Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide
Speaker 1: to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, and now your host,
Speaker 1: Tony Peterson. Hey everyone, welcome to the Wire to Hunt
Speaker 1: Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Tony Peterson. Today's episode is all about
Speaker 1: how and why you need to give yourself as many
Speaker 1: ambush options as you can. Here's the thing, guys, it's
Speaker 1: go time. This is the time of year where if
Speaker 1: you're going to get something accomplished deer wise, you better
Speaker 1: get on it. People are going to be arrowing velvet
Speaker 1: bucks this week, with every passing day opening up new
Speaker 1: seasons across the country, it's deer season or damn near.
Speaker 1: And there is this thing we should all consider to
Speaker 1: be more successful as deer hunters. All are options. How
Speaker 1: mobile are we? How many stand sets do we have up,
Speaker 1: how many blinds do we have? Brushed in? The more
Speaker 1: the freaking merrier, my friends, which is what this episode
Speaker 1: is all about. I grew up in a little dairy
Speaker 1: farming community in southeastern Minnesota. There were benefits to that lifestyle.
Speaker 1: For sure. You knew damn near everyone in your community.
Speaker 1: And if you didn't directly know them, you knew of them.
Speaker 1: We had one stoplight, so traffic wasn't something we planned around.
Speaker 1: And while you couldn't order a pizza and have it delivered,
Speaker 1: for at least most of my childhood, I know you
Speaker 1: could visit the small town staples like Dairy Queen and
Speaker 1: get a burger in a blizzard. We worked on farms
Speaker 1: in the summer, bailing hay mostly, and at least for
Speaker 1: much of my youth, no one cared if they looked
Speaker 1: out in the back pasture and saw some kids fishing
Speaker 1: Smalley's or trout in the stream that wound its way
Speaker 1: across their land. Now, of course, this is a nostalgic
Speaker 1: look back at the good things about small town life.
Speaker 1: The bad thing, if I'm being totally honest, at least,
Speaker 1: was that the options for a girlfriend were pretty limited.
Speaker 1: My graduating class consisted of like seventy three people, less
Speaker 1: than half of which sported XX chromosomes. Competition for a
Speaker 1: limited resource is always well interesting, and it wasn't until
Speaker 1: my first few days at one known a state university
Speaker 1: that I realized how nice it is to have a
Speaker 1: lot of options. One elevator ride up to the tenth
Speaker 1: floor of She and Hall, which is women's dorm, was
Speaker 1: like stepping from a life of poverty and famine to
Speaker 1: one of unimaginable riches. Options are a good thing. Not
Speaker 1: only does this apply to rutting college kids, but running
Speaker 1: bucks as well. I honestly think one of the big
Speaker 1: things that holds an awful lot of hunters back is
Speaker 1: limited ambush options, or put it a better way, how
Speaker 1: we limited ourselves with everything we do as far as
Speaker 1: where we want to sit or where we're gonna sit
Speaker 1: to wait for a deer to come by. Now, I
Speaker 1: got a Wirior to Hunt episode coming out here shortly
Speaker 1: with the One and Only Andy May, where he describes
Speaker 1: getting creative with his stands to make a killer spot
Speaker 1: work when conventional methods just wouldn't cut it. No, I
Speaker 1: don't want to spoil it for you, but it's a
Speaker 1: perfect example of why being open to as many ambush
Speaker 1: options as possible is often what separates the big buck
Speaker 1: killers from the rest. Now, options can be broken into
Speaker 1: two main categories. You've got your mobile you know, and
Speaker 1: then you've got your set it and forget it. Basically,
Speaker 1: we all know the mobile options saddles are the big
Speaker 1: one these days, but you can opt for a lightweight
Speaker 1: standing sticks or a climbing stand, or you can throw
Speaker 1: on a Gilli suit and talk into a deadfall somewhere.
