00:00:02 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your home for deer hunting news, stories and strategies, and now your host, Mark Kenyon. Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Kenyan. In this episode number one. Today the show, we're joined by Gordon Whittington of North American Whitetail Magazine, and we're discussing the challenges of hunting October bucks and a whole lot more. All Right, welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, brought to you by sit Gear. And today in the show, we're joined by the editor in chief of North American Whitetail Magazine, Gordon Whittington, and we're going to be discussing a number of different interesting topics, including some things related to the challenges of hunting during the month of October, and a lot of stuff actually related to the fact that Gordon has had a wide variety of experiences hunting all over the country. So we're gonna dive into some of these different regional specifics to maybe some stuff about hunting in Texas, maybe some stuff about hunting in the Southeast, how that all compares with the Midwest, and different stuff along those lines. So it's going to be interesting. But before we get Gordon on the line with us, it's been a long while actually since Dan and I have been able to catch up and fill all of you in on how our seasons are going so far. So Mr co host Daniel Johnson, it's good to have you back. Yeah. Have you ever been so busy that you forget to go to the bathroom. It's not you go with your pants or anything, but you're like, holy cow, I haven't p today, I haven't poop today, I haven't had water in like a day. Like, have you ever been that busy? You know, I've been close to that busy, but usually that's a high priority for me, So no matter what, I still still make it happen. But I know you're a different type of You're different animals. So yeah, that's right, one of those day. Oh my god, it's one of those things where it's like I'm really, really, really busy, and then I'm trying to fit bow hunting into into the mix. So we have not talked since the beginning of hunting season, or at least not at the beginning of your hunting season. Um, how many times have been out? Uh, Well, I went out, say Friday morning, Friday night, Saturday morning, Saturday night, and then looked for a deer on Sunday morning and couldn't find her. Now that's this past weekend, though, did you hunt it all opening weekend? I got out Wednesday or I got out Sunday night and that was it? Okay, So walk us through because today is October, I think right to October eleventh, so there's been a lever of ten days of hunting so far from you in Iowa. So you went on Sunday night anything studying that night. Let's see, here's what happened. Um, I first night in the stand, and I don't know if you know the very I don't know how you are, but the very first night in the stand for me is almost like a decompression chamber where you're just trying to get back into like the hunting mindset. You know. I did my first running gun set up. UM. I took it slow. I made sure I was doing everything right. Um. And then once I was set up, I you know, tried to clear my mind of everything else except what was currently in front of my face. Right, So I was just trying to decompress. And UM, I had had a fairly good night. Um, I saw three deer um. One of them was a three year old that I didn't get the opportunity to pass him, but I would have probably passed him. How how big of a three year old are we talking from? From a headgear standpoint? I think he's going to be sitting around like the high one twenties, lowe one thirties. Um, he's a he's a nine pointer. He's kind of got a weird, funky uh left side. But uh but yeah, you know nothing, you know nothing that made me personally jump out of my seat. It was cool seeing the first buck of the year, though for the triestan um and then he was it's funny. So right now you're thinking, Okay, they're eating acorns or they're eating I watched him clear out an entire bush of out right now there's these there's it's a bush, it's green, and they got these red little berries on them. I don't know if you ever know if you know what those are. But yeah, you know, I I even know the name of him. But I'm struggling right now to think of what is it choke cherries? Maybe I don't know. I'm not sure. I feel like but I know, I can't think of that, right, but he he cleared out an entire bush, I mean along along this field edge, and uh, I'm so. I was like, man, you know those are a field edge. Yes, don't tell anybody, don't tell anybody field but listen, I think you got it mixed up because I I do hunt field edges when I'm in an observation set because I want to see. I want to see. But but when I go in for the you know, dive in, I'm not hunting field edges. However, this, uh, you know, I I saw him clear out this entire bush. Three dose or two dos came out, and he starts pushing them like he's putting his nose to the ground sniffing and you know, doing a half as type of chase, you know what I mean. They weren't having it. He knew it wasn't time, so um, they just all kind of mingled around this this little inside corner of a field for a while and then right at last light, another deer stepped out. It was a dark bodied, bigger body. I couldn't see the head on it, um, but it pushed that other buck out of the picture, and the does kind of just started working their way away and this other deer. By the time it kind of got to where I could see they were, it was too dark, So I don't know what that was. Could have been a you know, one of the bucks, the bigger bucks on the property, but nothing, you know, I couldn't I couldn't tell what it was. Interesting, So pretty good first sip though, So then what the week passes. We got the big cold front that came through this past weekend, so you took took Friday off, hit the stand. Uh Friday morning saw three Larri's or dinks and uh then one dough They all four came out at one time and just kind of milled around this slow spot in the field before they headed into the timber. Um. I checked trail cameras, came back home for a little bit, then headed down to my main farm and uh for for Friday nights hunt and had an absolutely awesome hunt. Uh. I was kind of doing another I was doing another observation type of set, but knowing what works their way through there. Um and after consulting deer lab. I don't know if you use that or not, so you know I'm using I'm using my dear lab. I'm going up and I'm saying, okay, last year at this time or two thousand fourteen or two thousand thirteen, let's just check my trail camera pictures that I've had I have uploaded on there, and they they are, you know, saying that I have some activity at this certain this certain fence crossing. All right, So I'm gonna go sit there. It's not only a good observation stand I can see everything coming in, but statistically it's a it's a high spot because my goal was to shoot a dough. Well, the short story is I had to. I have five does come from the south, three does come from the north, and they they're walking through this bean field that has been cut blown over by wind, and it's making a lot of noise, almost the sound like me walking through it. So the does to the south get scared and start blowing at the uh dose to the north, which ends up scaring the dose to the north, and they all kind of run away, so they spooked each other. Now after a while they all came out back again. Um. I ended up passing uh a really big bodied three year old with like a hundred non typical. He may have been a little bigger than nine thirty, but he had like a uh four point side and then he or yeah before it was a five point side, real small, and then it's like a crazy non typical double brow with like a twisted kind of a drop type of deal. But that's awesome. But yeah, it was pretty pretty decent buck. And then um passed two more four corns and then uh, probably with about thirty minutes thirty five minutes left in the night, I start hearing what I thought was rattling in the distance, So I put my binose up into this uh you know, through the tree line, and I can see two bucks sparring. They weren't fighting, but they were tickling each other's antlers, and one of them was I believe. I couldn't tell because there's so many leaves still on the tree, but I believe one of them was a buck that I have put on my hit list. Um, kind of an eight pointer with his brows are split like banana peals, Like they don't split and go up, they split and both kind of peel down. So um, that's a four year old, I believe. And other than that, then, uh, you know, the does never did get close enough to within shooting range because they got spooked. And then they all came out further down the fence line into this cornfield. Uh so that was over. Um. Then the wind shifted, so I wasn't able to hunt in that area for the following day. Um. The next morning, I went to what I thought was going to be a historical travel pattern travel corridor back to the um betting area in a different area. Didn't see any deer. I heard him across the ravine, but I couldn't see them they were too far down. And then, um, what a Saturday night. I went to this little back pocket where I had we're in the past when the corns in there, they feel very comfortable coming into this this corner of this different corn field and they just hang out there. I bumped one dough at two thirty or one buck to thirty in the afternoon, walking in who was already in this cornfield, and then I set up, he came back out and what else? Oh? Um, so I'm sitting there, I'm, you know, just kind of hanging out waiting for it to get to the good, good time of the night. And a dough and a buck. A buck's already following this dough and it's a maybe a hundred inch buck, maybe an eight pointer, and he's kind of following this dough real close, and I'm I'm by this time, I'm standing up looking down in the The dough looks at my bottom stick on my tree, on the tree, my bottom bottom lone wolf stick follows every stick up and looks at me and blows and runs into the timber. She didn't know what I was, so she blew and she I'm talking thirty minutes of blowing, and by this time I'm just like, oh my god, do I get down right? Well? She she gets close again, she stopped blowing, She gets close, she blows and blows and blows again, and then she goes back into the timber. And then finally, I don't know why, why dear do this? If they're afraid of something, but they get curious because they don't officially know what it is, because she never had my scent. She steps out in the field and I draw back and I ranged the spot where she stepped out at. I had a gap between the field edge and a tree limb right, and she came out fairly fast, and I ranged the spot and the spot was thirty thirty five yards and she stepped out a little bit further than that. So I put my forty yard pin on her and I set the you know, I you know, settled, let the arrow fly, and I hit her. But I couldn't see really where because she was right in line with a corn row. So then she she jumps out. She goes into the cornfield and she stands there for twenty thirty minutes, and she every step she took, it looked like she was getting ready to fall over. So I said to myself, you know, I think I hit guts. I think I hit a little bit low and a little bit back, but there's a chance I got liver, all right. So I said, okay, I gotta treat this like any deer if it was a big buck, what would I do? Back out? We give it time. So I went home. The next morning, I come back with my stepdad and we started with where she was standing, right, I mean it, if she took a step, she was almost getting ready to fall over. And we go there. We find a little bit of blood and I'm talking maybe ten fiftt of blood and nothing, and we we ended up gritting probably close to forty acres of cornfield and timber, and I ended up not being able to find her and it it basically ruined my weekend. Yeah, jeez, I was gonna say it sounds like a great weekend and then you really ended on a downer. Yeah, And you know, it's one of those things where it was a forty yard shot in an open corn field. You know, I don't know, I've I felt confident enough to take the shot and it didn't work out. I was off. Um, it sucks that I ended up wounding a deer and taking, you know, a shot. You know, some people out there probably would say, hey, you don't you shouldn't be able to you shouldn't take a shot like that. Well I look at it this way. If that buck was two, I would have taken the shot, just like I would take the shot on the dough, you know what I mean, Like you have to just because of it's a giant buck doesn't mean you should change your you know, change your your range. Right. You have to be and and ethically I felt that I was good at forty yards and I pulled off a shot that was not as good as I hoped it to be. And unfortunately, Um, you know who knows if this uh, this dough is a lib or not. And it really it really sucks. Sorry, man, I know when we've talked about this type of thing happens and it's uh, it's the the worst part of hunting is when something that goes wrong and we do everything we can possibly do to have you know, as quick an ethical kill as possible, but as as you and I both know it, no matter what you no matter how hard you try sometimes or how much of practice, sometimes just stuff happens. Well, And it's crazy, right because you can practice on a target all day long, you can practice from a tree stand at a target. But the hunting not to make excuses for a poor shot. But you don't practice for a deer that you have to stop, you don't have to have. You don't practice for a deer that's already been spooked. You don't practice on um, you know, all these different scenarios because in the timber, some of these scenarios are almost un unpracticable, if that makes sense. So you know, and don't I'm the last guy to make excuses. I feel bad that I end up winning this deer um, So you know, I