00:00:00 Speaker 1: What is going on? This is Jake Holfer. Welcome to another episode of Back forty and this week we have our panel of guests once again, Aaron Warburton, Adam Key, Bill Winki, and Jeff Sturgis. And building off of last week's episode and as we build up to the opening day of many archery seasons October first, this is our panel. They're giving us a quick rules and advice and guidance leading up to this upcoming season for twenty twenty six. And so this episode is all about rules. And I know rules sometimes get a negative connotation, but the root of this question is more so guidelines pillars to keep in mind across a broad spectrum of guests and get their perspective of what comes top of mind. What are the biggest rules that will help point you in the right direction? Almost bumpers and you're going bowling, They're going to keep you on the bowling lane and headed in the right direction. So we're going to kick things off with Aaron Warburton. Welcome to another episode of Back forty, presented by Moultrie. Here we go, all right, I think this is my opinion. People say they hate rules, but people kind of like rules to have an idea if they're on the right guidelines, and maybe rule and guidelines is somewhat similar. So I want to boil it down to five rules, five five principles, five guidelines that hunters should certainly consider for this year and probably perpetuity. 00:01:30 Speaker 2: So what do you got, Number one thing? These and these are mine. This is my perspective here, So take that with a grain of salt. Everybody's got a different one. Number one thing for me is to have fun and enjoy what you're doing. So there's a bunch of different ways to skin the cat. When it comes to whytail deer hunting. You can hunt specific bucks, you can hunt with a group of buddies, you can do deer drives, you can solely bow hunt, etc. Whatever you're choosing to do with that. Try to have fun and learn as much as you can. That's my main thing. If it gets to the point where you're getting so serious about it that it's getting stressful and it's causing you problems with family, problems with friends, problems with neighbors, et cetera, then I would I would advise you just to back up and go back to that rule. Just keep it fun. Nobody's starving. We're not. We're not shooting deer today because that's what we have to We have to survive on them, you know, we Although I love eating them and I do eat a lot of them, but it's modern times. We need to have fun and remember that always, like remember the fun and then the learning aspect. That's the that's the number one rule, real quick, real quick, before you go to rule number two. When's the last time you broke your own cardinal rule? Oh? I do it often, But the last time that I broke at big time was well, actually it's when I when I guess I invent this rule in my brain. When I was like twenty twenty one years old, I had taken I was going to college and working at the same time, and I'd taken time off school and work and hunted all day long for a specific buck on the farm, the private land that we hunt, my family farm. I'd hunted like nine days in a row day like dark, same tree. And I had a picture of one deer. I had one picture of him, and I was waiting for that one deer, and I, I mean, I was getting worn out. I did not want to I mean, you've sat all day in a tree. I'm sure it's not necessarily an enjoyable thing. Sometimes not nine days in the road. No, you get to three or four, you're like, oh my gosh, I've had enough. While I took ten days off and I was on the ninth day, I think, so I'm running out of time, and I've let some bucks walk that I probably shouldn't have. And I climbed in the tree that day and I rattled in a big buck and he comes in underneath me snort, waez is understand makes us great? Does every everything? He's seven yards broadside, dead to rights, and I'm sitting there measuring his points and thinking about which deer he is. And I let him walk off, and I right before he left the field and jetted into the woods about one hundred yards out, I said, well, I let me have one more to look. I pulled on my binoculars and I look, and I said, are you kidding me? That's the deer that I've been hunting all fall. I literally i'd had one picture of him, so I'd never seen him, you know, on the hoof. And he came in and I don't know if he just wasn't quite as big as I was hoping or something, he just didn't meet my criteria. And as soon as I saw that it was the deer I was trying to shoot, my mind completely switched and I'm like grunting and trying to get him to come back in and everything. Well by that time, he's already gone, you know, he's he's out, he's out, He's gone. And I was so mad. I just climbed down and left. It was like, I just I just spent nine days of my vacation. I only have two weeks of it a year, you know, and I'm on my I'm on out of it. I just spent all that time trying to kill that deer, and I just could have killed him, but I was worried about all these external factors, about how big is antlers, wearing all that. I wasn't focused on just being in the hunt, being in the moment. 00:05:12 Speaker 1: Of the hunt. 00:05:14 Speaker 2: I was focused on all this other crap. And from that point forward, I said, I ain't never doing that again. I'm going to go back. I the reason why I started hunting was because I heard a deer coming in the woods, crunching in the leaves. My heart started pounding. I turned around. It was a dough and I just about had a heart attack trying to shoot her. When I was eleven years old. I said, I'm going back to that mindset, and I'm never I'm never going back to this. So that's where that rule comes from. 00:05:40 Speaker 1: That's an excellent story. That's uh, that's that's awesome. It sucks to happen, but I guess it was just so ticked off. 00:05:50 Speaker 2: Walking all the way back to the truck, and I say, this is stupid. This ain't why I signed up for this. This ain't why I started hunting. I started hunting because it gets me freaking excited when I see a deer or a turkey or something like. I mean, you know, if you're hooked when you're a kid, if you have that feeling, I said, I am never going to lose that feeling again. And I should have just been torn to pieces by that buck coming in and making a scrape right underneath me. There's a big, old mature buck, and I let him walk. He's probably one hundred and forty somethingch deer. So I ain't never doing that again. So I haven't, and it's been glorious ever since. So that's the number one rule. Okay, rule number two. Rule number two. I'll get into tactics a little bit. Obey the wind, everybody says it, but understand what the wind does in different environments and understand how it behaves in your environment that you hunt. That's a complicated thing and you could go way down the rabbit hole on that, but I'm telling you, if you don't have the wind right on, it's going to you're going to lose more opportunities at mature Bucks than you get if you don't have that one nailed. 