Speaker 1: Mobile has a lot of different ways you can do
Speaker 1: it now the set it, forget it options, or anything
Speaker 1: from heavier hang on stands, two ladder stands to ex blinds.
Speaker 1: Depending on whether you're hunting the family farm or attracted
Speaker 1: public land, your options will be dictated by the type
Speaker 1: of ground. First and foremost, the public land hunter isn't
Speaker 1: likely to spend several grand on a tower blind and
Speaker 1: then use their tractor to put it up on the
Speaker 1: best spot of open to all ground, although I have
Speaker 1: to say some of the stands that people put up
Speaker 1: on public land do blow my mind. In Wisconsin, where
Speaker 1: I hunt, you're not even allowed to leave up stands
Speaker 1: overnight on some parcels. Yet I can find double ladder
Speaker 1: stands without too much trouble. Ladder stands, I might add
Speaker 1: that don't appear to be going up and down with
Speaker 1: each rotation or the earth anyway. That's an obvious point.
Speaker 1: You first have to figure out what kind of ambush
Speaker 1: sites you can use on where you hunt. But this
Speaker 1: is also a great argument for not just settling for
Speaker 1: one spot either. Over there in Wisconsin where I hunt,
Speaker 1: I own two properties. I put up blinds in the
Speaker 1: summer for the girls, and I have several stands I
Speaker 1: put up for season long bow hunting. Down the road,
Speaker 1: you can find thousands upon thousands of acres of public land.
Speaker 1: This is a much different scenario than my private ground
Speaker 1: and demands a mobile set up. Interestingly, the dying art
Speaker 1: of using a climbing stand often comes into play on
Speaker 1: those tracks because some of them are owned by timber companies,
Speaker 1: which leaves seed trees that are often just straight trunked,
Speaker 1: perfect for climbing stand type of trees. They're also often
Speaker 1: located along logging roads. In other areas, you might expect
Speaker 1: a white tail to walk on the key to those trees,
Speaker 1: and that mostly unpopular style of mobile hunting is knowing
Speaker 1: where those trees are and when you'd use them with
Speaker 1: a climber. This isn't something I necessarily always want to
Speaker 1: figure out in the moment. The lesson here kind of
Speaker 1: transcends climbing stands too. If you're into saddles and you
Speaker 1: think they give you tons and tons of options. Well,
Speaker 1: you're right, but the dominant style of thought around saddles
Speaker 1: and other mobile strategies is to slip in, find some
Speaker 1: amazing big buck sign, silently ascend, and then shoot a
Speaker 1: buck in his lungs as a yawn stretches and stands
Speaker 1: up in his bed. That can work, but it's also
Speaker 1: not a bad idea to know where you might want
Speaker 1: to go hunt throughout the season and what trees you
Speaker 1: might want to ascend into. When you think about setting
Speaker 1: stands on a private piece where you can leave them
Speaker 1: all fall, it's usually about breaking them up to cover
Speaker 1: different parts of the season. You might set a blind
Speaker 1: on a bean field or a food plot for the
Speaker 1: early season, then a couple of stands in a thicker
Speaker 1: cover for mid season when the leaves start to fall
Speaker 1: in the bucks go into October mode. You'll probably also
Speaker 1: hang a stand or two for the rut wherever you
Speaker 1: can find a terrain trap on your hunting grounds. This
Speaker 1: strategy should address the changes in deer movement up until
Speaker 1: the post rut late season hunts. Anyway, mobile hunters would
Speaker 1: be well served to think that way as well, even
Speaker 1: if they can't go out in the late summer. And
Speaker 1: set things up for a season long plan. This is
Speaker 1: one of the often unspoken aspects of being a serious
Speaker 1: dear scouter. If you winter scout, spring scout, and summer scout,
Speaker 1: and then in season scout man, you're filling the database