gotta keep doing what I do, and that's practiced in my off time. So yeah, keep on keeping on. Yep. Well, I'm sorry to hear about how that first weekend went. I I now have forty five seconds to give you an update on how my last eleven days run hunting. Dude, I'm so sorry. I just you should have said shut up. I'll give you the really, really quick, cliff notes version of what's going on. I just want to know if you had any encounters with holy Field. I've hunted holy Field four times. I've yet to see him. I saw one other potential shooter at one of my other stand locations while I was hunting one spot. I saw him like four hund yards away. And then I hunted a couple of new properties in between during the week and I saw a potential shooter on one of them, didn't get a shot. That's basically my season so far. So do you think you know where he's stepping out? Holy Field? Yeah? I don't know what holy Fields doing anymore. I saw him the last night. I don't have any trout, although I've I've no I've got two cameras i've checked since opening night. He's not on them. The one camera that's in the middle of his core area. I have not checked since opening night, so I'm going to do that in the next day or two. Drive the fore wheler out there. Check that um. But last time I saw him was the night before the season, and since then, like I said, I went and hunted four different times. I was obsessively care the first three times I hunted in that little core area, once in the ground blind where I had to put waiters on and walked up a stream for like a hundred fifty yards to get into this little spot. Then I crawled on all hands and knees to get into the back of this ground blind so that no possible way anything could hear me, see me, smell me, etcetera. I didn't see anything that night. Then the next day the next two hunts, I hunted a tree stand in that area, and I took like this crazy roundabout route that I've never done before. But I'm just like trying to take every possible, every possible thing I can do to reduce the chances of this buck seeing me or hearing me when I sneak in. If he was betted up there in the front there and still didn't see him, I mean, everything was pretty darn great. I didn't spook any deer and never at least that I heard or saw. I never spooked any deer um, but just he was he wasn't moving, So there could be a million different reasons why. Maybe he still did hear me or saw me or smell me. Maybe other neighboring property hunters spooked him and kind of caused him to go nocturnal. But it's kind of how it is here, at least where I'm hunting in Michigan. It's like you've got the first day or two maybe, and then these bucks just on a dime switch it up because there's literally there's probably twenty guy is within yards probably of where I'm hunting, maybe last I mean, there's a lot of maybe not twenty, but a lot, a lot a lot of hunters, and that changes things. So have you now switched your attention over to this other shooter that you show that you saw. I still focusing on Holy Field. I'm basically pulling out there, and I'm not gonna hunt again until either I get daylight trail camera pictures or laid October cold front happens. Otherwise I'm just laying off this property completely now. Um. Now that said, if I get to that time period and it starts getting good and I go in to hunt, and if I see this other buck and I actually saw another buck from the road one night I didn't hunt, I still was able to scout just at last light, and I saw a different buck that was super crazy wide. I've never seen a buck this wide and this property before. He might be a four year old or three year old, I don't know. Um. So if one of those two other bucks shows up and presents me a great shot opportunity, I'm gonna have a decision to make. I don't know what I would do right now, because I'd love to kill holy Field. But at the same time, in Michigan, if you get your shot at a three year old or four year old buck, um, and if it's you know, one twenty or something like that, I mean, that's a really really really rare dear here. And if you get one opportunity year, you're in the top five percent. So I don't know if I can pass up that opportunity. Um. If I did end up shooting one of those bucks, then I would lay off the property the rest of the year, and I would let holy Field hopefully just create a sanctuary again and hopefully hunt him again at five. So maybe that will happen, or maybe I'm just gonna focus on holy Field. That's my number one best option. I hope that's what happens, but I'm just gonna see how plays out. I guess how many how many trail cameras do you have right now surrounding where you think holy Field lives? I have three on that property right now. I'm going to add a fourth here in the next day or two when I go out. I'm gonna go out and take the four wheeler and just check these cameras, um that I haven't been able to get to because I've been so careful not to go in there. But now, since I'm not gonna hunt it for like another three weeks, I'm gonna take the four whiller and drive up to these edges where I can just easily change out the cards and batteries on these cameras and just get them ready to be, you know, hopefully collecting some intel from me all these next three weeks, and then um, you know, once we get to that late October time period, then I'm gonna try again all right man, well, good luck, thank you sir. So I know, uh, we need to we need to pause here a second before we get gored on the line and take a break to thank our partners at Sick of Gear, and then we will start talking with Gordon Whittington. So as we do every week, we have a sick story today, and we're joined again by Sick of Gear employee Brad Christian, who sharing me a pretty awesome story of an unexpected hunting role reversal between him and his wife. Now set the stage quickly. Brad's away from home and he gets this text from his wife asking he'll come back home and watch the kids for the night because she wanted to go hunting. Now, Brad is all about his wife getting on in the woods, but he knew this could be a little bit tricky as she had a flight to catch at five am the next morning. I said, absolutely, draw home, you know, jam back, and kind of past each other in the driveway. I five, you know, and wished her luck, and you know she makes up the tree and and you know, I'm getting the play by play if you know sawbird, you know, here's the here's the weather, you know, here's the wind. Here's you know, the selfie you know in the SI caface mask, you know that that kind of thing, and and uh, you know, she's she's a planner, I think, you know, like like a lot of us. She's texting me like, hey, what if I you know, what if I kill a buck? You know what what you know in terms of processing and and everything, And I'm thinking, goodness, like probably statistically right, just you know, not trying to be Debbie down a room. Probably not something you know, I'm not I'm not not real worried about it, you know. And she's like, I gotta leave. I mean my fight leaves at five am, so I gotta be gone. And I'm just like, hey, but that would be an awesome problem to have. Let's just well we'll cross that bridge, you know when we get there. Um so I I you know, kind of forget about it. And then you know, the saft fox and then you know, a little bit later, out of buck and I'm like what text her back. She goes and I'm sorry, so sorry, my battery is dying. And I'm like, oh my gosh, of course your battery is dying, because your batteries always dying and she's like, sorry, this is gonna be it. I'm like, did you hit him good? She's because, yeah, I think so. But I'm my girlfriend. You she she saw the butt to go by, so I'm questioning and my battery seriously gonna die. And then she's gone, and I'm like, awesome. Great. She's like, I don't know, a couple of hours away, you know, leaving, you know, in you know, at three in the morning. I got the kids, and I'm just like, well, that's that. So I try to stay up for I was exhausted, and eventually I I passed out on the couch and just you know, that was it. And I wake up in the morning and I'm like, oh my goodness, what happened? You know, I'm still okay. I'm like running around. She's gone. She's not in our bed. I look out my trucks in the driveway, and so i'd be line it out there and I dropped the tailgate down and there's this buck laying in the bed of my truck. With it, there's a piece of computer paper that's like pierced by the G two. It's just hanging there that says thanks Mr Mom, I'll text you my processing and instruction. That's awesome, pretty awesome. Indeed, that was a sickest story. And if you'd like to learn more about Sick of Gears technical hunting apparel, you can visit sick of gear dot com. And now let's get back to the show and give Gordon a call. All right, with us on the line now is Gordon Whittington. Welcome the show. Gordon, glad to be here, guys. Yeah, we appreciate you taking the time, especially you know during hunting season. I always feel bad trying to get people to come on the show during hunting season in an afternoon when I know a lot of people are thinking about hunting at least, So appreciate you doing that, Gordon. And I guess before we dive into talking about that topic hunting right now, I guess it would be I think helpful for all of us to hear a little bit about who you are, some of your background. You know, we I briefly introduced you at the beginning of the show. Folks, I'm sure familiar with what you've done North American white Tail, But I guess how did you get to this point? Well, that's an interesting question. I grew up on a cattle ranch in central Texas. UM killed my first deer when I was seven. That was nineteen sixty three. I was sitting on my grandfather's knee shooting an open side at thirty to twenty Model ninety two Winchester car being UM there was only a few hundred serial numbers apart from the one John Wayne used in True Grit. So I guess that's my I guess that's my earliest claim to fame. If there was such a thing. There was the dough. And I've told I've told many people. I say, you know, look, I shot that dough through the heart and at the same moment, deer hunting shot meat through the heart. Because I absolutely never after that I could think of anything cooler than deer hunting. And and I'd grown up. I'd grown up in a ranch, like I say, and and and my parents were in the meat processing business. So they not only was in the cattle business, but every fall they would take in eight hundred to a thousand deer process And this is GOLLI fifty years ago now. And and so I grew up around that and hunters bringing in deer and just being around all that, and and my talents such as it was, I knew was never going to be an engineering or mathematics or anything like that. And I wasn't going to play in the NBA a little old me, so I kind of figured, you know, I need to figure out something that I can do with language, and my love was to deal with what was was to write and dealing with images and just trying to convey and communicate information. And it turned out that deer hunting was a perfect entree into that for me, As it turned out to be at a time when the white tail population was starting to grow, we were starting to get more specialized media, and I came aboard North American whitetail just as that wave was starting to swell in the early eighties, and I put my surfboard up on top of it, and I've been writing it ever since. But I'm I know, I'm getting close to shore now because I'm sixty years old, but I'm still having a good time. That's awesome. So given you have a unique perspective, I think compared to a lot of us, and that you got to observe this rise in this in this wave of deer hunting media and excitement and the I don't know, this big buck hysteria of sorts maybe that we're living and now I'm kind of curious, what are your thoughts and where things have gone from that time that North American White til first started to where we are now today. Well, if you look back in the early eighties, North American white Tail his very first issue came out in the fall of nine two, so we've we've been at it a little over three decades now. And I came aboard and I wrote two articles for the third issue of the magazine that was an early eighty three and I was still living in Texas at the time, and the magazine was founded here in the Atlanta area, and in summer of eighty four, I moved over here to actually work on the magazine, and I've been here ever since. So if I have kind of been here through you know, the long haul of it, if you will. Certainly there were a lot of people very interested in white tail deer long before I was born, and certainly the white tail has been important in American hunting, in North American hunting for for you know, centuries now. But but the restoration that was really just you know, coming on strong in the sixties and seventies, and obviously eighties and nineties all the way up into early two thousand's across much of North America, particularly the Midwest and in some parts of the Northeast. I think we saw that there was just this latent interest in big game hunting that otherwise was not available for people, and so it was such a rush for them to get to go out and hunt something beside squirrels and rabbits you know, we're ducks, and really go out and feel like there were big game hunting in part of the country where that had been absent for a while. And so I think that was part of the mystique and the allura that that really got people chummed up and interested in not just shooting deer, but as they as they started to find doubt that there were giant deer at least had existed in the past, whether they still did or not, people were fascinating. Body's big here? And who doesn't want to shoot a big deer after you know they exist? I mean, you you know that old six pointer, you know that hangs out behind the farm pond. It looks pretty good to you until you've been to the