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.
00:00:21
Speaker 3: The Wire to Hunt Foundations broadcast, which is brought to you by First Light. I’m your host, Tony Peterson, and today’s episode is all about reflecting on the past season and trying to learn from it.
00:00:35
Speaker 2: Look, I know it’s not over everywhere.
00:00:37
Speaker 3: A lot of Southern hunters definitely have some season left, and there are a few late season opportunities still going on up here in the arc there. But for a lot of us, the season is either actually over or over enough to be considered pretty much as wrapped up. This is a good time to relax a bit, but to also think about the past season and what happened to you, what went well, what didn’t, what you learn.
00:00:57
Speaker 2: This is not just.
00:00:57
Speaker 3: About how to kill deer, but how to enjoy the whole more, which is what I’m going to talk about right now. This particular week is just a weird one for me. Every single year. Not only does it signify that I can stop making the three hour drive to the part of our state that has some wild roosters to hunt every single chance I get, but the deer season is just about pretty much over. I am going to take my daughters on a dome mission sometime this month in southwestern Wisconsin, but I’m not gonna hunt, and that’s a candy Land deal, so it sort of doesn’t feel like the kind of hunting where you get a real fix, if that makes any sense. Although my daughters don’t care, and I guess I really shouldn’t care either. It’s a good opportunity, but it is bittersweet to see another season end, and not just because having the option to hunt deer is generally always better than not being able to hunt deer. But I also don’t know anyone who gets after it pretty hard who also isn’t just ready for a little off season.
00:01:56
Speaker 2: I am. I just feel conflicted on it.
00:01:59
Speaker 3: I’m also inflicted on the fact that it just seems like life is screaming by so fast lately. I’ve had a lot of conversation with folks who feel the same way as if the whole thing got put on double speed when we weren’t looking, and now the years are disappearing in the rearview mirror at a rate that just doesn’t seem right. It’s in that spirit that I want to talk about my first lesson from this season, which I think is an important one. I didn’t hunt with my girls as much as I’d like to be fair. That happens every season. It always makes me feel guilty, and by all accounts, they had a great season from the perspective of shooting bucks. They teamed up to kill three between Minnesota and Wisconsin, which is a lot for a pair of thirteen year olds, I guess, but we all know it’s not just the killing that makes the season, especially when the killing happens barely quickly without a lot of effort, which is what happened with both of their Minnesota bucks. Now, we did have some really cool sits where we saw lots of critters, and both of my daughters got to see legitimately nice bucks for the areas we hunt, which is always fun as a dad. When I look back on last season, I’m reminded of the low grade fighting between my wife and I over getting my daughters into the woods. More She’s on the path that most of the suburb dwellers here are leaning into, so I don’t blame her for it. But for me, I think we are just way overdoing the activities with our kids. I can’t help but think that my daughters would have had, you know, better memories from more time in the woods than they will from another basketball tournament out of a dozen or so per season. But I know I’m shouting into the void on that one. At least, it seems like it still doesn’t make me feel great to know that every season I find myself wishing I’d figured out just a little bit better how to hunt with them more. Just pull them out of school more, just make it happen. Now, if there was a way to bottle up that feeling and save it for nine months so I could get a fresh dose, you know, on the onset of the twenty sixth season, I would because otherwise I’ll forget it to some extent and things will probably play out in a similar fashion. I do feel better about how my daughters handled themselves on the season’s hunt this year, though I made them take a step up in responsibility with their gear so that I didn’t have to think of everything, and they would have to keep a little bit of, you know, more ownership over their enjoyment and success in the field.
00:04:12
Speaker 2: That’s a good thing.
00:04:13
Speaker 3: But I also know that for sure when it comes to the upcoming season, I’m going to get those girls in tree stands more. They will be old enough to hunt solo, and I want them to get the experience of being in stands more often and blinds less often. I’m actually really excited to work on some of that stuff in the off season on the properties where I can hunting two states kind of hard, I guess with them also makes me want to keep going to other places.
00:04:38
Speaker 2: The writing is basically.