Speaker 1: with a lot of good data points. And not only
Speaker 1: do they represent good hunting spots or potentially at hunting
Speaker 1: spots anyway, but they also represent a timeline of potentially
Speaker 1: action filled hunts throughout the whole season. When you scout
Speaker 1: in the late winter, I don't know. You might find
Speaker 1: a banging rub line leading from a bench on a
Speaker 1: ridge line down to a creek bottom. You might find
Speaker 1: a monster bed tucked into an alder thicket, or you
Speaker 1: might find a series of washouts that culminated one good
Speaker 1: crossing at the bottom where if a deer wants to
Speaker 1: go from one side to the other, that's about their
Speaker 1: only option. All of those individually are great finds, They
Speaker 1: are all wins in my book. But you start putting
Speaker 1: a few of them together on a specific property, and
Speaker 1: now you're in business. Now you're looking at a full
Speaker 1: season's worth of spots. And when you use that in
Speaker 1: conjunction with what you're seeing while actually hunting. You're really
Speaker 1: onto something. But there's a caveat to this stuff, which
Speaker 1: brings us back to that mention of Andy May at
Speaker 1: the beginning of the episode. A spoiler alert here, but
Speaker 1: Andy's story involves using a small step ladder and not
Speaker 1: a great stand tree set up and hunt a spot
Speaker 1: that he felt just needed to be hunted. This is
Speaker 1: an important lesson, my friends. When I talk about options,
Speaker 1: I mean two things. Scouting to find as many good
Speaker 1: hunting locations as possible, but also having a way to
Speaker 1: hunt just about any spot you can find. This is
Speaker 1: honestly one of the biggest hangups most of us have,
Speaker 1: and I run into it all the time and often
Speaker 1: have to make concessions of some sort to make spot work.
Speaker 1: I'll take a little area on a farm in southeastern Minnesota,
Speaker 1: for example. It's a few acres on one side of
Speaker 1: a trout stream where deer come and go from an
Speaker 1: eighty acre sanctuary that it borders. But because there are
Speaker 1: only a few acres on that side I can hunt,
Speaker 1: I'm really limited with wind direction, really limited with access too.
Speaker 1: But the deer there they use it a lot, and
Speaker 1: they use it all season, and it can be an
Speaker 1: absolute cruiser fest during the rut. The trees in the
Speaker 1: spot are okay, but the ground cover is almost non existent.
Speaker 1: So what do you do. You hang a stand in
Speaker 1: the best tree you can high because there isn't much cover,
Speaker 1: and you hope they take the trails that are up
Speaker 1: wind and not downwind. It's not ideal because some take
Speaker 1: trails where they're going to get you and that's just
Speaker 1: the name of the game. But that spot needs to
Speaker 1: be hunted and there are only so many ways to
Speaker 1: do it. Another example to highlight this happened to me
Speaker 1: in North Dakota, like I don't know five or six
Speaker 1: years ago. The bucks were crossing a little Missouri river
Speaker 1: in multiple spots. With the low flow, they didn't really
Speaker 1: need to cross on any given trail, and it seemed
Speaker 1: like the movement was actually pretty random, but it wasn't,
Speaker 1: because it rarely ever is. They were actually using three
Speaker 1: different trails, all within about a quarter of a mile stretch.
Speaker 1: One trail seemed to be really popular, likely because it
Speaker 1: led right to a sagging low spot in a fence.
Speaker 1: It also took the deer right through a section of
Speaker 1: the bank that hasn't had a suitable stand tree and
Speaker 1: it since Teddy Roosevelt was falling in love with that
Speaker 1: broken terrain that was some time ago, my friends. Due
Speaker 1: to extreme wins and some desperation, I decided to try
Speaker 1: to set up and kill a buck on that trail,
Speaker 1: even though I had to leave my stands at camp.
