Ep. 566: Foundations - Give Yourself Some Options

go time. This is the time of year where if you're going to get something accomplished deer wise, you better get on it. People are going to be arrowing velvet bucks this week, with every passing day opening up new seasons across the country, it's deer season or damn near. And there is this thing we should all consider to be more successful as deer hunters. All are options. How mobile are we? How many stand sets do we have up,

how many blinds do we have? Brushed in? The more the freaking merrier, my friends, which is what this episode is all about. I grew up in a little dairy farming community in southeastern Minnesota. There were benefits to that lifestyle. For sure. You knew damn near everyone in your community. And if you didn't directly know them, you knew of them. We had one stoplight, so traffic wasn't something we planned around.

And while you couldn't order a pizza and have it delivered, for at least most of my childhood, I know you could visit the small town staples like Dairy Queen and get a burger in a blizzard. We worked on farms in the summer, bailing hay mostly, and at least for much of my youth, no one cared if they looked out in the back pasture and saw some kids fishing Smalley's or trout in the stream that wound its way

across their land. Now, of course, this is a nostalgic look back at the good things about small town life. The bad thing, if I'm being totally honest, at least, was that the options for a girlfriend were pretty limited. My graduating class consisted of like seventy three people, less

than half of which sported XX chromosomes. Competition for a limited resource is always well interesting, and it wasn't until my first few days at one known a state university that I realized how nice it is to have a lot of options. One elevator ride up to the tenth floor of She and Hall, which is women's dorm, was like stepping from a life of poverty and famine to one of unimaginable riches. Options are a good thing. Not only does this apply to rutting college kids, but running

bucks as well. I honestly think one of the big things that holds an awful lot of hunters back is limited ambush options, or put it a better way, how we limited ourselves with everything we do as far as where we want to sit or where we're gonna sit to wait for a deer to come by. Now, I got a Wirior to Hunt episode coming out here shortly with the One and Only Andy May, where he describes getting creative with his stands to make a killer spot

work when conventional methods just wouldn't cut it. No, I don't want to spoil it for you, but it's a perfect example of why being open to as many ambush options as possible is often what separates the big buck killers from the rest. Now, options can be broken into two main categories. You've got your mobile you know, and

then you've got your set it and forget it. Basically, we all know the mobile options saddles are the big one these days, but you can opt for a lightweight standing sticks or a climbing stand, or you can throw on a Gilli suit and talk into a deadfall somewhere. Mobile has a lot of different ways you can do it now the set it, forget it options, or anything from heavier hang on stands, two ladder stands to ex blinds.

Depending on whether you're hunting the family farm or attracted public land, your options will be dictated by the type of ground. First and foremost, the public land hunter isn't likely to spend several grand on a tower blind and then use their tractor to put it up on the best spot of open to all ground, although I have to say some of the stands that people put up on public land do blow my mind. In Wisconsin, where I hunt, you're not even allowed to leave up stands

overnight on some parcels. Yet I can find double ladder stands without too much trouble. Ladder stands, I might add that don't appear to be going up and down with each rotation or the earth anyway. That's an obvious point. You first have to figure out what kind of ambush sites you can use on where you hunt. But this is also a great argument for not just settling for one spot either. Over there in Wisconsin where I hunt,

I own two properties. I put up blinds in the summer for the girls, and I have several stands I put up for season long bow hunting. Down the road, you can find thousands upon thousands of acres of public land. This is a much different scenario than my private ground

and demands a mobile set up. Interestingly, the dying art of using a climbing stand often comes into play on those tracks because some of them are owned by timber companies, which leaves seed trees that are often just straight trunked, perfect for climbing stand type of trees. They're also often

located along logging roads. In other areas, you might expect a white tail to walk on the key to those trees, and that mostly unpopular style of mobile hunting is knowing where those trees are and when you'd use them with a climber. This isn't something I necessarily always want to figure out in the moment. The lesson here kind of transcends climbing stands too. If you're into saddles and you

think they give you tons and tons of options. Well, you're right, but the dominant style of thought around saddles and other mobile strategies is to slip in, find some amazing big buck sign, silently ascend, and then shoot a buck in his lungs as a yawn stretches and stands up in his bed. That can work, but it's also not a bad idea to know where you might want to go hunt throughout the season and what trees you

