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 Kenyon. This episode number one Tay in the show, we're joined by Aaron Warburton, a d i Y public land hunting specialist and a member of the Midwest white Tail team, and we're going to great detail on his public land journey and the tactics he uses now to kill mature bucks on heavily pressured land. Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, brought to you by Sit to Gear, and today we're joined by Aaron Warburton, and Iowa bow hunter and a longtime member of the team over at Midwest white Tail. And Aaron is found a niche in the hunting world as a public land bow hunting specialist and in recent years over on the Midwest white Tail web and TV shows his public land exploits. They've they've gotten quite a lot of interest him and a team of other guys who are doing this. And Aaron and this group of folks over there that are focusing on this public land stuff, they have without a doubt proven that killing big mature bucks on public land. Even in states like Iowa where you would expect there to be a lot of nonresident hunting pressure on those public lands, you know, it is definitely possible. You can go to these places without owning any land, without leasting any land, and you can have success. So as you're gonna come to hear, if you haven't been watching what they've done over on Middlewest white Tail, they are absolutely getting it done. So today I get to chat with Aaron in detail about his background as a public land hunter, the different philosophies and tactics he uses to find and kill bucks in these situations, and particularly interesting, we get to dive into the specifics of a much talked about situation. Um, if you follow to us white Tail, you're familiar with this spot of public land where Aaron and a couple of his friends were hunting that they referred to as the buck Nest, where they're seeing a lot of really really nice bucks back on public land. And so we get to dive deep into how we found this spot, how they approached, how they scouted it, how they hunted it, their plans for this year. Very very interesting stuff. I think you're gonna enjoy this episode. But before we get to that, I do have my co host Mr. Dan Johnson with me for the intro here, and I want to offer fair warning if you're new to the podcast and if you're if you're right, if you're not interested in hearing rambling conversations here at the beginning here about screaming kids or hunting pronghorn or pack rafting in one of the largest wilderness areas in the lower forty eight Uh, if you don't want to hear on that point stuff, yeah, brownie points. If you don't want to hear about those things, you can fast forward a little bit to get to our interview with Aaron. But uh, what do you say, Dan? Should we get into these These are fun rambling intro thoughts. Yeah, and I like the warning, but don't fast forward because dude, life is like life in general, is what's interesting? Right? I Mean, we could sit here and talk about deer all day long, but you know, it's it's life. You know what happens in life that is uh that I think is is different than what everything else that's out there. We Uh, I don't know. I don't know if our lives are that interesting, but we certainly try to tell the honest truth, at least about what's going on. Right. It's a normal life though, Like I don't know how many people's dogs crapped on their carpet last night while they were sleeping. But this morning at five, when I woke up and went out to the kitchen to make coffee, either's about six little dog turds all over this brand new rug that my wife bought. And uh, I got mad and I said, swear words the dog. I cleaned it up. And you do you remember that one time where you accidentally ate dog food and didn't realize it. I'm glad you brought that up again. A high point in Dan Johnson's life. Hey man, I've I've had to climb out of the gutter to get where I'm at today. You know, I like you know Don Higgins, our guest last week, he said that he just he lives in the gutter. So if you scraped the bottom of the barrel, that's where you feel like. That's where we find you too, Dan, That's where I hang out. Those are my people. So what what's what's new in the gutter today? Well, in the gutter? Uh, all right, So me and my wife never really had a honey mute moon. And she is like dot un She's a wine freak, right, she loves wine. And so today I just bought plane tickets for it's not this year, but for uh summer of next year for Napa Valley. So I'm gonna I'm gonna surprise her on her birthday, which is next week. I'm having a surprise birthday party for her. Um. So when she gets home from work, all of all of her friends, all of our friends and family are going to be at the house, and we are going to uh surprise her. And then I'm gonna surprise her with these Napa Valley um Air airline tickets uh for June of next year, and she the baby, she might be so excited that the baby pops out. Well, get that done over with, right, absolutely. Man, you weren't kidding about the brownie points. Yeah, I gotta get gotta get the brownie points, and then that should get me a secure foothold for about just about any Western trip that I want to take next. That'll be really good. Now, one thing I'm a little worried about, though, you said this is gonna be a surprise, aren't you worried about her listening to this episode. Are you kidding me? No, she doesn't even listen to my podcast. Oh man, that's cool. That's a good plan, a very good plan. So Brownie Party order a couch too. Dang, yeah, that should get you some October hunts this year. Then I'd say, I don't know about that. Come on, it's just a couch, man, Right, you should see our couch. It has like kool Aid stains all over it, just like milk stains, like kids. Like the other day you guys even had kids, right, Oh, Mark, throw it in the low blows. I like it. The other day we had pizza. You know, it's one of those days where as a parent, you'll have days like this, Mark, where you will that's the weird by the life. What that you're making that reference that I'm going to have. You're gonna days like this where everybody's busy the only thing that you know time will allow. You're so tired, you're okay, screw it. Let's just put a frozen pizza in the oven. The kids eat the frozen pizza. And if your son is too for my son's too. He doesn't eat like with a fork and little bites. He takes a pizza piece of pizza, puts it in his hand and makes a fist and then like punches himself in the face with it repeatedly. And that's how he eats, right, So, so he gets all over his face, right and all over his hands. And we always take a shirt off when he eats because he gets it all over his clothes. And you know, so that's how he eats. So I picked him up off the table and I set him down on the kitchen around the dining room, uh floor, and he runs out. He gets away from me, and he runs out like mac, no, get back your stop, no, no no, and he runs right onto the couch just like an airplane lands and just smears everything that was on his stomach and hands and face all over the couch. I'm like Jesus. And then he looks at me with looks up at me with a smile, and I'm just like, I don't know what to do right now, go to time out or pick up? I don't know, you know, Just like that my life. Man, oh hey, on the deer. On the deer note though this weekend, you know, I always talked about the truck camera switch that's coming this weekend. You're gonna head out and shift them to the fall range spots. Yep, shift them for fall range. And then I'm going to take part of something I'd like to call stay out September, which means don't go into your hunting property for the month of September. Yeah, it's been kind of nice. I've had like a um a doubly imposed stay out since mid July on my main Michigan properties. Now because of my trip, it will be the least pressure that the area has ever been because usually I'm in there all in in August dealing with food plots and hanging last minute stuff. But I was forced to get all that stuff done super early this year. So holy Field is going to be in your living room when you get back. That'd be nice. Hopefully is at least leaving on living on the property. That's That's what I'm hoping. Excuse me, So wait a second, now, all right, I go to your Instagram and I see all these cool things you do. Yeah, okay, and you did some antelope hunting. I did, and I was extremely jealous. And I see all these Instagram updates of you getting close and then then the antelope running away. So listen, what what was antalope punting light for you? It was like that getting close and then watching the run away. Oh man, I had a ton of fun and I only got to hunt one day. So I've only had one day hunting, and yet I'll get more in um later when I start my white tail um. But it was totally like no preparation whatsoever. I knew nothing of the area at all. I just found some public land that looks good on the map based on the very little I know about antelope, and I had a free day where I didn't have to do any work, and Kylie, it's some other things going on, so I just drop off during the morning and I it basically was a was a mixture of state land and blm land and looked relatively flat with a few rolling hills and grassy sage brushy type cover. So that seemed like good antelope habitat to me. And I get my stuff. I hike up this first hill that that kind of leads up to this flat area on top, and as soon as I crashed that rise, there's a big anilope buck. Like I hadn't even been hunting for ten minutes, and I had already seen my first antelope buck, my first prong horn. I didn't even know if i'd see any at all. I had no idea if they were prong horn. Even there, I was just hoping, hoping there'll be some goats, and there's a buck. So and that was basically the start of like a whirlwind day, like it was so much fun. So I see this buck. He's looking right at me, though he's probably a couple hundred yards away. So I dropped back down the way I came back down that hill, and I stay, I keep that hill in between me and him in circle way around, and then I get all the way around up behind him because he's kind of sitting. He's halfway down another hill. So I stay behind my hill, then get up behind the other one, and I get all the way to behind him, and I keep I keep on sneaking to the edge and peeking over to see where he is, and I'm keeping tabs, and um, I get to with him like seventy yards probably, and he's bedded down there on the side of this