Ep. 691: Foundations - Go Where You Shouldn't

the same world as you. They hunt unbelievable spots and they either have control over them or they pay for the opportunity to hunt where someone else controls the pressure. In a lot of content, the narrative that comes out of these folks is pretty much an echo chamber of do this, don't do that. But the truth is I kind of have to do things differently from them. One of those things, but I think will make you a better hunter is to go where you normally wouldn't go,

which is what this episode is all about. Earlier this summer, I filmed a fishing show with the one and only Andy May. During our shoot, I happen to catch a personal best smally in a spot that has just kind of come on a radar, on a lake that I fish more than anybody of water ever except for maybe the Mississippi River. I honestly don't know really why the spot holds big fish, but I have some ideas. Depth

definitely plays a role in it. I find differences in small mouth concentrations and quality of fish, often in places that are a foot or two deeper than the surrounding areas. Food is another one. I know that the minos end up getting pushed up against the shore there when the wind is blown just right, but you know that happens in a lot of spots on big lakes. So it's kind of still a mystery I'm trying to figure out.

But it's also a good reminder that on a specific lake where I'm real confident in my knowledge, I still miss things all the time, and things are always changing, So maybe that spot wasn't good five or ten years ago, or maybe I just missed it, maybe something changed and made it better. I think this is possible because some of the normal rock piles that usually host schools of Brownies are getting a lot more pressure than they used to. Now are bast smart enough to move somewhere where they

get harass less. Probably maybe I don't know. I know deer moved to places where they get harrass less. In fact, that's one of the biggest drivers in their daily habits. It's something that's super relevant right now too, considering how many states are opening up their white Tail season over the next few weeks, if they haven't already. Let me lay this out in an orderly fashion so you understand

where I'm going with this episode. As the season opens up, we all dive into our opening week or early season plan on an individual level. Great, that's great, how do your best field edge stands and try to arrow that dumb buck that just hasn't caught onto the pressure yet. But understand this, the pressure that shows up opening weekend and honestly the weeks before, as hunters get the itch to hang stands and check cameras and just get in the woods, is going to change the deer right as

you think they should be most predictable. Now you've put in all this work, at least I hope you have to get yourself ready for filling an early season tag, and now you're going to read the conditions and act on that plan. But the wild cards are many. If you don't have a sweet, tightly controlled place to hunt, some plans will work out for hunters, but mostly they won't. That means the fervor of opening week will come and go and the reality of the season will set in.

This is just like when you go on your first day of rutcation, say on November first, and you're so excited you peech just a little bit on the front of your cameo boxer's Mark Kenyan style. But after that first all day sit reality kicks you right upside the head like a drunk muytai fighter at a dive bar.

As soon as you're done counting tweetybirds, your job is to figure out the deer, and that isn't something you can do by listening to advice from people who don't have to worry about a hunting pressure or limited hunting time or not having very much hunting skill. So how do you do this. One of the ways is you go where you aren't supposed to. You're going to have

to go find the fresh sign somewhere. You're going to have to look around and accept the fact that the spot you thought was the spot of all spots, the one you just knew you'd kill your number one hitlister in has gone the way of the old dinosaur. Now, this is so much easier to preach than it is to practice. I deal with this in my life all the time, and I'm constantly fighting the patterns of my behavior.

I do have one benefit in all of this. It's that I've been wrong about deer a lot, and fish and turkeys and elk and squirrels and marriage and all sorts of fun stuff. If you haunt enough to be wrong a lot, you realize that you have less to lose than you think, and more to gain from breaking some of the hard and fast rules that most hunters follow. But you have to acknowledge two things. The first is that you're going to do things you think you probably shouldn't.

