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 how to change your future as a deer hunter and ensure that you'll have a successful season. We all know that we love those get rich quick hunting products, we love the rut, We'll love anything that'll give us an advantage because deer hunting is hard, it's not impossible, and we're all just kind of chasing rabbits with antlers around, hoping we get lucky in fill a tag. 00:00:49 Speaker 3: Well, not everyone. 00:00:50 Speaker 2: There are a lot of people out there who kind of manifest their own deer destiny and it's no accident that they succeed when most hunters fail. 00:00:57 Speaker 3: That's kind of like a power. 00:00:59 Speaker 2: That's in us all, at least to some extent, and it's what I'm going to talk about right now. A few weeks ago, the stars aligned and myself and three buddies made a guy's trip happen. While one of them had to leave early in the trip to go attend a bachelor party, another had to show up late because he has a lot of work to do. So it actually shook out really well because at any given point of that trip, I only had two other people in my boat. When you're tossing top waters with a bunch of treble hooks on them for smallmouth or fake kermits for large mouth, three dudes in one boat is more than enough. We had originally tried to make a Florida fishing trip happen last winter, But anyone who has kids and friends and jobs in life and all that other stuff understands that at some point you just lose any easy chance to get together with your buddies and do something cool for four or five days. It's pretty wild. And I know you young fellas listening to this won't believe it'll happen to you, but it will any hooters. We timed our trip well, and the smallies were just coming up to spawn and the large mouth were just wrapping up a wave of spawning. So depending on the wind, whether and how busy the lakes were. We fished for smallies on the rocks or large mouths in the weeds. The large mouth were already guarding fry and hanging around the bluegill beds that looked like craters on the moon, although they're just a bit too uniform in size. The small mouth were just on shallow, hungry males up making beds or forming little wolf packs to chase minnows, while the big females were holding tight to boulders and docks. It was easy fishing and changed by the day. Finding some fish anywhere that seemed fishy wasn't terribly difficult, but we were on the hunt for big ones, and so we catered our strategy to them. It was a blast, and I didn't think much of our success until I showed some pictures to a woman at the gym who asked me often why she doesn't and her family doesn't catch bigger fish at their lake Kevin. Now, when she saw the bass we caught, she said, you're so lucky at fishing. We never get that lucky boy. Have I heard that a time or two in my life, and it's representative of a common outdoor mindset, those who succeed are lucky, those who don't aren't. This is a comforting thought for a lot of folks because it means that at some point the fates will break their way and it'll be their turn to be lucky. But that totally discounts the reality of nature of predators and their prey, and the truth that the outdoors can definitely deliver you some good fortune, but it mostly won't until you give it what is necessary to be. You know where you need to be when you need to be there. When it comes to catching a five pound large mouth on a bright pick frog and the lily pads and emerging wild rice, it's mostly a matter of making a lot of long casts in areas where they should be when they are looking up to eat. If it's pretty cold or pretty windy and you look around and you and see a whole bunch of dragonflies cruising around, you might not get too many blow ups. 00:04:05 Speaker 3: The fish could be there. 00:04:06 Speaker 2: The fish could be there, but they might not be eating kermits a whole lot. You might have the right location but your timing is off. Or you might go out and fish that sweet spawning bay with the beaver dams and the floating bogs and only catch a few northerns even though the sun's shining, it's dead calm, and the dragonflies are just buzzing all over. So now you've got the right timing in the wrong spot. Now think about this with white tails. Scratch that, Think about this with a really good buck, the kind of buck we all want to shoot, who represents a class of deer that is rare enough in our neck of the woods to be a trophy. Not only do you need to be in the right spot at the right time, you also need that to happen on one of the moments when he puts himself in a position to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I know that's kind of saying the same thing, but kind of not. On any given day that you can hunt, he probably won't do that, And if he does, he has a pretty good chance of winding you, or spotting you up in your tree, or just taking a trail you didn't expect. So instead of walking by at twenty yards, he passes by at forty five, and then you try to grind him in and he doesn't have the best reaction, or you miss or whatever. When you acknowledge how hard this shit is, it's easy to want to believe that it's all just luck. For most of us, that's a comfortable blanket to wrap ourselves in because it removes most of our personal agency and protects our egos. I like that, and I bet you do too. I honestly think this is one of the reasons there's been such a harsh reaction to non residents in the last ten years. Has crowding increased in some areas, for sure, no question. But we've also been shown that some folks can show up in our backyards and kill big deer and we can't do it, and that doesn't sit well with a lot of us. So there must be a reason. And this social contagent thing creeps in and we decide that no one can do it because there are too many people trying. So the best bet is to kick some people out who are powerless. That's far more comfortable for a lot of us than admitting we aren't very good at this thing that we love, especially