hill now. And so at that point I'm like, holy crap, like is this actually gonna happen. I've been hunting problem one for half an hour and I'm about to shoot one. Um, I knock an arrow. I dropped my pack and grab my range finder. I'm checking stuff. I start crawling. Um, just close the distance on him, and then I feel that wind shift. The wind had been kind of like quartering to me and so cutting across my face. So I was trying to angle so I would be able to be within the range of him just before my wind would get towards him. Um. And unfortunately that wind shifted about forty five degrees, went right to him, and you saw him all of this stand up and I get my bowl ready. He's still probably sixty five yards away. And UM. Then I wasn't gonna shoot an antelope unless it was pretty darn close. Just because of the fact that, you know, as we talked about last week or two weeks ago or whatever it was, you know, I'm shifting up my shooting process my whole Um, I'm kind of relearning a new way to shoot my bow. So I really want to I don't want to shoot any long shots early on. I want to be safe and make sure I get a good shot. So sixty yards is too far away from me right now. So he stands up and I'm looking at him, and he didn't like look at me or look at my in my direction, but just all of a sudden bam, like a bolt of lightning, he just just sprinted away full speed and went just running off forever. And I just I stayed still, and he stopped every hundred yards, stopped and look back in my direction. And I just stayed frozen all the way till I don't know, like five minutes maybe, until he disappeared over another rise, and then I just sprinted. I sprinted all the way across this wide open flat expans for as long as I could. Finally got over this next rise, and there's this little basin there's a water hole down the bottom, and some cattle, and I could see him pretty far away now but angling back into this other like kind of draw heading up behind these other hills. So I'm like, all right, maybe I can cut him off go in that direction. So I started running the other way, and um man, I absolutely wore myself out in this day. I put on more than ten miles in the boots, lots of ups and downs, and um well, long story short on that I try to cut him off. I come over another hill and here's ten more bucks just over the edge of property, the property land, so they were on the private side. And so I'm I won't walk you through the entire day, but that was like basically the day I was in antelope. Whole day. I had three stocks. So I had that first stock that I got within like seventy or sixty five yards, and then he winded me. I had another one where um, I was making a move to another group of better antelope I saw across the way, and I was going through these little ditches and gullies down the bottom spot here, and as I came over a little bump, I saw the back of an antelope. And then eventually as I got I kept sneaking in getting closer, and then that they're into being six bucks there down this bottom and I got really close to them. I had them at probably fifty five yards, but if super windy, and I'm sitting there on my knees, I'm ranging them, and at this point they had they had seen me. That's I mean, I'm sure you when you were hunting Muley's slash, she has an antelope with you in Nebraska. I'm sure you saw this. It's like everyone says they have incredible eyesight, but it's like you don't actually feel that until you're actually there, and like not even if you're not moving at all, like you can be completely stock still and they just see you no matter what. Oh yeah, so fifty five yards. They kind of knew I was there. They knew something was there, but they weren't totally freaked up. But one of them would be looking at me of the it will be feeding and then move off, and I'm sitting there, I'm like, gosh, a fifty five yard shot. You know a lot of guys would take that shot going after antelope or something out west. But I just I just didn't want my first shot with this new shot sequence and shot process to be along poke like that in the wind. So um, so I watched them. They go over a little rise, then I do like some super crab crawling to try to close the distance. And when I get over that next little rise of right to the edge of and peak over, there's nothing, nothing there, And they had booked it, And so I had one more stock like that later in the day. Um, same deal. I got close, not quick close enough, but um I saw a lot of antelope, had a lot of fun, and it was public land, free to anyone to use. The first time I've ever set foot there, and I had like an incredible hunt. So it's just a great reminder to me of how achievable or something like that is, you know. Now, Yeah, I did get lucky that I picked a good spot, but um man, anyone can do it. It was awesome. It was so much fun. Yeah, I definitely want to get out. I think that's something that me and you need to do together, to do an antelope punt in a couple of years. I think that'd be a lot of fun. And there's places to do it that aren't too terribly far away from you, and maybe we could do like you did Nebraska or South Dakota or all the way out to Montana or Wyoming. But it's not too bad. I don't care where it's at. I just want to go and hunt stuff and super pretty country, you know. I think it's kind of like what you were dealing with in the sandhills. He's rolling kind of golden amber hills of grass, huge vistas like the horizons never ending. It was just it was super cool. So and I think we had to talk about that a while ago. You know, it's like mountains are awesome, but at the same time, there's something about the prairie man that's just different but at the same time breathtaking. Oh yeah, yeah, I love I love the planes. It's yeah, very very cool. What I found is, like, I think the one thing that both of them have in common those two different kind of ecosystems were general relizing here. But why do open space, big views, big skies. I love just being able to see often the distance. Um, I really like that rather than being hemmed in deep in a force. And there's something cool up being in a force too, But I like those views. So absolutely, man, who's super cool? And now, um, I'm heading out in a couple of days, so when people start listening to this, I'll actually be out there. I'm heading out on a four day backpacking and pack rafting trip into the Bob Marshall Wilderness in northern March. So that's gonna be quite an adventure. We're gonna be paddling up this lake into the mountains and then getting out packing up the rafts hiking. I don't know, fifteen or more miles up this river up into the core of the wilderness and then spending it up there and then rafting our way back down, um down all the way back out. So that's gonna be uh, that's gonna pretty cool. We're gonna do much fly fishing all the way. And the wife is going to be with you. The wife is not going to be with me. She's uh, yeah, we decided this one was going to be a little bit too much for you know, her being pregnant and everything. So she's gonna hang out in town. And my buddy Andy. I don't know if you've met Andy et, but Andy's actually flying out here and he's going to join me for it. Andy May not Andy May sorry, Andy Brad Andy Bratt one of my another buddy of mine in Michigan. So yeah, man, so that's my story. And and then I get back from that, get back from that, and like three days later it's Alaska and then White Tails. So it's gonna be a whirlwind. Yeah. You you're gonna be busy. Yeah, very like choke it in, man, choke it in. Yeah. And in no way can I complain at all because it's like the coolest schedule stuff, but it is like a little overwhelming, Like I'm a little bit like holy smoke, there's so much going on. Um Like, I have not been able to like put as much time in planning any one of these as I wish I could. Um So like this backpacking trip has been like thrown This about Marshall trip has been like thrown together all last minute. And then I get back for three days and then like try to get everything packed and ready to go to Alaska, and then I'm there. I get back on the ninth and that day I get back, I'm just gonna grab the camper and drive across the state to where I'm going to try to white tail hunt. And then I I budgeted myself four days to try to kill a white tail and a pronghorn in Montana, and then I got driving to North Dakota and I have four more days to try to get a white tail there. And all I've done I've never seen any of these places. I've only just looked at maps. But I spent like three hours last night studying maps, trying to pick the best public pieces and dialing in where I think the best access points will be to them. And so I've got like I focused on Montana last night. I've got like five different sections of public land I think have potential, and I'm probably just gonna drive out there the first morning or first night whenever I get there and just glass and try to pick whichever one looks to the most promising. And then it's just like learning the fly. It's gonna be one of those kinds of septembers, just learning on the fly. Hey, that's uh, that's part of the Uh, that's I guess that's all that's intriguing in a way. You know, Yeah, yeah, it'll be. It'll be a learning experience for sure. And like the the Adventure, that a lot of adventure, just like a lot of unknowns. So right, one way or another, I'll learned something. I don't know if I'm gonna fill any tags, but i'll learn something. Hey, you might learn where not to hunt. That's true. That's true. Hopefully it's not what I learned, but the worst case scenario. Yes, that's so. I don't know anything else you want to cover before we kick this over to the main interview. No, man, I you know, I'm just a dad with two and a half kids. I'm a dad. Well, I'm a future dad with about half a kid. Yeah in the in the oven and uh yeah. So all right, well, let's let's shut the centro down next week. I think we've got a good guest on on on Tap for next week that you'll be able to be with us for the whole one. You weren't able to join us for today's interview because of some scheduling things on my end, but thanks for happening on for the intro, Buddy Mark, It's always a pleasure to to be in your digital presence. Well you flatter mere, we go, here we go. All right, let's let's stop while we're still barely ahead, and we're gonna kick it over to our sick story, and then after that we will get Aaron on the line. For this week's side story, we're joined