Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your guide to the whitetail woods, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light Go farther, stay Longer, and now your host, Mark Kenyon.
Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. This week on the show, we are kicking off another round of our what would you Do series, in which we're running a hunter through a very specific set of hypothetical hunting situations to see how they would handle them, and our guests
today from the hunting public. It's mister Aaron Warburden. All right, welcome back to the Wired to Hunt podcast, brought to you by First Light, their camera for Conservation initiative and their brand new line of whitetail gear, the Core Phase and Thermic Kits. Can check it all out over at first Light dot com. But today we're kicking off another one of our series that we have done annually for
a number of years now. It's a favorite of mine and many other folks, and this is the what would you Do series, in which we get a hunter on the line with me and I walk them through a series of very specific hypothetical hunting situations. You know, imagine this this day, you're in this state. Here's the conditions you have, here's the setup, or here's the thing that the deer is doing, or here's what you just saw. Now walk me through how you would handle it. What
would you do? Why would you do it? This is an interesting way to learn new things about deer hunting strategies, but with a lot of specificity. You know, it's one thing to have someone tell you, wow, this is you know how I like to hunt the rut. It's another to hear specifically how they would handle this various situation
during the rut. With these conditions and these variables, all of that I think allows us to get a lot more from an indie and our guest today, Aaron Warburton from the Hunting Public, is a great individual to talk to about this kind of stuff. He's obviously very experienced. If you if you've seen him, which I'd be shocked if you haven't on his previous work with Midwest whitetail
we're now the Hunting Public. You've seen a guy who can get it done in a lot of different situations, from the Midwest to the South, to the west to the east, a lot of different public land experience private as well. The guy is just a great deer hunter and a really good communicator, and in this episode he does a great job explaining how and why he does things.
And I think we are able to know. You can watch him on his hunting videos all the time, and you're seeing them do all these things, and sometimes it's an incredible surprising, interesting you know, why are they doing this? How are they doing this? Some of the stuff seems like so off from you know, how we used to hunt ten fifteen years ago. But Aaron does a great job today in explaining the thought process behind these things,
how he would deal with different challenging circumstances. So if you want to learn how to be a better deer hunter on public land or really even on private in tough situations in many different parts of the country, today's
episode is a great opportunity for you to do so. Now, before we get to that, one quick update for you, I want to let you know that if you are listening to this when it drops, which would be you know, oh gosh, this would be August twenty second, twenty twenty four, if you're listening now or soon after that, We've got an event coming up August twenty fourth, twenty twenty four, in Northern Minnesota that I will be at and would
love to see you at as well. This is going to be paired with one of my Working for Wildlife Tour events. This is our last Working for Wildlife Tour of the year, and we are going to be working up there on the edge of the Bounder Waters with Sportsmen for the Bounder Waters and a whole bunch of volunteers to help improve a WMA on Lake Vermilion. We're going to be planting conifers and oak trees for whitetails
and other species of wildlife up there. We're going to be doing some canopy opening to make sure there's some light getting down on the ground so that new growth can come up and provide wildlife habitat. We're going to be helping create some access trails for recreators and hunters, a boat landing so you can boat across and use this area and experience this great new wildlife habitat that we're going to be creating. So it's gonna be a
great way to give back to our public lands. The downside or the bummer here is that we are capped out on how many volunteers we can have at that event, so we are full up as far as people who want to participate in the actual work, but we have a open to all celebration later that evening. So anyone up in Northern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, if you want to get over to Ely, Minnesota this Saturday evening, I'd love
to see you. This is going to be at the Grand Eely Lodge from five pm to nine pm August twenty fourth, twenty twenty four. There's gonna be live music, there's gonna be speakers, including myself. There's gonna be barbecue, a bar raffles, auctions, some swag from First Light that you can enter to win. I think there's gonna be some stuff for me, maybe some signed books, all sorts of good stuff. We're just gonna have a great time celebrating hunting, fishing and public lands and would love to
have you there. So again, if you want more details, you can go to the Sportsman for the Boundary Waters website, which is let me get you that ur l here shortly. I should know this. It is wait for it Sportsman bw C A dot O RG SO going over there you can get details about the event. There's also a Facebook event page that you can rs VP for as well. So hope to see on Saturday. Speaking of the Working for a Wildlife Tour, I want to give you a
quick update on this. This is gonna be our ninth event since the last spring, so nine of these events in which I and many volunteers such as yourself have gone out volunteered on public lands to improve wildlife habitat, to give back to the wildlife and wild places that we enjoy so much, that we benefit from so much. So I wanted to kind of give you a state of the union. Since we started this twelve eighteen months ago, there's been almost I think almost seven hundred volunteers that
have participated in these events. So far. We have done such things as collect more than two thousand pounds of trash of public lands. We have improved more than eighteen acres of early secessional habitat that was in one of the events last year. This year in Pennsylvania and Kentucky, we probably you know, more than doubled that because we did a bunch of vasive species removal, We did some tree cutting to I guess it'd be thinning to allow
candipy relief for oak trees. We improved eight to eighty small game brush piles created northern Michigan for small game and other wildlife. Collected eight hundred pounds of white oak acorns which are then planted at a nursery, and I believe the number of trees is something fifteen thousand seedlings that are growing right now that we're then going to
go plant back on the National Forest next year. Thirty five acres of wildlife food plots planted on public lands, two hundred crab apple trees planted, more than a dozen acres of aspen forest restored. So many cool things like this that are going to make for better habitat for deer and turkeys and upland birds and birds and butterflies and so many other critters. It's going to make for better you know, access and opportunities for hunters and recreators.
And this is the kind of thing that you know, you don't need to wait for a Working for Wildlife Tour event to be a part of. There are these kinds of things all over the country put on by many different organizations, and I would just encourage all of you guys to consider participating. It's a fun time. You get to spend time with other folks who care about the things you do. I've made a whole bunch of new hunting buddies and friends to this stuff. It's inspiring.
You come away from these things after doing something tangible and good feeling like, hey, I actually can make a difference. Hey, I actually gave back to this thing I cared about. That's going to make you feel good about yourself in the moment. It's going to make a tangible, positive difference
right now for the landscape. And I think it leads to bigger and better things down the road, because when you start doing this kind of stuff, it tends to snowball and it becomes a little bit of your identity. And I think that if we are going to spend time out there hunting or fishing and enjoying and taking from these resources, right we have an obligation to give back, and this kind of thing is a great opportunity to do so. I appreciate everybody who has come out for
the working for a while life to our events. So far, it's been great meeting you. I really hope we can do more of it next year and hopefully we'll see more of you then. And this Saturday, August twenty fourth, five to nine pm, grand Elie Lodge, I hope a bunch of you can come on out and help me celebrate the finale of our twenty twenty four edition. So with that said, we should get to our podcast today with Aaron. It's a good one. You're gonna enjoy it.
Here we go, all right, hear me now on the line for the I don't know third or fourth time. Maybe we got Aaron Warwarden back on the show. Thanks for being here, man, no problem, happy to do it. I know this is a crazy time of year for all of us as we're racing to the finish line. So I don't know what time of year is the worst, because hunting season obviously is really hard time to get a hold of people because we're all in the field.
But at least we're all dedicated to that time, to the work and to being out there, and we're already away from our families and it's already kind of crazy. But then right now, least for me, I'm trying to get a lot done, but at the same time also trying to pack in family time or like honey, you list kind of time, and so I also feel bad pulling people away from that kind of stuff. Now, so long story short, thank you.
No man, it's no problem at all. I mean you should see my office. It's a complete tornado in here of just stuff all over the place, bows and arrows and boxes and hard drives and yeah, I'm in the middle of all kinds of stressful stuff. So this is this is a good change of pace, just to good counting for a little bit good.
