00:00:01 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, and now your host, Tony Peterson. Hey, everybody, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, brought to you by First Light. Today's show is all about muzzleloaders and how to kill a buck. As the late season officially kicks in, and I realized that there are early muzzleloader seasons in a few states. I think I always got one in Kansas, and plenty of folks down cells are also kind of just getting started hunting with their bows or their center fire rifles. Whether your muzzleloader season is going on right now, or it's about to start, or maybe it's a few weeks or a month away. I hope you get something out of this episode. Not actually scratch that, I hope you get something out of the next two episode. My introduction to muzzleoader hunting, as it was the case with almost all of my hunting, came from my father. He's one of those guys who loves bow honey, but also really really loves shooting guns. He's into the precision game. I don't know how much paper he punches every year at the range, but it's a lot, or at least it was until ammo became as scarce as two bucks on public land in Florida. So about I don't know, fifteen sixteen years ago, he mentioned that we should probably try muzzleoader hunting, so he bought a cheap kit muzzle order, one of those I don't know, two D muzzleloaders that you buy and they come in the big plastic thing like you would uh, I don't know, a a pair of scissors or something. And since you could only use open sites in Minnesota, then he figured he wouldn't be out too much buying one of those kit guns. But it was a gun, and since it was a gun, he liked it. I did too. It wasn't long before there were a few more muzzloaders laying around and we were out hunting with them. It also wasn't long before I figured out the hunting with a smoke pole wasn't as easy as I expected it to be. I'm sure it was pure cockiness on my part to think that I could just go out and kill one with a gun. Because I kind of frequently killed deer with a bow back then, I thought i'd be able to clean out the woods just because I had a gun, and even though it had you know, somewhat limited range and iron sights, I was still probably too cocky and I was wrong. This might come as a surprise to some of you listeners, but some of the best moves I've made as a hunter have come from getting shipped so wrong it's embarrassing. This was one of those things. With my early four rays into muzzleloader land. I just went out and sat on the food. I figured with a hundred yard ish weapon and low standards, I only needed to get on a cut corn field and wait for the sun to set. The problem with my plan was that I tried it first on a farm that gets absolutely pounded during bow and the regular gun season. While I'll get into this later in far more depth on some future episodes, let me just say this about late season advice. If someone tells you that all you have to do is sit on a food source and wait for the rut starved bucks to show up, punch them right in the throat. You don't need those kind of lies in your life. I'm just kidding. No physical violence. Please, Instead, kindly remind them that you're hunting in the real world, and it's not so simple because pressure deer don't follow the same rules as unpressured deer. This is the problem with any deer hunting advice, and that it tends to kind of gloss over our individual realities because it really has no other choice. In my individual reality, when I started muzzled or hunting was that I bought into the tall tale that food was king and it would override the dear sense of survival as the hangover from the gun season faded and the real Minnesota cold set in. What actually happened was that the deer that were left had been scared into patterns that didn't make them want to show themselves during daylight hours. This doesn't take too long to figure out. If you have snow and then you sit on the edge of a field and you don't see deer, the snow will show you the tracks, the field won't show you the deer, and a whole lot of nocturnal feeding becomes pretty obvious. But those deer have to get there somehow, and they have to leave from there somehow, and that's where you kill them, or at least that's where I started killing them. Does any of this sound familiar. It probably should. In past episodes, when I've talked about bow hunting pressure deer, it's been all about figuring out where they like to walk and then getting in there to kill them. With gun hunting, the same rules apply. As a hunter, figuring out where deer are going to walk during daylight hours is like nineties three percent of your job. It's your number one priority, and it doesn't matter what advice you've been given from some random hunting celebrities. What matters is what you see in your own world, in your own chosen woods. If the deer run to the alfalfa field to mow down two hours before dark and they show you that, then you know what to do. If they don't, or a few of them show up within the last few minutes of legal shooting light, then you know you've got to figure out where they are coming from and how you can get in there to get on them. How I figured out how to do this for myself was by reverting right back to my favorite thing, staging areas. This was largely a happy accident, by simply just defaultings of some of my bow stands after flaming out on the field. Edge hunts with my muzzleloader. You guys know that I love staging areas, and when it comes to early muzzleloader failures, I realized I need to get into the cover and start watching. This was easiest to accomplish by going to stands I already had up that took advantage of the cover. What I saw eventually was at the bucks and does that were left after gun season. They would move, and they do it in daylight some, but