Ep. 815: Foundations - Not You, Not Now

But the bad news is that a lot of folks won't fill their tags then, and they won't have a very enjoyable season. The reasons for both are many, but one that I think we really don't understand as a whole is prevalent and pretty damaging. And that's something I'm going to talk about right now. Way back in nineteen sixty eight, many of the world's best athletes descended on

Mexico City to compete in the Summer Olympics. It was an event of first including being held at higher elevation than the Summer Olympics had ever been held at before or since, at seventy three hundred and fifty feet above sea level. The athletes, especially the flatlanders, felt it It was the first time that a synthetic all weather surface had been used for track and field events. The track surface was developed by three AM for horse racing, but it must not have been all that great because it

never really caught on. This was also the first year that doping tests were introduced, and the first person to get the boot from a failed test was a kidish pentathlete who consumed several beers before one of his events, making him, at least in my opinion, in honorary wisconsinight

as well. The nineteen sixty eight Olympics also featured a fella who won the gold medal in the high jump using an unconventional technique instead of running up toward the bar and jumping over so that he was faced down as he went over. It kind of I guess, like how a dolphin might jump along behind a boat. Dick Fossburry went over back first. He called it the Fosbury flop, And while it might seem dumb to us now, at the time, he changed the game by simply jumping just

a little bit of a different way. And who knows how he figured it out or how many other athletes had tried it but decided they wouldn't do it because everybody does it a certain way. We know that he did figure it out, and no one else at that point had at least developed enough confidence to use that

move in any major competitions, let alone the Olympics. Now, imagine working your whole life, which for Olympic athletes is usually not that long because they're all damn near kids, except for that Turkish dude this year who shot that pistol even while looking a hell of a lot like a professional hitman, or the infamous breakdancer who calls herself a ray gun and who really colored outside the lines

with their dance moves. Anyway, imagine working so hard to make the Olympics, no matter what your age, and then you compete like everyone else, and then you get beat by some dude who just decided to, I don't know, reinvent the jumping style. It's pretty wild. But we see

this in sports. Sometimes we see it in other things too that aren't really sports, like golf, but also deer hunting, which actually takes some real skill instead of just hitting a ball into a hole while driving a little electric car around and drinking with your buddies while wearing polo shirts. The way things have changed in the whitetail world is interesting. We went from figuring out where deer like to walk to changing the landscape to make deer walk to us

in like the last twenty years. Not everyone does this, of course, but a lot of folks do. We kind of figured out how to hack white tails, and with enough money or land, which usually go hand in hand, you can do this too, and a lot of people do. Here's where things get a little squirrely, though. Just because other folks engage in some type of tactic that results in a lot of big dead deer doesn't mean that it means anything to you, or that you should be

doing things the same way. An obvious example here is the difference between hunting public land and hunting good private land. They aren't the same thing in almost any way, and yet it's pretty common for people to try to adopt some of the private land techniques to use in the public land space. Now, is there some crossover? Sure, you're both just hunting deer. A cold front might be as good for you as it is for them. The acorns might just be the ticket for you and for them.

The rot happens at the same time the public land as it does on the private There are similarities, but it seems like a lot of hunters try to draw connections where there are none, or the thread connecting the two is so thin that a slight puff of wind could split it. I've started to think of this as a not you, not now situation. Let me give you an example that i've You know, I've brought it up a few times, but it really kind of stuck with me,

and I want to use it one more time. Last season, a buddy of mine texted me that he was headed to his farm to hunt a Brassica plot in early October. His reasoning was that he saw an Instagram post about one of the big whitetail names killing a very big deer in the Brassicas Now, the difference in available land between my buddy and that fella is literally thousands of acres.

They are also in different states, and while my buddy stuff is really good, you know, it's Wisconsin land and it's top not stuff, it's not really, really really good southern Iowa Land. I don't know the details of the big buck in the social post, and I don't care. I can fill in the blanks enough to know that deer might have been in there to eat brassicas, or he might have been in there to walk through the

Brassicas to go eat something else. I will bet good money that the guy who killed that buck gets paid by a food plot seed company and honestly might even own one. That entire hunt might have been built around selling people food plot seed, and might not have had anything to do with how much deer like brassicas. I don't know. What I do know is that my buddy didn't go in and shoot a two hundred inch buck off of his brassicas. It doesn't work like that. Let

me frame this up another way. When Dan Infault started getting a lot of attention for killing big bucks on a betting pattern, I thought it was great a bullshit. The reason I thought that was because I couldn't figure out how to use it in my life. It just didn't click for me, and while I tried to scout beds and try to make some sort of effort to understand that part of a deer's life better, I failed badly. Instead of becoming a stone cold killer around bed patterns,