Speaker 1: The best option was the skeleton of a long dead
Speaker 1: cotton wood that fell back to earth amongst a patch
Speaker 1: of sagebrush. When I crawled in there after a quick
Speaker 1: rattlesnake check, I realized two things. The first one that
Speaker 1: I was going to have to do my best puck
Speaker 1: Stani fil impression and just barely poke my head about
Speaker 1: the cover. The second was that it was a pretty
Speaker 1: damn good natural blind provided I could stay low enough
Speaker 1: while I did, and when a familiar group of doze
Speaker 1: one buck crossed the river, several of them got to
Speaker 1: blowgun range before the buck made his way down the trail.
Speaker 1: He never busted me drawing, and neither it did his girlfriends,
Speaker 1: which was a miracle. Now, maybe because they didn't expect
Speaker 1: anyone to be right there. I don't know. I do
Speaker 1: know that it was a hunt saver, mostly because I
Speaker 1: decided i'd rather figure out a way to hunt that
Speaker 1: spot than not. Now, this is a necessity. When you
Speaker 1: travel a lot to hunt public land. You just don't
Speaker 1: have the option to set stands ahead of time. At
Speaker 1: least you almost never do, and you're usually on a
Speaker 1: pretty limited schedule. Not hunting isn't an option, so you
Speaker 1: have to try to make things work for you. It's
Speaker 1: easy to understand that when you have an expensive nonresident
Speaker 1: tag in your pocket in four days to get it done.
Speaker 1: But the same message applies to really all of our hunts,
Speaker 1: even if we don't think we need to listen to it.
Speaker 1: Because we've both hunted the same family ground since we
Speaker 1: were twelve. This idea plays off as something I fully
Speaker 1: believe in that it's better to go to the deer
Speaker 1: than ask the deer to come to us. If the
Speaker 1: bucks show you that they want to be in a
Speaker 1: gnarly creek bottom or a cat tail slue and not
Speaker 1: the dreamy patch of deciduous for us that has two
Speaker 1: thousand perfect stand trees in it, then the bucks are
Speaker 1: telling you everything you need to know in a really
Speaker 1: how you got a hunt them? Well, not really. You
Speaker 1: have to figure out how to hunt those environments, which
Speaker 1: is a real challenge and surprise, surprise probably a pretty
Speaker 1: good reason why the bucks are there, and you can
Speaker 1: try to make it work with your chosen ambush metho that,
Speaker 1: or you can consider your options and try to get creative.
Speaker 1: Let's take the cat tail sleu for example. You could
Speaker 1: pick the next closest cover with trees and put up
Speaker 1: a standard saddle, but that might take you so far
Speaker 1: away from the bucks want to be that you're essentially
Speaker 1: a long range observer with the hope in your heart
Speaker 1: and deer tags that will most likely go unfilled. Or
Speaker 1: you could get to that edge somehow and hunt them.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's a natural blind in a patch of willows
Speaker 1: or sumac, Or maybe it's a pop up blind set
Speaker 1: up to shoot where a trail not only enters the
Speaker 1: cat tails but also intersects with the inevitable trail that's
Speaker 1: going to parallel the outside edge of that cover. Maybe
Speaker 1: you can wait for a windy or a rainy day
Speaker 1: and try to glass a buck heading into the cat
Speaker 1: tails to see where he bets. If the conditions really
Speaker 1: favor you, you might maybe, and this is a big,
Speaker 1: big big maybe be able to sneak in and shoot
Speaker 1: him where he stands in his bed where hell, you
Speaker 1: might pick up a lightweight tripod stand and set it
Speaker 1: up on the edge. While these options aren't great for
Speaker 1: bow hunting in the close range game it involves that
Speaker 1: can be a super effective strategy for gun hunting. Just
Speaker 1: getting to the ten foot level so you have a
Speaker 1: better shot angle in a view of the cover. That
Speaker 1: can be a real game changer. And I think this
Speaker 1: is a lost opportunity with a lot of gun hunters,
Speaker 1: So I'll say this, Think about your preferred ambush style
Speaker 1: or styles, think about how often you use them and
