Ep. 564: Foundations - Taking Kids and Newbies Hunting, Part 2

them up for good shots and a great experience. Last week I talked about taking kids and beginners hunting and how there is this internal battle for us to figure

out how to make it easy. This week, I want to take it a step further and talk about the things I've learned after taking my twin daughters deer hunting for two years, or I guess more specifically, what I've learned about the setups and the things I have to do right so they love their time out there in the woods and they get hooked on hunting, which is my secret goal. Yeah. Here's the thing, my young listeners, who may not have a minivan full of kids yet.

You may not think this topic is relevant to you, but it probably is. Taking kids out isn't a whole lot different from taking newbie hunters out. You learn that your game has to be damn near perfect because there's won't be, and we should be taking people out. If you remember a couple of weeks ago when I talked about where hunting goes to die, and that the hedge against that that I think is at least possible is participation, more participation by us. So I say, let's not let

it die on our watch. Let's keep it alive because hunting is a gift, and one way to do that is to introduce people to hunt it, like I did with my daughters. But just like when I had my punks out there with me, you've got us think through your setups when you've got newbies. You really do. But this is a good thing on two fronts. The main one i'll get too later in this episode, but the first one is that you kind of just default right

back to just hunting deer. And I've talked about this a lot, but I think there's a huge benefit to just hunting deer. I think when we laser focus in on big box, which is totally okay in so many situations, we tend to miss a lot of important aspects of being a good hunter and about enjoying the whole process. Now, when you take two fourth grade girls, you learn all about this. The girls had one rule for me, well too technically, but the first was they were not shooting fawns.

I figured that was pretty much a given anyway, so early wasn't on the table. The second was that they wouldn't orphan fawns. If a doe had fawns, it was a no go. They were not cleared hot. The good news on that front is that we were hunting a predator rich environment where a lot of does lose or

fawns to bears and coyotes and bobcats and wolves. I knew it would be just as likely we'd have a lone dough come through as we would a doe with fawns, and it it turns out it's actually way more likely because there's really high fond mortality over there. If you take a new bee out, it's important to listen to them about stuff like that. Everyone has their own hangups and expectations.

And while you might be some weirdo who loves nothing more than to shoot those with youngs, you know, still spotted triplets, the person you're taking out might be devastated by that. In that way, you kind of have to play by their rules. If that seems dumb, think about the lines you draw in the sand around your own hunting. We all have things we like and things we don't, things we will do, and things we won't. I feel like I just wrote a pop song that Mark would

play on his way to some dumb convention somewhere. Anyway, it's important to pay attention to the hunters you take out. They'll tell you what they're looking for out of the experience. There's a caveat to this. It involves the size of a buck. Usually with a couple of young girls who have seen me bring home everything from dose to four keys to a hundred and fifty plus inters. I knew I probably wouldn't be dealing with an unearned sense of entitlement to big Bucks, but it happens all the time.

I know a lot of husbands who have brought their wives out only to find out that they want a big buck or nothing for their first year. I know a hell of a lot of dudes who have started hunting with someone who is acting like a mentor, who have the same kind of idea about Big Bucks. In that situation, I say no, just kind of read it, feel out how much it actually matters to kill a big one, and if it seems right, if the opportunity comes along, encourage a little drop in the old standards department.

In this realm, I'm like that Green Day song because I'm a walking contradiction. I want people to shoot whatever makes them happy, while simultaneously believing that starting out as a trophy hunt is a sure way to never really

develop a love of the game. This is why when I take new hunters out, I try to stress that we are looking for a no brainer shot first and foremost, just like you wouldn't take a brand new hunter on a spotting stock antelope hunt where the diaper butts are likely to not let you get closer than sixty yards. Setting up for good box often means setting up for some shots that require a little skill, that might require a thread the needle scenario, or something that isn't just

a fifteen yard broadside situation. Stressing the importance of hunting deer for really high odd shot tends to diminish the desire for the end result of a big buck at least some because it reframes the parameters of the hunt, and it shifts the focus from a certain caliber of a deer to a deer that poses up in a way that is most appreciated by anyone who wants to

make a perfect shot. The last summer, when I was setting up for the girls and this summer while setting up for them and my buddy's son, this was first and foremost on my mind. I knew this meant one thing. Though we wouldn't be where we would see a lot of deer. This is one of the ways you just have to find a balance with this stuff, and it's

