00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.
00:00:20
Speaker 2: Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. I’m your host, Tony Peterson, and today’s episode is all about sneaky ways you can use to build more confidence in the woods and why that matters so much.
00:00:32
Speaker 3: To big buck success. Okay, okokok.
00:00:42
Speaker 2: Before I get into this, I have to say something that is going to surprise the crap out of you. We have another sale going on here at Meat Eater. Now, if you can’t tell, there was a little sarcasm there, but the truth is we do have a hell of a lot of good stuff marked way down right now. And if you haven’t been paying attention, we are stuck in a weirdy. I mean, we’re getting a job is really tough. The value of the dollar hasn’t been moving in our favor for a while, and well there’s just a lot of uncertainty when it comes to money, but you also need some decent gear to get you through the deer season or the next ten deer seasons.
00:01:12
Speaker 3: And that’s where we come in.
00:01:14
Speaker 2: If you head on over to the mediater dot com, you’ll see that some of my favorites from our first light line are marked way down. Favorites like the Core System, which is a perfect mid season through the rut and after in a lot of places lineup that consists of a jacket, bibbs, and a vest. The whole line is thirty percent off right now until October fifth, and the white Tail three h eight pants are twenty percent off as well, which is pretty sweet too. I’ve worn those pants a lot in the last year and they become my go to for a lot of outdoor activities besides deer hunting. Actually really love them. Go check them out at the mediater dot com. Now, enough of that, this episode is all about confidence, but might not go the way you expect it to. I’ve had a few experiences this season already that really drove this home for me, and what I want to talk about is how you can develop confidence in your deer game in a variety of ways, all of which should help you kill bigger deer more consistently. Who doesn’t want that? I know you do, so buckle up because I’m about to get into it. Picture this if you will. It’s pouring rain. I’ve just come off a couple of weeks on the road filming like a good little employee, and now I need to pack up for the first hunt of the year. As has been the tradition since my daughter started deer hunting, I didn’t need to worry about a weapon for myself because I was just going to be a guide for one of my girls. And before we made the two hour drive to my buddy’s house on the eve of the Minnesota opener, I checked off my list.
00:02:41
Speaker 3: One by one.
00:02:42
Speaker 2: Camo check, licenses, check, butcher kit, check, food, buy nos boots right on down the line, check check, check check. We hit the road in the evening and ended up at my buddy’s house at around I don’t know, pretty close to ten o’clock at night, and when I unpacked my truck to stage up for the morning hunt, I realized something.
00:03:02
Speaker 3: My hunting pack wasn’t in my truck.
00:03:05
Speaker 2: It was laying in my garage where instead of packing it in my truck, I had left it. In it where my bios I saw pruner, headlamps, range finder, and the biggest kicker of all our hunting licenses.
00:03:18
Speaker 3: Driving back home.
00:03:19
Speaker 2: Wasn’t an option, so the best I could figure was that we’d go in and get her a license reprint at a shop, because in Minnesota you can’t just print deer tags at home. I felt really really stupid because what I had done was really really stupid. We went into the weekend with four sits at most to work with, and I’d cost us one right off the bat. Now when I told my daughter, she wasn’t too upset, because getting up at four point thirty isn’t super appealing to thirteen year old girls anyway. I eventually took my idiot self to bed, where I spent some time lying there thinking about how I’m never on my a game at the beginning of the season. When I woke up in the morning, I tiptoed passed the pullout couch where my daughter was sleeping, and I had a couple of cups of coffee. When it was time to wake her up, I walked downstairs and realized that my hunting pack was leaned up against the couch. I immediately said, are you effing kidding me? My daughter had unpacked my pack thinking it was hers, and the entire night while I was bemoaning my seriously defunct mental skills, she didn’t think once to check the pack she had carried downstairs, a pack that was twice the size of the day pack she brings along and about thirty pounds heavier. Now we had a lively conversation, ended up hunting that evening and almost killed a great buck, and managed to salvage the weekend. The whole ordeal was a good reminder of why I make lists, try to get my gear game as solid as possible, and generally try to be somewhat ordered in disciplined when it comes to hunting. Why you might ask, well, dear listener, it’s because nailing down some of the little details always gives me more confidence. And Plus, it really sucks settling into a ground blind in northern Wisconsin, for example, and reaching for your range finder to pre arrange some landmarks, only to realize that your bino harness is in the passenger seat of your truck right next to your thermocel. Now I didn’t think I needed a paternity test with either of my daughters before that, but I was pretty sure they were mine after. Anyway, I believe confidence is maybe your number one acid in the deer woods.
00:05:21
Speaker 3: I actually really do.
00:05:22
Speaker 2: It flavors everything about our hunts, and that flavor might be like chocolate moose Tracks ice cream, or it might be like a stale clump of kale. You know that dusty, gross, leafy abomination that Steve Varnella told me recently he likes and intentionally grows in his garden.
00:05:38
Speaker 3: Of course, confidence is.
