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Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.
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Speaker 2: Hey everyone, welcome to the wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I’m your host, Tony Peterson, and today’s episode is all about the not so secret cheat code to life. It also happens to help us become much better hunters, which is curiosity. This is sort of an expanded take on a couple of points I made a couple of weeks ago about how we should all ask ourselves about the deer sign we find when we’re doing other spring activities. I truly believe that curiosity is a cheat code to life, and that you not only have to try to stay curious, but also understand what it’s doing for you on a daily basis. I know that might sound a little crazy, but I’m going to make it sound I don’t know, reasonable, I hope as I dive into this one about how to make yourself a better hunter overall. Look, there are a lot of questions that can’t currently be answered, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask them, and it certainly doesn’t mean we shouldn’t actively engage in the thought process of trying to follow the threads of possible answers as far as we can go. That kind of thinking isn’t for everyone, but it is a very common theme amongst the folks I know who have gone from pretty much nothing to being multi millionaires and who, by every definition that matters, are successful in life. I’ve spent quite a bit of time working with three people who I firmly place in that category, and they are all extremely curious, Look, are there other factors at play? Sure, without question, you can’t discount Look, but that’s also a nice protective covering. A lot of us like to throw on someone else’s success so we don’t have to acknowledge how small of a role the old four leaf clover really played. There’s work ethic, no doubt of those three fellows I’m thinking of all of them, work their asses off. There’s a lot to it. And I know it’s currently popular to be extremely dismissive of anyone who is more successful than us, but that’s the wrong way to look at it. There will always be those folks, and how they are is a blueprint for how anyone else should consider trying to be. If being more successful is the goal, this goes for business, sure, but hunting too. Now. If that weren’t true, I wouldn’t really have an audience, I don’t think, and neither would anyone else in the hunting industry. People aspire to be better at a lot of things in life, especially the kinds of pursuits that will get you up at four am when you could just keep snoozing away. If you want to know how to put this into practice, a good way to do it is to hunter fish for anything other than white tails. I say this slightly tongue in cheek, but mostly not. Maybe I’m too close to the topic, but it feels like the one outdoor pursuit that we feel we can fill in all the blanks for is deer hunting, and I think that’s super dangerous ground. When you don’t know what you don’t know, but you tell yourself you do, you’re operating off of false assumptions. Now we have to do that somewhat like when you fish a new lake. You have to decide somehow where to start, what lures or baits to use, how to use them. All that jazz. You plug in what you know and you try out some things. Fishing, at least on new water, is a curiosity game, but the stakes are generally low, so we don’t think about it that way. The same goes for something like upland hunting that I like to talk about a lot. You know, when it’s new and on October twentieth, we expect the roosters to be in certain spots in the field, and when it’s nine am on December twentieth, we expect them to be somewhere else. But this is where the two types of hunters who are often out there deviate from one another. A lot of folks aren’t curious. So there are those guys I talk about all the time who walk the outer edges of the slough and the fence lines around the property, and they think, well, I’m doing good enough because I’m either right by the cover or I’m right by the food. But here’s the thing, you know, that might be all you need to think about on private ground, but it won’t cut it on public because if it were that easy, there’d be no roosters left for anyone to shoot. Why would they be there where they get hunted the most, Then say some other part of the property where they don’t. When we walk that well used circuit along the fence lines and flush three hens, when the tracks are everywhere in the snow but the birds aren’t, the question should be if not here where? It’s no different than when we are sitting in the edge of a beanfield on opening day a bo season and the bachelor group doesn’t show up. You see, we look at curiosity in the form of some crazy haired engineer type sitting in a lab with a white coat and a microscope, or maybe sitting at a bench in the garage. It’s littered with electrical parts and tools and stuff. Science is advanced by someone saying hmm, that’s odd and then digging into whatever the odds is. When they don’t get what they expect and that result isn’t readily explainable, they don’t make up a solution and keep running a failed experiment. They try something different. They follow a new line of thinking given their new information. Let’s frame this up another way. Take someone who has the land and the means to curate a white tail paradise. You know, food plots, ponds, box blinds, dream property stuff for a lot of folks. Add in a couple dozen sell cameras that are running surveillance twenty four to seven, and the questions are mostly answered. They know where the bucks will be, where they’ll hunt those bucks from, and it’s sort of a mostly solved problem that is very, very appealing to a lot of us, and for good