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 everyone, welcome to the Wired 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 hunting the deer that are not white tails. Look, I know most people will never go hunt meal deer, let alone blacktails, or you sick a deer up in Alaska or a COO's deer down in the desert, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't at least consider it now. While it's true that the days are easy to get tags done died in the last decade for most of these non white tail species, there are still some opportunities out there and where they can take you is pretty amazing. That's what I'm going to talk about right now. About a decade ago, I got off a plane in San Jose and met up with the then editor of Bowhunter magazine, Kurt Wells, and a pair of videographers. We grabbed our rental car and drove a couple hours away from the city and the people into a part of California that would be indistinguishable from most Western states if you didn't know exactly where you were. It was honestly one of the most beautiful environments I've been lucky enough to hunt in. We glassed feral hogs and then stalked them for a few days, and mixed in with those plentiful pigs, which you could see from a long long ways away, rooting around in oak mots or crossing grassy hillsides in single file, were plenty of blacktail deer. Now, the thing about blacktails is that if you talk about the ones that call California home to someone who lives, let's say, in the Pacific Northwest, they will almost inevitably make a snarky comment about how they aren't real blacktails. They'll say that the Oregon and Washington dwellers are the real deal because I guess of where they live and what they live in, while the California blacktails are just the kindergarteners of the whole thing. Even though blanket statements about deer and entire states are often just kind of dumb. The first time it happened to me, I remembered instantly the amount of shitty comments my uncles would make about the deer I hunted in southeastern Minnesota while I was growing up. Since all my uncles were all iron Rangers, which means they were born and raised in the topmost part of Minnesota, where the deer numbers are extremely sparse and the wolf numbers aren't, they had the view that anything that wasn't a big woods, low density hunt was just too easy. Never mind they never hunted anywhere else. They'd casually say things like, we don't have the luxury of just picking a trail on a cornfield and shooting them when they walked by. I remember thinking, one of the farms I hunt has a one hundred acre cornfield on it, and that corn is usually standing for the bulk of bo season, and almost all the bucks I hunt seemed to live in it, and it was not something that was easy for me to overcome. It's a myopic view that we as hunters just can't seem to shake. Just as every one of us thinks we have the best dog in the world, we believe that our hunting is the most difficult, and anyone who isn't from where we are would struggle to fill a dough tag. You know, they couldn't even kill a dough on where we hunt, let alone a decent buck. I don't know why we were like this, but we are, and blacktail hunters definitely don't break them old there. But you know what, when I got a chance to board another flight to San Jose a few months later and hunt those blacktails on the same pig infested ranch I had been to earlier, I didn't say no because they weren't real blacktails. I said yes because getting to hunt some kind of deer in a new environment is almost always a yes for me. And I'll tell you what, hunting those blacktails out there and patches of live oak strud was just like dangling Spanish moss was cool as hell. The Bucky shot was quite a bit short of the record book, if you get my drift, but he was also cool as hell, and he was in velvet and nice enough to walk in with a buddy and good camera light. This was maybe a decade ago now, and the tag I hunted on was over the counter for non residents. When I think back on the other deer that I've hunted, many of them were on over the counter licenses. Today not so much, although it's not impossible to hunt a mule deer or one of the other subspecies and I'll walk up to the counter and buy it tag. And speaking of meal deer, if you want to get in on that action in any meaningful way, you should probably start thinking about it now. You know how I feel about hunting opportunities for non residents, so I'm not going to get into that, but I don't mind stressing this point for the billionth time. It's not going to get cheaper and the tags aren't going to get easier to come by. There is one trend when it comes to both of those, and that trend is definitely not your friend. You can jump in line now and take whatever chances come your way or not, but if you don't start now, you will only probably ever hunt white tails, and that's kind of a shame. For example, if you put a gun to my head and said what's the most fun you can have with a bow in your hand, I'd instantly say that spotting and stalking meal deer is at the top spot on the podium. It gets even better when you get to hunt them in breaky, rolling country, where every hill you climb opens up a new world beyond, and it's usually just a matter of covering ground until you see a deer that will give you a chance to stalk it. Now, that's not to say those high country early season bachelored up meal deer aren't pretty special, because buddy, they are sitting on a glassing knob as the sun starts to light up the mountainside and the deer just seemed to glow. Is an experience I wish every hunter could have, even if just once. Just