Deer show and seeing the hole in the hornbuck hanging there, and all of a sudden you realized, there's a different world out there than I live in, and yet it's here in North America, and regular people sometimes with the guys shooting these mega giant deer. Well, I think that that dream and fantasy of being one of those guys and and having a chance to really kind of live out that fantasy. I think that was a big part of the allure of of the megabuck, if you will. Back in the eighties and nineties in particular, some people feel like, now, well, you know, we've seen so many giant deer. There's so many farm deer now, there's so many videos, there's so many sheds, there's so many everything out there, collections and stores, replica as you name it. That there is a certain amount of what I think Dr Dr Crowe has often references antler fatigue. We don't have any less interest in shooting these mega giant deer. We're still excited about the idea of it. But seeing these giants deer that are that thirty years ago, we're totally unknown and now somewhat somewhat more common, whether through social media, whether through just the general blitz of media in general, including us here at North American whitetail. I do think that's taken some of the mystique, if you will, off the off the world class buck. But nonetheless, hunting those deer is still as magical as it ever was, and maybe more so. Yeah, what is it about? What is it about a giant buck that has guys like us daydreaming all year around? You know? What's what's? What do you think that draw is? Well, you have to there are several things I believe, I mean, as impressive as a giant pronghorn antelope or a mountain goat. Is they all pretty much look like the same animals. Some are a little bit bigger than others, but white tails, even a hundred and twenty class nine pointer, they don't all look alike. They don't all Uh, they aren't all taken by the same method, in the same way and exactly the same kind of habitat. There's all sorts of different situations. Uh, you know, the land holdings. Sometimes they're small. We understand that the odds are against us getting a shot at the monster versus making the guy across the fence or two farms over, so we've got that. We felt like there's a massive challenge to that number one because we know it. You just don't shoot these big deer every day. Uh and and sometimes you go with fifty years and you never get a chance at a hundred and fifty deer. And yet you could be the best hunter in your county, but you just don't have big deer to hunt. And so I think knowing how rare it is, and how special these animals are and how difficult they are to hunt, I think all of that contributes to this fantasy that man, will I ever be the guy that shoots a deer like that? Or can I make it happen if a deer like that comes by me? Can I keep it together? Can I get the job done? I think I think there's so much, if you will, just an aura about these mega giant deer that it's in some ways they're intimidating. And in fact, I've heard the writers say one time, you know, this is the only animal that can intimidate you without even knowing that you're in its presence, because he can just walk by your spand and you fall apart, and he just walked by blissfully not even know when you were in a tree trying to kill him. If you turn to Jolo and he never was even threatened by your presence. Yet that's why you were there, was to kill that deer. And so when you realize that, that's the effect they have on us. And sometimes the more you yearn for that opportunity, the harder it is to make it happen because you put so much pressure on yourself and sometimes a deer just blissfully goes on its way and doesn't even know that it was close to die thing, and yet you you almost sell out the treaty. So you know, I don't know how many big game animals can do that, but a white tailed deer can do that. Do you still do you still feel that, Gordon, You've You've killed a lot of deer in your day. Do you still fall apart and turn to jellow one when some of these big boys roll through. Well, you know, to be honest with you, you know, I I can keep it together pretty well myself, And I think one of the reasons is that because I'm so often now basically there with a cameraman and we're trying to shoot TV footage and while internally, of course you're a wreck sometime because it's the tense situation, a lot of anticipation and adrenaline, You're you're having to focus pretty hard to make sure you do your part because you are there to shoot TV footage. At the same time, at its basic level, this is still hunting, and if you don't have any emotion, you really do need to look for something else to do, because it's too much time and trouble and effort and money to go hunt big deer if you don't get anything out of it in terms of a thrill or an elevated pulse rate, I mean, otherwise, why even bothered? Yeah, that the day that I don't get that elevated pulse rate, it will be the day that probably I, like you said, consider some other hobbies or easier ways of acquiring my food maybe, because that definitely is an important part of it, and it never it has yet to get old for me, Thank goodness. Um I guess so speaking of that, right, uh, For the fifteen minutes actually before you came onto the show with us, me and Dan, we're just talking about our October hunting woes. All things have gone wrong for us, and how we have not killed a deer yet. Um. And that's kind of what I wanted to start our conversation with Gordon was just about some of the challenges of hunting this time of year we're entering, and we've all heard a thousand times, we're entering this period of the season that many people referred to as the October lull Um. I guess maybe what do you think about that, Gordon? Is there such a thing Do you believe that the October law is? Is that factor fiction? Well, I think there is no question that at various times of the fall, and really year round obviously, but during the time of year when hunting is legal, we all know there are times a year when your probability of seeing a mature buck on his feet in legal shooting light are better than others. It depends on habitat, weather, moon phase, but mostly hunting pressure, to some extent, habitat type. There's all these different factors involved, deer densities, so many things. But I would say that in general, if you if you talk to the guys who have let's say, like in Michigan October one bowl opener of Illinois, that way, you know, right around October one, at least you've got you know, the deer have been out of velvet for three weeks to a month. The bucks are you know, of course, somewhat reclusive and solitary. Really when they come out of velvet, they come out of their bachelor groups, they really go into a short travel pattern. They don't move much in daylight, even if they're not spook or being hunted, they're not moving a long way to food. And you know, maybe out in the prairie of Wyoming you've got deer walking two miles from alfalfa fielding back, you know, even in early season. But for the most part, in most habitats, you have deer on a very short travel pattern. And that's you know, compounded by the fact that then suddenly we get the acorns and the other fall masts that starts to come into play. And that's a that's mostly back in the woods, and we're trying to kill these deer on the edges because we don't want to penetrate their sanctuaries, and yet their sanctuaries might literally have acorns dropping into their bedding areas as those deer lying there waiting for dark, well that deer's got very little incentive unless he's really thirsty. He's got very little incentive to get up and move much in daylight. And I think if you look at Reggio telemetry and you look at all the different GPS studies that have been done on while deer, you'll see that mature bucks just have a very short travel pattern at this time of year. So there aren't if you have the terminus, let's say, is a food plot, and it may be the best food plot in the county, and you may have the best bedding area two hundred yards away from there in a swap or something. If that buck is in that swamp and he's going to that food plot at night, he's got very little ground to cover to get there, and he can get on his feet right at dark, you know, stretch a little bit, rub his rack a couple of times, and then prance right out of the food plot, and he's already too late for you to kill him. Now, that's just the fact of life that, you know, hunting pressure didn't necessarily cause that. It might have accentuated that pattern, but it didn't really cause it. He's just got no incentive to get there early. He's also got no incentive to stay there after daylight in the morning. By the time you got daylight coming over a food plot, he's normally back in a place where you can't get him killed. So these are just realities, and he's not very responsive to rattling or calling. Generally speaking, you don't want to do a deer drive. There's all sorts of things that you're not going to do an early season that otherwise might compensate for that lack of mobility on his partners, a lack of a daytime pattern. You put all that together, and that's a really long winded way of saying, Uh, they're hard to kill now, but but we understand why they're hard to kill. They're just not on their feet much in daylight. And and I don't know what you can ultimately do to change that pattern very much. Trail cameras clearly have made it easier for us to pinpoint those locations where they're spending time, but you have to be very careful not to blow the deer out either checking cameras or going in to hunt that spot. And a lot of guys just get so impatient, and early season there's like, oh, man falls finally here, I've been waiting all all year to get in the tree. I'm going, well, when is not quite right, I'm going anywhere, you know, I gotta go. It's Saturday. I'm going, Well, you can go and blow him out and not see him again for three months and have your neighbor killing three weeks later. And that's a lot of times. It's just the reality of what happens is that we just don't have the discipline to wait for better conditions. So would you typically recommend Let's say we've got someone who's hunting in that type of scenario you just listed there where he's not getting daily trout camera pictures of a buck. He's not seeing daily activity from a buck yet because of that situation, right, he's this buck doesn't need to travel very far. Maybe he hasn't been overly pressured yet, but he just doesn't have that incentive to move during daily So that's our scenario. Would you tell this person, I guess, would you typically think this type of person should wait until the run or are there some things that they should do now to try to still make it happen. I would I would go to a separate area and try to get my dough shot. That's the first thing I would focus on if I can't get him shot in the in the setup that I feel is most likely to produce an opportunity in the first time or two or three that I sit there during the earliest days of season and catch him unaware and possibly get him shot before he knows the season it's even open. If I can't do that, I'm gonna pull out. I'm gonna go somewhere else. I'm gonna try to get my doze shot, or to be honest with you, for many of us, it's I'm gonna try to get all my jobs done around the house so that when prime time gets here, I can spend more time in the woods. And I do think that's some of It's a function of time allocation. We all have limited time, even those of us who hunt quote for a living. We all still have other things in our life we have to do. And the worst thing in the world is to put all those off. Hunt hard in October, mess up your spot didn't come to sifth and November, and realize you're behind on your honey dues, and then have to spend three days in prime time catching up so you can then go and chase deer again. I mean, I think sometimes we just don't have a really good game plan. And because of that. That's not to say people don't kill big ones in October or even mad October. They certainly do. I mean, there's been some big ones kill the last couple of weeks all over North America. But the number of people hunting relative the number of big deer opportunities is with a pretty skewed ratio. Yeah, definitely, I mean, I think it's hard to argue with that. It's definitely possible, but at the same time as challenging, at least from everything I've ever learned and from all the different people we've talked to on this podcast, I think, you know, one of the big things that comes down to is, you know, there's certain types of conditions, or certain little weak spots in a big box armor of sorts that you can take advantage of if you have that perfect scenario for it. But eight times out of ten, you know, either you don't have that scenario or you don't have all the intel that you need to make a smart move or whatever it might be. Eight times out of ten, usually the smarter bet is to wait until those right conditions, because to your point, when you start pushing in there and doing things before the times, right before the scenario is right, you're just gonna muck things up before you ever even had a chance. And then when you might have had that better chance, maybe in late October or November, whatever it is, or when the cold front comes through, you know, now you can't take advantage of that because you've already educated that buck. And that's a tough lesson to learn. Yeah, it's difficult, and and I could never blame anybody for saying, Look, I just flat enjoy being in the deer woods, and even if it messes up my chances of killing the big one, I want to go. Well, how on earth could you tell a guy that you shouldn't go. I mean, I you know a deer. Deer hunting is supposed to be to be fun, and if that's fun to him and he's legal and safe and ethical, then good for him. I mean, I hope he shoots one, but if he doesn't