Ep. 829: Foundations - Red Light/Green Light Hunting Spots

That happened to me twice recently on this very topic, and I realized that it's something I should probably break down in detail, because the hunting industry generally won't. Now, that's not a knock, but it is true. And we usually give general advice like call at this conditions or hunt this weather situation this way, and on and on

that kind of stuff. But this difference between the general advice and where you actually hunt is often pretty big, and it matters on how you approach that so even if that is not clear at all, it will be shortly. I haven't seriously fly fished in probably twenty years now. I still mess with panfish and poppers, and occasionally sometimes I go deep and try, you know, to catch big smallmouth or northerns. But mostly fly fishing for me is a reason to do something different and give the fish

a break that wasn't always that way. Where I grew up in southern Minnesota, there are hundreds of miles of trout streams. They are some of my favorite bodies of water, and they weave their way through my favorite kind of land, that bluffy, deciduous forest, you know that just full of deer in, turkeys and squirrels in a case, viasionally a cattle pond with a few wood ducks paddling around. I love that area now. As a youngster, my dad got me into fly fishing when I was still in grade school.

He made a crude but functional fly tying table thing, kinda that he could set across his lap while he sat in his recliner and watch TV all winter long. The goal was always to fill the fly boxes with as many elk hair cattis flies as we could crank out. Now, as you can imagine, he kind of got sick of that, so it didn't take him very long before he taught me to tie those flies and irresistibles and about any

streamer that my young brain could come up with. There was a sense of accomplishment after tying maybe half of a dozen flies in an evening and then looking at the rows and the tackle flat slowly filling up. It reminds me of how I feel at the end of the deer season, when I can look into my chest freezers and see enough venison to make it through to the next season. It's crazy satisfying. Now. When I first started fly fishing, I was obsessed with numbers, as a

lot of kids are. I kept track of the trout I actually caught, and I can remember being eight and catching eight in one summer. Now I know that's not great, but I'm a slow learner and I'm jumpy as hell, So when a ten inch brown SIPs my fly off the surface, I give them absolutely no time before I set the hook, usually way too aggressively. It's a problem I had then, and it's a problem I have today.

It might just be me. At this point, there were a couple of years when I was in third and fourth grade, when my dad went from working second shift to first shift. That meant instead of only seeing him on the weekends, he'd get home every day at about four. And when he did that, we fished so hard, and the stretches of streams that we frequented became something familiar in a way that's kind of hard to describe, even

if you know nothing about fly fishing for trout. If you can imagine a small stream winding its way through a cow pasture, think about the structure of moving water. Typically you have some rapids, then some deeper water, some rapids, and then some deeper, but you also have bends in the river, with the inside shallow and the outside generally deeper.

There are random boulders splitting the current and providing tiny pockets of slack water where trout not only have to burn fuel caliaries to stay there, but also kind of just delivers insects and other food right to their mouth. There are undercut banks, the kind that allow for safety against overhead predators and the cover of shadows in which to hide. You know, there's a tree overhanging this pool,

and some overging grass along the other bank. When the insects start coming off the water, the trout start feeding, and it's a wonderful thing to witness. It's also true that you can wade into a pool and catch fish without knowing hardly a thing. After all, you're taking a dumb fish and putting something that looks like food in front of it where it expects that kind of food to be. But as dumb as they are, or at least can be, they don't suffer a lot of mistakes either.

Thrash the water with your line used too heavy of a touch to lay down your fly, sorry, stumble on a few wet mossy rocks, and make some ungraceful moves to stay above water. Sorry. There starts to be an understanding between you and a spot where if you approach from downstreams slowly and you work the closer seams first,

you can get the most out of a spot. It's like listening to someone who knows how to play an acoustic guitar really well, but they aren't trying to be the center of attention, versus a teenager who only knows power chords and wants everyone to know they kind of can play a few Nirvana songs. The thing about learning a spot like that is that it takes time on the water, and there's no way around that. It takes time when the water is high and low and the

tap water clean or somewhat stained. It takes cloud cover and bright sunny days and amazing hatches and sparse hatches, and for whatever reason, no hatches at all. Just one pool in a trout stream can be a lifelong learning experience if you do it just right. Hunting spots are

the same way. Mark and I recently had a fellow from Florida send us an email about how to manage hunting a spot along a creek where there is a dominant wind, often blowing, you know, and some thermals to contend with, and moving water that might suck the air a certain way. His question basically was what do I

do here? My answer is this, I don't know, but I do know that you have a better chance of learning that spot through trial and error than listening to a couple of upper Midwestern dudes spitball some random suggestions. I was thinking about how to respond to him when I went out to sit for my second time this season on a little piece of private ground where I got permission last year. It's just close to my house.

