Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide
Speaker 1: to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light,
Speaker 1: creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind.
Speaker 1: First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host
Speaker 1: Tony Peterson.
Speaker 2: Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast,
Speaker 2: which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host,
Speaker 2: Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about how a
Speaker 2: lot of hunters seem to think they can get things
Speaker 2: perfect or almost perfect during their deer hunts, and how
Speaker 2: that just never really happens and it's actually not necessary.
Speaker 2: I'm becoming more and more convinced that the reason hunting
Speaker 2: is so hard for most of us is because the
Speaker 2: delta between what we expect on our hunts and what
Speaker 2: we actually get is too huge to overcome. It breaks
Speaker 2: in our little hairless monkey brains, and we don't know
Speaker 2: how to react. We keep chasing the idea of the
Speaker 2: perfect hunt or the perfect setup and it just doesn't
Speaker 2: really exist. Well, actually it does exist, it just doesn't
Speaker 2: come around that often. Learning to live with that is
Speaker 2: honestly the key to figuring this thing out enough to
Speaker 2: have consistency and success, which is what I'm going to
Speaker 2: talk about right now. Have you ever heard the phrase
Speaker 2: don't let perfect be the enemy of good? That phrase
Speaker 2: is often attributed to Voltaire, a French philosopher who I
Speaker 2: don't remember anything about other than having to read some
Speaker 2: of his stuff in a seventeenth century literature course I
Speaker 2: had in college, which was a long time ago. That statement,
Speaker 2: which actually started out as the best is the enemy
Speaker 2: of the good, but in French, which I don't speak,
Speaker 2: it's somehow morphed into what we commonly say today. Now,
Speaker 2: the saying might not come up a lot in your
Speaker 2: daily life, but the sentiment probably does. We are force
Speaker 2: fed the look of perfection all the time, so much
Speaker 2: so that we revel in seeing people make mistakes. And
Speaker 2: in a lot of industries, if you really want to
Speaker 2: stand out, you should actually not shy away from all
Speaker 2: of your mistakes. That has been a pretty good thing
Speaker 2: for my career, to be honest, because I make a
Speaker 2: lot of mistakes and it never felt right to hide
Speaker 2: them all, to project an image of a hunter and
Speaker 2: a person that just isn't real. It's easy to think
Speaker 2: perfection is or near perfection is Anyway, I recently saw
Speaker 2: a podcast interview with a fellow who is well known
Speaker 2: in the white tail space who said something to the
Speaker 2: effect of three and a half year old bucks or
Speaker 2: the dumbest deer in the woods. If you give me
Speaker 2: an hour, I'll kill a deer of that age. Now,
Speaker 2: to the poorly informed, that might hint at perfection on
Speaker 2: that dude's part, but I'd say it's more of being
Speaker 2: totally delusional due to hunting candyland for thirty years. No
Speaker 2: one who hunts public land in Pennsylvania would make that
Speaker 2: statement with a straight face, unless they are the kind
Speaker 2: of person who eats crans for the nutritional value and
Speaker 2: who boofs monster energy drinks because it takes too long
Speaker 2: for them to hit by ingesting them how they are
Speaker 2: intended to be consumed.
Speaker 3: Perfection doesn't exist in people.
Speaker 2: I was reminded of this recently well watching videos of
Speaker 2: past bass Master tournaments like a totally cool and normal
Speaker 2: guy does, and I saw a recap of Attorney that
Speaker 2: I think was on Santi Cooper down in South Carolina
Speaker 2: from about ten years ago. One of the anglers who
Speaker 2: got a lot of screen time in that tournament is
Speaker 2: a fellow named Kevin Van Dam. To anyone with even
Speaker 2: a passing interest in bass fishing, that name is probably
Speaker 2: familiar to the walleye fisherman and worse, the non fisherman
Speaker 2: in the audience. I'll give you a quick rundown a KVD.
