Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your guide to
Speaker 1: the Whitetail Woods, presented by First Light, creating proven versatile
Speaker 1: hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light
Speaker 1: Go farther, stay longer, and now your host, Mark Kenyon.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the Wire to Hunt podcast. This week on
Speaker 2: the show, I'm joined by Mike Reed of Midwest Whitetail
Speaker 2: to discuss his incredible twenty twenty three hunting season and
Speaker 2: late season tactics so you can put into action right now.
Speaker 2: All right, welcome back to the Wired Hunt Podcast, brought
Speaker 2: to you by First Light in the Camo for Conservation Initiative.
Speaker 3: And here we are at.
Speaker 2: The end of twenty twenty three. I believe this is
Speaker 2: going to be our last episode of the year, and
Speaker 2: I want to wrap it up here with another fun
Speaker 2: episode looking back on this past season with a terrific hunter.
Speaker 2: Our guests today mister Mike Reid. You likely know Mike
Speaker 2: from Midwest White Tail. He's been a prominent figure on
Speaker 2: the Midwest White Tail show for years and now I
Speaker 2: believe he's one of the co owners. He is doing
Speaker 2: all sorts of good work there, putting out daily blogs
Speaker 2: and being a part of Chasing November and their main
Speaker 2: season shows. You can follow so much of what he's
Speaker 2: doing there, and he's doing it really, really well. Mike
Speaker 2: had a incredible twenty twenty three season, killed his top
Speaker 2: two target bucks, has had his family out there hunting
Speaker 2: with him and helping them have success. So today in
Speaker 2: the show, we actually end up talking about hunting with
Speaker 2: kids and his experience with his family. We talk through
Speaker 2: each of his successful hunts this year where he did
Speaker 2: fill his tags there in Iowa, the lessons he learned,
Speaker 2: the tactics he used. We dive into a lot of
Speaker 2: how he approaches targeting one single buck, because that's something
Speaker 2: he's really found a way to be successful at over
Speaker 2: the years, consistently putting his tag on his top one
Speaker 2: or two deer on the properties that he hunts.
Speaker 3: We cover some of that.
Speaker 2: We talk through some of the things that translate from
Speaker 2: what he does now in Iowa to some of his
Speaker 2: previous types of hunting setups back in the past when
Speaker 2: he hunted in Louisiana or when he didn't own land,
Speaker 2: so that's interesting. And then finally we wrap it all
Speaker 2: up by discussing some of the tactics that can help
Speaker 2: you and that have helped him in the past during
Speaker 2: the late season. So if you're listening right now and
Speaker 2: are trying to have some of that last minute luck
Speaker 2: around the holidays or early in twenty twenty four, Mike's
Speaker 2: got some ideas as well. So that's the game plan
Speaker 2: for today. Let's get right into it. Let's not beat
Speaker 2: around the bush, and let's get going.
Speaker 3: With Mike Reid.
Speaker 2: All right with me on the show is someone who
Speaker 2: I've wanted to have on for a long time and
Speaker 2: just hasn't happened yet for some reason. I'm very glad
Speaker 2: to introduce mister Mike Reed. Thanks for being here.
Speaker 3: Hey, thanks for having me man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've been, you know, following what you've been doing
Speaker 2: and all the guys in Midwest White Tail for a
Speaker 2: long time now, and uh, and you've been on that
Speaker 2: list I have of guys that we just got to
Speaker 2: get on the show eventually. So I'm glad this worked
Speaker 2: out and under good circumstances too. You've had a heck
Speaker 2: of a year.
Speaker 3: Huh. Yeah, it's been one that I think we're gonna
Speaker 3: have a tough time beating for a while. Between myself
Speaker 3: having a great season, but just the kids and the family.
Speaker 3: It's been one that'll be tough to top for sure.
Speaker 2: What's that been like as the kids have gotten more
Speaker 2: and more in hunting, and has that forced you to
Speaker 2: re shift priorities at all or how much time you're spending?
Speaker 2: How do you handle that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure, I think naturally it's what I want.
Speaker 3: You know, My interest in hunting has just progressed over time,
Speaker 3: and now to sort of building that desire in my
Speaker 3: kids and teaching them. And so, you know, my oldest
Speaker 3: as twelve, and she picked up a bow this year
Speaker 3: actually last year, started practicing with the bow and we
Speaker 3: were able to make some hunts with the bow this year,
Speaker 3: and she's become a really proficient hunter, a patient hunter.
Speaker 3: She's had great success. And I'm trying to build up
Speaker 3: that woodsmanship in her and some of the scouting and
Speaker 3: some of the stuff that my grandfather taught me and
Speaker 3: you know, pounding out on Louisiana Public Ground. And you know, now,
Speaker 3: Ryan and I actually were just talking a couple hours
Speaker 3: ago about what next year is going to look like
Speaker 3: as my you know, so my twelve ten eight year
Speaker 3: old girls, my twins are going to be six in February,
Speaker 3: and I said, you know, I Brian, my eight year
Speaker 3: old killed two bucks this year. I just killed her
Speaker 3: second one a week ago, and Bellas killed two. My
Speaker 3: ten year old is circling back saying, I think I
Speaker 3: want to go again. She shot one when she was seven,
Speaker 3: and I want to be like my mother. Two sisters
Speaker 3: and the boys are chomping at the bid. I was like,
Speaker 3: there's no way I'm going to be able to take five. Ryan,
Speaker 3: my wife trying to help me. It's it's a lot
Speaker 3: of fun, though. It just is so much fun, and
Speaker 3: I get way more I think, enjoyment out of that
Speaker 3: than even you know, hunting for myself. I think it's
Speaker 3: just it's just a lot of fun. To see their excitement.
Speaker 2: It's so cool man, so so great. It's it makes
Speaker 2: everything new again for you. You know. That's what I
Speaker 2: found is we kind of get we take so much
Speaker 2: for granted right after doing this for so many years,
Speaker 2: and we get so deep into it and kind of
Speaker 2: obsessed with the deer, we're after YadA, YadA, YadA, and
Speaker 2: then you take out your kid and all of a
Speaker 2: sudden they see the squirrel next to the tree and
Speaker 2: are like, that's amazing.
Speaker 3: That it's amazing. Yeah, so good.
Speaker 4: You need that.
Speaker 3: Oh it's beautiful. Yeah. It just rekindles a lot of things.
Speaker 3: And you know, I want my kids to enjoy the outdoors,
Speaker 3: and so to see them like Bella this year getting
Speaker 3: in a tree stand for the first time, being in
Speaker 3: the timber and being like mass squirrel is three feet
Speaker 3: away and got turkeys and pheasants and deer and and
Speaker 3: just every time she turns around, why I'd be like,
Speaker 3: you know, it's just it's just so enjoyable.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So, so now they're on this topic, I've I've
Speaker 2: got to pry you for some info. Info they'll help me. So,
Speaker 2: like I've told you before we start recording, I've got
Speaker 2: a three year old and a five year old. They're
Speaker 2: just about four and six, and they both want to
Speaker 2: go all the time. And the six year old almost
Speaker 2: six year old is gung ho and like is getting
Speaker 2: good as far as being able to control himself out there,
Speaker 2: being able to stay quiet. He's into it all. The
Speaker 2: four year old is manic right as most three slash
Speaker 2: four year olds would be. So one of the things
Speaker 2: I've struggled with or just thought about a lot of
Speaker 2: guests is trying to find this balancing act when you
Speaker 2: take them out, whether it's hunting or camping trip or whatever,
Speaker 2: balancing this idea of keeping it fun right. You want
Speaker 2: them to enjoy the thing so they want to keep
Speaker 2: doing it.
Speaker 3: But then I.
Speaker 2: Also have found, or at least maybe this is just me,
Speaker 2: but I've thought that hunting and the outdoors and things
Speaker 2: like that are opportunities for growth in a kid too, right,
Speaker 2: learning mental toughness, or learning how to persevere, or learning
Speaker 2: how to deal with a little bit of discomfort. How
Speaker 2: have you navigated that with your kids? You've been through
Speaker 2: a bunch. Now you're ahead of me. Is that something
Speaker 2: that you've ever thought about at all? Or do you
Speaker 2: lean one way or the other?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I think you hit the nail on the head
Speaker 3: as far as growth. I mean, not only are they
Speaker 3: learning actual useful information and how to harvest food from
Speaker 3: the land and be self sustaining and all these types
Speaker 3: of things, but you know it's challenging, right, How many
Speaker 3: six year olds have put a pack on and climbed
Speaker 3: up a big hill, you know? And I try to
Speaker 3: use little moments like that say hey, there are a
Speaker 3: lot of things we have to work for. It's hard,
Speaker 3: It's okay if it hurts a little, it's okay to
Speaker 3: you know, suffer a little and have a challenge that
Speaker 3: you overcome. And I actually use it a lot in
Speaker 3: everyday life talking to them about you know, if they're
Speaker 3: whining about something or crying about you know this I
Speaker 3: got to out or something, I'm like, hey, you know
Speaker 3: you you we talked about going elk hunting. We talked
Speaker 3: about going out west in the mountains and and how
Speaker 3: tough you have to be to go and do that
Speaker 3: for a week in the mountains, and you know, sometimes
Speaker 3: you got to suck it up and like it's okay
Speaker 3: to push through some pain. And you know, I think
Speaker 3: it's hard to get that in other places in life.
Speaker 3: That Aldre certainly offers some opportunity there, and I definitely
Speaker 3: try to, you know, capitalize on those.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's the truth. So does does anyone in
Speaker 2: the family still have tags for the late season?
Speaker 3: Yes? Yeah, actually so the second split of archery and
Speaker 3: late musslower and I would just opened up today actually
Speaker 3: and Bella, so my wife got a landor and tag
Speaker 3: and filled his first shotgun tag, so she technically could
Speaker 3: get a late Muzzy tag. But she's she's usually happy
Speaker 3: with one Bella. I offered her, you know, she got
Speaker 3: a Kansas buck and then a youth buck and so
Speaker 3: she can get a late Muzzy tag. And I had
Speaker 3: offered her, like do you want second gun and go
Speaker 3: with the three point fifty or do you want to
Speaker 3: go Late Muzzy with the crossbow. And she was like,
Speaker 3: I want to go Late Muzzy just because she gets
Speaker 3: two weeks off of school and she'll she'll want to
Speaker 3: go every day.
Speaker 2: That's so great.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So I was like, okay, all right, you'll get
Speaker 3: And then I asked my third daughter, brind I said,
Speaker 3: do you also want to wait for Late Muzzy or
Speaker 3: do you want to get the second shotgun? And she
Speaker 3: went ahead and got second shotgun and two sits in,
Speaker 3: got a buck last Sunday and so she's done. And
Speaker 3: so yeah, my daughter Anna Cat, she hasn't hundred in
Speaker 3: three years. As I mentioned, she she has a late
Speaker 3: Muzzy tag, and then Bello will have a late Muzzy
Speaker 3: tag and myself and you know, so that's gonna from
Speaker 3: here until the end. I take every day off, every
Speaker 3: afternoon off, starting January first, get I get busy at
Speaker 3: work the end of the year, and so we hurt
Speaker 3: we hunt the holidays. You know, it's kind of a
Speaker 3: family affair. We'll all be out there on Christmas, even
Speaker 3: Christmas Day and all that, so those days will be good.
Speaker 3: But then starting New Year's that ten day stretch will
Speaker 3: gover afternoon. Wow, there's still there's still plenty of plenty
Speaker 3: of hunting to be had for the Reid plan.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, with all these kids, I feel like you're
Speaker 2: you're like running an outfitter, Like you've got so many,
Speaker 2: so many people to put here and figure this out.
Speaker 2: I mean, you've got a lot of balls in the
Speaker 2: air trying to figure who goes where and when, and
Speaker 2: you've got an interesting hunting situation there in a.