Well, the game plan for this series, as you know, is is basically throwing you a bunch of curveballs, a bunch of different hunting scenarios, some that you've probably encountered, some maybe not exactly. But the idea here is to kind of see how you would do this stuff, how
you would tackle these specific hypothetical situations. You know, as a deer hunter, and you know, you and a lot of your buddies there at THHP have had such a diverse set of experiences, traveling so many places across the country. I think we can learn a lot from you guys, and these are these are extra helpful. So here's my first question. We're just gonna jump right into it without wasting any time. Imagine that you've got a traveling hunt
planned for this season for you know, primetime. You're gonna go somewhere in the Midwest in November. But this is going to be a new area, so spot you've never hunted in the past, and it's gonna be a decent sized chunk of public land. All these things sound great.
The problem is, for whatever reason, you have no time to go there and scout it ahead of time in the spring, and you can't get there a few days early in the fall, so you're gonna have to You're gonna drop off, and you're gonna have like five days of hunt November, and it's just got to happen. I'm gonna give you one day in August to scout one day late August. This is you have to achieve anything you want to achieve for this hunt on this one
single you know, twenty four hour period. How exactly would you best use that single day in August to prepare yourself in some way for that upcoming November hunt. What would be like the most efficient bang for your buckway to spend that time.
I would probably end up spending most of that twenty four hour period in the car. Honestly, especially if it was a big public area or just an area in general that I had never been.
To before, I would start.
I would start off with the low hanging fruit, which is figure out the road systems. Which roads are closed, which roads are minimum maintenance, roads that could be muddy in a rainy or a wet situation, Which roads are passable, which roads can you park off of, try to figure out lots of just general regulations about the area. Some public areas, for example, you have to park in a parking lot. Some you can park right on the side of the road in the road ditch and take off
in there. And then there's also some road systems that have like a big guard rail that runs down the side of them for two miles where you can't park on the side of the road. All these are just little details that you get just from the truck, and that would be I would have my maps and I would just be cruising around that entire area, trying to cover every inch of that road system and thinking about access. Now, if I got all that accomplished, then I would try
to dive in to a betting area or two. The reality though is that. I mean, if I'm looking at betting areas and I'm trying to be efficient, it's hard to pick one that's two miles deep, even though that
might be a good candidate to scout. If you only have twenty four hours and you're looking at like a third of the day, it's going to take you four or five hours just to get back in there and start looking around, and then in an additional several hours to kick over every rock in there to understand it. Because that's ideally what I would like to do if I was scouting to betting areas. Once I get in there,
I want to spend time in there. I don't want to just look at it for twenty minutes and then feel rushed and have to leave, because then I'm not going to know. I'm not going to get all the
intel that I want. So if I was down to a day, i'd spend most of the time on the road, and if I had any time left over, I would try to think about efficient bedding areas that I could scout, So stuff that's really close to the road, stuff that's overlooked, fairly small in size, you know, acre two or less that I could just burn through as quickly as possible, and that's probably gonna fill up the whole day, honestly.
I mean usually if we're scouting an area, about the second and third day is when we really get into the nitty gritty of figuring out betting areas in there, you know, And after you've got five, six to ten days in there, then you really start putting the pieces together. But it all starts in the car.
Yeah, So what if I change the time of year and instead of your one day to scout being in August, instead it's going to be the day before you're hunting. So now you're allowed to show up on November second, or whatever day it's going to be sometime that period. You can't hunt for whatever reason. You can't have your ball with you, you can't have a firearm with you, just scouting. But same question, but now it's the day before, still in the car.
Even if I could hunt, if I had five days to hunt, I would, and I was going in blind to an area like that, I'd probably devote the first half of that trip to just scouting, and maybe the
first entire day to just being in the car. I mean, driving from public area or parking lot to parking lot, looking at who's parked where on the side of the roads, and just kind of trying to look for a hole somewhere that's not getting attention that could be really thick, that is getting deer pushed into it from the onslaught of hunting pressure. Because you're talking about the Midwest and the Rut, I mean, there's going to be hunting pressure.
That's when everybody takes your vacation. So if you show up there on a Saturday or a Friday or a especially, those are the days when I really want to be on the road looking for pressure because that's gonna ta Those are those are the high pressure days, right, I mean that's when most of the people are out there,
is on the weekends. So I want to look and mark as many hunters as I can in that given day, and there's gonna more times than not we find you know, sixty seventy percent of the property's got hunters on it, but you know the rest may not have anybody in there.
And then if we scout again the second day from the road and nobody's in there, then we know, okay, that's two days in a row during the beginning of the rut where it doesn't appear, at least from the outside looking in, that there's any hunting pressure on this little spot, and then we might drill into that one a little bit well also if it's in the rut too. We we're always on the move, whether we're on foot or in the car, and we're looking for the hot action.
I mean, whether that's driving down the road and running across a big buck with a dough that's in a road ditch, or whether we're burning boot leather and in search of you know, the rut if you will, trying to find a hot dough with several bucks on her. We do the same thing.
When you are doing this kind of hunting pressure check and you see a car at a trailhead or an access point, how big of a radius are you crossing off the map? And I wonder, like if this has changed it all? It like maybe ten years ago most guys were hunting close to the truck, but now most serious hunters know, or at least a lot of serious hunters want to go deep now because of you know, continued attention and you know, discussion about best ways to
do this. So now when you see a truck at a trailhead, how much are you crossing off the map, assuming well, okay, that's been pressure because there was someone here.
It just depends on the nature of it. You know, some public areas are real smaller. Even a portion of a public area maybe just a narrow access with a you know, a two spot parking lot. So if somebody's parked there two days in a row, and you can assume just by looking at the map that they're going in in one direction. Now, if it's a parking lot that's surrounded three hundred and sixty degrees by public land, and they can go two miles in every direction, then
one vehicle isn't a problem. I mean, five vehicles may not be a problem. You know, it just depends on where they're going. You can't infer as much from that. But say, for example, you're driving down a road. Left side of the road is private, right side of the road's public, and you're seeing a car every three hundred
yards down that road. You can assume on the public side of the road, you can assume that those people are parking, and they're going straight in for the most part, at least for the first couple hundred yards, So it kind of just depends. I don't know how to answer that accurately with that out seeing the exact scenario that you're that you're dealing with. But those are the thing
that's what I'm thinking about. I guess that those are the things that are going through my mind whenever I'm whenever I see a vehicle there, I see a hunter there. And also to caveat that, how do you know if it's a hunter. It's if it's public land, it's close to a city or something, and there's lots of hiking
trails or something there. It could be somebody out walking their dog, right, I mean, there's dan Imfall used to talk about that about how he would have like his old mom car or something that he would take out there every once in a while that he would park on the side of the road because they didn't want to They he didn't want to have his truck out there with his hunting stickers on it because then everybody knows, oh,
that's a hunter and he's in there. He you know, had some old minivan or something that he was in out there to try to make it appear like it's somebody just out walking their dog. So I don't know, there's a lot of these things that are going through my mind as I'm thinking came through that.
But interesting. Okay, let's shift a little bit into a real hunting scenario. Now we're going to start the year out. It's early September still, and it's one of those states like Kentucky where you've got that early September opener. It is super hot but also wet, not only muggy, but there's actually been kind of sporadic rain showers. It's that
kind of thing. And you are hunting near a beanfield where at least you can see into the bean field from where you're sitting up in a tree, and you are set up assuming that there will be deer coming out of some thick, nasty bedding cover off to your let's just say to your west, but in the opposite direction is the bean field. You glass out there and you see a shooter buck stand up out of the beans. Turns out this buck was betted in the beans the whole time. So there's a betted buck steps up out
of the beans. You watch them the rest of the evening. Day two arrives. The morning of day two, how do you approach the next day after seeing this buck stand up out of the beans? Are you hunting in the morning? Are you waiting till the evening? Either way, what are you doing?
