Ep. 847: Foundations - How to Suck Less at Gun Hunting Whitetails

some would say more than maybe necessary. But to shout those same things from the rooftops to a large digital audience is kind of a different thing. But here it is. I am a bad gun hunter. I just am. I'm actually a pretty bad shot with guns too, but I'm working on that. I'm working on all of it. And this is what I want to talk about now, the truth about being bad at gun hunting and what can be done about it. I think there's something we need

to get straight about the hunting world. It bothers me so much, and even though I talk about it a lot, I just want to drill this down because it's something like I truly believe. I don't think success is necessarily correlated with being good at hunting. You can buy a giant buck if you have enough money. In fact, you can buy a whole lot of them. There's a group of people in the industry who are chasing two hundred inch deer like crazy, and some of them have killed

quite a few of them. You just don't do that without money. I'm sorry, you just don't. And are they good hunters? I don't know. I don't care. I've seen this so many times in the industry that I really believe a lot of the most successful hunters maybe aren't as skilled at hunting as you'd think, or maybe I'm just jaded. It's really hard to say at this point, and I'm kind of sick of thinking about it. We have this weird thing about us where we look at the result, which is a big buck, and we fill

in the rest of the blanks. But there are some qualifiers out there. I'll think about it if you go on a high fence hunt, hunt in quotes, and kill a giant, most folks universally know that does not mean you're a good hunter. In fact, I think I can say this without too much black A lot of folks would look at that as a signal to the opposite. I do, But I'm not above being a judgmental prick either.

The next level down is an outfitted hunt. Those are great for some people, but having someone else scout the deer and set up for the deer and tell you where to hunt those deer, you know, it takes a little off the top when you kill that deer. The hunting industry lived off of this type of hunting for a long time, and a large part of it still does. But then you go down a little bit more and you have the private land hunters with awesome spots. A really good spot can make up for a lack of

high level skill pretty quickly. Then you have the rest of private land, permission based stuff, properties loaded with hunters leases, tiny properties with no cover. It starts to get muddier as we add in or take away variables. Then you have public land. I just did a public land hunt in Iowa, and while there was no shortage of hunters, there was also no shortage of deer. It was fun. I went right from there to northern Wisconsin, where I saw,

on average almost one deer per day. Different story there. Now, the person who consistently kills in Iowa on public land, it's probably a pretty good hunter. With a person who consistently kills in the big woods where the deer density is abysmal is unquestionably good. There isn't any way around it, provided the rules are being followed. The thing you learn when you travel a lot and hunt different stuff across many different states is that the variables are so different

from hunt to hunt. But one that isn't is that a lot of hunters feel like they are much better at this stuff than they really are. I don't know how often someone has casually mentioned to me they could tear it up on public land and such and such a state if only they had the time or money or whatever. Maybe they're right, but they could find that out and they won't. If that tells you anything. Now here's the thing. I'm one of those people too. There

isn't a hunt out there. I don't think I could crush, but that's easy because I mostly won't ever do most of them. I'm not going to hunt sheep or mountain goats or moose or white tails wherever, or elk wherever. Most stuff isn't in the cards, and the opportunities aren't getting easier to come by. What I do know is that there is one kind of hunting that makes me feel like a beginner again, and I sort of hate it and sort of love it. It's gun hunting white tails.

I've only really done it a handful of times, and while I've had okay success with it, I don't feel like I ever really had much of a good plan or really put in the right effort. I killed a big target buck of mine one time in northern Minnesota with a rifle. The second time I ever tried to hunt with a rifle. I just posted up in a cattail so that I knew that buck liked, and a

dole led him to his demise. I killed a pretty decent one in Wisconsin the first time I rifle hunted there, but it was purely a good luck situation for me and a bad luck situation for that eight pointer. There have been a few others, but mostly I felt like I wasn't myself while rifle hunting. I was just doing rifle hunter stuff and it worked out. Maybe that doesn't make sense, so let me explain it. I think random chance does a lot of heavy lifting for a lot

of gun hunters. There is a big group of hunters that hunts the property to the north of my buddy's land in Wisconsin, the place where we stay at when we're over there hunting. Every opening morning they show up in a bunch of different trucks and they set out to the same spots to stand in the field and push some large chunks of woods. The standers actually just stand right out in the open in a field, and we've yet to see one with any type of shooting

