00:00:02 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your home for deer hunting news, stories and strategies, and now your host, Mark Kenyon. Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. I'm your host, Mark Kenyan, and this is episode number three fifty five, and today in the show, we're talking serious deer hunting tactics with Wisconsin d I Y Bow hunting expert Joe Rnmewster. All right, welcome to the Wired Hunt podcast, brought to you by on X. Today. You are in for a treat because we're getting back into some serious deer talk. Now. I know over the past month or two, I've occasionally kind of I don't know, We've explored some different kinds of things. We've talked mushrooms, We've talked high level conservation advocacy, we've talked cooking, and all sorts of others slightly off the mainstream white tail beat kind of stuff. And I'm glad we did that. It's the off season, after all, and there's nothing wrong in my opinion, with stretching our horizons a little bit. But if if I'm being honest, I know that we're all chopping at the bit for deer hunting season, which unbelievably he's quickly approaching. So today we are going to give you an extra large helping of know how to help in your preparations. And to do that, my guest today is Joe Rentmester. Now, if you're not familiar with him, here's some quick background. Joe is a Wisconsin deer hunter who many folks probably know because of his appearances and collaborations with Dan Infult and Hunting Beast forum videos and podcasts. He also might know him from some of his appearances on the Hunting Public videos. He's been on the Public Land Challenge episodes. And I think that most of you are familiar with Dan Infult and we've had him on the show multiple times. And what's cool about Joe is that he's been able to learn firsthand from hunting with Dan over the years, and there has been a go out there and put his own spin on this beast style of hunting that many of us have become familiar with, and he's done it really successfully. In fact, the o G himself, Dan Infult, has called Joe the next great and a quote here he's called the next great big buck serial killer end quote. So what I'm trying to say is that Joe knows his stuff. He's having success killing mature bucks and a lot of tough situations like public land in Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin. And he's trusted and admired by many of the best hunters in the country, which all leads me to say, this hunting season is almost here. I can feel the skin prickly on the back of my neck as I say that, um hunt of season is almost here, and Joe is going to help you and I get ready. So without further ado, let's talk bucks. All right, I am here now with Joe, rent me, stir Joe. Welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Hey, I appreciate making the time to do it, like like we're just talking about. I know you've got a little baby there at home, and I know from personal experience that's no easy task. So thanks for making this happen. No, not a problem. So far, so good. He doesn't have legs where you can take off on me, so I think, so far, so good. Man. That's a good point. I've just gotten to where my second son is back in the stage where he can't well, he can't move. My older son runs around all the time, and now I'm appreciating the one that's a mobile so much. Now. Those toddlers, man, they keep you on your toes. But you never know. You never know in the door is gonna fly open and they're gonna go out, oh man, or or crashed into the office and interrupted podcasts, so be warned for that too. Um. Well, cool, Joe. I I'm excited to be able to have this conversation because you're a guy who I've I've kept tabs on from Afar. I've been watching what you've been up to. Of course, you know, I've been following and learning from Dan in Fault a lot myself, and you've been a part of that sphere, and um, so it's been nice to see another. You know, there's been a pretty significant group of of young guys kind of coming under Dan's wing, learning from him and taking that into their own world, their own places, and putting it into action. Would you would you say that's a fair way to describe you, is like a Dan in Fault disciple? Um? Is that is that a fair way to describe it? Yeah? I would say that's absolutely fair. And there there are a lot of guys that came out of the beast and went and did other things or or got better. Yeah. Absolutely, huge, huge number of guys that have been on your podcast in the past, you know, Andy maybeing one of them. Um, yeah, absolutely, lots of them. I am actually a friend of mine another Beast guy, uh who I actually was just thinking today. Looks like the two of you could be brothers, my buddy Ross houseman. Um. I can't remember what his handle is on on Hunting Beast, but um, but the two of you guys, Yeah, yeah, I guy, you guys look like you could be related. So I want to look into that and see if there's something back there. All right, But but point being, um, you have had this, this tremendous amount of success kind of hunting in this Hunting Beast style, like a lot of other folks have taken and and kind of shifted and made work for them. But I guess what is interesting to me to start out is what was your hunting like or your hunting journey like before that? So what was the pre beast life for Jill in your hunting world? Like? Sure, yeah, so my hunting started like a lot of people. Um, my dad bought me a bow and stuck me a tree and said sit right here, and uh, from there, he kind of set me for him. Oh, and taught me what a rub was, taught me what a trail was, kind of the basics, and you'd see a ubin on trail coming out of a swamp or something like that, and you'd set up and Uh. It got to a point as I got older, we would get we started using trail cameras and we would get these trail campigures of these giants coming out of um different swamps and stuff. And it got to the point where I noticed nobody in my face, Emily or locals weren't killing these big bucks. But we had him on our trail camera, and I thought, there's gotta be a better way. There's gotta be a way to be killing these deers. Somebody out there has got to be killing these dear how do you do it? So, just like a lot of people, um, I started digging around on the internet. I think I started on like a real tree form and I started asking questions about swamp hunting and someone said, hey, you've got to check out dan in Faults Marsh Bucks DVD. So I checked that out, and uh, I believe my question on that real tree form was I've got to swamp. The bucks are in it. Do I go in the swamp or do I stay on the field edge? And uh, I crawled down that rabbit hole and the answer was getting the swamp, which I later learned isn't necessarily always the answer, but that that shot me to the hunting deest, and that was that was the beginning of the end right there. Yeah, those DVDs are the beginning of the end for a lot of folks. Those Uh, they are very helpful. I I too enjoyed those. So so you found Dan, and from what I've heard, you send him some messages and he started answering your questions and and eventually you guys struck up a friendship. How long has that been now that you've been kind of hunting with Dan or using his methods and and things like that. Oh gosh, that was I was a junior in high school, so I'm not good with dates, So I would say over ten years now, we're getting old. Joe. Yeah, yeah, what do you think then? That switch was for you, like for a lot of people, like for me for sure, I had like a light switch moment where I went from hunting like my dad taught me, which is just kind of like you were talking about sitting in Sitting for me was sitting on the ground blind next to a trail and hope something walks by. Um. And eventually I had a light switch moment where all of a sudden things just started clicking and I started seeing more dear and then older deer, and and so on and so forth. Do you is there anything like that that stands out for you where you realize, oh, wow, now I get it. So yeah, that's a tricky one. So from the in the very beginning, when I was watching those DVDs, I was like, holy cow, this makes sense. It was when he explains the stuff. It's all common sense. It's all very simple, but everyone really overthinks it. And I mean especially if you you come up reading a lot of the magazines that are out there today, they all kind of send you down a certain um path, and then when you watch these DVDs, it's completely different than that. So that those were kind of aha moments all in themselves. UM. I would say, in the last five years, I've really had some true aha moments. Um. I was. So there's a lot of guys. I guess I'm kind of almost taking a shot at people when I say this, But there's a lot of guys online that they'll read Dan's word, take it for gold, and that's it. They don't think any further than that. And that was me, for gosh, five years of the five years of being a hunting Beast fan. I guess you could say I just took everything he said. I saw a loan tree standing out in the cattails. I'm like, yep, there's a buck bet under there, and when really it was doll betting. Buck wasn't using it. So and there's a lot of different variables that can change different things, Right, So when Ann says that there's a loan tree in the cattails, that might be a buck, but that might be a buck, that doesn't necessarily mean that it is. So in the last five years, I've really kind of stopped. I've made a lot of mistakes. I've gotten closer to some of these big ones. And when you get close, you kind of stop and you analyze and you look at what's going on around you, and you look where you made those mistakes, and it just that's where it really started. Clicking for me when it was when I took those hunting beast tactics and made them my own because where I hunt is different than we're Dan hunts, or where you hunt in Michigan and stuff like that. So that I would say is the biggest aha moment? Yeah, So I thinking for myself. Yeah, that's a good point. Do you feel like there's anything now that you can point to now that you've applied this to your own hunting and you've had these aha moments that you do different than Dan now where he would be like Joe's kind of crazy, but this is what he does and now you've found it works for you. Boy, No, I don't think so. I think if I told him what I was doing and why I was doing it, he would say, yep, it makes sense. Is there anything? Is there anything that he does that you wouldn't want to do well, that you tried and didn't work out or didn't like it so much, or you think that maybe you've got a slightly better angle on it. Sure? Um, when I guess what the example I have is when we're hunting Michigan together, we're giving each other grief. It was in one of the videos and he kept seeing the bucks pop up in a certain corner of one of the fields and there was a valley. The field was up on top and there was a valley, and he said, based on the map, he said, the deer have to be coming out of that spot. And then Tim, our camera guy, was seeing them come out of the other corner of the field, and I remember there was kind of a bowl back in the little other corner of the field, and I'm like, man, they've got to be coming up out of that bowl, and that that's why we're missing the game. And I remember we argued about it and it was in the videos and it was kind of funny and uh so, just nothing major, just a little pitoly stuff, you know, in the moment thing. Yeah, okay, that's fair enough. That's fair enough. So what about some of those, um, some of those specific things when it comes to swamps, that's one of those situations that I deal with a lot myself. I'm particularly interested once you have those those a niche the same exact things that you talked about work. Okay, we got this swamp and a lot of white tailed media out there over the last ten twenty years has talked about if you've got a great swamp, you should leave it untouched, you know, don't go in there. That's the sanctuary. Don't mess with it. And so for a long time I was afraid to get in there and screw it up. And then you start hearing about more aggressive tactics like Dan's or other people, and you start seeing there's this other world. How did you start thinking through that? And where have you settled now? And the different things you think about when deciding when to push into something like that versus when to be a little more careful. Yeah, so where I started with that, UM, I guess was another lesson from Dan. He said, if you don't know what you're doing in a swamp, start by following around their tracks in the winter. And that's exactly what I did. I started looking for the biggest tracks I could find and just started falling around and they would kind of leave me from betting area to betting area to betting area, and then I could make sense where those betting areas were. Um. I would even pick up sheds in them sometimes that way kind of confirm it. UM stuff like that. Then UM, as time progressed, I would the mistakes I kept making I made. I mean, I've made tons of mistakes. Um was. I would hunt those betting areas. Gosh, I would hunt it five nights in a row, that same betting area, and I would kind of just adjust twenty yards every time or something along those lines. And that wasn't working. That was too much pressure. Um So I guess that that was kind of the beginning of it. As I progressed and learned, I've learned. So for example, say you've got a swamp, whether it's public or private, and there's almost no pressure and you can hunt the field edge. I would almost say, if you know that buck that you're after is going to be in there, I would say, hunt that field edge, but only hunt it when it's appropriate. If you're hunting it all the time, that buck is gonna learn that you're sitting at the field edge's gonna learn that it's danger that sort of thing. Um. So, sometimes you don't necessarily want to be diving into that swamp. Now, if you're dealing with pressure, like a particular swamp I was hunting this year, um people were they would go like twenty yards into the swamp and set up that was their swamp hunting. So then I had to dig I had to dive in quite a bit deeper to get ahead of those people to deer started learning that that twenty yards inside the swamp zone was danger, so I had to dive in quite a bit deeper. So it really is circumstantial, it really. And another thing too, it depends do you have a tamaracks cedar swamp. Do you have a