Ep. 881: Foundations - How to Suck Less at Shed Hunting

like a step below impossible at some times. Chad hunting isn't that, but it isn't nearly as easy as a lot of people make it seen. There's sort of like a I don't know, a couple different ways to approach chedd hunting, some that require brute force determination and some that require a little more of a tactical approach. But you kind of got to work in most situations. But I'm gonna talk about both of those tactics and some

other stuff right now. I didn't start duck hunting until I got my first retriever when I was in my mid twenties. I did about everything wrong that you could with that dog, but she turned out to be impervious to some of my shortfalls, at least when it came to retrieving. She did. That Golden Retriever would literally retrieve anything. And while she wasn't the biggest go getter in the pheasant slough unless she had a real snoop full of fresh rooster scent in her schnas, she would bring me

anything I asked her to go get. She was kind of like the dogs you read about from maybe sixty or seventy years ago. Honestly, the hunting dog, like general hunting dog that just went with you no matter what you were going after, rabbit, squirrels, grouse, quail, pheasants, whatever lux was with me, and if I shot it, she'd go get it. That actually became real handy when I started hunting rabbits in the North Country where the cottontails

and the snowshoe hares lived together until that dog. I didn't realize how many rabbits I shot that actually ran maybe ten to thirty or forty yards away before piling up. It was an eye opener, especially since a lot of

them would croak inside of a brush pile. As my life progressed with lucks, I started to look for other hunting opportunities and realized that where I live in the suburbs is sort of a black hole for upland hunting aside from woodcock, but it's pretty full of duck hunting opportunities if you know where to look, and I do so. I started putting the hurt on the teal and the wood ducks that like to fly into the small ponds and streams on public land around here, at least during

the early season. But you know how that goes. I love woodies and teal and I don't want to diss them, but if you duck hunt long enough, you start to want a nice greenhead or two so you could fit in with the big boys. I'm not proud of that, but it is true. And I realized something. I wasn't really any good at duck hunting at all. Sure I had like seven thousand dollars worth of duck camo on a dog in a camel, vests and calls decoys and whatever,

but my actual experience level was minimal. I also couldn't really scout mallards the same way as some of those other small water ducks, mostly because they just didn't, you know, frequent the places where I could hunt and glass them kind of wore on me for a while. And when I finally did have some green heads swoop in on the leading edge of a cold front in late October, I carried those birds out like I had done something

really special, but I had mostly just gotten lucky. And it wasn't until quite a few years later, and well into a different dog, that I killed a few more and started getting a little more consistent up to a lot of folks killing some mallards as a matter of just going duck hunting because they know their stuff and they have the right spots. You know. Usually it's a

little of both or a lot of both. To that crowd, they think it was insane that someone could struggle for whole seasons to kill a couple of greenheads, but that was my reality. It reminded me of something else that I was terrible at for years and years, which you guessed it is golf, Just kidding, golf as child play compared to shed hunting. I didn't find my first shed antler until I was probably in my early twenties, and

it wasn't from a lack of trying. And if I'm being totally honest, that antler was a turkey hunting bonus that had already been run over by a tractor. So that's kind of like saying you got your first big bonus at work, when really it was a ziplock bag with some candy in it and a five dollars gift card to a frozen yogurt shop that's been out of business for three years. You know why I couldn't find a shed antler to save my life for quite a

few years. There were a couple reasons. I spent my time mostly looking on a farm where the deer don't winter a whole lot. And while this might seem like a little bit of revisionist history, the winters we had growing up seemed a hell of a lot worse than the ones we have been having lately. Here. The farm that I shed hunted, because it was the farm that I hunted hunted didn't host a big deer population in

the winter. If the bucks aren't there to drop their antlers, it's pretty hard to find their antlers, if you get my drift. I did also shed hunt some public land with the few buddies, but that yielded predictable results as well. It wasn't until we got antler point restrictions in that part of the state and then had some milder winners with the right crop rotation on that farm that I

started finding some antlers. And when I say it went from almost impossible to actually pretty easy, real fast, I mean that we had more bucks than ever and they were sticking around sometimes all winter long. That's a recipe for good shed hunting. And I had a few days where I found anywhere from like three or four to my super best day where I found eight. When I shed hunted like a fiend with that golden retriever up here in the cities, I might have found six in

