Ep. 660: Foundations - How Avoiding Whitetail Trends Will Make You More Successful

and a public resource. Fair enough, I get that, but I also wonder why those same people folks because solely on social media influencers. But I don't know outfitters, not the state game agencies who view hunters, especially non resident hunters, as cash cows, not the media and the marketing companies pulling the strings behind the hunting industry. Or hell, I

don't know the manufacturers themselves. You know those companies that make the gear you buy and who want your money, and they figure out how to make you aware of their products so you do buy them. It's really an old problem viewed in new light. But it also follows something that this podcast is about trends. There are trends in hunting that just come and go, and I'm sure

there will be a new enemy at some point. I'm sure too that what we think is the answer to our deer hunting problems now will be something different in the future. And that's what I'm going to talk about, because conditioning yourself to be a deer contrary and allows you to start making decisions that will differ from your competition, and in most cases, this is the best way to find the success that eludes most whitetail hunters. People are

weird at our most fundamental level. We are just kind of like hairless monkeys, trying desperately to stay in our little tribes. You know. That might be a political or religious tribe. It might be a click at work or a friend group. It might be in hunting where you and your buddies only take self made traditional bows to the woods, and you look at anyone who uses a compound, or, worse yet, a crossbow, the way I might look at the sole of my shoe after stepping in a pile

of dog shit. It's in our nature to group up with like minded individuals want to fit in. It wasn't that long ago in our history where being a part of a group meant you had the best chance of survival, and if you got booted out for some social faux pa, you were on your own and very likely to die. We still feel this. It's gene deep, and it's one of the reasons that the low owners in our society

can be so dangerous. We crave kinship and companionship, and we despise being ostracized and treating like an other whatever that means. This need to belong, coupled with the fear of being booted, it leads us to do kind of weird stuff. Look at any group you want, really, you'll see identifiers that people used to signal hey, I'm just like you, buddy. This might be the cultivated look of a motorcycle gang. It might be sports fans of a

specific team. Hell, it might be the dumbass boys in my daughter's grade who all of a sudden decided mullets were cool again, and that for some reason, wearing tights undershorts is the hottest fashion trend of the century, and to be fair, the girls in their grade aren't spared

from that stuff either. I recently noticed that one of my daughters was adamant about wearing one of those hairclip things that your mom used to wear that looks kind of like a spider, some kind of multi legged insect if you see it on the floor or the kitchen counter. I thought, man, she's really kicking at old score with this look, until I showed up to coach softball and realized that a lot of the girls her age are

rocking those bad boys. What goes around comes around and the tool song Enema Maynard sings a little about this, and while I can't repeat the line, he does mention that he thinks anything retro is stupid. I agree, probably because I'm getting old and krabby, But I also think

it's mostly harmless. I mean, who cares if an eleven year old boy wants a mullet or an eleven year old girl wants to put a grammar level hair accessory in When it comes to hunting, the trends are mostly harmless too, at least when you view them from thirty thousand feet, but at an individual level they might actually not be so harmless. Let's take saddle hunting as an example. This should work for a couple of reasons. First off,

saddle hunting is actually an old method. Saddles first got kind of popular over twenty years ago, but the options on the market they weren't that great. Still, there were several companies making them, and some guys found a way to put them to good use. They never really caught on though in a I don't know a mainstream way, however. But fast forward to this more recent decade and saddle hunting has come on real strong. This isn't a bad

thing in and of itself. Hell, last year I killed a bull elk and my biggest buck of the year from a saddle. Now I'm far from anti saddle. I think the options today we have a pretty sweet and I think that if you're into mobile hunting, it's one hell of a good way to go about things. But it's also totally unnecessary for a lot of hunters if you're dead set on hunting the same private forty acres until you qualify for Social Security, you might not need

a saddle. You can set up spots with more comfortable options well in advance of the season. You don't need to put on a camo diaper and a hang sticks for every set. You might also just not like hunting out of a saddle. For whatever reason, it might not be for you. Maybe you're more of a ground hunter or a ladder stand hunter. Maybe that's something worth figuring out before you jump into the saddle bandwagon. The public

land hunting thing is another example. This trend sort of feels like it's dying now, probably because it has been beat to death for a while. You couldn't show your face at the local pro shop if you hunted private land, and the shame you felt was palpable. It was also stupid. And I say this as someone who has a lot of pride in his public land skills and as someone who has pushed that narrative for a long time when I was a younger man trying to make a name

