00:00:01 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson. 00:00:20 Speaker 2: Hey everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson. In today's episode is all about mystery and the deer woods. Why it's such a good thing? Hey, quick, before I get into this, I got to ask you guys a favor. If you're not subscribed to the Wired to Hunt podcast, can you just do that so my boss will leave me alone on this topic. It would be really really nice if you did that, if you're not already subscribed, so then I can stop asking you for stuff like this. Thank you in advance. I put some miles on my truck this brand, hunting turkeys in a few new locations in Nebraska and Kansas and came away with the old feeling that sparked this podcast. It's that feeling this keeps me going, you know, new places, new experiences, a little of the unknown that stuff goes a long ways toward keeping the fire lit, and on top of that, I think it makes you a better hunter. This sort of thing goes against the grain and with a lot of white tail hunting these days, but I don't think that's a bad thing. And I know I talk about this topic a lot, but I really want to dive into it here because I think it's super important. So I'm going to do that right now. A few weeks ago, I dropped my boat off at a service center to get a few things looked at before the small mouth moves shallow and I forget about turkeys for another year. I happen to bump into an old acquaintance of mine from my tournament fishing days, and we struck up a conversation. And while a lot of it centered on deer in turkey hunting, because like a lot of us, he goes pretty hard in the outdoors in several directions, but predictably, you know, we got to talking about bass first. He's kind of like me, although I hate to admit this, but he's a lot better of a fisherman, but he is like me in a way that he's mostly stopped fishing for a trophy and has just stayed fishing like a fiend because it's damn fun. We talked about a few different tours we competed against one another on, but mostly about our mutual friends and what they are up to, And finally we got onto the topic of forward facing sonar. Now, if you don't know what this is, I'll give you a brief and probably somewhat inaccurate rundown. Imagine your typical depth finder which shows you a view of what's below your boat, Or at least they used to. But over time the big brains at some of the fishing and electronics companies realized they could probably angle transducers to the sides and show fishermen not only what was under the boat, but what kind of structure was within casting distance on each side of your boat. And side imaging is damn cool if ever used it, and the rocks and sunken trees and all kinds of stuff you can see with it change how you fish. That was only a matter of time before someone decided to point the whole thing toward the front of the boat, juice it up a bit to make it a bit more sensitive, and voila you have forward facing sonar. Now that might not sound like a big deal, but if you use it, or better yet, fish with someone who knows how to use it, it's a game changer for real. I'd say the difference between it and the older graphs would be like using a brand new crossbow versus busting out an old re curve. Forward facing sonar is so effective at not only showing you whether fish are in front of you, but where they are in the water column or how they're relating the structure. It's a different thing entirely a factor in that you can also see your lure or your presentation, even a small croppy jig, and then you can see the fish moving in to eat it or swimming away because they're spooked, and you start to see where this is going. Now, in some situations, like where you have a boulder field or maybe a rocky point in front of you, you can pull up and see whether there are any fish even to cast too. If not, you can move. For species like muskies, this is something that takes the fish of ten thousand casts and turns it into the fish of not very many casts. What I know about this technology is that it works insanely well and when it comes down in price to where the average fishermen might have it, there's probably going to be some new laws regulating it. It's probably going to impact the resource. There just isn't any other way to look at it, I don't think. And it's a shame too, because forward facing sonar is fun to use and it can teach you a lot about fish behavior, but it's also a big step toward taking the mystery right out of fishing. And if fishing is good for one thing, it's the promise of something cool happening at any moment, even if that thing thing mostly doesn't happen. Sounds a little like deer hunting, doesn't it, And we are working hard to take the mystery out of deer hunting. I had a conversation recently with a fella about selling one of my properties, and he mentioned that he just came across a cheap ish trail camera that uses AI to identify individual bucks and then factors in when they were moving and what conditions were prevalent to try to predict when that individual buck will move again. Now, this guy was all in on that idea, but I wasn't you know, different strokes for different folks and all that jazz. But here's the thing, though, that shit is coming and it'll change the game for a lot of us. We will use it to try to hunt precisely when we should be able to kill, and it'll work some, it should work a little bit, but mostly we will use it as a reason to hunt and a reason to not hunt. And if the software gets good enough to predict individual buck movement, it will be a huge, huge, huge hit amongst hunters. There will be a lot of us who kill more bucks and more bigger bucks, but who also don't get better at deer hunting. In fact, a lot of that stuff will probably make us worse deer hunters in general. But it really won't matter to most of us. But if that matters to you, or the idea of it just doesn't sit well, then consider why. Maybe you're