00:06:57 Speaker 1: And so just for out of clarity for people, not just the wind of the thermals and how the wind and thermals behave is what you and do you think that is something? How does someone improve off of that? Obviously you have milkweed, Like, what are some ways that people can say, Okay, I need to I need to follow this rule number two? What are some ways I can improve? And or do you guys have many videos or resources that you guys dive deep into. 00:07:20 Speaker 2: That we do, but it's been a few years since we've done something like that. We've talked about it some in podcasts, but it's it's hard it's very hard to explain via video or podcast. It's much easier if you just go to the woods and you drop milkweed NonStop and you watch how it behaves. Now, if the wind's blowing fifteen miles an hour out of the south and you're sitting on a high ridge and it's been doing that for three hours, well it's going to continue to do that, you know. But as the sun falls and the day winds drop off, it's going to change how it behaves. Vice versa. In the morning, as the sun is coming up, it's going to change how it behaves. You can feel when you're walking out, like say you got a bunch of ridges next to a creek bottom, and you're walking out the edge of that creek bottom where all them ridges play out, and this is an hour after dark or thirty minutes after dark. You can feel that cool air dumping down those drains coming off those ridges. That's those thermals pulling hard right at dusk. Once you start to understand that, it's gonna help you set up and get closer opportunities, especially at mature bucks. I mean, and the reason why we know is because I've messed up a pile of them. I've messed up way more really big ones than I've killed because of the wind. I've had everything else dialed, but that wind is critical. If it is not, I'm so anal about it now, Like if if I'm not one hundred percent confident that I know where it's going and what it's doing, then I'll just get down and leave. I would rather not hunt that spot, even though my ground since in there, I don't care about that. I do not want is for him to come in there and smell me in that tree or that setup before I get a chance at him, because that is that's checkmate. 00:09:10 Speaker 1: Yeah, so milkweed and all right. Rule number three. 00:09:14 Speaker 2: Rule number three, if your bow hunting or your gun hunting take close, high opportunity shots, don't try to force it. A lot of people practice in the yard all summer and they get it in their head that, Okay, well I can hit a baseball at forty five yards, so I'm good at forty five yards. It don't work that way in the woods. When when you're hunting and your cold and your heart's pounding, and you haven't you know, this is the first gear that you've drawn back on all year. There's so many other factors involved. I would just try to make your setups in such a way that you get close high odds opportunities. I would rather have an opportunity at you know, a smaller buck at twelve yards dead broadside than I would a great, big, giant bucket forty eight yards through the brush, flinging and errol. I just I do not want to lose a deer. I do not want to wound a deer, even if that means, you know, if in my mind, if I shoot a deer in the guts and I get him the next day that was a failure, I want to shoot him and kill him as quickly as possible. That's my job as a hunter. So I want close range, high odds opportunities. 00:10:32 Speaker 1: That's a great rule. That's great rule, all right, Rule number four. 00:10:36 Speaker 2: It kind of it kind of piggybacks off of that. Set up is everything. And this is coming from this is coming from a guy that hunts primarily big woods type stuff. There's different ways to skin the cat, but in my mind, the way that I hunt, I want to have high quality setups in a bunch of different for a bunch of different conditions. If that makes sense. I want to be going into whatever it is, my week vacation, my two week vacation. I want to have stuff dialed. I want to know how I'm getting in and out of that spot. I want to know how high in the tree I need to be. I want to know, you know, do I need to bring a stool to sit on the ground in this brush pile? Where's the trail that I'm shooting, where's the scrape at? You know, down to the nth detail. I want to have all that stuff figured out if I can, before I go in there. 00:11:36 Speaker 1: How hard is that to do? 00:11:37 Speaker 2: It's very difficult, but it's it's just time consuming, is all it is. You know, there's a lot of people that want to travel and hunt, and we do it all the time. We love going into new areas, but it is an extreme challenge. You are that local guy that has more time to scout, that's been out there once or twice a week all year long. Is gonna have a leg up on anybody that shows up. You know, unless it's Ani may or something. You gotta have a leg up on anybody that shows up because he's gonna know he's gonna have his spots styled in You know, whether he's got stands hung there or not, that doesn't necessarily matter. But I'm talking about actually putting boots on the ground and knowing exactly where you're gonna set and when you're gonna set it, and how you're gonna get in and out of there, and that all. I figure most of that out scouting in like late September early October. 00:12:36 Speaker 1: H All right, do you have a rule number five for US? 00:12:40 Speaker 2: Five adapt to the conditions M So basically, take what the defense gives you. Uh. If you have, say, for example, you're going into your hunt and there's a warm front and it's record high tempts, everybody's kind of pessimistic camp because the deer ain't moving. You know, it's eighty degrees. It's the rut. We're in a T shirt. This sucks, blah blah blah. Well, what usually a company's a warm front is high south winds. So if you get fifteen twenty twenty five min south winds during a warm front, don't be sitting around on your butt, you know, waiting and hoping for the next cold front so that you can go out there and hunt. I'd be out there going into the wind every day, scouting as much as I could. Because the one thing the advantage, like I said, take what the defense gives you. The advantage of that twenty twenty five mile in air wind is you can get into the wind. You can scout into the wind and blitz through a lot of areas, cover a lot of ground with your eyes and your boots that you otherwise would not be able to cover if it was calm. Does that make sense? 00:13:52 Speaker 1: Makes perfect? 00:13:53 Speaker 2: You're gonna get away with a lot more moving around on a windy day than you are otherwise. That's just one example of many. But I'm always I'm always thinking about whatever conditions it is that day. If it's warm and windy, water's going to be way more important, you know, north facing shade in hills is going to be more important. So and deer will move around their environment. I mean, they're still out there. It's just understanding how they use it under the different conditions. You know. The same could be said if there's a blizzard that comes in big time north wind. All the leaves are gone, their food's covered up with a foot of snow. Where are they gonna go? They're gonna go to south facing thermal cover if they can. If they don't have any hills or topography, they're going to go to thermal cover. That means cedars, pine trees, you know, et cetera, in a big grove of cedars and pines and hedges and whatever, hedge trees and whatnot. Anywhere where they can get sort of out of those elements, they're gonna go to. And you can really use that to your advantage. You know, I mean your property may not have deer in it, yeah, I mean it may not have deer in it for two three weeks leading up to that point, but all of a sudden, you've got a bunch of south facing thermal cover on your property. Big north wind comes in dumps eight inches of snow. Your property went from holding three or four deer to now it's holding twenty five deer and they're all just stacked right in there. But they're only there because of those conditions. 