by Montana Wilds Travis Botton, who tells us about an elk count that became something more so. Was October and at the beginning of rifle season. The plan was to take my dad out on a first l cont to hopefully still his tag. The conditions were perfect. We had a little bit of fresh snow, and right away we found fresh bowl tracks, and so my dad and I. We just started following the tracks of the snow, hoping we'd catch up to the elk, and we actually caught a glimpse of the bowl looking at through the timber what we see about dred and fifty yards away, and unfortunately we bumped the bowl. So he just continued to follow the tracks and my dad hit this patch of trees where it actually stopped him, and he was kind of, I guess, discouraged on trying to break through the brush and potentially, you know, scare the the bowls away any further, and I ended up finding a new pathway and as I cleared the trees, I could see a black on white moving through the forest about hundred yards away, and instantly I thought it was a bear, but had a long two ft tail, so I dropped to a knee. I instantly knew it was a wool and one shot later the wolf dropped in his tracks and I had filled my first wolf tag ever. On Travis's hunt, which you can see on Montana Wild's Vimeo page, he was wearing a storm front jacket and mountain pants. If you'd like to create a sick Of story of your own, or to learn more about Sitka's technical hunting apparel visit sitka gear dot com. Alright with us on the line now is Aaron Warward and welcome to the show. Aaron. Thanks for having me Mark. Yeah, absolutely, I've for a long for pretty a long time now. I've been following what you've been doing over at Midwest White Tail and have seen a pretty cool progression with what you've been doing, both from a content standpoint and from a hunting standpoint, especially with a lot of public land stuff going on. So I'm glad we can finally connect and talk more. You know, it's just been kind of quick highs and hellos at shows or emails, So I'm glad we could do this. Thank you for making the time. Yeah, no problem. I'm looking forward to Yeah, definitely Land. I'm sure you've got the it's that I've got right now, these these late August days are getting me pretty pretty anxious to get in the White Hill Woods. You feel in the same way. Oh yeah, we've already been out Oh, I mean between three and five times a week for the last month or so, you know, whether we should be or not, we've so been going out there and uh and you know, getting cameras out and scouting some new areas, trying to plot some tree stand locations for the fall, and checking out some new public lands that you know, just became available in some different spots. Because we try to keep it, we try to keep a close eye on that all the time as well. You know, these states um sometimes purchase extra pieces, you know, depending on the year and what their goals are and what their budgets are, and whenever they buy them, we like to go and check out the new stuff. We've been We've been doing a lot of that here lately. That's exciting to find one of those spots and you one of the first people to get in there. That's always a good situation. Yeah, sometimes they forget to sign them for a couple of years and it's pretty pretty good hunting as you can imagine. But yeah, any any time we get to get on new ground, which luckily for us hunt in public land, there's there's a good amount of it, if you know, if you're willing to drive a few hours to get there, So we're never short on new spots and adventurous scouting missions. That's awesome. Well, I want to dig into a lot of that stuff. You mentioned, you know, finding all these public land spots and the scouting are doing all that stuff. But I guess before we get there, um, can you just give us the the one oh one on how you got to this point with the Midwest white tail and then maybe what you're doing now today too. Okay, Well, I mean my story is is pretty basic redneck from northern Missouri, from a little bitty town of about nine thousand people called Paris. And uh, when ever, since I was really young, we were hunting and fishing in the woods. You can imagine rural community like that, that's sort of part of your lifestyle for a lot of families and mine was no different. So growing up, we were always in the woods hunting stuff and total cameras around and uh, you know, I mean from an early early age, like nine years old, the first hunting videos that I saw. This is kind of what I wanted to do. So early on, you know, we had video cameras floating around. Old you know, take cameras and stuff that I think my dad's still got a few of them in his house that are just sitting back there collecting dust. But that's uh, basically started when I was very young. And just slowly progressed, um into what I'm doing now. And that's, uh, that's my passion. It's it's filming you know, hunts and trying to really trying to recreate content that the average hunter can relate to. That's kind of what that's what drives us, um, you know, specifically us here in the office and the public land guys, we all sort of have had the same interests in that regard. Whatever we're doing, I mean, whether it's helping somebody on private or or you know, hunting private occasionally or hunting public, that's what we're always trying to do is just relate to the average guy. So um, you know, because that's who we are, that's where that's where I came from. So I like, I'd like to think that I relate to those people or try to anyway. Um. But yeah, the whole video thing started at a young age and just progressed through it and eventually met some folks in the outdoor industry going to Turkey colong contests and stuff, and just sort of grew the network from there and uh, and always was involved in video editing even through college and and doing other things when I was younger. I've always stayed involved in video editing and and doing stuff kind of freelance for the hunting industry for a while before I started here. I've been I've been at Midwest Whitetel now for uh I think six years, started here in two thousand and eleven and been here ever since. And that started an internship? Is that right? Yep? Started as an internship as most of our employees UM at Midwest Whitetel did start the as an intern except for Greg. He came on full time in two thousand and ten. And then I was an intern with four other fells in two thousand eleven. That's awesome and uh, and so what what's officially your role now? What exactly do you have your your your hands on? Oh, I'm then I'm a video producer first and foremost. UH, I just work on all kinds of projects from from you know, different accounts and stuff that we have with sponsors and brands that support our show. UM. Right now, I'm starting to work on the Cabella's White Tail Season series, which is something that UM I do for them in their website every year. And then uh, we also produce lots of how to and gear tips for their YouTube channel and some of their other stuff that they have going on in the house, and I I kind of head up all the Cabella's accounts that we have, um as far as that goes. And then uh, I managed the office here in Midwest Whitea. We've got three employees including me and three interns this fall, so it's gonna be pretty hectic place. But I kind of oversee operations and make sure that that the interns are, you know, on the straight and narrow, and we're we're getting work accomplished and and that sort of thing. It gets real hectic, but it is definitely a lot of fun. Man. You've you guys have just have so much different content coming out and I can't imagine trying to keep track of it all because, like you said, you've got things going on for Cabella's. You guys do the Chasing November show kind of later in the year. That's kind of that more produced version of the Live Hunts you're putting out for all the day from shows and then holy smokes, and I don't know how you keep your head straight during the season or at any point when you have so many and then the Turkey stuff in the spring. Uh, how do you how do you remember what you have for breakfast in the morning after all that. It's pretty it's pretty tough. But we drink a lot of coffee, let's put it that way. Um, and we don't have your average work hours. Um. That may that may have something to do with why I'm not married yet, but yeah, I don't know. Uh. We uh, we stay extremely busy and and uh we have the freedom to work here, you know, at night when you can't legally hunt, So we we work here at night most of the time. That's when we get most for editing done throughout the fall, and are are uploading our web content stuff to the different sites that we manage, including this Midwest white Tail. But yeah, we spend we spent a ton of time in the field hunting during the day, work during the night. And that's a pretty good schedule. I think a lot of guys that like that. Yeah, yeah, um, And that's and that's one of the things that gets gets us a lot of intern applicants every year. And then once they get here and they realize, you know, two hours of sleep on average every night for a month and a half straight, eventually starts to wear a little bit. Yeah that can you can see that being pretty brutal for sure. Um, yeah, it's grueling, but it's fun. Yeah. Yeah. But I think to something you alluded to earlier, I think that adding what you guys have been doing from a public land standpoint has been a really great way to counterbalance some of the things that Bill is doing and some of the other guys on the team, Um that have a bunch of land in a great state, heavily managed and that that's fun to see, but sometimes not everybody can can relate to that. So I think you guys have done a really nice job of of of showing what Bill is doing, which is amazing and people love seeing that, but then also seeing what you guys are doing, which seems much more within the reach of you know, the average guy or girl. So, um, you guys are doing great work. Big props to you guys for that. I've enjoyed falling along And um, I guess related to that public land aspect, you mentioned that you know, that's a lot of what you're doing now from a hunting standpoint. When did that start for you? You've been hunting public land for pretty long time, is that right? Yeah, Um, To be honest, I've been hunting public since I since I started hunting when I was really young. The first buck that I ever killed with my bow, I think I was twelve, um, And I could be off a