it would always be in the cover. This didn't mean I had to get right in on a sanctuary with them, like during the heart of guns season, but it meant that I had to be somewhere between that and the food in the morning. The same strategy worked. I just had to reverse the likely deer travel and pay real close attention to my entrance roads and the impression I made on the deer while getting in there. This sounds simple, right, and it can be. If you've got conditions like powdery snow that lets you sneak in quietly, then it can be easy. But if you've got a sheet of icy snow covering that powder, that sounds kind of like you're stomping on a bag of potato chips With every step, your results may vary. If you can't get to your stand without learning the nearby deer, it's freaking over. The survivors don't tolerate mistakes, and it's really easy to make a mistake during many of the conditions in which we find ourselves muzzle or hunting. Ditto for late season bow hunts. Earlier, when I said your number one priority was finding where do you like to walk? I kind of lied. This is part of it. It because you sure as hell don't want to hunt where dear don't like to walk. But just as importantly, you've got to read the situation and decide if you can get in without blowing everything up. There's two steps to this. Find where the deer like to walk, figure out if you can get in there. If you can't, you're in trouble. This is tricky. I found that sometimes when the conditions are loud, I mean really really loud, it's impossible to hunt very well. This goes for late season white tails, as well as pheasants, grouse, bunnies, and probably every prey animal we hunt. This also means that if you plan a muzzle oader hunt, you better obsessively check the weather. Cold conditions often create noisy conditions, which means the mornings or evenings, when hunting should theoretically be best for those hungry deer that should be moving, will actually be worse for the hungry two legged predators heading out there with what used to be a primitive weapon and is now not really so. But conditions vary a lot. You might get a nice warm up in the mid day that makes sneaking in easy, or you might get a pre or post frontal wind blowing through that covers your noise and your movement. This is why obsessing over the weather and planning your sits around it really matters this time here. If you hunt in snowy country, you might see that a morning hunt is out because it's just too cold and too crunchy. But the weather might break mid day, or the sun might have just enough time to soften things up for an afternoon sit where you can get in quietly, so you have to plan accordingly. If you hunt too far south to have to consider much or any snow, you might still be dealing with cold weather in the morning and warmer weather in the afternoon. This might be the difference between crunchy frosty leaves and easier to move in without detection wet leaf, litter, groundcover later. I know that's a word salad, but what I mean is when stuff's cold, it's noisy. When it's warm, it's often not. That might mean the difference between crazy would surface ice on a little stream or other wetland at seven am in the morning, but a different quiet or open water type of thing at two in the afternoon. I know I've mentioned on here and other podcasts I've been on about a billion times about how hunters love excuses to not hunt, but some are legit conditions you simply can't overcome, especially on pressure. Deer are some of them. Sometimes sleeping in is the right thing to do, even if that doesn't fig your m oh throughout the rest of the season. Or better yet, you can just set yourself up with some backup options. This might sound familiar to and if it doesn't, I urge you to go back and listen to my earlier scouting episodes of this podcast. We dropped all summer long, having backup plans, having backup stand sites, and even backup properties. Moolle importante mi amigoes. When it comes to conditions where you just feel like you can't overcome them, then you shouldn't hunt there in that spot. Maybe there is another location that allows for quieter access. Maybe it's a stand closer to a busy road, or maybe you can just go glass some of your ground from a safe distance. Do some observation. As common as it is for hunters to decide they're being smart by not hunting due to the litany of reasons, others will hunt no matter what, this is just as bad and might be a little worse if you don't have too many options. If you hunt public land much, you'll see all kinds of folks who are hunting when and where they probably shouldn't be. That's the game out there, So no matter what, crunch crunch, crunching your way into the heart of the best cover on the property, to take the smoke poll for a walk because it's a Saturday morning and you want to hunt. That can cause a lot of damage to your season. Be careful with how easy it is to skip hunts or how die hard you are when you absolutely have to hunt no matter what. While they're on opposite ends of the spectrum, the end result is often terrible hunting. Of course, in addition to making too much noise on the way in and out, there's also the issue of hiding from deer. It's easy to be a gun hunter who doesn't value this aspect because of the range of the modern rifle and the prevalence of box blinds. I'm not knocking either, just saying they kind of make it possible to wear blue jeans and hockey jersey and go out and kill deer. You might also muzzleloader hunt from one of those blinds in that type of situation, and if you do, good for you, but remember pay attention to what to the deer show you. I've seen quite a few of my hunting buddies by big box blinds and put them on food plots, thinking that will be the end of any work they need to do to kill stuff. Sometimes that works, but