I got frustrated. But I've also paid a lot more attention to beds in the last ten years or so and have just tried to acknowledge that in my hunting strategy. It's just not really my style at all. It's just a hole in my game. The lesson in there is maybe a little hidden, but it goes like this. When you take a really good hunter and they work really hard to develop a hunting style or some set of skills, you probably won't be able to emulate it very well.

That's not to say that you shouldn't try, because you should. Doing different stuff is important, especially if that stuff is challenging. I think that every private land hunter out there would benefit greatly from going on one public land hunt. The world that that opens up can never fully be closed,

and that's a good thing. I think you should try new stuff, and you should pay attention to what other people are doing, but you should also try to understand how it's relevant to you or how it might not matter at all to your hunting situation. So let's look at this another way. Hit listers are all of the rage right now. Right it seems like everyone is naming bucks and passing bucks and talking like they are a celebrity power couple on the Sportsmouth channel. You might really

aspire to that lifestyle too. And I get it. I mean, after all, who doesn't want to be able to pass up four year old bucks so they can shoot them when they are five? Who doesn't want years of history with certain deer to a point where they just become giants and are worthy of a tag. But here's the thing. There are only two kinds of hunters who hunt this style. People who have really good spots to hunt, or people who really don't understand that they don't have very good

spots to hunt. If you're able to pass up three year old bucks at all, that's incredible. If you can do it and expect that some of them will come back next year, you probably have a good spot to hunt. There's no way around that. Now. If you're out there trying this style and your basis for it is that a lot of other people do it, and you're just using trail cameras to build your hit list off of nighttime buck images, you know when they swing through once a month. I have bad news for you. That's a

not you, not now a situation. Maybe you'll get a spot where that's entirely possible someday, and I hope you do if that's what you want, but you have to be honest about what you're working with. Now. Where this gets even muddier is let's say you hunt a state that is known for having a lot of hunters. You got your Pennsylvania's and your Michigan's whatever, or you hunt a state that just generally isn't known for having booners behind every tree, like some of the southern states, you know,

South Carolina, Mississippi, whatever. There are generalities that apply to all states and all regions. But the white tail is a small ground kind of critter. Even the biggest home ranges of white tails, according to a hell a lot of studies, might top out at around nine hundred acres. That's a big home range, and a lot of bucks

live on less land than that. In other words, a deer born on a section of land might spend his entire life there, or he might, as a young buck, end up in a section of land when he's a year and a half old and spend the rest of his life from that point on there. Someone who owns or leases that section or maybe half a section, has a hell of a lot better chance of naming deer

and keeping tabs on them until they are mature. They can do that in the most pressured state out there, because it's about the land they have access to, and that's it. You can take a terrible hunting state and create a little oasis because it really doesn't take that much land, and suddenly you don't have typical Michigan or South Carolina hunting. But is that your situation. Probably not. Again,

it's not like you shouldn't try this if you want to. Hell, you could go try to build some inventory on public land and target specific bucks. The key point I'm trying to make here is you might not really be able to do this at all, or more likely, you might be able to just borrow a few key elements from this style and apply them to your own hunting. Now, this is something I can't stress enough and is really

kind of the gist of this whole podcast. You don't want to follow someone else's path, and most likely you couldn't even if you tried. Being aware of what other people are doing in their techniques is a great thing. It's a great thing, but you have to figure out where the line is between you and them. This is a good strategy on many levels, but maybe the most

important is that it mitigates some of the frustration. Most of us know how frustrating it can be to scroll through Instagram the first week in November and just see grip and grin after grip and grin after grip and grin. It can pretty easily feel like you're you're the only one not posting photos of one hundred and forty inches. But you're not, and it's not even close. The truth is that there are very few hunters who are really

unbelievably good at hunting. Most of the best hunters you know of have access to really good properties, which is the key to consistent success for most folks. That's just the way it is, but we don't want to look at it that way. Now. I'm not saying the folks with great land can't be great hunters, but the way we look at It is just kind of silly to me. It would be like someone only fishing private farm ponds.