00:15:31 Speaker 1: So I like that. Those are some great rules. Those are some great rules and guidelines for people to fall along when throughout the season. Do you think when you wake up and it's not ideal conditions, it's not you know, a twenty degree temperature drop November seven. It's not that day, But do you wake up and like, Okay, what can I do today? These might set me up for tomorrow or the next week when things change. That's pretty much your strategy throughout the year. 00:15:54 Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm always playing the long game. So like, even if I can get out, even if I kill a buck on October twentieth, I can go scout on October twenty first, and it may not help. I mean, I've filled my buck tag, so I can't shoot another one. But whatever I find that day might help me kill one next year on October twenty first, or the twenty third or the twenty fourth. So like, if you just go to the woods every time because you enjoy it and want to learn stuff, and you just pick up little nuggets every time you go, you don't have to you know, you don't have to figure out everything or reinvent the wheel every time you go out there. So if you just pick up a little nugget or two every time you go, and make a point to go as often as possible, all this other stuff we're talking about takes care of itself. 00:16:37 Speaker 1: When you do, you have milkweed with you every single time. You go to the woods during season. 00:16:41 Speaker 2: Not always, ok, but I mean I'm always kicking myself if I don't have it. You know, it's different though, You got to you got to understand the conditions that you're out there. And if I'm scouting in late May or early June, sure, and you know the tree canopy is all on the win's gonna behave differently in there than it does in the middle of December, you know. So you could drop milk weed and kind of get an idea of how it flows across that ridge. But you really need to get in there and get up to stand height and see what it's doing. But I can't tell you how many times we've climbed, got fifteen twenty feet up, started dropping that and climbed straight back down because like, nope, and it ain't doing what we were hoping in here. It's going the wrong direction, which I battle. 00:17:26 Speaker 1: I think that's a great example because a lot of guys, well I'm just gonna write it out or like you know, I don't want to make more noise. I don't want to get down, I don't want to move, I don't want to you know, it's gonna take me twenty thirty minutes to get reset up. You're very aggressive in that sense where you're, hey, we got to go, gotta do something. 00:17:41 Speaker 2: Got to go, gotta go. 00:17:42 Speaker 1: Let's go. 00:17:42 Speaker 2: Let's go do something that we got confidence in right now. And like you said, if the conditions aren't good, let's go learn something. Let's go. Is there a place up throw we've never been on before, Let's go scout it. I mean, even if we burn up a little bit of it, we're getting up some knowledge for later. So it's constantly you're constantly pushing the snowball, you know, and it's getting bigger and bigger and bigger over time with knowledge about these different spots. But most of the mature buck encounters that we have, we're putting the deer on a spot. We know where they're going and what they're going to be doing based off of our scouting. Now I say that we know, we don't truly know, But most of the time when we get those opportunities, it is by design on those big ones. And if the wind is not, like, if the wind ain't cooperating with your plan that you have in your head, sure enough, he's gonna come walking down that trail. He's gonna smell you and that's it frustrating. 00:18:37 Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, yeah, I like it. Well, I know everyone can find where you're at, but where can people find you? Aaron? 00:18:44 Speaker 2: Uh, best place probably YouTube, the hunting public. That's where we have all of our current content at, but also on most of the social media platforms as well. 00:18:57 Speaker 1: All right, there, you guys have it? Really liked Aaron's if and number one having fun as the number one rule. That's why we do it. We all have goals, we all have ambitions. It could be just filling the freezer, it could be shooting a personal best buck, but ultimately keeping it fun because the season goes by so fast, and laying the framework now in August to hopefully feel prepared this upcoming season. So we're going to roll right into Bill Winky with his rules doesn't give us exactly five but plenty of insight. Here's Bill, all right, Bill, I feel as much as people don't like rules and don't like guidelines and guardrails, as much as people say that they really do want rules and pillars to follow when it comes to this upcoming season. And so I'm going to ask you if you could only follow a handful of deer hunting rules. What would they be? So what's Bill Winkie's rules of the white tail? 00:19:52 Speaker 3: Well, rule number one is you can't kill them if they know they're being hunted. So you've got to go to extremes. And this really changes almost everything that you do during the course of the season, because every time you step out of your vehicle, even where you park, everything that you do from the time you leave your apartment or your house impacts your chances for success that day. They can't know that they're being hunted, So take that to the extreme, you know, like the noise that you make going in the wind direction while you're walking to your stand. And you know, I remember reading an article one time when I was just a young bowlin er many many years ago, let's say, I don't know, thirty plus years ago, and it's called Stalk your Stand and it really was about, you know, like getting in clean. And I'd never even thought about that before. And how could you be in this, in this sport or in this activity and not understand that you've got to get in there clean. Well, you got to do a lot more than that. There's so many ways that the deer figure out that they're being hunted. You've got to use your imagination and your creativity sometimes to say, okay, what are all the various ways that they can figure this out? Like, you know, maybe you'd have to sneak behind, you know, a tractor while it's going out in the field to pick up a round bail, and or maybe you ride on the back of the tractor and when it goes past your tree stand, you jump off and the farmer keeps going, or whatever it is. You've got to come up with ways to beat them at that game. They can't know they're being hunted. I think that's the most important rule. If you do only that, and then the next rule is hunt as often as you can. If you do if you do those two well, if you if you don't let the deer know that they're being hunted, and you put in in as many hours as you possibly can, you're probably gonna have a pretty good season. Throw a few more rules in, you know, find the food, find the deer. That's a very common one, and typic that's going to be something that applies to the early season, late season more so than the rut. And then during the rut, you know, I find the dos, find the bucks. You know, another pretty simple one. So we're up to three. 