Speaker 2: He's a Michigan born fella who had a thirty plus
Speaker 2: year career in tournament fishing, which if you look at
Speaker 2: his bass Master stats alone, tell a story of someone
Speaker 2: who is without question, one of the best, and if
Speaker 2: not the best. He fished three hundred and fourteen tournaments
Speaker 2: and made the Classic twenty eight times. He won that
Speaker 2: four times, which has him breathing some rarefied air. He
Speaker 2: also racked up twenty five first place finishes in tournaments
Speaker 2: against the best of the best. He had sixteen seconds
Speaker 2: and eighteen thirds. Out of those three hundred and fourteen tournaments.
Speaker 2: He finished in the top ten one hundred and twelve times.
Speaker 2: Over the course of those tournaments, he brought almost twelve
Speaker 2: thousand pounds of bass to the scales, and he won
Speaker 2: almost six and a half million bucks. I have a
Speaker 2: good buddy who followed KVD for a day on a
Speaker 2: tournament down in Oklahoma just to watch him, which is
Speaker 2: a thing in those tournaments, and he said that he's
Speaker 2: never seen anyone who could cast farther or more accurately.
Speaker 2: And this is coming from a guy who won over
Speaker 2: one hundred grand last summer fishing alone, so he knows
Speaker 2: his stuff. In the tournament that I watched, KVD caught
Speaker 2: a giant on a crank bait. I don't remember if
Speaker 2: it was eight or ten pounds, but even for down South,
Speaker 2: it was just a huge, large mouth. What blew my
Speaker 2: mind was that when he went to remove both sets
Speaker 2: of treble hooks, he absent mindedly pulled way harder on
Speaker 2: the crank bait than he probably should have, and he
Speaker 2: buried one of the hooks into the palm of his hand.
Speaker 2: It was such a dumb moved witness I couldn't belie
Speaker 2: leave it. But it was also understandable because we all
Speaker 2: do dumb stuff.
Speaker 3: Even the guys.
Speaker 2: Who are the best of the best at whatever they
Speaker 2: do still make mistakes like that. He had to have
Speaker 2: an observer come over to his boat and do that
Speaker 2: method of hook removal, which involves looping some heavy braid
Speaker 2: around the hook and doing a very quick yank to
Speaker 2: free it. That's a move I've done a few times
Speaker 2: on myself, most memorably with a dry fly stuck into
Speaker 2: my hand one day on a little stream in southern Minnesota,
Speaker 2: and I can say that it is both effective and
Speaker 2: generally not that much fun. It's better than cutting them
Speaker 2: out with a utility knife for pushing them all the
Speaker 2: way through to pinch the barb, though, both of which
Speaker 2: I've done, and I don't recommend seeing KVD do that
Speaker 2: move with that crankbait and then move on to go
Speaker 2: catch a whole bunch of fish and collect a giant
Speaker 2: paycheck for fishing that would equal the entire yearly salary
Speaker 2: of someone considered lower middle class here in the Midwest.
Speaker 2: Reminded me of what makes people good at fishing, and
Speaker 2: then of course hunting. They just move on from their
Speaker 2: mistakes and they keep trying. They don't stress too hard
Speaker 2: when they make mistakes because they accept them as a
Speaker 2: part of the whole deal. Now, what does this have
Speaker 2: to do with you and I and deer hunting. Well,
Speaker 2: a lot, and some of it is obvious and some
Speaker 2: of it probably is not. The obvious lesson is the
Speaker 2: one I just stated, which is that you're gonna screw
Speaker 2: up a lot, but how you move on from those
Speaker 2: mistakes is really what matters. The less obvious reality here
Speaker 2: is that a lot of us become so scared of
Speaker 2: making a mistake that we don't even try until every
Speaker 2: possible advantage that we can get is fully realized, and
Speaker 2: even then it mostly doesn't work. Let me give you
Speaker 2: an example here that I think sort of highlights this.