The second is that it's not going to happen quickly. Let's start with the first part. What do I mean by going where you shouldn't. Well, isn't that self explanatory? You have to go walk that swamp edge, You have to go into what you think is the primo betting area. Sometimes you have to go where you can learn something. If you're thinking, man, this guy's an idiot, I'm not walking into the best spot on the thirty acres I hunt only a few days after the season opener. Let

me remind you of something. I've been begging you to find more spots to hunt. Why didn't you? Huh wouldn't one more spot make a world of difference? So you wouldn't be so scared to go? Figure out why you're listening to just another moron. It's spout hunting advice instead of taking your freshly killed and kate buckhead to the taxidermist. Even you, mister, I only hunt thirty acres. Guy can go where you think you shouldn't. The way I do it for those small properties is this, I wait until

I have the conditions working in my favor. The first is that I know I won't be able to hunt that property for at least a few days. I want to go in when I know I'm going to be somewhere else for a little while, you know, right before a trip or a long stretch of dumb work where there won't be any hunting to do. The second is I want to go in there in the midday, preferably in the rain. The midday part is easy enough to do, especially if I plan to do a morning hunt on

one of those small properties. The rain isn't as easy to come by, but it helped if you can get it. I'll also just take a good steady wind to at least cover up some of the sound and some of my movement. Then it's just a matter of guessing on where the deer probably went if they weren't where I expected them to be. I see this a lot in my neck of the woods, where the deer starts really tuck into the edges of the wetlands once the season opens.

They are often a mix of soft and hard edges close together, and it's consistently some of the best betting cover also functions as staging cover, where those early season bucks will often leave their first rubs of the year. The overall goal is just take a quick look around while causing as minimal damage as I can, yet still trying to learn something if you are interested in this and are a small property hunter, or hell, if you hunt huge properties, this works too. You should think small

when it comes to hunting spots. Don't think of a whole ridge or the whole edge of the cattail. SIU think about the exact spot the bucks should want to be the most. Then go find it. Take that walk. Yeah, you'll leave scent, you'll probably spook some deer, but you should learn something. And I'm going to get into this later,

but remember this isn't a short game. Even though you might find some sign worth going mobile on right now, you're also building up some knowledge on what the deer do as soon as they know they are getting bow hunted again. That knowledge comes into play for the rest of your hunting life on that property you hunt right now and others you'll hunt in the future. Look at it this way. Even if you've been hunting the same spot for fifty years, there are things you don't know.

There are deer spots you've never understood in those five decades, and there are countless things that are different this year from twenty five years ago, as well as one season ago. There's always something to learn. I feel this every time I start setting up for the new season, and then really understand it once I start hunting. But it's also a motivator to get out figure some new things out. Sometimes I have a hard time with that though, for a couple of reasons. One is that I get scared

and lazy. I don't want to spook dear, and sometimes I just don't want to go do extra work for something that should be fun, so I trick myself into doing it. This often means I pick up a shotgun, a round up my dogs. Maybe I'm gonna go jump shoot a few woodies. Maybe I grab my twenty two and I'm gonna go hunt squirrels for a little bit. If there is something else to hunt, I find it

easier to go where I think I shouldn't. Now I know this is sort of a contradiction because I told you not to make an impact, but again, you got to figure out how to do this. It's more important than not doing it. So if that's what it takes,

go do it. It's kind of like how it's easier to go winter scouting if you have the possibility to find a shed antler or two, or how it's not so bad to hike a couple of miles deep into an elk drainage if you know you have a couple of blunt tip arrows in your quiver and really high odds of bumping into those delicious and oh so stupid mountain dwelling grouse. You know, the lowly woodcock, the worst eating and easiest to hit game bird I've ever encountered.

And yes, I know you'll send me some nasty emails on how tasty they are and how they are the supreme challenge for real wingshooters, even though you're wrong, has probably led to more accidental big woods deer hotspots for me than any other activity, aside probably from winter scouting, which I think is a big woods hunter's best friend.

The thing is, woodcock hunting is fun, especially if you've got a puppy and you want them to learn the ways of game birds without dealing with roosters that will run them to death or the randomness of rough grouse

In the early thick woods. Woodcock are predictable. They feed in low wet areas, the kind of areas that bucks on public land often retreat to when the masses show up with their bows and crossbows ready to roll the routes I take through the woods to shoot a few of those warner meters as the routes I need to take to often figure out where the bucks are living.

This is one of my favorite things to do when I have time and several thousand acres of national forest to hunt, although I will do it on a smaller private parcel too. The truth is it's just something I enjoy doing enough that I'll sand bag a little bit of potential deer success now to do it. But even that's not entirely true, because walking where I think woodcock might be has led to an awful lot of deer.

Like I said a few years ago, I spent quite a bit of time on a large parcel of land in northern Wisconsin hunting deer, grouse, woodcock, and catch it a few brook trout throughout September and October. I pretty much target all those animals and fish. At some point, and as the rut drew closer, I switched mostly to deer, but I hunted spots I found four weeks earlier while woodcock hunting, because that took me into places I needed to see to have a better deer plan throughout the season.