marsh swamp? Um like done by Dan his marsh is you know exactly where the beds are, so why not get close to them? Um? A lot of your cedar swamps you don't know exactly where they're bedding. Um. You know, he might be forty yards this way, fifty yards that way, and that can completely ruin the whole game for you if you're not set up on the right trail. So sometimes you want to find bottlenecks as well in a situation like that. So it really really depends. Talk to me about this swamp bedding because one of the things that I'm always trying to do is you find something that sure sure as hell looks like, okay, this has got to be this is a big ice late of bed on an island out there, or point into a swamp and it kind of has all the boxes checked. But then you start wondering, Okay, how do I tie this to you know, a specific buck, or how do I take it to that next point when you start learning how a buck is using that bed? What do you do or how do you start thinking about a bed after you've found it once you're getting towards hunting season, Like, what's the next step for you? So if I've if I found a specific bed, the biggest thing to do is to absolutely leave it alone. Um. If trail cameras are this is another thing I've learned in the last five years because I was always that anxious why your kid that wanted to run trail cameras all the time. But leave your trail cameras out of there. If you can monitor that betting area from afar And when I mean that, if you've got to swamp with a field across the road from it or something or a field next to it, if you can monitor that food source rather than getting up in there to confirm that that deer is in there, That's what I would personally suggest doing. Um. The trail cameras are just so dangerous because you're sticking your scent in there and those those bigger mature deer one you stick, you're sent in there one time, and that can book ram um. So I guess just surveilling from Afar week, we can deer shine in Wisconsin. I don't know if you can. You guys do that in Michigan. No. I think I feel like I looked in this and there are some weird things about it, like certain times of the year you can, certain times you can't. I think maybe fifteen days before the hunting season you have to stop doing it. It's something like that, Okay, But shine shining is a huge one for us UM, particularly in the summer. They start towards the end of summer, they get shined enough where they kind of start getting edgy. But you at least can figure out if they're coming out of that particular betting area based on where they're feeding. And a lot of that stuff is stuff that you'll learn over many, many years of hunting that betting area versus watching that field, If that makes sense. I know you do a lot of hunting specific deer, So yeah, what is there anything else you're doing when trying to tie a specific deer to a specific bed other than just what you said, observe the food sources if you can. But as you know, I mean, there's a lot of situations where you can see a little bit of one yield, but the rest of his territory have no idea what he's doing. How else do you try to say, Okay, yeah, I think that buck is using this bed because that you know, I feel like it is so up in the air unless you see it actually use it once. Yeah, that that is very true. And a lot of times you hunt that bed and he's not there. There's a different deer in there. Um that For me, that comes down I guess to backpatal a little bit where I hunt. If you have a mature deer four year old or older, his sign looks completely different than any of the two or three year olds that are running around. So in a situation like that, if you can't if you think he might be in a certain area, when you start getting closer to that area, you start watching for tracks and rubs and scrapes and those basic um types of sign that you would read, and you you should be able to tell if he's in that area. For the most part, would be I guess my just feed on the ground, um, and then set up right away, don't don't wait till tomorrow. What would you say that older uck? When you say that older buck sign is just so different than a two year old or three year old? What do you mean by that? Just higher rubs and bigger tracks, um. And and I guess how they move through the woods to it. It looks a little different. And that's one of those things that's just it's hard to explain over over a call. You almost have to see it. And I know the maps, maps are helpful. I heard one example you were talking about of this where in it when you said this, it was it was something I could recognize in myself, my earlier self as well. You said in some of the conversation I was listening to, you were talking about how a lot of guys will look at a swamp or some piece of cover, and then they'll look at the neighboring food source and they'll think that there's a buck in that cover or there's a buck in that swamp at point A, and he wants to go to point B, which is the food source, and so we just assume, okay, he's gonna go straight from point A the shortest route to point B, like a straight line from there to there, and oftentimes we think about, okay, how do we get in between there and there? But what you'd seen and what I've seen too, is that often times they're going to take a much more uh strategic route where they'll come in at an angle and then parallel the field or come into it, so they come in downwind or into a low spotter or something for some reason different than just point A to point B. Um, Am I accurate in describing that thought from you? And then number two? What are some other things like that that you found as far as how these mature bucks just move different? Yeah, so yeah, I would say you're absolutely correct, and sometimes they just move from point A to point B. But I've seen it a lot where so you've got a swamp, they're they're cutting into that swamp where they know they're not going to encounter humans because I mean swamp edges really I just just get hammered with human scent. Um. So they're there. It seems like they're finding the best place to cut in where they know they're not going to be ambush, even if it's in the dark. Because sometimes running you can run a trail came run trail cameras all up and down a field edg to try and figure out where a buck's cutting in. And that's something that's always been really hard for me, is figuring out where they're cutting into the swamp. But then when they get in the swamp, they know where they want to go and they'll I mean they'll travel. I've seen him travel a half mile through swamp when they could have just cut in in the field and they were I don't know, a hundred yards in from the edge of the field. They take the long way for safety. I think you think that's when you say safety, you think it's like a wind thing or is it? What is it? Yeah, I think it could be that too. Um. That's a tough one because I really don't have any way to confirm. I haven't seen it enough times too um confirmed that it's a win thing. I feel like they're they're cutting in the places that I have found them cutting in. It's kind of your overlooked spot. You know, you'll find where they're cutting in and you'll think, boy, I've never never thought about hunting that spot. So I think I think it's more based on that human intrusion and scent on the ground. I could be wrong on that. I mean that that thing right there. Trying to figure out how they come back and to cover back into a bed, I feel is such a tricky one, especially these big old bucks that so often are going back in there before a light even And so if you're trying to pull off that morning hunt and knowing how they're getting back in there, you have to not only think about whatever weird route they're taking in based off of wind, based off cover, based off what you're doing, but then also when are they going to do it? How can you get in there? Um? That one always keeps me up in the middle of night trying to think it through. In in two thousand nineteen, so last year, I think you pulled off a smoke and hunt just like that where you pegged exactly where you thought this buck was going to go into bed and he betted right underneath you. How did you do that? How did you How did you pull that off? Because that was that was an early season morning hunt and you you, baby Ruth, did you bath basically pointed your bat in the stands instaid you're gonna hit the home run? Right there and then you did it. Sure. Yeah, so that one to rewind. That one really goes back to when I was gosh, um, twelve years old when I started hunting. Um. That's a spot that I hunted since I was twelve. Um. That particular spot I've hunted in so many different ways, um. And just to describe it for people, it's it's farm country. There's really no swamp around, but that particular spot. I've tried so many different things, from sneaking up close to the edge of that woods and hunting it at night. I've I've shot deer out of that bed with the gun by jumping them up and shooting. UM. I've tried kind of catching them coming across the field sitting in the corn row and had him catch me drawing to that bed. And I've tried everything, and I've had some giants. I've actually there's some footage out there that I have. I think it's on Damn Dan's Farm Country DVD where I actually stuck a camera up in the tree over the top of that bed and I've got some pretty decent footage of there was I think in the video there's just one specific buck multiple times. UM. But over the years, there's been some slobs in that specific little spot, specific spot start to interrupt. But I just feel like if this is this is a spot that bucks keep bedding over and over and over again, it's a slam dunk buck bed. I feel you'd be really helpful to understand the details of why this spot is such a good buck bed. Yeah. So it's a basically if you could picture two fields side by side with a drainage ditch going in between them, and then the drainage ditch leads into a little point of woods that's maybe um, that point is maybe only twenty yards wide by fifty yards long, and then that little point of woods turns into like a bigger one acre woods. And they like to bet on that little point of woods with They actually like the wind at their back. Um. And if if there's no crops that where they're sitting, they can actually see the road. So anybody coming at them, they can see them coming at them, and anybody coming from behind them they can smell them from coming behind them. Um. Does that paint the picture? I guess before I okay, And what's nice is over the years, I mean I hunted both parts of the woods morning and night, and it seems like the bigger, more maturity are always in the point of the woods, the bigger one acre piece of woods. Sometimes you get some doughs and some all our bucks in there, um, but the big boys hang out right in that point of woods, and it's it's nice and tight and small where if you get up in the right tree, you can shoot that whole thing. And I've seen it time and time again where when you set up in the morning, even if they do bed down before light, they're eventually going to get up and kind of stage around and and sometimes I mean, if that happens, he moves fifteen yards, that's all you need to get your shot. So that's in that scenario, that's what I was banking on. Um. So basically, the night before I shot this deer, um I had, I was hunting, how do I describe it, two hundred yards across the field basically, and I was getting down early because I blew some other deer out of the field and I wanted to try and make a move on them. Um. But I was getting down early, and as I actually had my I was using the tethern platform and as I slung it down the tree. I hit something and it made a loud clank, and I saw him go tearing off back to that little point. And I felt very confident because he didn't know what I was in the tree. My wind wasn't blowing at him. All he heard was a clank, and it's not like he heard a clank looked up and then he had you know, he had sound envision. He heard that clank and took off just immediately, so I felt like he wasn't very hard. He just heard something he didn't like and got out of there. So I felt like I could come in from the other direction to this little point. Um basically what I did from the road. I walked through standing corn and then straight to a tree. I just picked up, picked a tree that I felt like, in the dark would cover most of that bedding, and got as high as I possibly could. The reason for that is because I wanted to get my scent out over the top of the corn. I felt like I was too too low it could swirl down on the corn, So I got as high as I possibly could, and he came laid down below me, and I would actually ended up happening was in the dark. I heard one and go, there's the main bed that I've gotten the trail camp pictures of all the deer on. I heard one go to that bed, and then I in the moonlight, I saw the target buck bed down right below me, and I could kind of see him in my binoculars in the moonlight. And I didn't know of any bigger deer um in the area that were substantially bigger than the one that was below me. So it got just light enough, I flipp down the goal pro like I was scanning kind of in the grass and the brush on the right side of me, on the on the other bed, the primary bed, and I didn't see the other buck. I turned put the camera on the on the buckeye shot shot him and then actually a big boy jumped up out of the main bed. He was like he was cratching. That's that's my lessons learned for the season is I should have been more patient and just um waited to see what that was. But we'll see this year's corn on both sides of that ditch, so that's gonna be huge. They like, I guess I should explain if there's alfalfa on both sides or either side of the ditch, you've got people driving by with a TV s, people walking their dogs, Whereas when you have corn on both sides of the ditch, there's no being there, so all summer long they're left alone. So it makes a makes a big difference. That's nice. We'll see maybe he'll be back. So you I want to make sure I understand why you decide to move that specific location. I think I understand it. But for everyone listening, basically, you you spooked him that night before, and you saw him run back to that point, and so because you saw he headed back that way, the assumption was, Okay, that's probably where he came from. If he's heading back to safety after getting spooks, he probably came from this