If you saw them posing with ten pound large mouth every year, it would be easy to assume they are really good at bass fishing. But are they? I don't know. They might be good fishermen, but there's no denying the huge benefit to fishing where no one else can fish and where the bass are babiesat their entire life, so they grow real big. You know, that's not the same thing as going out on Lake of the Ozarks and catching a ten pound er you know, every season, or

let alone any given season. Ever, It's just a different beast. And hunting is like that, and your hunting is highly specific to you and your region. Your effort, your access to ground, your experience level, and your commitment to the whole thing. All of these factors should feed into your goals and your decision making process. I'll give you an easy, relatable one here. Everyone wants to kill big bucks for obvious reasons, and almost no one kills big bucks for

obvious reasons. There is a huge disconnect in that department for an awful lot of hunters. Most of them would be way better off calibrating their goals to their actual hunting situation. But that's hard. We tend to lean into our egos here, but that just leads us down a frustrating path. So we think, well, this guy kills big bucks this way, so I'm going to try it. But you don't have the time, or the skills, or the spot or the understanding of the tactic, and so it

doesn't work well. Instead of meeting your hunting self you're at at the moment, you try to cheat the system and make it happen, but it usually doesn't, and it almost never does with any level of consistency. Now I want to make this clear. Now I'm not advocating for making excuses. I'm really not. I think hunters love making excuses for not hunting and for not killing big ones, and for missing when they shouldn't and on and on.

Don't do that doesn't do you any good. In fact, what I'm really talking about is doing the best you can to have some fun and challenge yourself and hopefully succeed at a realistic level given your situation. You know, in spite of the fact that you could point to ten reasons in your life why you shouldn't be able to kill a big buck today or this week or whatever this season. Everyone has those excuses and a lot of us use them, but you shouldn't. Instead pivot, don't

be like everyone else. Look at the actual effort you're willing to put in. Ask yourself, what the odds are that the bucks you really want to kill? You know, the ones you have on camera occasionally, are they actually in play? Like are they maybe? Or maybe they were and they aren't now. Or maybe the one big buck you have on camera is super inconsistent and you don't have much land or time, but there are a few

scrappers who show up a lot more. Maybe that's just it for you, And maybe killing them from a tree stand during the rut isn't much of a challenge and that doesn't appeal to you. So go kill one from the ground, or kill one some other way. Maybe use calling or a decoy or something. Use whatever you have to get better at hunting, instead of hunting someone else's way and never really leveling up because you've used success as black and white. Dead big buck or no dead

big buck. That's a bad way to look at it, because it's a great way to keep hunting someone else's hunt. This is the final point I really want to drive home. As we slide into the actual deer season here, you probably have some stands out, you probably have some deer scouted, You have some pieces in place to fill your tag. But reality will set in and that rock solid pattern and those bachelor bucks can die in an instant. One

wind shift and it might be over. You might be planning to kill one on a pond, but the weather is going to be cooler than ever, maybe super rainier both. Maybe you plan once again to wait for the rut to hunt because you think that's your best chance, and that's what all of the big voices in the outdoor space preach. But it hasn't worked well most of the time for you. That might be a not you, not

now reality. When the season actually it's and our preseason plans tend to die, we often turn to scramble mode. We panic and try to do what we see working for other folks, but that often just doesn't work well for us. There are too many variables that create real differences between us and them, you and him. You know you get my drift. Changing your mindset now is a

good start. It'll help you navigate the reality of dear season and help you make choices that are the best for you, even if someone else says you should never hunt mornings in the early season or never snort we he's at two year old Bucks in September. Run your own race, my friends, because that's how you're going to have the most fun in this stuff, and that's how you'll end up getting a lot better at it, which

is pretty fun. Borrow what you need, Absorb some influence from others, but be careful about trying to be too much like other folks, or worse, sacrificing your own identity and a loss cause attempt to be like someone who you really have nothing in common with except a love for deer. Do that and come back next week because I'm going to talk about acorns and apples and all kinds of mess. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which

is brought to you by First Light. I'm so happy that you guys are checking in every week and listening to this podcast and watching market and Ize White Tailed du series over on the meeteater dot com or at meat Eater's YouTube channel if you just want to get your fill a white tail content, or hell, maybe just fill the time as you're driving out west to hunt elk and you want to listen to some podcasts, whatever you need need to tickle your little hunting fancy, the

meeteater dot com has you covered. Head on over check it out.