00:00:01 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired2Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting. 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, Tony Peterson. 00:00:20 Speaker 2: Hey everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about thinking through your setups to make sure you get the best shot opportunities possible on big bucks. All right, I think this episode might be one of the most helpful ones I've ever put together so far. The thing I love about this podcast is that I have to take some of the things I just do in whitetail hunting that I think work, you know, like how I set up my stands and blinds, and then explain them, you know, explain the reasons why I do what I do. Maybe that sounds dumb, but on this topic I'm working through today, I think it'll make a lot of sense when you hear it. And I think if you listen and at least loosely follow this advice, you might not necessarily see more deer, but you'll shoot more deer and not just any deer either. Big bucks. Let's run a visualization experiment here. Picture yourself at the top of a mountain, like way, way at the top. Doesn't have to be Everest. Just an exposed mountaintop. What's happening to you? Well, you probably have a beautiful view of the mountain range around you. You know, the green valleys below. Maybe way off in the distance you can see a road with traffic passing along. It looks like it's all just toy cars and trucks because they're so small from your view. And that view is great. But also, the wind is smoking and it's cold. The rocks around you are like a moonscape. And everywhere you look are places where if you slip and fall, You just might die or at the very least end up with a couple of important leg bones sticking out through your skin. The beauty of the view might outweigh the feeling of being very exposed and not all that close to anything truly safe. 00:02:02 Speaker 1: Maybe. 00:02:03 Speaker 2: Now, leave that mountaintop. Go completely somewhere else. Like Central Florida. Instead of being 15,000 feet above sea level, you're not 15 centimeters above sea level. Standing on a small hump of dry ground in a swamp. let's say, in July. Forget the bugs for a second, which you wouldn't be able to do if you were actually there, but just think about your view. You can see maybe 10 or 20 feet in any direction, but mostly you see greenery, jungle-like brush and trees, and there's water everywhere. It's a claustrophobic environment and probably not all that comfortable for a lot of people, particularly the average Midwestern whitetail hunter. Now, if you were hiding from someone, You might be comforted by the fact that you'd be hard to find just on principle alone in a spot like that. But what about the alligators? Maybe there's a big cat roaming the swamp looking for a bite-sized deer. Snakes? Sure, they're there. The mind can find plenty of danger in an environment like that. And since you can't see very far, the general thought will be that the dangers could be close. It's not a settling, comfortable environment. Not unlike the mountaintop. which is kind of the exact opposite but provides a similar feeling, even though the look is totally different. But why are those scenarios anxiety-inducing? Well, one explanation comes from a fellow named Jay Appleton, a geographer who wrote the book The Experience of Landscape, which came out back in 1975. The central idea of the book is that humans are evolutionarily bent toward environments that provide two things, prospect and refuge. Prospect is simply the ability to see outward and observe the surrounding environment. But refuge allows for the ability to hide and find shelter, to remain safe. Where would this come from? Well, most of our history was spent out, you know, in the wild looking for food and trying to find shelter and water, while simultaneously trying to spot short-faced bears and other critters that could turn us into lunch. And let's not forget the other humans out there who once encountered would often prove to not be very friendly. Simply put, an environment that allowed for observation while remaining in safety was ideal, and we sought them out. Now, our ancestors who didn't, didn't get to make as many babies as those who did. Think about houses and how they're designed and why they are comfortable and cozy. And then think about why we generally don't build houses without windows, for example. Or maybe a more fun way to think about this is, Think about why kids like to build forts. This is sort of a universal experience for children, or at least it used to be. A fort is an enclosure that offers the feeling of protection, but there's always a window or a gap in the blankets that allows for observation. This might also explain our preference for elevated locations like tree houses, upper floor balconies, hilltops, mountain overlooks, and well, you get it. It's fascinating stuff, and it has a lot to do with why a lot of hunters don't kill very many big bucks. You see, if you think about our preference for views and our environments, and you run it back through the march of time, you can start to understand why our ancestors chose very specific types of locations. It was truly a means for survival. We don't really need to think about it that way now, but you can put yourself in a buck's, uh, hooves? and start to see why he might not want to spend much of his daylight hours feeding away in shin-high hayfield, as opposed to betting on a hillside bench with his back to a deadfall and his eyes pointed toward the valley below. He's looking for the right kind of spot that gives him refuge and a valuable enough view of whatever might be headed his way. Just like with us, he's looking for a kind of controlled openness in much of his life. A big enough view that