Speaker 3: Way, and it's it's been something that it's a little
Speaker 3: challenging the balance. I said, you know, there's no way
Speaker 3: we can all continue to shoot this many deer. I
Speaker 3: mean I've bought land and invested in land and tried
Speaker 3: to diversify and get good pieces that have good caring
Speaker 3: capacity and can carry a lot of deer, and a
Speaker 3: lot of them. I don't shoot anything the first three
Speaker 3: years I own them. I just try to get the
Speaker 3: age structure really up, and we're pretty nitpicky. Even the kids.
Speaker 3: They from the time they were little, we talk about
Speaker 3: what we actually go after, and they always say, we
Speaker 3: want to shoot Grandpa deer, and I'm like, exactly, So
Speaker 3: you know, if a buck comes out like it's not
Speaker 3: a Grandpa deer, and I'm like, that one's not a
Speaker 3: Grandpa dear, We'll go ahead and keep waiting. And it's
Speaker 3: not because I have good age structure and I haven't.
Speaker 3: You know, they don't have giant racks, but there's plenty
Speaker 3: of five year old type plus year between the properties,
Speaker 3: and it's been a luxury. It's been a blessing for
Speaker 3: sure to be able to say, okay, you know we
Speaker 3: can we can go in harvest and a lot of them,
Speaker 3: I mean the kids. We'll shoot some four year olds
Speaker 3: and things like that. I mean, obviously a first year
Speaker 3: is difference kind of go shoot whatever. But I try
Speaker 3: to start fairly early thinking about conservation and the herd management.
Speaker 3: And it's been a challenge though to set up enough
Speaker 3: spots that you can say crossbow hunt out of, because
Speaker 3: when they're real little, they're not super interested in the gun.
Speaker 3: I almost ruined my oldest daughter with the gun getting
Speaker 3: on a muzzled or when she was six and she
Speaker 3: killed one, but then she was seven it kind of
Speaker 3: got her. And well, I've really taking a step back saying, look,
Speaker 3: whenever you guys are ready, and that crossbow has been
Speaker 3: a blessing to be able to take them. Doesn't make noise,
Speaker 3: doesn't kick. I just got to get them within forty
Speaker 3: which obviously that's a challenge, especially late season.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, So what's that age that you found? This
Speaker 2: podcast a whole different direction than I originally planned. But
Speaker 2: I'm so interested because my kids are great there. We
Speaker 2: don't have an age limit anymore in Michigan as far
Speaker 2: as your minimum age. They can start going as soon
Speaker 2: as they want, as long as they're a parent or mentor.
Speaker 2: And so my five year old almost six year old
Speaker 2: boy for two years. But I can do it dead,
Speaker 2: I can do it. I'm like, no, we're in a
Speaker 2: wait a while. But what I've struggled thinking through what
Speaker 2: that right age will be and is there a difference
Speaker 2: between when he physically can pull the trigger accurately versus
Speaker 2: when he's like mentally ready. Just thought about that a lot.
Speaker 2: How have you gone about you know that decision with
Speaker 2: your kids.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's interesting. It's it's I think it's different for
Speaker 3: every kid, you know, and I even think probably between
Speaker 3: boys and girls it's probably a little bit different. I mean,
Speaker 3: I feel like my boys are they're doing that boy
Speaker 3: thing where they just want to shoot all the time.
Speaker 3: They love shooting the twenty two. They love it just
Speaker 3: you know, target acquisition, getting a good site picture, doing
Speaker 3: all that kind of stuff. Belle wa' be in my first.
Speaker 3: You know, I just cultivated it into her and I
Speaker 3: felt very comfortable when she was six. You know, Anna
Speaker 3: went when she was seven, and when we did it,
Speaker 3: I was like, oh, that's probably a little bit early. Brin.
Speaker 3: When when she was six, I was like, it's definitely
Speaker 3: too early. I mean she was just in the blind
Speaker 3: doing all this and you know, late season in a
Speaker 3: blind with the heater, with some hot chocolate and snacks
Speaker 3: and like a puzzle and some books and like trying
Speaker 3: to make it very very fun. But say, you know,
Speaker 3: let's get up and count the deer. Let's talk about
Speaker 3: the deer. You know, it's interesting. I think your situation,
Speaker 3: it matters what you're going to put a kid into.
Speaker 3: They gotta be comfortable. It's got to be fun. It
Speaker 3: can't be too long. And I definitely started like last year,
Speaker 3: I didn't take brand when she was seven. This year
Speaker 3: at eight, I mean, she's totally ready in the zone,
Speaker 3: knows how to get focused. And you know, some of
Speaker 3: my kids are a little more eightyd than the others,
Speaker 3: and so that's fluctuated with with how I might approach
Speaker 3: you know, them individually, And it's hard to know the
Speaker 3: right answer because I've had buddies take their five year
Speaker 3: olds and just knock it out of the park. But
Speaker 3: you know, with my kids, I kind of tiptoed around
Speaker 3: that six seven age mark and sort of feel better
Speaker 3: a little bit older, like come, come sit in the blind,
Speaker 3: come watch, but you need to sort of show me
Speaker 3: that you can do it before I just turn you loose.
Speaker 2: Right, And what about the age when they've actually been
Speaker 2: able to pull the trigger and do that? Well, has
Speaker 2: that been like that six seven mark or seven?
Speaker 3: Bella was six and it was seven and Brent was six.
Speaker 3: On the crossbow. That crossbow, you know, it's a little
Speaker 3: tiny one, it's compact and it fits them. And of
Speaker 3: course we do lots of practicing at the house until
Speaker 3: I feel like you can get a good group. We
Speaker 3: study deer pictures where to aim. I make them take
Speaker 3: a pencil and put marks, you know, and I'm very
Speaker 3: selective about when I would give them the green light.
Speaker 3: You know. Both my first two did really well, no issues.
Speaker 3: My third daughter, she kind of was arguing with me
Speaker 3: in the blind, you know, years old, and there's a
Speaker 3: beer at forty and I'm like, just use the forty dots.
Speaker 3: She's like, I want to use a twenty dot and
Speaker 3: I'm like, uh, well, I'm shooting this dough right here,
Speaker 3: you know. And then I'm like there's deer walking and
Speaker 3: moving and she's all over the place. I was like, wait, okay, everybody,
Speaker 3: just take a step back. Let's stop for a second,
Speaker 3: wait for a night, let's make sure we're shooting the
Speaker 3: right one. And you know. So, I think it is
Speaker 3: different for each kid, but and the gun, I've wanted
Speaker 3: to wait until they just feel super comfortable shooting the gun.
Speaker 3: Tak them some out turkey hunting where it's not so
Speaker 3: much chaos. But yeah, I think that six seven range
Speaker 3: has worked well for me. The boys are certainly beating
Speaker 3: on the door. They're five, and they really want to go,
Speaker 3: and I'm like, I want them to wait one more year,
Speaker 3: just because it's hard to take five kids.
Speaker 2: I can imagine.
Speaker 3: For the gun helped me out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, seriously, got to get the whole crew. They're just
Speaker 2: taking out the kids. You mentioned a three point fifty
Speaker 2: and you mentioned a muzzleoader has been Has the three
Speaker 2: fifty been the best option for the young kids or
Speaker 2: what did you started them most? Y?
Speaker 3: So I I had a muzzleoader and I got kind
Speaker 3: of loaded it down, you know, fifty grains and keep
Speaker 3: the shot close. And that's just because that's all I
Speaker 3: had at the time when Bella that was that was
Speaker 3: six years ago. Since then, Iowa change the law where
Speaker 3: you can use a smooth wall cartridge rifle during youth
Speaker 3: and shotgun, and you can't do it during late muzzleloader
Speaker 3: or early muzzloder, but youth and shotgun. And I got
Speaker 3: a little youth three fifty and I really had the
Speaker 3: recommendation of a bunch of my buddies just saying, and
Speaker 3: the gun shops and that's a great youth gun and
Speaker 3: they shoot it very well, very consistently out to one hundred,
Speaker 3: great group and they don't complain about the recoil, and
Speaker 3: so to me, I don't have a lot of experience
Speaker 3: with a lot of other but you know, at the
Speaker 3: recommendation of a lot of people, tried it and I
Speaker 3: have really loved it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've got one of those. You can use those
Speaker 2: in southern Michigan during our rifle season, and I thought
Speaker 2: the same thing. Perfect for someone young. I mean, no
Speaker 2: recoil light, easy to use, Yeah, strong choice, very effect.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And I mean to put them down too.
Speaker 2: It does, it does the job. You don't need more, Yeah,
Speaker 2: you really don't need more. So what about your season?
Speaker 2: So you've had the kids out, they've had some success.
Speaker 2: I've seen for sure, you've taken two of your target bucks.
Speaker 2: Have you taken anything else?
Speaker 3: Or is that? That's you know? Here in Iowa, I
Speaker 3: used to do urban. I stopped doing urban a few
Speaker 3: years ago when I first moved up here, just my
Speaker 3: job was so labor intensive that I couldn't get out
Speaker 3: of town hardly. So I started doing urban. It was
Speaker 3: a nice way to manage the population but and get
Speaker 3: an extra tag. But essentially, in Iowa, you get an
Speaker 3: archery tag, you get a statewide and then you get
Speaker 3: a landowner to choose either archery or gun, and so
Speaker 3: I usually get a landowner archery and a statewide archery.
Speaker 3: And uh, yeah, I took down DK on October thirtieth
Speaker 3: buck that I kind of come into the season. He
Speaker 3: was gonna be my primary target. And really before we
Speaker 3: even got going with the with the rut, he comes
Speaker 3: strolling in and in a in a spot that I've
Speaker 3: had a lot of good luck with on my river
Speaker 3: Bottom farm and a spot I called the pinch. It's
Speaker 3: just a great natural, little funnel area. And yeah, he
Speaker 3: just walks into twenty yards and you know, yeah, I
Speaker 3: hut some deer for years and you know, can't even
Speaker 3: get him within fifty you know, but that one worked
Speaker 3: out pretty well.
Speaker 2: So we got to rewind that a little bit. Mike, Yeah, sure,
Speaker 2: because because you, like you mentioned, you've hunted some of
Speaker 2: these deer for years, and while some of them have
Speaker 2: taken you a while, I mean, you've any deer that
Speaker 2: makes it on your hit list is in big trouble,
Speaker 2: it seems like for for a long time now. I'm
Speaker 2: I mean you've gotten your target bucks or one of
Speaker 2: the bucks on your list, or several of the bucks
Speaker 2: on your list every year, So you've you've really seemed
Speaker 2: to have nailed down this process of like figuring out
Speaker 2: a specific buck. So that's something I love to do,
Speaker 2: and I guess I'm just curious about what that process
Speaker 2: has evolved into for you now after you've done this
Speaker 2: for so long, you have a system that obviously is
Speaker 2: working now, like, yeah, maybe with DK as an example,
Speaker 2: or if one of these other bucks is a better example,
Speaker 2: can you kind of walk me through how you go
Speaker 2: about kind of putting that entire plan in place to
Speaker 2: dial it in and kill that one deer.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, And it's I mean a lot of it
Speaker 3: goes back to history. I have been very fortunate and
Speaker 3: be successful over the last good bunch of years, at
Speaker 3: least the last five years. When I really started saying
Speaker 3: I'm going to just hunt this dear, just enjoying the chase, right,
Speaker 3: I used to start to add my list of these
Speaker 3: are all my shooters on the farm, any buck that's
Speaker 3: five or older, and I was pretty happy to take
Speaker 3: any of them. And then over time I kind of say, well,
Speaker 3: let's make it a fun chase and go after one.