year one way or the other there, but I believe I was twelve, and that buck actually walked off a public land with another one and onto the edge of private land that I had permission to hunt at the time, and uh, and I got a shot at and been killed him. So we hunted that that public land back home a ton when I was younger. We spent a ton of time on it all the time, and we in back in those days it was much easier to get permission on private land, so we also had lots of private land to hunt. But you know, when that permission started drying enough, as I got older into my teenage years, hunting that public started to come more of a priority, because you know, I didn't want to quit, honey, so that was sort of the option I was left with in that particular situation. So I started hunting more public and and uh got up here Kiowa in eleven and just kept on kept on doing the same thing, you know, I mean I and and the other guys in the officer the same way. Greg came from eastern Nebraska and he hunted public there for many years before coming here. And then Uh and Zach Farrenbaugh Um from out in Ohio. He he hunted public a lot out there with his friends and family before coming here. So it was really just a natural fit for all of us. And of course the interns that come here and I want to be in the woods all the time, most of them don't have access, so it makes it nice and we can just go out to a place where we're all equal and have a level playing field and can store work as a team, and it really works out good. Yeah, yeah, it seems like a good situation. Especially to your point, there's if you're willing to drive there. There definitely is quality public land hunting available in a lot of states. I mean, especially by you guys, there's there's some exceptional quality from a public standpoint, But really, if you're willing to put in the work in time looking for it, you can find places most areas of the country you can get out there at least and have a good experience. Um. I'm curious though, you know, in recent years I know you've killed and the other guys on the team have killed some really nice bucks in public land. Um, and I know pretty recently the last couple of years curtain if I'm wrong, But the last couple of years, I think you've been pretty heavily influenced by guys like Dan Infalt, you know, guys that we follow and learned a lot from two. Um, did you see a dramatic change in your success after you started using some of these different tactics, some of these betting area focuses and some of those scouting tactics that Dan talks about. Or were you still having the same type of success before that and this is just changing a little bit of what you do. Um, we had some success before, but it's definitely helped. And Uh, one reason why I gravitate to Dan so much is because I relate very much to his situation throughout his life. I feel like, you know, and I'm sure a lot of your listeners have listened to those podcasts that you've done with Dan. They're awesome and uh, and learning from him. You know, when he was younger, he sort of just hunted hunted him to death. You know, he was just out there all the time and eventually would would quote unquote dumb into one, you know. And that's that's kind of what the way we were prior to that knowledge. We we spent I'm thinking, you know, throughout my younger years and leading up to that point, before we started concentrating on bed hunting, we spent most of our focus on scouting still, but we scouted a lot of dough betting areas. You know. We we always tried to find local dough groups on these public lands and then we would pretty much surround our entire strategy of round those spots during the rut. Now, we we had success doing that, just hunting strictly during the rut, you know, all day every day for the entire month in November. That's the advantage we have here. And I was you can bow hunt throughout the entire rut um. So we did have some success. But since the betting tactics have come along, it sort of started flipping on these light bulbs in these other times of the year especially and uh and yeah, it definitely definitely helped them. Has had a big impression on me for sure. Yeah. So so for those who maybe aren't familiar with some of these high level things we're talking about, Can you kind of tell us what were those light bulb moments for you? What were these you we've talked about, we've kind of alluded to some bettings type stuff, but can you just give us a little more details specifically what these things were that you started focusing more on that that made these things start working better for you. Well, a lot of the a lot of it was wind based buck betting. Um. When I started figure and now that a lot of bucks bed with the wind of their advantage, we were able to to kind of confirm that theory very quickly, whereas a lot of folks won't be able to do that. And the reason being is because we have so many years worth of footage here in the office. We have so much whitetail footage from great process that we've got all over the country. You know, we've got trail camera images on you know, millions of us you're hearing on our servers. So when I started learning that stuff from Dan about how a buck beds, I started, you know, checking back into all these previous experiences whenever we whenever we would encounter immature buck filming mature buck, you know, we started looking at all that previous footage and then starting to kind of think where that buck is coming from or where he's going to as far as his betting locations go. And after after doing a bunch of that, it started making sense to us. So I mean that that was really when the light bulb came on. I heard about it all at first. We actually did a podcast with Greg Litzinger, I believe, and uh, he's a he's a killer from up in the northeast part of the country up in New Jersey, I think, and uh he started, uh, he started bringing up those tactics in a podcast, So we started researching more into it, and I think, uh the betting stuff aside, the the part about white tail hunting um that it really intrigues me is it's very situational. No matter what you do. I mean, you can you can hunt here an aislea on a piece of public land and drive ten miles up the road to another piece that hunts completely different. And it's just because those deer are so adaptable, you know, and they used that habitat and each one of these areas differently, so being adaptable as a white tail hunter never being become set in your way, so to speak, is gonna help you kill more, dear, and people hear that as a blanket statement all the time, but it is true. Don't ever, don't ever think that you know, you're one method. You might have one method that does work, but if if you want to continue to learn more, especially learn more about deer, then start trying some some other things, and uh, try some of these other off the wall tactics that you hear. I mean, the betting stuff is definitely it's it's definitely proved h to help us out a bunch, you know. And in the lightbulb moment, I guess we we we already had a lot of confidence into it going into last year. But the lightbulb moment for a lot of the viewers happened that the buck Nest video that a lot of folks that I'm sure I've seen on the Midwest Light Tale show, you know, up to that, up to that point, everybody kind of looked at us like we were crazy. But then when all these bucks started staying up out of these beds, they're like, ohly, oh, like yeah, maybe these guys actually are onto something. But yeah, yeah, that's pretty ridiculous. That was some pretty ridiculous footage and encounters you guys had. That's awesome. Um So, so a couple of things. Number One, I agree with you one hundred and fifty on what you just said there about the fact that you just always need to keep an open mind and never get set in your ways. I mean, if there's anything I've learned from doing this podcast and talking to so many different successful hunters, it's that there there's a thousand different ways that skin the cat. You know, there's so many different ways to go about hunting mature bucks, and and I'm always a big believer and take in every single different opinion and perspective as you can, and then run that through the filter of your own circumstances and find whatever pieces and parts you can apply to your own um So, it's it's great to hear that you've got a similar philosophy on then obviously it's working for you. Taking some things you've learned from your own experiences, some things from these guys you've talked to, whether it be Dan or Greg or Bill or whoever, and kind of kind of mix it all together to get the Errand strategy, which is always pretty cool to see um. Now, before we get to the buck nest, you talked about the wind based betting um, So this being how wind direction might influence where buck chooses to bed. Can you elaborate a little bit on that and what you found after you started looking at your pictures and your videos, you know, what was the correlation there um or what was the aja specifically with the wind and how it influenced betting. Well, we started looking through our pictures and we noticed that, like every once in a while, say you're getting a buck pretty regular on your trail camera. I'll just use this and as an example. So you got a buck that's living on your property, you're getting pretty regular on one trail camera, and a couple of days and a matter of weeks, you get him in daylight, you know, almost doing something a little bit differently than he did the the other times that you picked him up. Well, the more we got to look at those images and trying to measure like daylight activity and all this, we we got to thinking, you know, maybe he's not necessarily just being more daylight active that day. Maybe he's betting closer to the dead gum camera, you know, I mean maybe because that would make total sense. Why is he showing up there in the middle of the night five nights out of seven and then boom, all of a sudden, he's here. You know, it's an hour before dark. Well, we found is that a lot of times it depends on their betting locations. You know, there's mature buck don't for the for the most part, they don't move very far during daylight. So if you're going to intercept them, it makes sense to be hunting close to their betting locations. If you can start to predict where those are as far as wind direction goes, then you're obviously going to have more success in my opinion. But yeah, we