is paired with the feeling of protection. All right. So where am I going with this? Well, take a drive through the countryside about anywhere these days where deer live and people still hunt them. You'll see box blinds on field edges and other highly advantageous spots. We literally took little houses and put them up where the deer live. Which does what? It gives us big views, but a cozy spot to observe them from. Because the big views are often not great for killing big bucks, though. We often pair those little houses up with, you know, food plots and other things that should draw deer in. but I don't want to talk about box blind hunting here. I want to talk about regular unenclosed tree stands and saddles and ground blinds, you know, both the hub style kind and the natural kind, the kinds of setups that a lot of bow hunters utilize throughout the season. Now, what would you say is a fairly common denominator found around, you know, ambush setups that the average weekend warrior whitetail hunter would choose? Forget the style of stand or blind, but think about the environment. it's almost always somewhat open. Field edges? For sure. Meadows? 00:07:08 Speaker 1: You bet. 00:07:09 Speaker 2: Power lines cut through miles of state forest? You know it. How about just a nice deciduous forest with old growth trees that blot out the sun and keep the undergrowth from getting enough tiny packages of energy from the sky to grow some weeds and brush? Absolutely. Now imagine just the difference between hunting those types of spots on the ground versus being 17 feet up in a tree. The view is going to change. The vibes are going to change. What we want is the feeling of being secure and hidden while also being able to see as much of the environment around us as we can. Now, imagine that you're a five and a half year old buck on public land in Pennsylvania or maybe Kentucky. Your encounters with hunters and all of the times you catch a whiff of where someone has been through recently, they all stack up in your brain as cautionary experiences related to a threat. What percentage of those encounters with bow hunters, or I guess deer hunters in general, happen in those types of spots? I would guess most of them. Especially most of the encounters that don't involve a person just blindly walking through the woods anyway. The kind of encounters that signal you're around someone with bad intentions. What would you do with that information if you were a big buck? Well, in a day you'd find that bench or other spot that offered ideal protection and threat detection. And at night, when the hunters were gone, at least the two-legged hunters, and the four-legged toothy critters were out, you'd probably spend more time out in the open where the danger has no good approach to you. That leaves most of us with not a lot of options for how to kill a big buck of that age. because most of his life he's conducting himself in a way that doesn't expose him to our style of preferred ambush hunting. Sure, we can blind call our asses off and try some other tricks to get him to give up his advantages, but we all know how well that works when we're in pursuit of a real mature buck in most places. This means you need to break his life down into those spots in which he's going to move, in daylight, and then figure out how to get there and hunt him. But you know what you usually have to do in order to make that happen? Ignore those big views. This is a lot harder than people think, and it's partially just due to our evolution. Kind of like when you come home from being out all day and you're just starving. You're not as likely to take the time to make a nice, well-balanced, and healthy meal because your brain is wired to look for calorie-dense foods that can give you energy your body is asking for without any commitment of extra time. A big bowl of mac and cheese is just more appealing in that situation than a salad, even if you could get them to the same calorie count. When most hunters hang a stand or put up a blind, at least a partial reason for them choosing the location is going to be because of the view. But is that the criteria we should be working off of? I don't think so. I have a reputation for a couple of things in the whitetail world. You know, hunting water is one. Shooting forkeys when I want to is another, but I also tend to hang stands that don't offer awesome views a lot of times. I like to hunt right where bucks are likely to go and set up so if they do just that, I can shoot them when they are 20 yards away. People often comment when they sit my stands that they go a little nutty, but when the buck shows up, it's awesome. You'll see a lot of this if you watch the 12 and 26 film from when I hunted with Steve and his buddy Pat last fall in Nebraska, which is coming out this week. Where Pat killed his buck was just one of those spots. There were far more open areas on both sides of that pinch point that he was on, but the spot to get a buck close and broadside was where I put up that blind. It wasn't a fun blind to sit because he couldn't see much of anything, but it was the place to be when a cruising buck came through. I know that makes sense when you hear me say it, but think about what most hunters actually do when they go in to hang a set or put up a ground blind. And listen, I'm not saying you can't kill deer or big bucks on field edges and other openings because that would be stupid. But most of the season on properties that experience at least some hunting pressure, or at least in areas with a decent amount of hunters, that's just not a high odds deal most of the time. How do you go about breaking that cycle and not factoring in the view when you set stands? Well, I think about it like this. I want to try to predict the exact spot a buck will walk and