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: Everyone, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about how to kill deer in areas with high hunting pressure. Now, this might seem kind of like an odd time of year for a podcast about hunting around lots of other hunters, but honestly, this might be the most important thing to learn for an awful lot of us. And it starts with our mindsets and how we view our hunting situation. And you know, there is no bad time of year to address that kind of thing. But that's not all I'm going to talk about here. I'm going to explain how I approach my hunts on public land and just generally pressured at spots, and go pretty deep on why I think this is sort of the easiest and the hardest thing to do in the white tail space. My paid writing career started in two thousand and three with a trout fishing article, and let me tell you something, when I saw my byline and an actual outdoor publication, I about lost my mind. I thought wrongly, I might add that my place in the outdoor industry was solidified at that point. After all, they don't just let any rando write a trout fishing article for a newspaper and then pay him a whole thirty five bucks for it. I knew I was breathing some rarefied air there, but man, was I super wrong. It took me years of begging for work to get anywhere at all, and those few years that I really had to go hard they were awful lean. I had to learn not only how to write for individual editors and their audiences, but also how to pitch assignments that I could actually tackle. No. Over time, this gets easier, but you never really have things mastered. I was reminded of this when an editor of a now defunct magazine asked me to write a simple article on walleye fishing. Do you guys know how I feel about walleyes, and while I will occasionally target them, especially when I have a landowner who is willing to trade out hunting access for fresh filets. I'm just more of a bass guy. I can't eat fish. I hate trolling, and although I did catch two walleyes on top waters last year, I generally gravitate toward fish that when they hit, will make your heart race. You know, another way to look at it is I really like the kind of fish that will definitely eat a frog if it hops on by overhead through some lily pads. Anyway, I took that walleye assignment because when you're a freelancer, you get into the habit of saying yes, because when you do, you can buy Eggo waffles for your kids, and if you say no, you generally can't. But as soon as I started writing that piece, I realize I wasn't qualified. I don't remember the exact gist of the article, but I knew that my info would be a mile wide and an inch deep, and that just doesn't cut it when you're supposed to be a quote unquote expert. It was one of the few times in my life that I just flat out admitted to an editor that I didn't have the chops for an assignment. I thought I did, but what I thought about myself was wrong. That shit always stings a little, and it always reminds me of how hunters view the key to their success in the field. There's sort of a ubiquitous reasoning in the white tail space, at least for folks who aren't consistently successful, that what they lack in skills they can make up for by buying something. Look, that's an easy thing to understand, at least for us, you know, men and our egos. But in reality, we just don't have what it takes. We don't acknowledge that we don't want to, so it must be something we don't own, like a specific deer call, or the right knee high boots, or the most realistic decoy or whatever. Now, Look, I work for meat Eater, and I want you guys to buy all kinds of hunting stuff because my kids still eat eggo waffles for breakfast. But the truth is, if you're hunting where other hunters hunt, your best bet is going to be to buy something your competition won't buy. It'll be to understand what it means to hunt around pressure. So let's look at it this way. First, Why does everyone want a hunting spot to themselves. Why does everyone dream of having control over deer ground. Why do most of the people who are killing giant deer also happen to be the same people who have access to ground that no one else has access to Because unpressured deer are dumb and they are easy. Now there are degrees to this stuff. Of course, unpressured deer on a two thousand acre lease in Iowa are a different thing from unpressured deer on a hundred acre lease in Georgia, South Carolina. But the thing about whitetails is that if we give them a safe space away from our influence, they just tend to be less cagey. They tend to grow more comfortable moving during daylight hours and just doing deer stuff when deer are supposed to do their stuff. This is like the secret that no one really talks about in the hunting industry because most of the hunting industry is dominated by this type of hunting. But most hunters are dealing with with the challenge of killing big deer, where other people are trying to kill big deer. The thought process here is generally that the hunting pressure sucks, but I still have to outsmart the deer, and the way we've been promised to do that is by grunting at a certain point in the season, or using an ozone generator, or buying whatever and using it correctly. That will allow us to fool the deer. And to some extent, all of that is true. If you buy good products and use them correctly, you're not going to be a worse hunter for it. But we are also not going to kill booners on public land in Kentucky because of it either. The thing about this is that if you want to fool the deer where they get hunted a lot, you have to understand how they survive. What do they do that allows them to live on parcels that have lots of hunters, Because when you think about it that way, you have at least some type of roadmap to follow to find the actual deer. Let's