Ep. 630: Foundations - Transcendent Land Lessons

really learning the land. As a I don't know, quote unquote content creator, which is I'll admit a pretentious sounding titles that also seems totally made up and kind of stupid. I'm continually faced with a specific dilemma. I can create articles and podcasts and videos on topics that are guaranteed to do pretty well. The analytics back that up, but they've also been done a million times. Or I can take a flyer on other topics that I believe in and hope enough of the audience comes along for the

ride that I get to keep my job. Now I have to add in the pressure from the faceless folks who answer to the beam counters, and the task gets even harder because the mandate from those people is usually along the lines of, uh, do whatever draws the most eyeballs or in this case, Earballs. This is my struggle because I think there are ways to get better at deer hunting that don't involve buying a product or being

indoctrinated into the latest hunting styles and fads. I think there's a hell of a lot of good old woodsmanship out there that carries far more value than some of the more popular topics around deer hunting. So I guess that's what I'm gonna get into today and next week, and I hope you enjoy it. H I doubt you could take any point in human history, at least for the last several thousand years, and find one where whatever

society wasn't focused on wealth. You know, we think of wealth just his money now, but you know, throughout our history wealth it's food, shelter, and freedom and control over one's life. And those are things that us humans have been pretty interested in for quite a while, and we still are. If you scroll through the front page or whatever news apps you have on your phone or tablet, you'll see countless stories about the current state of the economy.

You'll be bombarded with folks arguing that inflation is killing the average consumer, while others will argue that it's not really that bad. You'll see tons of pieces on retirement planning. How much money should you have sucked away on your thirtieth birthday? What to do if you're sixty and you haven't saved a dime? Will Social Secure already still be around after or will it be cut? You'll see articles on the Federal Reserve and their likelihood of, you know,

interest rate hikes or cuts. You'll see stuff on the housing market. You can consume endless pieces of content built around the stock market. Do you want to go slow and steady or do you want to go all in on the latest meme stocks? The underlying question of all this and so much more around the world of personal and business finances, how do I get some of that wealth everyone keeps talking about? Do you take your tax

refund and buying the game stock? Because you heard that a bunch of dudes on Reddit are direct registering their shares so they can't be land out for shorts in the hope that it will keep the interest positive and drive up the share price. Do you go boring and buy into index funds and mutual funds and play the thirty five year game of compounding interest and disciplined contributions,

or I don't know. Do you cross your fingers and hope that a rich uncle will get eaten by great whites while snorkeling The great are your reef and leave you a couple of million bucks in his will. Listen,

and I cannot stress this enough. Don't take financial advice from me, but I will say this, if you look at the reality of most of us folks who aren't likely to inherit a fortune or start an AI tech company that revolutionizes the health care industry or something like that, we kind of just need to look at the best path to achieve some financial independence. And it's often pretty simple.

You learn about the investment vehicles available to you, and you do your damnedest to pick the ones that work for your current situation and your risk tolerance and your age and blah blah blah. Then you really do your damnedest to fund them as fully as you can, and you keep doing that while you keep waiting, and you

do it again, and you wait. Over time that money starts to make you money, and instead of winning the lottery and going from broke as a joke to Kardashian in a single evening, you steadily work your way towards something signific again with some diversified revenue streams that will pay for your food, shelter, freedom, and allow you to have some control over your life. Eventually you don't have to sell hours of your day for a specific amount

of money. That's how I look at it, anyway, And it's not as sexy as pick in the next fifty banger penny stock. It is a viable path to a good life, though at least for a lot of people, it takes time and some work and a lot of discipline, but allows you to level up through various stages to an enviable position where you've truly earned what you have. That's actually pretty incredible, I think. I also think there's an aspect of deer hunting that mirrors this long boring

diet tribe on personal finances. Yeah, learning land, I mean really learning land, not necessarily just learning the deer. Although that's a topic that definitely warrant some discussion, and I'm going to get there, but not this weeker the next. For now, I want to talk about forgetting the get rich quick stuff in deer hunting, the meme stocks of deer hunting. If you will. I want you to think about what you can do over years to really start

to understand how to be a better deer hunter. I honestly don't think there is a better way to do that than just dedicating yourself to learning land. I should clear that up because you're probably thinking, well, I don't know, I hunt the same farm, dude, I've always haunted it. I know it pretty well, So what is there to learn? I'd say probably plenty. But I'd also say it's kind of a net negative to get so locked into a single property that you stop learning about the habitats in

which deer live. Because what if that land goes away? What if the housing market comes roaring back to life and then local developers visit every landowner with a dump truck full of cash, or I don't know, that least you thought you'd always have might just disappear in an

instant when a much better offer comes along. What if the far armor who you've had a good relationship with over a couple of decades happens to have a daughter, a fine, strapping dairy farmer's daughter, and she marries a dude who happens to have a pickup truck that is plastered with bow hunting decals, and that dude, he says to his new father in law. You know what, man, I love to hunt, but I don't love other hunters.