something I've talked about a ton. It seems like there are so many situations where you can sit and see deer but the odds of a great shot opportunity are pretty low, or you can sit where you won't see tons of deer, but the odds of a really good shot opportunity are high. I almost always default to the latter situation because I had a lot of pressure deer. I'm not going to go sit on a food plot or a field edge very often and see seventeen deer in a sit although I am lucky to hunt places

where that happens once in a while. For the most part, though, I'm always looking for something that will put me right on top of a travel route, or some food or water source that is small and because of its size, should really concentrate movement. Now, remember back at the beginning of this episode when I said there were two benefits to taking newbies out. I think this one is huge.

It's just for us to develop his hunters. When you have someone who might move too much, or you know, make a bit too much noise or whatever, you need to do everything you can to put deer right in front of them. That makes you better. For my girls, that meant pop up blinds that are truly brushed in and seasoned. And I'm not joking here. I like to get my blinds out in midsummer at least and then cross my fingers that an angry yogi doesn't come along

and tear them up. At least once per year that happens. In fact, bears tend to take out at least one of my blinds and one of my trail cameras every single year. It sucks, but it's just a name of the game in the north Woods. This year, I put up a camera in Wisconsin to leave it for several weeks, only to have a d twelve pound bear come in, swat it right off the tree and move on with his life. Like six hours after I hung it, he hit it hard enough to snap the plastic pieces on

the back that holds the strap. I've that happened a lot, and without a bearcage, it's almost a given at some point. I even had one Minnesota bear that I tried my hardest arrow and never did that put his canine tooth right through the lens of a camera. It was a perfect bull's eye, turned my camera into a camel covered paper weight. I don't know. Maybe you deal with bears, maybe you don't. But pop up blinds are a really,

really good option for new hunters. The ability to move and whisper and eat a sandwich or sip some coffee, or eat fifty calories worth of runts and those unbelievable gummy nerd candies that we recently discovered. That's nice. The downside to blinds is well known to most of us, and if you follow my strategy of setting up fifteen to twenty yards downwind of a pounded trailer water source, you might not hardly see anything until the year is

right on top of you. That's the downside. Now. That happened to my daughters and I last year with almost every deer we encountered. We were hunting mostly early season, so the leaves didn't do us any favors for hearing or seeing approach deer. And we're in the big woods, you know, the timber is thick. You just not not a great option to watch a lot of deer activity. And that's the downside, especially when you put yourself in

a blind. But the upside was that the deer that did come in almost all posed up so well that even two kids with the woodsmanship skills of a born and raised Los Angeles socialite could kill them, and they did. The three high odd shots that they took and made didn't happen by accident, even though there were spots I wanted to set them up in because I thought we'd see more, Dear, I didn't want to get into a situation where the deer we encountered weren't anywhere other than

right on us and oblivious to our presence. This goes back to the brushing and blinds thing, And I mean I truly blend them in with limbs, branches hanging over the windows, I want to give it a true three D look and hide our movements in the shadows. It also meant that we could only keep one window open where the shot would be w cross our fingers that

that was what would happen. It also meant that I had to think about prevailing wind directions not only for the mid September opener, but what it was going to be like when we were hunting in mid October. It also meant since the girls were in school and had limited time to hunt, I needed morning and evening options

for different winds. Now, this is something I'm going to go through like in a deep dive in the next episode, so I'll keep this a little light here, but I'll say this, having to think through all of that stuff absolutely made me a better hunter. I really mean that, it really did. I didn't think it would either. It's easier to get delusional about yourself as a hunter, and I've kind of relied on my public Land resume to

do the talking for me. You know, it's easy to drink your own cool and I guess, but I've been hunting white tails for thirty years. I should know how to put myself on a deer putting new hunters on a deer is different, and it forces you to really consider the possibilities. It forces you to think about the little details and a thing you might have gotten wrong.