started looking at those pictures and looking back at all that footage and and everything, and then comparing historical weather data and and going and using WonderGround to do that. But that was what we were noticing is a lot of these areas, not all of them, but a lot of these areas bucks with bed in a specific area with a specific wind, and a lot of a lot of guys you'll hear talking about how bucks will move with the wind of their advantage. I don't know enough about that to say if that's true or not just for my observation, but I will say that theory could come from wind based betting. For example, if a buck is bettered in an area on a northwest wind, and you and every time there's a northwest wind, you know, you see him moving through that area that you're hunting near it, maybe because he's betted in that area, Maybe because the wind is putting in there so bad, not necessarily to move. Oh yeah, So that makes a lot of sense. And and and basically what I think you're saying too, is that a buck is using the wind. When we're saying that the wind is is kind of influencing them to better specific places because they can use that wind to their favor while they're bettered. So correct me if I'm if I'm wrong on this, But I think most scenarios that I see or hear about, you've got a buck that's better than the location where he can look out in front of him, and he's got the wind to his back, so you can smell behind him, he can see ahead of him, and that kind of gives them three relatively three sixty degrees of safety. Um, is that kind of the same thing that you're either seeing or theorizing, and when you think about it, all makes total sense. When when is a mature buck most vulnerable, it's when he's laying down during the day, not moving. I mean a lot of your listeners, I'm sure, have been walking through the woods and jumped to mature buck almost like a rabbit out of a brush pile, you know, I mean, right next to him. And Uh, the reason is is because that's when they're That's when they're at their most vulnerable point. So if they're not using their senses to their ultimate advantage throughout the day when they're bedded, then uh, they're gonna be in trouble. I mean they're gonna get killed. And the interesting thing and Dan's talked about this a lot too, but they always watched that back trail. Remember they go into a bed or a betting area, they always slip around and they're watching down a back trail of some some sort. They're monitoring that somehow, And it makes total sense. You know, when they walk in there, they're laying down, sense, how is the predator going to come in and get them? A lot of times that predators gonna track them into that bed. And if they're if they're turned around and they're watching down that trail that they walked in on. They're gonna see a kyote or a bobcat or mountain lion or whatever it is, or you know, they're gonna see any of those predators coming down the trail coming at them, and they can escape. Most of the best betting areas that we find are set up like that. They've got covered back when coming over the top of them, and then they're looking back down that trail, and uh, the best locations offer great escape routes for him, you know, where they can just pop out of there and then not hardly be seen and be gone in a way. But every time, and like I mentioned, habitat and training is gonna gonna dictate how they bed and how they use an area, so to speak. But the one consistent thing is they're always betted with one to pack. I mean, if you find a buck bed, you know with and and look at how it shaped, you can usually tell which direction he's laying by by looking at the shape of the bed. And is a lot of your October hunting strategy now revolved around knowing that you guys have I don't know fifteen different potential buck betting locations. You guys have scouted out now and you know the given winds that hypothetically a buck would use them. So it's October seventeen maybe and a coal front came through and you've got a northwest wind. You know that there are three different beds that potential beds that maybe there's a buck in there, and you make a move based on that. Is is that a lot of what your strategy looks like now? Yep? It sure does. And the strategy is is different, only changed because now we don't necessarily always hunt with the wind to our advantage. We're looking just to hunt a buck with the wind to his advantage. And that's another one of those kind of general statements that you hear a lot. But that's what we need, is the wind to the buck's betting advantage. Yep. So you're not actually the you know, some people when they say that, they're talking about the buck when it's on the move. So saying like you mentioned earlier, like a buck wanting to move with the wind in his face or quartering to him, you're most more so concerned about how it influenced where he beds. And then that is that's that's probably a little bit of a safer bet as far as the variable a better chance of that being accurate versus how it moves, would you say so? Yep, Yeah, And we've learned some interesting stuff just in the last few years when we've when we've kind of switched our strategy to this. I mean, it's it's really changed how you look at how you look at deer hunting period Um, when you really when you really commit to this and see a lot of people are still real skeptical about it, but and the and they go out and they have trouble finding the beds and everything. But when you really commit to learning how they bet and how they survived during the day, you're gonna you're gonna figure out so much about deer and deer hunting. It's it's unbelievable. Um, just just how deer will will use your property, you know, betting with the wind to their advantage, like that you know where where that where's the pressure at on your property? And uh, you know where are the betting areas? Don't just look at don't just look at these little pockets to cover like they're a betting area that you gotta bounce around and hunt on all sides because the deer may not be there but only a certain few days, depending on depending on the wind. And really it makes sense to pay attention to betting ears rather than you know, travel or of course there's different times of focus on different things. But the betting area is the is the hub of a wheel. So at any given time, that is the spoty is going to be the most And if you know those locations, it's much more easy or much more possible to start predicting how he might be moving out from within that core spot. It's a lot harder to start from the outside and try to figure your way in. Um So, so here's what I want to do. I want to try to break down this a little bit more with an example. Um but I want to start like really high level and then drill in. So let's talk about the buck nest. But let's first start like how what I'm curious about is how do you find a quality piece of public land? How do you start scouting a piece of public land? How do you determine where the best places are within that piece of public land? And then we'll start to talk about hunting it. Actually, so with the buck nest. Example, if you're comfortable talking about that, can you can you talk us through first, you know, how do you find a spot like that? How did you figure out? Hey, this is probably about worth spending some time on, and then we'll drill from there. Well, what's interesting is I think most people have access to spots similar to that. UM. You know, maybe can maybe it's not Iowa buck nests where there's five, you know, four or five year old bucks round around. So if you're hunting the Missouri, for instance, in your and your target buck is a two or three year old buck, you've got areas like that around. I mean, there there's not just one necessarily bucked nests quote unquote that we have found. There's lots of other areas that set up just like that, UM that probably have similar situations. Now, whenever we went into that specific property, it's a few thousand atures in size. So the first thing you do is lay out the public map of the area, and then you start because you're not where all the access points are, UM, start looking at where the pressure is. So you're looking for boot tracks, you're walking those access trails, you're you're looking for you know, tape in in the tree marking, um tax. Anything that's gonna mean mean hunters is what you want to stay away from for the most part. Um. So you you're taking that map and you're crossing off a lot of it, but you can't umm kind I put this, You've you've got to keep an open mind when it comes to every inch of that public piece. So if that's a couple of thousand acres in size, and you cross off a lot of the access points and the area is most likely to to harbord hunters, then you still end up with quite a bit of land that may be untouched and a mature buck. The interesting thing with them is they will go wherever they don't ever encounter humans. I mean sometimes you'd be surprised. It may only be thirty yards off of gravel Road because nobody goes there, and they have that wind advantage on a specific day or whatever, like, they may well bed there and and spend a lot of time right there. So and that's really that's kind of how the buck nest is. That area gets hounted. A lot of people think when they watch the buck Nest video that that area doesn't get a ton of hunting pressure, but it's actually the opposite. If you watch the second video in that video box series, you'll see hunters walk round or need to stand um that night when they're headed out. But uh, there's tons of hunting pressure on that piece. It's just one little, small, out of the way area that those bucks bedding, and there's a couple other ones like that on that public area as well. So the I guess the point there is is don't overlook. Don't overlook anything really. I mean, the more you learn about the more you learn about buck betting in how they use that when to their advantage and stuff, is gonna help you decide which one of those areas you're gonna spend time in. But don't overlook any single one of them. I mean, I've made that mistake ready in the last few years, is just walking by open hardwood hills to get back to the thickest, nastiest spot possible, when in fact that buck, the biggest buck on the property, may be betted in those open hardwoods. Um, if he is set up in the right spot with just a little bit of cover. And that's another thing that that folks miss. It does not take very