Speaker 3: And you know, I am fortunate since I own the
Speaker 3: property and I've owned the river bottom since twenty seventeen
Speaker 3: and the home farm since twenty eighteen. Now to have
Speaker 3: years of history, probably what works the best for me
Speaker 3: is I get to sort of pick up on these
Speaker 3: deer when you are three, you know, and then four
Speaker 3: and I'm just not going to shoot him then, you know,
Speaker 3: and I'm I'm watching them and learning a lot about
Speaker 3: their moving patterns, where they like to be, what times
Speaker 3: a year. And I mean I knew DK pretty well
Speaker 3: because we've got four years of history with him and
Speaker 3: where he likes to be, and so coming into the year,
Speaker 3: I just designed my plan around that, you know, where
Speaker 3: am I going to put food, where I'm going to
Speaker 3: set up my spots, How am I try to get
Speaker 3: him early? And then you got your good natural rut
Speaker 3: spots that if you sit there enough and they're in
Speaker 3: the area, you should probably encounter them. And then I
Speaker 3: always fall back on late season, you know, if I
Speaker 3: had a good good amount of time to have success
Speaker 3: growing my crop and my food plots. You know, the
Speaker 3: river bottoms of Wetland, So there's a lot of rules
Speaker 3: and I have a compatibility use agreement with the NRCS
Speaker 3: that allows me to put five percent of the property
Speaker 3: into food plot and so it's not there's no agg
Speaker 3: there as far as just I planted one hundred acres,
Speaker 3: I combine eighty and I left twenty standing. I mean,
Speaker 3: I've got five percent and it can and I mix
Speaker 3: it between green and grain. But the deer population is
Speaker 3: so high there and I'm still working on that. It's
Speaker 3: hard to grow grain, you know, So I do sorghum,
Speaker 3: and I do beans and corn, and I got to
Speaker 3: fence it and then it's just been a it's been
Speaker 3: a struggle to grow it. But the years that we
Speaker 3: can get good food late season ends up being you know,
Speaker 3: if you haven't got them yet, you probably are gonna
Speaker 3: be able to get a shot at him late season.
Speaker 3: But I prefer archery hunting. I love the chase in
Speaker 3: October November, and so really historical knowledge and then learning
Speaker 3: the property. I mean I added onto the River Bottom
Speaker 3: farm in twenty twenty, and you know that was an
Speaker 3: extra three hundred and forty acres in addition to the
Speaker 3: two twenty, So there's a big chunk. And I feel
Speaker 3: like just this year I start of know how deer
Speaker 3: like to use it, just natural movement patterns, and then
Speaker 3: what it's changed over the last two years is the
Speaker 3: drought years, which slews have water and how that affects
Speaker 3: your movement. And then this year the mass crop, the
Speaker 3: mask crop was just insane and both the bucks I shot.
Speaker 3: You know, I have all my spots I like, and
Speaker 3: I'm like, if I just rotate where I'm hunting in
Speaker 3: the wind, I'm going to encounter them at some point.
Speaker 3: Like this buck lives over here, I'm kind of dips
Speaker 3: in the farm over here. This one's over here, and
Speaker 3: five hundred and sixty acres. Mean it's a good it's
Speaker 3: a good chunk of ground. But it's not like I
Speaker 3: encompass their home range completely, right, So all these deer
Speaker 3: are coming and going and they're they're they're crossing roads
Speaker 3: and encountering other hunters and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3: But this year I modified a lot what I was doing,
Speaker 3: just based on the mass crop and where the does were,
Speaker 3: and I mean it worked really well.
Speaker 2: So when you say you modified what you're doing based
Speaker 2: on those two things, how did you modify You're modifying
Speaker 2: your habitat plan or just how you hunted.
Speaker 3: No, just how I hunted. Yeah, So the river bottom
Speaker 3: doesn't have a ton of eight oak trees, and there's
Speaker 3: a couple of just concentrations of them, and I was,
Speaker 3: you know, I noticed there was a good mass crop.
Speaker 3: But then I'd go sit there and be like twenty
Speaker 3: dos just sitting here for two hours all morning, right,
Speaker 3: and so coming in and out, I was like, well,
Speaker 3: so then I was like, okay, I'm not going to
Speaker 3: go move and hunt. You know, when I get that
Speaker 3: north wind, I'm not going to go to that spot.
Speaker 3: I like, with a north wind, that's just sort of
Speaker 3: a good spot. I'm just going to keep hunting around
Speaker 3: these oak trees, playing the wind, just in the spot
Speaker 3: and kind of staying in those locations. And just because
Speaker 3: all the deer were coming there, and you just knew
Speaker 3: the bucks they were going to be there that morning,
Speaker 3: you know, the amount of encounters we were just having,
Speaker 3: it was it was just it was hard to want
Speaker 3: to go somewhere else. I'm like, I mean, this is obvious.
Speaker 3: If I keep sitting here, it's gonna it's gonna work.
Speaker 3: And even when we switched to my second buck and
Speaker 3: who was all the way on the south piece of
Speaker 3: the property, and again, the form I've just kind of
Speaker 3: been learning the last couple of years, and I just
Speaker 3: I'd hunted this one particular tree a few times in
Speaker 3: the past, but it was always okay. I just noticed
Speaker 3: that those red oaks were just dropping like crazy, andess
Speaker 3: all the year kept going there. I said, well, I
Speaker 3: think we keep sitting we're going to kill him. And
Speaker 3: you know, five years of history with this deer, it's
Speaker 3: been kind of all over the place, all over both
Speaker 3: pieces of the river bottom, and you know, I had
Speaker 3: three encounters with him in one day and then ended
Speaker 3: up shooting him November eleventh, and it was just like, well,
Speaker 3: it's hard to talk myself out of going, you know.
Speaker 3: RIGHTE asked me where do you want to go tonight?
Speaker 3: And I was like, we got to go back to
Speaker 3: that spot. You know, you climb in the stand and
Speaker 3: there'd be deer you could see embedded and they get up,
Speaker 3: come feed and the a carns go back in bed,
Speaker 3: and it was it was just interesting dynamic. I don't
Speaker 3: know that we'll see that again soon. I mean, in
Speaker 3: six years of owning the place, I've never seen a
Speaker 3: mass drop like better. Is it changed the deer patterns
Speaker 3: for sure?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I know that mass situation was unique. But
Speaker 2: one other thing I've I've struggled with sometimes is this,
Speaker 2: I guess it's it's like a pressure, and it comes
Speaker 2: from what we've heard a lot and what many of
Speaker 2: us have seen in our own hunts, which is, you know,
Speaker 2: oftentimes the first time you hunt a spot, it's the best, right,
Speaker 2: and then your impact slowly chips away at the deer
Speaker 2: activity right, And so there's always this temptation to be like, okay,
Speaker 2: I should move. Okay, she go to the next spot,
Speaker 2: she go to the next spot, bounce around, bounce around,
Speaker 2: keep them on their toe. But then sometimes, like in
Speaker 2: a situation like you're talking about, the right move is
Speaker 2: actually to stick it out. Or I've had a deer
Speaker 2: like I was hunting this year that it seemed every
Speaker 2: time I would go to A, he'd be at B.
Speaker 2: So then I would go to B, and then he'd
Speaker 2: be at C, and then I go to C and
Speaker 2: he's D. And I kept on the rotating round and
Speaker 2: he'd always be random in which way he was going.
Speaker 2: And then I finally got to think, and I just
Speaker 2: need to stay in a spot, and then he'll eventually
Speaker 2: cycle to me. How do you how do you think
Speaker 2: through that and manage those two kind of competing thought
Speaker 2: processes when picking out where you want to hunt.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I don't like to overhunt a spot. I
Speaker 3: mean I usually say, if I've got a buck that's
Speaker 3: using area and I feel like I've got a good chance,
Speaker 3: I do like to give it three sits. A lot
Speaker 3: of times I just play the law of averages like
Speaker 3: he's gonna come by. But for the sake of you know,
Speaker 3: like what you were mentioning, you stink it up and
Speaker 3: you disturb it too much. And some spots kind of
Speaker 3: lend themselves if they've got good entry and exit to
Speaker 3: repeat hunting without disturbing it too much. Other spots are
Speaker 3: blown out deer every time you go, you know. And
Speaker 3: the Pinch is one of those spots where I really
Speaker 3: feel like I can just hunt it over and over
Speaker 3: and over, particularly in the morning. I don't hunt it
Speaker 3: in the Afternoon's hardly ever I can get in there
Speaker 3: in the morning the deer or nowhere around. We get
Speaker 3: in early, and the thermals helped me so much, got
Speaker 3: deer on all sides of me. We never get picked
Speaker 3: off there. They all work past. I hunt till noon
Speaker 3: or whatever. You get down, get out, and I've got
Speaker 3: a mode path that basically goes almost directly to the stand,
Speaker 3: and we hunt it repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly, and I say
Speaker 3: it like wee hundred it twenty times. When that doesn't happen,
Speaker 3: I naturally, with wind directions and going back to work
Speaker 3: and all these things give it breaks. Yeah, but I
Speaker 3: try to be conscious about over hunting a spot. Three
Speaker 3: spots is kind of three times is my number. And
Speaker 3: then I've changed what I do for vacation. I used
Speaker 3: to take a week off, you know, and hunt nine days,
Speaker 3: and then that was it. So now what I do
Speaker 3: is I take three days off, two or three days
Speaker 3: off the last week of October, two or three days off,
Speaker 3: two or three days off, and so I break up
Speaker 3: my vacation days. I usually take seven or eight vacation
Speaker 3: days over a three week period, flank weekends. And you know,
Speaker 3: before the time change, I can hunt afternoons a lot
Speaker 3: of times, and so you know, earlier I'm not hunting mornings,
Speaker 3: you know, and we're we're working into the end of October,
Speaker 3: you know, and then just that naturally gives my farm's breaks.
Speaker 3: And then obviously having more than one spot I can
Speaker 3: rotate around. It's it's a little different than it used
Speaker 3: to be now that you pick a bucket, Like I'm
Speaker 3: hunting K and he's on this piece of the farm.
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm basically rotating around that one spot. So
Speaker 3: I try to be conscientious of it and hunt smart.
Speaker 3: You know, I'm not. I don't dive way back in
Speaker 3: there very much. I mean a lot of it's got
Speaker 3: good access, it's on the edge.
Speaker 2: Yes, can you can you break down that pinch a
Speaker 2: little bit more? I know you mentioned you've got the
Speaker 2: mode path in and out, but what else makes it
Speaker 2: so that you can hunt it uniquely like that? And
Speaker 2: it seems like I mean I've seen an arail of it,
Speaker 2: so I can. I can see that it looks pretty good.
Speaker 2: But for the folks listening that maybe don't don't hit
Speaker 2: that background. Can you kind of walk us through a
Speaker 2: how you can hunt it so much? Be what it
Speaker 2: looks like and why it's so effective?
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I get this question a lot, just like
Speaker 3: on our videos, they'll type how does this working? There's
Speaker 3: no way it works? You know, it's hard to appreciate it.
Speaker 3: I think just from a like an aerial or a
Speaker 3: drone shot, but so to paint a picture. The entire
Speaker 3: farm is a wetland. It's flat, there is no undulation.
Speaker 3: You know, there's a couple slews, but it's all wetland grass.
Speaker 3: It's tall natives and wetland grass and willow thickets, and
Speaker 3: it's got great ground level horizontal cover. And so I
Speaker 3: have a lot of mode lanes all over the place,
Speaker 3: primarily for fire breaks. I mean, I want to rotate
Speaker 3: my burning, and I have a fifteen foot mower that
Speaker 3: I keep everything mode really really short. But it also allows,
Speaker 3: based on certain wind directions, access because I can just
Speaker 3: use an e bike or walk in boots and there's
Speaker 3: just no vegetation to rub up against, and so all
Speaker 3: my spots I can generally access fairly well because of
Speaker 3: the mode paths. The river is on the west side
Speaker 3: of the property. We have this one hundred acre peninsula
Speaker 3: that is just thick, gnarly wetland and it's all bedding,
Speaker 3: and so the deer work their way out of that
Speaker 3: peninsula up the river in the in the afternoons to
Speaker 3: the north to all the big aggfields that I don't own.