00:05:39
Speaker 2: Best gained from killing big Bucks, but that’s really a chicken or the egg thing, or I don’t know, maybe a cart before the old hay burner thing, as many people have pointed out to me over the years in mostly unfriendly and hurtful ways. I don’t lack confidence with deer, but I did for a long time, and the second guessing that I could get into was almost enough to burn my smooth brain right out. But you kill enough of them in enough places and in enough different conditions, and you start to understand when you’re on them and how it will all go down, or it’s likely to go down anyway. Now, if you’re not there, then you have to back up. A couple of steps, though. The most logical one is scouting. I had a hunter I know who is on a quest to kill a public land Bobuck messaged me about a loaded oak tree.
00:06:24
Speaker 3: It was just dropping bomber acorns.
00:06:26
Speaker 2: And the picture that came along with it was of the ground that was absolutely.
00:06:31
Speaker 3: Littered with tracks and deer poop.
00:06:33
Speaker 2: Now, if you scout and find something like that during the open season, then your confidence is bound to be sky high. That in the moment, scouting is almost a necessity if you haunt public land, especially outside of the rut. If the deer aren’t showing you where they are right now, you’re not going to be where they are right now. I don’t know how to put that any other way. You can step back from that in season scouting thing, though, and get into the off season scouting thing now. While you can’t really do much about that right now for obvious reasons, the truth is that the more scouting most of us do, the more confidence we will have learning the ground, like really learning the ground.
00:07:11
Speaker 3: That’s a huge deal. This isn’t because you solve the.
00:07:14
Speaker 2: Problem of where the deer are now and how you’ll kill them, Even though that is definitely you know a potential result of off season scouting too, But it’s more than that, because learning the ground as well as you can helps you make educated guesses on where the deer should be throughout all kinds of different conditions and changing variables. I think about this a lot, and it is something that just comes into almost every hunt I have, regardless of where I’m at. Rarely do I go out and have a mirror image haunt of as sit I had the year before. Now, that happens in some spots, almost always private and at least somewhat controlled spots, And it happens on small spots sometimes because the deer are often only going to use a small property in a few different ways.
00:07:57
Speaker 3: But even that is in the guarantee.
00:07:59
Speaker 2: What in season and especially out of season scouting does show you the landscape as it is and should be for a few years. It shows you oak trees and deer trails and old sign and fence crossing, and the factors you might have to plug into the algorithm to make a good haunt happen Right now when it’s fifteen degrees warmer than this time last year, and the field is corn and not soybeans, and you know right on down the line. Confidence in knowing the land helps tamp down the panic when the land or what’s on the land isn’t what you expected from last year or the last five years. It’s also a huge benefit when you hunt new ground for so many reasons. But you can go further back than that, even you see there are a lot of different ways to build confidence in yourself as a deer hunter that go beyond killing big bucks and scouting like a fiend. That story I told at the beginning of the show about my daughter in the pack, the reason that sucked for me is that I was so confident I had done what I needed to facilitate her first hunt of the season. Suddenly realizing that I hadn’t really sucked quite a few years ago. Now, one of the editors of Field and Stream magazine reached out to say they wanted to do a story on my public land process, and he wanted to come out and hunt with me somewhere. It was a really cool opportunity, but also one of the strangest assignments I’ve ever gotten, simply because I was already a writer for them, so we’d be doing a story on me as a personality, while also having me write parts of it. Anyway, one of the things I realized during the build up of that article and then through the eventual hunt was that I have a process for a lot of parts of deer hunting that I often don’t really think about. For example, I try to never ever go out in the feel without having several pieces of gear in my truck or in my pack, flagging tape, a good cushion, saw pruner, just the stuff that I may or may not need at any given moment in the field, but especially for the times when my plan a becomes a dumpster fire and I need to figure something out fast. Having that stuff always with me gives me confidence when things just don’t go my way from the jump, and they often don’t, but to take it a step further. The second hunt I had for myself this year involved me taking a slow, slippery walk through a beautiful brook trout stream that winds its way through thousands and thousands of acres.
00:10:24
Speaker 3: Of big woods.
00:10:25
Speaker 2: I had sticks, a saddle, and a low but you know, growing expectations as I got deeper into the north Woods. When I picked out my tree, I had one set of sticks secured to it when two fawns walked into monch acorns, which on a blind hang and bang sid is always a confidence booster. I eventually got my platform up and settled into that tree, but not without going through a familiar process. I knew where my toe rope was because I always have it in the same pocket. I knew where my release was, where my strap on bowhanger was, and right on down the line to my glove. The week before, I hadn’t put my gloves in the pants pocket I usually do, and I went to pull them out of my pack.
00:11:07
Speaker 3: My left glove fell like a wet maple leaf to the ground.
00:11:10
Speaker 2: I did go on to kill a buck that night, which is always pretty rad on your first sitt of the season. But the whole thing was a reminder of why I try to stay organized.
00:11:18
Speaker 3: Now.