might want to ascend into. When you think about setting stands on a private piece where you can leave them all fall, it's usually about breaking them up to cover different parts of the season. You might set a blind on a bean field or a food plot for the early season, then a couple of stands in a thicker cover for mid season when the leaves start to fall in the bucks go into October mode. You'll probably also hang a stand or two for the rut wherever you

can find a terrain trap on your hunting grounds. This strategy should address the changes in deer movement up until the post rut late season hunts. Anyway, mobile hunters would be well served to think that way as well, even if they can't go out in the late summer. And set things up for a season long plan. This is one of the often unspoken aspects of being a serious dear scouter. If you winter scout, spring scout, and summer scout, and then in season scout man, you're filling the database

with a lot of good data points. And not only do they represent good hunting spots or potentially at hunting spots anyway, but they also represent a timeline of potentially action filled hunts throughout the whole season. When you scout in the late winter, I don't know. You might find a banging rub line leading from a bench on a

ridge line down to a creek bottom. You might find a monster bed tucked into an alder thicket, or you might find a series of washouts that culminated one good crossing at the bottom where if a deer wants to go from one side to the other, that's about their only option. All of those individually are great finds, They are all wins in my book. But you start putting a few of them together on a specific property, and now you're in business. Now you're looking at a full

season's worth of spots. And when you use that in conjunction with what you're seeing while actually hunting. You're really onto something. But there's a caveat to this stuff, which brings us back to that mention of Andy May at the beginning of the episode. A spoiler alert here, but Andy's story involves using a small step ladder and not a great stand tree set up and hunt a spot that he felt just needed to be hunted. This is an important lesson, my friends. When I talk about options,

I mean two things. Scouting to find as many good hunting locations as possible, but also having a way to hunt just about any spot you can find. This is honestly one of the biggest hangups most of us have, and I run into it all the time and often have to make concessions of some sort to make spot work. I'll take a little area on a farm in southeastern Minnesota, for example. It's a few acres on one side of a trout stream where deer come and go from an

eighty acre sanctuary that it borders. But because there are only a few acres on that side I can hunt, I'm really limited with wind direction, really limited with access too. But the deer there they use it a lot, and they use it all season, and it can be an absolute cruiser fest during the rut. The trees in the spot are okay, but the ground cover is almost non existent.

So what do you do. You hang a stand in the best tree you can high because there isn't much cover, and you hope they take the trails that are up wind and not downwind. It's not ideal because some take trails where they're going to get you and that's just the name of the game. But that spot needs to be hunted and there are only so many ways to do it. Another example to highlight this happened to me in North Dakota, like I don't know five or six

years ago. The bucks were crossing a little Missouri river in multiple spots. With the low flow, they didn't really need to cross on any given trail, and it seemed like the movement was actually pretty random, but it wasn't, because it rarely ever is. They were actually using three different trails, all within about a quarter of a mile stretch. One trail seemed to be really popular, likely because it led right to a sagging low spot in a fence.

It also took the deer right through a section of the bank that hasn't had a suitable stand tree and it since Teddy Roosevelt was falling in love with that broken terrain that was some time ago, my friends. Due to extreme wins and some desperation, I decided to try to set up and kill a buck on that trail, even though I had to leave my stands at camp. The best option was the skeleton of a long dead cotton wood that fell back to earth amongst a patch

of sagebrush. When I crawled in there after a quick rattlesnake check, I realized two things. The first one that I was going to have to do my best puck Stani fil impression and just barely poke my head about the cover. The second was that it was a pretty damn good natural blind provided I could stay low enough while I did, and when a familiar group of doze one buck crossed the river, several of them got to blowgun range before the buck made his way down the trail.

He never busted me drawing, and neither it did his girlfriends, which was a miracle. Now, maybe because they didn't expect anyone to be right there. I don't know. I do know that it was a hunt saver, mostly because I decided i'd rather figure out a way to hunt that spot than not. Now, this is a necessity. When you travel a lot to hunt public land. You just don't have the option to set stands ahead of time. At least you almost never do, and you're usually on a

pretty limited schedule. Not hunting isn't an option, so you have to try to make things work for you. It's easy to understand that when you have an expensive nonresident tag in your pocket in four days to get it done. But the same message applies to really all of our hunts, even if we don't think we need to listen to it. Because we've both hunted the same family ground since we were twelve. This idea plays off as something I fully believe in that it's better to go to the deer

than ask the deer to come to us. If the bucks show you that they want to be in a gnarly creek bottom or a cat tail slue and not the dreamy patch of deciduous for us that has two thousand perfect stand trees in it, then the bucks are telling you everything you need to know in a really

how you got a hunt them? Well, not really. You have to figure out how to hunt those environments, which is a real challenge and surprise, surprise probably a pretty good reason why the bucks are there, and you can try to make it work with your chosen ambush metho that, or you can consider your options and try to get creative.