00:22:15 Speaker 1: We up to three rules, let's say three and a half. Yeah, three and a half. 00:22:18 Speaker 3: I really have to come up with one and a half more. Okay, what would be another important one? Well, obviously you got to play the win. Everybody knows that. But I think what would be another good rule? Well, it's tricky. Any shot past twenty five yards is tricky with white tails because of the string jumping. So I know it's not like a strategy related rule. But if in doubt aim low, that's another one of my you know, very I don't know, it's when I learned the hard way. 00:22:55 Speaker 4: You know. 00:22:55 Speaker 3: I didn't want to learn that lesson, but I've had so many experiences with string jumping deer that that lesson got forced upon me. So anything past twenty five yards I aim increasingly low, especially if the deer is alert. At thirty five yards, my pin is going to be below the brisket. And sometimes they don't drop, you know, sometimes bucks during the rut they're preoccupied and they don't drop. But let's say seventy five percent of the time they do. Well, you can't aim normal and have three out of every four of them react, you know, and then you're just going to have, you know, high hits or you're going to miss them or whatever. So that's another rule that I think maybe most people don't really understand very well. You've got to aim low on a lot of the shots that you take, and you hear very people say very commonly, well the most common hit is a high hit or a high miss. Well that's they don't have cameras like we do, the video cameras, and I would have said, I'm just shooting high. Why am I shooting high all the time? Well, you don't realize how quick that deer drops and gets back up again. Like when you're watching it on video and you go into slow motion, it's like only a couple of frames, you know that the arrow is right on the kill zone, and then just you know, a frame is the thirtieth of a second. You know, just a couple of thirtieth of a second, that deer drops ten inches and then the arrow hits ten inches high and then it's right back up again because they drop down to load their legs to run. So that's that's a key rule. I would say that most people might overlook. So does that count for one and a half? 00:24:38 Speaker 1: Yeah, that counts as one and a half. What's so I know, I know in the past you've done a lot of coaching for track in other sports too. What's a what's the hat from winki for a coaching hat that you can coach up hunters? So give us, give us a word of encouragement or something that you tell folks, this is gonna be something that is like, Man, I remember when old Bill was our coach and he always said this. He's like, oh yeah, he said that to us to what's what's the cheap thing that you tell people? 00:25:07 Speaker 4: Uh? 00:25:08 Speaker 3: Well, I think with white tails you don't give him too much credit, you know. I think that's one of the things that we make. The mistake is we think that somehow they've got us figured out, and I do believe that they're all killable. Well, I shouldn't say that. The reason that we don't kill him usually is not something that we did wrong. Sometimes it is, you know, sometimes we blunder around and we make mistakes. But a lot of times it's just the fact that the deery that has a really big range and he's not around as often as we think, or he's a very you know, nocturnal, he's not very daylight active. And then you run into the next buck and he's got the opposite, you know, behavioral personality, and he's a homebody and he's more daylight active. Well, all of a sudden, you think you're a genius, whereas the other buck major look stupid. So I think you just got to realize that just because you're not being being successful doesn't mean you're bad at the sport. There they can be really tough to kill. 00:26:06 Speaker 1: Yeah, that's fair that that counts as five. So I appreciate the hunting rule is one question I have in regard to hunt a lot. There's also there's the direct opposite of that. That take is you got to be really thoughtful and really strategic with the cyts that you take. The less I hunt, the more success I have. And so what is what is your thought with that take? 00:26:30 Speaker 3: Well, the only reason that would make sense is if you're hunting spots that you can't hunt without the deer knowing, you know, like maybe there's certain wind directions that you just can't hunt, and the buck is more or less of a homebody. He does have a fairly small range. You know, let's say he's living on forty acres that you know, or your property is forty acres and you know he's in there, you know quite a bit. Well, you can only hunt when the conditions are right. I was just like super still in the mornings, you know, like you can't you can't even get in and out of those spots without the deer knowing, you know, because crunching of the leaves and you know. So you just can't hunt in those conditions. Otherwise, you just done as often as you can in the areas where you think or believe that the buck that you're after or one that you would shoot is living. So yeah, you have to use some discretion. You definitely, that's where you could make some mistakes if you were too aggressive and just say well, I'm going in there, I don't care. Yeah, you might get him. You might, And then the next year you're gonna say, oh, I'm a genius because look all you guys saying be careful are such dummies. You never kill anything, look at me. Well, then you might spend the next four years screwing up your hunting spots. So you know, over the course of time, like long term, the consistent sea of success is usually going to come when you're careful and you're not being too aggressive and going into spots when the conditions aren't right. If that makes. 00:28:11 Speaker 1: Sense, Yeah, I think that makes that makes perfect sense. Well, once again, Bill, appreciate it. Where can people follow along with the rest of your season? Here? 00:28:20 Speaker 3: Check it out on the bill Winki YouTube channel. 00:28:23 Speaker 1: All right, that's what Bill has to say. And what I really appreciate with Bill is Bill provides a succinct black and white. Here are the rules, and we're going to roll right into the next guest, Adam Atlanta Legacy. Here we go. All right, Adam, welcome back. We're I'm gonna grillly with one question once again, and we're going to dive into it. And I feel that people like rules. People say they don't like rules, but people like rules to follow. They like to have guidelines to understand. Am I on the right track? And so I'm going to put you on the spot, and you can only give me up to five rules I have to follow or principles that I have to follow for this upcoming season that will inherently make me send you a thank you letter in the mail at the end of all, so what are they? 00:29:11 Speaker 5: I think one of the biggest takeaway that I've learned over the years is the emphasis on betting and changing it from the food plots the crop fields where I'm getting trail camera pictures, because most likely my trail cameras aren't in betting areas, they're close to them, or they're on the edge of food plots, and so I'm not really trying to focus in on where I'm getting pictures. 00:29:35 Speaker 1: I'm trying to figure out where he's betting. 