start with something that I hear so often but just drives me nuts. I hear hunters make blanket statements all the time about deer in their state, or the deer in their county, or on a specific chunk of public land. I remember reading a thread on bow Site quite a few years ago about public land hunting in Nebraska, several of the locals weighed in and said there were no bucks older than two and a half or three and a half due to the timing of the gun season and the onslaught of hunting pressure from non residents not that time. I hunted Nebraska public land every year, and I never had an easier time finding mature bucks than I did there. At home in Minnesota, I could find them, but not as easily and not as frequently, and I might add not even on public land but private I thought, if you believe that to be true, you will absolutely live that truth. As the kids like to say, you're never going to overcome that mindset because you've given yourself an excuse not to. It's an open and shut case, but it's also mostly bullshit. There are good bucks in every state that has white tails, and plenty of them live on public land. You have to operate under that assumption, but you also have to keep your standards within reason. If you want five and a half year old bucks and only on a few weekends on public land in Oklahoma, good luck, buddy. You're just not living in reality. And it's not because the bucks aren't there. It's because you're not gonna be able to do what it takes to kill them. You have to scout enough and hunt enough to believe the truth about the deer that are out there. Because they are out there, then you have to take a long look at your competition just the way the deer will. So let's think about this from the perspective of something that is said, all of the time, deer pattern us better than we pattern them. It's cliched. I also believe it to be absolutely true. I really do. I think when you're a prey animal and your number one predator shows you what it does, you pay attention and you play the odds that what that predator usually does, it will keep doing. If an animal with a brain about one third the size of ours can predict our activities, why can't we. We want to be able to run a pattern on the deer so we can predict them you know when and where to hunt them, But first we have to run a pattern on ourselves in our competition. So what does that mean? Well, where do you usually start at the parking area other access points? Where is the average hunter going to walk into the ground that you're hunting. This is usually pretty easy to predict and it's a hell of a starting point. But where does it go from there? On pressured ground, there are often well worn hunter trails into various parts of the property. How far do you think the average hunter is going to go? Is he likely to climb a bluff, cross a river, wade into a thorny mess or is he going to mostly stay on the level and not cross the water and avoid the thick stuff just to stay in the easier habitat what you looking at there is probably what eighty percent of your competition will default to. The deer know this well and they bet their lives on it. So now what you just go where others don't? Sort of, That's a huge part of it, if I'm being honest, And a huge part of knowing where those areas are is by scouting right now when everyone else isn't scouting bucks on public land leave sign too, and it's out there waiting for you to find it. Now. On this task alone, we make the mistake of thinking that if we find the spots on the places we currently hunt, then our job is over. It's not. You're not just looking for the location you can arrow a buck this fall, but you're trying to learn how to find the spot's pressure deer most likely to use. Because that great spot that you find tucked into a river bottom flat this spring might be the ticket of this fall. Or you might have a couple of young dudes who like jump shooting ducks show up and change your whole game. It's not enough to just find a few good spots, although that's a hell of a start. I want to understand the process of how you go about finding the locations you need to find, no matter when it is and what's going on around you with the other people. Now, this makes it sound too simple, because you might find the absolute best mature buck spot on the thousand acres of public land in your neck of the woods. Hey, that's great, it's freaking great. But does that mean it's the kind of spot you can arrow a one P fifty in during the September opener or do you need to go in there and hang and bang in late October? Is there enough pressure on your spot to make you consider not trying to get in there on a Saturday afternoon instead of waiting until a Wednesday. What factors are at play here? Are you going to state where crossbows are legal, and a lot of the weekend warriors might be sneaking around trying to shoot one in a way that almost certainly won't work. How we think about this stuff is as important as putting in the miles and the sweat equity, and it all needs to be filtered through the reality of what the hunting pressure is probably going to be like, because hunting pressure is your number one enemy. It puts deer down, It disrupts the rhythm of nature, and at some points you just can't really overcome it. You have to work around it. So to dive deeper here, think about it this way. What's your dream date to hunt? November seventh, Halloween? I bet it's somewhere around there, maybe a little later if you'd live in the Deep South. Now ask yourself, who else would answer those exact same dates? Is it most hunters? Because well, it's pretty simple shit really Okay. So if you were a prey animal that even though you really want to spread your genes around, but also realize that day to day the amount of nasty predators in your world is increasing, how would you respond? You would probably