a whole winter. I say that to frame this up because it's important. Even though it's painfully obvious, if you're not on a decent spot, you won't find very many, if any, antlers. There's nothing tactical here, there's no real strategy. If you want to find more antlers, you have to

shed hunt good spots. The people who promote shed hunting a lot that's often their secret, kind of like the people who consistently tell you all of it secrets for killing big bucks, but who also happen to hunt places with tons and tons of big bucks and coincidentally not a lot of hunters. This is largely true. Anywhere with

a decent population of hunters got to outwork them. It doesn't take too many hardcore shed hunters, and there are some people out there who really put in a lot of miles for antlers before you realize that somebody else is out there scooping up more than their fair share, making it tough for you. So the places where anyone can go, or at least several people can go, that also have some antlers laying on the ground often don't

have antlers laying on the ground for very long. So this means if you want to suck less at shed hunting, you either have to outwork those folks or go somewhere where there are fewer people poking around in every wintering spot to see what they can find. Now on the outwork front, it's best to understand what this means. To frame this up, allow me to talk a little about

pheasant hunting. It's just kind of a natural thing that at the end of the day, after following the dogs around for roosters, my buddies and I will check to see how how many steps we walked and how many miles we covered. Now, sometimes you get those dreamy days where the birds hold tight and the limits come fairly easy, but even then it's usually at least a couple hours

of effort. Most of the time, especially if there are at least two of us, the limits won't fully come or we will have to walk a lot for them. We often cover at least twenty five thousand steps in a day. Now. Those aren't steps on a nice two track in good weather. They are on frozen ish slews, mostly where you might have seven foot high cattails for

a good portion of your walk. Many of those days, the cattails are kind of glued together with frost, or sometimes, like this year, they're just bent over and intertwined due to some straight line wind event, which is not that uncommon on tabletop flat land where there's no trees. Occasionally we break the thirty thousand steps mark, which is something that a better man might not feel, but I do. At the end of the day, the question is always how many birds did you get? Not did you death

march your way into exhaustion for a few birds. The outward appearance of an awful lot of pheasant hunts is that it's really about the dead birds, and they really aren't that hard to get, but they can be, and when they are, they're really hard to get, just like how it goes with shed antler hunting. When I was really getting after it, i'd average one antler every couple of weeks, which, if you broke that down to miles per antler, makes the return on investment seem super bad.

I think that reality keeps a lot of people from being serious about shed hunting, and I totally get that it's not that much fun to do something when you feel like your odds of success are extremely low. Yet we all go deer hunting, you know, often, and very rarely actually shoot one. Shed hunting is just one of those things to do, you know, or at least we view it this way. Kind of when the weather sucks and the winter gets to you and you haven't done

anything cool in a while. But it can be a lot more than that, and I kind of think we should all at least consider being mildly serious about it, at least for the month of March. Anyway, For a lot of us, by then, most of the antlers are on the ground, especially most of the big ones. By then it's far enough from deer season where you might be missing the woods a little bit. But you can also do a hell of a lot of winter scouting when you shed hunt the bonus. But I think it's

more than that. I think setting out to try to do challenging things in the woods is good for us, because that's just kind of what we do. Even though we are generally on a quest to make deer hunting easier and easier, we also know that if it gets too easy, it just won't matter much anymore. That eternal struggle with moderate hunting is no joke, it's real. Now.

A good way to sharpen the blade is to decide that this is the winter where you're going to find x amount of sheds or spend x amount of days looking now, even if you only hunt thirty acres, finding other areas to shed hunt is important. This will likely occur on public land, and spending time on public land looking around is good for anyone who only has a

small chunk of land to hunt otherwise. Now, there are a couple of great gifts that being a somewhat dedicated shed hunter can give you, Besides the obvious reward of finding antlers. The first is one I talk about all the time that I'll just mention, which is that time in the woods is the secret ingredient to being a better hunter. It's also the secret ingredient to having generally

better mental health, which is no small thing. But shed hunting, even when the prospects are predictably grim, it's something else. It's a chance to work on your optimism and work through a changing type of plan. I do a lot of podcasts where I'm the guest, and I often get a vague question like how would you approach hunting my farm or the public land that I hunt? My answer is sort of always to default to the scout observe hunt scout observe hunt pattern. There's obviously a lot tucked

