Ep. 656: Foundations - Are You A Whitetail Pioneer Or A Settler?

that what you wish. Anyway, Ever since I heard him say that, I've used that statement a lot. It applies to many things in life, even to whitetail hunting. That's what I'm gonna talk about today. It's mostly about finding your chosen lane through new experiences till you can honestly declare yourself a certain kind of hunter. And maybe that

doesn't make sense, but I think it will. But before I get into it, I still have to let you know about this Mediator giveaway that's going on because you have until May twenty first to sign up, but only if you want a chance to win regrand worth of sweet hunting gear along with a personalized outfitting session from the Latvian Eagle himself. So you just got a head on over to the mediator dot com slash giveaway to enter. It's free, takes like thirty seconds, and you could end

up with a boatload of kick ass gear. One of the things that drives me nuts about hunting advice and hell advice in general is that it's easiest to declare a right way to do things instead of explaining how nuanced stuff is. It's far less difficult to just say there's just one way, the right way, and that's it. But life doesn't really work like that, however. Take music, you guys know, I love music, and I've played guitar

for a long long time. I'm not very good at it, but I love it, and teaching myself how to play has come with plenty of revelations that have helped me understand life better. Take chord progressions in a song. For example, if you don't play music, you probably don't realize this, but you can look at just about any song out there and find a way to break it down to

a simple chord progression. Or I guess an easier way to explain this would be imagine a heavy ish type of tune, some kind of songs, pretty heavy, something that has a lot of distorted electric guitars, often guitars that are tuned way down, way down to sound deeper and heavier. Then you add in some different effects through pedals and mixing and posts, and you throw in some badass drums, a good bassline, and a melody sung through everything from

whispers to screams. That's a far cry from like an old Willie Nelson tune, but at its roots it's kind of not. There will be a basic chord progression in there, somewhere, tucked way beneath all those layers of sound, and it just won't be as obvious to your ear as hearing old William Merle Haggard saying poncho and left here or something like that. The thing about this is even the

chord progressions aren't totally set in stone. You could take something that calls for a C chord, which is made up of CE and G notes, and try out an A minor or an E minor. Now they aren't the same as a C obviously, but they share some of the same notes and they produce a sound that might just work as good. You can also substitute major chords in the place of minor chords and do a whole host of stuff that is way beyond my skill set

for explaining. But what I'm really saying here is there are different ways to get to the same result, take a closer to the source material. Example of fishing, I've probably mentioned this a million times, but in my lifetime, I've looked at a lot of bass swimming in the water, and I know I've talked about this, but I think it really kind of frames us up on large mouths and small mouth They just appeal to me, and there's

nothing I like better than site fishing them. It's kind of like a nice mix of hunting because you have to see them before they see you, and then fishing, because well, you have to try to catch them. And when you steer into a lot of different bodies of water looking for little green or brown fish, you start to see patterns of behavior emerge some bass, and they're often a little bit smaller bass school up and they

go hunting. You'll see little wolf packs of bass working off of the points of wing dams or on a river system or patrolling a drop off in a lake. Their strategy is probably one of survival, because it's easier not to get eaten when you're with your buddies who might get eaten instead of you. But it's also a feeding strategy. You know, running into a school of shad or other baitfish when you've got the chaos of several of your buddies trying to eat them, it disorients the

whole food source. And when that happens, the likelihood of a minno breaking out and offering up a chance for you to eat him is higher, kind of like when a pride allions try to force a young will to beast out of the herd. But then you have the fish who ambush stuff, and these are usually bigger bass who have identified some prime location in the cover or next to structure where they can just kind of slip

into the shadows and stay still and observe. And then when a crayfish wanders too close or a little group of bluegills. The element of surprise comes into play. Plus you burn fewer calories with this strategy. It's efficient. Now again, they're vastly different strategies to achieve similar results, which is to fill their bellies while not filling something else's bigger bellies. When it comes to deer hunting, there are many ways

to achieve the same result. You might use a high powered rifle to shoot a big buck on an automatic feeder during a guided hunt, or somebody else did all the work for you, But a dead buck is a dead buck, right. Or you might also make your own re curve out of a tree you cut down, and then still hunt for a full season on public land with yourself bo somewhere in the big woods, and still manage to kill a big buck. Again, the results are