much cover to back for a buck to feel comfortable. I mean, it can literally be a couple of multi floor rose bushes with a dead log land in front of it, in the middle of wide open timber. He can bet up against that little patch of thick cover and look down wind. And if that's an area where nobody ever goes, it's possible that he may bed there. So don't overlook that. Don't ever overlook that stuff, um, you know, and it may not be like the buck. And that's where there's five of them that stand up out of there. That area itself is is a couple of acres in size, and it set up really well for buck betting, but you have just as much success in killing them. And those other areas that may only hand it may only have one or two, you know, it may only be able to hold one or two bucks. Now, was there was there anything that you saw when you're looking at this property, like before you set foot on it, like when you looked at on a map and we're looking for these pieces of public land and when you saw this, did you say, well, okay, it's a couple of thousand acres, it's definitely worth taking a look at. Or was there something else's that that made you say, yeah, this is a good one. What I'm I guess the larger question I'm getting at is is there anything I can look at digitally beforehand to say yes, this has potential or no, this is not worth spending time on. Yeah, I should get more specificate in that. Like you've mentioned, um, if you if you take that piece and you and you look for the edges of it, you look for the areas that are hard to access, and then you look for the overlooked spots. You you kind of measure up each area to the next one. So the spots that we avoid are those chunks that are accessible from all sides. We don't and we don't I wouldn't say we necessarily avoid, and we just don't prioritize them as high as some of the other areas. You know, if there's an area where you can only access from one side of it, it's a huge block. You know, it's gonna take some serious leg work to get to the back of it. Then then those are the ones that we're spending the most time on. You know, those back corners. A lot of times of the boundary lines are are good, the ones that required you to to you know, cross the creek or whatever. We're always looking for access access barriers, you know, are areas that are harder to get into. But with that said, a lot of times those than anymore. It seems like people are are getting braver and they're going back there that far. Well, they may walk right past the spot right next to the parking lot that's pretty dead. I'm good, and we do, we do see that. So I think sometimes people try to think too big whenever they look at those big public areas and they look for they try to find biggest public area possible, and then look for the farthest back corner of that big area. And we do the same. But don't overlook these little thirty and forty acre chunks that have one access point where you can monitor hunting pressure. If you drive by that thing a couple of nights a week and you don't see a truck park there at that access point, there's probably a couple of good buck betting areas on that piece. And and the one advantage those little, those little areas like that is that they a lot of times they have private land around it may not get hunted. It's hard, so it doesn't take much Um, Obviously it doesn't take much hunting pressure on those little areas to push them off, but it also doesn't take much of an absence in hunting pressure to bring him back on. Does that make sense? Yeah? Absolutely, Those little honey hooles very often like to exactly like you said, they get overlooked because people want the big, wide open areas that they think they could, you know, find some tucked away place. But sometimes the tucked away place is actually just a small property that everyone thinks the same thing. So your spot on I think. Now, Okay, so you you identified this several thousand acre pieces a good looking area. Um, you started kind of crossing off different access points or places that you didn't think would be as high priority because of, you know, the ability to get in there. How did you end up finding the buck nest? And how did you know that this was going to be a spout or did you did you know it's gonna be as good as its gonna be? Um? No, I found it by a lot of boots on the ground time, and that's usually what happens. We're getting better at it anymore. The more we learn about this, the more we can. Like I said, you gotta you've really gotta research betting and how they bed, why they bed there. And the more you do that, the more time you spent thinking about that, the easier it's going to be from this point forward. But how I found the buck nest was actually using my old tactic where you just you go to a public peace and you walk the entire exterior, you walk the entire outside boundary, and you basically work in so you're looking. You're still looking for the same thing. You're looking for an overlooked spot are you're looking for an area that that doesn't get much human traffic. And I actually found the buck net. Let me think when it was, uh, I believe the summer. I was in there scouting in June, and I was walking a creek and I came up out of a creek and I jumped the giant buck um. He was just in the middle of this grass field, and uh, you know, he hadn't he wasn't fully grown, you know, aunt or wise at the time that I could tell it is a really big deer. So I kept that spot in mind, you know, I figured, you know, why in the world is that deer all the way down in here? He's a mile a mile away from the nearest soybean field, which, as you know in southern Iowa, that's a huge girl in the summer or the soybean field. And I and it is. It was curious to me why he was so far away from one of those when that was where I was seeing all the deer. So fast forward a couple of years, we hadn't been back into that spot, and I'm picking up trail camera photos about a mile from there of several bucks that I want to hunt, and all the photos are at night. But I was I started thinking more about the optimal spot for a buck to bed and where is a location on this property where nobody ever goes? And it hit me and I was like, man, I jumped the biggest buck I've ever seen on this property a few years ago in that in that little CRP field back there, like so Zack and I that night when we checked the camera and we thought we had all nighttime pictures, that was and that's a mile away from the buckon mass Granted, we figured, man, they've they've got to be back in there somewhere. You know, they're coming from that direction. They're not getting here to the middle of the night, so they're not bedded anywhere close to this camera, so why waste any time right here? So we just go of all the way in and we went back there, and if you'll notice in the footage, we don't die straight into that spot. The first night, we we sit an observation stand and that's why we're able to watch all those bucks stand up. But the very first buck that we've seen was the big buck that I've been getting trail camera pictures of a mile away, and he was in the same exact bed that I jumped that giant buck out of, you know, two years earlier, in the middle of the summer. So what was That's sort of how we found it. Okay, we're gonna take a quick break here for a word from our partners at White Tail Properties. And if you haven't noticed yet, with this seven we've been having each week the land specialist working for white Tail Properties, they are just incredible resources. And you know, whether you're trying to better understand how to start preparing someday to buy property, or how to manage property, or just how to hunt it, you know, there are so many folks on their team that can help and Today, our producers spent some new hearth is with one of those very land specialists again this week with white to properties, we are drawn by Blake Farah, a land specialist out of Texas, and Blake is gonna be telling us about what a potential buyer should be looking for improperties in states like Texas and Oklahoma. You know, I think that it's probably pretty much the same answer no matter where you go, even if it's outside of Texas. You don't know, But the main three things I'm looking for in a piece of property, you know, to translate to you know, as big a white tail as you could possibly grow in the region, really is you gotta have good food, you gotta have good water, and you've gotta have good cover. And you know, the different regions of Texas offer a variety of those different type of categories. But at the end of the day, if you get a property that has a really good diversity of those three things and has a good balance of all three of those things, you're gonna have it just an outstanding hunting property. And it's gonna hunt differently depending on which region in Texas obviously that you're in. But at the end of the day. If it's got those three things, you absolutely can't go wrong. I'd say the one other key factor that I would also plug in there, specifically related to exes, is the fact that you know the land is gonna hunt much larger in Texas, I would say than maybe other different parts of the nation. Um, you've got a lot larger pieces of property. The deers, you know, range, how far they're going to travel is probably a lot bigger um. And so you know, these places aren't necessarily you might find a honey hole here and there, but at the end of the day, you're gonna have a lot bigger country to hunt. And and that translates to the size of the neighbors that you're hunting around you, how cooperative you are with them, that kind of thing that's really going to translate to the good hunt ability of a property and overall age structure of the deer, which is probably the most important factor. If you'd like to learn more and to see the properties that Blake currently has listed for sale, visit white tail properties dot com. Backslash Farah. That's f A R R A R. So let's talk about why why do you think that that's such a great place for all these bucks to be better in there? What specifically other than the fact that it sounds like it's relatively unpressured, um, what else about that area? What's the terrain or the cover or what's drawing them there? Well, it's all surrounded by timber um trees that you can get a stand in, and uh, lots of other deer insulate them back there, like you have to bump deer to get back to them. So if you're not, if you're afraid of spooking deers, and