shoot one, I at least know that he was out there, you know, exercising his right and the privilege to go hunting and be part of the American hunting force that we're also proud of. So I don't really and it's hard for me to bash that guy and say, oh, you're crazy or you're not being smart. I mean, I would like for him to see the payoff for doing things a little different way. But I'm never going to bash him because he made a quote poor decision and educated the buck that he might have otherwise shot. I mean, that's that's his call, not mine. Yeah. Now, given your position, you know, with North American Whitetail magazine, you get to hear a live different perspectives from other writers and hunters who do sometimes push a little bit more in October and have success. Are there any I don't know any standout tactics that you have seen from some of these other guys who do like to focus on October that either intrigue you the most or that you think have the most merit. Well, I think if you, I thank you, You've got control of your land and have attack to where you can have number one, a very relaxed deer herd, you know, and and and go out of your way to minimize the pressure on those deers so that you can wait for that little cool front. That really gets the buck a little bit more active, you know, a little earlier in the evening, coming out to the plot, and you've got a plot set up so that you've got places between bedding and feeding where you can get him shot. I do feel like if you can, if you can almost landscape your proper or your hunting areas that way, or or put the scouting in to find those situations, that clearly that's going to give you an advantage over the guy who's just randomly going to go say, well, there's acorns falling here and there's some deer pellets, I think i'll set here. Um, yeah, he might kill a many world record, but the chances are better for the guy who's actually got a plan, as we all know. So so I look at it and say, yeah, if you can find that you know, a place where deer or pushed a little bit more into a travel pattern because the topography changing crops possibly, Um, you know you've got isolated food sources as opposed to widespread food sources. If you can find those little honeyholes, if you will and really be super careful with the wind, be be very disciplined about how you go in there. And get out of them and and hunt them lightly, but give yourself a chance on the periphery of that dear's travel pattern to get a crack at him if he makes a little little bit of a slip up one afternoon or one morning. But you know, day and day out, you're just going to have to be very disciplined and how you approach it, because again it's it only takes one slip up on our part and the buck is totally educated to at least that particular hunting set up. Now he might continue to run widely across the area and get shot by somebody else. But but his knowledge of that one particular ambush site that you've set up, we want to minimize that. And we and you know, whether it's you know, because we've hunted it sloppily. You know, we we went in there wrong wind, or we threw trash on the ground, or we didn't you know, we didn't. We went in bad conditions, and we basically left a lot of of of of tell tale of knowledge for him to pick up by our presence. Even if he didn't come by the stand when we were in it, he still knows we were there and what we got to just continue to go back to is minimizing the possibility of that. But I do think that the guys they are most successful most often or really just crowding in as far as they dare on the downwind side of a travel pattern that they have reason to know is they're either because of sidings, you know, sign or more often anymore, it's just simply trail camera images that tell them that they're on the right pattern. You still have to be careful about how you hunt it. Yeah, And speaking of that whole topic of you know, just being particularly careful about everything related hunting pressure. UM. You might remember I actually wrote an article for North American Whitetail a few years ago about how I personally have decided to minimize almost completely the number of mornings that I hunt during early to mid October UM. And it's a long running discussion that me and Dan here have with between ourselves and other guests and stuff. And I guess I'm just curious about your take on that. What's your perspective on morning hunts in early to mid October. Well, I have shot some some books in the morning in let's say, the third week of October somewhere, and there where, of course, but later you get in October the generally speaking to better things were going to get. Um. I have had a little bit of luck on some bucks, some early bucks starting to cruise small isolated food plots and sometimes even coming into a to a buck decoy, and I've had I've had pretty good luck doing that. I do feel like that kind of minimizes my disturbance of any real security cover because I'm out there on the edge of an opening, and uh, you know, I can hunt that way. And if he if he comes out and he sees a decoy and he's responsive to it, then he comes around, gives me a shot, he's the right buck, then then I'm golden. If it doesn't happen, I've not have at least not disturbed any significant security cover in the process. I can back out, take my decoy and go home, so I have seen. You know, sometimes you tend to think, well, I've got to be back in the deepest, darkest swamp to kill one, you know, during this low period. Maybe not, but you do need a little bit of weather or something to get that buck a little bit more interested in what's about to come in November, and if you get that set of conditions. I do think that's a great time to get to get a shot at, you know, at some relatively mature buck. What are your thoughts on all us, Dan, I just have a question, you know, I always like to learn from how I fail? What do you think from from a hunter standpoint? Or you know, what do we fail at the most? And then how how should we fix that failure by learning? Well, here's the thing. You know, if you ever run into to some guy who's bragging about how smart he was or what a great hunter he was because he finally killed the big buck, you know what I like to do is turn it around the other way and say, look, if you want to take credit for every time you kill a big one, you also have to take the blame for every time you don't kill one. And that ratio will not be favorable for anybody. We're all going to fail dozens and dozens and dozens of times. And when I say failed, I mean fails to fill a tag with a mature buck. It doesn't mean that we did anything wrong. And maybe he just didn't come by that day, and maybe we hunted him on the only place in our hunt, our potential hunting area where we had a chance, and he just didn't walk by that day. We can't make him walk by, So sometimes you have to understand that this is a if there's a lot of patients involved here. I believe it was Jane Winsle who said, many years ago, the great Jeane Winsle who said, you know, if you know, for us to have a successful season, we've only got to be right one time. We hunt a hundred days, but we only got to be right one time and we won the buck. To have an unsuccessful season only has to be wrong one time. So you know, if you look at it that way, then he ends up dead. So if look at it that way, you realize our steaks are much much lower than his. And the fact that we didn't see him does not mean that we messed up. It might mean that he just wasn't there that day. We couldn't hunt where he was. It might mean that he never got out of his bed that day and we were unwilling to push him out of his bed to see him so we could say, hey, we saw a big buck. Doesn't do any good to say you saw a big buck. You don't get a good shot. All you did was mess up your spot. So a lot of times what people terms failure, Oh too bad, you had a bad hunt. You didn't kill one. Hey, some of the best hunts I've ever been on, I never even saw a big deer, you know, I just I just loved the people I was with the time I was there at the countryside. It challenged the whole field of the trip was it was a great trip, and yet I totally got skunked. So I quote failed. And other times I've killed a big deer, but I just didn't particularly like the experience because there were people, problems or something about it wasn't it just wasn't that much fun. And so while I have a nice here on my wall, I don't look at that is necessarily a quote overwhelming success either, because a big part of what I was going for was fun and and the chance to just to be out in creation and to enjoy myself. So so some of it comes down to success and failure. Frankly is goes beyond the whether or not you feel the tag. So we have to we have to be realistic about even why we're out there. And I think once we take a little pressure off ourselves, I think we just enjoy the hunt more, and frankly sometime we hunt better. Do you think that you think that a lot of hunters are putting pressure on themselves too, you know, I don't know, maybe they're hunting for the wrong reasons. I don't think there's any question that that's the case. If we if we could get you know, ego, which is of course, is just a you know, just a basic human frailty, if you will, I mean, I think that everybody's got some ego, and yet when we let it dominate, I want to kill a big deer because I want to kill eleven pointer, because old Joe's never killed an eleven point. I want to kill a deer bigger and Joe's killed. Or I want to dear that scores more than so and so, or I want people to think I'm the great hunter instead of so and so. Well, why are you even out there? Then? Because only one guy is gonna kill or one woman is going to kill the biggest one. Everybody else then theoretically as a failure. You know, if you don't kill the biggest one, that I guess you're you're all losers. Right, Well, I'd hate to think that that's how we gauge deer hunting. But yet some people are that way, and I think perhaps the emphasis on score and ranking and perhaps pro staffing television, all the perception by the quote regular person that you know, the people out in front of the cameras or in the ads or in the TV, in the magazine articles, perhaps they're um, you know, they think they're better than us. Or you never know how people's minds work, and everybody's different. We know that, but I do think there's a lot of people that there's a there's just inherent in the factor here, and and I don't blame them for being an envious of the opportunity for other people have. I think that's it goes without saying that they see somebody on TV shooting a monster buck out in beautiful country, they say, gohly, I wish that was me. Um, But I think that's human nature. But but at the same time, I do think if you let it control you and and drive you, you can that's where we end up, frankly, with some real legal issues. We certainly end up with ethical problems, and I think we get just a lot of bad blood and none of that is productive for deer hunting. Yeah, very true. It's a it's something that I think that social media and something. We actually had an episode about this relatively recently. We were just talking about this and that. I think social media sometimes is like a compounding factor on all these things. Right when you now have the ability to everyone can share, everyone sees what everyone else has done or has killed, or is doing or whatever it might be. Everyone can comment, and it sometimes creates a uh a nasty situation at times that I think seems to then continue this vicious cycle. That is a challenge I think today maybe more so than it ever has been. Well, you know what, you know what, you know what you're run into sometimes. I mean, if a buck is too big, if a buck is so big that you just have a hard time believing that he's even real. You know, if you put it on Facebook, there will be a response sooner or later, usually within the first hour. Well it looks like it's out of a high fence to me, or I think that was poached or so and so bought that off the game farm or fill in the blank. I mean it'll be something negative. Now, Now, I don't think very awesome, to be honest with you that there's any real fire whore the smoke is in this case. I think most big deer are killed the way that people say, and I think they're killed fair chase and ethically. But there have been enough outliers, if you will, that we know it's possible that somebody could try to pull one. And even if the deer is not killed illegally in the high fence, I mean the perception that you're trying to pull something by by bragging about a high fence deer and not saying that it's high spence. I think that that has got people pretty leary of some of the really big deer that we're legitimately taken. And so, you know, I told somebody one time, I said, man, I said, my my dream is to have shot so many giant bucks that everybody thinks I'm a poacher, you know. But but but it's a joke, but in some ways it's almost true. It is like, if you've killed very many really big deer, there is somebody that thinks you must be doing it wrong with as well. After all, they lived there their whole life and they've never killed one that big. And the only alternative to you being a poacher is that you're a better hunter than they are and they can't handle that, so they'll that's impossible. Yeah, you know, and so that's just that's just how people are. I guess again, human nature is explains a lot of these problems, but social media has only made it easier for bad human nature to be to be evidence to other people. Yeah, yeah, that's the truth. Well, um, pivoting off, pivoting off of us back to a brighter topic, I suppose, back to back to killing deer. Um. You mentioned trail cameras a little bit as one of the pieces of the puzzle sometimes for people in October. Just kind of curious to hear about your overall take on how you're utilizing trail