Some of the spots I've found this way have become season after season places that I always check and more often than not hunt at some point. Now, this is a different strategy than the low impact style so many people preach. But the truth is, if you hunt pressure ground, the deer used to some impact. They are used to people going into areas and leaving scent all around and generally making their lives more stressful. Now, you might think you can shortcut this whole thing and be real smart

by running trail cameras, but that's a tall order. Sure, if you have one trail or one tight spot that you can run a camera on and figure something out, great. Think about it this way. What if the property you hunt has just one ten acre swamp on it. There might be dozens of trails leading into and out of it. There are hundreds of yards of inside and outside edges to hunt on that little swamp. How many cameras would you have to run to get a pattern on the

deer going in and out of it? Probably more than you own. Now, what can you learn by taking one or two laps around and through it will be quite a bit. Some of it will be actionable in the short term, but a lot of it will be actionable in the long term. Now, of course, running cameras around it all season long might give you a hell of a glimpse into what you should do next season, So

there is that. But I still think there is such a benefit to finding sign in person and taking note of the deer that you jump and really looking at the land and how the deer use it or how they heloc use it or whatever. The main takeaway to this is that you can't be afraid to break the rules a little bit. I mean the rules of the hunting industry, not your state rigs. Just to be clear, the rules that others follow apply to their hunting situation,

not yours. And honestly, if the generally accepted hunting rules that came from the hunting industry worked so well, it wouldn't be so damn hard for so many of us to consistently fill our tags. Yet it is think about that. I want you to think about this as well. As you're opening week, plan unravels and you see how it's really going to take shape. Maybe that bachelor group you've been glassing all summer sticks to the pattern and you're good to go. That's great, But if not, what's next.

Maybe the best way to learn this is by going elk hunting, which is a topic I covered a few weeks ago. Elk will teach you things about how quickly gain can be here today and gone tomorrow, to force you to keep an eye on the clock because you'll be on limited time. They'll remind you pretty much daily. But how if you're not really right around them, you're

in for long, slow, frustrating, boring days. White tails will teach you the same thing if you learn to ignore the reality that you do have a long ish season in which to encounter them. They'll teach you that lesson if you're willing to be honest about the gaps in your knowledge on any given property, and your willingness, often too your own detriment to keep slapping the ass of that dead horse you're trying to ride when it's clear that things have changed and then deer have left you behind.

You don't have to buy a well bred lab puppy in a little twenty eight gage to woodcock hunt to do this. You don't have to go hunt squirrels in the same oaks that you're dear feet under you don't have to trick yourself into jump shooting some teal on a series of ponds hidden deep in a national force. But you should look at what it takes to get yourself out there, learning and looking around as that season progresses. This is the best way to stay proactive in my opinion.

And if you need to pair this strategy with some fresh trail camera sets, great. It's hard to gather too much deer intel, at least in my experience, But my main point is this, don't be like other folks. Don't put all your faith into your early season plan without acknowledging that if it doesn't work well, you need to

do some work. Don't just say to yourself, well, things will get back to normal as soon as the wreck gets closer, because then you'll sit out so much of the season on a long odds bet instead of getting out there and adding to your baseline of property knowledge and your overall understanding of just what deer might do

at any given point of the season. And don't forget to come back next week because I'm going to talk about shot angles, dear body language, and how to mostly deflate lungs or puncture dear hearts when you draw your bow. That's it. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by a first Light. I just want to say thank you to all the listeners, all the people who go read the articles at the Mediatter's site, everybody who's viewing the

different series that we put up there. So much support from you guys at Gales. We just absolutely love it. We truly appreciate it. If you are listening to this and you want to hear podcasts by Clay or whoever, you can go to the mediator dot com find those. You can find all those series. The Element boys are putting up all kinds of good stuff, and of course tons of articles on every kind of hunting and fishing and foraging and whatever else that you want to see.

It's all there. And if you're like, you know what, I think I need a new first Light jacket or maybe an FHF bino harness something like that to your stores there for you as well. So while you're doing a little reading and consuming some content, maybe do a little shopping too, you do you, but check it out at the medeater dot com.