frantically picking a part a basin that is banked on top by alpine and on the bottom by the timberline while you shiver in the early more warning chill because you undoubtedly sweated your ass off getting up there, even if you tried really hard not to is an experience that goes way way beyond just being fun. It's damn near transcendental and only gets better when you see something big and velvety, lay down to snooze away the lunch shift, and you get to start planning your route to him, a route that will take you down and then be grudgingly up and then who knows, And when those high country bucks start losing their velvet and the pressure of idiots from Minnesota trying in vain to stalk them gets on their nerves enough they often drop down into the timber. When they do, they get a hell of a lot harder to spot. But if you do spot one, they are usually pretty close and usually have a lot of cover to work with to get right in range. It's hard to describe this in a way that resonates, because we have something innate in our brains that makes us focus on the dead animal part of a hunt and not what surely will be nine nine point nine nine percent of the reason to be there. When you do the work to get a mule deer tag, whether that's buying points in a state like Wyoming for years before applying, or you suss out one of the dwindling over the countertags still floating around, you are buying a ticket to an experience that the whitetail is mostly never going to give you. The mule deer is a big country deer. He lives where white tails live, but even then, the white tails will almost all be concentrated along the corridors where the water flows and the big cottonwoods grow. The rest of the land, of which there is plenty, will be pockmarked by mulder. He is one of a macro game, whereas the whitetail lives in the micro. There is something that both subspecies share, and that is the misconception about them as trophies. If you mention a I don't know, one hundred and thirty five inch meal deer to a western resident, they'll respond as most whitetail hunters would when they hear mentioned of one hundred inch eight pointer. There's probably not going to be much interest those deer to a lot of folks, at least in their minds, are a dime a dozen and not special. When you're on your first meal deer hunt and you lay eyes on a bed at one hundred and thirty five inch four by four, I promise you that you won't be dismissive of it unless you've drawn a once in a lifetime tag for a unit with almost no pressure and that buck that a lot of residents wouldn't take the safety off for he's going to kick your ass at the predator prey game, almost guaranteed just like if those Western hunters who think white tails are all shot on food plots and require no effort or skill would never ever see a hundred inch white tail if they showed up most places where the hunting pressure is real, which is a hell of a lot of the places that most of us hunt. It's not just the deer that factor into our decisions, it's us too, and not just what we want out of the deer, but what we want out of us. The meal deer, for example, is often pretty thirsty because he often lives in pretty dry locales. Now, stalking him the way you want to, because that's what you want for yourself in that dry grass when the wind isn't blowing really hard is super difficult unless you're toting a high powered rifle, and even then it's not a sure thing. But there is no meal deer hunt without at least a few stalks, because otherwise, what the hell are you doing? The thing is those thirsty deer. We'll head to water, and that's where you can kill him if you're patient. But is that what you want out of the hunt? Who cares? Do it your way? I say I've shot them, you know, after running into them while mostly glassing and giving up on my chances. I've shot them after finding them bedded and crawling in, and I've shot them while sitting in a stand over a cattle guzzler. It was all amazing, and it was all a hell of a lot of fun to figure out. Getting out out of your comfort zone to hunt deer that aren't your deer is just a low grade adventure that is almost always worth the price of admission. I have yet to hunt the little desert dwelling cous deer because at the time of the year when I should be doing that, I've had just about enough of deer in general, and the pheasant hunting is usually starting to get really, really interesting. But I have spent a stupid amount of time looking at public land in places like Arizona, which on most years might as well be on Mars. But it doesn't hurt to humor yourself a little bit and drop a few pins on random water holes on public land that you could only get too if you drove for twenty four hours straight or hopped on a couple of planes and then rented a truck, And even if you got out to the desert and started picking apart the landscape with some high end optics, you might not find a whole lot of deer. The folks I know who are just totally ate up with cous deer hunting, at least in the States and not down in Mexico, where the game can be vastly different, they remind me of my buddies who run ultra marathons. After every hunt. Just like those guys, after every race, it's kind of the same thing. They say, I'm not doing that shit again. That's the last one for this reason and that reason, in all the usual suspects. But then a little time passes and the memory of the misery starts to blur, the edges soften, and before too long there are outright conversations about doing it all again. And then they do. Why am I trying to not so subtly convince you that maybe it's time to hunt something other than our typical white tails. I mean, besides