. Like I said, it's just a situational thing. And from my arrow set up in my um, you know, hutting off the ground to makes a huge difference your tree stand. It's a lot different than an angle and it's a lot harder lot off. But anyway, yeah, that's why we sho super fun hunt man. Yeah for sure, dude. And it looked like a lot of fun. You know, it's a cool state to go to. I think I remember you talking about Pennsylvania back in the day when we first met you. But um, you know, that's the reason we shoot heavy arrows to man, those day six arrows, you know, you want them to blow through some stuff when you get an opportunity. Now, do you think that, um, that shot was easier or more difficult than your elk shot because you took a funnel on your elk too, right, Yeah, you know I think that as far as getting a pin on him, it was obviously easy. The tough thing was was like we talked about in the in the video too, it's you know, you don't practice for a three yard shot. I mean I'll go up to ten, twelve, fifteen yards and shoot pretty often. I mean I'll just I mean I can hit I could hit a you know, a thumb back in there, but it's at three yards and just actually shooting out a lot of animal. I mean it was it was pretty difficult. But the advantage that you have at three yards is the deer doesn't have many times it. I mean, that was the fastest, I mean the fastest ever an arrow will that probably ever hit a duer that I shot him, like in him before I could even probably move my boat. Right. It just didn't really make a typical arrow. It's like, you know, but then that that you know that this difference between that elk beau is that elk. The elk had time to move. Um, so they were both they were both unique. I think I think I'm yet to find that sweet spot of like a twelve yard or you know, for that frontal shot, I think is kind of a sweet spot because it's it's still the distance we don't really have time to move, but it's also that distance still where you can burn a pin into a single hair or a single little spot on their you know, aim small, miss small. Right at that distance, it's it's essentially the perfect opportunity. But like I said, you know, you get twenty plus yards and it becomes more difficult just because the deer, you know, white tails are cagey, they're going to move. And even at twenty yards on a broadside shot especially um, you know you toss the tree stand angle in there, maybe you're just above them on the hill or something. I mean, there's there's definitely a lot of chance for them to move. But you know, level ground, you know, sixteen seventeen about maybe eight yards, and you know that would be kind of that window I would say the perfect for quartering two or frontal shot. I would say just where you can really pick your spot. You hear us talk a lot about the effectiveness and the quality of Cobra releases all the time. But guys, quite honestly, there's a mantra and the montrey goes look good, feel good, hunt good, and let me tell you there's a there's something to it. Okay, there's a reason why I like my cameo to match. All right, y'all might make fun of me. That's fine. Whatever. I like it, okay, And I like my Cobra release because man, it looks good. It's a professional quality product. You can tell that the leather is high quality. And everything they've got, man, there's They've actually have different colors of leather and different varieties of stuff you can do. If you're real flashy. They've got the harvest to release. It's orange. I mean, come on, man, you can't beat it. So if you want something that looks good, helps you hunt good, and helps you keep go check out Cobra Archery dot com. Well, man, that's awesome. Congrats on on the p A Buck. I know, like Casey said, you know, you've been talking about Pennsylvania for a few years now, and uh and um, it's really cool that you're able to shoot like pretty much a buck that I think most people would consider a good buck just anywhere in the country, you know. I mean a lot of times when you go out of state, you're like, you know, you're thinking, well, I'm just kind of looking for a buck. But that's a heck of a deer man, And congrats on that for sure, Thank you, thank you. Yeah, it was. You know, it's kind of a life, lifetime dream come true. I really have always been intrigued by big Woods Pennsylvania, hunting a lot of eastern Ohio and stuff when I was a kid, and then having buddies that lived in Pennsylvania, and you know, as time goes on, I meant more and more friends that live in Pennsylvania, and it's just it's kind of that just the just the hunting culture of pennsyl Mania and the big Woods setting is just so cool and something that brings a unique challenge. And I was very excited to tackle it, and I'm excited to go back there some day in the future and then you know, continue to explore the Northeast and East in general. You Know, the thing I'm thinking about now is I'm like man, how do I get down in the southeast? Yeah, bring bug spray and snake gas man. That's right. Cool, Well, we appreciate you hopping on the phone. I know you're busy, and uh, this time of year is just gonna get busier. But uh, with the rut Man coming up, good luck with everything. I know you guys are gonna put some down and we'll be watching man. Cool man, Well, I appreciate it, and I appreciate you guys. Give them the opportunity to tell my story. Sure dudu alright, we'll see you later. Man, what an awesome story about a big buck. Guys, we want to say big thanks to Exitus, Trail Camers and Cobra Archery for being a part of this big bluck breakdown for sure man. And also, if you want to check out what we do on a daily basis, maybe even see some of these big bucks, go to Instagram and follow us at the Element Wild and then also subscribe on YouTube to keep up with what we're doing throughout the season and subscribe on the podcast. And remember this is your element living in and meet you sid. I'm not sure why we even have to fucking grew up being in the same situation between its cause a lot of frustrations. Brothers, let's forgiving for games.

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