Speaker 1: in what spots you use them, But also think about
Speaker 1: the spots you want to hunt where you just don't
Speaker 1: think that style is feasible. Is there another way to
Speaker 1: get it done that doesn't involve that coushy ladder stand
Speaker 1: you really want to sit in. It might be as
Speaker 1: simple as bringing in pruners in a cushion and hunting
Speaker 1: from a natural blind. While the visibility will be limited
Speaker 1: compared to being in a tree, you can often set
Speaker 1: up right where you need to with the style, and
Speaker 1: when the deer do show up, the shot opportunities are
Speaker 1: usually pretty sweet. Or maybe just feel like you burn
Speaker 1: out your best areas too quickly and would like to
Speaker 1: spread out the pressure. This is an important one, especially
Speaker 1: for a lot of us who might have permission to
Speaker 1: hunt small parcels. If you only give yourself twenty or
Speaker 1: thirty acres to hunt an entire season, you're right for
Speaker 1: partial or total burnout. Even if you only hunt a
Speaker 1: couple of days each week, Tacking on new ambush styles
Speaker 1: and finding some spots on the public land is a
Speaker 1: half hour away can be a huge benefit here. Now
Speaker 1: offer this as a parting thought to piggyback onto this
Speaker 1: as well. Oftentimes, the willingness to give ourselves a few
Speaker 1: more options is the best way to remedy our own mistakes.
Speaker 1: We always think of it in terms of out hunting
Speaker 1: the deer and the other hunters, which is certainly true.
Speaker 1: But when it comes to how dear learn about us
Speaker 1: and our tendencies, and just where we like to park
Speaker 1: and what stands we love to hunt, we give them
Speaker 1: just about everything they need to not get killed by us.
Speaker 1: A few more options, both in stand and blind sights,
Speaker 1: and the willingness to mix up strategies to be able
Speaker 1: to hunt wherever they're dear demanded of us can really
Speaker 1: be the difference maker. This is something you hear about
Speaker 1: a lot in states that allow baiting, particularly states that
Speaker 1: allow automated feeders. Good luck finding someone who runs a
Speaker 1: feeder like that who also doesn't have a camera on
Speaker 1: it and a standard of blind set up twenty yards away.
Speaker 1: But the corn that that little feeder throws out isn't
Speaker 1: as big of a draw to mature bucks as survival is.
Speaker 1: And there's nothing with more gravity for hunters than the
Speaker 1: thought of sitting right where the feeder is going to
Speaker 1: throw a cup or two of corn on the ground
Speaker 1: for the critters. But a buck with a few seasons
Speaker 1: under his belt is probably pretty wise to that trap.
Speaker 1: While he may not come in with the does and
Speaker 1: scrappers during daylight, he'll often hang out a ways back
Speaker 1: and let things get real dark and less dangerous. The
Speaker 1: hunter who recognizes this could back up into the thick
Speaker 1: stuff where the rubs are and set up a different
Speaker 1: way to kill that unkillable feeder buck. It happens every year.
Speaker 1: It happens in far more scenarios than just this example.
Speaker 1: So give yourself some options, my friends, Think about your
Speaker 1: preferred hunting style, what you have set up for the season,
Speaker 1: think about all that stuff and how you can hunt
Speaker 1: more effectively and more efficiently by giving yourself some more
Speaker 1: ground to hunt and more ways in which to hunt it.
Speaker 1: That's it for this week, my dear obsessed friends. I'm
Speaker 1: Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast,
Speaker 1: which is brought to you by First Light. As always,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for listening. All of us here
Speaker 1: at meat Eater Wired Hunt really really appreciate it. And
Speaker 1: if you need a little bit more White Hill wisdom,
Speaker 1: you can head on over to our wire to Hunt
Speaker 1: YouTube channel to watch a ton of videos that Mark
Speaker 1: and I produce based around all kinds of how to
Speaker 1: strategies and techniques. Or you can head on over to
Speaker 1: the meatator dot com slash wired and see tons of
Speaker 1: articles covering all kinds of topics around here hunting