Speaker 3: They're just destination agfields, and then in the morning. I
Speaker 3: get there early, and don't I don't come down the
Speaker 3: river edge. I come at it perpendicular. So I come
Speaker 3: in from the road and I have a modepath essentially
Speaker 3: that kind of comes at the river perpendicular. And so
Speaker 3: the pinch, there's the river and then there's a slew
Speaker 3: and it's a strip of timber oak trees, and then
Speaker 3: when you get on the other side of the slough,
Speaker 3: it's all that wetland grass, which is really it's a
Speaker 3: lot of bedding as well, but it's little pockets and
Speaker 3: deer bed out there. And they don't all come through
Speaker 3: the pinch, obviously, but all the deer that are going
Speaker 3: back into that peninsula, they naturally come through that pinch.
Speaker 3: It's and when the slough has water in it, it
Speaker 3: works really well because you got you can have deep
Speaker 3: water in there and then the river and they really
Speaker 3: walk through there. Right now, you know, they spread out
Speaker 3: a little bit, some of you can see them going
Speaker 3: through the grass and the natives and some are in
Speaker 3: the slough and and all that, but it's still that
Speaker 3: that peninsula pulls them to the river's edge because they're
Speaker 3: going around that bend, and it just it's one of
Speaker 3: those spots where I mean I've killed four I mean
Speaker 3: I've owned the place six years. I've killed four bucks there. Wow,
Speaker 3: I mean I've hunted a lot in the spot. Funny, Yeah, seventeen, nineteen,
Speaker 3: twenty one, twenty three. So my camera guys, all right,
Speaker 3: every other year we got a shoot buck. Wow, it works.
Speaker 3: It's a good spot.
Speaker 2: And so that's where DK met his end, right in
Speaker 2: the pinch.
Speaker 3: That's right October thirtieth. And it was sort of funny
Speaker 3: because we were seeing pre road activity. We were filming
Speaker 3: some great four year olds and some great three year
Speaker 3: olds chasing, grunting, awesome vocalizations. And I had had an
Speaker 3: encounter a couple encounters with DK there last year. I
Speaker 3: had one encounter, like November third with him. He didn't
Speaker 3: come all the way through, but you know, I knew
Speaker 3: that he would come through there at some point, and
Speaker 3: I wasn't really thinking then. I thought maybe on a
Speaker 3: dough later in November. But that morning he just was
Speaker 3: eating acorns. I mean, there was does and some little
Speaker 3: bucks and he's just kind of feeding and walking around.
Speaker 3: They're just socializing there, eating and where the stand is,
Speaker 3: it's right in a little cluster of oaks where you
Speaker 3: can see the deer walking. They hesitate there to munch
Speaker 3: for a little bit. So it worked out well.
Speaker 2: So so walk me through what your kind of hunt
Speaker 2: strategy looked like, you know, from the beginning of the
Speaker 2: season to that point, because if I remember right, you
Speaker 2: took a couple stabs at him early and he had
Speaker 2: daylighted in like a little plot somewhere, and you kind
Speaker 2: of were kind of the wrong spot, wrong time a
Speaker 2: couple times. And then that transition a few more hunts
Speaker 2: into that late October time period when you start hunting
Speaker 2: the pinch. But can you walk me through a few
Speaker 2: of those decisions along the way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right, So early October, mid October, I tend
Speaker 3: to focus on afternoon hunts over whatever food source I
Speaker 3: think they're hitting. And he was living on the north
Speaker 3: side of the farm or or off the farm and
Speaker 3: kind of venturing through the north piece of the farm occasionally.
Speaker 3: And I had two plots, little tiny clover plot, this
Speaker 3: little bow plot forty yards by forty yards, and a
Speaker 3: little acre acre and a half turnip plot. And when
Speaker 3: the deer come through the pinch and out of the peninsula,
Speaker 3: they often work through my turnip plot off to the
Speaker 3: north to all the agg and just way more deer
Speaker 3: traffic there, and the little clover plot it's it's just
Speaker 3: not in a high traffic area. So you can sit
Speaker 3: there and see a dough or two and it is
Speaker 3: what it is. And so I tend to gravitate towards
Speaker 3: the other plot because I feel like he's more likely
Speaker 3: to show up there. And I had him the beginning
Speaker 3: of September, multiple afternoons in a row eating turnips, and
Speaker 3: I put a bunch of radishes in there in front
Speaker 3: of the stand and it just had it just made
Speaker 3: a nice plot. And he was there a lot in
Speaker 3: early September, and I said, okay, you know, the food
Speaker 3: patterns are going to change and this, that and the other.
Speaker 3: But I still thought statistically that one's going to be better.
Speaker 3: And so I actually had a set up for a
Speaker 3: south and set it for a north wind, and I
Speaker 3: would go sit that blind and there was a time
Speaker 3: or two that right at last light, with five minutes ago,
Speaker 3: he'd pop up on that clover plot and basically what
Speaker 3: he was doing he was coming my way, you know,
Speaker 3: but where he was betting off the property. He would swing,
Speaker 3: he'd come through all this standing corn and then swing
Speaker 3: through that clover plot, get his picture taken, and then
Speaker 3: he'd keep working his way eventually after dark onto the turnips,
Speaker 3: and I thought, man, and I was always saying, well,
Speaker 3: if he's better on me today, he's going to hit
Speaker 3: the turnups first. But if he's not better on me,
Speaker 3: he'd probably be over there. It took a lot for
Speaker 3: me to go hunt the clover, and I ended up
Speaker 3: hunting it twice, and it was pins and needles, because
Speaker 3: just like, man, if he's better in this corn right here,
Speaker 3: he's going to be on us. And the first time
Speaker 3: we hunted it, we actually stayed in the stand for
Speaker 3: thirty forty minutes after dark and we got a picture
Speaker 3: of him. I mean he walked probably sixty yards from
Speaker 3: us and was working a scrape in the dark. We
Speaker 3: couldn't see him, but yeah, because I was like, well,
Speaker 3: let's let him if he is coming in, let him
Speaker 3: come in and get past it. Because so early, I
Speaker 3: never I never felt like I have other deer. In fact,
Speaker 3: like last year the Bucky shot October sixth I mean,
Speaker 3: he just was in the property and I felt like, man,
Speaker 3: I could kill this dear early, I never really felt
Speaker 3: that way with DK, just because he wasn't really on
Speaker 3: the property and yet had the cards feil the right way.
Speaker 3: I mean, it could have happened. I was. I was
Speaker 3: still focusing on these October cold fronts and kind of
Speaker 3: playing my moves. But those two food plots aren't terribly invasive,
Speaker 3: and I just kept hedging on the turnups and the
Speaker 3: one night he daylight while I was there. It just
Speaker 3: happened to be on the other one man.
Speaker 2: So it goes and then the you know, you go
Speaker 2: through the month waiting on fronts and whatnot. You get
Speaker 2: to the end of October. You said that was the thirtieth,
Speaker 2: so that would have been a few days into that
Speaker 2: awesome cold front that we all got in the Midwest.
Speaker 2: Was that was that part of the rationale for starting
Speaker 2: to hunt those more? I know, I mean it's kind
Speaker 2: of that time of year two, but you pushed into
Speaker 2: one of your best spots on a morning hunt. Was
Speaker 2: it the combination of it's the end of October and
Speaker 2: cold front?
Speaker 4: Yep?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean, how could you drop a better picture?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 3: And I had. It was actually the last day of
Speaker 3: my five day stretch of vacation. Maybe I had a
Speaker 3: six day had a six day stretch. I took off Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday,
Speaker 3: and then I had Monday. And I just loved the
Speaker 3: pre rut. I loved the end of October. I love
Speaker 3: those older bucks looking for that first dough and just
Speaker 3: being callable and kind of doing that stuff. It's just
Speaker 3: one of the most enjoyable times to hunt. And so
Speaker 3: I started hunting mornings. I mean, if I look back
Speaker 3: over the last fifteen years of hunting Iowa, I've had
Speaker 3: some really great pre rut morning hunts starting October twenty
Speaker 3: somethinghere around there, so I'll start hunting more mornings. I
Speaker 3: have to negotiate all this, right, so our balance out
Speaker 3: how much I hunt, and so early I've done a
Speaker 3: lot of afternoon and then sometime around October twenty I
Speaker 3: start focusing more on mornings. And you know, like you said,
Speaker 3: the cold front, but I'd actually hunted the pinch maybe
Speaker 3: three or four times before that day, and we had
Speaker 3: gotten his DK's picture before I killed him. We got
Speaker 3: him way south into the farm, in fact, the spot
Speaker 3: where i'd really never gotten him. And I was like, man,
Speaker 3: what this is so weird, because what I was thinking
Speaker 3: was going to happen wasn't really happening. And we took
Speaker 3: six bucks off the River Bottom farm last year, which
Speaker 3: was kind of what I was like, Man, I really
Speaker 3: cleaned out. I mean eight year olds and seven year
Speaker 3: old and six year olds and my daughter shot two,
Speaker 3: I shot two, Rye shot one, and his wife shot one,
Speaker 3: and it's six bucks. They were all six year older
Speaker 3: except one of them him if I remember right, No
Speaker 3: two or five, Wow and so. And we hadn't taken
Speaker 3: a lot of bucks to previous years. We were hunting
Speaker 3: Marino and Dax so much and just got a lot
Speaker 3: of age on some of these deer and somebody's here
Speaker 3: one hundred and ten inches. But you know, they were
Speaker 3: bully bucks, like we like to call him, and we've
Speaker 3: taken him out of there. And I do think that
Speaker 3: was probably a factor in inviting DK being able to
Speaker 3: roam in there a little more was he didn't have
Speaker 3: as much competition. But you know, Mike ran, we're talking
Speaker 3: it over about where to go because we got his picture.
Speaker 3: I think that night to the South I was like, yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm not going hunt over there, though I'm still going
Speaker 3: in the pinch because you know, whether he's coming out
Speaker 3: of me or coming back in after a night of
Speaker 3: tomping around. I mean, that's still the spot to focus on.
Speaker 3: And you know, just trying to get that area where
Speaker 3: you can get him in bow range. You know, it's
Speaker 3: one thing to go sit somewhere and see a deer
Speaker 3: off in the willows, but get him in bow range.
Speaker 3: So yeah, the end of October, the food, the acorns there,
Speaker 3: the cold.
Speaker 2: Front, you know, all lined up well, yeah, couldn't couldn't
Speaker 2: write up much better than that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so you're the void you created.
Speaker 2: It's very interesting. I mean this scale, like the way
Speaker 2: you're able to do that is way off from what
Speaker 2: I could ever do. Like, you have a lot of
Speaker 2: land there, and your age structure is incredible, and you
Speaker 2: can take five six bucks over five that that's amazing.
Speaker 3: It's crazy.
Speaker 2: It's crazy, but but I think even like random schmuck
Speaker 2: like me could probably still learn something from this, or
Speaker 2: you take something from this, and that, you know, I've
Speaker 2: started thinking about trying to create a void myself. Now
Speaker 2: I'm working with like one hundred, one hundred and twenty
Speaker 2: eighty like stuff like that. But I've had situations where
Speaker 2: they'll be like that really nice three year old, and
Speaker 2: then there's a four year old and a five year old,
Speaker 2: and they might be like the standard, just like, hey,
Speaker 2: he's going to be one hundred and twenty inch eight
Speaker 2: and he's a hundre in twenty three inch eight and
Speaker 2: he's one hundred and twenty seven inch eight. And I've
Speaker 2: always been so paranoid to go and hunt some of
Speaker 2: these spots too often in fear of educating the deer
Speaker 2: and pushing them off under the neighbors and stuff, that
Speaker 2: I've sometimes avoided targeting a deer like that at all
Speaker 2: because I don't want to go muck it up for
Speaker 2: that really nice three year old that I'm hoping to
Speaker 2: hunt in a year or two. Sure, so how do
Speaker 2: you balance? Do you ever worry about that? Have you
Speaker 2: thought about that? Like you got to kill the bullibucker?