What can we do about that, Pops? What if you own some land and you think no one's gonna take this from me, and you're right. But what if that really old neighbor that never set foot in their woods sells out and your new neighbor doesn't really care one lick about trespassing, or they've got seven sons who are all dirt bike enthusiasts who really enjoy writing your property lines at first and last light. What if? What if?

What if? My friends spots come and go, but your ability to understand terrain and habitat doesn't stays with you. And the more you sharpen that blade, so to speak, the better off you are. So what I mean when I say learn the land at least for now? I mean? How did deer use different habitats at different times of the year. How do they don't like to walk from one place to another in bluff Country? Do they really care about Sumac at all any point of the season.

What happens when a clear cut matures from serious ruffed grouse cover to far more open turkey habitat. Do the bucks in your area utilize cattiles loose all season long or just when it gets cold? How about when it's a drought year or it's a year when the rain never seems to stop and you can hear frogs just about anywhere you go. There are an infinite amount of questions I could come up with around habitat, terrain and just how the deer use everything, And that might seem daunting,

but it's also kind of not. Just like there are a million different funds where you can dump your retirement money into, there are some that just makes for certain people with certain goals, and those funds work for a lot of people who might not seem to have a whole lot in common. Some things are just kind of simple and they transcend what appears, at least on the surface to be an unusually complex landscape. Take I don't know the swamps of Louisiana, for example, and compare them

to the swamps in northern Minnesota. There's definitely gonna be differences, But are there similarities? I bet there are. You know why, because I know deer would rather walk than swim, mostly so all that water is going to influence where they go, and a dry year up north might influence them in a similar way to a dry year down south. They might have far more options for travel in those years

and be far more limited in wet years. What does that mean for your hunting season if you hunt around swamps or maybe you hunt egg country and the crop rotation is always soybeans and corn. Great? How did the deer use the standing corn in September versus the cut corn in November? Do you think that deer in Illinois behave way differently than deer in South Dakota when it comes to standing corn. Let me use this corn thing

to drive this point home a little better. When I first got permission to hunt a farm in Minnesota while I was in high school, I didn't know a whole lot about how to actually kill deer, And after the first season hunting there, I realized something that is just stuck with me. The deer seemed to come from the corn in the evening, where they had passed through the woods on their way to beans or alfalfa. In the morning, they'd reverse that course, simple right, They were betting in

the corn, no biggie. But the big question really is why. Well, the woods were pretty wide open. It wasn't thick, and apparently they don't like open woods. For years, that property hunted that way until a tornado went by. Then my pattern of hunting them when they left the standing corn to enter the woods changed a lot after that twister knocked a pile of trees down and let the sunlight hit the long forgotten forest floor. The whole place turned

into a jungle. Not only did that do wonders for the mature buck population, it also changed their betting habits. It was like that for years until you guessed it. The woods grew up and the trees started forming a real canopy again. Two years ago, with the woods open as I've ever seen them there, I realized we'd gone full circle. The sign showed it, the sighting showed it,

and my hunting strategies reflected it. Now, imagine, I don't know, I go to a new property in the Midwest somewhere, and I see the woods and I see standing corn,

and I'm no dummy, so I make the connection. Now, that's not the end all the shooting big bucks, but it's a hell of a starting point, river crossings, terrain traps, big woods, clear cuts, overgrown fence, liness, destination, food sources, brows, bedding cover all of these things and so many more involved learning specific pieces of ground and learning ground overall. The idea is to have the been there, done that mentality whenever you're hunting white tails, even if you actually

haven't been there or done that. I'll never forget. When I got hired at Peterson's Bow Hunting in two thousand and six, one of my first tasks was to write a tree stand buyer's guide. Because of that, I had to call each manufacturer to request a tree stand so we could set up a photo shoot for the piece. With a flatbed trailer and like a dozen brand new stands, me and a couple other guys who worked for the company drove to my editor's property. He had like five