point. And from previous history you knew that in that point there was this bed, which then told you, okay, that bucks betted there, probably, so I'm gonna kick this wing at him tomorrow, right exactly. Yep. And now a lot of times when we say bed, a lot of people are looking for Hey, he beds right tight up against this one tree. That's where he is every single time. And the betting in there it shifts around a little bit. It can be twenty yards this way, twenty yards that way. So it's it's not exact. It's not like I was staring at one specific spot, but you're exactly correct. Yeah. So here's another thing we I've talked to a lot of different people who've talked about identifying buck betting areas, identifying buck beds. Um. You know, we've seen the duties where Dan walks through the different things he notices a buck sign of a buck bed. But what can you describe for you in your mind, the key things that you look at to help you pinpoint Okay, yes this is a buckbed, or yes this is a buck adding area. Maybe just give a few examples in different scenarios, just for people that maybe aren't as familiar. Sure, so, I guess I would say I do kind of backwards from a lot of people. I find the deer and then kind of work my work my way back through scouting and glassing and trail cameras to where they are to figure out where they are. It's not too often that I'm scouting looking for a specific bed, because all too often these these big ones don't leave big sign right in their betting like this, this betting area where I shot this buck out of in this point. There were no rubs. Um. I mean I crawled all over there just to look. I was curious. There were no rubs from that bigger deer in there. Um. There there were rubs from the deer I shot. You can tell he's a little bit younger of a deer, but there was nothing that really jumped out. UM. Bad question, it really. I mean, I wouldn't say I'm always looking for beds. I'm more so looking for the betting area. UM. In Dan's situations, you have that one little high spot in the cattails. I know I'm not. I guess now I'm kind of being repetitive. You've got that high spots, you know, Hey, that's that. But I'm looking for betting areas, whether they be thick and overlooked or high stem count um areas or um areas that aren't gonna get a lot of human Trusia's something I'm always thinking about is where where is your average guy going? And that's exactly where the de're not going to be, the maturity are not going to be. UM. I probably didn't answer that question in a very good way, but it's it's it's tricky one to answer without showing people. Yeah. Another thing I'll add is a lot of times I'll jump a deer right out of the bed and then hey, I know he hung out there or he betted in that spot at this time of the year, and then the next year I'll go hunt that betting area, knowing that that he uses that. It's a tricky one, Yeah, for sure. Do you ever do that on purpose in season? I know that some guys like the bump and dump idea. Whenever you're going into a new place, do you ever get purposefully aggressive, purposefully aggressive or so aggressive that you'll go in there thinking, yeah, I might bump them out. But if I do that, I know exactly where he's better and I can make a play tomorrow or or something like that. Yeah, I've done that, but I can't I can't think back to any success. But I know other people have had success with it, So I've definitely I'd rather be aggressive in a new area than be just out of the game the whole time. So I've done that, but I can't say I've had success around it. Yeah. Have you ever done like the wind bumping thing that Dan does? Sometimes not in particular no, what what then would you say when you're let's talk morning hunts in particular, because because those are like I mentioned, especially you know earlier in the season or later in the season can be harder to pull off. How how do a lot of your morning hunts look like at those times of year when some guys say, don't hunt mornings at all at that part of the season because they're a little higher risk. Uh, they can just be a little more tricky. Is it is it going to be something just like the scenario already outlined in that hunt or are there some other rules or kind of playbooks that you that you follow. So that's I mean, that would be what I would go for personally. Um, But a lot of the deer I've killed in the morning where boy, a lot of them they were coming in and I don't know if it was the whole Jay Hug factor, whether they're trying to come in and win their their bed. But a lot of the deer I've killed in the morning where at the very first light I could I could see I'm thinking of two of them right now that I could see, I could see them in front of me before legal light, and eventually they work their way around, and I was able to get a shot on both the deer. I'm thinking of one of them being November, one of them being UM late season, actually two of them being late season. Usually I'm catching them in the betting and working around UM. A lot of times they know something is up, but they can't figure it out, and they seem to just stall and try and figure out what's going on, and usually gets light and it's too late. Yeah, how early are you getting in there on those kinds of hunts? I think if I remember right that that hunt we were just talking about, you were in there at least an hour beforehand, Is that right? Yeah? I want to be set up and sit in the dark quietly for an hour, so probably, I mean, if it takes, I mean, give yourself extra time and be at the base of the tree um two hours before it's going to get late. And would you do a hunt like that on any random day or would have to be you know, a special set of circumstances like you saw the buck and you've pinpoint where you thought he was betting, or some kind of conditions coming through us, a cold front or I don't know, something like that that makes you think that you know tomorrow morn is going to be a special morning. I guess that really depends upon the circumstances. Um for the most part, Like, I'm not I'm not like the kind of guy that reads the moon just because I hunt when I can hunt. I can't hunt all the time. Um, obviously the wind has to work. The wind is huge. I mean, you've got to get that wind away from them. Um, Like if you can create an obstacle, if you have an obstacle, like in this particular situation, that this deer coming in was not gonna jay hook me because he would have to walk cross ways through the corn rolls. And I just didn't see a buck every morning walking for the whole summer. I just couldn't picture because it was early season. I could picture of box walking through the corner rolls cross ways. So that's a big thing, is just getting that wind away from them. Yeah, what would be I don't know if the answers that question, but yeah, speaking of that early season, Um, what are you doing for the evening hunts? How are you? I think I remember hearing you talk about there's some discussion you're having about scouting and just how when it comes to early season scouting. Oftentimes you're doing all the scouting leading up to the first hunt, and the first hunter too, and then it's all out the window because things have changed, and then you have to re assess and adjust after that pressure. Um is that to interpret that? Right? Is that? Is that how you approach things early on? Yeah, very much so, because you can have something all figured out and the night before the season or the day of the season, somebody goes in and sets up wrong and has their wind blowing right into the betting area of the deer after and then everything changes. So yeah, absolutely, yes, So what are you doing leading up to the season. Then what's that early season outing those final piece of the puzzle look like. Yeah. So for for summer scouting, um, it's a lot of running cameras in places that that don't intrude. It's a lot of glassing, sitting back and glassing. Um. One one secret that my buddies and I joke about. I guess that isn't that big of a secret. But if you can for glassing, if you can get out of your truck and just walk one fence line back, you're going to see so many more. Dear, than the guy's driving around. I recognize a lot of the trucks that are always driving around the summer glassing and they never get another truck. And you talk to some of them, they're like, hey, I saw a twenty dollar last night, And I'm like, did you see any antlers? And he's like nope. And meanwhile, I was one fence line back watching two booners. You know, I had that one year, which is why I say that, Yeah, do you when it comes to that, that glassing? How often? I feel like this is one of those things that we hear a lot about. We know like we should do, we should glass, we should do we should scout more, we should spend more time in the woodler in these places. But I think there's like a disconnect between knowing you should do that and what doing that actually entails. And I was talking to my buddy Andy about this last summer and I asked him, when you say you're doing this whatever it was like some kind of scout, how many times are you actually doing that? And he said something like, well, I don't know, two or three times every week for months leading up to the season or something like that. Um, when you say you're doing this early season scouting or something like that. You know, is this a once a week thing? Is this? I mean, is it once just before the season? Just helped flesh with that? Actually looks like I'm guessing it's more than just once. No, that's about correct. I would say it's like I would almost say it's three or four times a week. I don't know how having the little guys going to impact that, but three or four times a week and then that that week before. I always try to adjust my work schedule to be able to last every single night and see if I can get a solid pattern on something. Um. Yeah, that's accurate. So what happened year? What was the what was opening night like last year for her? Yeah? So last year I had a specific buck Um that I was watching and he was he was moving through a spot. I was glassing him, i should say, And he was moving through a spot and there was a small little window that you could catch him moving through. I would say, I was watching I don't know, a half mile back and the window that you had to catch him moving through was like twenty yards wide, So you had to just stare with your eye through the spotting sculpt and you would catch him at very last light. So and that's not a huge tip about glassing. Most of the glassing I do is fairly pointless until that last ten minutes light or so. Um. But anyways, I was watching this specific deer and uh, then opening night came along. The wind was completely wrong, so I literally, um just kept driving around the block watching to see what was going to happen in this particular spot. And nobody was in any of the parking lots, and I thought I was good, and then it was it was getting late where you you wouldn't. I was going to skip the night hunt and just wait and then moving the next day, and it and the the suddenly one guy pulled up and headed back with his wind blowing straight into the betting area. So idove in. Um again it was late, idolve in kind of put my wind a little off to just kind of give it a try, but I knew it kind of screwed up everything, but I was still going to try it because the spot was blown at that point. And what happened nothing thing. Yeah, So then it was back to square one. After that, you probably was often moved to either different timing as far as when he moved or he adjusted, were able to catch eyes on him or anything else after that, Yeah, yeah, so he actually adjusted. Actually in the particular swamp, I was running a number of wireless trail cameras, which I'm not a big fan of doing that. I probably won't do that anymore because it seems like the dear smell something that isn't right, and they started wearing those those trails with the cameras on them. But I was running cameras in this particular swamp, and at one point I think it gosh, I think it was, I don't know, a few days later caught him going. I got a picture of him, um going back to bed, the specific buck going to back to bed, and I think it was like twenty minutes before light. So I knew he was really close and it was going to rain that afternoon. So I ran that morning. I ran to the swamp and I tried to follow through the swamp where that deer because in the swamp you can kind of see where where the mud gets pulled up onto the cat tails. So I tried to follow my way back to where he went because I knew it was going to be in kind of one of two clusters and uh, then the wind was just off that night. So I went back home, grabbed all my gear, got in there, got set up, and then the wind just started swirling. So I think that buggered him completely that night, and that was where that was where I got frustrated and kind of switched gears and started looking at farm country. Um, there was a different deer in the area that I half heartedly paid attention to. He was a giant, and some dude shot him, um over a bean or I think it's corner beans. He tried him over a bean field opening night on public land, and I was like, shoot, I need to switch gears, get out of swamp. I'm diving too deep. I'm making this too hard. And that's what led me to the farm. Farm land. That's an interesting point. That's another thing that I've heard you to say before is sometimes the need to just completely switch up your strategy. Like if you're getting frustrated, if this one deer, this one thing is not working in a swamp, then switch to the farm, or switch to hill country, or switch to something else. Why why do you recommend that kind of full scale pivot sometimes? Sure, So that's when I would say I kind of learned from Andy. I remember on a podcast, your podcast, actually, I believe Andy was talking about how when he goes on these out of state trips. I remember him saying, the deer are there, you just have to figure out where they are. And we don't have a ridiculous amount of deer. So like in that scenario, I was pounding around in the swamps and they were hard Most of the deer were hardly in the swamps. So then when I saw this guy shoot this other buck and post it up he posted up on a report page, it kind of brought me to the realization this buck was right out of my nose in the crop fields, a fully mature, big buck in the crop field. So you just you half the deer are there. You have