00:00:01 Speaker 1: 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. 00:00:20 Speaker 2: Hey, everybody, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about shot selection and what we often get wrong around when we draw on deer and try to shoot them. It's that time of year again when I know that on certain nights I'll get a text or a phone call about a poorly hit deer from someone in my life. This happens quite a bit, and it's part of the game. It's also true that a lot of folks don't practice enough, sometimes take questionable shots, and just don't know how to generally address this crucial part of being a bow and it is crucial. I believe it, and I believe that you can kind of get your reps in a couple different ways, and you can rehearse how to get through a shot opportunity even if a buck doesn't really follow the script, which is what I'm going to explain right now. Picture this if you will. You are a bad bear hunter, but your twelve year old daughter has a bear tag, so you head on over to Wisconsin with a truck full of expired circus peanuts and fruit snacks and trail mix and cookie dough and banana chips and about sixty pounds of generic Swedish fish. You set up a blind and a bait site in front of it, but you have to put it fairly close because of how tight the situation is. You bait the site, You bait your buddy's site because you're a good guy, and you wait for the dopamine dump that comes when your cell camera shows you that Yogi found your goodies and is well on his way to type two diabetes. Maybe you have some giants come in, like legit three hundred and fifty pounds plus types of bears with their bellies nearly hitting the ground with every step, but they are nocturnal, as big bears often are. But you also have one normal size bear, the kind that most people shoot, even though everyone says they shoot three hundred pounders, just like everyone who bass fishes. Seems to catch six pounders or like the one guy at my gym just loads up on eight pounders, which is quite a feat in a state like Minnesota. I mean, you don't bump up on the state record large mouth with a lot of consistency unless you're really, really good or I don't know, totally full of shit. Anyway, one bear a great bear for anyone, let alone a first bear for a seventh grade girl, starts coming in pretty regularly, so regularly it's like nothing you've ever seen before. For nine days, this bear hits the bait in daylight, and it's all you can do to even sleep at night, knowing how good that first sit is gonna be. So you pull your daughter out of school on Friday of the first week of school year, by the way, which according to some of the basketball moms you talk to, is totally Bunyana's especially to kill a poor, innocent, cute little baby bear. Maybe it's one of those rare situations in the outdoors where you believe, in your hunting heart of hearts that you're going to get an easy one finally, and better yet, your daughter is going to have an exciting and amazing sit. So as you slip into the blind. You know it's just a matter of time, but the slow decay of time doesn't stop, and soon you're out of light, You're out of ideas, and back to the reality of just being a terrible bear hunter. Overnight, you check your cell cameras about seven thousand times and realize that for some reason, the bears are just gonezo. So, with nothing to lose, you get up early and decide that it's time for an all day sit, or at least dang near an all day sit. By the time you get your daughter to eat some donuts and get her stuff ready for the long haul, And instead of going in and banging some bait buckets around and generally announcing to the local bears that there are some fresh growls available, you go in like a pair of ninjas. Three hours pass she falls asleep, and just like that, there's a bear at twenty yards enclosing real fast inside that blind. It's straight up to your nobyl, but she gets on her crossbow and you both watch as the bear puts its nose in the air, turns around and walks away. The one bear you had to work with just winded you, and it feels like curtains for the hunt. But for some reason, while you're sitting there in your despair and frustration, you want to cry just a little bit. You know. Ten minutes later that bear is back, and this time, after about five hundred careful sniffs of the air, it makes its way to the logs piled over the bait. You whisper to her to take the first good shot, because it's a situation that could be over in the matter of one errant breeze, which feels more likely by the second you know more than utter that sentence. Then the bear climbs up on the logs, sits down like a dog, and the crossbow goes off, surprising both you and Yogi. It never occurred to you that the first good shot would look like that, but it wasn't your call, and you don't even have a chance to really think about it before you hear the death mone All's well, that ends well, I guess now you may have guessed, but that wasn't actually a made up hypothetical, but a very trimmed down version of a recent bear hunt I had with my daughter, which I might add was one of the most badass experiences I've had in the outdoors, even if it ended up with me having to butcher a bear and find someone to make a rug out of it, which might end up costing me more than a year of tuition at a state school. Although it's been a few years since I walked the hallowed halls of our finest institutions, the first good shot. It's a rule that we all should know, we should probably all follow. We should all admit that we often don't really understand what it means at a deeper level, though on the surface it just means what it says. If that buck walks in and he's twenty seven yards out and you are very confident and he's roadside, are quartering away, why wait? You know, maybe he looks like he's going to walk into fifteen and that would be better, But that's also a gamble. Another buck could walk in and mess things up. He could turn right around and leave. You