when we know that some people can go to where we hunt and kill the big deer that we can't. That sucks, but it happens to all of us. But we do have agency over ourselves, and we have the means to make a good hunt happen instead of singing back and crossing your fingers, you know, and thinking maybe this'll be our year. 00:06:34 Speaker 3: Now. 00:06:34 Speaker 2: I know I sound like a judge prick here, but let me tell you something. I can have a pity party with the best of them. I mean, try being friends with Andy may all fall. You get pictures from him of giant deer from someplace public, and there's always like a quick text with it that's like, well, I only had three days to haunt two states that I've never been to, so I killed these two one sixties quickly and went home. It's honestly kind of disgusting. I also know, from spending time with him and a hell of a lot more really good hunters, that it's not just luck to put those deer in. 00:07:06 Speaker 3: Front of Andy and these other guys. 00:07:09 Speaker 2: He knows what it takes to make something good happen, and he does that no matter where he's hunting. At home, that means tons of scouting, boots on the ground, scouting, not just trail camera work, but getting out there to learn about deer and the places they call home is what he's doing on the road. It's tons of digital scouting, which is immediately ground truth whenever he gets to where he's going. It's a near constant quest for up to the minute intel. Now pay attention to that, because this is a mindset thing, and it's something I personally struggle with every season. In fact, I think my biggest weakness as a white tail hunter is this. 00:08:00 Speaker 3: I like to hunt off of memories. A lot of us do. 00:08:04 Speaker 2: We had a good encounter last season around Halloween in this spot, so we go back there this year. It might work, but it probably won't because something major will have changed. Crop rotations, hunting pressure, wind direction, general weather, hard mass, soft mass, a pack of coyote, you're setting up shops somewhere new, you name it. The variables are endless. You might get a repeat, but you should try to figure out how likely that is. I think about it this way. When I have some good encounter, public or private, and I'm inclined to go try to repeat that pattern the following season, I try to remind myself of what went into having that good encounter in the first place. If it was a public land hunt, it's almost a guarantee that some sighting or some mid day scouting session put me in a spot that was just humming with potential, which means that I did some level of work to make it happen. When I hunt on memories, I'm mostly counting on the scouting or sightings of some other season to make something happen now. And when it comes to pressure deer anyway, old data is generally not very good. This is where things get tricky because we can easily fool ourselves when we are running the mind game of where to hunt, and when we think, well, I haven't been in the woods in two weeks, so this spot should be primed for deer activity because the pressure has been super low. 00:09:33 Speaker 3: But what does that mean? 00:09:35 Speaker 2: What if you only hunt forty acres, so you mitigated some of the pressure on a piece of ground that's four hundred yards by four hundred yards. That's great, But what about the rest of that deer's home range around where you hunt. Where I'm going with this is that we often talk ourselves into a plan because it's easy and not necessarily the best way to achieve our goals. I see this at the gym a lot, with people who month after month walk on the treadmill and play solitaire. 00:10:04 Speaker 3: Look, that's great, but I know. 00:10:07 Speaker 2: A couple of them well because they are my neighbors, and they often complain about not getting fitter, not getting skinnier, even though they go to the gym quite a bit. But if you don't get your heart rate up and really get moving, you're not going to get the results you want. It's one of those simple but not simple things. You could literally move into the gym and eat like shit and not really exercise a whole lot and never see results in spite of literally living in a gym. It's not the time there that matters, it's how you use that time. And the same rules apply to the White Tail Woods in season and odd of season. If you go out and glass from the same spot over and over because it's where you have the best chance to see a bachelor group, that's great, but over time it can tip from being a net benefit to being net neutral or if they are onto your game or the conditions change, a net negative alone doesn't mean anything, and to figure out how to do it in a way that will inform your choices for the season and not potentially hurt your chances. And then you use that information to set yourself up to be where the deer should be early in the season, which is when the summer glassing juice is easiest to squeeze out of your hunts. Of course, most of us aren't glassing a whole lot now that trail cameras are pretty cheap and easy to use, which is maybe the biggest component of us wishing for a good hunt instead of actively trying to make one happen. When we get pictures of that one forty who lives in the section that our land is in, it tells us many things, some of which are true and some of which are lies. For starters, we know he's in there, in the area somewhere. That's huge, It's true, it's important. There's something about knowing you're around a deer you'd really like to shoot that just helps sharpen the blade, so to speak. You're less likely to be sloppy, more likely to go in early and sit as long as possible, more likely to try to be quieter and pay attention more. All good stuff, really, But that picture or pictures, even if you know he shows up every week or every couple of weeks, they also lie to us, or they allow us to lie to ourselves. We tend to use the images to fill in a whole lot of blanks and decide that he'll show up on the retisan and he's no longer nocturnal, or we think that we can rattle him in during late October when the mornings are cold and the whole thing is about to snap like a top rubber band. Yet we don't know anything about that deer really, like those small moths coming out of their wintering holes, spawning on a big boulder and two feet of water, then backing out to stage and recover in five or six feet of water where there's cabbage starting to grow and the minnows are thick, and then eventually moving to the mid lake rock piles and points and sand drops for the summertime. Bulk up deer have a purpose to their daily movements, their weekly movements, and whether you know they're going to give you a chance or not, all of that's tied in there. 