to find where they are. What are they feeding on? Um? In there? I guess what I'm learning is in the early season this particular swamp, the deer aren't pushed into there yet. They don't need to be in there yet because the pressure isn't hyped up enough. So really finding where they are I don't I can't say enough. It's that simple. I guess it's funny as you're saying that, um, it makes me think about the I don't know what you call it, like the manic state I'm in during the hunting season when I'm trying to think through all those same things and I'm thinking, you know, are they in this stuff or no, they're in a totally different area, or what are they doing? Or what's wrong here? I'm constantly you know, thinking, over thinking, second guessing text and buddies seeing what they're seeing, trying to apply that to what's going on by me, Uh, what are you like during this season? I mean, what's is this ship going through your mind twenty four hours a day? Or can you turn it off? Or how do you handle it? No, it is definitely twenty four hours a day. It's it's I remember, And what happened two so in last year was two thousand nineteen and two thousand eighteen. I ended up eating my tag because I chased a specific buck around all year. And I remember in the last week, the last two weeks of the season in two thousand and eighteen, I went just absolute crazy. I was manic. I remember I was hardly sleeping because because we could shine till ten o'clock and in the winter, ten o'clock is really late, so I was I was shining like crazy, just trying to catch a buck coming out of so well, I'm just going nuts. And then I remember in uh, at the beginning of two thousand nineteen, I'm like, if I can apply that attitude and that mentality to the first because I took the first week of vacation for two thousand nineteen, I'm like, if I can have that same attitude and that same craze, I wonder what's gonna happen. So my I went crazy the first week, and just like you said, yeah, it eats you up, I do the I do the same thing when it comes to one buck. I get one buck in my mind, and it's usually the death of me, and it's usually on like one small little property where I'm super limited, and I end up getting hung up on him though, and throw all these other things rings out the door because I'm just trying to get that one. Um, how how do you handle just that? Because I know I've heard you stay in the past that you end up hunting specific bucks a lot. Do you where's your head at some years I'm thinking, like, I'm not gonna do that anymore. And then the next year just happens again. What about you? Yeah, so I guess to flip back on your real quick before I answer it. Part of the problem I run into is we don't I mean, we don't have a crazy amount of deer to go after, which is why I'm so obsessed with that one dear. I mean, is that the same for you? Or do you have a fair amount of good deer you can go after? So it is a little more like you and that I've I've got usually just a couple small properties that usually have like one good dear for sure, maybe two like the best years, um some years. What I what I usually have is like one or two decent local spots, and then I travel like on a state um, to a bunch of different places. So my problem is probably that I don't have enough good local spot to give me tons of options that that could certainly be part of it, right right. And then the thing you run into doing, which I did forever, is you over hunt the heck out of him and blow the deer out of there anyways that I've done way too many times. Um. The big biggest thing I've learned with that is just kind of sit back and be patient, um and sometimes you just you don't even hunt, You sit back in glass, or if the wind is completely wrong, you don't even hunt because you you are so limited, um, with that one specific deer. And then sometimes you just have to get aggressive, if you like I wonder that I was chasing for a while. Um. I posted up pictures of him on Instagram for people that follow me. He had double drop times, just trash everywhere. Yeah, he's he's a freak. And I could not figure out what that deer was doing. So I just dove in and I ended up jumping him up. But that was when I was We've all got those deer where we say, if if I had known then what I know now, that you will be dead and that that in that particular case, when I jumped that deer up, I went and did everything wrong. I was a young, um, crazy kid that was excited and over outed it. Um. But just sitting back and being patient and calculated and knowing when to and when not to move in. What are some of those things for you that I mean it's time to move in? Like what are the green light signs for you to to swing for the fences? Sure? So just seeing him shining, um, seeing him, catching him moving across the field like I did with this in this particular situation with the one I killed that year. Um. Sometimes a rumor, I'll hear a rumor from somebody. Um. Yeah, the basics, shining trail cameras of visual just seeing him. So talk, let's talk a little more about the shining thing. Um because because I know that I've heard from Wisconsin a lot of folks seem to do that since it's it's legal there. Um and and probably plenty more states too that I just don't know. Um, how why the net do you cast? I guess you could even apply this to you know, glassing from Afar too. You know, if you think that there's a buck in a certain area, or maybe it's just a property of permission on our piece of public that you can hunt. Like how wide a zone do you go outside of that core where you think something's happening with your either glassing or shining at night? Like, what's that circumference? To give you a circumference? It would be tricky, I would say, from the moment I turned the spotlight on till the moment I turn it off and head back to my house. It's usually only like a half hour shining mission. So I'm just checking spots from checking fields. Um, there's certain little spots where the some of the more maturity or you can actually catch them in little crevices moving through out to food. Um. The big deer I've learned too. I mean they'll eat right on the edge of a field and when they hear your car coming down the road, they cross the road before you even get there and cut back in the coverage. I've tried a lot of different things, from driving fast and clicking on the light to see just different things like that I've learned over time. UM yeah, I UM. This isn't related shining, But when it comes to glassing, I do a lot of the truck driving stuff too. And um, I went from having a silver truck to a black truck, and for some reason I found that the black truck spooked deer a whole lot more so in the future. I just got a new truck. It's black again. I guess I didn't think that one through. But is it? Do you think it could be a louder exhaust or louder tires or something. Sounds definitely that's possible. That's possible to I don't. I can't say that I recall it being dramatically different, but it's certainly possible. Um. But for whatever reason, it was just it was dramatic. I used to be able to get away with you know, being a couple hundred yards away and these bucks, you know, would be okay, I don't know, three hundred four hundred yards out there at the back of the field. But with a new truck that I got. This was I don't know, six years ago when I got that one. Um, it just went. I would pull up, stop and bam, they're gone. So, like you were saying, I started trying all sorts of different things. I would just do the do the roll by so you see them, you think lots of good buck. But instead of stopping, you just keep on driving and then you come around the block or something, or you do a turnaround and then you just then you creep just where you can get and look past the trees or something and see him. Um. Yeah, it's interesting trying to do these different things. What about What about This is another one I always wonder about because you described how just getting off the road and getting back one fence or you can see so much more I constantly have this inner debate in the summer when I'm thinking, Okay, I could either do that, but I'm committed to that one field and I'm stuck and that's all and sees this one spot. Or I can cover a ton of ground in a much bigger space and check off, you know, a whole a lot more potential. Yes, no type of areas like okay, that's where he is, that's where he's not that kind of thing. Um, do you ever do the I guess what am I trying to say is do you always commit to one spot like that and get back off the road or do you sometimes try to cover a bunch of stuff on the car? Or how do you balance those two things? If you do off? Yeah, I would say my glassing is kind of a there's always a little tweak almost every night, a little adjustment until I do lock onto a certain deer, and then I'll sit at time and time again. Now with the glassing, I would say I treat it just like hunting where Um, when you're walking, you want to make sure your wind is not blowing into wherever they're coming out of um. When you're where you're walking, you don't if you're sitting and glassing in a spot that two hours later the deer got to come through and smell where you sat there and glassed. I wouldn't glass there. I mean, I'm trying to glass in spots where it's it might be along a hiking trail or along a tractor lane where there's human scent. Anyways, I'm trying to not make it, not make it obviously these deer that they're being watched. I've made that mistake before. Or I would sit up on top of a hill and a half hour later after I left, they walked right where I was on top of the hill and they realized something's up, and dear seasons on right exactly. There's no they don't know you're not hunting yet, right exactly. Yeah. Yeah, that's a tricky one trying to figure out. One of that. One of those light switched things for me was understanding the value of observing and learning and scouting and how that's just as important, if not more so, than actual hunt hunts. You know, do you do do you do that with observation stand kind of hunts at all? A little bit? Yeah, I would say a little bit. I know, I know some guys will go really really light, so just observation stands until they get the exact until they need and then they get super aggressive with it and they then they just strike hard. Then but most of their season of observe, observe, observe and then strike hard. And then there's other guys who have and and maybe this is how you might describe Dan, maybe not, but he you would say that they have a whole bunch of good spots scouted out and then they just go harden this one and then blow it up or kill. They go harden the next one, blow it up or kill hard, and the next one blow it up for kill. How would you describe your like if I had, if you had to generically describe your approach in that way, would yours be? But I think I think it would be a combination of both. If for those nights when I get frustrated I don't know where to set up, I'll fall back on old bedding areas and just go for broke um. And then there's those other times where I'm I feel like I'm onto a specific deer, We're I'll sit back and watch and then move in and pick the cherry. So to speak, um with that late muzzleloader buck that you killed last year? Is that a good example a little bit of how you hunt one specific buck because I think if I remember, you had a history of that deer and you were kind of working on or is that right? Yeah? Yeah, that that was a deer I wanted to kill. There was one that was one other one that was potentially in the area that I was more interested in, but I didn't know if it was alive yet, So I wasn't going to stack all my eggs in that basket. I knew this one was alive, um from a sighting, but I didn't know or from a trail camp picture actually is what it was? Um? But yeah, so so can you walk me through then basically your whole experien adriance with that deer and what I'm leading to kill um eventually? Yeah, so that dear, I want to say it was two thousand and seventeen. He ended up being four years old based on all the pictures in history I had with him. But I got my This one's kind of a confusing one to explain because I got my first picture ever of this year. He always had a split G three on the one side, and I got my first picture ever of them UM near one swamp, middle of the night. UM. And then that same winter when I got that picture of that same same time of the year, I also was getting pictures of him in a different swamp. UM. And that was kind of the end of that. And then two thousand eighteen rolled around and Uh, he popped back up in the main swamp where I hunted him. And I'd love to give you the names of the swamp so I can make the story better, but I shouldn't keep that under red, right, So he popped back up. UM. I chased him around a little bit. I was. I got pictures of him UM in two thousand and eighteen during the Muzzli season, multiple mornings in a role coming back to UM, coming back to bed, and I was actually I actually ended up shooting uh huck. I wasn't sure which bucket was. I just saw the rack on his head. But when I was hunting him in two thousand eighteen, I ended up shooting a different one UM in that exact betting area. He still one question started to interrupt, But these cameras that you're picking up pictures of them going back to bed, what what kind of camera setups were those, And I mean, like, where where were you setting these cameras up to get that kind of info? Just down trails and the cat tails, So okay, so you're back in the swampy stuff yep, and and a lot like that specific camera was not a wireless one, so I uh, that intel I received after everything happened, But but I still went. It was actually right after everything happened, so and I still went and hunted it, hoping he would do it again and end up shooting that other one. But with the the one thing I'll say with those, So I've got wireless trail cameras now, and I keep getting pictures of them one time and then I'll never get the picture again. And this winter I had one where I got a picture of a new uck. He was looking right at the camera, had the camera hidden well, and then um, I went out in the snow to retrieve the camera. I had the one picture of him. And then when I retrieved the camera, he started literally just going around the back of the camera through some really thick stuff. The camera was kind of in a funnel, but he purfectly you could he had a hell of a