this style definitely is for you. Um. But with that said, this is the one area where there's no trees, um. And I think that's simply it. There's no trees right there, so people can't hunt there. They won't hunt on the ground. Everybody that's in there has got a tree stand on their back or is is planning on hunting out of a tree stand that they hung prior to that. And it's surrounded on all sides by these big timbered hills that attract quite a bit of hunting pressure. And those hills hold a lot of sign too, And you can go through there in a good acorn. You're in their giant ruds ripped up everywhere. But what what makes that spot so good is those bucks are bedded right next to water. I've noticed that a lot. They love bedding next to water or in very very close proximity to it. It can be a big body of water, a lake, upond, a creek or river or whatever. They love water. They love being close to it. And like I mentioned, there are no trees. Once you start trying to figure out how to hunt those bucks in the buck nest and October, it becomes really hard because you just can't get within a couple of hundred yards of them in a tree stands, and they just don't they I think that's why they're there. It's because everybody's walking around the edges that that that's the RP field and they're hanging in those trees h or or way up in the big chimber where they're finding a lot of that sign. But nobody's actually going down in there, or they very rarely are. When you look at it's just a grass field. You know, there's not really any other terrain change or habitat change other than the grass bucked up to a creek. And right there where that edge forms is where they like to bet and there's no trees along the edge of the creek that you can even get us stand in, so nobody, nobody ever goes in there now. And that's another misconception, is is uh, how far away people can be from those beds um without bumping them. And people walk the edge of that field all the time. I'm talking like two hundred yards and those deer they walk in and out of this public property in that field, but they don't ever go go back into that corner because there's nothing that they can hang a tree stand in. So just keep that in mind and think about that for any property that you're hunting, if you're trying to keep the pressure off, even on private land. When those bucks are betted, they they don't mind you walking two hundred yards away from mog times they don't know that you're there, you know, if you've got the wind right to where they're beted at. But in this situation, they people walk and hunt the heck out of that timberline that's two yards away from those bucks. But it keeps them out of there. Those The lack of trees does interesting. So so I've seen I don't think I saw every one of your guys video blogs hunting back there, but I've seen I think most of them. Um. But for those that haven't seen that, can you walk us through your through the series of hunts that happened last year as you guys are trying to figure this out and trying to have a successful hunt there, what you did and what your thought process was as you made those adjustments. We basically, um, I already told you how we started there was you know, backtracking those bucks after getting the trail camera pictures of them back to that location. And that initial hunt was set up by all the prior scouting. That's so crucial. You've got to walk these areas you um, You've got to spend a ton of time out there, Uh, just getting familiar with how the train lays, if nothing else, figuring out how you get in and out of those areas you know efficiently is is a huge deal. But after that initial hunt where we observed from a distance we watched those bucks stand up out of the beds, we started plotting ways to get in there tighter to them now. And on the next hunt we actually went in and we set up about a hundred yards from the beds on an exit trail where the first night we sat there, we watched one of the bucks walk right underneath this little tree along the edge of the field. So we went down in there and we we uh popped up in the tree, and it was a windy day. I don't think we'd have been able to get two stands in the tree to film it if it would not have been windy. That was that was a huge deal because the wind was blown so hard. We're able to get up in that tree quiet and uh and kind of over top of that field where those bucks couldn't hear us or see us. As we were getting set up, we went up the back to the tree, got set up, and UH, I was doing my interview and I was pointing back there at the at the willow where I thought they were gonna bed. About five minutes after I did that interview, they both stood up right there and they were a hundred yards away. Um. That night we didn't get a shot. We had a nice younger buck that was bedded close to those to the mature bucks come by underneath this, but the mature bucks stay just out of range. I think they got about sixty yards, but that was as close as they as they got and ideally I would have liked to have been set up closer to them, but there was no tree. So the next time we just kinda we left the stands in the in the truck and said, to heck with it, We're going in there on the ground with gilly suits on. And there's a little waterway that runs down through the middle of that grass. And uh, the grass is too tall to shoot through if you're standing in your crouch, but that waterway is just short enough. Then it forms kind of a little edge there at the deer like to walk out of their beds down this waterway to hit another patch of timber. So we set up along the edge of that waterway with gilly suits on, trying to trying to kill one of them, you know, leaving their beds. And that night we got about fifty yards from them in their beds, but they they stood up and uh, actually had another but get up out of a out of a different bedding area to the I guess to be north of us, about fifty yards away, and he came by first. The problem was that he wasn't a buck that we wanted to shoot. We could have killed him, but um, we weren't hit well, we were just in the edge of that grass there, and uh, he kind of busted us a little bit and took off, and the mature bucks were out in the field. I caught a glimpse of one stand up and kind of start moving away from us, just feeding out there, browsing on on stuff. But they didn't really ever even spook when that dear spook, But they definitely didn't come that direction. They eventually just kind of worked off the other way. It they would have got there first, it might have been a different story, but we took that chance. You know, we swung and we missed. And uh. Then I think our last hunt in there was in late November and during the rut and Seawan and Zach saw a pile of bucks in there running does and just couldn't get one close enough for a shot. During the rut like that, they weren't in the actual bed. Go back in there to that security and there was a handful of bucks in their honor, and they just you know, with the chaos of the rut, they weren't able to get one close enough. But we tried multiple things to get in tight those bucks and kill one. It just didn't work out. I'm hoping that that we can get back in there again this year and maybe, uh maybe do something with them. But every time we sort of changed our strategy and we got close, we just didn't quite close the deal. As most of you know with bow hunting, that happened sometimes it does, so so us the game plan. Then this year, did you do any additional scouting anything in the off season to try to to put yourself in a better position this year, or you're just taking what you know and you're gonna try a few different hunting tactics. No, we did more scouting and I found a tiny little tree out there that if I was hunting by myself, I think I could maybe pulled off, or not just me, any of the guys were hunting by themselves, they could. But because we're filming, it's gonna be tough. However, if we get another one of those high wind days. It's a tree that, you know, I don't know, maybe five inches wide, and I think we can get a couple of stands in it, and if we are, if we're able to, we'll we'll be shooting twenty yards to a scrape that's located about sixty yards from the bedding, which is which is ideal. Um, that's right where those bucks headed the very first night we sat there. They went right to the point of little island out there to work for scrap. And if we can get into that tree without being busted, we'll be in uh in a great, great spot to skill one. I just don't know if we if we can get in there without getting busted, if we're gonna get seen in the tree as we're setting up, or if if the tree is too small to afford us enough covered. It kind of depends on who the first bucket is that shows up. Yeah. Um, there's so many of them in there, that's the problems. But if a younger buck comes in first, then they may blow the whole deal. But yeah, a good problem to have, I guess, being so many bucks in there. Um yea. So well, here's a question I have related to when you're going there. When you go into hunt, you mentioned that you hopefully will have a windy day to go in there hunt. A lot of times when we are hunting, maybe some private land that we know there's not gonna be other people on it, Like I don't build lots of times will time some of his best you know, move into some of his better spots when he gets that cold front. There's some type of condition like that he wants, and that of a situation before he dies in there on public land, when you're dealing with a lot more hunting pressure and other people going in there all the time, are you still gonna wait for those conditions like that? Or do you have to get in there early and as soon as you can because you know other people will start messing these things up if you don't. We usually dive right in. Um we've scouted most of these areas. We've we've scouted the heck out of them, and we know where most of the betting is on. And some of them were more familiar with than others. The spot, the buckness spot in particular, we're very familiar with because we've spent so many years hunt in the immediate area. And what we noticed after we started putting more pressure on those bucks is they didn't leave. They just I mean they would eventually filter out. The very first day, there was a ton of bucks in there, but the next, the the next few times we went in there were fewer and fewer bucks. And then I also noticed that I started picking them