Speaker 2: When I hunted Nebraska last year with Steve and his
Speaker 2: buddy on that big old ranch down there. I had
Speaker 2: to find the spots that cruising bucks would travel through,
Speaker 2: pretty simple rut stuff, but the trouble was that the
Speaker 2: amount of available stand trees wasn't great. I see this
Speaker 2: a lot in my life. If I hunt someplace where
Speaker 2: the stand trees are plentiful, like northern Wisconsin, the deer
Speaker 2: usually aren't play and they are usually very wary of
Speaker 2: a two hundred pound camel blob in a tree. In
Speaker 2: areas with few trees, the deer don't get hunted out
Speaker 2: of them as often, and they often don't look up
Speaker 2: as much. But you have to settle for the trees
Speaker 2: you can make work and sit on the ground If
Speaker 2: there are no workable trees where you want to hunt. Steve,
Speaker 2: coming from Michigan and who has mostly taken a break
Speaker 2: from bow hunting white tails for a couple decades now,
Speaker 2: has the mindset of a lot of hunters that you
Speaker 2: have to get pretty high up in a tree to
Speaker 2: kill them.
Speaker 3: I feel that.
Speaker 2: Way in some places, like over in Wisconsin, unless I'm
Speaker 2: in a really good multi trunk tree or a pine
Speaker 2: tree that offers real cover. But in Nebraska, those ranch
Speaker 2: deer weren't the smartest deer in the herd, and they
Speaker 2: don't get hunted out of trees a whole lot. We
Speaker 2: didn't need to be twenty two feet up. We just
Speaker 2: needed to be up as far as we could get,
Speaker 2: which in most of the cases I found was probably
Speaker 2: in like the twelve to sixteen foot range. I just
Speaker 2: wasn't going to find the perfect pinch point that also
Speaker 2: had the perfect tree and perfect access, But that didn't
Speaker 2: matter because we didn't need it. We needed the spot first,
Speaker 2: which is the most important thing. Access that's always important too,
Speaker 2: but not crazy important since you know that specifically was
Speaker 2: a rout hunt where the bucks could show up at
Speaker 2: any time and they were covering a lot of ground.
Speaker 3: Now I wanted perfect trees. I just didn't get them.
Speaker 2: I got trees I could work with, and in some
Speaker 2: spots no trees I could work with, which led me
Speaker 2: to using blinds. I knew we would make some concessions
Speaker 2: on our setups, but that is how it goes almost
Speaker 2: everywhere I hunt. Very rarely do I find a spot
Speaker 2: that I fully believe in that also has unbelievable access
Speaker 2: and the kind of trees that allow you to set
Speaker 2: up twenty yards down wind with a low likelihood of
Speaker 2: getting picked off. I spent a lot of time this
Speaker 2: past spring hunting turkeys on public land, and I can
Speaker 2: tell you something. The minute you walk into an unfamiliar
Speaker 2: piece of ground and try to kill something that you
Speaker 2: know has been hunted hard for a month, you realize
Speaker 2: that you're not even going to get in.
Speaker 3: The ballpark up perfect.
Speaker 2: You'd kill for a good enough spot, and even then
Speaker 2: you'll have something that works against you. Four days I
Speaker 2: walked into random chunks of public land in central Wisconsin
Speaker 2: to try to call in a gobbler, and for days
Speaker 2: I didn't do that. I did find one spot that
Speaker 2: had a lot of sign and some hens that were vocal,
Speaker 2: but I had to cross two rivers to get there,
Speaker 2: and it was in a floodplain with stagnant water everywhere,
Speaker 2: so the mosquitoes were damn near biblical and they drove
Speaker 2: me out after seven hours, honestly, just couldn't take it anymore,
Speaker 2: and having left my thermosil at home, I felt like
Speaker 2: it was my first day on the job. Those birds
Speaker 2: were there because they felt no one with an ounce
Speaker 2: of brains would sit in there and try to kill them.