00:04:39
Speaker 3: On the wall for most traveling hunts, especially for the folks who aren’t wealthy, and I’d really like my daughters to hunt for a few new critters in some really cool places before that’s kind of, you know, completely off the table. I don’t know yet if that’ll just be a turkey trip to Nebraska or maybe some type of trip out west for something. But this year they’re going to a new state to hunt for something. Now this season, I also learned, or I probably should say relearned a few things about myself as a white tail hunter. That Nebraska rut hunt I did reminded me of just how nice it is to get my hands on a property and get to really work just that property with cameras and then a whole bunch of well scouted out setups. It wasn’t the hardest hunt of the season, but that’s just fine. Sometimes. I really enjoyed the process of looking at a new piece of ground where I could trim shooting lanes and run a whole bunch of cameras and just work it and learn it and then see how everything came to fruition. It was a good reminder of a lot of things, but also how important it is to have a plan if you’re going to hunt a place for a limited amount of time and that time happens to be the rut. I really don’t feel like that hunt taught me too much other than sort of reinforcing a load deer density strategy and maybe helping me be more patient that way. But a few other hunts have my wheels just turning. One was the early season hunt in Minnesota here with my daughter, when we drove to southern Minnesota and it was hotter than hell, sat on a pond, or at least as close as I dared for the first night and had encounters with four bucks, but they all did what I secretly hoped they wouldn’t. And the next night, when when we returned to sit closer, the farmer who owns the place decided to chop all the corn for silage, the corn that the deer were using to get to that pond. Now I had played it safe, got close, and then got shut out. I only had two days to hunt with her, so I should have just gone in and sat right on top of the water as best I could, But I didn’t, and it cost us. The next time I’m convinced a buck or multiple bucks are going to use a spot like that, whether I’m with the girls or not, I am going to go for broke, but also just make sure I have a backup spot in case I blow the whole thing up. There is a dance between being too cavalier and being too cautious that is so easy to screw up, and most of the time I think we are just too cautious, And even though I rarely am when it comes to a lot of my public land stuff, I keep finding myself playing it a little with the girls that I probably need to. I think that lesson is one that we can all learn from, and it’s important to remember how much recency bias or I guess you know, the successful hunts bias our memories and our future plans. Think about how often you didn’t hunt because you wouldn’t think it would be good, and then think about when you did hunt because it should be good, but you sat somewhere that you knew was a little dicey. Those decisions, like all of our decisions, have repercussions, and they can help us make better plans in the future. I think all of us be wise to pay attention to when we feel the need to go for broke versus the timing or conditions that talk us into being super cautious. When it comes to the latter, there are a few follow up questions we should probably ask ourselves, like was I overly cautious because I had, you know, only a few stands in blinds to choose from? Or I just don’t I don’t have a reliable mobile setup. Even if you remotely believe either to be true, it would be a good idea to learn from that and alter your course for next season. Another lesson that I learned from this season is how easy it is for me to miss something crucial. I found a spot this past summer on some public land in Wisconsin that got me really interested, so I scouted it and then I hunted it a few times in the early season. I had encounters with doughs every sit, which is no small victory over there, but I never saw a buck, and I mostly didn’t want to shoot a dough there, even though I had a tag. There just aren’t that many deer over there right now where we hunt, so I just didn’t feel like I needed to shoot a dough just because, so I limited myself to bucks. I also hung one camera above a creek crossing as I left one morning after hunting, just to see what I was missing, and man, I was missing a lot. I had a couple of dough groups that got pretty consistent, and then some bucks as the rut ramped up. Now, I never got a really big deer on camera there, but I had a couple of year typical two year old type of deer that I would have loved scene coming in. They would have been just fine for me. Now, when I killed my buck on a different property. I went over to pull that camera, and I realized a couple of things. The first is that there are some apple trees along the trout stream in that property that deserves some attention in the early season. I don’t know why it never occurred to me that they could even be there, but they are, and I’m not going to forget them this year. I also realized that the trail camera that I had hung was on a trail that split about ten yards below the spot I actually chose, so I had monitored one trail instead of both. And if you’re wondering why, the only thing I can say is because I’m stupid.
00:09:37
Speaker 2: I guess.
00:09:38
Speaker 3: I don’t know how I missed that when I hung the camera, but I did, and it actually explained some of the travel that the images showed, which I didn’t understand at the time. I think it was like a low faith do it because you can set a camera kind of thing that I just didn’t care.
00:09:53
Speaker 2: That much about.
00:09:55
Speaker 3: That was stupid because the travel on both trails looked to be about the same, so I might have actually down by half the amount of recon I could do instead of just simply pointing my camera downhill. Instead of uphill. I could have captured both of those trails. If there’s a lesson there is to try to get your cameras in the best spots possible instead of just getting so much tunnel vision that you don’t even look around a little bit. I also found a few trees on that trail which were way better for a quick hang and bang with my saddle than the ones I had actually set up. And when I went in there to hunt, I hate when I do stuff like that to myself, But I also checked my work a lot, so maybe I’m not more of a mistake machine than most of us. I don’t know, but I know that that spot had a lot of promise and it delivered on some fun sits, and it left me with a lot of questions and the feeling that I had done about I don’t know ten percent of what I needed to in order to kill a buck there. And speaking of killing bucks, I’d say maybe the most pertinent lesson I got from last season was this, you can kill bucks incredibly easy with the right setups, or you can get your ass absolutely kicked for years while doing almost everything right. I killed a super easy buck in Minnesota on water in September when it was hot and they were just coming to get a drink.