I walked in and jumped a fawn sleeping away right where I saw her the last time I hunted the spot, but this time I watched her mom sneak around me and meet up with her as well. This spot, you know, it's a no brainer location. Really. It's next to a small pond in the middle of the woods. It was eighty two degrees when I walked out, which is pretty hot for Minnesota in the end of September. The landowner wanted meat and I wanted to hunt, so I figured it was a pretty simple thing to go in and

sit over some water. Now I had about forty five minutes before dark, I heard what I thought was a deer, and in a rookie move that I still make, and I don't know why, I paid close attention for a couple of minutes, and then I kind of just lost focus. The second time I heard it, I knew it was a deer, and I peered over my left shoulder and realized that a good sized loaner dough had made it

into about fifteen yards. Now, instead of going to the pond, she walked right to my tree and sniffed around underneath it. I was pinned until she walked straight in front of me into a tangle of cedars and grapevines and raspberry fines. I realized then that I probably wouldn't get a shot despite having a deer I wanted to shoot right next to me, but I slowly stood up and got ready anyway. And I noticed at that moment, just for a second, a little buck walking across a trail in a spot

that didn't make much sense. How the dough below me hung around for a minute or two before making the mistake of walking right into the only good shooting lane I had on that side of the stand. Look, I can screw up shots with the best of them, but a ten yard quartering away shot isn't one I mess up too often these days. And as soon as I heard her crash, I heard another deer behind me. It was a dough in a fawn, and they were maybe

ten yards from the pond, but they never drank. Then I had another dough come trotting in from the opposite direction, and it looked like she was going to hit the corner of the pond and hydrate herself nope. I saw seven deer during that sit, and every one of them was within maybe thirty yards of that pond at some point, but not one of them went in to drink. They browsed in certain spots, walked in certain spots, and generally gave me a crash course on how I didn't understand

how they used that location at all. I've set two stands there in two seasons, both to shoot the edge of the pond, and now I planned to move my stand off of the pond just a hair where they screwed around it. I'll probably get that wrong too, But even when you get things like this wrong, you still sometimes end up dragging out a deer. Now here's the thing, and I want to make this very clear. Try to go into your spots with the idea that there aren't

very many rules you need to follow. And what I mean by that is forget about the thermals for a bit. Forget that you think the wind is going to swirl, because all you have ever heard is that wind is going to swirl in the bottom of the valley or whatever. If you have a spot you want to hunt, take that risk. Take seven of them. If you have to figure out not only how to hunt the spot, but what you have to do to keep hunting it. Don't

worry about spooking deer. As crazy as this may sound, we make this so academic, and we think our way out of hunting a lot of different spots. But really we got to get in there and just try it to see how it works. Now, I think we are way to concerned with spooking deer, if I'm being honest, I say that as a public land deer hunter mostly too, we have been conditioned to play it safe so much that we are playing it safe too much and not going in and doing what we need to do. Now.

I know I've talked about this a lot, but bear with me here because it comes up all the time. Now. I want to use the valley example here. At least twenty seven times a season, someone will text me or email me satellite imagery of their hunting spot and they'll mention that they only hunt the ridges because the thermals or the swirling winds in the valley just take them right out of play. Then, without question, they'll explain how much sign is in the valleys. Well, yes, deer love ridges,

but they love valley bottoms too. They are usually cooler when the weather is hot. They often have different types of vegetation in trees, often thicker, honestly, and they are spots that just concentrate movement due to terrain without thinking about swirling winds. Doesn't that sound like it's worth hunting? But if you say that the wind is going to swirl and that it's unhuntable, that's the end of that.

But you don't know that, and neither do I. There are times when the wind is barely blowing and times where it never stops. There are days when it blows until five point thirty and then settles down until dark. There are times when the temperature rises quickly or cools down fast where the thermals are noticeable, and there are times when the air temperature doesn't change three degrees during the entire sit and the thermals are a total non factor.