What are the conditions when I get up that morning, same kind of thing, hot but scattered showers, windy at all or no wind. We're gonna say this is a light wind, like less than ten twelve miles an hour type wind. I'm going to try to observe again, unless I noticed something the day before, like if he was betted in the beans with a waterway nearby, or with a weed patch out there, or something to that effect, that I could maybe use his cover when I'm slipping
into that spot. The other thing you got to take into account is how tall are the beans, because if they're really tall beans, how you're going to get an arrow through the crap If he's in the middle of the beans, So you have to find some sort of mini transition out there that you could set up on where you could maybe kill him. You know, if the beans are below chest heighth on the deer, then you
may not have as big of an issue. But the thing that I'm immediately thinking of is trying to observe him again if the conditions don't lend itself to slipping close. Now you said it's wet, it's been rainy or whatever, so that helps quiet my noise down as I'm trying to sneak in close to that deer where he's at. But if it's not very windy, it's still going to be a challenge, especially if he's up and feeding, you know,
first light in the morning. So what I'd rather do is I'd rather watch him bed down that morning, see if I get eyes on him, and then watch him as long as possible. That's sort of the chink in his armor, if you will, is he's choosing a bed in an area that is wide open until he lays down. So if you can get eyes on him while he's up and moving around out there, you can really get a lot of information without spooking.
You know.
You can sit back from a long ways away and put together all of these pieces and then watch where he beds down, wait for the day winds to pick up in the middle of the day, and then sort of crafts you're playing to get in there really close to him. Jake and Hayden did that a couple of years ago in October. They did it with a muzzleoder, but they were watching from and it wasn't a beanfield,
but it was similar vegetation height. You know, they watched a buck travel all the way across it in the morning and lay down out in the middle of it day winds picked up.
They marked the spot.
They marked many lan you know, many landmarks around the buck so that they could have a point of reference. That's another thing you have to consider is when you're watching that deer, if he's out in a big, monotonous beanfield, Yeah, he might be easy to see from tree stand twenty feet up from four hundred yards with a good set of binoculars, But how you're going to know where exactly he's at once you get out there on the ground with him. So is he next to this little green
bush out there? He is he next to this little waterway? How far is he from that little waterway? You know, I've heard lampers talk about that a little bit. When he's spotting and stalking mule deer, Like he's always trying to measure how deep the cuts are and how far across they are as he's glassing, so that he can anticipate where he needs to get to be in range of that mule deer buck, And it's kind of the
same situation. You're trying to anticipate where you can get to get a shot at that deer within his bubble. The good thing is is that you know right where he is, so and you and if it's a giant beanfield and he's out in the middle of it, you can seemingly get the win right and come in from
any direction possible. But I would definitely wait till the day winds pick up and then create a plan to slip in the narrow on him and try to get an arrow to him when he stands up later in the day, or even when he stands up in the middle of the day just to brow.
Does your answer change it all if I tell you that no longer do you have that rainy situation. So now it's been just parched dry, it's been drier than dry, and it's one of those very still days, so maybe like two miles an hour and very very still, you know, very very hard stalking conditions. Now, so what are you do in that scenario?
It depends on how much time I got left in the hunt. I'll push all my chips in. If I don't have much time, and you know, and you feel like you're not going to be able to get on this deer again, then you got it. Then it's like, well, you know, what do I have to lose? I might
as well go after him. He's not going to be on this same pattern in a week anyway, more than likely, especially if it's early in the year like that, those beans are going to turn by the middle of the month and he's going to be on acorn somewhere or on natural brows or whatever. They just don't you know, So spooking him ain't necessarily going to run him out of the county. You're probably gonna be able to come back in there and hunt him within the next few weeks.
So he's in a vulnerable position.
The problem is is that when it's dry and calm, it is so hard to get close because everything is magnified every step that you take. Your noise factor is a problem, but also your movement because those beans aren't blown around, and the grass isn't blown around. Everything's dead, calm, and you're the only thing that's moving in that field.
So all he's got to do is here, you know, a little twig or a bush or something break, a stem of a bean plant break, and he whips that head over there, and he catches a little bit of movement, and he knows that something's up, you know, while you're stressful. Oh yeah, if it's wet and windy, you can you can go about it a lot differently. But in that scenario you've got to be infinitely more patient because your movement is so critical. You know, you may not be able
to get as close either. You may have to kind of push back from the table a little bit and say, all right, this is as close as I can comfortably get to this thing. Here's a little waterway or a weed patch, and these beans are a hard pin in the field where the beans aren't his tall, where if he does decide to come this direction, I can get a good shot in there. So maybe I should just stay back one hundred to two hundred yards, make a
good setup and see what he does. Those would be things going through my mind.
Yeah, would you ever employ something to try to get him to come to you? Like, would you call it all? In that scenario because of the fact you have to stay back farther even though it's early season or anything else like that.
I'd consider it, but not calling without a decoy in the wide open like that. He's going to stand up in those beans and he's going to be able to look right over there. And if he doesn't, if he doesn't see this source the sound, he's he's a not going to come in, or B maybe worse, he's going to come in, but he's going to come in straight at you on alert looking. You know, you don't want an alert deer facing you at forty yards stomping his foot at you.
You It's it's.
Better, in my opinion, at least to catch him by surprise. Or if you've got a decoy and he commits to it, that's a that's a great situation. And they could do that that even early in the season, So I wouldn't. I would not rule that out as a potential option. Does any of this change if you are doing all this along a very busy road and this is all within sight of a busy road, and you know there's gonna be people walk driving by frequently, other hunters driving by.
Do you worry at all about doing anything that makes you visible and or encourages someone to stop and start watching or glassing or anything like that. Or do you just have to say, well, it is what it is and we're gonna hope it doesn't mess things up.
Uh. If it's under the perfect conditions where I can get in there real tight to the buck and I feel good about getting within fifty yards of him, I'm gonna go. I don't care about anything else that's going on. I mean, that's what that's when my brain kicks into Okay, it's killed time. This is the situation. We need to get close to this thing and killing so we're going.
If it's if it's the second scenario that you talked about, it's a little bit more difficult and I have more time, or I'm coming back in a few weeks or something, I might just hang tight and watching. But I mean, if he's close to a road, you got road noise too, that could aid you. That's also another distraction that he's probably watching and paying attention to his car slowing down
on the road, people driving by. You know, he's not able to devote all of his senses just to you as you're going in because he's distracted, So that could con benefit you.
That scenario man. I mean it could either be like feast or famine. Right, you could see this being like, oh, this is amazing, what a great situation to some degree, or then if you've got that wrong set of conditions, then it's then it's like, jeez, this is kind of a nightmare. I almost wish I didn't see him, because now it's gonna be so stressful.
Yeah, it could definitely be stressful if you don't have the right conditions, you know, but there's so many things that if it's hot and dry and calm, and there's a ditch with water one hundred yards from him, or a little pond out there with a little brush around two hundred yards from him, that may be a perfect place to just go and make a good setup for the rest of the day. You might kill him right there.
I mean, you got a bow in your hands. So yes, you can be aggressive at times under the right situation, but a lot of luck is almost always involved.
When you have a bow.
You have to almost wait for them to make some kind of mistake.
All right, let's fest forward through the calendar just a little bit. Let's get to like October first, and you guys are going to a swampy part of Louisiana, which might be almost all Louisiana. But let's say you're hunting down south a swampy area of public land, planning to start hunting on October first. What does your e scouting look like leading into that hunt. I imagine you're gonna do some map work. Let's say this is the spot you haven't hunted before again, so you're trying to learn
it ahead of time to plan things out. You talked about your driving scouting, but what kind of stuff would you be looking for in swampy southern ground when trying to plan a hunt before showing.