could feel a slight breeze on your back, you know, on the back of your neck, like you do out west all the time when you're elk hunting. Whatever else could happen. Close Proximity is why bow hunting is so awesome, but also why it's so difficult. It's easy to get busted when they're right in your lap. What take the first good shot means on a deeper level is that you have to let the deer tell you when to shoot. In hunting, probably a lot of other things in life, we get an idea in our head of how, you know, either we want things to go down or how it will go down. This happens a lot when we are redlining from adrenaline and the buck we've been waiting on all season is right there. We think all he has to do has walked ten more feet down the row of beans across the river like they always do, and just pose up at eighteen yards. But when we wait for that to happen, deer just tend to do other stuff. I almost never killed deer exactly how I envision it, unless I'm on a really really good terrain trap or sitting on a kill plot where they just kind of naturally position themselves. What happens mostly is I expect them to do something and they just do something else, And often I think, shit, I should have shot the first time he walked in, but I didn't. And now a higher level of panic is settling in because now it's going a different way than I expected it to. This is where bad shots happen and stupid decisions are made. I'll get to a few of those in a second, but let me tell you a story from last season about a deer I felt like I almost didn't get because I was waiting for a better shot. It was the last day of a four day shoot here in Minnesota, and I hadn't had a good opportunity at anything but a couple of scrap in a couple of does, but even they had all young fawns, so I hadn't even really got close to drawing my bow yet. And for the last sit, I walked with my cameraman through a bean field and saw that it was browsed like crazy, and there were also a lot of acorns in there on the edges of that field as well, and the whole corner of the field was just buzzing with deer sign. I had intended to go much deeper to a different stand, but walking past that much sign is dumb. So I got into a backup stand that my buddy and I had hung there during the summer, and as the light faded, two bucks hit the field behind us. One was a little six pointer, and the other was a really nice ten pointer. The ten pointer was feeding in a row right behind that little buck. When the little buck hit my best shooting lane, he cut right to the stand and then took a trail ten yards in front of us, and it was perfect. Now, I figured that the bigger deer, which was browsing away at like thirty yards, would do the exact same thing, so I didn't shoot, but he didn't do the same thing. He turned around and started staring back up the field edge, and it looked a little bit wiggy. I don't know what he was looking at. I don't know what he heard or smelled, But all of a sudden, the whole vibe change. My best shot opportunity, the one I was counting on, even though I could have already shot him several times, went up in smoke. And then I had more panic in my heart, in my head, more bad thoughts telling me to rush things before he leaves. And he looked like he might leave. I waited for him to turn and open up to a broadside shot, but he stopped slightly. According to it was an ideal, but I was in kill mode. It was definitely a very doable shot, and I hit him right where I needed to. But I didn't have to take that shot. I had a better shot earlier. In fact, I had multiple opportunities to take a shot on that deer at absolutely doable effective range, and I opted out. I let perfect be the enemy of good enough, and it nearly cost me that deer. That type of thinking has gotten me before. Maybe I'm just a slow learner, but you can learn from my stupidity. If you have a shot where you are very confident you can make it, just take it, honestly, take it. Maybe in some situations where they are coming into water or something where they are very likely to position themselves better. Maybe. Wait, but I lost one hundred and fifty inch Wisconsin buck a few years ago thinking like that, So I don't know. I'm a little cagy. I had him dead to rights and then he caught me dead to rights in what was seven minutes of sheer panic that broke his way. How do you know what shot is your best first shot? Though? Well that's up to you. But the best way to get really confident in that situation is to just shoot more. Dear, The thing about this is you might have done this yourself or you have. I doubtedly heard people say this that they could have shot this buck or that buck, or they could have stacked up the doze. Passing up deer gives us a lot of confidence that we could have killed deer. But let me tell you something, until you pick up that bow, draw aim, and execute a good shot, there is no such thing as you definitely would have without a doubt, killed that deer. About twelve years ago, I snuck in and hung a stand on a small river bottom in Nebraska to try to arrow a public land buck. The trip wasn't going all that great, but I was still on the fence about what i'd shoot. When I saw a scrapper seven pointer coming in on the exact trail I was set up to cover, I realized that my standards were down to exactly a scraper seven pointer. I took it for granted that the tenderloins of that young, lust filled buck would be sizzling on my open fire later that day. All I had to do was let him get into range, turn a bit in my stand, stop him, and kill him. Simple right, Except when I turned a little bit in my stand, one of those bootloop grammet things that Almost all hunting boots have caught on the cable of my stand that holds up the seat platform connects the whole thing, and it causes little ping sound that was enough to take a sure thing and make it a not going to happen thing. Little stuff like that happens when deer are super close, and they rarely make it easier for us to fill