00:29:36 Speaker 5: So first and foremost, understand where they're betting, and then build off of that and go the next point being food. Where is the primary food source? Is it a crop field? Is it a food plot? Hopefully, but I say that tongue in cheek. It's most likely a big patch of timber with acorns all through it, So good luck. That's why we're focus on I'm betting. And then of course, if you've identified those two things, you've identified betting, you identified food, you have to have appropriate access and so that would be number three for me, and then number four being understand the weather patterns, whether it be barometric pressure or temperature or wind Heaven forbid, I say this next one, but where's the moon at in relation in the sky? That would be another one I would throw out there. And so understanding those, okay, I've got all the variables that would put the five and a half gold that I'm looking for on his feet more in daylight. And then of course the last one being trust your instincts. And that's something that's I can't hardly be taught, but understanding what it is that is triggering all this, and then just trusting the instincts that you have all these other four rules in place, it's time to go. 00:31:01 Speaker 1: How often do you break one or two of those rules on a hunt. 00:31:07 Speaker 5: When it comes to the rut way more? You know, we talked in past ones about the rut. Kind of throw all that out. I just need to put time in the stand and in a travel corridor and in an area. 00:31:18 Speaker 1: That he's frequented, and I'll be I've got a chance. 00:31:24 Speaker 5: As far as breaking them, I have a you know, I got four kids seven and under, and so it's hard enough for me to find time to get in a tree stand. But ultimately that helps kind of as a buffer to not make me jump into a stand when it's probably not ready for me. The I miss more good days than I do hunt bad days, and so having those young kids have actually really helped me be more successful and as far as less time in the tree, but more successful. 00:31:55 Speaker 1: How on some of those good days, I mean a lot of people, have you scheduled vacation time, whatever the case, How painful is it to miss one of the good days and then you and then you over compensate and hunt a bad day. So then it's like double jeopardy, but not double jeopardy in the sense of what that actually means. I have a little different approach. 00:32:15 Speaker 5: I'm more of like it's haunting very much so to miss those good days because in reality, my opinion is we might have we have less than ten good days in my opinion, like we can kill them on some mediocre days, but there's like ten days or less a season where it's just like a absolute no brainer, and so missing those days is gut wrenching. 00:32:39 Speaker 1: I'll share a quick story. 00:32:41 Speaker 5: Two years ago, I had a deer show up that had triple beam, a stud for the ozarks, and I'd hunting two or three times and had known Okay, I'm pushing the envelope like I'm waiting. We haven't really it's early October. I haven't really gotten that weather yet to put him on his feet. But I'm gonna get as close to where I think he's betting as possible and just hope. And I was playing cat and mouse like we hunted there and thirty minutes after we left after dark, he walked through. You're like, okay, we just missed him, and uh, it was right at the end of October, and it's just like looking ahead four days. The weather is perfect, the moon's where it's at. Got to get in the stand, Brothers, like, I'm taking off. He's gonna film me. That morning we checked my youngest into the hospital with RSV, and that deer walked thirty minutes before dark right in front of the tree down we were gonna go hunt. So that one still haunts me because it was a my neighbor ended up killing a few days, like the next day or the day after, and it was one seventy three, Oh my gosh, And so he would have been the biggest one on the farm for us harvest. We've grown a little bit bigger, but that one was definitely gut wrenching. And that's one of those where it's like you could have looked at the month of October and been like bing, bing bing, that's the day to be. And of course that's when he walked, and so I would say I look at it going I missed that once that deer was killed. I don't think I hunted the rest of the fall because there wasn't a deer. 00:34:25 Speaker 1: You know, I've tried to. 00:34:28 Speaker 5: Like committed to five and a half year olds on the farm and there was no other ones, and I'm like, I'm not doing it. I'm gonna go kill a four and a half year old just for the sake of killing one. 00:34:36 Speaker 1: So I just chalked. 00:34:38 Speaker 5: It up to a fall of spinning it at Silver Dollar City with my family. 00:34:44 Speaker 1: Yeah so what? And so that is tough. And I feel like everyone, maybe maybe not the RSV, but everyone has some sort of some sort of gut wrenching experience like that. And I feel like the quick trap to run into is like a I missed it. Now I have to try twice as hard, and then it's like, yeah, it just continues to compound to get worse. And that's where like having this framework of you know, quote unquote rules is for your benefit, not to your detriment. 00:35:10 Speaker 5: Yeah, and I think the quick thing would be I'm mad, I'm angry at this. 00:35:14 Speaker 1: I missed out on that deer. 00:35:15 Speaker 5: Go shoot a four and a half year old or a three and a half year old because you want to kill something, but that could have been your next best buck the next year. And so now you're then once again behind the eight ball, going Okay, I've got a couple more years to have that age class that I was looking for. 00:35:31 Speaker 1: Isn't it weird? It takes five and a half years for a deer to get five and a half years old. They don't magically get older faster. Yeah. That's the worst. 00:35:39 Speaker 5: That's the worst part of land management and habitat management and deer management is going to think that a deer that I'm going that I want to hunt this year, who's going to be six and a half is one year younger than my oldest daughter, and like, whoa, I feel like I've had She's been with me for a lifetime, Like I have a hard time remembering life before her, And it's like, oh my gosh, yeah. 00:36:05 Speaker 1: That is well, is there anything else to wrap up on? The five rules if you want to rattle off, Yeah, with the pillars. 00:36:10 Speaker 5: The instinct thing to me is the one where you're like not banking too much on trail cameras, but at the same time kind of trusting your instincts to going ultimately when to go because I have no inventory or I have no inventory of the buck I'm hunting on this side of the farm, and so like for instincts for me is going, I have a when you're trying to hunt a four and a half year old or five and a half year old, you have a couple of year history of this deer, so you're kind of watching his patterns each and every year as a youngster, going okay, he made this shift, or he did this in mid October, he did this in mid November, and then going okay, you know, like I need to kind of pay attention to that because next year, when he's a hitlesser, we're gonna make We're going to account for that. So like last year, we had a deer. He's got a terrible name, kind of as a joke, tongue in cheek, but Booger is his name because we thought he was multiple deer. We weren't sure, and we're like, oh, it's the same deer. He's been under our nose this whole time. And so we were hunting him as a five and a half year old and he kind of a made. 00:37:19 Speaker 1: A shift the year previous. 00:37:21 Speaker 5: In the in the year previous, like he kept shifting the north part of the family farm, and we're like, hey, he hasn't made that shift yet. It's typically this time of year. Let's just go in there and hunt that hunt that stand, and maybe today's the day made the shift. And we were in the tree stand last year and I got a email and thirty minutes before we were in that tree stand, he walked by and he's like, we had no pictures. We just trusted our instincts. We were almost there. But that's how deer hunting works. 