Up that early in the season. I have very little experience down there, so what I would be looking at doing is calling somebody that's got some I'd be trying to talk to biologists, other hunters in the area, anybody that could glean that I could glean some info out of. Not necessarily on well where are the bucks right now? I want general info like early October, what are the deer generally feeding on in the woods around here? Like
which oak trees are dropping acorns this early? And you might even be able to do a Google search and figure some of that stuff out, Like for example, down south, a nut all oak tree will drop acorns much later in the year, so in like December and January they will be flocking to those things, whereas in October they're holding all their acorns. So maybe you know, it could be any other type of food source, not just acorns, but I wouldn't need to get more information on that.
And if you're looking at a thick swamp that is essentially endless betting cover, especially early in the year before there's been you know, when the woods are super thick, I'm not so much focused on betting. I'm more focused on food, just trying to figureigure out what on earth the deer or feeding on at that given time. And then i'd also be looking from a map on like creative ways to access the area, ways in which that
other people might not access it. I'm not saying that's a that's a clear, hard and fast rule by any means, because it's early in the year, there hasn't been a
lot of pressure yet. But if there's a canal running through there, or a stream of little marsh by you whatever, where I could get in a canoe and I could efficiently move up through the middle of that area without spooking deer, because in most of those situations of swamps are flat, so you need any if you can find even just a couple feet of elevation difference, that can help you when it comes to moving through the woods undetected.
Whether that's just like.
A mini ridge in the middle of a bottom, or like I'm talking about, a swamp or a creek or something that would I would I really like those situations where you can get a boat with a trolling motor in there, or a canoe something quiet water access where you can go up every three or four hundred yards and pop out of that water, raise your head up two or three feet and look around at the situation.
You can spot deer.
That way, you can observe deer, you can learn stuff about the area without putting a bunch of grounds in in there or spooking deer. I mean, we've paddled past deer in canoes dozens of times within bow range and they don't hardly look up. It's a very very low
impact way of learning an area. So that would be one thing I'm looking at, But I will caveat that by saying early in the season don't be surprised if there's a huge buck three hundred yards from the parking lot and he's feeding right there on a daily basis, because there has been no pressure up to that point.
So there's a couple of ways to look at that.
You know you can you can try to efficiently scout those area that are really close that don't have a lot of pressure, Or you can look at the water access, but also combine that with the food intel that you get.
MM. So you've looked on your maps and you've found some water access, maybe you've talked to someone to figure out what the best food sources of that time. What does day one or day two of the actual hunt look like in this kind of wet, big country where let's say you've driven around, you've done that night before whatever, you you've kind of figured out where there's people where there's not. What does your actual first day of hunting
look like. Do you think you would do that first thing that you described, which would be the float around and eyeball everything, or would you do that part of the day and then eventually pick the best looking piece of high ground and hop up in a tree, or how would you navigate that Uh, yeah, more than likely.
If there was a good place where I could access via water and I could really cover some country, I would not be too worried about hunting that first day unless there was like a phenomenal front that was coming through and deer we're going to be definitely on their feet and moving. I'm just focused on learning at that point, so I'm trying to I'm trying to find as many points of interest in spots as possible, get and gather as much information as possible. I'm like, where's the fresh deer sign?
Right now?
I'm not worried necessarily about spooking some deer here and there. That's actually a good thing because then I start to you can start to put little pieces together every time that happens. But the kayak and the canoe in the water would be you know, if I had that scenario where I could cover a few miles or whatever of country with limited low impact and ideally learn half a dozen spots or more in a given day, I might
not even hunt. I might not even get in a tree unless there's a situation where I can get in a tree and I can observe a great distance, or I really find something that's super hot and very convincing, you know, But a lot of times that's not what you find. It's like, you find and here's a little bit of sign. Here's a little bit of sign here.
Especially down south and so much big monotonous terrain, you you'll occasionally find a feed tree that's got a lot of sign under it, and those you need to hunt asap. But that's not the norm, at least it hasn't been in my experience. You have to do a lot of scouting in order to find that. So that's what I'm focused on.
So describe for me. You give one example there the feed tree, but describe to me an example, what are some examples of amount of sign that would be like, oh, I need to stop, Like what's the threshold of freshness of amount of what that looks like? And then just for people that maybe aren't familiar, can you also expand on a feed tree how to identify that situation too?
Yeah, that's a good question. Google Warren Womack. You'll learn everything that you need to know about feed trees. He's the he's the freaking g he knows what's up, especially with hunting deer down south. But when you find signed underneath them. Say, I'll try to equate this to some examples even up in the Midwest, because it's similar. I mean, it's just different food sources in different parts of the country. So you're creeping through an oak flat and there's white
oka corns all over the ground. Tree to tree to tree, there's white okay corns everywhere. Well, you find a fresh pile of deer poop here, there's a fresh rub here, fifty yards later, another fresh rub one hundred yards later, another fresh rub, and some deer scat fresh like you step on it with your boot. You can see that there's flies on it. It's moist that the deer just pooped in the last day or two.
Right there.
Then you come upon a big tree that you can hear the acorns falling out of it, and you can visibly see there's a higher percentage of them on the ground. They're fairly fresh. And now you're looking down there and within a ten twenty foot square you see ten piles of deer poop and two or three fresh rubs, and you're like, you're paying attention to these other trees, and like there's no other tree in the woods. That's raining
acorns like this one. This one's got more you know, per square foot down there underneath the cap or the canopy of the tree than any of the other ones that you found up to this point. That's not to say a buck ain't gonna walk to one of the other ones, but that's like, that's what I would classify as a feed tree. Lots and lots of tracks going around in opposite directions, you know, in circles, almost just in a feeding pattern. Lots of deer poop in a
concentrated spot, and then obviously the acorns raining down. Now you can here's the thing that you got to watch out for with feed trees is weak old sign can trick you. So you roll up on a big tree and there's a bunch of caps on the ground. There's not a ton of acorns, but you can visibly see tracks. You can see deer poop everywhere, but some of it is dry and it's four or five days old, and there's only one pile of deer poop that looks like it's a day old. And some of these tracks are
a little worn in since the last rain. They're not real sharp in the dirt, and you don't hear any acorn fresh acorns falling on the ground, And like I said, there's a lot of caps, so there's not a lot of actual acorns left. But it's obvious that the deer we're here in a high concentration. Those will trick you because you'll sit there and you'll see one fall in or a spike or nothing, and you'll be like, what the heck? This is a feed tree? Is like, no,
this was a feed tree a week ago. And that's why, you know, just looking at the overall amount of sign doesn't get you there that that's why you ask a good question there is because the details in which the sign is left in is what is most important. Like I would rather find the beginning of a feed tree than the very end in that sense, even though there's way more sign to look at it that you know a week later because they've been using it, but they're not.
They're not using it like they were before. You want to be there when the sign is getting laid down, so that fresh sign is paramount.
So that brings me to another scenario. And I'm betting that some of the stuff you just talked about applies to this next one. But let's just throw it out there and see what else you'd ad. Let's take you out of Louisiana. I'm gonna bring you up north and we're gonna go kind of northeast ish in Appalachian State, so a state with some of that national forest, big woods, big hills. You know, this could be like Pennsylvania, Tennessee, something like that, and you're hunting national forest, but you
just have a weekend. So you've got a weekend to hunt national forest in one of those areas. Walk me through, and again, let's let's assume you've done your scouting with your maps and you've driven, You've you've kind of figured out where there's people. Now you're actually stepping foot into the woods for the first time. But the problem is you don't have a whole lot of time here, so you can't Well maybe you can, but how do you how do you spend two to two and a half
days if that's all you have in this location? Walk me through on the ground scouting slash hunting. How you give you the up, what specifically you'd be looking for, and how you would approach those next two days? What time a year? Uh, good question. This is gonna be the late October. Ah, it's grape time. Mm hmm.
Okay, that would that that has a big impact on it, because that's going to change the strategy for me, whether it's an early season scenario like you talked about a mid season mid to late October scenario versus a rut scenario.