hardwired to solve a problem because you wouldn't like deer hunting if you weren't that way, at least to some extent. That's the best part about the outdoor stuff. It's not the grip and grins and getting seventy one likes on your trophy photos. It's willingly engaging in something that forces you to solve a problem, often many of them in succession, to finally fill that tag. But also think about it this way. What's really cool about deer hunting to you? Specifically? I mean, is it running cameras and glassing all to find your hitlister and then drilling down to kill only him throughout the season? Okay, you do you, but think about it a little bit differently. One of the things that I love about deer hunting is hearing a stick crack at prime time and just knowing someone is going to come down the trail. But is it a fourky or a one to fifty, a dough, a buck, a raccoon? Who knows? But that space between hearing the stick crack and something materializing is damn fun. What about when you're sitting on stand just having a look around and you catch a glimpse of movement in the woods. Is it just another fox, squirrel, a blue jay or a deer? And if it is a deer, what deer is it? What about when you just get sick of sitting the usual stands and you go make a natural blind somewhere that you usually don't hunt. How does that feel different from the stands you always go to because it will feel different. Where I'm going with this is just to act ask you to think about the little parts of deer hunting that make it so fun. Walking into your setup and seeing a fresh scrape or a fresh rub and wondering if something new and antlerie is about to stroll through at some point. That's fun. There are a lot of different ways the unknown can make deer hunting special. But here's the rub. We won't seek it out mostly. I kind of look at this like the new weight loss drugs that have taken over the market. Anyone with the money or probably good enough insurance can now use an appetite suppressant and probably drop some pounds. It's simple, and yet it's not. Now. Going from an unhealthy weight to a healthy weight and not experiencing any side effects is objectively a good thing, there's no question there. But losing that weight from an injection is different from losing that weight through discipline. The result might seem like the same thing, but it's not. The person who uses the drug to get skinny hasn't changed as a person mentally psychologically besides weighing less. The person who loses the weight through diet and exercise has fundamentally changed themselves as a person to some extent. Now we can skin these kiddies a whole bunch of different ways. But on the deer hunting front, if we have an easy way out, we generally take it. I'm not above it, and neither are you, probably, But when we do that, we almost inevitably miss out on that crucial component of hunting that makes it so special and so different from most of our day to day lives, where we know exactly what's going to happen, and it's honestly not that exciting. So how do you get some mystery back? Well, you have to fight your nature mostly and make an effort to do something different. I go back and forth on this because it's nice to default to some hunting scenarios where I know if I do this, then that will probably happen. My spring turkey hunting this year is a prime example of that. Now at home, I hunted two properties by my house that have lots of birds and where I can set up for them. Works really well. My daughters killed Tom's in the first few days of the season, and then I wrote a Tom. It wasn't challenging really, and while it was fun, especially for the girls, there wasn't a ton of mystery involved. I know it's just a question enough blind time and the toms will eventually respond to my calling on those places. And because of that, and because I know that I don't always get what I need out of hunts like that, I impulsively did two things and I've talked about. I bought a Nebraska tag and told myself I was going to hunt some piece of public land somewhere that I had never set foot on. And I applied for a Kansas tag with the exact same goal in mind. 00:10:59 Speaker 1: Now. 00:10:59 Speaker 2: I didn't find much in Nebraska for deer sign but man, was it fun to finally shoot a jake. After roaming new ground for a few days in Kansas, which was a hunt that I probably did the least amount of planning for that I've ever done at any point in my life, I managed to stumble into a piece of ground that was full of turkeys and had quite a few deer on it, as well as quail and pheasants. I also learned that Kansas has four kinds of rattlesnakes and a hell of a lot of scorpions, which like to hide where guys like me like to look for fossils, and very close to where guys like me like to camp. Now in Kansas, I managed to call in a hen who was desperately trying to shake off one of those super jakes, and after I shot him, I realized how different I felt on those type of hunts. There's an uncertainty to a ten hour drive to some state you've only been to a handful of times and then trying to find some public land that will offer you up a decent hunt and a decent chance. But that land you've never set foot on is chock full of mystery. Are there birds there? Or are there any deer here? How about? What's the hunting pressure? Like? Is it light? And if it is, why, If it's not, when will it be? Where will the animals go when it's not. This is the thing that drives me so nuts about this movement to boot non residents out of every state so that we can all have theoretically easier hunting at home. When we do that, besides acting like anti hunters in our own right kind of, we are removing the opportunity for someone to just go try to find a little mystery somewhere else, because it's often hard to find at home, given the fact that we can learn properties well when we live right where we hunt. But you might not want to travel, and that's okay. You can force