cameras throughout the year. We always like to kind of hear everyone's different perspective on this as it's, of course, you know, one of the most commonly used and probably um positively used tools out there for helping deer hunters. Is that a big piece of what you're doing, you know. I I don't use them as religiously as some people do, and part of that is because I tend not to hunt the same locations as nearly as often as the average person does. I U. For instance, this year, I was in Wyoming a few weeks ago. Dr Carol and I were hunting out there. It was a ranch I've never been to before. I don't know if I'll ever be there again. Uh. They were used trail cameras heavily, and they certainly played into our taking a couple of beautiful bucks. Um that said, you know, so it isn't always you know me personally, it's actually running the cameras as much as people I'm hunting with or hunting on their property or their operations. So in many cases, of course, that is playing directly into where we where we have been set up, and where we end up killing deer. Um that said, I mean, I do still think that the greatest advantage of trail cameras is not so much indirectly leading to a kill of a certain deer that was on camera. I still believe the greatest advantage, if you will. Number one, they're fun. People love, you know, It's like Christmas. Every time they get to their trail camera, it's like, well what's on my camera? Well, that frankly might be more fun to them than actually sitting in a frozen tree, waiting for a buck that never comes by. And that's what that's what the reality of hunting itself often is. We know that the anticipation of deer season is quite often more interesting and enjoyable than hunting itself. I mean, that's that's just the fact of life, based on the conditions we deal with. So so if you can extend throughout the whole year, whether it's shed hunting, whether it's trail cameras, in particular, the study and the observation and and the sense of wonder you get from quote, watching your dear at two o'clock in the morning over a bait station, which you could never see that yourself with your own eyes, and yet you get to observe nature in a way that thirty years ago we simply could not do. Well. Is that a bad thing? And certainly I look at that as a very positive thing. Um, And yet I would say that that's why I say that in many cases guys have got deer on trail camera, but they never they never see the deer in daylight, or the neighbor killed it three months later, two miles away chasing the dough. But yet they know what dear it was so their involvement with specific deer, and their ability to manage their land and and understand their buck do ratios and all these things, the fawn crop and predator problems and so many things. Even trespassing, obviously security is a big, a big boon of trail cameras. So I look at all of this and say, it has added tremendously to our enjoyment of the deerwoods. Whether it has resulted in us pinpointing Old Smokey and getting him shot the third morning he comes down that trail, that's another matter. But just enjoying what we do as deer hunters and deer managers, I think that's been a tremendous boon. So I looked at it like, even when I'm not running them myself, I'm a I'm very much in favor of their use, and and honestly, when I have a chance to use them myself, I certainly do. But when we jump around hunt four days here on the place we've never been, and then and then a month later we're a thousand miles away hunting five days with somebody we've never never placed, we've never been before. Uh, it's a little difficult to use them for patterning per se in our hands, but we do utilize the knowledge that they they have provided to the landowner before we ever got there, So in that sense, we do use them quite a bit. So, you know, on the topic of the fact that you are traveling all across all across the country, you've hunted in in many different areas compared to probably the average hunter um and I'm kind of curious about it's picking your brain about some of those regional differences. You know, one thing we've never talked about on this show is hunting Texas. And it sounds like you grew up in Texas. Imagine you've hunted there a lot. Can you speak at all about some of the unique aspects of hunting in Texas, whether it be the culture or strategies you know, To be honest with you, it is, you know, almost everything about hunting white tails in Texas is a little different in some way. A white tail is still a white tail. I mean, we we understand the animal is still the same whether he's in South Florida, whether he's in Northern Alberta. It's still the same animal, but he lives in such a different world that in many ways, it's it's like hunting a different spe see. But nonetheless it's you know, people are the same in Ethiopia, Argentina, Canada, you know, fill in the blank. A person is still a person, but their lifestyle and what they've dealt with in their cultural everything about their their existence is tied to where they're from and and who they're surrounded by. Well, dear, the same way so Texas, Dear, I've often said, are if until you've been to Texas and hunted white tails, you can't really say that you've checked all the boxes as a white tail hunter. And I say that knowing that a lot of people will never get that opportunity. And I don't I don't demean people who never go. Believe me, I've blessed to been born there and hunted there many times. But this is it's a different world. Um. You see a lot of deer. Generally speaking, the deer are not terribly you know, running over the farthest mountain as soon as they see somebody stick their head up over the horizon. They the deer acting like deer. They're acting like deer should everywhere. But many cases, deer hunted so hard they don't get to act that way, and yet in Texas you kind of see them act the way deer want to act. Well, that's that's a good thing, because that's really that's part of the appreciation of the animal is seeing their natural behavior. You see a lot of bucks. Um, yeah, the dear, smaller body, but you see so many of them who cares and the bigger deer still impressive. But it's the culture. It's the people, it's the size of the land holdings, it's the unique habitat, it's the hunting methods. Almost anything goes in Texas. You can ride around in a motor vehicle, don't even have to turn the motor off on private land, roll the window down and shoot one you feel like shooting one that way, you can't. Well, if it's run deer hunting in Texas, it's you know, I can't tell that there they've got three million deer left. I mean, you know, it doesn't look to me like it's exactly wipe them out. That said, I understand that that's a foreign way of hunting. It's a foreign way of looking at the at hunting uh in a general sense to a lot of people who never been exposed to that. But you don't get a lot of deer drives down there. You don't get a lot of people shooting it running deer. You get people hunting, you know, relatively calm deer acting naturally on private land. Uh in nice habitat. That is that is different from almost anywhere else. And and and that to me is just you know, if I can only hunt one state from now, I would hunt Texas. But it isn't because the size of the deer. It's just that, you know, Texas is in my home state, and I just feel like there's so many different kinds of hunting there. Um, you know, it's seven hundred miles across the state, So I mean, you know, there's a lot of different habitats to hunt there. You'd never run out of different ways to hunt. And there's a lot of big bucks. And you can hunt them with a rifle and the rug, you can hunt them with the bow, you hunt with a cross bow. I guess you could do whatever you want to. And basically, you know, it's just one of those special places in the deer universe. I you know, I'm I'm blessed to have grown up there. I'll put it that way. Now, what's the public I'm sorry, go ahead, Mark, No, Danny, it's it's all you. What's the public land presence in Texas? Well, there isn't much of it, of course, if you look at you look at you know, Illinois has almost none either, uh, Iowa doesn't have much. A lot of states don't have very much. But in Texas what makes it different is that the private land is not only overwhelming, but very but not very much of it can be hunted for free. And it's been that way though since before I was born. I remember back to the early sixties of deer hunting in Texas and it was the leasing already existed in Texas then. Um so when it came to the Midwest. In other places, of course, it was closer shock because people just, oh, my goodness, this is the end of the world. Well seem normal to me because I've grown up around it. But you know, so there wasn't There's never been much of it in terms of public land or free access compared to most states. However, Man, last year, I mean a guy took a bow and killed the deer over I think he gross about to fifteen in central Texas on public land on core of Engineers land, and yet that's an area that people say, we can't kill a big buck there, Well, this gotta kill one, you know, big, non typical, and so so there's opportunity there North Texas upon Lake Texoma. You know, to deer over to fifty have been killed in that county with a bow. So I mean, it's not like there's no opportunity, it's just that you know, it's spotty and you have to know what you're looking for. So on that topic, why why is it? And maybe it's just I don't know the fate of history order, but why is the culture in Texas in relation to hunting and with access so different? I mean, why is it that leasing took place so early on? And then secondarily, why is the fenced hunting culture high fence, low fence, whatever. Why is that so prevalent in Texas compared to everywhere else based on your experience and we've heard and seen sure. Now now of course you know right up front we even with the fencing thing, most most land in Texas is not high fenced. Um. In fact, even most land in South Texas I would say probably is not high fence. It's just that defenses. When you drive down a road in Texas, I mean, if there's high sense that's right next to the road, maybe it's on both sides, and you just think, goli, I'm in the middle of a you know, some kind of a prison compound or something. Then it goes on for thirty miles, you know. But but sometimes sometimes there's you'll have large areas that are all high fence, all individual rants is all fenced apart from each other. Now, now, of course, sometimes you're talking about a place that is U thirty tho acres and all of the brush has thorns on it, and it's so thick you can't see twenty ft unless you're on a road or on a fence line, and so you have to practically have a helicopter to see the deer that are in it. Yet they're surrounded by a high fence. And so you know how that began. I mean there were people there that had their resources. I mean, there were some very wealthy ranchers there that had resources, and they either you know, we're having neighbor problems. That's generally what causes fencing problems. UH fences to be built is the problem with neighbors. It isn't so much that. In fact, I know people would have built fences because they had food plots, and they were low fence with their neighbors, and their neighbors made no effort to control their dear number. So every time the neighborhood, this guy would plant a food plot, especially if you irrigated it. Well, here came all these deer will come to dear season. You shoot all these those and you think, okay, I've got my dear number done. And next year here comes in other ways, because there's nothing to stop them from coming off the neighbor So in some cases fences were literally built to keep deer out more so than to keep deer in. Nonetheless, when they are confined, I understand, you know as well as anybody, the rule of fair chase with would be in c N T N L I as you just can't have them, you know, inside an artificial confinement of that nature. Um, you know they call it fair chase. But I have also said, look, if I were if you told me, I could be a buck chasing a dough and I could be in a fifty thousand acres pasture of head, high brush and cactus. In South Texas surrounded by a high fense. Or I could be in a snowfield in Alberta and the one wood lot that's in this whole half a county, and I've I've gone in there with this dough into this wood lot in in knee deep snow, and there's two sets of tracks going into it and none coming out. And there's twenty five guys in orange lined up in the circle around that wood lot. Which buck would I rather be? I'd way rather be the buck in the highest fence, then I would that quote free ranging buck in Canada, you know, because which one's got a better chance of escaping? I mean, and so so you. It's hard to define high fence as good, bad, or otherwise. I think it's just another management tool. I understand the people that say, oh, look, well, that's not fair chaise. The fact of the matter is that most people, in my opinion, who complain about fair chaise, they're not worried about fair to the animal. They're worried about fair to them, quote competing with the guy that gets the hunt inside of one. That's the reality of it. I don't believe any of these people are concerned about animal welfare. I don't think that's why they oppose high fence. They just feel like that guy's got an edge on them and they don't like it. And I don't, and nobody will ever convince me otherwise. And so I just think if people look deep in their hearts, that they will realize that's why they don't like high fence. They're not worried about the deer. Deer inside of high fence are probably better taking care of than a lot of low fense there are. And I say all this as a guy who doesn't I've hunted high fence many, many years ago, but I don't do it anymore. But I have no problem with it as a management tool because I know most of the people that have