00:37:50 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I instinct for sure. I think that's probably one thing that everyone can lean on more is instinct and don't get too analytical with all the other things. I got to follow your gut, that's it. 00:38:01 Speaker 5: I would rather a guy learn instincts than be a better shot. I mean, you're probably a pretty sufficient shot by now, and you can kill them out to forty or kill them out to thirty train your instincts. 00:38:13 Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's a great, great thing there. Well, Adam, if they want to follow along once again with what you have going on, what's the best place to do it? 00:38:21 Speaker 5: Check us out on social media platforms Land and Legacy or podcast platforms because we do a weekly podcast as well. 00:38:31 Speaker 1: All right, there is Adams rules to live by when it comes to white tail hunting. We're going to round out this episode with Jeff Sturgis up in Minnesota. So here is Jeff's perspective on the five rules every hunter should pay attention to in perpetuity. All right, Jeff, welcome back. I feel that oftentimes we don't want rules as people. We like to go rogue, we like to do our own thing. But in the same breath, I feel sometimes rules are guidelines. I don't like rules either, so I'm framing it this way. I don't like rules. Ultimately, I want to ask you just to get to brass tacks of like, Hey, if you followed these five things, you're going to have a great season, a successful season. You're going to learn, You're going to learn more. But if you could only follow five deer hunting rules, what would they be. 00:39:20 Speaker 4: You know, one of them. 00:39:21 Speaker 6: I really do love to hunt by the weather, and so I've been very fortunate even when I worked at a bank and it was mostly all women and no one hunted. Even if I only had two weeks vacation time, I could take a half day off at a time, and so I quickly found in my late teens and early twenties that taking a half day or a day off and a good day was worth far more than taking three days off on bad days. And so whether that was a Wednesday afternoon and a Thursday morning, I really tried to follow the weather hunt the backside at cold fronts. And for people that say the deer don't follow the weather move in the weather, I just challenge you to find how many deer moved heuring a blizzard or a thunderst or high winds or a high heat. 00:40:03 Speaker 4: They just don't move, and so those. 00:40:05 Speaker 6: Are all weather induce movements or weather restricted movements. So hunting by the weather has paid off very well throughout the last thirty three years. Somewhere around there it had been my early twenties, and so I just found that I didn't have a lot of time off. 00:40:23 Speaker 4: I wanted to be home more with the family. 00:40:25 Speaker 6: It developed into where I was self employed too, and so I had a pretty demanding job where it was hard for me to get away for a long period of times. So it was time off and I could hunt any time I wanted then, but I couldn't hight for a long time. So between family time off from work maybe a limited amount of time, it was a lot more important for me to hunt weather and prioritize those best days and learn those best days than actually just hunt whenever. What weather has been critical. 00:40:55 Speaker 1: What's one thing that people may misunderstand when you say you know hunt the weather. 00:40:59 Speaker 4: You know? 00:40:59 Speaker 1: What is that you know obviously before the front, after the front, temperature drop, barometric pressure. If you had to, you know, briefly explain you know, this is what makes great cunting. 00:41:10 Speaker 4: Weather barometric pressure. 00:41:12 Speaker 6: And I do have a book All Weather, White Tails that explains all of this in a bunch of chapters. But one of the things barometric pressure is very misleading as it relates to when deer actually moved. And what I mean by that is, to me, the entire premise about deer moving after weather is when you have extreme weather come through high winds, high temperature to low temperature, extreme weather of thunderstorms, blizzards, snow, lightning, thunder and it's a big change. So you've had a lot of calm for four or five days, seven days, and all of a sudden bam, everything drops. Then deer feed five times in a twenty four hour period. So when they're socked back in their little heidi hole for up to thirty six hours and a major front that drops the temperature eighteen degrees, not only is there a lot of noise and commotion and stress which burns energy, there's also a big temperature drop which burns energy. And then they're missing quality feedings, so that energy is not replenished. So when those conditions break, there might be the winds went for forty mile an hour down to twenty the winds, you know, have been cut in half. They're still there, but there's been an appreciable change. The temperatures dropped. It's in the backside of rain that's dripping all over the place and making things stressful and noisy in the woods. To me, there's a good twenty four hours of really good hunting, maybe even thirty six hours. That barometric pressure then might still be on the rise two days later and even three days later. But if you wait for the high barometric pressure two and three days later, you missed that sweet spot of twenty four to thirty six hours because it's going to be higher after that. On the flip side, you could have a barometric pressure that deer feeding out in the fields and there's six inches of snow coming down, it's wet, and you see them playing out there. We've all seen that the merimetric pressure is the same there. With a blizzard that's coming in, there's going to be a major temperature drop, lots of snow, heavy winds. For some reason, even though the barometric pressure is the same, the deer notice stay hunkered back in their bedding areas during the blizzard and not during that five inches of wet snow that's just falling down lightly for several hours. 00:43:34 Speaker 4: There's more. 00:43:35 Speaker 6: They relate more to tangibles. They relate to probably the amount of how dry the area is, how wet areas and humidity levels, the wind, the wind direction, the smell in the air. 00:43:48 Speaker 4: They relate to. 00:43:49 Speaker 6: They're out three sixty five, So they relate to those tangibles more so barometric pressure can cheat, and you might even have a double drop. And that's another thing too, where you have a big sis that comes through temperature drop, you have a sweet spot to hunt, but because there's another pressure, another low pressure system on the heels of that one. Three days later the pressure staying low. But now you get two major drops to hunt in a span of four days, and both had low pressures and not as high as what follows, And so people wait till what follows, and here you miss two great times to hunt. So as it relates to whether I hope that makes sense, you're just looking for change on the backside. Usually calm is not a good thing, but somewhere in between, but definitely after the front's gone. 00:44:32 Speaker 1: Through perfect all right. Rule number two. 00:44:36 Speaker 6: Rule number two is that you can fool a year's now with any contraption gel, powder, spray and things that a deer