00:13:03 Speaker 3: Now. 00:13:03 Speaker 2: That buck that you got the pictures of, he has multiple bedding sites he uses. He's feeding on all kinds of different brows and masts and crops and whatever he has access to. He has trails, he likes to take when the wind is out of the southwest, and trails he'll only take when it comes from the north. He knows all of the deer in his neighborhood, and he knows a hell of a lot about when you come into the woods and when you leave. He can learn about you after you leave, and most likely does when he walks past your camera. He's giving you a single data point, and it might be very valuable. Probably is, but it's not enough to build a real plan on. You need to see him if you can, even in June or July. That's a start, But also finding his tracks or getting a picture of him in two different locations in a week, or finding an area with huge rubs absolutely shredded in mid October. Then you start to understand his routine and the routine of big Bucks in your area. You start to be able to predict where he might actually show up and win at least have a pretty educated guess. And when you can do that, you stop wishing, at least to some extent, and you start manifesting your own destiny. Now I realize I'm dumbing this way down, but I'm also not dear are creatures of habit just like us, and they leave evidence of their presence, just like us. Their job is to avoid us. Our job is to find them. They're generally better at their job than we are at ours, but we can get better at ours. We never will, though, if we take a mostly passive approach to figuring out their day to day activities. This is something that can be accomplished in multiple ways, but there's one that works for me pretty well. When I go into the woods, I try to get myself to pay attention. 00:14:46 Speaker 3: And be curious. 00:14:47 Speaker 2: I'm heading to Wisconsin to hang some cameras this weekend, and I know it'll be a buggy and thick and generally gross mess out there, but I also know it has rained a lot lately, so finding big tracks is a real possibility. Instead of just marching in to hang cameras on trees that I've hung cameras on before and then getting out, I'm going to force myself to pay attention to the trails and the tracks and the beds and anything else that can help me sort of put the whole thing together over there. To me, that's literally the difference between walking slowly on the treadmill for forty five minutes or running for forty five minutes. You could do either with the same amount of time, but one is definitely more beneficial. So I guess my question to you, find folks is how are you going to stop wishing for a good hunt this season and try to make one happen? Do you have anything planned in the next couple of weeks that will put you on the right path forward? What's your scouting plan for this summer? Do you have a plan? How about your stand hanging plan? Do you feel it's too early to care about that stuff because the hit list isn't even close to being ready yet. Are you going to wait till August and then go put up your usual sets for the year while you haunt on memories? If so, ask yourself this, how well has that worked for me in the past. If it's worked pretty well, great, You know what isn't broke doesn't need much fixing. But what if it didn't work? How will you take agency over your deer hunting success this fall by doing something? 00:16:07 Speaker 3: Now? 00:16:08 Speaker 2: I know this kind of sucks to hear because hunting is supposed to be fun and not tons of work. But fun comes in many forms. It's pretty satisfying to glass up a good one right now, even if the mosquitoes are bonkers and there are a lot of fish to be caught. It's pretty satisfying to hang a few cameras earlier than you need to, and to start getting pictures of some bucks doing their thing in different spots, which means that you'll be able to slip in some rainy summer day to hang a set or three in those new locations. 00:16:33 Speaker 3: It's pretty fun to get. 00:16:34 Speaker 2: Active with this stuff so that you're really learning about the deer and what they do, because that can tamp down the season long second guessing and give you confidence in your decisions. 00:16:43 Speaker 3: Don't look at it like work. Look at it like. 00:16:45 Speaker 2: It's just a necessary part of the process that will literally set you apart from most of the competition, because you know what, most of those big bucks out there are counting on you to hunt like everyone else, and when you don't, you start to run into them more frequently, and that is when you can really level up as a white tail hunter, which is what we all want. So do that and come back next week, because I'm going to talk about summer scouting mistakes that most folks make and how to avoid them. That's it for this episode. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for your support for listening, for reading the articles, for watching the shows, everything. We truly appreciate it. Here at meat Eater. If you want more hunting content, you know where to go. We put up new articles, we put up new shows, we put up new podcasts, just tons of new content every single day over at the meeedeater dot com. 00:17:41 Speaker 3: Go check it out