rub line going through some thick stuff just avoiding that camera. And the one thing I noticed when I walked up to that camera, I have like a python cable on it. As I was on strapping it from the tree, I could smell the rubber from that Python cable. So, and maybe I'm being a little crazy, but those I mean, it's not every day there's that smell of rubber in the middle of a swamp like that. So I don't know if that you know, he's like, something's not right about this. It wasn't big enough of a danger to completely leave the swamp, but it just bothered him. So for people to consider, yeah, interesting, Okay, so you've got this, these cameras back there and the cat tails. You're getting a few pictures and this this is your muzzle er season is in December or November? When is it? Yeah, it ended up landing at the beginning. I think it was the second week in December. I could be wrong on that. It ended up being nice and late, which was good because then you've got the cold weather working in your favor, and it landed right on that second rout as people call it. I'm not a not an expert on all those phases and stuff, but when all the fonds come into heat, and I've done pretty well with those fonds and those late doors coming into heat over the years. But yeah, he he was actually the buck that I was catching in the summer moving through, and he was the buck that that other guy kind of messed up. Um, And that was a buck I really wanted to chase around. But then obviously I filled my tags, so I just really kept tabs on him with trail cameras, and I the entire archery and gun season, I confirmed that he was still in that swamp, still holding up in there, and then uh, guns season, I dove into their opening morning. Actually my cousin wanted to go along, so I took him in there and he actually he had a nice eight point come through that he shot, and he was pretty jacked about that because it's a little little different style of hunting for him. Um. And then I think with all that commotion that morning, UM, I don't know exactly what happened, if he he was still in there or moved over, what happened, But my plan was going to be with the muzzleloader was I was just gonna work my way through that swamp kind of um in a line morning after morning and catch him moving through. UM, so that I took vacation that I want to say. It was like the last five days of muzzleloader season, and that first morning I set up, didn't hear anything. It was horrible. There was like a half inch of ice, so as you went through there it would break you break through and then smash your shins on the ice. So it was horrible. Glad it ended quickly. UM. So then I hunted that morning and then I spent the whole day. It's a huge swamp and I we had a fresh snow, so I made an entire circle around that whole swamp. Took many hours to do just looking for I didn't know exactly what his track looked like, but I was looking for a big track because again, like I said, there's not that many mature bucks in the area, so if there was, if I found a big track, it was more than likely going to be him. Um. I didn't find any that really piqued my interest, so I went and uh. I went and sat at the at the other swamp, the initial swamp where I got the very first to of him, just to watch the doors come out and kind of just chill for the night and hang out and wait for the next morning and continue my strategy of just working through in the mornings. And uh, like I've said many times, I had all these doors come out and I looked in the back of the field and I, um, he actually he lost that split G three. He's got real short G two. And I remember looking in the back of the field and seeing the really short G twos on a big buck that looked out of place, and I was My mind was blown, and I shot him right there. So it was kind of a situation where sometimes it's just as helpful to know where he's not at then where he is right being able to check something off this is important too. Yeah, absolutely, And and that was one of the things I talked about in the video. I don't know if you've seen that that the Hunting Beast video over on YouTube. And I was kind of telling Andy May I'm like, yeah, I got lucky, and he's like, no, you didn't. He said to me, that's exactly what he's seen time after time. Is you get a deer that'll maybe go back to a certain area at a certain time of the year to check on a group of doors and they'll they'll do a year after year for a short little window. And he told me, he's like, you caught him in that window, and I was like, no o kidding. So that was a big learning experience for me. So yeah, I've experienced the same kind of things. And one example was this buck that um I only would see him show up in December, and he showed up once a year. He showed up once in December, on December fifth or sixth or seventh, something like that in two thousand sixteen, and then in two thousand and seventeen he showed up once a little later in December, and then in two thousand eighteen he showed it back up on the farm much earlier. He showed up in early November, and I had a bunch of close calls with him in early November, but then he disappeared again. But I kept thinking, Man, if we get to that first week or so of December, you know, he seems to that's when historically he's come back, and so I was hoping for that and was trying to do some long distance scouting in Lo and behold, I think it was December five. I think was the day or eighth, fifth or eighth, and there he was second rock kind of thing, just like you described. He was chasing a doll and I killed him that night. So so yeah, I've seen a lot of things like that too. It's it's it's very it's very true. It's weird. It's weird that they have these kinds of annual cycles of sorts. Um. But it was that that big point, that big. I think it was a thick, heavy time point that you have for a lot. You got it for like a lot of different profile pictures. Yeah, yeah, he was. He's the really big one in Michigan that I got a few years ago. Yeah. Yeah, that thing is a tank. Yeah yeah, I always kill that one. I never I'll be honest, I never dove in deep enough to figure out how you killed him. Yeah, he's uh, he was. He was an unexpected buck. You don't see man like that around here. So it was it was cool. Orto. Yeah, that was beautiful, dear. Yeah. Um, so okay, that's kind of interesting. You've got a couple of hunts last year that your past history in these places, years of studying them, years of scouting. Lad to you getting the kills that early season, that late season buck. But then you've got these two hunts smack dab in the middle of that in Michigan and Ohio where you were hunting brand new places and you were able to kill a buck. And I think that's I think last year your season was impressive regardless, but the fact that you've got two kills in that kind of scenarre and then two kills and brand new spots, that that makes it really interesting. UM. I can't and we can't have this conversation and not talk about your Michigan hunt right um, right here in my right here in my home state. Uh, do you want to talk to me about how you guys approached trying to break down your strategy there in Michigan. Um, I know you guys had tough conditions a lot different things like that, but but walk me through some of the challenges and in ajas as you guys broke things down over the course of that early season hunt. Sure. So with the with the Michigan hunt, it started by just kind of reaching out to people and learning where the decent area were where people were killing um different deer, and uh, we kind of ended up nailing down two different spots that were, um, one was an hour north of camp and one was an hour south of camp, so kind of putting them two hours apart. Um. But what the spot I ended up killing was a spot where a local guy said, Hey, my buddy goes in there every year. He shoots a hundred inch buck every year. And my thinking around that was, if if somebody can go into a spot in a public land spot to hundred buck in Michigan every year, that's where we need to be. That sounds great to me. It's a good spot in Michigan if it's doing that. What's that? I said, it's a good spot for around here if that's the case. Yeah, yeah, absolutely was gonna say did you know where it was? But uh yeah, So we dove into this particular spot and uh what it was. To describe it is it was it's kind of a high ridge, um, a high long ridge, and most of it was woods, but at kind of the one end of the ridge there was a sybean field and usually the back of the ridge there there wasn't a accessible trail that most people would come up and they would kind of um get into the back where actually all the good betting was. But what we ended up having was all that flooding. The flooding I would say, put the water on that trail like belly belly button deep when it was at its highest. You probably saw that in the videos. So it actually cut everybody off from coming in that one way. So we we ran into all these deer out in this field. Actually mid day, we ran into some dose in this bean field, and we're like, if if this is gonna be this simple, if these deer are gonna be eating out here in the middle of the day, let's start by hunting the field. So we hunted the field edge. UM that first night, Jake and I saw that two and a half year old buck and that smaller buck out there, and the way hunted the field edge a few more times, UM had a lot of different weird things happened, and you could tell that our pressure was starting to affect the deer. So we decided we needed to work start working our way into the cover, not knowing exactly where the betting was. And this is where that debate kind of came in that we had with that I had with Dan. They were actually accessing the field in two different spots. They were kind of coming out of two different betting areas, and I think happened as we burned the betting area where Dan had seen a big buck come out of. We haunted that, and then we were starting to hunt the spot where I believe the deer were coming from. And that first night when we dove in the cover, we had those guys come through, ripped down all our equipment, and we we went further back in deep. And the biggest thing I guess if I could explain to a guy as to what we were looking for, is as we headed back through the woods, it was very open. I mean you could I think you could see almost a hundred yards with with the leaves on, and it was very open like that. And we got to a point where it got really thick or high stem count. And right at the beginning of that really thick we jumped up dear that took off, and I remember that bed was just war to the dirt, and that was really really started to slow things down. I remember I was kind of going crazy going fast and Jake's like, we gotta slow down right here. I'm like, yeah, you're right. Was being a little bit of a back seat driver there. I thought, Yeah, I guess it depends where the rules are. But I was cool with it. But you know, sometimes you get all fired up and uh, you go too deep. I do that way too often. That was and I guess I could back pedal a little bit. There was our first night or second night we hunted some frag mights believe they are called, and there was a buck that I just don't wag too deep in on. The sign was so obvious. Um, but I just don't way too deep. And that's what you think that that's a benefit of me being able to with Dan as I can have him say, hey, why the hell are you diving in so deep? That's stupid and you get it in your head real quick. Okay, So before we go to further, though, you gotta you gotta help me understand that thought process in your head, because that right there is one of like the big differentiators I think for a lot of people is knowing when to when to keep going, when to stop. A lot of us are guilty of one of going too far one of either way. So a lot of us are so nervous to blow dear out. This is how I was for a long time. I was so worried to spook dear that I would never go far enough. And then you get the opposite where you want to be aggressive. You want to be aggressive, and so you do what you just describe, where you push in there so hard and blow everything out and you need someone to kind of knock up the side of ahead and say, well, what are you doing? Um, yes, walk me through how you try to do that or how Dan has maybe shown different situations where he said, hey, this is this is when you got to stop anything like that. Stand out that you could help us kind of illustrate it with. Yeah, so I get in that particular situation, Um boy, I guess just to say that he yelled at me. He's like you because he'd seen me do it multiple times, and he's like you, you don't have to dive in so deep. And I think I always had this growing up. I always had this mentality that I was going to outwork every other hunter in the area, and I was going to go deeper, and I was going to go in spots where nobody was willing. And sometimes it's not not that you make it too difficult, right, So it if you have if you can find a friend that's a better hunter than you and get him to go along with you. And I guess that's another technical in and of itself. I've got a few buddies that I've literally just met because you start seeing him posting these big bucks on social media and you reach out to him and you don't develop a relationship, and pretty soon you're scouting with him and you're learning things from them and they're learning things from you, and uh, that's that's huge. There's a few kinks out of my system that have been worked out by Dan over the years saying hey, why are you doing that? And uh, that's huge. You's got to be able to take that feedback. Yeah, the second set of eyes can can be super helpful. Especially it's so easy to just to see things the way you always see them, right right. Eventually, just you don't notice certain things because you've always kind of done in a certain way, or when a new person comes in all of a sudden, something will stand out so easily that you just took for granted, right. I mean, it's a great, great point to add on to that. I've got to I've got a buddy, Jordan's um He's He's one guy you should try and get on here. He's he tries to be a little more silent, but I bet you could get him out here. But he's talk Yeah, he's he's strictly a swamp hunter. He only hunts from the ground. I talked to him to buying a tree stand. But I got to know him because he was posting these giants that he was killing in the cat tails from the