sticks or bipod. So that tells you anything. It tells you they are shooting at running deer freehand. So that's something that's well not good. I have a feeling that fellas in that group all hope this is their year, just like last year, just like next season. It will be for a few of them, but that will be likely up to a lot of chance. It won't be because the deer drives they put on are suddenly a very good strategy for hunting. They're just random and they

are pushing rabbits with antlers in a general direction. Some of those deer are just gonna get unlucky, though. I can't stand that type of hunting for myself. Now. I don't care if that's exactly what those guys want to do, and I don't care if they do it. I really don't. I'm happy for them, but for me, the fingers crossed type of hunting is just not fulfilling. It feels like a light version of hunting to me, and it bothers me. That's also how I've mostly rifle hunted, which is kind

of dumb. I mean, it's dumb for a lot of reasons, mostly because I already went through this phase as a muzzloder hunter. When I started doing that, I thought the extra arrange meant I could just go put my back to a tree and kill them like I was spring turkey hunting. And you know what, I killed some those little bucks anyway, and only when the conditions allowed it to work. If the snow was crunchy or there was some other weather factor that made it more difficult, the

tags did not get filled. Even though I had that extra range of that weapon. The moment I resigned myself to sitting my bow stands and trying to think through why I'd sit one place and not another. You know, given the conditions, my tag started getting notched pretty regularly. It's so dumb and simple. I'm almost ashamed to admit it. It turns out, if you hunt like a bow hunter who doesn't have the benefit of randomness or long range weaponry, you put yourself close to where deer like to walk

and then you can shoot them. That's so hard to do with a rifle or a shotgun. You get that longer range gun in your hands and the gravity pulls you hard to those big views where you can just reach out and touch them. You know this, We've been over this. But what do we do about it? Well, I know what I'm gonna do about it. I'm gonna start hunting with a rifle like I do with my bow. I'm not a very good rifle shot anyway, so close is always better for me, and this might be a

close range deal. But before that, I want to talk about something. I think we get married to tradition and we don't want to rock the boat at deer camp. But here's the thing. If you want to be a successful gun hunter, you're going to want to think about your setups. This is where there is such a difference

between bow hunting and gun hunting in general. With bow hunting, we obsess over where the deer should be right now, what they should be eating, where they should be chasing dose, what the wind is doing for this spot or that spot, or what our trail cameras show us we should do with some more set up somewhere. Then we act on that info. We try to see if we are right. Often we aren't, but we might see something that points

us in a better direction. We might find some sign, We might encounter something that alters our plan and puts us in a better headspace to complete this whole thing. With gun hunting, we tend to go, well, I'm going to sit the ladder stand on the field edge again, or I'm going to post up on the shooting lane in the swamp, and that's it. We go, well, I have one option, or I have two or three. We might ride it out at our only spot, or we

might file between a couple. But it's often not based on anything more than we either saw a deer when we sat one place, or we didn't. If we did, we go back. If not, we might, we might move. I'm planning to hunt Wisconsin this year, and the truth is, I feel real unprepared. I feel like I'm going to hunt just like that, you know, just go wherever. And I don't want to. In fact, I don't want to for two very specific reasons. The one I explained before that it simply just doesn't do much for me. I

don't get out of it what I need. I don't know why. I guess I'm just a quirky fella. The other thing is that it's not a good way to kill deer, and I just really like shooting deer. So this year, I am going to force myself to avoid the familiar traps. Will I go sit a ladder stand that over looks a swamp on opening day? You betcha? But mostly because I just walked in there recently and found one of my neighbors setting up not one, but two ladder stands right on my property line to shoot

into my land. You know why, Because they know I'm almost never there. Between their illegal bait piles and this kind of shit, it makes it very tough. I have a strong aversion to a grown man looking me in the eyes and lying to me. But that's what they did when I mentioned they were straddling the line and setting up in a way that makes it look an awful lot like they're gonna shoot into mine. I'm not

great at letting stuff like that go. The assholes who sit those stands are going to have to look at me sitting mine this year. I'm not proud of the way I am, guys, but I'm too old to fight my nature. After that, though, where I hope to make a good point shoot one so they can watch it. I'm going hunting for real. I'm going to read the conditions and either go to setups I already have or