high fences also really love their ranches and they love their land and are trying to grow big deer even though they know they can't go on the record book. They us want to do the best they can with their land and offensive wells and to do that, so it isn't I don't put it out there. It's a polarizing topic as much as I just think it's it's poorly understood by people who have never been around it. Yeah, it's definitely something very foreign to so many of us who have never been exposed to anything like that. And I can understand how there's definitely some shades of gray, especially large properties like that. But I'm curious, would you would you make the same defense for one of these situations where it's the small areas, like a twenty acre enclosure, where they are micro breeding with you know, artificial insemination of these bucks and you know, creating these gargangelan animals, etcetera, etcetera, and then selling off, you know, one of those deer to be shot in there for fifty dollars. Is that something that is different than what you're describing. Yeah, that's animal husbandry, and that is basically you have converted there into livestock at that point, Um, I have no interest in hunting livestock. I don't ink that's a positive image for hunting. Now. That said, you know, it's of course up to every I guess the public or the leaders in every state or province to decide what's legal and what's not in terms of uh, you know, enclosures and and and commercialized hunting inside high fences and all this sorts of things. I really don't. Don't look at it as having a blanket statement on it's saying okay, there's a definitive if it's if it's six acres, it's okay. If it's five nine, it's not. Well, I think we all know that, you know, there's a lot more variables than that, um and so I can understand the taking the high road on it as the as the record books have and just saying simply, we're not going to get into this shades of gray routine. We're going to just say you've either got a fence, a hunme it or you don't. If it's it's half a Texas inside of one fence and you have access to all of it as a hunter, then it's high fence, you know. And so again there's all the different shades of gray sometimes because we have the uh, you know, we do have the people that are saying, well, mine is almost all high fence, except I left the gate open on one end, and if I sit there long enough, I'll kill a buck that comes through that gate. Well, in effect, you have altered the habit at and you've altered the deer's opportunity to escape. But your quote legal perhaps by Boone and Crockett poping young. I mean, people are always going to look for the loopholes. But I would say that in general, if you start breeding animals specifically almost if you start calling it put in take hunting, let's say, um, you know, you know, we don't look at you know, game birds is like, well, what's the state record rooster for Minnesota? Which one had the longest tail? Well that one was shot in a while, but this one was a release bird, so he doesn't count well. Same with stock fish. I mean, we have different attitudes sometimes about big game being stocked and released and you know, putting tag versus hunt small game birds or fish something of that nature. We we kind of differentiate that in our minds, I think, But when it comes to big game, I just don't think you can have an animal that was ever handled by man and really and then release back into an enclosure at any point. It's one thing to say you had a faun that you got out of a fence, he turned him loose, and five years later out in a while he became a boon and Crockett, well, that's different from saying you you bottle fitting you know, or you you gave him a name, or you tattooed something a number in his ear. He was walking around with the yellow ear tag him and he shot him. You know, all these are different shades of livestock and animal husbandry as opposed to pure wildlife management in my opinion, I mean, my opinion doesn't account from us, but that's just my opinion. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I tend to tend to agree with you on that. I don't personally think that I would not call that hunting um and I think that there in lies some of the issues I take with with some of those practices. But I've I've talked plenty about my things, not all that on past past conversations and everything. But I think you bring up an interesting point, and it's one that sometimes I I sometimes fail to think through because of just not having that context, you know, having experience in Texas where I think it's easy for some of us to put to throw that blanket negativity on high fence, when to your point, you know, there's very different shades of gray when it comes to that whole issue. But back to back to killing dear, if I'm in Texas and this is a horrible question, I know this is a horrible question. But like I mentioned, we've never really talked about Texas hunting on this show before. And I apologize to everyone who hunts in Texas and who listens and who's thought, why why don't you guys care about us? So I'm gonna put a lot of pressure on you right now, Gordon. For someone hunting in Texas, that's okay, I don't I don't mind. I'll talk about Texas all day. It's so so for somebody hunting in Texas, you know, on their own in like, can you give me a cliff Notes version overview of your best ice for killing mature deer in Texas? Handful? You had to pick a handful of things. If if if the thing about it in Texas, it's all about access. If you have access where the habitat is good, it probably has a stable and relatively dense population of white tails already there. I mean, there are some marginal habitats in northwest Texas. You get out in some real open, dry country with very little habitat. It's a little bit of linear habitat, but very fragmented. Some of that country doesn't have many deer in it. But if you get anywhere in the eastern half or two thirds of the state. And what I would tell somebody is if you were going to go to Texas and you said, look, here's because we all have a budget. You know, we may not adhere to it, but we all have some idea of what we can spend to go deer hunting every year. If somebody says, look, I've got a thousand dollars, I've saved it for two years and a coffee. Can I want to go Texas? To Texas and at least say I went hunt? Okay, well and dollars, that's going to cost you your license. So already you're down to pretty much gas money and eating free toes, you know. But okay, where can you go and have a chance to kill a deer? Well, yeah, you can put in for some of these corps of engineer hunts. They're mostly bow hunts. There are some probably you can knock on enough doors, if you had enough time, you you probably could get somebody in a little not in the prime areas, but some of these fringe areas you probably get somebody say yeah, I'll let you hunt for fifty dollars or whatever. You know, go out and sitting on that stump and see if one comes by, you might kill a big buck doing that. I mean, in general, if you really want to take it seriously, most outsiders are going to end up either hunting with family or they're going to to to in many cases actually do a seasoned lease of land the way a lot of people now do in the Midwest. They may not live there, but they may say, look, we're, you know, four of us going to go together in lease this little farm or wrench. And that's how most guys end up doing it. But finding that place is difficult no matter where you go, your place of inequality. And so I would say myself, based on the size of some of the deer killed around some of the public reservoirs, the Corps of Engineers land, I probably would look at that first and say, that's my best shot at killing a really nice deer at quote bargain prices in Texas. That that would be my that would be my approach personally. Interesting, and this is another thing that I've read a lot about in the past, just a tactic that I've heard that works remarkably well in Texas compared to a lot of places. And that's just rattling, right. We all rattled all across the country with varying levels of success. But from what I understand, it's different in Texas. Is that true? Well it probably you know, who's to say where it really started. I do think it was. It was popularized, no question in South and central Texas, probably back in the fifties and even into the sixties. Early practitioners in Texas circles Bob Ramsey's He's dead and gone now, but he was considered one of the uh truly the founding father of modern rattling in Texas, and he caught a lot of the outdoor riders. He and they have then get proliferated from there, long before television or anything of that nature. But I will say that there's something about Texas when you when you start rattling in Texas and things are right, you'd better have your gun ready and you'd better be looking because literally, I mean, I've killed deer that what that jumped out of the brush within ten seconds, mature deer and just said here, I am shooting me, okay, And I shot him. Now, I didn't I didn't argue with him, I just shot him, okay. So uh and sometimes sometimes it's just that magical. Sometimes you can sit in one spot in the brush have and say that I saw ten or more bucks, and there you're You're on the ground and the brother you're not even in a blind, you're not a tree, you're not You're just in the brush, okay, and you saw ten bucks that you could identify differently come in and kind of have circle you like sharks almost, And then they'd leave and get down wind and they'd run off or whatever. Then someone would come back and then a little one would run into the middle of them. Say what's going on, guys? I mean sometimes it's just that's a nuthouse sometimes. So does it work like that in most other places? Absolutely not, Um Texas, there's something about it that's just magical. It must be the herd dynamics. That may be the habitat type, but South Texas in particular, if you if you hit the antlers, you need to have your gun loaded, you need to be looking around, you need to be ready, ready to shoot something, because then literally before you can get settled in, you might have the biggest buck you've ever seen in twenty yards from your looking right down your throat. Now why if that why it's that way? I wish I could tell you, because I'd make it that way everywhere, But and I'm not that smart. You know, that would be nice. What is the right you said, like, when the timing is right or something along those lines, What are the right conditions at the right time to actually pull off that type of scenario in Texas? Is it just the rut? When is that? I don't know, is this something different? You know? It's funny. I've I've rattled in a lot of places. I think the earliest I've ever seen deer come to rattling was like tinkling antlers was like early September in Kansas. And the latest I've ever seen them relative to the rut was like January ninth in Iowa, where I've seen a deer commenced say clarity that deer is responding to rattling. The latest I've killed the deer that I could say was coming into quote rattling, although in this case it was an actual live buck fight that he was responding to, was February the twenty in South Texas, um we heard the deer fighting in the brush. The sixth and a half year late, pointer there's like two thirty on the hoof big big Texas deer. He goes rushing over there. I whistle, let him stop him and shot him before we got to the fight. But we could hear the fight in the brush. This was February, but that's also about two months past peak rut in that area. Those deer normally rut in December, so it wasn't like February in Arkansas or something, but it but it was definitely way, way way late in the year, and that was one of those places. Yet you know, you could one of those ranches you could hunt through the end of February with the you know bucks and does because of a special permit situation. But we literally killed a buck on February twenty two running to an actual buck fight. So you know, if I look at it and I say, you know, what are the conditions that it takes. Um, I've tried it early, I've tried it late. You know, mostly you're gonna kill him in between. Uh. Some people say, man, I just don't like I don't like peak rut because that's you know, all the big bucks with those Well, there are times during peak road even granted that's a little bit later than you normally get the best response. Normally late free road is when you get the best response all so when you get the best response to like bug de coin. But I would say that you can rattle in some really big deer during the absolute peak of the rudd because they happened to be between those. Um I rattled in a big hundred fifty something is nine pointer in Alberta one time on the ground at seventeen steps in the middle of a ball field swamp November the eighteenth. That was as peak rudder as you could get. And yet he came walking in at living thirty in the morning and just walk up and see what I was, and I shot him, So you know it. You know, they don't swarm around you in Alberta maybe the way they do in South Texas, but it still works. It's just a function of lower deer densities. Sometimes they have to travel farther to get to you. But you know, if you're patient, if you can't rattle the man, if you don't try to rattle them, that's the one thing about it. You know, you'll never rattle in the deer you don't try to rattle. So a lot of people say that, well, it just doesn't work. I try it one time, it didn't work. Well, it's like saying I try to green, you know, jitterbug one time and I didn't catch a big bass on it, so it's not a good bass lure. Well that's that's that's crazy. But yet that's if you don't have confidence, you can you can fake yourself out of almost any kind of success if you try hard enough. And a lot of people just don't have the confidence because they think, oh, this is silly, this