It makes you consider whether you have enough setups to keep things going through a variety of conditions, and you know what, it makes you realize that you can always do more. Last year I put up three blinds for the girls. I set them up for south and west winds. Mostly I set them up from mornings and evenings, and in fact they all worked for both. Some worked better for first light, well, some worked better for last light,

but they would do for either scenario. No, I'm bad at math, but that feels kind of like I might have doubled our options. And even so, after one of my daughters killed a doe on the second morning of the season, it felt like that blind was burned. That left two, which isn't that many. I felt like I

needed more. So this summer we did more. Not only did I have my buddy's son to think about, so I had another youth hunter to consider, but also just the reality that if the conditions don't favor my setups, well, I end up forcing something that I don't want to force. I think us deer hunters we do this a lot, especially when we have private land to set up for

the season. And on this note, I think there's really something important to talk about too, to help, or more specifically, having kids or whoever you're taking out help when they get involved in that process. Like I talked about in the last episode, they just tend to own it more. And I think we don't acknowledge this enough in this space.

Quite frankly, with parenting in general, when it comes to hunting deer with bow or a gun, being involved in the preseason work or the set up work throughout the season, it just helps everyone form a stronger connection to the work and the hunts. It's real important. I think it might be something that a lot of us who hunt for ourselves don't even truly understand. Back when I had a lot more time to check my d m s and respond to all of them, before this weird meat

eater association made it just too much time. One of the most common things that happened to me was people reaching out to ask me where I hunt. They always think they are being tricky and often really try to brow you up before their real motives come out. You know. This bothers me for obvious reasons, like if I put a ton of time into scouting a spot in a specific state so I can have an enjoyable hunt there, I don't really want to just give that info away

to a stranger. But it also bothers me because that's so much a part of what is fun about hunting, finding spots and scouting spots and hunting spots, and of course the less fun part, which is the inevitable losing spots. But when that happens, the cycle starts over, so you

get to have some fun again. Owning that part, or those parts, I should say, it's important, just like it's important for a couple of ten year old girls to swat some horse flies while setting up cameras or helping brush in blinds, or maybe sitting on the edge of a bean field in late August to use the spotting scope to find a few velvet bucks. There's another aspect of this that's worth acknowledging as well, the role of

the teacher. I really believe, especially after getting to know some of my daughter's teachers over the last half a decade, the good teachers are so damn important to society. I think they rank right up there with good cops and good nurses and anyone else who has a career mixed with helping people. Being a teacher, which I most definitely am not in a professional capacity, provides a great benefit.

If you want to learn a subject, well, you can study it, but you want to develop a deep understanding of a subject, you also have to learn how to teach it. And teaching hunting, as silly as that might sound, is going to help you level up. Explaining the why behind everything helps you understand the reasons so much better, and it helps spawn new ideas too. It's important. I think it's actually probably some kind of evolutionary thing. It

might be why so many societies help. Probably all of them had such a strong oral tradition with their stories, and not really just stories, but tales and myths and fables and lessons that were good enough to remember and pass on on through multiple generations. In that case, the listener gets a benefit from them in the lesson, but to tell her those stories get something out of it too.

Thinking about the ancient Greeks or maybe Native Americans passing along their lesson filled tales of existence at various points through their history might seem like a real stretch when you're compared to trying to take a I don't know a new biout and talk them through their set up, or why you hang a camera certain way, or just why all the tracks emerge from the standing corn here and not there. But it's not. It's not as far

away as it sounds. It's not to me anyway. I think we aren't so far removed from our recent history. And hell, I mean a couple of generations ago, Lewis and Clark thought they might run into Mastodon's in the middle of America because it was so wild, which is crazy to consider that wasn't that long ago. We aren't so different from those explorers heading up river into territory

unknown to them but well known to others. Even though a lot of that has changed, what hasn't are the fundamentals of learning and of teaching, Of giving a gift to someone in the form of a well placed blind and a setting sun accompanied by the sound of hoofs scraping and the dried leaves. That's so important. And that's enough for now, my friends. Next week, I'm gonna expand

on this topic of giving yourself real options. I mean real options, because it's not just important if you take a couple of kids, or a new coworker, your brother in law, or whoever out hunting. It's good for you too, especially if you want to kill mature bucks, and I know you do, so tune in next week because I'm gonna make a case for you to truly expand your options to be a more effective hunter this fall. That's

it for this week, my dear obsessed amigoes. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, which has brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for listening. All of us here

at Metator truly appreciate it. And if you need more white tail wisdom, go to the meat eator dot com slash wired and you can see all kinds of articles by Mark myself and a whole slew of white tail killers and and head on over to our wire to Hunt YouTube channel where we drop weekly how to content as well. MHM