hang something to sit. By the day, I will hunt private, but by Monday I might slip into some public just to see what I can do about finding some little honey hoole and watching over it. I have a few of those scouted out from bow hunting, and the advantage of a little range might help me with all of them. What I'm not going to do is sit around and just hope a deer comes by me for like five days. I'm going to go to them like I do with bow hunting, and I don't know if it'll work yet,

but I'm hoping. It makes me feel like I'm leveling up and changing a little bit as a gun hunter. Now, let me ask you this. If you're going gun hunting this year, what's the plan? Are you going to do what you always do? If so, will that make you happy? If that answer is yes, then carry on, my friends. Do what blows the wind up your skirt? I say, or actually Mark says that so much though that I often wonder if he has petitioned First Light to make

him a camo skirt. What if that's your plan? But you're wondering if this year is going to be a lot like a lot of the other years where the best you can do is hope that the randomness of it all chooses you as the big winner. Then it's time to think about your hunt now. As I mentioned before, a lot of people don't want to rock the boat with the group dynamics of a gun hunt. But that's a personal call. Maybe you love doing the deer drives,

maybe you hate it. Maybe you don't care about being back at the cabin at noon for the chili cookout. Can you move stands midday to something tighter in the cover. Can you bring a mobile setup to the spot. You're just kind of curious about what can you actively do to hunt them when you have a high powered rifle in your hands or that scope shotgun. A lot of these questions don't have answers yet because a lot of

folks listening to this haven't hunted yet. There's a lot of inputs to take in before you decide to be the guy who goes rogue and wade into the thickets, or skip the social stuff to spend the eleven ish hours of daylight. You have where the deer live and not where the beer disappears into bellies and the chili farts radiate off the cabin walls, like that scene in Blazing Saddles where the bad cowboys are sitting around the campfire eating beans. It's good to consider these things though.

I believe this because if you aren't working on something in your head, you won't work on something in the field. It's easy to fall into the same patterns. There's comfort and familiarity. It's nice to not have to make a lot of decisions or really think something through. But if you want to kill deer every year with a gun, and you currently don't, or at least don't kill the deer you really want to kill. Ask yourself where you could improve on that program. The easy one is to

hunt longer than everyone else. That one's so simple, but it's hard, and it's not like all day sits are going to always result in filled tags. The deer that won't cross the open you know, at sunrise, aren't likely to cross the wide open at noon, if you get my drift. This is why I'm an advocate for the midday move if necessary. Bull hunters do this all the

time and it works a lot. There are setups where all day sits are money, but you have to believe in them, and if you don't, a still hunt from one stand to another during the midday hours is a nice break, and it's nice to have a different view. It's also a good idea to go looking. I think a lot of gun hunters like to walk around and look for deer, but a better bed is to really sneak around if you have to with another destination in mind.

I mean, how often do you think you're going to walk up on a buck during gun season and shoot him? Probably not too often, unless you have a thousand acre ranch in one of the flyover states. I'm also not advocating huge moves here either. We are often off by so little that it surprises me so much. Maybe you saw a few deer in the cree bottom below you. A move of one hundred yards might get you some kind of different opportunity, you know, just to hunt better cover.

That might be all you need. I kill a lot of deer after little moves while bow hunting, and I plan to kill some while gun hunting. I also think that when you approach it this way, you're more open to going off at instinct, and I think that shit is important. What if you're sitting there looking at wide open woods and not seeing deer on day three? Instead of just giving up and giving in, what does your

gut tell you? Probably tells you the deer in some spot, And while you don't usually hunt it, you probably could right instead of trying to blind call one to a burned out area, go to where they might be and

find out if they are there. If you jump some deer, which you very well might take note to where they are, there was a reason, and the reason is probably good enough for you to sit there today or tomorrow or the next day, think it through, try something different, go try to find them if you have to, and come back next week because I'm going to talk about making mistakes and giving ourselves a little grace because we are all flawed. 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 just want to say thank you to everyone you know sticking with us as we you know, drop new films on the mediator dot com, or we throw these articles and podcasts out there, whatever. We are creating so much content right now and you guys are consuming it like mad, and

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