down wind is going to be fooled. And you'll even have people online hunting industry that'll take great sponsorship money to prove that and to try to deliver it to you that it's great too. You can use this contraption to hide your scent. And what I found is if down wind of view and it's a mature buck or mature dough, they're going to find out. And if they don't and they don't react to it, it's probably because there's a thermal working that you don't understand. Maybe a buck is following a dough and he really doesn't care in that moment, but the other ninety eight percent of the season he does. And so whether it's even on a mock scrape or you're scent control in general. Now, I do believe you can have clean clothes, you can leave less of a trail in and out. You can spray your boots down to mask a little bit of your scent, but that's on scent left behind on a plant or something where when you're trying to reduce the scent in the stand, blowing add a deer a mature deer. Especially when you get in the high pressure states of anywhere from Minnesota to Wisconsin to Michigan to New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana. 00:45:50 Speaker 4: You can go out east, then. 00:45:52 Speaker 6: When you're in some of those high pressure states, then there's really nothing you can do about it. Sometimes in low pressure states they just don't care. Because at one time, I think it was twenty five thousand bowl hunters in Kansas, Michigan at at four hundred and twenty five thousand at that time, sixty five thousand, and maybe Iowa that two time. Two hundred thousand hunters over all in Kentucky at that time. So when you compare to the one point one million gun hunters in Pennsylvania go out in the woods or over that in Texas, it's pretty crazy when you think of some of the hundred numbers in some of the states and how on paper or in a cool video somewhere you can hide your scent, but in reality pretty darn hard. 00:46:32 Speaker 1: They need to make an ad I think I know which one you're talking about of a piece of milk weed, you know, going into the detection zone of a buck with the machine going like that. Would I feel like that would be enough to convince more people versus to your point, Like, I don't think people realize what their wind is really doing or what the thermals are really doing, and you know, I feel they can get misled in that fashion. 00:46:52 Speaker 6: So the bottom line, you know, if you just always set up your stand location so that you're blowing yourself hunt into a non deer area or hunting the edge of cover instead of in the cover, you're hunting the edge of movement instead of in the movement. Then you're going to be safe. And to me, hunting that safe way allows you to live and hunt another day and eventually shoot your target about eighty percent of the time. 00:47:16 Speaker 4: I like it. 00:47:16 Speaker 1: Our rule number three. 00:47:18 Speaker 6: Rule number three is you can kill more deer by sitting on the couch. Patience is key, strategy is key. Hunting smart at key, not hunting every day, And especially some of us with limited stands, limited locations to hunt. We're not like the Hunting Channel where xyz star might have seventy different locations to hunt or fifty or forty. They're in a low pressure state and they can just skip around hunt every day if they want. We really have to pick and choose. And again I like hunting by the weather. But what I found is that over the years, instead of hunting one hundred different times, one hundred different sets and shooting two bucks, you sit twelve times and shoot two bucks because you're hunting smart. And I believe by not hunting a lot of those days that were bad days, then it's even more of a premium when you do choose to sit and those locations aren't spoiled. You're allowing them to age like a fine wine, and you go in there and really have a high percentage set in that location. 00:48:24 Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, do you have a real number four in mind? 00:48:28 Speaker 4: Yeah? I do you know? 00:48:31 Speaker 6: Food source when it comes to does in dough family groups, as long as the food is adequate and the cover is thick year round. They like fawning cover in the summer, escape cover in November December, browsing in December November, and beyond all winter long thermal protection you're in the winters, and that all adds up to similar cover and if you have similar food sources in there that you know, maybe they're not great, but they're always there. Those are really small homebodies. They have a small home range and they like to stick close to home, and so it could be very deceiving that, oy, we have all these dos around, there's going to be mature box or mature buck. His home range is several times greater than a dough family group, five times greater, eight times greater, whatever that number is. It's a lot and three mile home range on average. Right, I'd say a dough family group might have a half mile three quarter mile. Now we're not considering yarding areas in migration, but in the typical area mature buck to me, he moves with that food and so public land. He's on the food source of the moment, but it's got to be low pressure, and it's got to be relating to thick cover. During the summer. His summer range might be a mile to a mile and a half different than his fall range. So that buck will move with the food source and he'll go to the best food source with the lowest amount of hunting pressure. Maybe that's an adequate food source, but it's low amount of hunting pressure. And it's not just hunting pressure, it's a low amount of dough pressure and dough social stress. Dear, social stress in general. So properties that have an enormous amount of dozen fauns, maybe he wants to be around there a little bit during the rut. But if you have high dome numbers in an area and he's repelled because of that the majority of the season, he may not even show up during the rut because obviously where he's at has dozen funds and he's got exhaust those first before it even goes over to that area, And to me, that all relates to food. And I think we've blurred into a fifth topic of too many doughs and how many doughs you're seeing, how many deer you're seeing. But really, those food sources rule his roost, and he's willing to travel long ways. And I believe the older he gets, he has three or four areas in mind that have kept him alive instead of ten when he was young, and he gravitates to those areas, and if you spook him out of one, he's likely to stay in the next the rest of the season or until that food runs out. Public land might be the food source the moment, but that might be clear cuts in December, white oak stands in September, maybe red oak stands in the middle of the season. Maybe a neighbor's food plot or agfield that dwindles out in November, golf course, neighborhood. But bottom line is those food sources are always changing, so you need to learn to change with them. Or if you have private land, build it and keep them there for the entire season. 