And let me let me let me preface this or let me add to this. I'd be curious to hear your perspective for late October, and then I would also like to hear let's let's move it like ten days later and now it's like November tenth or something like you know, ruddy stuff. Are you bow hunting or your gun hunting or you bow hunting on both bow hunting only, bow hunting only. Okay, So.
Every I was thinking about this before we jumped on here. Every buck, I'm trying to think back to all the bucks that I've killed, and then the other bucks that that the guys have harvested or close calls, whatever, and like as you go down the list, every single one of them is a different, unique situation. But the one,
the one thing that has yielded the most success. Now it's still in the the grand scheme of things is a small percentage of the total deer killed, but it is yielded the most success of scrapes and hunting scrapes with a bow close to betting areas. Okay, So that would be my first thing that i'd be looking for. Now, if you're in big hills in big national force like that, where there's not a lot of transitional cover, it's very big, monotonous,
closed canopy forest, I'm gonna look at topography. So if there's a road at the bottom of a giant hill, for example, and it's really steep to get up there, and kind of bluffs out and benches out up towards the top where it's very difficult to access, I'm gonna think about those benches and how i can get above them and look for scrapes on that ridge or look
for scrapes along that bench. Also, if the conditions permit it to where I'm gonna have fairly calm winds where I'm not gonna get a lot of swirling going on, I'd be checking thermal hubs. So any place where four or five ridges, you know, or three ridges whatever, converge and then drop into a bottom, I'd be trying to access up that little creek or drainage at the bottom
looking for thermal hub scrapes best I could. If it's mid to late October and there's still is leaves on the trees, so there's a fair bit of shielding cover for me to slip up that bott them without being detected from deer that are betted on the benches and on the ridges around that hub. That may be a good a good place to check out. You just have to be real careful scouting those areas, especially in the middle of the day, or in this situation, only got
two days, so I've got to be fairly aggressive. You gotta be careful going in there in the middle of the day when you got day winds, because your scent will just whip around in there and roll right up those hills sometimes. I mean not in every scenario, but you got to be thinking about that when you're going in.
But if I found some thermal hub scrapes, that would be spots that I would be trying to sit, or if there was some logging that was going on, I would be looking for scrapes in the edges of those You know, if I found some feeding areas where deer are traveling to some acorns, I would be trying to set up on scrapes near those I shouldn't say near the feeding areas. Depends on how close the betting is.
Be trying to find scrapes in between the two feeding area to betting, so a clear cut or something like that where there is some you know, chest high cover growing up where deer could potentially bed. I love hunting scrapes that time of the year. A lot of times they don't work out, but when they do, it puts
those bucks on a spot. So you know, I said a minute ago that it's it's still a small percentage of the overall deer killed by that strategy, but that I could think of five or six different ones that we've killed over scrapes. And the next thing, as far as general tactics went was decoys, and there was like three or four on decoys, and then everything else behind that was, you know, one we did it this way, one, we did it this way, one we did it this way,
and so far on down the list. But scrapes are great for bowhunting because it puts a buck on a spot and if you get close to security cover or close to an area where there are no people, where those bucks feel comfortable moving. Sometimes that's all you got to worry about, is just him coming into the scrape, get the wind right, set up over it, wait for him to get there, draw your bow back and shooting. And sometimes that's as simple as it gets.
Then what if we go up into November now, so November tenth ish, does that change things at all? Yeah?
I if I only had two days, man, I would be tempted to sit in a saddle for forty eight hours and just try to kill a buck that is cruising. But I know what I would probably end up doing, and it's not that now I'm saying that that could definitely work. If you've got the patience to do it, and you've got the right wind to sit there in a good setup, that may very well be worth doing to get a good shot at one. What I would probably do is I would be popping ridges into the
wind and I'd be looking for action. When you said popping ridges, what do you mean. I'd get in a situation where I can go. I would map this out my route up through there, depending on where the wind direction is, because I want to be going into the wind, and I would be I would creep a ridge. So what I mean by that is, as you get close to the cap of the ridge, you start to really
slow down and still hunt. So you stand behind a big tree and you watch out ahead of you for several minutes until you can get to a point where you crush right over top of the ridge where you can visibly see the next one, because they roll over one after another, you know, in a lot of those situations. So you want to get to the point at the peak of that ridge where you can see down in the valley below the next one, and then up the
side of the next one if you can. If you can get to that point without spooking the deer below you, you can cover a lot of ground with your eyeballs doing that. What I'm looking for in the rut is the action. So where's the hot dough? Where are the cruising bucks? If I pop over a ridge, is there two bucks over there that are postured up to each other?
And what does that mean?
Well, there could be a hot dough in the thermal hug right below them, or in the bottom or on the bench bedded right next to them, and we might be in for a party right here, like there there might be four or five bucks right here in this one spot. And now I've found the hole, and I just got to stay with the action until I get a chance or try calling or whatever.
What happens if you do that? Sorry interrupt, No, say go ahead? What happens if you if you pop over one of these ridges and you end up bumping some deer that you didn't see and you scatter, you know, you can see a few dos run off, and then you do see some antlers as they top over the other hill.
We then I'm just watching the direction they're going, and then I'm getting on my maps and thinking about, like, where's the next secure place that they're going to go to? If I've got the wind in my favor, which is that's why that's kind of a fundamental thing starting point.
If I got the wind in my face and I spook them as I'm still hunting, the likelihood of them going more than four or five hundred yards is pretty low, especially if they're if you're dealing with a hot dough in multiple bucks, Like they're gonna run off a few hundred yards, They're gonna put a ridge or two in between you them and the danger of me, and then they're gonna calm down and they're gonna go back right
back to what they're doing, which is running behavior. So that's what I'm trying to anticipate, is the direction they go, and where's the next likely spot. It could be three four hundred yards away, it could be six seven hundred yards away. But as long as I have put the wind in my favor up to that point, and I wasn't just gomming through there and blowing the heck out of them, you know, spooking them hardcore, then they're usually
not going to go too far. If I'm in a big public area, like you're talking about a huge national forest, most of the time, I'm going to have room.
To work with. If you're what if we're let's go back to October and let's let's let's shift years back to late October, and we're in the Midwest, so kind of your classic whitetail country stuff you're pretty excited about. And let's say you are set up in a saddle in like a buck nest type place, like you're you're hunting some great buck betting nearby. You're confident, and you're set up, you're setting there, It's it's early afternoons still,
but you have high hopes. And then another hunter comes walking in and he walks past you, heading towards that betting that you were set up on. Do you stick it out or do you bail and do something else? What do you? What do you do? Mid October or late October? I'm thinking more late October?
And I can see the betting area from where I'm set up, I would assume, So, yeah, okay, I'm gonna watch him go all the way through that thing and see what happens until I because I'm gathering information the whole time. I can see him, and I can see the betting area. I'm gathering information. So where is that hunter going? Are they walking through there? Are they walking in there to set up? Are there any deer getting up as they're going through the betting? And what are my options? So?
Do I have? Is this?