kind of the same. Dead buck is dead buck. But anyone hearing those two examples knows that it's not actually about the result. It's about the process and the experience. And I think you can largely break down white tail hunters into two categories, the pioneers and the settlers. Now this is purely academic, so bear with me, because people change and often don't fit rigidly into a two part system. Take me, for example, I'm primarily a pioneer when it

comes to deer hunting. I enjoy hunting new spots more than I enjoy going back to the same spots over and over again. I don't know why that is, but I'd rather have to figure out new areas and new states and new properties every season than not. There is a comfort level I enjoy going into old, familiar setups on properties I know and I've hunted for a long time. But if we're going to talk about what I really

enjoy out of hunting, that's not it. That's why I try to structure my season around those new experiences I've learned over a lifetime of hunting that that is what I need to really enjoy the whole thing as much as possible. Now, Listen, I have fun hunting over food plots from year to year, or climbing into certain stands

where I have years of memories stacked up. But what makes me feel alive and still so obsessed with white tail hunting is scouting up something new and then settling in for a sit that's shrouded in the unknowns in the mystery. A lot of hunters, they're almost exactly the opposite of me, And you know what, that's great. I've got a buddy who I hunt with a fair amount,

who is obsessed with creating perfect deer spots. He can't get enough of food plots and planting apple trees and then climbing into a box blind right in the middle of his little deer meccas. He'll do this every year until he dies, and he'll be really happy about it because that's what he likes and it works for him. He knows this because he's done a lot of different hunting. He used to go out west every year, sometimes multiple times a year. He used to go turkey hunting all

over and hunt deer in several states. Now he basically hunts two states on two properties he owns, and you can't get him to even consider not sitting certain rifle stands for the Wisconsin opener, or not sitting as redneck for ninety five percent of his bow hunting in Minnesota. I think this is important stuff to know about yourself.

You don't know how many deer seasons you have left, any more than any of us do, and so making the most of them is important, and it's not about making the most of them in a way that means

you'll have the best chance of killing big bucks. That's a part of it, for sure, but that's not really what I'm talking about here, Instead learning whether you need knowns or unknowns, whether you need to set out across the plains of deer hunting, or plant your flag next to some river and start building a cabin for you and your family. But why is this important? Though? I think it's because deer hunting demands our time and our resources.

It soaks up some of our mental bandwidth. It's a big part of our lives, and it's important to feel like you're getting what you need out of it. So let's say you're not sure what camp you belong to. Have you ever traveled to hunt? If you did, how was it? Be honest? Did you love seeing new ground and living out of a tent or a motel? Did you enjoy the process of speed scouting some new chunk of dirt somewhere and then going mobile to hunt it, or do you feel like you were spinning your wheels

and wishing you were back home. Have you ever taken a saddle and some sticks into public land somewhere to try to do what all the guys on social media seem to be doing. How did it work out for you? Did you like it? Now? Keep in mind here, I'm not asking if you killed a deer. I'm asking if you enjoyed the process. Now, I'm asking if you loved every second of it, because you probably didn't. But how did it make you feel afterwards? I look at this

kind of like going on a long run. It's not that much fun, but it sure does make you feel good when it's over. Hunting deer a lot of times is just like that. How about if you have always hunted your grandma's farm or you've been on the same lease for a decade. You go hunting to have fun, So are you having fun when you go? Do you find yourself super excited to get out there, or are you in a situation where you just know that if you wait until the Halloween and you go, you'll probably

get your shot. Is that what you want out of hunting? Or do you wish you could go more but that you just don't have to ask yourself? Are you bored? Do you feel a sense of accomplishment when you hunt this way? Or maybe do you just feel that it's exactly what you need to refill your cup a little after a week of working and taking care of the kids. I think we often aspire to do what others do without considering if that's really what we want out of life.