Speaker 2: You want to try to open up a space for
Speaker 2: these younger, higher potential deer, but at the same time,
Speaker 2: you don't want to blow all the bucks off your
Speaker 2: farm and then have him get shot by the neighbors.
Speaker 2: Or you educate that three year old and then the
Speaker 2: next year he's like he's on you already. Yeah, anything
Speaker 2: that ever happened.
Speaker 3: I've spent a lot of time thinking about that over
Speaker 3: the years, and I mean I've I've not owned land
Speaker 3: for a super long time. I mean, I'm I've on
Speaker 3: land now for eight years, and so I've definitely changed
Speaker 3: the way I think about things. I've had some lease
Speaker 3: ground before that, but before that it was public and
Speaker 3: just grinding it out, and I had some friends that
Speaker 3: would let me hunt some back in Louisiana. And but
Speaker 3: you know, what I've come to the conclusion is if
Speaker 3: I really make my property as good as possible, so food,
Speaker 3: water cover very inviting, and hunt it smart, those deer
Speaker 3: are going to want to be in there. And so
Speaker 3: like I don't worry too much about running off the
Speaker 3: three year old because of my human pressure, I worry
Speaker 3: much more about the bully buck doing it. You know,
Speaker 3: I mean, I've just seen it over and over where
Speaker 3: you get this, you know, five year old, six year old,
Speaker 3: seven year old book that I'm like, well, I don't
Speaker 3: want to burn my tag on that. Even at one point,
Speaker 3: you know, I get one bow tag and before I
Speaker 3: own land, and I wanted to just hunt the best buck.
Speaker 3: Well then you sort of think, well, it's great if
Speaker 3: there are multiple deer, but every farm is a little
Speaker 3: bit different, and how much cover do you have, what's
Speaker 3: your carrying capacity? I mean, you've got a couple five
Speaker 3: year olds, it's not like there's so much covering the
Speaker 3: river bottom area. That deer density is ridiculous. I've never
Speaker 3: seen anything like it on anything that I've personally owned
Speaker 3: or hunted, and just a year after year, there's just
Speaker 3: there's just so many deer. So it's it's really a luxury.
Speaker 3: But like what I teach my kids, we still have
Speaker 3: to manage the herd once they get to five. And
Speaker 3: you could argue, I think in a luxurious situation that
Speaker 3: six would be better, you know, as far as seeing
Speaker 3: the most potential out of a out of hampers. But
Speaker 3: whatever they have on their head, they're probably not going
Speaker 3: to get a whole lot bigger, you know, and you
Speaker 3: might as well haunt them and harvest them. They've reached
Speaker 3: full maturity. This is a grandpa dear, let's let's do it,
Speaker 3: you know, and so trying to just focus on taking
Speaker 3: out the mature ones and then hopefully keeping those young
Speaker 3: ones there to grow up and have future deer to harvest.
Speaker 3: So that's kind of how I look at it.
Speaker 2: Man, I hope that four year old that you call
Speaker 2: Moss because that deer is cool. I love that kind
Speaker 2: of heavy tall brows, like the drop, the tall.
Speaker 3: I mean, I know even last year, so I don't.
Speaker 3: I don't know him from the year before last, and
Speaker 3: you think he would be very recognizable. But last year
Speaker 3: I had one pitchure him in velvet and I was
Speaker 3: like immediately like, whoa, what dear is that? You know?
Speaker 3: You just see these big tall brows and uh, you know,
Speaker 3: then we got to get more picture of him and
Speaker 3: get it, get a good age. Guess. I was like,
Speaker 3: he's got to be three, and you know he's a
Speaker 3: stocky three year old and uh, this year I actually
Speaker 3: saw him getting involved and uh, I mean, I just
Speaker 3: love those brows and I don't have I've never killed
Speaker 3: a year with like a big drop time. I've killed
Speaker 3: some little ones. But he's got he grew a big
Speaker 3: bass kicker, and it just takes everything I have to say.
Speaker 3: You next year comes at ten yards like three times.
Speaker 3: But you know what I mean, See I try to commit,
Speaker 3: you know, DK okay DK nothing and play the game.
Speaker 3: But good news, I did get a picture of moss.
Speaker 3: Like yesterday night, I was like, he made your gun season,
Speaker 3: So that's great, Like statistically he should hopefully be there
Speaker 3: next year.
Speaker 2: Man, Yeah, he is one. He is super cool. I
Speaker 2: hope he's there for you. Yeah. So so speaking to
Speaker 2: this kind of topic then of like getting these deer
Speaker 2: to some age on them. The other deer you killed
Speaker 2: I heard you talk about I think it was on
Speaker 2: one of your Guys podcasts. You were talking about how
Speaker 2: fits the other buck you shot looked like a four
Speaker 2: year old forever? Like every year, like I has a
Speaker 2: four year old ten, and then next year I has
Speaker 2: a four year old ten. Talk to me a little
Speaker 2: bit about a deer like that and how a deer
Speaker 2: like that can kind of slip through the cracks for
Speaker 2: years and then finally this year it all came together.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's such a strange thing. You know, they we
Speaker 3: put a lot of weight on body size and you know,
Speaker 3: skeletal structure and how you might age a deer and
Speaker 3: all this kind of stuff. And I've seen too many
Speaker 3: times that example of a deer that just never is
Speaker 3: a big body deer, and so so much of it
Speaker 3: goes back to just history. To really feel like Okay,
Speaker 3: I'm confident in where they're at. And I think for me,
Speaker 3: a lot of it falls back to he was on
Speaker 3: he was a three year old. Right when we really started,
Speaker 3: I started kind of picking the deer to hunt. And
Speaker 3: it's at the same time as my chaos in my
Speaker 3: life between kids and work and Midwest whitesel and everything
Speaker 3: else is on ramping up. And I said this on
Speaker 3: our podcast talking about I used to just I didn't
Speaker 3: have kids, and you know, all the trail cameras and
Speaker 3: all the time and just going through stuff, and I
Speaker 3: just knew everything about everything, and I never would have
Speaker 3: looked over at any deer. I just knew who they were,
Speaker 3: and I could tell you from a one hundred yards
Speaker 3: novel that so and so and you know. And so anyway,
Speaker 3: getting focusing on a certain target, and when I'm flipping
Speaker 3: through trail camera and sell cam picks. Over the last
Speaker 3: few years, as I've transitioned to that, you know, I'm
Speaker 3: usually blowing by stuff that's not the buck I'm after,
Speaker 3: and I just want the information I need to strategize.
Speaker 3: And so a little bit of that played into it.
Speaker 3: But a couple of years ago, you know, fits we
Speaker 3: were seeing him late season. Every time he'd pop out
Speaker 3: of the timber, I'd say, man, that's a good dear,
Speaker 3: what deer is that? And oh it's that big four
Speaker 3: year old ten? And then last year he just didn't
Speaker 3: change it all. In fact, I think he got a
Speaker 3: few inches smaller. And so then I started questioning myself,
Speaker 3: was he three last year and he's four this year?
Speaker 3: How old is that, dear? And so I started going
Speaker 3: through tild camera pictures and I was like, oh, man,
Speaker 3: he was. He's been four a long time.
Speaker 2: So I was like Benjamin Button deer exactly.
Speaker 3: And so once I kind of got last year, you know,
Speaker 3: I was focused on what I was doing with Kelsey,
Speaker 3: and but I told I told Ryan last year, I said,
Speaker 3: we didn't we didn't have that dear extra He's gonna
Speaker 3: be seven, and you know, he grew his best rack.
Speaker 3: I mean he went from a straight up ten for
Speaker 3: four years in a row to a six by seven
Speaker 3: with kickers, and I think he had seventeen scoreable points,
Speaker 3: which is wow, just nuts. He wasn't a lot of masks,
Speaker 3: not a big frame, but you know, lots of points
Speaker 3: and certainly age is the most important thing. Just seven
Speaker 3: and a half year old buck. I mean that so.
Speaker 2: Hard argue that. Yeah, so how how did that?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: So how that'll come together? You killed DK at the
Speaker 2: end of October, and now you've got like a little
Speaker 2: work break. You go go work for a while, and
Speaker 2: then you've got one of your little rocations again. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So how did you kind of attack him now that
Speaker 2: you had to shift gears?
Speaker 3: Yeah, because we were shifting into you know, primary breeding.
Speaker 3: So it's a it's a pretty difficult time to hunt
Speaker 3: one particular deer, right they're locked down for two or
Speaker 3: three days and you might catch them. And we actually
Speaker 3: joked a little bit when I was hunting DK because
Speaker 3: DK is not on the farm, you know, like he
Speaker 3: didn't really live here. We're gonna have to kill him
Speaker 3: in November. But he was the one I wanted. But
Speaker 3: all the while, I'm getting pictures of fits in daylight
Speaker 3: over and over and over and over on the south
Speaker 3: end of the farm. And I was telling Ry, I
Speaker 3: was like, man, mid October, I think we could have
Speaker 3: killed him, gone in there and killed him. He just
Speaker 3: was so it was on such a pattern, and I
Speaker 3: was like, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna It's not
Speaker 3: gonna be that way now. And so anyway, kill DK
Speaker 3: go to work for three or four days and I
Speaker 3: come back to start over, and our first day back,
Speaker 3: I said, you know, I still think because it was
Speaker 3: November third, maybe November third, I still think he's betting
Speaker 3: in this one particular spot, and I still think he's
Speaker 3: going in there in the morning and bedding down for
Speaker 3: a while, kind of mid morning, nine o'clock after he
Speaker 3: does his rounds. And I had had a few pictures
Speaker 3: of him doing this this thing the previous two weeks,
Speaker 3: and so I thought, that's our best chance, hopefully before
Speaker 3: he really leaves or goes and does whatever bucks do
Speaker 3: in the rut. And we sneak in there, and I
Speaker 3: was right, we're in the but we're in the tree
Speaker 3: goofing off because we're not overly confident what we're doing.
Speaker 3: Then all of a sudden, I hear running, and I
Speaker 3: turn around and he's coming up right behind us, and
Speaker 3: he got out of there. Both of us were pretty
Speaker 3: disappointing ourselves because we had let our guard down, and
Speaker 3: that was that would have been an opportunity to just
Speaker 3: I mean, bang bang. But yeah, so he caught us,
Speaker 3: and I actually shifted to the other side of the farm,
Speaker 3: probably eight hundred yards away the direction he ran off
Speaker 3: in that morning, I thought, you know, he's gonna probably
Speaker 3: go bet up somewhere over there. And then I had
Speaker 3: a food plot over there, and we saw him twice
Speaker 3: that afternoon, once kind of harassing oze out in the
Speaker 3: timber about one hundred yards away, and then at dark
Speaker 3: he came through the food plot and I hunt that
Speaker 3: particular spot on A West and I have a different
Speaker 3: where I killed him on a south. And so I said,
Speaker 3: you know what, in the mornings we can go hunt
Speaker 3: our runt spots, but in the afternoons we have these
Speaker 3: two food sources. I've got the acorns right here, and
Speaker 3: I've got that turnip plot that we almost killed him in,
Speaker 3: And just based on where the wind was, I was
Speaker 3: going to bounce back and forth between those two spots
Speaker 3: in the afternoon. And we actually never saw him again
Speaker 3: until the day that I shot him. So we had
Speaker 3: three encounters in one day, and then actually he wasn't
Speaker 3: on camera for three or four days. And what I
Speaker 3: think was happening was, I mean he was locking down
Speaker 3: with a dough. In fact, I went through that little
Speaker 3: four or five day cycle of hunting, went back to
Speaker 3: work for two or three days. We had some good
Speaker 3: weather come through and I got a picture of him
Speaker 3: in the morning with a dough, and then I got
Speaker 3: a picture of him that afternoon going back out with
Speaker 3: the dough, and I was like, Okay, he's just in
Speaker 3: this little area with the dough, and it's something that
Speaker 3: I actually seen the year four with him right in
Speaker 3: that spot, and so it's where he liked to be
Speaker 3: in the rut, and so I just kind of said,
Speaker 3: you know, I'm gonna I'm gonna hone in on this area.