It is this the X And I don't have any other good options for that afternoon hunt. If I do, and I have two or three other ones that are four or five hundred yards from that spot, I may just bail out of there completely as soon as he starts walking through that betting area. I might just, you know, say, okay,
I got four hours of dark, I'm climbing down. I'm moving five hundred yards deeper in the opposite direction, because I know there's another betting area back there, and I can be set up back there in an hour and fifteen minutes, So I may bail and do that. If I do not have the option, I'm gonna watch what he does and see what happens. There's a chance he might bump a buck out of there, and I get
to watch the direction in which that deer goes. There's a chance that that hunter walks clear through the middle of it and doesn't spook a single thing out of it and nothing gets up. In that case, I'm probably not going to continue sitting there because he just left his ground sent all the way past me. But I might still hunt that betting area because a buck could have easily been laying fifty sixty yards from where he
walked through and not gotten up. But now I'm going to think of that area that he just walked through as kind of a dead zone, and I'm going to look for spots on the outside of that because I do not want a buck a buck could easily stand up one hundred yards from where he walked through and start coming my way. But I do not want that groundcent on the ground between me and the buck. So I'm going to maneuver a little bit to try to
get in a better position. But I mean, we've seen that situation happen several times, especially during gun season, where we watched a buck bed down in a betting area and then drivers proceeded to walk all through that betting area for the next five hours and that buck never moved, and we just stood there on a rock watching that spot. And I mean there was a guy whistling and singing. We could hear him from three quarters of a mile away, and he walked one hundred yards past that deer, and
the deer never got up. And that evening I killed him, wow, because we got right in there next to him, and we were confident that he was still there, and he got up with three or four doze and came out just like nothing had ever happened. Man, So in the middle of a thick betting area, they got they'll let you get pretty dang close. And if they're moving quickly through there, it makes them harder to smell the danger
because they're moving past. It's not like you're set up there and your wind is just blowing in there for a long period of time.
Interesting. That's so like what an eye opening exp to get to see that thing happen and play out in front of you and see exactly how those bucks just hunk her down sometimes and wait and uh, yeah, they give.
You too much credit. We give We give bucks, especially too much credit. The big ones they don't. I was thinking about this earlier this morning because you mentioned you wanted to talk about situations and scenarios, and I was like, man, a doe is responsible for, you know, bearying young and making sure that those fawns don't die every year. So a four or five six year old dough every year
for part of the year is paranoid. I mean she is looking out for anything, a twig break here, whatever, And they mostly rely on their eyes, their their nose or ears. But I mean those are in family groups A lot of times they're just paranoid and they drive me insane. But a buck from birth never has to worry about that. He's not thinking about protecting a fawn or anything like that. He's worried about eating and laying down and sleeping until it's the rut, and then he's
worried about girls. He's either worried about fighting his buddies or girls or eating and sleeping. So by the time they get to be old bucks, they just are. They are not nearly as skittish as does are.
Now.
Their nose is a different story. They live and die by that thing. But if their noses compromise, if you got to wind in your favor and you're walking through the middle of a betting area like that, you got to darn your step on them things to get them up and to move them. And sometimes when you jump them, they run forty fifty yards and turn around like they didn't know what the heck just happened. They just don't have the same level of I don't even know paranoia as a as a doe does.
Yeah, And the ones that get old I think, have a certain level of confidence in their thing once they get that, because the only reason they made it to that age is because their thing worked right. And so it's hard to push them off the routine, off their spot, off their safety zone, because man, that's worked really well for them. If they've made it to the weeks, right, Yeah. Yeah.
That's one thing that I think a lot of us early on we assume that these things are like magicians and that oh gosh, you you you ever give them any clue, they're out of there. But oftentimes it's it's kind of the opposite. Let's let's do this one. Let's let's stay in the Midwest Ish and let's say it's November and you're working in to hunt a mixed aag and timber kind of property like your your textbook. Great, you know some ridge, top fields, some cover, some draws,
et cetera. You're heading in and you were going to you were playing to hunt a ambush location. You've brought your saddle in, you were planning on getting up in a tree. But as you go in there you spot a buck locked onto a dough, slowly moving, but slowly moving away from you, so they have no they have no awareness of your presence, but their general direction is heading away from you. It's the rut. It's early afternoon, because you're heading into hunt. What do you do in that scenario?
Burning the hand guy, I'm going after him some way, shape or form. I'm either trying to use the cover whatever that offers to continue moving in the direction just right behind them, because they're walking. If they're walking away
from me, they're not looking at me. And if we've got a little bit of wind, which is which I would ideally have in the middle of the day when the day winds are up or early afternoon, I'm moving aggressively towards them until I get to a point where they can start to hear me or see me, and then I've got a Then I need to be a little bit more strategic about where to go and how to get there. But the movement in the rud is so sporadic and unpredictable, especially whenever it involves a buck
and a dough. One thing that we have noticed is they'll occasionally push them up against a barrier of some kind, just like a river or a fence or a road or a wood lot or something like that. But it's still as hard to predict. So it's I've made the I've done this so many times and not had success where I saw that happen, and then I was like, oh, I just need to set up nearby. Well, I set up nearby, and then I ended up watching them all night, or I watched them until they moved away or called
at him, rattled at them and didn't do anything. Now, a few times we've decoyed the men from a way's way, but most of the time we're trying to get in tight to that action, you know, and just wait for them to make a mistake, and they're they're dictating our plan at that point. Once we see them, especially if they're not spooked, that's that all the eggs are going in that basket.
Let's say you try to, you know, try to circle around, try to make a move something, but for whatever reason, you can't get close enough. It doesn't work out. But you can see, like this buck is on this dough. It gets dark, there's still not away of your presence. What's the next morning plan?
It kind of depends on the conditions of that morning. Ideally you slip out of there without Boogernham. If they're not aware of our presence, that's a great thing. But the next morning I would just want to know if they're there. So if I could get right back to that same spot where I could see a long distance
or whatever, then I would do that. If I couldn't, I would try to get to a spot where I could observe again into that same area, and I might sit there for a while, because at daylight they may not be they may not be standing up out there. A lot of times they'll move around all night and then they'll bed down before daylight and they may not even stand up until nine ten o'clock in the morning.
You know, if I can't see in there good enough until they stand up and start moving around, then I'm just going to go right back to observe me again on the ground, or would you get up in a tree to see more. It just depends on the situation and what it yields. You know, if on the ground you're dealing with chest high cover and you can't see that far, then I would try to get elevated in
whatever way that I could. I mean, I've thought about taking an eight to ten foot step letter out there and just going two hundred yards out in the middle of that stuff and popping it up and sitting on top of it until I see a rack move or a deer move around in it, and then down I go and over to them and repeat the process again that we did the day before. But it's the rut.
Everything is so unpredictable. So yes, they could still be there the next day, but there's also a high chance that they ain't there, and you don't want to just burn your entire day in there. If you get real aggressive and you go right back to the same exact spot, that could work out. But if you can't see fifty yards, then you're putting all your chips on them coming through that spot, and it's easy for people to run out
of patience in that scenario. So you know, by nine ten o'clock in the morning, when you need to be watching and ready, you're starting to second guess yourself and you're like, are they even here anymore? And I've got this other spot or you know, only have three days left to hunt, and I'm hungry and blah blah blah. All that stuff starts going through your head. So I'd rather get to a spot where I know if they're there or not.
So this might be a scenario that you never put yourself in, because I know you are pretty aggressive and like to move around and everything. But let me lay out a possible scenario and if this is like, if the premise is ridiculous, then you can tell me, I would just never be in this. But let's just say, like you found the spot of all spots for the rut. It is absolutely dynamite sign It is a funnel pinch, some kind of situation where it's just like God, it screams,
it screams, this is good. Maybe you have historically seen all sorts of bucks cruise through this place, or you have trail camera pictures from the past or something that tells you, like, man, this is it, and you decide, I am going to sit this spot because a cruising buck will hit this on November seventh or sixth or whatever it is. And you set up there and you
spend a day or two daylight to dark. So again, maybe you wouldn't do that, But let's say you've spent, like you put in serious time because you believe in it so much. Is there ever a scenario like that in which you would marry yourself to a location and sit it out for more than that, or if you if you go a full day in a dynamite spot like that, or a full day and a half or two days, you're just you're gonna give up and you're gonna move on, and you're gonna keep seeking out something fresh.
What would you do in that situation, and or what is the more realistic version of that scenario for you? Did it?
Last fall found a spot like that on a relatively small public piece that was really thick.
Where it didn't.