isn't gonna work. Well, your opinion doesn't matter. The deer's opinion is what matters, you know, And if you do it right and you give it a chance a lot of times, you'll you'll realize, man, this this stuff works. And that's true of almost any tactic. You gotta give it a fair chance. All right. Well, before we move on to my next question for Gordon, we need to pause briefly for word from the sponsors of this episode of the podcast Carbon Express Arrows. And I've been shooting Carbon Express errors for very close to my entire bow hunting life. But one thing that I know I've personally struggled with at times and I know a lot of other hunters have to is just wrapping my head around all the technology that goes into an arrow and how it might make one arrow better than another. So that said, today I pulled in carbon Expresses alex Tap to help us try to understand that very question in regards to their flagship arrow, the Maxima Red. What goes into that arrow is UM, First of all, a lot of technology UM, something that you just really don't see on the market UM across the board. So difference between that and your general ARRA that you're going to find in any other company is going to be the triple spine. So what that means is there's three separate sections that are fused together UM, the middle section being extremely weak, the end sections being extremely stiff. What that does, UM for a bow hunter specifically, is it keeps all of that flex in the middle. So an arrow does need to flex to be accurate. UM. It needs to flex a certain amount, not too much, not too little. And that's why you see different spines UM for different drawings, different poundages, because that arrow does need to flex a specific amount UM. So getting back to the red zone, what that what that does differently is that it still flexes just as much as it need too, but your broadhead moves around less, your veins are moving around less, you're not moving around less. All of that flex is harnessed in the middle um and it really helps with accuracy, specifically with broadhead accuracy. Now that makes sense to me. So if you'd like to learn more about carbon Express arrows or the Maxima reds, which are in fact the arrows that I personally shoot, you can visit carbon Express Arrows dot com. And now back to the show and now and now. A lot of these aggressive tactics like that kind of rattling and stuff. I feel like these are assumptions, but I feel like that's something you know that that works particularly well in a spot like Texas, where you mentioned there's some kind of unique herd dynamics, or maybe in a spot like Iowa, Kansas, where you know there's a disproportionate high number of older deer and lower numbers of hunters relatives to a lot of spots in the country. But I'm curious Texas, it's a southern state. Now, compare that to one of these other southern states, one of the south Southeastern states like Alabama, Georgia where you live, or anything along those lines. How does it differ from Texas to those parts of the country. Is are aggressive tactics like rattling and everything, you know, on average something that are going to be on par with their neighbor in Texas or is it totally different in that part of the country. I think you're I think relative to the number of bucks within hearing range, good property is good property. I think. You know, I can't say this because it's never hunted New Hampshire, but I suspect that if you're in New Hampshire and you're in a bus in the right frame of mind, and you rattle to him and he hears you, that there's a very good chance that he's coming. Now the habitat type, his particular aversion to moving, you know, through openings and things like that, based on hunting pressure and all that. I mean, I do think that obviously all that comes into play, much as it does with you know, does a big bull elk on public land it's it's heard five thousand bad bugles from hunters or kirkey yelps hunter, you know whatever. Do all these animals get educated and do they get you know, call shy and all that. Well, absolutely they do. You know, the older ones have heard this routine before. But in general, if you say, I have not over rattled or called or decoyed or whatever the tactic is, but I'm going to apply it at the right time, let's say, late pre run early breeding period, the right kind of habitat. You know, where do you feel comfortable moving in daylight through this habitat to get to the to the sound of the fight or or the ground or whatever it is. And I do think that on an individual basis, the deer in here in the southeast or just about as likely to respond. They might not come in acting like you know while that act like they want to fight, but they do come in to check it out. And that's really, frankly, about all you need. You know, ideally, he just wanted to come in where you can get him shot. You don't care if he comes in with his hair on fire. But but I would say that you don't tend to see the response here as much because, frankly, the landholdings are smaller, the hunting pressure is higher, the deer is somewhat more educated in general, and frankly, there's so much cover here that they're very difficult to see. Uh, they're very difficult see in Texas too, But you just set up where they have to cross the sendero or a cactus flat or something where you've got to fighting chance to at least get a look at them before they smell you and run off. And so and there you've got so much more land to work. I mean, if if you rattle right here in Texas and you say, well, we didn't rattle in but a couple of two year old, let's let's walk three yards cross wind and go over there and set up by that stock pond, and we'll rattle again. Where you go over there and there's seven different bucks and you and you shoot one of them, and then you walk half mile over here and then you see another big one. Okay, well that's that's a different world. And almost anybody can you can relate to in whitetail hunting, because that's just not quote normal. Uh. But yet down there you have you may have thousands of acres one pasture, so you don't you're not limited to one tree space. I'm sitting up on one two week of food plot. I mean, you've got your your hunting a very big world. Yeah, that's so so different. So in that in that situation in the southeast where there's so much cover and a lot more hunters. Um. I guess, reverting back to what we originally talked about at the beginning of our conversation, let's say that's our situation. I'm hunting the southeast, lots of cover, lots of hunters, and it's October. Is there anything different than I'm doing down there than I would, you know, for me up here in Michigan, like the stuff we talked about early, is there anything unique to that part of the country that you know, I could possibly apply if I was trying it out done there. Well, here in Georgia, you tend to get in November rut um, places like South Carolina low country, the coastal plains there that parts of South Georgia that are adjacent to that you tend to get into October rut um. The low country of South Carolina right now is pretty much peak rut So you could you could definitely, you know, ramp up your aggressive tactics, um, whether it was calling or just hoping to catch bucks out, cruising food plots, and and and cutovers and things like that. Looking for a dough, you get a lot more daytime movement. You come up here to Georgia right now, and the movement's not nearly as high. A lot of these places were restocked with totally different geno types of deer over a long period of time, and those genotypes have tended to hold in terms of rutting dates. So Georgia, even parts of Georgia, one part of one county was restocked with Texas deer they run at a certain time, and another part of that same county was restocked with Michigan deer. One well, they they have still had two separate kind of ruts in that one county even fifty fifty years later. And that's that's roughly fifteen generations of deer. Let's say that they still have basics and those deers not totally homogenized. And so you really do have to know when you say October in the southeast, well, that could mean if that means Alabama, Mississippi, where they have a December a Christmas rut, or in Black Belt of Alabama where you have when I shot a buck chasing a dough January thirtieth, A few years ago. It's a fully mature buck and next to the last day of the season. And so you know where else could you find that? Not many places, but yet so but that's just the deer they have. They have very late running deer. Other places, like say South Carolina, they happen to be early. So it's a broad you know, it's a broad topic to try to cover. To say, any given date in the Southeast is uh, it's not like the Midwest, whom you say, Gali November tenth is a magical day. It's always going to be. I don't care what the weather is, whatever else. Some big bucks looking for a dough or November the tent somewhere, Uh, but maybe not, maybe not in Alabama, maybe not in Louisiana, maybe not in South Carolina. So you know, it's difficult down here. A big part of what it is is you have so much food hit the ground all at once. You've got so many acorns and they're so widespread, and the deer scattered out a huge amount of cover. A while that cover in pine wood there's evergreen cover, so good luck to you. And you can't bait in most of these areas. Some of them you can, but not all of them. So what are you going to do to pull him into this one spot? I mean, you better have a really hot food plot. You better really you know, have some really uh you know, be be dialed in with trail cameras on exactly which trails a big buck is using. If you had that advantage, you know that you work for. I do think you'd have a fighting chance, but it's still going to be better in general down here you should get later in the year. Switching up questions just a little bit. You've been to a lot of state, different states to hunt, and aside from your home state of Texas, do you have a favorite state that you like to go hunting. Well, yeah, there's many places that I would you really love to just just hunt, you know, any time I got an offer tunity, I have not hunted. If you talk to most people that grew up in open country as I did, most of those people feel somewhat coustrophobic as you get into the woods. I mean, I'm kind of that way. I grew up in in Brushew hilly ranch country, where if you saw a deer half mile way just went over there and shot him, or try to shoot him. Uh. You know, that's three farms away here in Georgia, you know, I mean, and it's all flat pine woods. So so there's certain kinds of habitat that I don't feel as comfortable in and as proficient in, uh and in heavy bottom land, swamps and things of that nature. Not really in my cup of tea. I've hundred New Brunswick. I've hunted Nova Scotia, you know, I've hunted a lot of places. But some of that country is very good deer hunt deer country, and but it is not particularly suited to my way. I like to hunt. Um. I like to be able to get out on foot. I like to be able to cover some ground. I like to be able to find a good set up and then and then work that set up. And I like to have some roll to the land. I like to have a little bit of openness so I can kind of see the land in three dimensions, because I don't want to have to be living off my GPS to tell far I am. I'd like to just be able to get out in the country and just kind of go. Now. Naturally, some type of some parts of the world don't lend themselves of that at all. Uh, you know, good luck in eastern North Carolina. You know, you can't see twenty feet and it's all a swamp. However, if I get into central Montana, if I get into western South Dakota, if I get into Texas Panhandle on up through really all up into North Dakota, all that country on the western Great Plains, I would say, in general, is a little bit more my cup of tea. And that could be from Texas all the way north clear up into the prairie provinces of Alberta. But I do think some of the more overlook stuff is really you know, western Dakota's uh, you know, parts of Nebraska. They don't get talked about much, but man, that's that's some good deer country up there where your shot. Like I say, Dr Crol and I will to you know, northeastern Wyoming and you know last month and we sawt a couple of beautiful deer up there, and that country is is very scenic and productive. I just feel like that kind of country is what I enjoy hunting, regardless of what's there. But it also tends to have some really nice deer in it as well. Yeah, I just hunted Montana for the first time, which was my first western white tailed trip, and that was just incredible, both as you mentioned, scenery and the actual deer and deer hunting element of it, um Man. I could see myself getting pretty quickly addicted to that hunting well. And the thing about it is that you know, we understand, we're we're we're blessed to get the travel, and we understand that I've hunted. I think I don't know if I've ever totally counted them up, but I think I've hunted close to forty states and provinces four white tails, and that you know, I have not hunted South America, but I've hunted been one of hunter New Zealand, of Hunter Canada, Mexico, most of the US. I mean, at least been there long enough to say, hey, I was here, I see what the hunting here is like. That doesn't mean I've shot deer in all those places, but you know, I've gone out of my way to go to a lot of places because I feel like that educates me and helps me understand what's relevant to a reader or two of you or the TV show. So I look at that as you know, it's a I won't say as a job, but it or a duty. But it is certainly helped me to come up with what I think is relevant content because I see what people have to deal with here in Georgia. George is hard state to hunt, but they have some big deer. None of less, it's hard state to hunt. You know, Kentucky. Everybody