for myself as a writer. This trend, you know, the public land one, has been a weird one. You should hunt where you can and where you want to. If you have access to private ground haunt that if you want to explore public go ahead. If you want to shoot a four hundred grain arrow that will blow through the biggest whitetail with ease, provided you can shoot it where it should go, do that. You don't need a

kate buffalo arrow to kill white tails. If you want to beef up your archery amo and quite your bow down, go for it. Just understand why you're doing it, what you're giving up, what you're gaining. Maybe it's the right move for you, maybe it isn't. The thing about trends and hunting is that, well, they are trends and by the very definition they're going to be popular and at the forefront of our minds till they're not. They'll be adopted by many people. And that means you have an

opportunity you as an individual. For some things, maybe you want to catch the same wave as everyone else. For others, maybe you want to do something totally different. Let me give you an example from my recent hunting life. Back in May, I drove down to the heart of Nebraska to chase turkeys with Sam Soholt. We hunted sand hill birds. And what that means is if you don't know. Anyway, we had a lot of room to roam, and we were hunting where there was really nothing specific to keep

the birds in one spot. There's no dreamy picked cornfields for the birds to end up in on each day where they would feed, no multi generational roots, because they can roost just about anywhere down there, and when the weather is nice they do. There's not much of a pattern to those birds because they live in a mono habitat where you know, this thousand acres is exactly like the next thousand acres. It felt like hunting big woods bucks honestly, or hunting elk in Colorado in an over

the counter unit. They are where you find them today and they're probably not going to be there tomorrow. Those hybrid birds we were hunting down there, they also happen to live in a place where they are highly stockable. The sand hills are this fascinating type of habitat with

rolling grassy hills. You know, often ridge after ridge after ridge, all more or less running in the same direction, and between those ridges are lush meadows, so it goes meadow ridge, meadow ridge, meadow ridge, and on, and in between those ridges are scattered pine trees, you know, cedars, the kind

that offer you really good cover for stalking. They're all over the countryside, and the birds in the meadows pretty visible, the birds on the ridges somewhat visible, and the birds that gobble a decent amount are awful easy to pinpoint in that country. The season is long down there, and when there is an option to run down a bird and set up close or just bush whack it, that's what most folks do. There aren't a lot of pop up blinds sold in that part of the state, is

my guess. Decoy sales are probably pretty low too. Locator calls, on the other hand, probably make up a bulk of the turkey sales down there. Now. The problem with this is the popular way to do it results in a lot of dead birds, but also a lot of survivors

who are real hesitant to announce their presence. They're also real hesitant to loaf away in the meadows, at least on the public dirt weaver hunting hunting them like the average hunter, where the goal is to cover ground until you hear see one, is a strategy that really dies on the vine as the weeks pass. A better bet. We found out a little bit too late on our hunt was to set up in the cover, use good decoys, pay attention, and be patient. Those birds would come in,

and they'd come in fast and usually quietly. It's a different kind of hunt. Now, if you think deer hunting doesn't follow the same trajectory, think again. I've hunted places where the deer absolutely know that they are most likely to get shot by some cameo clad dude up in a tree. They look up a lot, and they don't put up with much in the way of poor stand setups. I've also hunted deer, primarily out west, who simply haven't

caught onto the program yet. I've killed bucks out there from six feet up that never once looked at me, even when I was in a tree that was barely big enough to hold a pine squirrel. It doesn't matter what style of stand or saddle you use. If you're hunting where the deer look up a lot, you might be better off bucking the train and figuring out how

to kill them from the ground. You might also notice that every hunting show you watch has a host who will happily rattle, grunt, snort, wheeze at the bucks they see and often when they don't see a buck, just to get something to happen. And you might think, well, I'm gonna call my butt off when I get into

the woods because it sure looks like it works. But then you hike out to your favorite spot on public land and you rattle just like everyone else, and guess what, very few booners come running into pose up at twenty yards. I know it's shocking. The trends are everywhere, and they mostly aren't your friend. Now. I know that I've often said you need to find your own path out there, which is kind of really what this episode is all about,

and I believe it. But I also think that harboring a deep need to be a hunting contrarian is super important, particularly if you happen to hunt pressure ground. This is because what most people do on any given hunt doesn't work very well. The styles, the strategies, and tactics that most hunters attempt just aren't very effective. The big buck tricks that you can read about or watch tutorials on