acres around his house, but it didn't really matter. We just needed some suitable trees in white tail looking type of habitat. And as we were putting up various ladder stands and hang ons and climbers, my editor at one point asked me to look at a slight rise in the woods. He said, do you see the way the ground folds up there and just creates that little ridge. It was subtle, but in March it was obvious. And he then said, just a matter of factly, the box

always run that. And I had probably walked past a million subtle, barely there ridges in the woods over my lifetime and never once consider them as a route Bucks would specifically choose to run. But you know what I do now, especially after moving from bluff country to much flatter country, I started to learn that it doesn't take much elevation to mean something to the deer, both for travel and betting, and for how they can use their

noses to avoid people and other predators. And I know I've talked about this before, but I think these connections and this level of understanding the land in a general sense as it relates to deer so valuable. It's why winter scouting is so valuable. It's not just to find a big rub where you can hang a camera and a stand. Next year is to train yourself to think about the why behind what deer do in a variety

of different environments. Not only does this prepare you for year to your success as you filter your ever advancing understanding of the land through your actual sightings and scouting. But it prepares you for change. It prepares you for when the landowner does say no and you've got to find a new spot, or when you show up to spring scout in the logging trucks and skitters are all over the woods. The woods you've known as a constant for decade, and you know now it's not going to

be the same. This is, in a weird way, sort of the antidote to scouting constantly, which is a great strategy for some folks who have the time and the motivation and the land to work with. You don't have to scout NonStop. If you've already learned to some decent level, how did you use the kind of environments you hunt? Although to learn that you do need to scout quite a bit, So we have ourselves a chicken and egg

situation here. I guess the best way to look at this is to think of your individual hunting situation as something thing that constantly encounters a generalized reality when it comes to white tails. Sure, your public land hunts might not seem anything like the private land hunts your buddy stalk about, and they are different in many ways. But

maybe not as many as you think. Now, the deer on their ground might just be a little more suicidal, but they probably also do a hell of a lot of the things that the deer do on public land where you hunt them. They use that subtle ridge. Although your deer might be far more nocturnal, they're gonna chase through those terrain traps. Although your buddies might have a great hunt on a Saturday afternoon, when your best odds are like Tuesday morning, when fewer hunters are out, more

of them are at work. Okay, so what does this really mean? I know, I said you don't need to scout super hard if you learn the land. But then I said learning the land involves a lot of scouting. Both are true, even if that sounds dumb. The key is to figure out just what you can spend some time out there this offseason and look at how the deer use the woods. Now, look at how they used

it last fall. At least if last year sign will tell you anything, and it probably will, think about your trail camera images from last year or the last five years. What do they tell you that will help you understand more about the land. Now? Can you make any connections between some of the picks and where you find buck sign now, or where you jump a bunch of deer or maybe stumble across an antler. Does it all seem

totally random? Because I promise you it isn't, and you should think about what doesn't seem random, like the location of some rubs, or why you always saw a deer from a certain stand when the wind was straight out of the west or the north. Do you know where all the subtle ridges are on the properties you hunt? Could you name five types of brows that exist there right now and should exist there next October? If not,

do you know the land well enough? It's so worth it to understand what the woods and the fields and the grasslands and the swamps offer the deer and how they use those features and more throughout the year, not just the deer season, but the whole year. You want this knowledge for obvious reasons, but also to help you understand why you keep screwing every damn thing up. Sorry, that was the old data me coming out and not a good lead into how I'm going to expand on

this topic next week. What I'm going to do is break down why learning the land helps you understand your impact on it, or more specifically, your impact on the deer on that land, like a boring, consistent contribution to a handful of funds that cover domestic markets and international

markets and the bond market. This accumulation of knowledge works in your favor as a deer hunter, but it doesn't do you any good if you don't understand your impact on the deer at any given time, which is kind of like selling all those stocks in your portfolio after the market craft because you're scared of losing more even

though you have a twenty five year investment horizon. So listen in next week because I'm going to tell you how to know if you're screwing things up with the deer and what you have to do to well, uh not screw things up as much. I guess that's it, my friends. I'm Tony Peterson has been the Wire to

Hunt Foundations podcast. Head on over to the wire to Hunt YouTube channel to check out our latest how two videos, and feel free to visit the meat eator dot com slash wired to read up on the latest and greatest and hunting advice, and as always, thank you so much for your support.