Speaker 2: White Tail hunting goes like that a lot too, But
Speaker 2: even when you do things right and really make good decisions,
Speaker 2: you'll mostly get your knackers kicked in. That's how it goes,
Speaker 2: and I think we mostly know that. So I see
Speaker 2: a lot of hunters sort of fall into a few
Speaker 2: different camps. Some folks will claim, you know, they don't
Speaker 2: care what they shoot, or if they do shoot one,
Speaker 2: they'll say they're not into it for the antlers or whatever.
Speaker 2: But I think most of that is a coping mechanism
Speaker 2: to soften the blow of the almost inevitable failure that
Speaker 2: we all run into out there. I don't know too
Speaker 2: many hunters who actually don't want to shoot some deer,
Speaker 2: let alone big bucks. We have other hunters who strive
Speaker 2: to be tacticians but kind of get locked into the
Speaker 2: paralysis by analysis mentality, which if you know anything about
Speaker 2: any of the other whitetail hunters here at Meat Eater
Speaker 2: can clue hint who might just fall into that category.
Speaker 2: To them, it's a thinking man's game, which white tail
Speaker 2: hunting is, but it also just is partly instinct. Look,
Speaker 2: this isn't physics, where eventually the right math will explain
Speaker 2: the forces of nature. A lot of this can be
Speaker 2: reasoned out to some extent, but there are far too
Speaker 2: many variables to factor in to ever make it truly predictable,
Speaker 2: at least if you don't hunt a place where the
Speaker 2: deer are essentially being grown to be killed. This type
Speaker 2: of is low key obsessed with perfection and keeps them
Speaker 2: from taking risks and trying things that have higher failure
Speaker 2: rate than they find acceptable. This is the reason why
Speaker 2: so many people who figured out how to grow big
Speaker 2: dear also happen to have backgrounds in engineering. That mind
Speaker 2: is built to solve problems and find easy solutions to
Speaker 2: the big questions. And if the big question is how
Speaker 2: do I kill one hundred and eighty inch deer every year.
Speaker 2: One solution is to figure out how to get enough
Speaker 2: money to buy enough land that can be turned into
Speaker 2: a deer paradise with tightly controlled pressure. That doesn't necessarily
Speaker 2: make them better hunters, but it does make them wildly successful,
Speaker 2: and it certainly removes a lot of the variables that
Speaker 2: conspire against most hunters to take a perfect plan and
Speaker 2: turn it into grade A dog shit. I think acknowledging
Speaker 2: that you'll mostly get things somewhat wrong, and that you'll miss,
Speaker 2: and you'll get winded, and you'll bump your target buck
Speaker 2: on the way in, and whatever else that can go wrong,
Speaker 2: just eventually will I think that's the best setup we
Speaker 2: can take to moving ourselves into a spot where we
Speaker 2: become better hunters. If you know you'll get winded sometimes,
Speaker 2: but you hunt anyway, you're going to level up somehow.
Speaker 2: Not only will you figure out how to not get
Speaker 2: winded as often, you'll find out that some of your
Speaker 2: fears were overblown, and that making a mistake, even when
Speaker 2: you know you'll probably make it's not the end of
Speaker 2: the world. This is also a good way to condition
Speaker 2: ourselves to try things that have a higher risk, higher
Speaker 2: reward ratio, which I think is super important now. You
Speaker 2: don't want to be overly cavalier and your hunting strategies,
Speaker 2: but trying things you don't think will work, or putting
Speaker 2: yourself in a position where you're more likely to get
Speaker 2: busted or less likely to see a mature buck will
Speaker 2: change you, probably for the better. You don't learn a
Speaker 2: whole lot about yourself or the deer if you only
Speaker 2: hunt the first week of November when the weather is perfect.
Speaker 2: You'll certainly kill some deer, or at least you'll get
Speaker 2: your shot, but you won't learn much. We all know
Speaker 2: that's a good strategy, but it leaves out a whole
Speaker 2: lot of weeks you could be hunting. It's also true
Speaker 2: that even if you did only hunt the first week
Speaker 2: of November, you'd likely have years where you didn't shoot one.