into that. Truth is that it's a strategy that works, and it conditions me to accept failure as a necessary part of the whole thing. Not seeing or not killing deer, you know, is that kind of failure, But it doesn't feel like a failure when you know it'll happen on some sits and it's part of the process. Hell, it might happen on many of them, you know, as you work through the old steps to get around one that

you'll eventually get a shot at. So what does this have to do with shed hunting and honestly becoming a better shed hunter? Quite a bit. Actually. While you can go out on a Saturday afternoon with your buddies and walk where the deer trails take you, and I'll note there is nothing wrong with that, you can also decide to give it a bit more effort. You can look at your farm or the least or the public ground

you like and break it down into different areas. You can walk the easy stuff for a gimme andler, but eventually the sheds in the fields will be scooped up by you or someone else. Eventually you'll have to start walking the cover and you won't want to walk the same routes. Eventually you'll have to start to develop some kind of a plan or at least some type of acknowledgment that you've already done this thing, so it's time

to do something else. This is what I love about this time of year, when I fully expect to eventually find an antler or three. I know where I should walk according to typical advice and quite honestly my experience, but I know where I will walk right away, and then I know I'll have to figure out where I need to go to find the antlers that didn't give themselves up earlier. That's when it starts to get rewarding, because it starts to feel like you're actively working through

something toward a goal. If you walk a certain route through the main betting areas today and along a well traveled ridge and you don't find an antler, that's okay, because you're going to use that as a jumping off point for the next time you go where you won't

walk that same route. It's fun to just go out and explore and freelance a bit, but it's also fun to decide that in the next few weeks you're going to go out for even just an hour or two when you can, and you're going to decide where you'll start your shed hunts where they'll take you roughly and where you'll end up, and when one is done, the next one is already being planned. This is so close to how you often have to be to kill deer, at least deer in spots where they aren't easy, and

that I feel it's absolutely worth it to try. I don't want to turn shed hunting into a not very fun mission to divide and conquer the landscape. So I'll say this, If you do this, and you pay attention, you'll kind of notice a progression. Like I mentioned, the first few miles will be spent looking at the fields, in the open areas, and just generally the easiest stuff to walk. This is true in egg country, and it's

true in the big woods. You're not going to deal with a lot of open ground there, so just generally the easiest, highest odds routes are where you'll begin your shed hunts. When those are played out, you'll have to get creative and go where the deer like to walk and probably where they like to bed. This is the exact same path most hunters follow, but you know what, most of them never get away from those first easy paths. Those are the spots where the power couples kill giants

on hunting shows, So why wouldn't you stick to them? Well, that's not where the deer are likely to be a lot of us, at least not big mature bucks. If you want to kill big pressure deer, you almost always have to go where other people won't. It might seem like a leap to go from that back to just an attempt to find a few antlers, but there's nothing wrong with conditioning yourself to not only work harder than most hunters, but to also go where most hunters won't,

which not coincidentally, is just generally more work. You don't have to do this to find antler. It's just like you don't have to hunt that way to kill pressure deer. But if you want to do either consistently, there's just kind of a template to follow. Most of us just want to swim downstream, but it's better to point your nose into the current and start moving. I know this might seem crazy, but I believe it to be true.

If you shed hunt like most people won't, you'll find more antlers, and you'll put yourself in more spots where the deer or the deer sign can really teach you something. It's sort of like bringing a training dummy along when you take your dog for a walk in the park. Sure, the walk is a good enough reason to go, but why not mix in a few steadiness drills or fun

or trees or something. It won't take anything away from the walk, but we'll definitely give your dog something it needs and that it's only going to benefit you as the owner of that dog. So go find some antlers scratch that make the decision to do some shed hunting in the next few weeks. You'll probably find something, and if you don't, at least early on, you have the power to change things up and give yourself better odds to work through the problem. Eventually you're going to see

that wall of times and it'll be worth it. And if not, hell, at least you tried, and you probably found a whole bunch of interesting deer sign along the way while also spending time in the woods. So do that and come back next week because I'm going to talk about why we should all be more honest about deer hunting and just not lie so dang much. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by first Light.

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