00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.
00:00:20
Speaker 2: Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by first Light.
00:00:24
Speaker 3: I’m your host, Tony Peterson.
00:00:25
Speaker 2: And today’s episode is all about the lockdown phase and why it’s just so dang hard to kill a buck right now. Look, if you didn’t kill one yet, at least you fellows who aren’t way down South waiting around for this rut to show up, you have your work cutout for it. But I’ve come to think about this deer thinging kind of in a way where I try to focus on the advantages I have and what that means to my strategy. I know this might sound dumb, but I think it’s important and it really matters when you hit the lockdown phase, where you know the feeling that things could bust open any minute is just gone, and it’s now a slog to try to capture a little of the rut magic before the late season shows up and brings with it a whole bunch of hunting that usually isn’t nearly.
00:01:07
Speaker 3: As fun as the rut.
00:01:16
Speaker 2: If you could go back in time to Little Rock, Arkansas, on May twentieth, nineteen forty two, you might be able to walk into the maternity ward in the hospital down there and see the nurses roll a newborn in who would eventually go by the name of Carlos Hathcock. I’m guessing a fair amount of you had a different upbringing from me, but Carlos Hathcock came up in conversations in our house quite a bit, mostly because my dad spent a year and a half in Vietnam and the war was a thing that you were always just aware.
00:01:43
Speaker 3: Of with him.
00:01:45
Speaker 2: Hathcock, who’s the subject of a book called Marine Sniper, which I read when I was pretty young, and I highly doubt my mom had any idea what it contained, because it’s pretty freaking brutal, was a sniper who had a pretty unbelievable run. Hathcock was already known for his marksmanship before he entered the Marine Corps, and his reputation only grew from there. He had ninety three confirmed kills and from his words, quite a few more unconfirmed since there was no third party to verify a lot of his work, such being the nature of a sniper in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Hathcock is the guy known for shooting an enemy sniper through his scope the enemy scope, by the way, by aiming at the reflection off the lens, which is the kind of thing that you probably don’t get away with too often in your career, because it means that the business end of your enemy’s gun is pointed in your direction and probably pretty close to heating up. He’s also known for shooting a female officer with a penchant for torturing American Marines. A soldier has spot her identified when she squatted to take a leak at like seven hundred yards, which I guess is a pretty good giveaway since not a lot of male soldiers would pee that way, even if they really wanted to. Another time, he accepted a mission that he he was only informed about after agreeing to it, where he had to crawl for four days and three nights across an essentially open field to make a shot. He was almost stepped on by the enemy, bumped face to face with a venomous snake and had a hell of a time dealing with the insects that took an interest in him. But his margin for error on that mission was as close to zero as you can get, and any move to swat away some biting ants or back off from a pissed off danger rope slithering through the grass would have been enough to get him busted, and the Vietcong were pretty interested in his whereabouts. In fact, he had a thirty thousand dollars bounty on his head, which was a lot of money at the time for them to offer up for anyone. I was obsessed with that book and the stories of Hathcock when I was growing up, but it wasn’t the marksmanship that mattered to me as much. I felt then wrongly, I’ll add that just about anyone can put the crosshairs on something and make a decent shot. I know now that’s wrong, because I’m a pretty bad rifle shot. In general, it was his patience and just dedication to the mission that blew me away, and still does. The ability to wait and do nothing, and wait and do nothing and wait until the moment arrives, and then you have your mind and your body work the way they are supposed to in order to get the job done is just so much more impressive than hitting a target that you’re aiming at. One is a skill that can be worked on by sending hundreds of rounds down range. And it’s not a skill I mean to diminish. But the patient’s thing is different. And while it might be a hell of a stretch to compare his achievements to shooting a buck right now, I think we can pull a lot of lessons out of life if we know, you know, kind of where to look. In fact, scratch that, I think we can learn a lot about how to be better at life if we not only allow ourselves to look for those lessons, but to truly put them into practice. I see this constantly at hunting, and I used to think that laziness, you know, amongst the general hunting population, is what saved the most.
00:05:00
Speaker 3: Deer, But I don’t know. Now. I think it’s impatience.
00:05:04
Speaker 2: Maybe they are closer together than I think, but the truth is that patience is just what gets the job done. I also think this is part of the reason why it’s so common for folks to use blinds, and especially box blinds to deer hunt. Now, I know there are plenty of valid reasons to use them, but it’s pretty hard to argue that the most comfortable you can be, you know, it’s going out to the box blind with a heater and while that’s running and keeping your warm, and your phone is charged, and you have a bag of snacks and a good view and you can move around without worry.
00:05:34
Speaker 3: Just comfy.