ground, and I kind of message him, like what are you doing? And we developed the relationship that way, and he came he came out and hunt. Excuse me, he came out and scouted a spot with me on a buck that I was trying to figure out. And I remember we're hardly in the swamp. And the first thing he pointed out to me is you get these swamps on these trails with the dogwood and uh, just the I don't know, the vegetation that's not very big around. And if you look really close, these bucks when they go through the dogwood and stuff is so soft that they will sometimes pull their antlers through the dogwood. And if you look, you can catch little knicks on the dogwood. And he was pointing out he's like, so you can tell he would went down this trail because of all the knicks and the dogwood, and there's just these these tiny little knicks, and I was like, no kidding, and it was just it's such a such a simple thing that I've I've never seen. I walked past a thousand times, so I always wondered what sign I'm missing like that, But just that one little experience kind of change the game for me because it's something I look for now, and it's something that I can add into my pack of now. Yeah. So okay, so you're working your way down this ridge and there's this transition from the open hardwoods to this thicker stem count, and I think that's that's definitely an obvious change in habitat. I'm gonna start slowing down and write a lot of Okay, now we get to change. But then it's finding that spot within the spot. That's always the real trick, you know. Do you go right in the edge of it, do you go fifty yards into it? Do you go until you see a rubber or scrape or a bed? How do you how do you approach that? And in this case, you you have Jake who kind of told you to tap the brakes, But what are you thinking about as you move through there. So shootability, I guess it's a big one for me. I mean, obviously you don't want to go too far be too short, but you also really need that spot where you can when they do come through, you can get a shot. So we had the tree we ended up picking. We we didn't go far in because when we looked at on X, you could tell that you couldn't really go much further before you were going to run out of that point and you were going to be into water. So we didn't want to go too far in. But then at that point it was being able to shoot as much to the left and as much to the right as possible, but also having in that situation we had our wind blowing out over the water and kind of behind us at an angle, and knowing where our wind was because it was a point where if the deer would get too far to our right they would wind us. That was that was kind of a situation with that. And so describe the spot you picked him in. What happened there? Yeah, So that particular spot. Um. One thing that was interesting about it is we we kind of were right in the betting area. I wouldn't even say we were on the edge of it. We were right in it, and uh they were actually uh polk trees right in the betting area with acorns dropping. And I remember turning to Jake and I said, we're right in the thick of this. I'm like, anything could happen at any time, because the deer when they were making it out to the field, they're getting out there really early, and we were quite ways into the timber. I'm like, so anything could move at any second. And I remember looking over and seeing this buck standing there and slapping the back of the tree because I think he was staring at I think I was moving around kind of, you know, not quite down yet because we just got in there. And then like there's a buck right there, and uh, from there it was it's kind of a rodeo. The buck zig zig left and right, and he was at like forty yards and then thirty two yards. There was a point where I thought, man, this year, he's sitting and feeding on this oak. At what point does he say that he's not gonna say anything, But at what point does he realize that he's content and full and he's going to go back to his bed and lay down and walk out of my life forever. I'm like, I gotta make this shot work. And I had, unfortunately had my range finder with me and I clicked it at thirty two and uh letters sail and I felt like it was a little far back and a little high, but he ran and rolled and it was pretty sweet. It was. You know, one thing that was cool about that hunt, too, is we always talked about that the first buck you killed, the excitement of the first buck you killed, because there's no standard for you know, you know, you're you're not going in there try to kill the biggest buck in the world. You just want to kill a buck. That was kind of like what that was. And I was so freaking jack because I didn't care what it was. I mean, I didn't want to shoot a pork buck, but to have a nice racked buck, I I was. It was like kind of like my first block all over again. You could probably see in the video, Yeah, you were pumped. Um. So that was just simply because of you know, the challenge inherent in a new place and Michigan public Land being particularly tricky for a lot of folks. All that made it probably especially for failing, right, Yeah, exactly, yeah, and then you got a camera over your shoulder. You feel like people are watching. Do you how do you feel about that whole thing? Does that? Does that get to you? Do you get do you feel that added pressure? So for for the public land challenge, yeah, just because it is a challenge, and I'm a very very competitive person, so absolutely it does. For my regular hunting. When I'm self filming, this maybe sounds crazy, but I feel like it helps me um focus on something else rather than get anxious and get nerves. It's I don't know, I love it. I love self filming. It's I've had Even when I was younger, I would forget to bring the video camera and I would run a mile back to the truck and go get the camera just because I just had to have in the treat. What if something happened, I think that I'm film right. Yeah, it's funny you say that. I That's that's how I ended end up being. Most of the time. I hate the pain in the butt of like getting it all set up when I'm in the tree and then taking it down, especially the end of the night. I just want to like sneak out quite I hate having to mess around with stuff and jingle jingle things my backpack or whatever it might be that, you know, just having extra gear entail sometimes so the couple times when I don't bring it, I'm like, oh, this is nice. But then you see a nice buck and you can never look back at it again, and then that kills me. Yeah. Absolutely. Um, So that public land Challenge in Michigan, you killed, you know, on that tough situation in Michigan, and it panned out. Now I wanna before hearing about your final hunt, or at least the other hunt I know about in two thousand nineteen, I want to rewind the tape back to two thousand eighteen to the other public land challenge you were part of. This is Minnesota, and you had success on that trip as well, and I wanted to talk to you a little bit about that because because you guys are doing this kind of island hopping kind of thing during that one, and I was curious to hear a little bit more about that particular hunt and then any other times you've done this, because I think for a lot of guys, the hunting swampy areas, cattail swamps whatever. Here in Michigan, we've got a lot of stuff where there are those islands, UM, I'd love to hear kind of how you guys approached it in that case or any other situations you've you've seen where you have targeted these islands as as buck areas, buckbetting areas or anything like that, and how you approach them, how you set up all that stuff would be would be interesting. Sure, so I can speak to kind of the approaching the set up, but I personally, I don't really have that sort of terrain. By me, we don't really have um Oak islands and the very few that we do, actually last year I went in and looked at one in the summer and it had UM. There's like two or three different trill cameras on the one guy had a note on his troll camera saying please don't steal this, and there was a mini it is the whole thing, And I'm like, this is ridiculous. And I don't know if that video kind of broke the theal on islands island honey, because the video really did make it look so simply hunt the islands ki, but that that hunt was actually a result of UM being the guy willing to UM work like crazy for it because we ended up going three miles back and carrying a ton of crap on my back, the camera, the camera arm. Um, so it really did work out that way. The big thing that we learned her I learned on those islands is you if you say the island is kind of long like a peninsula, and you start by setting up at the beginning of the island, that better be your best fit. Because later in the night that I'm interrupted, Joe, sorry, we gotta we gotta take one step back before this and and just I got to hear the basic gist of like what this habitat or what the scenaire looks like for people that aren't familiar with the video who haven't seen kind of example maps and stuff you showed. Um, I think correct me if I'm wrong here, But we're basically talking about big cat Tail swamp with isolated high ground islands in the middle of that that have oak trees on them and a series of those scattered throughout. Is that right or would you describe it any other way? Yep, You're You're exactly correct. Okay, So that's just want to make sure we have the right picture in everyone's minds. Now, continue yep. So it was a matter of really just hopping those islands and kind of working your way back through them. Um. The thing I will say this is where I really got really good at reading sign was I would get onto the islands and I would say I think the sign might be old, and then I could turn the down and say, hey, what do you think about this? He's like, yep, the sign is all this is this guard wage. We need to keep moving. So and the sign too. It might just be the scrapes and the dirt are getting dry. There's no fresh pooh um that you can tell. The acorns haven't dropped in a while. So we worked our way through the islands. The island that I ended up killing on, I believe the furthest one back there. Uh in those clusters of islands. When I got to that island, it was it just screamed at me. There was fresh poop um. There were scrapes where you could you could tell where he dug his claws, and it was still wet, it hadn't even dried, so I knew there was something back there. Um. And then so you kind of it's a tricky game because if you go, if you run all the way to the back of the island, assuming the betting is off the back of the island. The um well, I guess that's that's probably the best way to do it, to be honest, because if you're if your oaks are dropping on the back of the island and you're set it set up on the front of the island, that buck is going to come out of his bedding feet on the oaks on the back of the island and never make it to the front of the island. So the best best thing for somebody that's hunting an area like that um year after year after year is to figure out exactly where the betting is because you don't want them to get hung up on one specific acorn oak tree um all night and then not move until after you get down. Because Dan Dan actually ran into that. He had that year and a half year old buck come in. It fed like forty r of the way and it until it was black and that was that was a huge learning experience for me. You have to you have to find the first oak trees um from betting, because those deer don't want to move too far from betting if they don't have to. In uh until it gets dark. I don't know if that makes sense, talk circle, No, it does. UM, So if someone has, you know, if someone was able to get out there the spring before, they can go and scout these islands and they can look and try to find that betting off the backside, and they can try to figure out, Okay, here's the first couple of oak trees, and how close can I get without the deer seeing me, You're smelling me, you're hearing me. That's the ideal scenario. But let's say we're hunting public and it's you know, we're heading from out of state, we haven't been able to scout in person before, we're heading in blind like you guys did in that situation, and you guys are just looking at maps and then scouting on the ground and moving as you did. UM, talk to about how you try to approach each new island and how you tried to work your way into it without spooking deer but trying to get close enough. This is kind of a similar scenarios. I guess I asked about your Michigan hunt. But again it's how do you pick the spot within the spot in this scenario? So yeah, yeah, So again for me, it goes to shootability. Um, and maybe that's that might be it's something I've always kind of kick around. Maybe it's a kink. I need to work out of my system and start getting the deer twenty yards from me. But I want I want to be able to shoot thirty yards to the left and thirty yards to the right. So I'm covering a sixty yard area that that deer is gonna walk through and he's in trouble. Um, that's a big deal for me. But then being I mean still being close enough that he's going to go past you. Um, stay on on that island, there was kind of like a little it was kind of high in the middle, so I stayed on the down wind side of the island and skirted. I crouched down when I walked, just in case there was something on the up wind side of the island bedded that way wouldn't see me, just in case it came out to the island and moved around. Does that make sense. Yeah, Especially when you don't when you don't know exactly where they might be, it becomes even more careful to be assuming any the worst case scenario. Guess right, exactly yeah, yeah, and uh. And then when I get set up in a situation like that where I don't know where they are, I'm moving really slow. Um. It was very windy, so that helped because if you when when a deer I always say this, A deer isn't looking for you when they come out to the field or whatever. They're looking for movement. So when that deer is laying in that bed, if you're moving around all drastically, climbing the tree, making fast motions, it's gonna catch It's more likely to catch that deer's eye. And that deer might be laying there kind of groggy. Um, not not all wound up, but you can sure get them wound up fast if you're making motions that they're going to pick out. So I move really slow. Just go slow, um, don't make any obvious