then set up for that shot knowing what conditions it's most likely to happen in. That's what I care about the most is that specific shot. You see, we think about a spot to hang a stand, and we look for a tree, and then we look for all the trails around it, and we look to maximize opportunities for shots everywhere we can, and that can work. But it also plays heavily into us wanting a bigger, better view. What we should want instead is to figure out the most likely travel route and then set up for our best shot on that travel route. while also hunting it when the conditions favor us just slightly more than they favor the four-legged travelers on the trail. This is honestly the best way to kill a big buck in my experience, during a hell of a lot of the season anyway. You know, like that time period after the opener and before the rut kicks in, that big bulky part of the season where a lot of hunters just really don't go very much because the odds of seeing a buck on the move in daylight in the open fields just aren't great. You know, when he's supposedly nocturnal because he doesn't want to walk by your bean field camera in the daylight anymore. I would say this is one of the hardest things to not only try, but to sort of build into your whitetail mindset. A lot of what we find really challenging in life is just us fighting our evolution, and it plays into diet and exercise and social interactions and a whole bunch of stuff that can make us feel good, or more likely, make us feel not so good. The only way to get past this stuff is to try and to keep trying. Positive reinforcement does wonders for us, and it's really the key to a lot of successful deer hunting strategies, especially if you don't have a ton of money or a really, really good spot to hunt. Trying something that isn't supposed to work and realizing that it works just fine is a great way for us to bust out of our mental prison cells. The biggest part of it is to understand the task, which can be broken down like this. Between where he beds and where he likely ends up for the night, he has to travel. He will choose to travel in daylight if he feels largely concealed and protected from the usual threats. Where those spots will be almost always are in the cover. Now you can find these spots by running trail cameras, which is a huge advantage if you do it right. You can also find these spots by scouting on foot, which is something that most whitetail hunters won't do a whole lot once the season is open. But the bucks out there are leaving sign and tracks on certain trails and they're telling you an awful lot about what they do throughout the day. What's harder than finding these spots, though, is finding them and then finding the right ambush options and then putting in the time to figure out if you were right or not. This is maybe the biggest, mostly unspoken thing that holds a lot of whitetail hunters back. They lack the confidence and conviction to see something like this through. What I've found with this style of hunting is that deer are, shockingly, not crazy predictable most of the season. Health. Even during the run on a great pinch point in most places, I need to put in at least a couple of days to run into a good one. Often more days than that, I guess. More days than I have sometimes, if I'm being really honest. Now, doing the same thing on October 5th is another level more difficult. It's really hard to get past sitting in a spot where you can't hardly see a thing, where you know that you're just not going to have a parade of deer going by, but you have to cross your fingers that a good one will anyway. when most of the whitetail sphere says he won't, and your brain says, this is not a spot I want to be in. But you know what? It takes one deer to start to alter your line of thinking. I'll never forget an encounter I had with a really good buck, like a 130 that came out in a little swamp here in Minnesota, you know, way back in the beginning of October in like 2011, 2012, somewhere around there. I was in a tree on a trail that I felt might just have a doe come down to it, and it was a beautiful night, and I wanted to hunt. I didn't think I would have an encounter with a good one, and he didn't choose my trail even though he flirted with it. But I remember thinking, if I was 10 yards away in a different tree, I could have killed an awesome buck, when it should have been very unlikely. The truth is, awesome bucks are out there all over walking through the cover throughout much of the season, but they aren't very likely to go into spots that we most likely want to hunt. The solution to that is simple, but it's not easy. It's worth the try anyway, because if you set up for the one shot and the thick stuff and it all comes together, you'll never not have that option in your arsenal. And I'm telling you, it's valuable. It gets you doing what other hunters mostly won't. And that's exactly what the bucks don't expect you to do. So think about it and then think about coming back next week because I'm going to break down morning hunts and what most hunters I think kind of get wrong about them and why they cost themselves shots at bucks. That's it. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast. As always, thank you so much for all of your support. If you need some more whitetail content, head on over to TheMeatEater.com. If you haven't watched Brent's Moose Hunt, that film, our 12 and 26 film, go watch it. He does such a good job. It's an incredible film. You'll see that at TheMeatEater.com. You'll also see tons of new articles, tons of new podcasts, films, how-to stuff, just about everything you want to learn about the latest outdoor issues or how to catch a fish or kill a deer or whatever it's all there go check it out and once again thank you so much for your support