00:05:35
Speaker 2: You have to do what you have to do to stay out there, which is something that is maybe the most true. When the bucks go from cruising and chasing to breeding and locking down with a receptive lady, things can get very quiet out there, but the big boys are still moving and they’re still looking. They just might not move, you know, too much, or look too much for a couple of days at a time. This also means that your cameras might go cold. That means the electricity in the air at sunrise might just fizzle out and die by ten in the morning. When you don’t see what you expect to see. That means that the hunting is harder than it just was, and hard hunting makes a strong argument to get your ass out of the tree and just go do something else. But that’s not a great way to kill big bucks. I recently bumped into these two mentalities while hunting with our Fearless Leader and his buddy in Nebraska last week. After filling my tag about four minutes into the hunt, which isn’t a joke, I had the pleasure or the opportunity, since a lot of it was the opposite of pleasure to figure out how to put Steve and his buddy right on top of buck action. Steve’s buddy, a fellow who goes by the name Pottery Pat, was very easy to handle. He wanted to hunt, has an amazing attitude, and he killed a great buck after sitting dark to dark without seeing a deer, and then sitting from sunrise until about ten am, when the first year of his trip, a really solid nine point came cruising through piled up seventy yards from his blind and it was awesome. Steve, on the other hand, is like dealing with someone who has extreme ADHD, a raging cocaine addiction, and an affinity for the outdoors that doesn’t quite extend into the world a white tail bow hunting. If you want to understand what I mean by that, consider this on November fourth, the first day of our rut hunt, when I shot one of the biggest bucks in my life. By the time I was tagged out, he was lacing up his boots to go set some traps for coyotes. The property we were hunting is a working cattle ranch that seems to have a very small amount of deer using it, like, way smaller than I expected when I signed up for that job. But it had some good books and enough deer to justify the time on stand in really good spots, you know, usually the kind with serious pinch points next to them, since the food game is almost non existent on that ranch. Well, Steve told me beforehand he didn’t want to sit blind, which is tough in a county with only like nine trees. So I stuck him in blinds when I could and stands when I could, which was all dependent on the wind. He had a rough go of it until I put him along a river and eventually in a stand that was just the kind of place where one eventually will come in and pose up, which happened. And I’ll tell you what if you ever have to guide your boss to a deer, And he’s the kind of guy who mostly wants to go run coyote traps. You will have a stressful week. I literally, and I’m not joking here either, almost passed out from relief when we walked up on the buck that he shot.
00:08:30
Speaker 3: That’s another story.
00:08:42
Speaker 2: The lesson in all of this was that we can fight ourselves to do what we want to do, or we can accept the mission for what it is and put in what we have to in order to be there when a buck walks through. That’s about it, my friends. And even though I want all of you to buy lots of calls and decoys and other hunting stuff, the truth is that if you want to be the kind of person who fills tags when most won’t, that lesson is just it. You have to find it in yourself to sit through the second guessing, sit through the days when the deer just don’t cooperate. You have to believe in the process because it works. Now, this might sound like some kind of motivational speech type of bullshit, but it’s not. I believe it big time because I’ve put it into practice a whole bunch. In fact, as I say these words, I’m mostly thinking about how the hell I’m going to get my truck loaded and head on over to northern Wisconsin to hunt the lockdown phase in a place where the wolves way out number the bucks. I probably won’t see more than a couple of deer in multiple days of hunting, but I believe a buck will show up eventually, and so it’ll be dark to dark for as many days as I can get. That’s my best shot over there, and it’s the best shot in most places we hunt now. Dark to dark often sucks, and it only gets worse when the action dies down. It’s also not always a great idea. When we were in Nebraska, we had a whole bunch of days when the wind would be out of the north in the morning and then out of the south in the afternoon. We had to switch spots midday, which is, you know, a good excuse to get out and get a sandwich and just recharge a bit. But that’s where the danger comes creeping in, because if you have to get out, why not take a little snooze, or go watch a couple quarters of football, or I don’t know, staple your apple bag to the wall. Really anything more enjoyable than watching the dead Woods for hours on end. We all know this, though, the more hours you put in, the higher likelihood you’ll have of an encounter. It’s just simple math, but there is an intangible to it as well. The more you don’t walk around, even if you have really good access routes, the less impact you’ll have on a location. And that stuff matters, my friends a lot. The more you enter and exit the woods, the more the deer know what you’re up to. Then you have the reality of what stand to sit or whether you should go looking for a new spot. The two stands and the one blind that we killed from in Nebraska were all set up on really, really good funnels. They’re the kind of spots where when the wind is good for you, it’s good for the bucks to go sniffing around, and when they do, they hit certain parts of the train that just force them to go down very specific trails. Look again, we all know this, but do we live it. How many of us rode out the rut hours on field edge stands or other openings on the hope that we’ll see something and maybe be able to call it. In this time of year, the deer know what’s up, and even on private ground, the deer have yet to be more pressure than they are right now at this point of the season, because everyone hunts the rut, literally everyone, which means that if you’re sitting on a tag now, you should be probably sitting in.