00:51:22 Speaker 1: Yeah, I got a lot of questions there, but I think in the spirit and the spirit of this. Do you want to do you want to pick that for the year fifth? Your fifth rule deer food rule. 00:51:31 Speaker 6: Number number of deer. Yeah, number of deer we could get into. Let me see, uh, because I can only pick five. You know. One of the things that I think, you know, high deer numbers are bad, you know, and I'll I'll blend this into a number, you know, like five by kind of bridging the gap. But high deer numbers are bad. They does and fall ins fill space and it makes it stressful for mature box. So that leads into my number five rule, which is morning betting areas have made my hunting career. I hunt in a morning betting area with a bow less than twenty percent of all sits, maybe fifteen percent of all sits. Yet they account for sixty to seventy percent of all my mature box four years older greater let's say forty to fifty mature box at that age, and that morning sit is what I'm always looking for. So so many people think afternoon food source, they're coming out into this afternoon food. For one deer will beyond those food sources, especially a mature buck of very low percentage of the time. If you look at the entire season. However, he's in his betting area during the daylight the majority of the time. So when I choose to go in there at the end of October early November, when it's starting to get into those cold front mornings up here, when we first get those those first frost October twenty seventh, I'm coming into the non food side waiting for him to come back. And if you have too many, too many falls, it's a stressful, chaotic property. He might not be there, He's somewhere else. But if you have that good balance where you got to have dozen phones or why would he be there. But the point is, if you have good balance, then you have that mature buck betting at the right depth. It allows you to come into the backside. And although you might not sit there very often throughout the season, is an extremely high likelihood he's going to be there. And even if he moves a mile that day, he might not have left that seven acres of cover, which puts him at your feet multiple times here in the day, gives you opportunities to shoot him. And when you figure in that, you're blowing your scent, not trying to hide it to the outside of that, you're hunting cold weather and you're hunting those weather fronts. You're hunting a location that has good food sources and betting areas that are supported by that food. Using those first four then that fifth one and hunting that morning is an opportunity. So to me, it's your system, not just one, two, three, four or five. 00:54:02 Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, they built off each other. Here's a quick question. We're, you know, relating back to four. So if you for someone that has this past summer, they've had just a bunch of pictures of fawns and doze, should they be it's not super excited about this upcoming season? Or is that an indication that they have good funding habitat which could be good deer habitat, or like what could someone deduct from. 00:54:26 Speaker 6: I think I think there's a couple of ways to look at it, Jake. If you have an enormous number of dozen fauns during the summertime, that could be a really really bad thing just because mature box will stay away from that. Sometimes mature are a large dough population and fawns is reflective of poor hunting strategy and spooking deer. And so if you're spooking deer doz and funds can take that young bucks. If you don't have enough depth for bucks to actually bet in, meaning to go one hundred yards and other food source one hundred yards of wood's edge, you don't have an core area for a mature buck to live, then you're gonna have all dozen fawns. And so that's that's a big part of it. Too many dozen fawns can be reflective of a bad area to hunt. If you have too many dozen fauns. Socially, that buck and might not want to be there, and you think, well, I'm gonna have these dozen funds are going to come in in the fall. Well, if he is choosing to set up shop somewhere else because of those dozen fawns, because there's not enough cover for him, then he might show up during the rut, but it's going to be a very low percentage of the time. 00:55:31 Speaker 4: And as the ages. 00:55:32 Speaker 6: What I find is if he chooses because the property is nocturnal, because you have a lot of dozen fawns, because it's over pressured because you have food everywhere, then if he chooses to be somewhere else when he gets to three, four, five, years old. To me, that pattern is only cemented in so you might find a buck that all of a sudden you thought, this is a really cool looking eleven point that had a stick or a kicker somewhere when you're three and a half where to go? Poachers must have took him. Well, then you find out that, hey, that's that buck that neighbor shot is one hundred and eighty inch buck a mile away. He didn't just die to poachers. He moved because he grew out of the reclusive, reclusive reclusiveness level of the property that was offered, largely because of too many doughs, maybe hunting pressure, and the older he got, he just looked at it like, not only am I not going to come on your property during the night as a nocturnal property. If it's out of my property during the daylight, why do I even go there at all? 00:56:30 Speaker 1: Yeah, So for someone that has that, it could be lack of cover and just too much food in too many places. Is that the most common reason you would say that someone would fall into this. 00:56:39 Speaker 6: Too much food, too much summer food, too many dos and falls, maybe indicative of a poor hunting strategy, and that you're spooking the mature bucks off. 00:56:49 Speaker 4: And it could be. 00:56:50 Speaker 6: Though that you're just your property is really set up to where you have thick cover, you have a minimum amount of food during the summertime, your doughs are more of a bad and in that case, then it's more likely that you'll have mature box in the fall because it's not too many dos. You're gearing your property more towards fall food. You already have fall cover, and that's more of an indication that you'll have a good hunt in the fall than if you have a lot of mature box on there during the summertime and they're going to leave because you don't offer that fall food and cover. 00:57:25 Speaker 1: Okay, all right, Well there's the five rules. They all tie together, and I think I do think if people follow those principles, they're going to be pointed in the right direction for this fall. So I appreciate that Jeff white Till White Tail Habitat Solutions is the best place to find everything. 00:57:41 Speaker 6: You got, Yeah, YouTube, Instagram, and then on Google our website. 00:57:46 Speaker 1: All right, there, you guys have I hope you guys enjoyed this week's episode of Back forty. I really appreciate all the guests taking the time to hop on here and share their insights, and like I said in the very beginning, I feel that these are guidelines. These are your north star. This is a way to get pointed in the right direction and avoid the pitfalls. I know we talked about it in the last episode of Back forty about the eighty twenty what is going to be most helpful most often? And that is the root of this question in the direction of this episode, of what do people need to pay attention to? And I think that this provides a sense of clarity for this upcoming year. So I hope you guys really enjoyed this week's episode and we'll be back with another episode of Back forty in two weeks with the same panel of guests, with a new question, with a new dilemma that will hopefully help everyone out. So I appreciate it, and I'll be curious, what are some rules that you live by when it comes to white deal hunting that maybe we're not discussed in this episode. I'll read all the comments. So that is it. We will see you of a great rest of your week.