Speaker 2: Sometimes you go out and everything seems perfect and you
Speaker 2: get your ass handed to you. Anyway, that's the kind
Speaker 2: of thing that keeps a lot of people from trying,
Speaker 2: because it shatters the illusion of what are solved for
Speaker 2: this problem really is. This is the danger in striving
Speaker 2: for or expecting a near perfect hunt. When you don't
Speaker 2: get it, which you mostly won't, Then how you react
Speaker 2: and keep moving forward matters a whole lot, and that's
Speaker 2: a problem a lot of hunters have because they don't
Speaker 2: handle that well. I know that because I'm one of
Speaker 2: those hunters. But I've also learned that it's also an
Speaker 2: absolute truth in my outdoor life that that's the outcome
Speaker 2: more often than not. The only way to deal with
Speaker 2: it for me personally is just keep going out. The
Speaker 2: more I do that, the more those mistakes become less
Speaker 2: meaningful as I stack up the hours and the eventual
Speaker 2: encounters with deer that happen because of me. Just keep
Speaker 2: it on, and even then, when I do get things
Speaker 2: right and earn the perfect shot opportunity, I often don't
Speaker 2: deliver a perfect shot. The reason bow hunting white tailed
Speaker 2: deer is so damn rewarding is that if we are
Speaker 2: all being really honest about it, it's really freaking hard.
Speaker 2: It only gets harder the more we expect it to
Speaker 2: go a certain way, because it rarely does. Now I
Speaker 2: guess I should wrap this up by saying you can
Speaker 2: also go too far in the wrong direction. Here with
Speaker 2: accepting mistakes and trying risky hunting strategies, the game has
Speaker 2: to be played a certain way, and if you try
Speaker 2: to color outside the lines too much, you're gonna fail.
Speaker 2: This is why when someone comes out and they have
Speaker 2: the method for killing deer that is new and novel,
Speaker 2: I generally feel a giant amount of skepticism. The deer
Speaker 2: are beatable. But in the parameters of our game laws,
Speaker 2: in our reality of the hunting situations we find ourselves in,
Speaker 2: there are just ways to go about it that will
Speaker 2: work over a long enough timeline. It's generally is not
Speaker 2: going to be some kind of new bed hunting strategy
Speaker 2: or stocking them with gilli suits or whatever. It'll usually
Speaker 2: just be planting your butt into a stand over and over,
Speaker 2: or maybe in a ground line you know, when the
Speaker 2: wind is blowing just good enough and the odds aren't
Speaker 2: zero that he'll move, which is almost any time you're
Speaker 2: out there if you.
Speaker 3: Don't leave that.
Speaker 2: Consider that Kevin van dam hook to the hand moment
Speaker 2: during that tournament, almost no one and maybe honestly no one,
Speaker 2: is better at fishing fast than him get He made
Speaker 2: a dumb in the moment decision that cost him time
Speaker 2: and could have cost him a better finish. Given that truth,
Speaker 2: what are the odds that some random accountant or plumber
Speaker 2: or car salesman or whatever is going into the woods
Speaker 2: with a plan so good that it's going to work
Speaker 2: out easily, just like it's supposed to. That's not how
Speaker 2: it works, but it's also worth the effort. And if
Speaker 2: you accept your mistakes and your inability to reach perfection,
Speaker 2: you'll end up in a place where you give yourself
Speaker 2: a little more grace, You move on from the mess
Speaker 2: ups a little quicker, and you realize that what it
Speaker 2: takes to kill Big.
Speaker 3: Bucks is not a perfect plan.
Speaker 2: It's a plan with some flaws in it, executed by
Speaker 2: a flawed human over enough attempts to eventually have the
Speaker 2: whole thing coal less into the moment when you shine
Speaker 2: your light down the blood trail and catch sight of
Speaker 2: a white belly. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson.
Speaker 2: This has been the way to Hunt Foundation's podcast. As always,
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