Speaker 3: When he was three or four years old, he was
Speaker 3: farther to the north, but the previous couple of years
Speaker 3: he had moved down to his pocket of doze, and
Speaker 3: I was really making decisions based on that and hunting
Speaker 3: the dose. You know, where the dough is going to be,
Speaker 3: and those acorns and I mean that dough drug him
Speaker 3: under the tree three yards just.
Speaker 2: Can be then Yeah. Yeah, so you've killed you killed
Speaker 2: these two bucks this year. Last year you killed Kelsey
Speaker 2: and I think another big old giant buck, and then
Speaker 2: the year before that, you kill the legends Dak and Marino. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and you know, you can go on and on. You've
Speaker 2: you've had this amazing run. But you mentioned a while back,
Speaker 2: you mentioned, you know, you've only owned land for eight
Speaker 2: years something like that, and you've been in Iowa for
Speaker 2: fifteen or something like that. Before that, you were Louisiana,
Speaker 2: right hunting some public and hunting other people's stuff. So
Speaker 2: something of a lot of folks, you know, like to
Speaker 2: gripe about when it comes to like the hunting media
Speaker 2: today is they say, well, we're just seeing these guys
Speaker 2: kill these big giant bucks on a bunch of land
Speaker 2: they own, right. But I always like to kind of
Speaker 2: look at the situation and then separate the situation from
Speaker 2: like the strategies that have got them there. And I
Speaker 2: always think that even though I have better situations now
Speaker 2: that I hunted than I had fifteen years ago, man,
Speaker 2: I've learned so much that I could go back to
Speaker 2: those places and be way, way, way more successful than
Speaker 2: I was back then. So this is a long winded
Speaker 2: way of getting to what would be like the top
Speaker 2: one or two things that you've learned in these recent
Speaker 2: years that you would take back with you if you
Speaker 2: had to go back to Louisiana or if you had
Speaker 2: to go back to hunting public or buy permission stuff.
Speaker 2: What do you think have been like those most important
Speaker 2: things now that would translate to a less ideal scenario.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think you know, probably the most useful thing
Speaker 3: that I've honed in on is scouting aerial maps, you know,
Speaker 3: looking at a piece of property, because the way I
Speaker 3: hunt is I want to figure out where the deer
Speaker 3: bed and where they feed. That dictates everything. Where they bed,
Speaker 3: where they feed primarily, and then I don't I mean,
Speaker 3: I have a few stands of a inbedding areas and
Speaker 3: I love getting into thick stuff at the right time
Speaker 3: of year and having a lot of fun. That's how
Speaker 3: I grew up hunting public, because all the deer get
Speaker 3: pressured and go into that. But in the Midwest it's
Speaker 3: a little bit different. I mean, it's different than the
Speaker 3: swamps of Louisiana, where it's just thousands and thousands and
Speaker 3: thousands of acres and similar to what you probably hunt Michigan, right,
Speaker 3: I mean, it's like big wood stuff, you know, and
Speaker 3: especially if it's heavily pressured, you're getting back into certain
Speaker 3: areas and that's a lot harder to look at. I
Speaker 3: would say aerials and pick out okay, betting feeding, and
Speaker 3: I had some experience doing that, but it was private
Speaker 3: ground still in Louisiana, where there were food plots and
Speaker 3: there were things where you say okay, and there were
Speaker 3: cuts where they were doing rotational logging operations and you
Speaker 3: knew where the deer were going to primarily be betted,
Speaker 3: and so you could sort of say okay. And that's
Speaker 3: really back in the early two thousands when I started
Speaker 3: sort of honing that idea of I'm not just hunting
Speaker 3: a trail, I'm not just hunting a scrape line, you know,
Speaker 3: in a way I am, but I'm still trying to
Speaker 3: figure out, okay, where these deer really betting, and then
Speaker 3: where they headed out to and is that acorns right now?
Speaker 3: Is that ag? Is that something I planted? I think
Speaker 3: it's definitely easier in the Midwest. But any property I
Speaker 3: get and I talk to a lot of people friends
Speaker 3: that have property, like, how would you approach this? And
Speaker 3: I mean you pan that camera out and where is
Speaker 3: the cover? You know? And then topographically what draws because
Speaker 3: deer man, you go out hunting out in Kansas and
Speaker 3: it's a ton of grass, you know, and it's little
Speaker 3: ditches and are you look at what Caleb just did
Speaker 3: recently on the show, Like you know, it's just tree
Speaker 3: lines and waterways, you know, and deer. They're resilient creatures
Speaker 3: and they find areas, but trying to figure out where
Speaker 3: you're at, where they like to hang out and where
Speaker 3: they're going to feed and get in between, and that's
Speaker 3: probably the most useful thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So then in this scenario that you are in where
Speaker 2: you do have your own land and you can make changes,
Speaker 2: and you have made changes and things, what do you
Speaker 2: think is the most important change that you have made
Speaker 2: as far as you know, being able to manipulate the habitat,
Speaker 2: set things up how you want. You know, you've you've
Speaker 2: you've built something in a couple spots now that works
Speaker 2: really really well. If you had to put your finger
Speaker 2: on that one or two things that made the just difference,
Speaker 2: what do you think that would be?
Speaker 3: Probably food, honestly. So the home farm was a cattle
Speaker 3: pasture for seventy five years, never farmed and heavily heavily
Speaker 3: hunted every year. The farmer that I bought it from
Speaker 3: let everybody drive through it and push all the deer
Speaker 3: out and I mean, there was nothing for age on
Speaker 3: that farm when I bought it, and it was it
Speaker 3: was Hey, half the farm wasn't accessible because you couldn't
Speaker 3: get across the creek, you know, the cows had access
Speaker 3: to it. But I bought that farm. I put in
Speaker 3: four creek crossings for different access. I did sad busts
Speaker 3: where I could start planting, because you know, I'm investing
Speaker 3: a lot of money into land, so okay, let me
Speaker 3: start farming where I can because maybe CRP or whatever
Speaker 3: I need to do to generate income to help cover
Speaker 3: costs and things like that. And I didn't need to
Speaker 3: make the bedding be better on that property. It was
Speaker 3: already very centralized. Cattle pastures that are allowed to grow up,
Speaker 3: you know, tend to be gnarly things. I mean, lots
Speaker 3: of locusts and hedge and multiflora rows. So the bedding
Speaker 3: was pretty thick. And so I just optimize feed there,
Speaker 3: you know, basically strategically putting food where I can hunt it.
Speaker 3: And then the river bottom is is similar. You know,
Speaker 3: the whole place is cover. It's interesting now over time
Speaker 3: finding out okay they really like that peninsula, then trying
Speaker 3: to work with the nrcs and the forester about and
Speaker 3: the whole thing is not wetland. There's there's about sixty
Speaker 3: acres that's not a wetland that I can do what
Speaker 3: I want on. But where can we do TSI work
Speaker 3: to thicken up some areas and really hold them there,
Speaker 3: and then release some of those valuable trees, those mash trees,
Speaker 3: those white oaks that are in there, the swamp oaks
Speaker 3: and that kind of thing. But it still goes back
Speaker 3: to food because for years before I owned it, there
Speaker 3: wasn't food on it. And the year that we flooded,
Speaker 3: and another year where we just didn't have success. I
Speaker 3: didn't have the right equipment and I was trying to
Speaker 3: figure out how can I grow food, and I hadn't
Speaker 3: bought electric fence yet. It's amazing that you're gone. I mean,
Speaker 3: once the rut's over, they go find food. And so
Speaker 3: I've made that a priority there and here in the Midwest.
Speaker 3: In these situations, particularly as you get late, food is
Speaker 3: just king. It's a must. But it helps a lot
Speaker 3: throughout the entire season, right, I mean early season. It matters.
Speaker 3: If you're holding dose on your property, the rut's going
Speaker 3: to be better you're going to hold more bucks. I
Speaker 3: mean all these types of things. So just really putting
Speaker 3: a lot of time, energy and effort into diversifying food
Speaker 3: plots and being successful with them and what it was
Speaker 3: going to take there.
Speaker 2: Yes, So that raises the question when you said diversify
Speaker 2: your food plots, do you prefer to have different and
Speaker 2: food sources in different places to get that diversity or
Speaker 2: do you ever mix in single plots? I've heard you
Speaker 2: mentioned like clover plot, Braska plot, But how do you
Speaker 2: usually do that to get that right ratio in draw
Speaker 2: where you want it when you want it.
Speaker 3: I generally have green plots and green plots, you know,
Speaker 3: like the home farm. I actually commercially farm it. So
Speaker 3: I do my corn bean rotation and I combine everything
Speaker 3: except like six acres that I leave for food for late,
Speaker 3: and then I put in green plots. Now my green plots,
Speaker 3: I tend to do a mixture. And I'm still playing
Speaker 3: around with it. I mean I had alfalfa there for
Speaker 3: a long time that we hate, and we actually it
Speaker 3: just was so tore up. The guy that was paying
Speaker 3: it for me is like, we need to just farm
Speaker 3: it a few years. It just it was so eroded
Speaker 3: and it just was a tough place to hay. So
Speaker 3: that alfalfa, I want to get back to it because
Speaker 3: it's so valuable early. It's so fun in velvet season,
Speaker 3: and it's a great spot to early bowhunt. And I've
Speaker 3: changed kind of how the home farm hunts by putting
Speaker 3: that into a crop rotation. But my green plots, like
Speaker 3: where Bella, my daughter shot big Mac in September, this
Speaker 3: eight and a half year old deer, five years of history,
Speaker 3: I do braskaz. I usually have clover mixed in, and
Speaker 3: I love radishes for early and so I'm gonna do
Speaker 3: a Braska mix. Got some turnips and rape and sugar
Speaker 3: beets and everything in there with a clover base. So
Speaker 3: I'll either depending on how old the plot is and
Speaker 3: how weed it is, sometimes I kill it, turn it under,
Speaker 3: put the clover and everything at one time. But what's
Speaker 3: even better is, you know, if I have a healthy
Speaker 3: clover plot, or like let's say I do that to
Speaker 3: a green plot and I put clover in with the brascas,
Speaker 3: it's mostly gonna be brascas that year, but in the
Speaker 3: spring it's gonna come up thick, lush clover. I'll mowed
Speaker 3: a couple of times have a nice clover plot for
Speaker 3: turky season and through the summer. But then when it
Speaker 3: comes time for the end of July, I'll go in
Speaker 3: there and either till under strips to put brassicas or
Speaker 3: drill brascas in there and have a nice mixture and
Speaker 3: then broadcast radishes like what I did this year in
Speaker 3: front of each stand. I just went in a thirty
Speaker 3: yard circle and just put some extra radishes just onto
Speaker 3: the ground on top, and it was interesting to watch
Speaker 3: the deer kind of gravitate there and concentrate there. And
Speaker 3: I just like having a mixture in the green plots
Speaker 3: because I don't have tons and tons and tons of
Speaker 3: green plots. I have a couple that I like, and
Speaker 3: each one of those different things is more palable at
Speaker 3: different times. And you know, it's fun to watch what
Speaker 3: the deer like to eat. But I think they all
Speaker 3: kind of might feel like something different each day too.