wants to go to Kentucky. Kentucky is not the easiest state to hunt, but they do have big deer um. You know, some of those parts of northwestern Montana, Idaho, eastern Washington. A lot of that country up and there is beautiful and has big deer. But the deer don't just run out and say here, I am shooting me. I mean, you know, big deer hard to kill pretty much wherever you go. But I would say that clearly. You know, some places are hot spots for a reason. They just got more big deer. The regulation and that season timing, the weapon restrictions, whatever, they just make it easier to kill. And that's why we tend to think of those as the hotspots. But you know, a great deer hunting probably can be had almost anywhere you have deer, and sometimes it's what we make of it. It's it's our expectations have to be tempered, what's realistic, and if they're not, then we're quite often going to find ourselves frustrated. I don't care if you're in the business or not. I mean, you're not going to shoot what's not there. And if you don't give yourself a fighting chance to stay there long enough to kill one figure one out, your chances aren't very good either. I don't care how good the place is. So so every situation has its own challenges. Is just that some have a much greater payoff than others. Yeah, yeah, that's that's such great advice there. I got a question and it kind of it kind of goes back to your profession of of being a writer. When when you do write an article about maybe strategy or um of we're hunting in general, how do you how do you approach your writing that will allow someone from Texas or someone from New England or someone from the Dakotas to all read it and maybe take something away from that. Well, I don't know that there is any universal advice that equally applies. I guess if if every article started with go where there's a lot of big deer hunt a lot and be able to shoot. You know. In fact, I've said that in seminars before. I said, look, I can tell you in ten seconds you know how to kill big deer, and said, now I'm going to spend the next fifty nine minutes and fifty seconds explaining what I just said in ten seconds. But that the reality of it is is that you're always and that's that's part of the advantage of traveling now anymore, we all feel like we get to travel because if we stay on Facebook or Instagram or whatever long enough, or watching enough outdoor TV or read the magazines, will feel like we just went on a world tour every time we every half hour and and maybe just so, in some ways, the world has gotten smaller UM, and people that don't even hunt outside of their home county ever, may feel like they know what it's like to hunt in Illinois or Alberta or or Florida because they've just been exposed to it now, which is a good which is a very good thing. I think that's I think that's great. People enjoy doing that. UM. But when it comes time to talk about what really works in all these places, there is no universal tactic that I could say, oh, just this is the magic being. I mean, all you gotta do is either plant this and you know and get your gun ready, or you gotta rattle a certain way and here they come, or you know, if you use this scent or this cameo or whatever else. I think I think most of us are smart enough to know that there's a lot of different ways to kill deer. Okay, and not everybody in the same area that successful uses the same equipment or hunts in the same way. But they may all kill for knife deer occasionally, well that that's because myths deer lived there, you know. But but it doesn't mean it just cause you kill one big deer one time in your life that that you even hunted the best way that day. Maybe you killed him despite yourself, you know. So so sometimes I think we have to take these individual, isolated cases of success and be and be honest with ourselves about it and say, look, you know this was you know, just cause some and so kill a big one doesn't mean that everybody needs to hunt the way he did. So I take all of these, you know, monka buck kills to some extent with a grain of salt. I mean, I know most of the guys that kill most of the very biggest deer they have ever been documented, at least that we can identify the hunter. I know most of the guys, and very few of them are Daniel Boone. Okay. They were in the right place, right time to kill a great deer, and they made it happen. They didn't blow it when he when he came out, they shot him. They got him killed. Okay, so good for them. But most of them don't put themselves forth as Daniel Boone either. They just say, look, you know, I did what seemed to work, and one day it was magic and it was my turn. Okay. So so when I look at my own tactical approach, I say, what the first thing I want to do is look for common denominators. I wrote an article a few years ago in fact, is that I think it's a good example of this. I look back at one season and I said, you know, in the last year, I killed four or five mature bucks on food plots or right next to food plots in the morning. Now, most people would say that can't be done. Okay, you can't. At no point, even hunting the food plot in the morning. However, I killed almost all these deer around the rut. And my take on it, whether I kill one, I kill one in Maryland, I kill one in South Dakota, I kill one in Wyoming, another one in Texas, another one in Kansas. I think that was it. And one year I killed mature bucks on food plots and all those places hunting in the morning. And most people would say that's a lifetime of morning food plot success. And I at it in like two months. Okay, now I'm not saying I did that, cause I'm Daniel Boone either, but I am saying that when I saw that pattern evolving in front of my eyes, I said, you know, there might be an article here. And what made me think it was an article is not that it was just one isolated, oddball incident of killing a nice beer. But in three different time zones over two months, you know, halfway across the continent, the same pattern held. And so I said, look, there may be something to this pattern. And here's what I think there is to the pattern. And I talked about the fact that running activity bucks coming back to circle back to food feeding areas in mid to late morning sometime looking for that last though, h etcetera, etcetera, And these were this all played into my success that one year. Um, And I didn't say, look, you can do this anytime you want to. I'm just saying, look, in one year, I saw this happen in a wide variety of situations, and these I think with the common denominators. So to me, that's the essence of the advantage of travel and the advantage of seeing all these different habitats is sometimes you do get to compare and contrast in fairly short order one place sources another, and you do see what the common thread seems to be of either success or failure. If you can do that, you might can help somebody that's hunting in one of those kind of places. And again you're talking about a number of different habitats and number of different latter cudes and launch cues. So then we're coming up on time here, Gordon. So I want to ask you one final question, and I want to kind of push you to answer the impossible as you just described that. You know, there's so many different ways that people can go about it. There's so many different things across all these different locations. But just hypothetically We've got a reader of North American Whitetail magazine who's hunted his whole his or her life, reading these stories, seeing these great big bucks, and they still haven't got it done. They've not been able to kill whatever it is that they're trying to shoot. So for this person, it wants to take that jump to now be targeting and actually successfully killing let's say the top ten of bucks in their area, so it's relative to where they're at. Is there one common dominator you could share, one common concept that no matter if you're hunting in Texas or Maine or Iowa or Michigan, is there one concept or a couple of concepts that you could share that could help that person make that next step up. Well, if if I make the assumption that the person will cash in on their opportunity when they get it, that what's not holding them back is the inability to shoot or to hold it together under pressure, But they just are not getting the opportunity. If that's if that's what's holding them back, you know, the one thing I would tell you is you have to be sure that what you're hunting is where you hunt. I mean, if you say that you know I'm just I'm a failure. I haven't killed at one fifty here in Georgia. Most guys in Georgia I don't care. And there's some lers here in Georgia they just there's not a one fifty where they hunt. Okay, So you have to and sometimes that means breaking away from where you your comfort zone. I think that's one thing that a lot of guys are unwilling to do because of whatever the scenario. They just feel like, well, this is my hunting club. I've been a member here for so long. I don't want to find a new club. I don't want to go to a new place. I don't want to quit hunting with Jerry, even though he smokes in the truck on the way up to the woods. I used, buddy, it's my brother in law Kent. You know, at some point you have to just weigh what's holding you back and if you really feel like, hey, there's one thing holding me back. The one thing we know is that if we keep doing what we've been doing in the same places, the chances are we're gonna get the same results. Right, So we've got to try something new, and sometimes new is it will scare people. You know, I don't want to go look for more land to hunt on. I don't want to go knock on doors. I don't want to do blah blah blah blah blah. Well, sometimes you just have the man up and say, you know, if it, if it means that much to me, I gotta what it takes to break out of the mold. And the mold is probably holding you back in ways you don't understand. So I really think sometimes you just have to say, man, I gotta be a lone wolf. I gotta go do it my way. I gotta hunt harder. I can't let my brother in law hold me back. I gotta go. I gotta push the envelope harder. And you know, and then but still hunting really really smart and be disciplined. I think if you do that in good country, you're gonna get a chance. Now what the deer is and as he busted up when he walks by, you know, blah blah blah, as he stopped behind a tree and you can't shoot him. I don't know, you know, those things happen, But I do know if you put yourself in close proximity to a mature deer, you've got a better chance than if you don't. And if you just if you'll just break free of what's been holding your back in some cases psychologically, but but often its location. Uh, you just got a better chance. I am twice as good a trophy hunter where there are twice as many big deer. I know that. That's the one thing I know about sophy. I am. I am just better when there's more to shoot, and so go where they are, and if they're not where you are, either grow them or go somewhere else. Those the things that in the end you'll be glad you did. Yeah, I can't argue with that. And I really like your advice when it comes to just breaking out of the mold. Um. That's one of those things that I think, even if you're stuck in the same spot, even let's just say hypothetically, for whatever reason you only have this one place to hunt, even if you just totally look in new ways of going about things, you're gonna learn something new. You're going to break out of the same patterns that maybe your local deer have patterned you on. I mean, there's some inherent, immediate benefits to just breaking outside of the daily routine, trying new things. Um, I think that's a that's a great thing for all of us to try to do a little bit more, because it is really easy and comfortable to stick with the same old, same old. I think all of us probably fall into that sometimes. So, Gordon, this has been This has been a lot of fun, it's been interesting. Um, some different perspectives here that I think are really helpful for us to hear about. So thank you for sharing all that. And then if people want to learn more about what's going on with North American White Tail the magazine or the website or the TV show or anything like that, where where can they go to to get that? Well, the simplest place would be North American Whitetail dot com. We certainly you know. Obviously the magazine is out there on newsstands and most people subscribe to it of our readership, And obviously the TV shows itself is on Sportsman Channel several times a week. So wherever you find us, we welcome you and I hope everybody has a fantastic season. Awesome. Well, thank you, Gordon, and we wish you the best of the luck of the rest of your hunts too. Thanks so much guys have a good one too, and with that we are going to shut this one down, so thank you all so much for tuning in. And before we go, of course, we do need to thank our partners who helped make this podcast possible. So big thank you to sit Gear, Redneck Blinds, Hunter Ta Maps, Yetie Coolers, Ozonics, Carbon Express, Maven Optics, and the White Tailed Institute of North America. Also little uh, I guess favor to ask. I suppose if you haven't yet, if you could give us a rating or review on iTunes. That is a huge, huge, huge, massive help. It takes like thirty seconds to a minute, and we'd love to hear an honest review from you. Same thing goes for the Wild podcast, which we're continuing to produce. Is our Q and a shorter form show with the guys over at Drury Outdoors and they've really been having some good ones lately, so be sure to check that out and if you have any feedback, we'd love to see your review too. All that said, thank you again for joining us today. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Gordon. I hope your hunts are going well, and I hope you will stay wired to hunt,

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