reason. Hunting deer, especially mature bucks, is a difficult thing to do. Success generally doesn’t come easy for almost all of us, and when it does for a select few, it looks like skill, and it certainly can be. But if you also strip away the mystery and as many variables as possible, you end up with something predictable, and predictability is kind of the enemy of curiosity. An awful lot of us look at that style of hunting and try to draw as much from it as we can, and then we think we have predictable hunting. But what we generally create a slightly more predictable hunting that still requires a lot more from us than we think. We still fail a lot, and we would still greatly benefit from asking why a lot when we put ourselves into a position to not ask why. It’s not that we fail as hunters, we just don’t really grow as much as we could. There’s a lot of bear hunting that happens here at Meat Eater. It’s the only outdoor company I’ve ever worked for where the audience just eats up bear content, which I think is interesting. It’s also not great for a fellow like me who doesn’t love bear hunting. I’ve thought about this a lot, because I really love baiting bears and checking trail cameras and having a good excuse to do some work in the woods in August and September. But when the season opens, I have no desire to go sit over a pile of donuts and trail mix. It’s not because I’m opposed to baiting bears either, I know that’s the most realistic option, you know, in much of bear territory, where spotting and stalking is just out, and so is the possibility of setting up for natural bear movement. I spend a lot of time hunting white tails in bear country, and I almost never ever see a bear from stand. It’s not the baiting, it’s what the baiting does. It results in one or two spots that are the only options. And while bear hunting feels like it should be easy, it never is. It’s a matter of just using the wind and sitting over and over until a bruin walks in. There’s not much to solve for once the baits are established and start getting hit. Look, you can switch up the baits, you can hunt during different conditions, and there are ways to be curious about it, but there’s only so much to solve for, and it’s just it’s not enough to truly interest me like some other outdoor pursuits do. I realize this recently after going from a public land turkey bohunt on a big property to sitting with my daughters on two much smaller private parcels here in the Burbs. The game is to weight them out in a couple of spots, because those are the only options. I do it because it’s available and my daughters don’t know any better. But it’s not nearly as enjoyable to me as having a bigger area to try to figure it out. There is a quote from a fellow who was named Plutarch that goes the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled. I love that because it speaks to our natural tendency to accept answers and never question them. Think about this example. How often have you said, or if you’ve heard somebody say it, that the bucks bed somewhere specifically on a property. This happens all the time. The betting area is this or that. But that is a great way to not think about it and to not truly understand what that means. You’re saying they always bed there, Probably not right with every wind direction, rain or shine zero degrees or one hundred with one hundred percent humidity on opening day versus six weeks into the season after being hunted hard on the right property. This is undoubtedly true, but for most of us, that kind of thinking is damaging. Look at it this way. What happens if you believe that and you hunt the routes leading out of that betting area for a week and a big one doesn’t show. Our natural tendency is to explain that away must have been coyotes or a small game hunter, or the buck is off on a walk about for the rut. Whatever. When we settle on an explanation that makes us comfortable, it’s over. We don’t have to try to figure anything out because the cause is out of our hands, which mean the remedy is as well. It’s just like the folks who say they can’t lose weight because of their genetics without thinking about how you don’t have to go back more than two or three ancestors before that starts to fall apart real quickly. But if you believe that’s true, there’s no lifestyle change that will seem worth it, and the case is closed. The hunter who will get better over time is the hunter who says, why was I wrong about this? Did they know I was there? Maybe a different ambush option is the solution, Maybe it’s worth trying, or maybe you ask yourself, why wasn’t he bedded there? After all, your access was money, you had great win, and after putting in the hours, the buck just didn’t show. Let me frame this up in a simple way. I have permission to hunt a farm in southeastern Minnesota, a part of which is cut right down the middle by a minimum maintenance road. The road allows us to access a hell of a lot of that farm. And when my dad and I first started hunting it back when I was in Google, we part close to a spot that is just one of those hubs of deer activity. It’s an area where two valleys kind of meet and sort of flatten out in one of those spots where if you know what you’re doing, you know we’ll always have a community scrape or three in it because it just nudges the local deer to go through it at all points of the season. What we figured out there after way too long, was that nothing burned that spot out for us faster than parking two close. It was bad enough for evening sits, but a total killer for morning sits. The spot would always start out so hot and then just get cold fast. And you know what, we thought for a long time it was the lull, or it was the acorns dropping somewhere else. We weren’t curious enough about