Speaker 3: You know, they're in there and they got a shortage bark,
Speaker 3: so it works out well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it seems like that that diverse approach seems to
Speaker 2: have a lot of benefits to it, like you described there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you want a drought year, right, I mean, like
Speaker 3: not every you do a monoculture, you're gonna potentially hose yourself.
Speaker 3: So having some shade tolerant, drought tolerant, you know, and
Speaker 3: then hopefully end up with something to hunt over. And
Speaker 3: I mean I've done this on where before I had
Speaker 3: any equipment, you know, like we always call it the
Speaker 3: pormat spot. Go spray and see it and you get
Speaker 3: a little bit of rain and you can you can
Speaker 3: really make a spot a lot more effective by doing that.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, so you mentioned the home farm and how you've
Speaker 2: you've got this grain rotation, but I wanted to talk
Speaker 2: to you about the home Farm to kind of wrap
Speaker 2: us up here a little bit, because there was a
Speaker 2: late season stretch a few years back that I watched recently,
Speaker 2: I guess it would have been sometime this past winter.
Speaker 2: I remember watching these episodes with my son and he
Speaker 2: got a kick out of it because two of your daughters,
Speaker 2: I think, if I'm remember right, two of your daughters
Speaker 2: and your wife killed bucks in like back to back
Speaker 2: to back sits right around Christmas, and I think from
Speaker 2: the same blind or we're like very close to the
Speaker 2: same place, like over and over and over, and that
Speaker 2: blew me away.
Speaker 4: Yea.
Speaker 2: So I had to ask, you know, as as we
Speaker 2: move into this late season time period that we're actually
Speaker 2: in right now when we're talking, there's people out there
Speaker 2: trying to get that late season last second magic. Tell
Speaker 2: me about this like dream scenario, amazing situation you had
Speaker 2: somehow it was able to like handle that, Like what
Speaker 2: did you have there that was drawing deer like that
Speaker 2: in the late season over the conditions that got these
Speaker 2: deer up on their feet over and over again? And
Speaker 2: how'd you manage to to do that without educating these
Speaker 2: deer the fact that hate we're getting hunted here after
Speaker 2: you had a shot and recovery a shot in recovery.
Speaker 2: How did that all work?
Speaker 3: I know, it's pretty crazy how it worked out. And
Speaker 3: the spot just lends itself to it so much. But
Speaker 3: it's in the back of the property. It's a sixteen
Speaker 3: acre agfield, and it's a big bottom goes up the
Speaker 3: hill and it kind of tucks in back to the
Speaker 3: main bedding area and it's this little finger of crop
Speaker 3: that goes back in there. And so what I did
Speaker 3: when I bought the farm, I just sort of looking
Speaker 3: at it and how it set up I was like,
Speaker 3: this is right up against the bedding, big thick draws
Speaker 3: that go down into the timber, super gnarly old cattle farm.
Speaker 3: As I mentioned, tons of multi four rows. The deer
Speaker 3: cannot see out into the field from the timber. It's
Speaker 3: just so thick. And so when I bought the property,
Speaker 3: it just kind of looked at where I could put green.
Speaker 3: I made four little green plots, you know, north south,
Speaker 3: east west sides of this thicket. And so this backfield,
Speaker 3: this little finger that goes back there at the very
Speaker 3: tip of it, I have a little green plot turnips
Speaker 3: and whatnot, which can be pretty effective late season as well.
Speaker 3: But then when we're drilling all of our crops, we
Speaker 3: go back in there and make a loop and turn
Speaker 3: around and come back out. And what I have done
Speaker 3: is I'll take plot screen, and the co op works
Speaker 3: with me on this. It's kind of nice, but I'll
Speaker 3: once my beans were coming up, I actually go and
Speaker 3: I'll till under a six foot wide strip or a
Speaker 3: ten foot wide strip and hand broadcasts of plot screen
Speaker 3: some Egyptian weed and sorg them and whatnot and pack
Speaker 3: it in fertilizer and flag it so that when they
Speaker 3: come back to spray my beans. They skip over that
Speaker 3: and where it works out great for a northwest wind,
Speaker 3: and I can come all the way around to the
Speaker 3: back of the farm. We walk up this big hill
Speaker 3: and we're in the blind and I've got plot screen
Speaker 3: and so you got great entry and exit for late season.
Speaker 3: And then it's just right butts up against the bedding area.
Speaker 3: And we had it was Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and
Speaker 3: then we skipped one day because the wind had switched
Speaker 3: out of the south, and then went back to that
Speaker 3: same exact line when the wind switched back. So three
Speaker 3: sits Thursday, Friday, Sunday, three kills and it was a
Speaker 3: five year old, a six year old in my four
Speaker 3: year old, my seven year old daughter. It was her
Speaker 3: first deer, and we were being we're certainly being less
Speaker 3: less picky, and my wife was with us, and so
Speaker 3: it was really cool. There were four of us in
Speaker 3: the blind. And I think, you know, the farm is
Speaker 3: interesting because it's in the center of a pretty big
Speaker 3: section and it gets hunted pretty heavily all around. So
Speaker 3: through gun season deer move in there. Every year, deer
Speaker 3: move in there. In fact, side note the buck my
Speaker 3: daughter Brin shot last weekend. I don't know the deer,
Speaker 3: and it's it's a big, mature deer. And I got
Speaker 3: one picture of the night before and I texted my
Speaker 3: Ryan and I said, man, look at this buck. And
Speaker 3: we went in there the next day and he was
Speaker 3: still in there and she killed him. And I don't know,
Speaker 3: the dear big ten. You know, it's like so and
Speaker 3: he actually had a bullet hole through his neck. Just yeah,
Speaker 3: And so, you know, they just get a lot of pressure.
Speaker 3: And in fact, that night there were three or four
Speaker 3: other shots. Right, there's just a lot of activity. So
Speaker 3: my farm, in the grand scheme of things, is not
Speaker 3: very pressured, and I'm very careful about how we go
Speaker 3: about hunting it. And there's great cover on it and food.
Speaker 3: So that particular year we sneak in there, we're using
Speaker 3: a crossbow, so that's also you're not shooting up the
Speaker 3: place with the gun. And both my daughter at the
Speaker 3: time she was would have been nine or ten, Bela,
Speaker 3: and my wife, you know, thirty yard shot, heart shot
Speaker 3: deer runs forty yards into the timber, and both of
Speaker 3: them died in the same exact spot. I mean they
Speaker 3: shot him the same spot. They died within three feet
Speaker 3: of each other and so quick quick recoveries. I think
Speaker 3: if we were tramping all let's say they hit him
Speaker 3: back and we were tramping all around the timber, maybe
Speaker 3: that wouldn't have worked out. But being able to slip
Speaker 3: in there after dark because they shoot him right before dark,
Speaker 3: get the deer out, get out of there, you know,
Speaker 3: I mean, it's it's And I think the other unique
Speaker 3: thing is that we were seeing like a different mature
Speaker 3: buck each day, right so, and I noticed that now
Speaker 3: if I go just rotate around my farm, because the
Speaker 3: way I have all the food set up around that
Speaker 3: central area, there might be a buck that likes to
Speaker 3: go to one. But it's not at all surprising. They'll
Speaker 3: come out to the east one one night, they'll go
Speaker 3: out to the south one one night. So you kind
Speaker 3: of get a rotation where that buck that we were
Speaker 3: shooting the next day wasn't there the night before, so
Speaker 3: he wasn't part of that exposure to all the deer
Speaker 3: clearing field or whatever. So it's sort of a perfect storm.
Speaker 3: But again it goes down to I think low pressure,
Speaker 3: good deer numbers. At that point, I hadn't shot a
Speaker 3: lot of deer on that property. So we were getting
Speaker 3: we're some pretty good age amongst the bucks, and you
Speaker 3: couldn't draw that up any better. I mean, what a memory, right,
Speaker 3: I have the best photo ever of my wife and
Speaker 3: two older daughters, all with with bucks, all with a crossbow,
Speaker 3: and it's just a crazy story.
Speaker 2: That's amazing. So so what are what are some of
Speaker 2: the other kind of foundational late season things that you're
Speaker 2: thinking about if if you were still trying to get
Speaker 2: one killed right now, or as you are probably trying
Speaker 2: to help your kids, you know, in these coming days
Speaker 2: and weeks, what are some of the other things you're
Speaker 2: thinking about to help choose where to hunt or when
Speaker 2: to hunt.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it's it's uh, I mean it's hard.
Speaker 3: It revolves around food, right, If you don't have food,
Speaker 3: you're not going to have deer. And they're definitely skittish
Speaker 3: just times a year, this time of year. They doesn't
Speaker 3: take much to clear a field, but we started. They're
Speaker 3: driven by their stomach and I shot a great buck
Speaker 3: a few years ago. I have a property, one of
Speaker 3: the first proppers ever bought. I've never sold it, and
Speaker 3: it's two and a half hours away and I rarely
Speaker 3: go there. You know, we farm it, it butts up
Speaker 3: against a lot of cover. And it was January first
Speaker 3: we had a huge storm coming in and I was like,
Speaker 3: we got to go sit that place, and you know,
Speaker 3: one hundred eighty inch deer comes out, and you know,
Speaker 3: you're like, well, there you go. That's the recipe in
Speaker 3: Iowa for success. And I think I was unique in
Speaker 3: that we're far enough north where we get we get
Speaker 3: we're post rut ruts. In November, we're post rut and
Speaker 3: then we have these can have this harsh weather and
Speaker 3: it just it just drives in the food. Of course
Speaker 3: I don't hunt mornings. Then, just that sort of concept
Speaker 3: of the deer feeding feeding, feeding, feeding, feeding, and they're
Speaker 3: not betting very far off the food. And so if
Speaker 3: you go in there in the morning and blow them
Speaker 3: out of they're not going to come back out in
Speaker 3: the afternoon. And so not only are we transitioning from hey,
Speaker 3: we were worn out. We just hunted however many days
Speaker 3: and we need to get back to, you know, other priorities.
Speaker 3: So it's kind of nice over the Christmas holidays, a
Speaker 3: lot of family time in the morning and then we
Speaker 3: go do a three hour hunt in the afternoon. It
Speaker 3: works out well, but I also think strategically you just
Speaker 3: have more success that way. I think some farms set
Speaker 3: up well to hunt bedding in the morning, the way
Speaker 3: their access is. I have friends that can do that
Speaker 3: late season. They can get in the back of a
Speaker 3: bedding safely and catch deer coming back from the crops.
Speaker 3: But none of my places really set up like that,
Speaker 3: so I focus on food and afternoons and cold weather.
Speaker 2: You mentioned the plot screen that you had on that
Speaker 2: home farm setup, which sounded perfect for getting out of there.
Speaker 2: Do you have any other exit strategies, because that's always
Speaker 2: one of the toughest things I encounters, is like, you
Speaker 2: could hunt good food in the evening, how do you
Speaker 2: get out of there without spooking a thousand deer if
Speaker 2: you're hunting close to the food. I know, it's what
Speaker 2: have you done?
Speaker 3: It's tough, you know. I don't have this luxury anymore.
Speaker 3: At one point I had enough people that didn't have
Speaker 3: anything to do that someone could come clear the field
Speaker 3: with a vehicle. You know, nobody's going that. So my
Speaker 3: wife would laugh at me. Maybe when my kids get
Speaker 3: a little bit older and start driving and be like, hey,
Speaker 3: we don't live on the farm, and so that's a
Speaker 3: you know, even the home farms thirty minutes from the house.
Speaker 3: But that's a good strategy if someone lives on the farm.