YouTube about mostly don't work. Most of the stuff people do to try to kill deer and especially big bucks, almost never ever works. How's that for depressing? You have to acknowledge this, and then you have to figure out what does work for you and how you can lean into whatever that is to further increase your odds. It also pays to learn how to hunt other stuff and

broaden your horizons. The way to become a good hunter is to learn about what the deer do, and not learn what other people think the deer do or what

other people say deer do. The real path is to learn that stuff for yourself, to figure out that yes, you probably should hunt mornings in the early season, or no, you probably shouldn't use a buck decoy on public land on November seventh, because the deer have been hunted super hard every day and they aren't likely to see your fake buckster and walk in sideways with their eyes rolled and their fists baled up, all ready to throw down. This is what I'm going to talk about in the

entire next year on the podcast. If I'm being honest, It's been two full years of white tail hunting, and I'm ready to talk about other stuff. I want to talk about Western hunting and how it applies to white tails. I want to talk about spot and stock hunting. I want to talk about why pheasant hunting will make you a better deer hunter, and why it's just worth to

go do these things. Maybe how learning to call a turkey will help you call on elk, and how learning to be patient for one critter will help you be patient for all critters. Now, I'm not going to abandon the white tail entirely, trust me, so don't bail yet. But instead, the next year of this podcast is going to be about hunting other stuff in hunting in ways that aren't all that common in the deer woods. But everything we do with our gear and our hunts is

tethered to the whitetail in some way. The connections might not make sense on the surface, but my job is to make sure they get there. I think the strategy of becoming a hunting jack of all trades is better than trying to become a master of one. I know that's probably counterintuitive to a lot of folks, but I believe it's a viable path to success in the outdoors, and I believe it's going to become more viable as the years pass and it becomes tougher to do just

any old hunt. We might set our sights on the availability of tags and hunting opportunities is tightening up. You might not get to hunt elk, but you might get a chance to hunt antelope. You might lose your favorite deer property to some city slicker with more money than hunting skill, and you might find yourself tramping around on ground that anyone can tromp around on. You might not get permission to hunt deer, but maybe you'll get small

game permission somewhere. Change is inevitable, and I think we are entering a world of white tails and hunting in general, where if you're not trying to get better, you better have some real disposable income. I know that might sound depressing, and honestly, it kind of is, but it's also sort of a cosmic call to action from Mother Nature herself. Even though we want hunts to happen the way we want them to happen, it rarely works that way for

most of us. And even though we might not be interested in grouse hunting or bear hunting or whatever they might be, the opportunities we have to spend time in the woods when we aren't in a tree stand targeting deer, or when for whatever reason we just can't get into a tree stand to target deer. I also plan on covering concepts that are not directly tied to white tails, but do affect our white tail hunts. You know how to use your gear to the fullest ability. Why understanding

your own shortcomings is important. How pressure on public land roosters or maybe public land meal deer is in a hell of a lot different from pressure on public land white tails. And if you can figure out one, you can figure out all of them. You know, stuff like that, So please stick with me as we shift gears in the podcast for the next year and dive into a deeper pool of general hunting, one that will always revolve around the white tails, even if the orbit isn't quite

as tight as it used to be. I think you'll find there's plenty to think about and plenty to consider if you want to become a better hunter overall, a better woodsman or woodswoman. Is that a thing has to be anyway. Next week I plan to start this process and talk a little bit about spotting and stalking and how much fun it is, how it ties to white tails, and how if you have any inkling at all, you should probably try to find a spot in stock hunt before it's too late. And lastly, I just want to

say thanks again for your support. This weird little podcast is a lot of fun to produce, and I hope you keep getting something from it because that means a lot to me, just as much as your overall support has over the last few years. That's it. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by furs As. I always thank

you so much for your support. And if you want more white tail content or more hunting content, maybe just want to watch a cool series like our new buck Truck series out there, head on over to them meeteater dot com and you're gonna see all kinds of articles and videos and links to podcasts and everything. Basically, if you want to get a hunting fix, that's where you need to go.