00:11:11
Speaker 2: They were just gonna get there.
00:11:13
Speaker 3: Then I killed a super easy buck in Nebraska that was cruising through a very obvious pinch point.
00:11:18
Speaker 2: Simple stuff.
00:11:19
Speaker 3: But the last buck, the one in Wisconsin, that was a totally different thing. I had literally talked myself into believing that I’d never get a big one over there. It’s like I could never get all that close no matter what I did. And what I mean by that is that year after year it felt largely like I reset to zero and had to start over. That’s a hard mode to operate in because if you feel like you’re not making progress, it’s really hard to give it a real effort. But that’s the only way to do it. And even though I felt like I wasn’t really phoning it in, there was always just like this nagging sense that it wasn’t meant to be. I had that same feeling for a long time when I just started bowhunting, you know, about killing any deer. Then I had it about killing anything bigger than a year and a half old. Then I had it about killing a big buck. I guess in some ways, a lot of us live with that throughout much, if not all, of our hunting careers.
00:12:16
Speaker 2: It’s a tough pill to swallow.
00:12:17
Speaker 3: When the old ego says it shouldn’t be this hard, but the deer decided that it will be. That buck I killed over there was just such a good reminder that even in places where it’s just difficult to hunt for a variety of reasons, it’s still possible. You just need the time to scout and to hunt, and you need to listen to the deer. What the deer this year told me was that they weren’t going to hang out in the big old swamps where the wolves liked to howl, but they were going to leave. But they also weren’t going to leave the country. They along with the coyotes, just shifted their core areas for a while, which did a couple of things that I hope I never forget. The first was that they moved closer to human habitation, even the big bucks, which tells you how much you know they respect the wolf’s ability to eat them. The second was that when they opted to mostly move out of the big cover, they got concentrated in smaller, easier to hunt cover. The third was that if it’s the rut, you just have to get your ass out there and keep trying. I know that’s kind of anti climactic, but that Wisconsin buck and his buddies were absolutely doing their thing, and they were not nocturnal.
00:13:22
Speaker 2: They were just not where I wanted them to be.
00:13:24
Speaker 3: I kept pushing hunts to happen in places where I thought they might show up because of the magic of November. But they didn’t show up, and they almost never do, so I had to go looking for them. In a way, I guess this brings me all the way back to that lesson on being too cavalier versus too cautious. For my Wisconsin Rut hunt, I was being pretty cautious because I thought I had to preserve a couple of spots where I figured eventually I just catch one cruising.
00:13:51
Speaker 2: But those spots were dead.
00:13:52
Speaker 3: And if I’m being honest, which I don’t really want to be, at least one of them is just a dud for reasons I can’t name. I don’t know why they won’t cruise through there when I’m there, but they won’t, and I need to do something different about it. I don’t know what that is yet, but I know that it was a high confident spot for me last year and this year, and it has delivered me a total of one button buck sighting and enough hours to tell me that it’s just wrong. So it’s back to the drawing board with that spot or that property. But that’s okay. That’s what this time of year is good for. We can get our heads right and give our past season some real thought. That’s what you should do, and you should be as honest as you can about it, because the more we take stock in our successes and our failures, and the more we kind of mentally inventory the plans that worked and the ones we were sure would work but didn’t, the more likely we are to try something different next season that will work. I think this is good for all of us, whether we only hunt one spot and we think we have it pretty much dialed, or you kind of free spirit type of person who saddles up in a new tree for every sit of the season. Give yourself some time to reflect, see if you can pull a few lessons out of the last season to learn from, and come back next week because I’m going to dive into a white tails biology to break down how they survive. Winner and further highlight how freaking awesome these critters really are.
00:15:16
Speaker 2: That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson.
00:15:18
Speaker 3: This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As I always, thank you so much for all of your support. We couldn’t do it without you, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart. All of us here at meat Eater are so grateful to have such a loyal and awesome audience, So thank you for that. If you’re bored out of your mind and you need some more content, I’m talking podcasts, films, articles, how too stuff, news stories. The mediater dot com has you covered. Go check it out. We drop new content literally every single day. You’re not going to run out of stuff. Go check it out of the mediator dot com and thank you once again.
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