Speaker 3: Some of my food plots, like at the river bottom,
Speaker 3: a lot of deer, even though it's a three acre
Speaker 3: food plot. They come out of the peninsula. They they'll
Speaker 3: feed there for an hour, but then they work they
Speaker 3: work off I mean every time, right, And so if
Speaker 3: you could somehow set it up where it's not truly
Speaker 3: the destination, that's ideal, you know, because you can just
Speaker 3: keep going back and they're not there when you get out.
Speaker 3: And then the other strategy that I've used where legal
Speaker 3: is like electronic calls, like a coyote call. You know,
Speaker 3: you put your your coyote call under the blind in
Speaker 3: the bushes thirty yards away and have the remote. You know,
Speaker 3: that's not legal everywhere, but you know you can turn
Speaker 3: on a coyote yapp and and then all the deer
Speaker 3: run off and you just get out, sneak out and
Speaker 3: get out of there.
Speaker 2: That's good.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's that's that's pretty effective, you know, if if
Speaker 3: it's legal where you hunt. But I always I try
Speaker 3: to wait till it's super dark. We don't use lights,
Speaker 3: you know, and I'm hoping that when I get out
Speaker 3: of there, you know, one dough clears the field right,
Speaker 3: and it's like, I'm they don't really know what's going on,
Speaker 3: because I definitely have had to get out and clear
Speaker 3: deer off the food plot. Another strategy, I don't use
Speaker 3: a ton I used to use it more like shoot
Speaker 3: a dough or something, but then you got to go
Speaker 3: recover the dough. And so I've never technically liked that
Speaker 3: one thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I don't know for sure what your forecast
Speaker 2: looks like, but I usually what you guys have got
Speaker 2: in I was just a couple of days ahead of
Speaker 2: what we're getting here in Michigan, and h when I
Speaker 2: look in the two week forecast or the ten day
Speaker 2: forecast coming up, it's not real promising for late season.
Speaker 2: It's a lot of warm, mild weather. We don't have
Speaker 2: that awesome blizzard coming through. We don't have the big cold, cold,
Speaker 2: frigid front hitting. It's kind of been the story of
Speaker 2: most of this December. Does anything change for you when
Speaker 2: you have this warm weather, Like, you know, if someone's
Speaker 2: got like, hey, this is my time off, I was
Speaker 2: gonna be a hunt around the holidays, and now we're
Speaker 2: stuck with this kind of lousy weather. Do you still try?
Speaker 2: Do you hunt a different food source, like I know
Speaker 2: some guys might prefer some type of food and warm
Speaker 2: weather versus some type of food and cold or is
Speaker 2: there something totally different off the wall that you'd be
Speaker 2: thinking about with that set of conditions.
Speaker 3: I I don't. I mean, still these deer are still
Speaker 3: post rut, They're still trying to put on weight for
Speaker 3: the winter, you know, and it's just not quite as good.
Speaker 3: They may not get to the food plot as early.
Speaker 3: And maybe that one buck you're really hoping showed up
Speaker 3: never does because he's just not It's it's not cold
Speaker 3: enough yet. But in general, you still see deer going
Speaker 3: to feed, and so obviously with the time I have,
Speaker 3: it's a huge family bonding time. I mean, we're going
Speaker 3: sit in the blind, we're spending time out there, and
Speaker 3: if we kill a greade, if we don't, whatever. But
Speaker 3: I do think the warmer temps, you can see even
Speaker 3: on like Troke coming stuff, that the deer might hit
Speaker 3: the green more. You know, they might be in the
Speaker 3: turnips more that day. And so I was actually looking
Speaker 3: at the forecast thinking about I had just drug. I
Speaker 3: have my blinds on trailers, and so I pulled a
Speaker 3: blind out to the beans, and I thought, I'm watching
Speaker 3: the cameras and I'm watching my turniplot have a bunch
Speaker 3: of deer in it every night, and it's actually easier
Speaker 3: to hunt with the crossbow because it's smaller. And I
Speaker 3: was like, man, I should probably pull a blind back
Speaker 3: with these warmer temps, and still trying to decide if
Speaker 3: I'm going to do that, but I I mean, I'll
Speaker 3: still go hunt my corn and my beans all the same,
Speaker 3: and you know, all that action might be the last
Speaker 3: thirty minutes, but you're still getting most of those deer
Speaker 3: coming out there, at least in my situation where it's
Speaker 3: it's private ground that you aren't super pressured. I mean,
Speaker 3: they're wanting to eat. I mean this is not everywhere
Speaker 3: that cold weather. You know, they're out there at two
Speaker 3: o'clock in the afternoon, and that what I love about. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you're out there so early, and that's when you get
Speaker 3: those jury you maybe never saw before that they're like,
Speaker 3: we got to find food, and they're traveling miles to
Speaker 3: find food and you're like, what buck is that you know?
Speaker 3: And so you know, we still have a lot of fun,
Speaker 3: a lot of success even if the weather's not perfect.
Speaker 2: All right, So you're saying there's a chance, go just go, Yeah.
Speaker 3: I can't kill them from as they say.
Speaker 2: Right, that is the truth. So okay, So folks want
Speaker 2: to see these hunts we talked about DK or Fits
Speaker 2: all the others. If they want to hear about stuff,
Speaker 2: if they want to stay up to date with what
Speaker 2: you've got going on, can you give us the loadown
Speaker 2: on where we can find all that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the easiest place is our YouTube channels. We have
Speaker 3: Midwest White Tail, our main page that we put the
Speaker 3: weekly Monday main show on and that's that's sort of
Speaker 3: the main kill every week, and you can find all
Speaker 3: those kills from all the guys on the main page.
Speaker 3: And then there's a group of us that do daily
Speaker 3: blogs and so that's really our journal, right, that's the
Speaker 3: highs the lows, that's the strategy. That's the goose egg
Speaker 3: hunt where you didn't see anything that's going in there
Speaker 3: having great hunts that some of that stuff gets replicated
Speaker 3: on the main show if we have good encounters. But
Speaker 3: that's where it pops up within twenty four hours. Typically
Speaker 3: it is the daily channel, and so we have a
Speaker 3: there's small group of people that enjoy watching the grind,
Speaker 3: I guess, and it is fun because you don't miss
Speaker 3: anything following along with that. And we also have our
Speaker 3: regional channel where all of our regional pro staff from
Speaker 3: across the country we post their content. And while YouTube
Speaker 3: is the easiest, we've got it on pretty much all
Speaker 3: the major platforms, so you can if you just search
Speaker 3: for Midwest White Tail, you can find those.
Speaker 2: You guys are pumping out a whole lot of stuff,
Speaker 2: and I'm always impressed with it. It's always good, it's frequent, consistent,
Speaker 2: and uh man, you guys are having a heck of
Speaker 2: a year this year. I don't know if you were
Speaker 2: gonna point and I mean probably ninety nine percent of
Speaker 2: folks listening to our podcast also already watch your stuff too.
Speaker 2: But let's just hypothetically say there's someone who's new who's
Speaker 2: not familiar with Midwest White Tail somehow, and you were
Speaker 2: gonna point them to one video that you guys put
Speaker 2: up this year, I can I mean, there's a couple
Speaker 2: of you guys have been pretty stoked about I know,
Speaker 2: all right, you guys have had some really good stories
Speaker 2: this year. If you had to pick just one that
Speaker 2: you're gonna say, Hey, you gotta gotta go watch this one.
Speaker 2: What would that one be?
Speaker 3: Oh? Man, that's oh I got two. I got to
Speaker 3: pick too, because there's two that are so good for
Speaker 3: different reasons. I mean Owen's early season kill of Lockness
Speaker 3: and getting in to Owen's history, and I mean being
Speaker 3: a Michigan boy and growing up and the grind and
Speaker 3: just like sort of the pinnacle of his hunting career.
Speaker 3: And not to mention, who doesn't love seeing a two
Speaker 3: hundred and fifteen engineer go down? And you you talk
Speaker 3: about the strategy. That guy's a master, right, I mean
Speaker 3: he he's a master of it. And so to be
Speaker 3: able to pin that deer down six and a half
Speaker 3: years old, all the history and just get him just
Speaker 3: like that was It's awesome. It's a great episode. And
Speaker 3: then our most recent one, Caleb Grinder, the story of
Speaker 3: his entire season. I mean, we'll bring a tear to
Speaker 3: your eye. The emotional stress. I mean for those of
Speaker 3: us that are like really obsessed with this and just
Speaker 3: live and breathe it and Caleb's one of those guys
Speaker 3: to go through what he went through this year, having
Speaker 3: just a dream hit list and hav an ehd ravage
Speaker 3: like everything, and then to come full circle and to
Speaker 3: do a spot and stalk on the ground on a
Speaker 3: giant I mean, it's just crazy. So it's they're both.
Speaker 3: They're both way up there. I think in the history
Speaker 3: of Midwest whitetail as just top in and they're both
Speaker 3: this year. And there's some other good ones this year,
Speaker 3: but those two, man, I'll be saying that in ten years,
Speaker 3: like these two episodes, you know that's I mean.
Speaker 2: I can I can say the one for sure. I've
Speaker 2: seen that one. Haven't seen Caleb yet, but it's on
Speaker 2: the It's on the to watch list here pretty soon.
Speaker 2: That's a long one.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's a long one.
Speaker 2: It's a long one. So I've got to invest some
Speaker 2: time in that.
Speaker 3: But three evenings to get through it with all the
Speaker 3: kids and the Christmas concerts and everything else. But I
Speaker 3: tell you what, it's it's awesome. I Mean we're always
Speaker 3: kind of bouncing around about what's best, how do we
Speaker 3: produce these things, And we've always really pride ourselves on
Speaker 3: a good story and education and all these types of things.
Speaker 3: And we used to try really hard to cut everything
Speaker 3: down to twenty or thirty minutes, and it's hard to
Speaker 3: tell the whole story. When you've got some of these stories,
Speaker 3: I would say, you know what, we're not trying to
Speaker 3: fit it into a TV channel like we used to be,
Speaker 3: like this, this is YouTube, like hey, you know what,
Speaker 3: people could fast forward through if they don't want to
Speaker 3: watch it all. And you know, but for the ones,
Speaker 3: I really enjoy that story. I mean, they're just great
Speaker 3: stories and like you just find yourself, you know, I
Speaker 3: mean I find myself just at the edge of my
Speaker 3: seat following along, so so free.
Speaker 2: I'm so glad that we have that freedom now of
Speaker 2: longer length. You know, the twenty two minute TV shows
Speaker 2: of the you know, back in the day, that is
Speaker 2: not enough to hardly do anything. So it's not I'm
Speaker 2: all about these forty five minute, hour long almost We're
Speaker 2: getting films now. Yeah, and these dear deserve.
Speaker 3: That, yeah yeah, yeah yeah truth.
Speaker 2: So well, Mike, I'm glad we finally got to chat.
Speaker 2: I really appreciate you taking the time to do this.
Speaker 3: Thank you, yeah, man, thanks for having me. Hopefully we
Speaker 3: can do it again sometime.
Speaker 2: I hope we can. I'm sure that next year I'm
Speaker 2: gonna have to get you on the show to talk
Speaker 2: about killing moss at five and a half with double
Speaker 2: drops and thirteen inch brow times and all that kind
Speaker 2: of stuff. So let's just cut that with calender now, okay,
Speaker 2: I only hope, all right, let's plan on it. Appreciate it, Bud,
Speaker 2: all right, and that's going to wrap it up for
Speaker 2: us today. Appreciate you listening. I hope you've had a
Speaker 2: wonderful twenty twenty three. I hope your hunting season has
Speaker 2: been fun, successful. I hope you've learned some things, and
Speaker 2: I hope, as we all try to do every year,
Speaker 2: I hope you've grown. And next year, hey, it should
Speaker 2: be even better. So enjoy the holidays. Merry Christmas, Happy
Speaker 2: New Year. Whatever are you doing however you're celebrating. I
Speaker 2: hope it's great. And until next time, stay wired to
Speaker 2: hun