00:12:01
Speaker 3: The field edge.
00:12:01
Speaker 2: Stuff can produce, but it probably won’t, and it certainly isn’t likely to produce all day. You know that food plot you love to sit on won’t either, because it’s been hunted a lot.
00:12:13
Speaker 3: Now.
00:12:13
Speaker 2: I know, if you’re hunting a bang and property that might not be the case, but for most of us that should just be accepted as largely the truth. If you have a pinch point and the wind is right, that’s about as good as you’re going to get. But what if you don’t. When I head to Wisconsin, That’s what I’m going to be dealing with. What’s worse is that we are supposed to get south winds, which doesn’t do me very much good for some of the stuff that I usually like to hunt. So I’m gonna have to go looking or try my best to get downwind of what I suspect our doe betting areas.
00:12:42
Speaker 3: This is the thing about this stuff.
00:12:44
Speaker 2: What we want out of our hunts, like we see on Instagram and the hook and bullet channels is basically a false read of most of deer hunting. That one eight walking across the field Nebraska as it might as well be a different species of deer because they aren’t available to you, My friend, the deer you have to hunt have been hunted. They’re exhausted from the rut, they’re weary from how much of the season has passed, and they aren’t much into risk at this point. But remember when I said in the intro about recognizing advantages and using them, Well, the advantage you have now is that the biggest bucks are out there, still moving. They’re still trying to capture the magic of the rut, just like you are. The lockdown phase is a time of limited resources for the deer. When it comes to finding hot dos, they have to go look for them, and sure, when they find one, they’re going to sit with her for a couple of days. But when she’s had enough of his company, he’s going to go look for another one. And where he is going to look for her at least throughout the day is where she might be laying down with a couple of her sisters. Now, I have absolutely been floored the last several years on the caliber of bucks that walk by my cameras during the lockdown period. Even though the frequency isn’t super encouraging, but it is encouraging enough to believe that if you can string together a handful of days, or you can muster up the will to sit whenever you have a block of hours to work with, you have a chance to have something come through. I know it’s somewhat bleak, but it’s not without hope, which I guess is a pretty good way to describe hunting a lot of stuff, and especially describe bowhunting white tails. Another way to look at this is that the days are crazy short now, but since you know that a few bucks are likely to walk around in daylight, the odds of you being there are pretty good since the windows so condensed. Maybe that’s just a mental trick, but sitting dark to dark for only like eleven hours isn’t the worst thing ever. I mean, we go to work and sit for a long time, and that’s generally always worse than sitting in a tree stand. To overcome the lockdown, you need one last ingredient.
00:14:51
Speaker 3: Confidence.
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Speaker 2: This is a chicken or the egg thing, though, because you won’t get a lot of confidence if it doesn’t work out, you can cheat this somewhat with trail cameras, but the truth is you gotta get out there and you got to punch in on the clock. It can be really rough. But man, when it’s like noon and you for sure hear a deer coming and it has that slow and steady gait of a deer that probably has antlers, it’s a whole different thing that might not happen until you’re on your third or fourth day and you’re thinking long and hard about a lot of the stuff that you could be doing that doesn’t involve staring through leafless trees while contemplating taking up golfer fencing. But it will happen if you play it right. Believe that, because if you don’t, you won’t be out there to see it come to fruition. So get out there and grab what’s left of the rut. Make the most of it, my friends, there’s still time to witness a little of that November magic before the whole thing comes to a sad but slightly welcome end. Do that and come back next week, because I’m going to talk about why we fail as gun hunters and what we can do to be a little different from our blaze orange clad brothers and sisters. That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson and this has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation’s podcast. I want to thank you so much for listening and for all your support. It’s been truly awesome, you know, working here at meat Eater and seeing how loyal our audience is and how engaged they are. That’s you, guys, So thank you for that. If you need more hunting content, or maybe you just need something to entertain yourself a little bit like a different podcast from mine, go to the meeteater dot com. Check out clay Is Beargrease podcast. Maybe listen to meet Eater Trivia and see where you stack up against.
00:16:30
Speaker 3: The crew whatever.
00:16:31
Speaker 2: Tons of new podcasts, new hunting films, short films, how to stuff, white tail, edu articles, recipes. We put up new content every single day at that site, The mediator dot com. Go check it out.
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