There's also the undeniable reality that if bucks feel they have the wind advantage, they move more freely in daylight. This is something that can't be taught, but if you haunt long enough, you'll start to figure this out. And it's important in fact. Learning how to use that confidence against them is probably one of the biggest reasons I ever kill them. When they feel safe, they act like it, and if you're in their neighborhood, the unkillable becomes suddenly

vult vulnerable. So let's look at that valley example again. Oftentimes we blame swirling winds for keeping the deer away, when it could be that we just got busted going in. Getting into a valley can be easy, or it can be really tough and require you a route that just isn't all that easy to sneak along. In this case, you might want to wait till you have a little

rain or some really windy conditions. You might need to use the weather to cover your track, so to speak, and let you get in there and just forget about hunting it on calm days. But then what though, Now you're in a swirling mess, and as soon as you get into your chosen tree you realize that you're probably going to get winded. Maybe you didn't need to get into a tree. Natural ground blinds are the answer to some of these problems, simply because you can reduce your

scent impact by getting on the ground. Now, let's drill this down further. Let's say you do get on the ground, or you have to be in a tree, doesn't matter. Instead of thinking of the valley as a whole, spot break it down. Where's the most signed, the biggest concentration, Where are the most prominent trails. Is there a community scrape in there somewhere? Maybe you just need to write off certain parts of the valley because the wind is going to bust deer in half of it. But what

about the other half? Can you set up to kill on a very specific spot on spot type of thing? Maybe you should, or maybe you should just try to hunt that spot in a few different conditions and figure out ways to tweak your approach and set up take some risks, just try to be calculated about it. But now let's step back to that Florida fellow who emailed us. He has a creek near his body is confused about and the flow is the opposite of the prevailing winds.

He wondered if that moving water would pull air against the general wind direction. My thought is probably not. But also there's a really good way to find out. Plus, when you have anybody of water, you almost always have a wind advantage if you know how to play it. If you can set up right over a stream or river, or you can plan for your wind to blow up or down it or across it to not mess up with a small area or hunting. You're onto something again,

though there's no way to know until you try. I think a lot of hunters don't want to try new things because they fear they won't work, and of course a lot of them won't. But that's not a good excuse, because a lot of what we do doesn't work. In fact, most of the decisions we make, even the ones we think are really smart and you know, kind of aligned with the best advice out there, they just won't work

on any given time. Bow hunting white tails is a game of almost NonStop failures punctuated by a few wins. That's it. If you learn to accept that and to use the possibility of failure to figure out a spot, then you're doing better than most of your competition. Take this another way, what if the spot you hunt requires you to walk through an area you almost always bust deer in, So you go, well, I can't you know, I can't hunt there in the morning because the deer

will spook. And that's that. But is it? I'm getting to the point where I don't care that much if I spook some deer, it's part of the deal, and they are generally more tolerant it then we think, provided we are walking. The bigger point here is that if you walk in and bust some deer or think you will, and you stop trying to figure it out, you definitely won't kill more deer there. You just won't. Maybe you can't hunt call mornings in that spot, But what about

windy mornings where you have some noise cover. Is you're ruling as true in September as it is in November? Does it matter for evenings or mornings? What about if you walk in an hour early instead of fifteen minutes early. The thing about spooking deer, and generally just our presence in the woods is that it eventually kind of resets. If you are settled in an hour before first light, but you bump some does on the way in. How much does that matter by the time shooting light hits.

Maybe a lot, but probably not as much as we think. I think. Maybe the best way to wrap this up is I'll explain why I feel so strongly about this topic. I approach this stuff as a maybe but I always have a plan, and I try to follow through with that plan. So I kind of know what tree I'm going to, and I kind of know what route I'm going to take, and I kind of know what conditions I feel will give me the best chance. Then I

just try it. If it works out great. If it doesn't, I usually tweak the plan to try getting in there under different conditions, just mix it up a little bit. Eventually I either go, well, this spot is just beyond me, or now I have something to work with. I know that sounds simple when I say it, but it's different putting it into practice when you have limited time to

hunt and maybe limited confidence in your plan. But believe me on this though, the more you try stuff like this, the better at hunting you'll get because you'll realize that a lot of the rules are total bs and don't apply to your specific stand locations. Think about that. If you're struggling right now and feeling like you need to sit out the lull to wait on a good time to hunt, you don't. Instead keep trying and keep listening, because next week I'm going to talk about the sounds

in the woods. That's it. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As I always thank you so much for listening. Honestly, we appreciate your support so much. I know you get sick of hearing about the sales and some of that stuff, but the way you guys showed up for our white Tail Weeks sale is amazing

and we do really truly appreciate it. If you want some more white Tail content, or if you want any content, maybe to kill some time while you're driving out to hunt somewhere and you want to listen to Clay's Bargeres podcast, or maybe you're at your office and you want to watch some hunting films that are getting dropped the meat Eater dot com. As you covered so much content, go check it out.