the fact that I believe it's worth it and that any hunt that takes us out of our comfort zone will change us for the better, it's also just because most of us find excuses to not do things like this. When I talk to folks about traveling out of state or to a different part of their home state to hunt white tails. I almost inevitably hear the same response, why would I go there to shoot the deer I can shoot at home. It's because you can have a different hunt, That's it. And I know we are all clamoring to have the same hunt year after year so we don't have to think about it and we don't have to worry about failing. But the same hunt on the same ground with wildly predictable results is a hunt that is going to feel a little more hollow with each incarnation. A hunt for the same deer in just a different place isn't a hunt for the same deer. One hundred and twenty inch big woods buck for the Pennsylvania hunter isn't the same as one hundred and twenty inch deer in the flooded timberlands of southern Arkansas anymore than it would be a hunt for a I don't know, one hundred and twenty inch deer in the Milk River a Montana. Just imagine the difference in landscape for those three, Not to mention the difference in behaviors of deer and the difficulty levels. There is still a mental roadblock with a lot of us that just says you don't need to travel for deer. So maybe that's the case with white tails for you, great fine, But who amongst us doesn't want to try to arrow a mule deer as he lays around in the midday sun thinking he's perfectly safe, Or who amongst us doesn't want to leave the tight confines of much of the white tails world these days to go where the deer live all over in big country that is open to each one of us lucky bastards who call this country home. Or who doesn't want to take a bush plane to an island in Alaska that's just a few degrees closer to Jurassic Park than anywhere else and see if they can weave between the brown bears to tag out on Sikka deer while the wind blows seventy five miles per hour for the whole trip. Okay, maybe not everyone is on board with that last one, and that's fair. That one isn't for everyone, and it's out there and doable though for some, mostly folks with some expendable income and a true desire for adventure. But you don't need to go wrestle small car size brownies and the alders for a different deer. When you can go to other places with less danger and more options, That's what I'm looking into hard right now. For my daughters, I highly doubt they'll get to hunt anything other than whitetails mostly in their lives, but I want to facilitate it a little bit because I want my daughters to shoot meal deer so badly, although I definitely definitely do, but I also want them to experience hunting that isn't walking out on a well used trail to a perfectly set up blinder tree stand to wait on deer that we know live where they live because we get them on camera and often see them with our own eyes. Mystery is an important part of hunting, and we keep trying to remove it. And I'd say the same thing about a little adventure. I'd also say that this is a good time of year to start doing a little research. Maybe that's nothing more than sitting in a turkey blind staring at your phone when the gobblers go tight lipped and you're trying to see where you can get a tag for a meal deer or a black tail or a coups, deer or whatever. Because when you figure that out, the next logical step is to start looking at on X just to see where the biggest chunks of public land are. This might seem a little bonkers, but I honestly think that planning a trip that might never happen is a good way to work a few muscles we often don't really work. And the more you kick around trip like that, the more likely you are to do something like that. Now, maybe you'll never drive thirty five hours up to Oregon to hunt real blacktails that are the toughest to kill in the whole world. But maybe you realize during your research that the white tails that live one or two states over seem kind of appealing. Now, and maybe you have a teenage daughter or two who would like a hunt that's different than the one on Grahama's farm out of the same box line, maybe you should just try to make that hunt happen, because those kids are going to keep growing up and the opportunities are going to keep going away. Now, it's easy to doom and gloom hard here, but a better bet is to accept the opportunities that are still available is worthwhile, and then figure out how to make something happen. If not, the worst thing you'll get out of it is a way to pass the time when you're waiting for the next strutter to pop into the field. And the best outcome is pretty damn special, no matter where the other deer take you. So think about that and think about coming back, because I'm going to talk about how to find more places to hunt at home, on the road, wherever, how to get permission, how to find lease. It's just how to expand your hunting opportunities for white tails. That's it. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. Thank you so much for all of your support. And we just had Turkey Week a little bit ago. You guys showed up big time for that. You voted in the Turkey Calling contest. You load it up on a lot of calls and decoys stuff like that. Thank you so much for that. If you want some more hunting content, maybe you want a new recipe, you know, cook that gobbler. You're going to be arrowing here soon. Whatever the meat eater dot Com has you covered. We drop new content every single day on that site, and I'm talking films, podcasts, articles, everything, it's all there. Go check it out.