tamp down that breeding urge sum because if you don't, you will die. You also know that the predators you're most worried about generally leave the woods alone all night long, so you don't move much during daylight when the predator saturation is high. But there are times when the predators sature is low, and you know it because you can see them, and you can hear them, and you can most definitely smell them when they're there and long after they've left, when they aren't around nearly as much, you know it. But we think about seasonal timing and it will just override their survival instincts. Sometimes it does, but not nearly as much as most of us need it to. A hot dough can make magic happen on heavily hunted ground, it just most likely won't happen to you on any given season. I think a lot of people who complain about hunting pressure want to hunt when they think it's supposed to be the best. But that's the dominant line of thinking in the hunting community at large. You have to be a contrariant here if you want to get around all of that hunting pressure and its negative effects. I know no one wants to take their rautation in earlier mid October, but if you hunt where the pressure is high, you probably should. I keep seeing this in my travels to hunt public life in many different states, and it's to the point now where I don't think a whole lot about the peak rut when I'm on public land. I like the weeks before that, when everyone else is waiting for it to get good, because the deer I want to kill will be more relaxed then than they will be when all the trucks roll in during the rut. It's so simple, but kind of not. To understand this and believe it, you have to go against lifelong beliefs that the best in the business have told us all about. You have to figure out why the general standard deer hunting advice doesn't actually apply to someone who is hunting a place where there are lots of other hunters. It would be like the difference between hunting elk and a unit in Wyoming where there are grizzlies versus a unit where there aren't. Both hunts can be a typical bugle until you get one working type of deal, or you know, maybe post up on water until you get one that's thirsty enough to come in, or he just wants to roll around in the mud, but there will be a dominant concern that just changes the game. The grizzly hunt, or you know, the hunt in an area with grizzlies, it is an elk hunt, but it's one with an added challenge. A pressured ground white tail hunt is a white tail hunt, sure, but it's one with an added challenge. And if you don't think about that challenge and understand how it affects the deer, you'll think that you're dealing with an insurmountable problem. You're not, but it will be if you approach it the same way as any average whitetail hunter would. Maybe that last point is the most important. Honestly, the people I hear from who say that their spot is just too busy, they kind of seem to have their minds made up. But I never hear them say that they scout it all winter long, or tried anything to overcome the issue of a lot of people in the woods. So I don't know what to make of it. I do know that pressured white tails are the hardest white tails to hunt. I believe that, and it only gets worse in a low density situation, And that only gets worse in a big woods type of situation. But even then the problem is solvable. It takes a due, realistic approach of putting in the work to figure out the spots of the deer are likely to use so that they don't bump into you, but also understanding that if you don't try to deviate from the strategies that most hunters rely on, you're going to have average results. And I tell you this because I think it's important if hunting pressure ground is too tough for you, lower your standards. I say that a lot, but I think a lot of people get frustrated not being able to kill mature bucks where they hunt. But what about two and a half year olds? What about does actually hunting for something you might be able to shoot is really important? Hunting for something that isn't going to happen is a great way to lose interest and to kill your drive and to give yourself an excuse to not go. And when that happens, you'll definitely believe the pressure has taken your opportunities away. So maybe you need to look at it a little differently and try to target something more doable to figure out how to make that happen, and then actually succeed out there. You know, that's something you know most folks won't do on pressure ground, but you can. And when you can do that, you can at least see the way in which you might turn it into something bigger. But it all starts with our mindset and our willingness to examine what it would take for a white tail to live through a couple of seasons where there are a lot of people trying to ensure that doesn't happen. That kind of thing can start now, and it should, especially if you pair it up with some scouting before the ticks are too thick and the greenery drowns out last year's sign. So do that and come back next week because I'm going to talk about procrastination and how it can kill the best white tail plans, especially when it comes to our gear. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. Thank you so much for your support. We truly appreciate it. You guys are showing up for our Turkey Week this week in big numbers, and just generally, you guys listening to these podcasts, you know, Clay's, Brent's, Whoever's uh, watching our films, reading the articles, whatever you're doing, you know, checking in on socialb We truly appreciate it. Without you, guys, we are nothing, So thank you for that. If you need to check out Turkey Week, or you just want to check out some deer hunting content, whatever the mediator dot com has you covered, go there, take a look.

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