it, so we use some of the go to explanations. But then I started just parking way farther up the road and walking in the ditch to get into it. And you know what, that stan came back to life. If grizzly bears took helicopters into the back country to hunt us a month or two every fall, we’d get real cagy when we heard a chopper in the distance. How different is it for a white tail during hunting season to hear those tires crunching in the gravel and then stopping, then all those little noises of someone getting out and unzipping the bow case and throwing on their pack and whatever else. In that moment you have everyone’s attention, and then you allow them to listen to you walking the field edge and then taking a path through the woods where undoubtedly there will be some other unnatural noises. When you get to your destination, you want the deer to write you off as another woodland critter, not hyper focus on your presence. I think at the heart of all of this, at least for yours truly anyway, is that failure is the catalyst for curiosity. Why weren’t the birds roosted where they were supposed to be? How come the crappies haven’t moved into the shallows yet? And where are they since they haven’t? Why can someone who doesn’t live in my state go to the public land by my house and kill a good buck when I believe you can, I an’t see a button buck in there on most days. Or I’ll use a better example that might be more relatable. Why when I finally do have a good buck within range, do I shoot like it’s my first day holding a boat. I had to ask myself that a lot. After a lot of years of making excuses for not hitting them at all, let alone not hitting them in the heart of the lungs, I had the whole equation mostly solved, and then I started not being able to shoot them as well as I wanted to again after getting this job, and I had to stop protecting myself and start being curious about why it would go south for me in that category once again. When you stop explaining away the mysteries and start engaging with them, you allow yourself to actually try to work with the problems instead of accepting them as immovable barriers. I talk a lot about how you can’t have above average hunting success without doing above average hunting work. You want to kill more chure bucks, I know you do. You better not hunt like the average whitetailer. It’s pretty simple, but that implies a mostly physical solve, and don’t kid yourself. The physical part of white tail hunting is very, very real and very important. If you’re not willing to sweat and go when you don’t want to. You’re not going to kill a lot of big bucks. But the mental side matters, and this is where the discrepancy comes from in hunting advice. The people who have taken the mystery out of mature bucks in their lives are the people who are often financially motivated to sell you a solution. I get the hypocrisy of me saying that, By the way, the truth is, you have to think differently, and that’s not just something that happens by acknowledging it. You know that George R. R. R. Fella, who wrote The Game of Thrones and I think five other spinoff series, he has a quote that goes like this, Why is it that when one man builds a wall, the next man immediately needs to know what’s on the other side. I think that’s a great saying, but also not entirely true. Some men and women do you need to know what’s on the other side, but a lot of them don’t. A lot of people will stare at that metaphorical wall and never really be curious about what’s on the other side because they think they know. Some folks understand that they can’t know until they grab a ladder and take a peek over the top. Those folks are the same people who say, I think the deer should be doing this, and when they get it wrong, they say, well, why not that thing I thought? What am I missing? Then they try something else, and maybe they see some deer that give them a clue, or maybe they blank again. But they don’t settle and decide it’s unsolvable. They stay curious and keep asking themselves questions that lead to action. This is maybe the most important part of this whole thing. Most of the time, when we aren’t curious, it’s because we are more comfortable with inaction. If you believe the lull is real and you can’t kill a buck during it, you have given yourself a reason to not do anything, and that sounds like the best choice. But the curious hunter says, why does it seem like the buck movement is suppressed? Where are they and what are they doing right now? It’s not like all of a sudden they all decide they need to bed during all legal shooting hours for a couple of weeks. That’s not how it works. But it’s an impossible problem to solve without taking action, and that action might be as simple as scouting for some hot oak trees, or maybe throwing a camera up on that stock tank that has some deer tracks around it. Curiosity is probably your best friend, and you should not only acknowledge that, but truly try to engage with it every chance you can. It might not make you super successful in life, but it won’t hurt. But it certainly won’t make you a worse deer hunter. That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for your support. I know you got a lot of things to do this time of year. This is such an awesome time of year to be a fisherman and a turkey hunter and start thinking about deer and doing your food plot work and whatever else. But if you need a little more entertainment, you need a little more education, head on over to the medeater dot com. You literally drop new films, new articles, new pieces on conservation news, new podcasts, new content every single day. There. Go check it out at the mediator dot com and thank you once again for your support.
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