Really allow for you to move around a lot there just wasn't I mean, it wasn't that big. It was a small area. So we sat that spot like two days, and then eventually middle of the day we had a huge buck come through. We'd seen a lot of does that kept coming through this spot. It was a funnel in between two beding air Its just a small little hardwood region between two thick bedding areas and would we constantly saw does moving through there. And then all of
a sudden we had a cruising buck come through. He was actually about twenty minutes behind a dough that had been panting a good bit. She came past and we could tell something was up with her, and she went through there, and we got ready and we waited a long time, and then all of a sudden we heard brush breaking and grunting and everything, and he ran right
underneath us, and I messed it up. I should have killed him, but that was an example of sitting in that spot and waiting, and that buck we never had pictures of. We had never seen him. Nobody else that hunted that area had ever seen him to my knowledge. So if you if you had been sitting that thing for one or two days and then gave up on it, you'd have never had that encounter. So it it depends on the spot and what you can and can't get
away with. If your access is awesome and you leave the little ground scent and your wind is super consistent, I don't see any reason why you can't hunt it day after day. But that scenario just doesn't. I mean, it's there's always a wrinkle in there. It's always like, man, this spot is great until ten or eleven, and then the day winds pick up, and then the wind starts to swirl around, and then I start getting busted more. And then it's like, well, you got to think about that.
And so with that said, the fuse spots that I have found like that, I would sit them over and over and over again.
But I also.
You know, if I've got other options in the immediate area, I'm probably gonna go give those a world too. Just to give that spot a rest in most situations where you don't have all the factors in your favor, where you know you are spooking a few deer here and there, going in and out of there, I'll give it a rest for a week, for a few days at least. But it's it's it's always on the table, you know.
If you say, for example, you have a south wind for ten days in a row, and that's a perfect south wind spot, and you hunt the first two days, you see a lot of activity. You just don't get a shot, but you do spook a few deer here and there, and you go down the road and you hunt Plan B and Plan C. Well, by day five six, the best action that you've had are still in Plan A in that spot. So it's like, man, I still got a good win to go in there, go back,
give it a try again. If that's the If that's the best option that you have, you might as well keep trying it until it yields poor results.
Right, Yeah, at least let the deer tell.
You all right, yep, yeah, And remember you're in the middle of the rut. Anything can happen to a certain degree that the thing I don't want to do, especially towards the middle and the end of the rut. I let me let me back up. The thing I don't want to do at the beginning of the rut and the end of the rut is I don't want to blow those dough groups out of there. You know, in the middle of the rut, when most of them are
in heat, it's just utter chaos everywhere. But as they start grouping back up, getting on the back half of November, you don't want to blow those dough groups out of there. You're hunting the doe group. You want to make sure that you're getting in and out of there without boogering them up, because bucks are going to swoop through there regardless of whether you're there or not. If the dos are right there, the bucks are going to be there, So don't booger the doze up.
So would that mean that you would usually avoid the more aggressive move around popping ridges, checking spots. You're not going to do that that first few days of November, last few days of November. That's going to be just that core ruck.
Uh No, I still will It depends like your scenario that you illustrated earlier, I only had two days and I was in an area that I wasn't familiar with. Yeah, so I don't know where the X is. I can guess, and I might be right twenty percent of the time, who knows. But if I only got two days, I'm not going to leave it up to guessing. I'm going
to go try to make my own luck. If I've already scouted in the ideal scenario and I've hunted that property a year or two, and I have a better idea, like you mentioned with this last exam of where bucks traditionally cruise through and where doughs like to bed, I have a lot of that information that I need at that point, I don't I may not need to go popping ridges, although if you get bored and you got enough room to go do it. It can work, especially
if you have good conditions. If you've got windy, wet conditions, you can go. You can get right up on them.
One follow up question on the spot where you really know the X and you have history, what's the MAXI amount of time? Or I guess what's the sweet spot of time? You will give a spot like that before going and checking out options B, C or elsewhere is two days that amount that you'll give it or what is that amount? Man?
If I get in there and I just ain't seeing sign, and I spend an entire day or a morning and evening sit in there under good conditions and I don't see any deer at all, I'm going to bail, but I'll read.
What is it it? Again? What about the scenario you talked about with that big buck that you ended up should have had a shot? I guess you said. So let's say it's it's great conditions, it's great sign and you are still seeing deer, Like there's a lot of does moving through. You just haven't had the right buck in that situation. Is that any different? Oh? Yeah, I'd hang with it.
Then, I'd hang with it for a few days potentially, so long as I can get in and out of there without bugger and stuff. It's like, I don't know the best way to put this. You only get so many strikes. So if you can get in and out of there, Man, if you can get in there and you can take it bats without getting struck out or seeing strikes and they just keep walking you, then you just keep stepping.
Up to the plate. Yeah, So that makes sense if.
You go in there, though, and you blow a dough and she's blowing down through the middle of the bedding area. And then a spike comes in and he does the same thing. You know, when you're leaving grounds in all around the tree, you're gonna notice if you just sit there day after day, you're gonna notice towards the end of that three, four or five day stretch that those deer are starting to get more nervous.
That brings up like another question that I've had some situations like this. We probably all have. But let's say you have a spot that you know is like the spot. It is a creek crossing with amazing bedding on both sides of the creek, and it is just terrific thick brushy cover, bushes, shrubs, tall grasses, the kind of stuff
that white tails just love to be in. And you know from past history and scouting that, man, if you had to pick any one place in this zone, this big old oak tree by the creek crossing is the spot that every buck passes by. But there's deer betted on all sides of you, and there's deer traveling on all sides of you, and there's there's no safe wind.
There's nowhere you can go that there aren't going to be deer getting you eventually, at some point, will you ever throw the hail Mary and say, yeah, I got to try it because it's that good, even though I know there's a very high chance at some point you're gonna get winded. Or are you going to say, Man, it's just going to be too high risk, I'm gonna blow things up eventually during the afternoon set or whatever. I have to find somewhere on the edge that's not quite as good but safer.
I might try the edge first, but ultimately dear the way that they go through their fall. As you know that, it's like segments and patterns change and behaviors change. So if you know they're in there and you have all the intel, I'm gonna hunt it at some point. Now the conditions may dictate when I do that. You know, maybe there is no safe way. Like you said, there is no safe way, But is there a way that
is safer than the other. So, for example, early morning, late in the day with a calm wind, does it blow straight down that creek and take your scent back down the middle of the creek under you know, between five and ten miles an hour. Will it do that? Versus midday fifteen twenty miles an hour. Your wind is
literally going in all directions. That's a problem because you have betted deer that are stationary all the way around you, and you're essentially jacked up in a tree right there, and you're a scent wick that's just blowing your scent with those swirling winds all the way around you. Is that is as unsafe as unsafe gets as far as deer getting you. But if you have that calm wind scenario, but you only have it for a first couple hours
of the morning, I'd be trying to hunt it. Even if you blow a deer here or there, I'd still be trying to get in there because if that's the ex it's the X you're hunting with a bow. You got to get within twenty thirty yards. In my opinion, you got to get within twenty five yards of the thing. So if that tree is right there and then you can blow your wind away from that trail, that's I mean, you're talking about two may check marks, excuse me, check marks right there. Yeah, I'm gonna hunt it.
Let's do one last question in these kind of scenarios, and then I'll run you through some really quick rapid fire stuff. But this one's gonna be very different because I want to throw one out here for the folks who are newer and who are looking to just get a deer killed. They're not worried about killing a big buck. They're not killing worried about killing the mature buck. They're
just trying to get a deer killed. And all they have is public land to hunt, and they're still trying to figure out how do you kill a dough how do you kill a young buck? And we're talking this whole time, which we always end up doing about how to kill the big giant deer. So so imagine you're that person. You are really just trying to get some meat for the frazer. You're in a meat crisis, you're relatively new to hunting, and you've got a day job, so you do not have time to get out here
for long spells. You're not going to take a week of vacation. You've got a weekend, you've got a Sunday morning, you've got a few hours, and you want to try to kill a deer, feed the kids, et cetera. Describe to me how would you approach this If let's say you've got one evening or one morning on a weekend and you just need to get a deer killed on some piece of public land, how would you approach that hunt.