Take the white tail settler or someone who might be leaning into that type of hunting. That person can watch unlimited hours of people hunting for TV shows and YouTube episodes through that very style of hunting. It looks pretty sweet on film, but it's also a reality that that style of hunting strongly favors the kind of person who wants good footage of big deer dying. They might not even be doing it because they're drawn to it. They might be doing it because it's the easiest way to

film white tails getting shot. Because it is. It's the same reason why so many hunting shows are filmed in Texas. There isn't a better place to go if you want to film a lot of deer, including a lot of nice bucks, and to kill one in a matter of a couple days. That type of hunting just might be what folks love to do, or it might simply be a matter of how easy they can get a show

out of the deal. Shows filmed in Africa often happen for the same reason, or at least that's one of the reasons you see an awful lot of hunting content film where lions still kind of roam. Sometimes this is a weird journey because you can live vicariously through so many different people, and I think you should, or at least you should let them inspire you to try new things, to find your own white tail lane, if you will. I think it's valuable to try new things on many

many levels. Take food plots, for example. There are people who live to plant them and to work them and then hunt over them, and there are people who straight up shit on the idea and call them bait plots. I wish the people in the latter category would go create one sometime, just to see that it's not quite as easy to minimize it if you've never really done

the work to try to get one to grow. They'd see that, just as they'd see that having a food plot is often not the answer to easily killing more big bucks. It's often a lot of time and money to see some four ky's and doe you know, the same deer you'd see without a plot. But it's also just kind of rewarding to do the work and see the results. I wish the folks who hunt prime ground would go out and have to find a few deer

on pressured public land. I don't wish that to punish them, but instead to get them to experience a new deer challenge and a new deer reality. I want all of you to try as much different kinds of white tail hunting as possible, because through those experiences you can start to filter out the things that really don't do it

for you. Instead of being pissed off that you'll never be one of those rich pricks who has an awesome property to hunt where they don't have to work to kill a big buck, you might find that that type of hunting does nothing for you. White Tail hunt is supposed to be fun, but that's base level stuff. If you don't enjoy it on some level, I don't know it's time to I don't know. Golf. There should be enjoyment in it for you, but there should be more.

You should feel good about yourself and get what you need out of it. If that's simply to unplug from the rat race and your loud kids and your kind of mean wife who is always passively aggressively telling you to do something around the house until you want to do a bunch of industrial drugs and move to Europe

to be an underground rave DJ. So be it. If it's because white tail hunting is a driving force in your life and something that just feels gene deep to the point where you think about it all the time and it represents the biggest challenge in your life on any given day, then that's great. Figure out what makes it really hum for you and then lean into that. So I guess, I guess what I'm saying here is this.

We settle for unhappiness a lot in life. It's a disease of humanity and it's prevalent in our societ piety. This is unavoidable in some aspects of life, but deer

hunting isn't one of them. We have options even if you can't afford to buy like two hundred and forty acres a sweet ground for yourself, or maybe sign on the dotted line for an amazing lease, even if you only have public land as an option, and even if you only have limited time to hunt in any given season, there are options for you to try to figure out how to get the most out of your deer hunting. It might be as simple as trying to kill a deer with a recurve because you love the challenge of

shooting without sights. Or maybe you want to shoot any deer with your rifle from the ground while sneaking through the big woods five days into the gun season. Maybe not.

You should try different stuff to find out, because the more you do, the more you'll be able to say one way or the other, whether you're a white tail pioneer who has to see new ground and do new things, or you're a white tail settler who can't think of a better way to spend a random afternoon than doing some timber improvement projects or maybe cutting an acre of clover.

The way I'd really frame this up is try stuff, keep looking, keep challenging yourself to do new things until you start to identify the aspects of whitetail hunting that, for whatever reasons, just work for you, and then keep lean and into them so that you eventually figure out why you want to be there and what it really means to you to be there doing that, and tune in next week, because I'm going to talk about the realities of using different kinds of trail cameras and how

to maximize your scouting in the off season by using them correctly and most importantly, giving yourself time. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast. As I always, thank you so much for listening. Now, if you want more whitetail info, you can head on over to the mediat dot com slash wired to check out a bunch of articles, or if you just want to be entertained and maybe learn a thing or two, the guys over at the Element

have dropped their new Buck Truck series. You can find it on the Mediator YouTube channel. You might even see me on an episode, Clay Mark. Pretty good stuff and those boys are killers, so if you want to check it out, head on over there and watch them