yourself to engage in a bit of the unknown at home as well. Now, this might be the most crucial step for most of us to level up our big buck game. If I'm being totally honest, I think that we look at big bucks like this. They are largely unkillable at any given point in the season, But they are actually mostly unkillable where we hunt most of the season, and by that I mean from the stands and blinds we choose to hunt the most. This is obviously why we like the rut so much, because we get to generally hunt where we want to and how we want to, and the odds of a good one coming through tick up somewhat. But what about the rest of the dear seasons? And what about all those days when the rut doesn't seem to be happening at all, and you just sit your favorite stand watching squirrels and wondering what the hell is going on? Ask yourself some questions, and then go try to answer them. If what you're doing isn't working, it's because what you're doing doesn't work very well. I think the loudest anti non resident voices need to hear this, because there is good hunting on public land in a lot of places, and if you can't get it done, it might not be because I might show up for a few days and hunt the same parcel. It's often because of what you're doing that doesn't work. We make a lot of mistakes, and we dig in our heels and we all do this, and instead of going why, we often double down and triple down and beat that dang dead horse until it's just a bloody pulp out in the pasture. A better bet is to go. If not this, then what what am I missing? What can I try that might change up everything for me? The real problem with this is that we often have very little confidence in chasing the unknown, so we just don't do it. I fight this all the time when I have a dear situation where it seems like they are breaking my mental rules about deer behavior that I have all gelled up in my smooth brain. I often fight a battle against myself to leave what I think I should do for something that will yield unpredictable results, but maybe better results. That's harder than most of us realize, but it's the secret sauce to figuring out what to do and what not to do. Forcing yourself to just run a camera and a question mark spot is a baby step in the right direction here because it'll show you something that you don't know. It will make you go, hmm, that's kind of interesting. Walking a whole creek bottom on public land to look at every crossing. We'll do this too. Glassing multiple nights in a row during the summer, that'll do it too. The bachelor group might not show on one night, but be sick as thieves the next night, and then you have to ask yourself why. This is one of the biggest reasons I think having at least one mobile setup, whether that's a saddle or a lightweight stand, matters a lot. The ability and the willingness to go, you know what, I'm going to sneak in and sit that island in the swamp just for the hell of it. That stuff's huge. There is mystery to that. And putting yourself somewhere new, somewhere different, to let the dear show you something is a great way to kill more big bucks. I think about how often my buddies and I will pheasant hunt a property one way over and over, season after season, and then for some reason, at some point, often because of the conditions or the wind direction, we'll just hunt it a different way, and the roosters will do what the roosters aren't supposed to do. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's dangerous to think we know too much and to use that to keep us from being curious about what we don't know. We make educated guesses all of the time in deer hunting, and in fact, that's kind of how the whole thing is played. But when we make those guesses, we often don't see them through. We go where the hell did that big deer end up all season long? Well? Did you go look for him or his sign? Did you move your cameras around to see if you could find him? Did you decide it was safer to not do any of those things for fear of bumping him off of his pattern, which is ironic because he's already off whatever pattern he is supposed to be on. Those thoughts don't come into play on over the road hunts nearly as much, which is why I like them. They teach you to be curious and try to answer your questions before the clock runs out. But our home ground hunts they do the opposite. We play it safe and tamp down our curiosity for fear of getting things wrong. But that is a move as well, and it's often the wrong one, and it's also often way less fun, which is maybe what I should say to wrap this podcast up. You want to have fun out there on every hunt or during every scouting trip, then embrace the mystery, be curious, and when you are try to satisfy that curiosity. Ask yourself what you don't know and how you could come to know something. Don't be afraid of the unknown out there, because it'll teach you more than the things we already know to be true about the deer that we hunt, or the things we think we know to be true. Mystery and the outdoors is good, and if you learn to love it, you'll kill more. Big Bucks promise you that, and I promise you if you come back next week, I'll talk about something that is front and center in my life, hunting small properties with high amounts of pressure. That's it for this episode. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for going over to the mediator dot com, watching our films, reading our articles, maybe grabbing a recipe off of there, you know, doing the crossword puzzle, whatever. Lots of good stuff there while you're there. If you get the itch to do a little shopping, you can check out the Mediator Store. But check out the content that we drop. We work pretty hard here to make sure that we have fresh content going up every single day, and we cover a ton of different topics, entertainment, education, it's all mixed up in there. Go check it out at the mediator dot com, and again, thank you for everything.