I would spend a day scouting and just looking for kill holes quote unquote. So say, for example, you got you scout and you're four hundred yards from the parking lot, and there's a fence that runs up through there, and there's an open gate in that fence, and there's two deer trails that are coming through it a bunch of tracks on it. You can tell that deer are passing through that spot. If it's legal, you might run a trail camera there and just see what shows up.
If deer are.
Passing through there during the day, more so in the evening, more so in the morning, then you may that may give you a better idea of when to hunting on your weekend, whether it's a morning or an evening hunt. But I would look for situations like that, at least
handful of them in my scouting day. And while you're scouting, I'd pick a tree over that spot, over those trails where you can set up with a given wind, so there's a tree south of that open gate north wind is blowing away from those trails, I can sit right here, and if a deer walks those trails through that open gate, I'm gonna get an eighteen yard broadside shot and that I would mark that spot, and I'd try to find half a dozen more of those. Not just the open
gate scenario. I mean it could be a potential feed tree too, like we were talking about before, during the early part of the season. You know, it could be the inside corner of a ag field where deer are funnel down and are coming out there where you know, if you're looking at the soybean field, for example, maybe that's the side that gets the most shade and it's it's heavily browsed in that corner. Find you a good tree where you can shoot the trails coming into that corner.
But don't find a good tree that's sixty yards from those trails. Find a tree that's twenty yards or fifteen yards from those trails where you can blow a wind from the trails to you, and I try to find on your scouting day, I try to find as many of those locations as you can mark those trees, and
then all the guesswork is taken out of it. When you go in there to try to kill your deer, say for especially for a morning hunt, you know exactly which tree that you're going to, under which wind condition, and even if the deer, most of the deer aren't even there. You're trying to kill a deer. So it's better to have one deer at fifteen yards than to see fifteen at one hundred and fifty. So if one deer comes through that spot and onto your trail, that's
your opportunity. I would rather have that as far as killing deer. That's the way my brain always thinks with a bow in my hand, especially, it's.
Like where's the kill hole? Yeah? And are you less worried about other cars in the parking lot, less worried about getting far away from the parking lot that kind of stuff in this scenario. Uh, kind of, But it still is a consideration, definitely. You know, we kill a lot of dose though they are real close to the parking lots, that are not far off at all, and they're nervous because they see hunters all the time. But
like I was just mentioned a while ago. Dose are paranoid because they they stay in those situations and they got to look after fawns and things like that. So a doe will stay there and she'll deal with all of the chaos all year, where a buck isn't gonna A big buck isn't going to do that until it gets to be the rut when he throws caution to the wind. But yeah, we we don't. If we're trying to kill a deer. A lot of times we are really close to the truck, whether there's other vehicles there
or not. All we got to do is get a deer on the X, on that on that trail crossing, on that scrape, on that feed tree, whatever it is that we're set up over we're looking for, or a quality set up really close to that where the deer can get to that spot without detecting us. We can get drawn and shoot them. But it's got to be close, especially if you're a new hunter. That is a big
deal being close. So true, so true. All right, let's do really quick rapid fire that you've got like one word answers here as I'm going to give you, Aaron, your first thought on this there's five or six of them, and then one. I'll let you expand on, but just give me what your quick thoughts are on these. Number one, would you personally take a fifty yard shot at a
white tail with your bow? Yes? Or no? No? If you could only have one of these tools for the rest of your hunting days, you got to choose radley, Antler's or drunk tube which you'd taken, grunt tube expandable or fixed? Labora heads fixed? Should you stop a moving buck with a sound before shooting with a bow? Maybe? Yeah, exactly? The do is give a question there? If you could only scout one season of the year, you could pick winter scouting, summer scouting, or in season scouting. Which would
you pick in season? If you had to get a buck killed in one single day, a buck has to die and you cannot do it. You have to pick one of your hunting public team members and you have to draft just one of them. Who would be your draft pick to get a buck? Not saying big buck, not saying any specific but just bucks gott die. Who are you gonna pick? Greg? All? Right, now, this one,
I'll let you expand on a little bit. Let's say that I rule the world, I control all hunting regulations, etc. And I am going to take your hunting license away in every state across the United States. Unless you kill a four year old buck or bigger. You have one day to do it, and you are the hunter. You have to kill a four year old buck or older. You have one date. That's I'm gonna let you pick a calendar date on the a date on the calendar,
and then I will let you describe the location. And if you don't get a four year old buck or older killed on this one single day, you can't hunt for the rest of your life. So describe to me the day you're going to pick, and what this picture perfect, amazing setup would be for this very high stakes hunt.
Betting area, scrape win coming out of the betting area, consistent win. So ideally a flat scenario, flat topography with a solid consistent win.
October thirty first, All right, October thirty first. You're downwind of the betting, so the scrapes in between you and the bedding. It's right on the edge of the betting. It's right on the edge of the betting. The wind is coming.
Ideally, the betting is there, the scrape is next to it, and then I'm down wind to the scrape and the betting both.
What's this betting look like? What's your best possible betting scenario?
Waste to chest high marsh grass cover with what's some with some mixture of trees out in it. Just nasty stuff that if a buck stands up in it, you can see his rack moving across it, but that's about it. Can't see much else.
What's your tree like?
Lots of branches up around stand heights, not too high, up twelve to fifteen feet ideally for a good flat shot into the scrape fifteen yards away, but plenty of horizontal branches.
To aid in cover. And what stadium in.
She if it's October thirty first, I'm probably gonna have to be in Wisconsin, Iowa.
Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio. Yeah, that was fine. Can't go wrong with any one of those kansas. Yeah all right, man, you I believe in you. I'm pretty sure you'd get your buck killed in that scenario, and you can keep it on high.
I would not want to be in that situation. She gave me twenty years, you gave me twenty chances. I would be much more compy.
Yeah, very true, so real quick. Then anything folks should look out for from the hunting public, anything new or anything that has come out that you want us to check out right now or look forward to this season.
Not in particular, working on a bunch of elk cutting stuff right now from last year that we're pretty excited about. We've got several elk tags in September that we're going to be going on, so that should be a lot of fun. And then we've done a fair bit of scouting leading into this season for deer, which has been hard to do for the last couple of years. So I feel really good about a few of the scenarios
that we have this fall. We're not Sometimes we overextend ourselves and plan too many trips and try to get to too many places, and then we don't adequately scout the ones that we do have to hunt. But I don't feel like we're in that situation as badly this year as in the past. We're more focused this year, so hopefully that will yield better results. I guess we'll find out.
What's what's a slam dunk for you this year? Like if what would be the thing that would make this year an amazing success for you.
Personal jinks me, Mark, I can't. I can't say it or it will all go wrong, all right there, it's like, Man, I don't, I don't know. I don't, I don't know. I like gun hunting late in the year, like hunting with a muzzloader. After thanks, that is that's that's quality time out there. People are fed up with deer hunting by that point. There's not near as many of them in the woods. It's cold, it's nasty. You got a muzzle udder in your hands, so you can reach out
there a little bit further. You can make things happen quicker during that time of year. So we'll see. That's been It's been good to us in the past. Let's say that.
All right. I'm gonna counting on a muzzle utter buck for you here late season. We'll be watching for it, all right, buddy, I appreciate the time. Thanks for doing this. I man, I know you guys have a great season. I'll be pulling for it in can't wait to watch. Thanks Mark, you too, all right, and that's a wrap. Thank you for tuning in until next week. Stay wired to hunt.