our tag when something goes down like that, if you have the chance to go out and take more shots that actual deer, do it. I have to say this so people don't get pissed now. I'm not advocating shooting deer just to get better at shooting deer. They're not good for living target practice. Don't do that. Shoot them because you want to eat them or someone else wants to eat them. But try to find a reason, a good reason to fill more tags. It'll make you more of a killer. This honestly changes everything about taking shots on deer, in my opinion. You learn much better about when exactly to time your draw, when to stop them with a little mirp or let them go naturally, and where your point of impact needs to be at all times when a deer is close and moving and eating and scratching its nose and doing deer things when it decides for whatever reason to circle the pond and not drink, but instead of standing the brush at twenty seven yards nibbling away on something tasty. That's the kind of situations I'm talking about. You learn to take the gift and open it right away instead of setting it aside for the perfect moment. Because in this case, not only do deer often do what we just don't expect, they are more likely to spook or get wiggy the more they spend time in close proximity to us. This is the worst case scenario when you've already slipped into killer mode. And this happens a lot. You take a sure thing encounter and suddenly, before you know it, the buckets put his nose up in the air and his eyes are bugging out, and suddenly he walks straight away. He does that thing where they bound ten yards farther out, stops and stares. This is a time when a lot of deer either get shot at, missed, or hit poorly. Happens a lot. It's sometimes unavoidable and just breaks that way. But it also sometimes happens because we don't take the first shot we can. It also happens when we aren't paying attention, or can be a consequence of us not quite having the lead time we need to get ourselves ready for the first good shot. I don't know how to address this because I'm as guilty of anyone else, But if you're in a situation where you might not hear them coming for a ways, it's best to pay attention when a deer surprises you. And believe me, I know this from experience, is suddenly a matter of how far out they are and what their trajectory is like. This is a time of panic, and again might not work out all that well shot wise during the run. That's going to happen quickly, and it rarely results in a dead buck. If you're deep into Instagram and not paying attention to the world around you, there is nothing worse than getting caught off guard and missing a prime shot opportunity. Because we are all addicted to the algorithms, there is nothing like the panic that settles in when you realize you already missed your first good shot opportunity because of pure operator error. In that case, you stack the odds against yourself in a way that becomes apparent quickly. That doesn't mean you won't get another shot opportunity. You certainly might, but you might not, or you might and not be as calm and prepared as you could have been. Both are potential outcomes, and neither are all that great. This part used to be the most frustrating for beginning hunters because it wasn't that long ago when it was just a lot harder to get close to deer. We didn't have as many deer thirty years ago, we didn't have the cameras or the blinds are the great clothing that we have now. It just wasn't as easy to sit undetected in the woods as it is now, so when you had one get close, it was go time, and often go time went wrong. Today, at least for a lot of hunters, it's easier to deer close, have more information and way better hunting gear, but that doesn't make it easier to be closer sometimes, and it doesn't make it easier to be a closer. People still have to work through that stage. And while it can be easier to keep your stuff together on a year link dough than it is on one hundred and sixty five inch non typical. You want to be able to read both encounters and choose the first good shot you get, no matter what deer it is. And I know which one of those deer is more likely to give you an opportunity, and that's an important distinction. But we run our own races, my friends. You can shoot what you want, but you should think about this as you get into the season and start to have some encounters with real, live, actual white tail deer. Now I don't advocate drawing on and aiming at non target deer because that means there is a small chance you'll actually shoot somehow, But I do think it's a good idea to go through the rest of the motions when deer come in. If you feel like they won't get you busted, think through how you'll stand up, if you're going to stand up, or switch sides in your saddle, or pick your bow up in your blind, do whatever you have to do in order to take the first high odd shot opportunity. And this might seem dumb, but it's not. If you get the reps in of just rehearsing how you're gonna get close there, and that buck walks in, that's only a little fork and you know you're not going to shoot him, it's still valuable to stand up and turn and get into position to shoot and watch how he reacts and watch how he moves through the landscape by your stand when you're ready to shoot, even if you might not shoot, because it's different than sitting there kind of watching them go through. It'll be a great opportunity for you if a really big buck comes into that stand four weeks later in the season, or if you're on a different stand three years down the road, because this is a skill that can be developed and worked on continually, and it's a guarantee that at some point, if you keep hunting, you're gonna need it. So think about that, Do that, and come back next week because I'm going to drop a whole bunch of Foundations episodes in honor of our white Tail Week. That's it for this episode. I'm Tony Peterson. 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