00:11:18
Speaker 2: A drop glove isn’t likely to cost you a deer, but I don’t know why risk it. I guess, so let’s follow this path for a second. When I got saddled up in that tree on public dirt and Wisconsin, I arranged the two trails I could clearly see.
00:11:33
Speaker 3: Then you know what I did.
00:11:34
Speaker 2: I drew my bow and I aimed at them, and then I aimed behind me, and then I drew my bow and I aimed off to my off side.
00:11:41
Speaker 3: This is a good habit to get into.
00:11:44
Speaker 2: Generally, but in this case was important because the tree I had chosen was crooked as hell, so I had to sort of tiptoe my way onto the corner of my saddle platform. Just a little, I don’t know, eight or ten degree difference in the slope of your platform can change everything, just as hanging a new stand will off and put you in a position where you thought you’d be shooting a certain way, but you realize you can’t, or we’ll need to shoot in sort of uncomfortable situations. The easiest way to quiet the fear around this is to pretend the deer is coming down the trail, draw slowly, and then aim at a leaf or something else along the trail. Just run through the scenario as best you can. I do this almost always when I get into a stand, at least in the evening, since I usually don’t want to move like that at first light in the morning. So it’s just a good way to make sure you have limb clearance and should be able to quietly get drawn if a deer comes in where you expect them to and definitely where you don’t expect them to, which is just what happened to me. With about fifteen minutes of shooting light left there, I heard a lot of not squirrel noises coming off the ridge behind me, and eventually saw an old horse of a doe headed straight at me. The wind had died almost nothing, so I wasn’t sure if she would get me then or when she walked up and smelled my sticks and where I touched all kinds of vegetation at the base of my tree. Well, she gave everything a real good sniff, gave me the side eye a few times, and then walked out on my off side and posed up, quartering away at maybe ten yards. I wanted to shoot her bad. Killing an old dough on public land in a place with not very many deer in a spot I’d never seen before in my life is a real trophy in my book. Plus, the freezers are pretty light this time of year, but I could hear almost non stop thunder rolling in the distance and knew that if I didn’t make a perfect shot, i’d be blood trailing in the pouring rain, and even if I did make a perfect shot, I’d be in for one hell of a drag in the pouring rain. I had decided before that hunt that it was good bucks or nothing, and I stuck to it. But I’m not going to lie and say I wasn’t real tempted to ignore myself imposed rules when that dough posed up. Little habits like ranging landmarks and going through the process of drawing and aiming when you get set up, aren’t going to help you kill a buck. I don’t know ninety nine point seven percent of the time you hunt, but they will give you a little bit of extra confidence if he does come in and the adrenaline starts to course through your veins and the whole thing is about to go down, And this is what you’re after. The thing about confidence is that it isn’t black and white. It’s not a binary thing. It’s not either or. It’s a slow progression that seems to move kind of like the stock market. The more you do to foster your confidence in yourself, the more it’ll slowly ratchet up over time. But just like the stock market, there will be moments where it’ll go the other way.
00:14:31
Speaker 3: You know, in the hunting.
00:14:32
Speaker 2: It’s when you make a big mistake or you find yourself in just like a six sit slump where you haven’t seen so much as a squirrel in almost a week, and your confidence will take.
00:14:40
Speaker 3: A real hit.
00:14:41
Speaker 2: Done and when it does, it’s easy to make more decisions that will help the whole thing keep retracing, and that means the climb back up is going to take more time. But that’s hunting, especially bow hunting for white tails. Losing confidence as a pheasant hunter is one thing, and it can be not a whole lot of fun, but it’s nothing like believing that you either will never have a good buck within bow range or you might and if you do, you are bound to screw it up in a major way. I guess the last thing I want to say on this is this developing confidence in yourself shifts the accountability from the deer to us. Instead of sitting the same stand we always do in blanking and then deciding it must be because the moon phase or something else, we can go figure it out every time we want to hunt if we have the confidence to do so, and when they do show up, if you have squared away some of the little details sit after sit, and you know exactly where everything is and what you need to do to make a shot happen. The whole thing changes. It just moves in your direction better and doesn’t always go right, never will, but believing it will definitely bends the odds a little more in your favor, which is a pretty huge deal if you ask me. So, think about that this season, and think about coming back next week because I’m going to talk about some of the recent blood trails I’ve been on. And what we should all think about is we set out to follow the spot to our bucks or maybe a buddy buck.
00:16:01
Speaker 3: That’s it for this episode.
00:16:02
Speaker 2: I am Tony Peterson and this has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. I mentioned our Whitetail Week sale earlier. I got to say it again. Tons of great discounts, you know, ten to forty percent off a bunch of stuff. A lot of our best white tail stuff over at first Light is thirty percent off. Go check it out, and as always, thank you so much for your support. I can’t tell you how much it means to us. Just trust me on this. We love you all. Thank you so much. For it, and if you need more white tail content or just haunting content, you know where to go. The meat eater dot com go check it out.
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