movements, climb up the side of the tree, um where you don't think the deer are going to see you. Put the tree in between you and the deer where you suspect the deer to be. So just going slow that way. Do you ever have any other adjustments you make again when you're thinking you could be close to bedded deer? Uh? As in, you know, sometimes I've hurt people go extra low because they want to make sure they don't get skylined, or they want to make sure they don't, you know, get so high as to be visible from a farther distance. So some people will hunt lower than usual because they don't want to be spotted from the bedded buck, while other people say they want to be higher so that if that deer starts moving their way, they won't be as likely to smell them or see them. Does does your height ever change based off snarrows? Like that? A little bit, not not a crazy amount, um obviously, Like on that bedded buck hunt, I knew I wanted to get as high as possible, and there's there's a point where you get really how you start to mess up that angle of you know, if you're going for a double lung shot, it gets it shot becomes more difficult if you get too high, And then I do get a little bit worried about going too low and getting picked off, But then there's the going too high and getting picked off on their bedded So yeah, I guess I think about it, but it's something I'm gonna start paying closer attention to. UM, I got a buddy justin right, Um, he's gotta He was telling me about a swamp that he hunts where if there's any hunters hunting the hardwoods that boughts up to the swamp, you don't see much for deer um coming into the hardwoods, he said. But if there's no hunters and you just go sit on the ground, you'll see all kinds of deer, he said, because the deer have become so accustomed to sitting in their beds and watching people climb up the trees. So that was something he told me this year that I'm gonna start paying attention to more. Yeah, you always wonder what what they what they know about you. I can't remember what Maybe maybe you said this earlier just now and I'm losing my mind, or in something I was listening to earlier. I've been preparing for this. You said it, But there was a scenario where you realize that there was a buck you've been hunting for years that had been possibly watching you for all those years. And that's one of the things that I always battle with, is wondering what sometimes these bucks could be bettered off on a point or much closer to the road than you would think. And every time you go and you think you have to go off into the back stuff, you have to get far from the road to get in their deep because you think that's where the big bucks should be. But maybe he's right up front, sitting in this stupid stuff and you think it's stupid, but it's actually smart because the buck sees you every time you're walking in and he's out of there before you ever get set up because of it. Um, I constantly have this little thing in the back of my mind just just chirping to me like you might be a total dumbass, Mark, he might be right there where you're walking by you. Do you ever have those worries? Yeah? Absolutely, Um, yeah, I can't think. I'm sure it's I'm sure ever run into it before, but I absolutely don't. And those those ones are always tricking me too, because those are your bigger, mature dear, and you want to be able to sit back and maybe glass room. You know, say they're coming out of just a little hole or something, and you want to sit back and glass him. But those are the bucks that they don't move out of that hole until after dark, right they they they're so tricky to hunt. You gotta know that, but you can't let them know. You know there, they're there. Yeah, that's that's that's the trick, is that. Man. They can sometimes be right right underneath your nose, but you'll never know unless you are really either right on top of him or get lucky, or it's the rut or something. Um. Yeah, or there's justin gentleman that I'm talking about. The big thing he does that we've been discussing is just track checking. He learns, he learns these little spots, and he learns the trails that come out of him, and he's he's checking for tracks coming in and out of those little spots. And when he sees that big track going into the spot, he moves in and I know he's killed a few of them and a little overlook spots that way. So something I'll kind of start looking for those little trails coming out of those little spots. The question I always had when it comes to some of that track checking, whether it be trails or I know some guys will track checked the edge of a crop field to get an idea of Okay, is the big boy in the area yet, um is, how do you pull it off without pressuring him, you know, I mean without when you're walking around like that. That that This goes back to the debate I'm always having, which is in season scouting of any kind, I'm always worried about pushing the envelope and leaving my scent or spook and deer. Yeah. I might be learning something, but am I screwing things up by my presence at all? Um? I Constantly I'm debating how do you how do you balance those things? That's a tricky one in some of those spots. What I like to think about is where I'm walking right now, is this a spot where people are normally walking? Like there there's a lot of lanes where people take the lane all the way back to the big woods, and then you've got the buck betting off to the side or something. So I'm maybe checking along the lane where the scent isn't abnormal. Um. I guess it's all about if you could I mean, if there are green little lines drawn everywhere where human scent where, or maybe the color kit do you can look at a map and see where all the human scent was and then look at where it's not. Um, I think you could learn a lot that way, but just staying maybe I'm over explaining it, but just staying where the human where they're used to that human scent. Yep, yep. Might know what you're saying, and that's it's as you're saying this. So I'm thinking myself, Okay, it makes a lot of sense to take advantage of aces where deer are used to human concentrations, right, They're used to like I've got a I've got a property that the neighboring property they mow the lawn like way back to the edge of the swamp, even though it's a bunch of thick junk all around there. For some reason, they mow some stuff and people are back there every once in a while walking around. But when there's not people back there, it's it's actually pretty good deer country all around it. And so I'm sure there's some of the deer I'm hunting or moving in and around there, and they know that this little spot they're used to human scent. But then you look at the flip side, which is okay, yeah, maybe I could take advantage of that. But on the other hand, you know that these older bucks, where the older bucks like to spend their daylight activity where they don't get bothered. So I want to take advantage of the spot where it's safe to scout and to walk. But doesn't really matter if that buck is never going to show up there in daylight or I mean, I guess there's always clues, right you could you could see, okay, he passed through here, and I know he probably didn't pass through here during daylight because there's always human scent through here. So that tells you that's one piece of the puzzle you could put in there, and that that might help you kill him somewhere else. Maybe I don't know, I'm talking myself into circles here. No, No, that's that's what we deal with, right. And one of one of my buddies, Uh, I've got a buddy who's a heck of a killer. I actually he's in the most recent um turkey hunting video that I put up on the Beast there. The turkey hung videos always a little cheat, so if anybody watches it, I'll fore warn you. But he's and one of the things he kills a lot of those overlooked bucks. And one of the things he told me, he said, Joe, you're always hunting the bucks that are that you think are pressured, that are that are old and don't want to be around people. He said, You've got to remember, some of these bucks are more social animals and they want to know what's going on. And just just him saying that they're more social animals. They kind of they want to be around the rest of the day. They want to see what's going on. Maybe a doll comes in heat and they want to know about it. Just him saying that some some of the bigger bucks are more social animals. As kind of changed my way of thinking and looking at things. So maybe maybe me just saying that, I'll get the gears turning for somebody who thinks like me and always thinks that the bucks are a mile in the swamp away from every other. Dear, that's not necessarily true. I feel like I'm at this point now for me personally, where I have been so indoctrinated with all of the ways you're supposed to do it. I mean, I've I've I've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people. I've I've written all these articles, I've read all this stuff. Like any of us, right, we've all we're all consuming all this stuff now all the time. UM, so we all kind of know the standard rules. You're supposed to do it this way, you're supposed to push in here, you're supposed to think this way. Um that you can kind of get stuck in a rut because now you know everything you're supposed to do, and part of you might say, well, I just need to execute better. But then sometimes you kind of need to just I'm starting to realize sometimes that maybe I just need to look at this in a complete a different way, Like forget the rule book. Let's just throw something new at the wall and see if that sticks. Because if if the rule book isn't working in this scenario, why keep trying it? Why not just try new things. I'm kind of like, sometimes the rule book works, but sometimes you get into a situation where you kind of want to be creative again. It's it's easy to lose that creativity when you know how you're supposed to do it. Yep, Yeah, exactly is there anything how about this, Joe? I gotta believe you've you've seen and heard a lot of the same things I have. What is one of these rules? You probably there's gotta be something that's like a craw on your side that you just hear people say all the time and you think of yourself, jeez, that's stupid. What's one of those like white tail rules that if you could have a magic wand and wish away and like everyone now has to forget that rule, what would that be? Mm hmm. Give me some examples so I can kind of wrapt around. Okay, So for example, this is one of the things that for a lot of years I've I've done and and I think there's some warrant to it, but I know there's plenty of other people that have success like you. That being like early season morning hunts, people say, don't hunt early season mornings because bucks are in their beds before daylight. It's super risky and relatively low odds for success. So people will say, just hunt evenings in the early season, and then once you get to late October then you should. Then you can start focusing on those mornings. There's one of those quote unquote rules that a lot of guys will will tell you, Um, that's that's one example, let's say, or cold fronts, like another one is like hey, and this is I'm again I preach this all the time, but like, if there's a cold front, you gotta hit it hard because the deer going to be moving. Like there's a super generic rule. Um, anything like that, or are others that you would say, Nope, that's bullshit. Ohay, So I'm maybe not gonna answer this right. But the biggest thing I see on reading the internet, all the different discussions and everything, and it's not even it's not a rule, but I gotta say it is I think people get too obsessed with their gear. There their way too worried about all of their gear. What what I always what I always like to think about as I was trying to figure things out, is that you know, you'd like to spend money and then get results, but it doesn't work that way. And you've got to think yourself, how many encounters that I have with big big Bucks this year while I had zero of them? Okay? Is that because I don't have the right gear usually know the answer is no. Um? Is that because I didn't scout enough? Yeah, I need to scout more? Um? Or hey I didn't Um, I didn't get this dear because it was around the back side of the tree. Okay. Is that because you're in a tree stand and you need to set up differently, or perhaps maybe you do need to settle. Maybe all of your situations you get bucks in on you. You screw up all the time, and it's because you don't have the right shootability, And maybe you do need to settle, because that's just how you think. That's the air you make and a saddle would be a patch on it, or it's just I know. I I just said people want gear to be their magic potion too often, and then I said, saddle might be your but you get what I'm getting. Buying new gear is not. And maybe that's your goal. Maybe you're a gear person. You love tinkering with gear, but at the end of the season, when you don't have a deer, you better not be piste off because you wasted your entire summer tinkering with your gear when drinking a beer when you should have been all glassing. Yes, that's a that's a great point. That's a great point. Now I'm gonna ask you the flip side of that. So, so what if and you kind of could have this is good. I'm gonna give you a hard one here because what you just told me sort of answers this next question, but I want to force you into another one. So okay, So I first asked you, what's one of those typical rules that you wish people wouldn't pay attention to? So what about the reverse of that, which is if you could create a rule. So you just sort of did. You said, don't blame your equipment for your lack of success. But now I'm going to give you the power to make one more So like layout one Joe rent Mester white tailed rule that everyone you wish would remember this one thing that that for you, you think they would help a lot of people. Sure, So I'm gonna almost take the one that I just said, and I'm gonna say, learn how to read sign because too many people they're they're scouting is their trail camera or um seeing the deer or whatever, or maybe seeing a track, but you have to learn while the track is signed. So now i'm counter counter getting myself again. Um, learn how to read sign, learn how to read what's going on around you. Maybe maybe and I didn't answer it directly, but there's there's there's no right or