Let's take the cat tail sleu for example. You could pick the next closest cover with trees and put up a standard saddle, but that might take you so far away from the bucks want to be that you're essentially a long range observer with the hope in your heart and deer tags that will most likely go unfilled. Or you could get to that edge somehow and hunt them.

Maybe that's a natural blind in a patch of willows or sumac, Or maybe it's a pop up blind set up to shoot where a trail not only enters the cat tails but also intersects with the inevitable trail that's going to parallel the outside edge of that cover. Maybe you can wait for a windy or a rainy day and try to glass a buck heading into the cat

tails to see where he bets. If the conditions really favor you, you might maybe, and this is a big, big big maybe be able to sneak in and shoot him where he stands in his bed where hell, you might pick up a lightweight tripod stand and set it up on the edge. While these options aren't great for bow hunting in the close range game it involves that can be a super effective strategy for gun hunting. Just getting to the ten foot level so you have a better shot angle in a view of the cover. That

can be a real game changer. And I think this is a lost opportunity with a lot of gun hunters, So I'll say this, Think about your preferred ambush style or styles, think about how often you use them and in what spots you use them, But also think about the spots you want to hunt where you just don't think that style is feasible. Is there another way to get it done that doesn't involve that coushy ladder stand

you really want to sit in. It might be as simple as bringing in pruners in a cushion and hunting from a natural blind. While the visibility will be limited compared to being in a tree, you can often set up right where you need to with the style, and when the deer do show up, the shot opportunities are usually pretty sweet. Or maybe just feel like you burn out your best areas too quickly and would like to

spread out the pressure. This is an important one, especially for a lot of us who might have permission to hunt small parcels. If you only give yourself twenty or thirty acres to hunt an entire season, you're right for partial or total burnout. Even if you only hunt a couple of days each week, Tacking on new ambush styles and finding some spots on the public land is a half hour away can be a huge benefit here. Now offer this as a parting thought to piggyback onto this

as well. Oftentimes, the willingness to give ourselves a few more options is the best way to remedy our own mistakes. We always think of it in terms of out hunting the deer and the other hunters, which is certainly true. But when it comes to how dear learn about us and our tendencies, and just where we like to park and what stands we love to hunt, we give them just about everything they need to not get killed by us.

A few more options, both in stand and blind sights, and the willingness to mix up strategies to be able to hunt wherever they're dear demanded of us can really be the difference maker. This is something you hear about a lot in states that allow baiting, particularly states that allow automated feeders. Good luck finding someone who runs a feeder like that who also doesn't have a camera on it and a standard of blind set up twenty yards away.

But the corn that that little feeder throws out isn't as big of a draw to mature bucks as survival is. And there's nothing with more gravity for hunters than the thought of sitting right where the feeder is going to throw a cup or two of corn on the ground for the critters. But a buck with a few seasons under his belt is probably pretty wise to that trap. While he may not come in with the does and scrappers during daylight, he'll often hang out a ways back

and let things get real dark and less dangerous. The hunter who recognizes this could back up into the thick stuff where the rubs are and set up a different way to kill that unkillable feeder buck. It happens every year. It happens in far more scenarios than just this example.

So give yourself some options, my friends, Think about your preferred hunting style, what you have set up for the season, think about all that stuff and how you can hunt more effectively and more efficiently by giving yourself some more ground to hunt and more ways in which to hunt it. That's it for this week, my dear obsessed friends. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always,

thank you so much for listening. All of us here at meat Eater Wired Hunt really really appreciate it. And if you need a little bit more White Hill wisdom, you can head on over to our wire to Hunt YouTube channel to watch a ton of videos that Mark and I produce based around all kinds of how to strategies and techniques. Or you can head on over to the meatator dot com slash wired and see tons of articles covering all kinds of topics around here hunting