a lot of times, by the time the muzzleloader season rolls around, the deer awful clued into the big green tower blind and what may be hiding in it. If you don't have that option, or if you just don't want to use it, you're going to half to hide. A scoped muzzleoader can allow you to reach out and touch them, but where you're going to find, Pressure Dear, you might not need to dial it up to eleven, so to speak. You'll probably be shooting them in close quarters, which necessitates a little ninja work, just like bow hunting. This is hard for a lot of folks to grasp because it seems like any gun, even a front stuffer, should allow you to climb into your favorite ladder stand and pick them off when they pass through. But Pressure Dear look for hunters on the ground and in the trees, and they really look for them in the trees that have had a ladder stand in them for seven years and they've watched five of their buddies get shot out of there. Where I'm going with this is the range of the weapon can be used to your advantage. But don't phone it in on your hides. If you go to mobile route, which is a great way to fill muzzle or tags, hide yourself just like you would on a typical bow hunt, set up on the far side of the tree from expected movement, or bury yourself in a deadfall on the ground with situationally specific camouflage. Do the work necessary to make the deer, do the work necessary to catch you. In fact, that ground game is a great way to hunt with a muzzle order because you can really dig into the cover and use it to your advantage, and you can buffer the wind a little bit. This also makes it more comfortable a lot of times, because there's nothing colder than sitting in a tree stand when the north wind is blowing hard and it's about seven degrees out. Plus you can use a decent tripod and take a really steady shot, which isn't always easy to do from a mobile tree stand or a saddle set up. Also, make sure you've got another round ready for the chamber if you catch my drift. The very essence of a muzzleloader, not surprisingly, is that it loads from the muzzle, or at least it did until one adventurous manufacturer created a hybrid version recently that loads an awful lot like a traditional rifle. If you don't have one of those, you gotta dig out a primer, some powder, and a slug. Have those handy and know where they are. I've had more than a few you blown shots of my muzzleloader that allowed for a follow up shot, and let me tell you, there are a few times in the woods that feel more urgent than that. Maybe maybe when you've had taco bell the night before along with about seven bush lights, and then the coffee kicks in an hour into your sit things can get a little more urgent. But barring poor choices like those, the need to get things going. It's very real when you've missed with a smoke pool and the deers still standing there gotta be fast. Quick loader options are a good way to go, but so is a system. What pocket is your AMMO in? Can you get your gloves off quickly and get the whole thing loaded correctly? Can you do that in a ladder stand or on a tiny portable stand. Sometimes you don't miss, but your spine one and a follow up shot is necessary. Are you capable of making that follow up shot as quickly as possible? Know that, and for the love of God, please use the rest. Part of the absolute beauty of hunting with firearms is the ability to use a good, solid rest like the tripod I just mentioned. That's a game changer to the whole thing. And you'll rarely see someone with a decade or two of successful gun hunting under his or her belt who doesn't always look for a quality rest in every shot situation and I mean every single shot situation. Now. Lastly, when it comes to muzzle oder hunting or I don't know, any hunting, really, make sure to just pay attention. I know you're going to watch any deer movement and take in all the deer sign carefully so that you can get out of bucker. Done now. But also some of that movement clues you into season long travel patterns. With the woods open and the pressure over the last several weeks so high. Those deer that you do see, they're showing you where they want to go or where they have to go, the travel routes they take, the places they bed. Those clues tell you a lot about their habits when they feel threatened. That's valuable information. It's gold for anyone who wants to figure out pressure deer, even maybe the deer that you don't really care to shoot, like the solo button buck who crosses an old fence in a certain spot in the wood lot during December. That little guy, he tells you something. The doe group that enters the field from a specific point when the wind is out of the northwest, they're telling you something too. And if you see a big buck, now that's even better make note of everything he does and figure out why he doesn't. Ask yourself to why. It's not just that he's working towards the distant cornfield at last light, but where is he coming from? How is he going to get there? How's this body language? Is he kg? Is he confident? Did he follow out a for key that walked through fifteen minutes earlier? Pay attention to what they give you because there is much to learn from every deer sighting. And get that muzzle are sited in because that's some of the most fun you'll have all season. In fact, next week I'll give you a part two on this and talk about some of the hunting strategies that will allow you to really enjoy your time in the field with the front stuffer. That's it for this week, my friends. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast. Please check out our wire to Hunt YouTube channel as well as the meat Eator dot com slash wired for more deer hunting tips, tactics and wisdom. And as always, thank you so much for listening for the support. We really appreciate it.