wrong answers, so you can totally say that, Um, it's okay, so give me let's go to the sub bullet on that though. And I know you've given the examples already through our conversation. But if someone heard you say that and they said, Okay, I gotta learn how to read sign better, tell me in detail. Like if you're my teacher and I'm the student and you said I need to learn how to read sign better, now I'm going to say, okay, how do I do that better? Like? What are some things that I can do two more effectively read this sign? Is it just a matter of paying attention to things in more detail? Or should I be paying attention to different things? Or give me a little more color there. So the big thing that I've heard Andy and all those guys talk about that I'm no different don is spending a ridiculous amount of time in the woods. And with that, though, is picking up on what's going on around you. There's a lot of people that will go for a walk in the woods go scouting, but that's literally what they're doing. They're going for a walk in their woods and then they take their selfie, they post on social media and say there I did some scouting today. But what that doesn't count? What as I that doesn't count. No, that doesn't count. So what did you learn? What did you pick up? Um? You could? You can almost look at scouting like hunting. Was it a was it a failed day of scouting? If I went scouting and I didn't come back with a new piece of the puzzle. And I think a lot of people might be able to relate to this. You go. I haven't been able to scout much with a little guy, but a few times I do scout, I'll pick up on one little tweak in something and then it just it's just on my mind for the next two weeks. So when you're in the woods, um, pick up on what you're seeing. Slow down that that's a really big one. All the killers that I've ever walked through the woods with, they all go slow. They they think about what's happening. They look at look at what's going on around them, and they think, how is that You're going to move through here? And it's you literally just stand there and think. Sometimes, Um, and now, I don't want people to just go stand in the woods kind of thing. Yes, I follow you. Do you know something I do I think a lot of other guys do this too. Is when I'm out there scouting. I'm constantly scouting at two different levels. So by that, I mean I'm scouting what's right in front of me, right in front of my feet on the ground level. But then I also like to have my phone out looking at the aerial map so that I'm also looking at the thirty tho ft overview, and so I'm always trying to look at what's the big picture, what's the small picture of the tiny picture right in me, because I never want to forget the context around me. So yeah, this, this rub right in front of me is an important puzzle piece, but I also constantly want to look at how does this fit into the bigger scheme and is there some bigger terrain feature or something else that funnels or factors into this little thing I see right around me? You know do you do you ever do that? Yeah? Absolutely? And that's that's where, um, we're all guilty of walking and scrolling through our phone. So that's where you need to stop when you're looking at your phone, and you need to stop because if you walk past that one rub, that's the beginning of a rub line taking you back to a bed. You might have just hurt yourself. So that's where you need to stop, look over your map and then continue trying to figure stuff out. And with the map, something that's kind of coming handy and you've probably experienced this is just when you see things, you start dropping pens, and with those pins you put your notes and when you get home you go back and kind of look over it and stuff starts clicking and starts making sense. Yeah, and everybody's a math professional nowadays. They're handy tool that's for sure. Yeah. Okay, so, uh, second to last question, biggest mistake by wanna be Beast hunters. There's all these folks that follow the forum, they see the videos, they hear people, you know, for the last decade or so, maybe more than a than that. You know, there's been this this uh coaching tree of sorts of people learning from Dan or learning from the Dquistos or whoever, um. And now there's all these different people trying it, preaching it, talking about it. What would you say the biggest mistake you see from people trying to hunt this quote unquote beast style. Yeah, giving up. Giving up is the big one I've seen. I mean, over the last ten years of being on the Beast. I've seen so many guys that are They say they got out of the swamp and they their sticks were clank, and they didn't know how to pack them together. They threw everything down. It was all strapped, it was falling off, They got mud in their boots, they were frustrated, and then they literally give up. I've seen giving up, as it seems to be the main reason people fail. What's the solution then, Well, if you don't know how to pack your sticks together, go on the beast and ask, hey, how do I I can't get my picks and my sticks and pack together? How do I do it? Um? But the true, biggest solution overall to all of that is to just keep doing it. Just repeat it, repeat it, repeat it, um, make little tweaks, pick up on what you're seeing. Picking up on what you're seeing is just such a big one. Um. And those are very generic answers. But yeah, that that's all. That's that's good stuff. That's there's no really great specific answer to that one. I feel like it's so true though, it's it's that it's it's hard to ever communicate the importance of that concept, and like just saying it, like Oh, you just gotta do it. You just gotta push through, you gotta persevere, you gotta have grit. It's hard to just say it in front to connect to people, but it's I think the best way for people to learn about that is just to see by see examples. So watching people do it, seeing you guys push through day after day, hunting the whether it's the public land challenge in Michigan, excuse me, or if it's you know, anyone of any other people putting it in, putting in the hours day after day, pushing hard in the public or pushing hard in some piece of private or failing, failing, failing, struggling, struggling and struggling, but keeping after it and finally you killed that buck you're after in December. I think that is While there's a whole lot of negativity that can come from social media and everybody having a podcast and everybody having a YouTube channel and all this media out there, it can be overwhelming. There's a lot of Yahoo's out there. But what it has done that I think is pretty cool is that it gives people the opportunity to see that everybody has struggles, everybody has challenges, Everyone screws up. Um, it can feel really lonely if you weren't able to follow along with everybody else making the same mistakes, are having the same challenges and learning as they go to right and pushing through them. Yeah. So there's something to that. Yeah. And and sometimes too, I've been guilty of it. You'll have a bad day. Um, everything every single thing that could possibly wrong, that could go wrong, goes wrong, and you literally feel like you want to quit. You You're like, hunting is stupid. Why do I waste my time doing this? I don't know. Maybe you don't get those days, but but I'll get them, and I'll finally get out of swamp and I'll get back to the truck and you just go to bad wake up next morning. You just need to reset. You need to reset you're thinking, because it does get tricky, it does get hard, and that's kind of the fun of it, that's the beauty of it. And as you progress along, you'll have less and less of those experiences because you'll start to embrace it and love it. And um, I mean, one example that I'll give is if I hate camping, I absolutely hate camping, And if it just seems silly, but I hate sweating, I hate being around the fire, I hate the bugs biting me. But now you yeah, you get it, you get it. I mean, I'll do it. But now you get into the public land challenge. We're sleeping in tents and the rain is plotting out our tents and you're walking through the woods and the bugs are buddy. I love it like I love the chance, like you start to love the the what's the word I'm looking for the process. It's the it's the journey. Yep. So I can have the same bad things go wrong hunting as camping, and I love it. Hunting hated camping. That's the grind. Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm constantly, especially the last year, I've been trying to remind myself of this over and over again, and anyone listening in the Who's Herd past episodes has heard me preach on this lately. But I definitely I get really goal oriented. Like I'm so focused on trying to get whatever that goal is. So if it's the kill on that trip, or if it's the one buck um after this year on a local property, I get so obsessed with it that it's really easy for me to get stressed out by it and just like single mindedly focused and worked up, and then you can lose some of the joy in there if you get two worked up. So I'm constantly trying to reset myself to don't be obsessed with the end goal, obsessed with the process. Enjoy the process. If you can learn to love the journey along the way to the goal, then whether you achieve that thing in the end or not, while of course you want to push for it, um, your ultimate satisfaction or happiness in life or whatever doesn't have to depend on that. If you can learn to love that journey. Um. So that's a personal goal of mind to continue getting better at YAR after year. No, that makes sense that absolutely, I actually I get I want the success so bad that I always make I should say I always I make the mistake and I go shoot two and three year olds. That's that's one of my big things that I gotta quit doing. Um Like, if I wouldn't have shot the buck, that the bedded buck, and I would have wait another twenty minutes, I'd have a hundred or if you know Hio, you know Ohio. If I would have been a little more cuck I guess we didn't talk about the Ohio hunt. I know I didn't. I didn't want to throw you under the bus with the antler shot. Right. We all make mistakes, but I wasn't calculated my shot one in the antler. And it's just those fine little things. You got a tweak, Yeah, so true, all those little things. Um. Okay, So Joe, you spent a whole lot of time with me tonight. I know you've got a little one at home, and uh, I don't want to talk to your off anymore, but I will ask you one final thing you baby Ruth did last year with that buck that you spooked the night before and you went in the next morning killed him right over top of his bed. So I want to see if you can do the same thing for the two thousand twenty season. If you were if you could guarantee that you kill one buck, how do you think it's gonna happen? Like if if you could like picture in your head? Okay, I think I know this one, dear, And I think if if I had to pick, like when I'm gonna kill him, wear them in a kill him, if I forced you into making your very best guests of how it's going to happen. What's that scenario? How are you going to kill a buck this year? Yeah, so there's one one specific book that I've chased for. I want to say it's like four or five years now, and he's seven or eight years old. He's a really old dear and I'm almost positive he's alive based on tracks from the spring scouting here and if if I can call this year I've tried. I could go on. I could spend two hours talking about how I tried to kill this year and all that stuff. But I think this deer's vulnerability is going to be there's again, this is a benefit of mine is not having a lot of deer in our area because there's a small group of doughs that live in a in a spot that I feel like can um manipulate, I guess you could say. And last year, I guess I've had this year for so many different years. I've tried so many different things. And one of the things I theorized last year is hey, when these doughs come into heat, he is gonna be over here wanting to read these doughs in their their night they're back in the cover. Um they're not out and open where everyone else is, so so this is gonna be good. So I threw a trail camera up and this old deer was on it. I believe it was three times over three days during the rough middle of the day UM in this spot. So if if I can tell you how I'm gonna kill this dear, I'm hoping to um during this window, like we said, do the whole the whole repeat thing during this window, catch him doing um what. Hopefully those doughs come and heated at about the same time and I can catch him that way. So I'm if I don't find anything big in the early season, I'm just gonna be patient for the rout because it's I cannot find his bed. Um, I'll keep looking for it. But that's how I'm gonna kill a buck during the rut. Awesome, which is interesting because I've heard you in the past say that the rut frustrates you and that you don't like it. So now you're learning to love your nemesis. Yes, absolutely all right, Joe, this has been fun. I appreciate you taking this time to do this. Um. If people want to follow along with your hunts and different things, you've got going on or that's going on the Hunting Beast. Where can they where can they find all that stuff? Yeah? So um, head on over to my Instagram. Just type in my name Joe Rome stir or on the Hunting Beast. Um. If you want to something something I always thinks kind of If you my name is Predator TC on the Hunting Beast form. If you click on my name and scroll back to some of my very first questions, you can see some of the most basic stuff, which is sometimes I read my own stuff and I'm like, what the heck? So yeah, the Hunting Beast or Instagram. That's awesome, Joe. All right, well, good luck this coming season. I hope that early or whatever part remember that was. I hope that's a good a good rough for you and that you you kill that old sucker. Yeah, thank you, and I hope you get that that one that the little guy was holding the sheds of so he can hold the rack man that he's he's my Moby Dick this year. That's the buck I'll be losing sleepover so fingers fingers crossed it all right, all right, and that's going to do it. I hope you guys enjoyed this one. It's got me just chomping, chomping at the bit to get after some white tails and man, get ready, it's going to be here before we know it, and that is a beautiful thing. So until next time, thank you for listening, and stay wired to hump