up on different parts of the area on my other trail cameras, you know, at different times of the day. I started picking up one of them. I remember in daylight in the middle of October that we saw the very first night at the suck nest and never saw him back there again for the rest of fall. What I think happens there is they are eventually detecting us from where we're in there hunting them. But all they're doing is moving a few hundred yards and it's not really impacting the way that they're moving or behaving other than they're change in betting areas. Does that make sense, Yeah, it does, And that's what that's what we're seeing a lot of places too, Like we we dive right in to your point because of the added pressure. But you know, on public land, if they're dealing with that much pressure and you still can't push them out of there, I don't. I think a lot of folks on private land that are hunting super careful, are almost too careful, you know what I mean, because they have they have so many betting areas and sanctuaries on their property. If we're seeing bucks move, but not pick up and leave the county, the country. I mean that every situation is different, like we talked about earlier. But um, that is one thing that we have noticed a lot. Is they just what they detected. You're there, They'll just go to the next best spot. Yeah, speaking of different betting areas, did you find with the buck nest? Was that wind based at all? Did you find them there on a certain way and bangs others or was it it was this was just such a great spot or the only really good spot that they were there regardless of wind direction. No, it was wind based. Um for the most part, I hunted it was mostly a westerly wind. Um a northwest wind or a west wind was best for that location. I hunted it a couple of times on the south and we did see mature bucks, but they weren't In many cases, they weren't right there in the same beds. They were in the general area, you know, but they might have embedded a couple hundred yards away from that exact spot. The advantage of that location is we can get an observation stand and we can watch the whole thing. And on the south wind days, they weren't right there in those bed by the willow tree. I'll just use that as a marker. But yeah, I mean on the on the northwest wind days, they were there, gotcha every time. And that's gonna differ, you know, spot to spot, you just gotta you just gotta scout it and and try to think inside out, like you talked about earlier with the wheel. Yeah, you mentioned earlier with this spot in particular the fact that you would have to bump deer getting in there. There's a lot of deer in between however you had to get in and this betting area. Um. With that being said, I still know that you guys do take some particular care when it comes to access. I remember watching one of your videos that you guys waited extremely long time after the deer moved through after dark and then didn't get back to your truck till like twelve thirty at night. Um, can you talk about your access situation on this and the different ways you found to get in and out of there with at least minimizing the impact you're making. Yeah, well, that's that particular situation you're talking about. We actually had one of those bucks in the buck ness coming bed right underneath to stand he was laying there. He was. He actually came in right after camera light and it would have been it would have been right after the end of legal but I could see him. He came in and he laid down right there. So Zach and I set up in the street, and we were thinking to ourselves like can we wait all night? And then you know, making Yeah. But we we sat there for a few hours and we got to thinking like, no, this ain't. We got to get out of here, you know, we just didn't want to spooking. But eventually we heard him get up and kind of meander off. Um, and uh, I don't know if he was. He could have been within thirty yards of us when we climbed down, but it took us about an hour to get from the end of the base of the tree and then sneaking out of there. So yes, we are very cautious about entering and exiting those areas, but mainly just really close to the bedding. Um, when we gotta go somewhere that's a mile two miles back in we don't mess around for the first, you know, two thirds of the trip. But when we get in there, really tight to the beddings. We we're going into snail's pace. I mean you're stepping over twigs, making sure that you don't snap them. You're waiting for the wind to gust so that you can move some of these areas in timber, Like if you're hunting hardwood timber, for instance, and you're going into a bedding location, you want you want it to be windy and wet is ideal. And uh if it's not, if you're going in for like an evening hunt and the leaves are crunchy and it's pretty calm mid afternoon, you're you're just not gonna be able to get real close to those those bedding locations because they're just gonna hear you before you get there. Um, but we do. We we go in a lot of times in the middle of the night, almost like uh, two or three o'clock in the morning. I'm a pretty firm believer and going in from morning hunts way ahead of daylight because I think deer can see you better at gray light than they can when it's dark. And uh, and and getting our stands set up, you know, about thirty minutes before that gray light even hits. And using those headlamps that we use. That's a That's another big thing, um as far as access goes, when it's when every single hunt we use those headlamps in and out and we're always waiting for the cover of darkness before we're going in or or going out on an evening hunt. We're always going in in the dark in the morning, and I think that has has something to do with with our success. That's what I did that morning that I killed the my buck last fall. The redder green lens head lamp for something that or what specifically you're using there. Yeah, we're using one of the uh Cabella's Princeton Tech head lamps and the one the one we've all got is the green beam that switches to the brighter white beam. But the green I definitely don't think they can see it if it's the pitch black dark, and to be honest, I think they have a heck of a time seeing the white beam. Um. I just I'm not real certain. I did a podcast not long ago on this and and trying to research more about deer vision and that sort of thing. But from my experience, I've got a deer close enough to touch in the dark with these light songs. If you're in a spot where you know you're not making a lot of noise and you're you've got covered. They'll walk right pie you where I know for a fact that ain't gonna happen during the day. You know they're gonna pick up and they're gonna look at you. Um, especially at gray light. UM. Gray light is that that's the time when you want to be set up or almost waiting in your truck to walk in. I don't. I don't think you want to be walking in a gray light in most situations. I just every time we do that, with the head lamps on or without them, we get we get busted. It seems that's when dear most active, and and I think that's when they can see the best. It's my personal opinion, but we always use darkness to our advantage if we can. Yeah, I'm right there with you. I always try to get in there super early in the mornings and set up. Um. And especially when you're in a situation like I think you guys are in most cases, and many times I am too. And that's when you're setting up, when you're running gunning, when you're setting up a new stand or two stands in your guys case um, right then for that hunt, um, And that's a challenge in the morning, in the darkness, and that's a challenge, you know, in the middle of the day when you're setting up for an afternoon hunt. Can you talk about some of the things that you guys have learned about how to hang and hunt in a somewhat efficient way without spooking dear, any tricks or specific methods you guys have to get in there, uh, without blowing it all up. Well, you've got to make sure that all your dear is sound um, sound proof before you go in, and like, don't just don't just kind of half fast your sticks onto your stand, you know, I mean, don't don't just wrap them around there and then have them clanking and falling off and everything. Really take the time to make sure everything is fashioned, fastened and secure. You've got a good set of straps because you've got to be comfortable. And that last little bit when you're getting to the tree with that stand on your back and it can't be making any noise. I mean they there's lots of little products out there that you can use to help dampen the sound on your stands Um, stealth strips or one of them. They're really cool little product that you can you can put on like your platform, um, you know, your your seat bar and everything in case that you have a buckle clank against that or something, you want those stell strips on there to dampen that sound. Um. And then we use we use those uh, those rope can sticks, those climbing sticks with the ropes for muddy and that is a huge advantage having something with fewer buckles, anything with the less metal of the better for the most part when it comes to get when it comes to your gear, you know, and uh, and those go up very quickly, very quietly, without without any metal on metal contact. We're always trying to avoid that. And and really it sounds like a huge shore to hang two stands and all that gear in the tree. It's not that hard. It's just time consuming because there is two of us there. So we have a we have kind of a little system. You know, one of us will go up, we'll hang the initial stand and then the next guy will send the rest of the stuff up so that you're not going down and back that sort of thing. But having a good lineman's belt, uh, Lineman's rope is probably probably like the number one thing when it comes to hanging a tree, stand by yourself, we're with somebody else for that matter, you need a Lineman's rope to go around the tree so that you can lean away from the tree and use both hands to get to stand up. It's just it is so much easier to do it that way. If you're going to be serious about doing any amount of hanging and hunting, you want Aligneman's belt of some sort or a Lineman's rope. Very true. Speaking of the of the of the ropes too, I agree with what you mentioned about the muddy sticks. I really do love that rope camp system. That is to your point. It's it's super quiet. It's a little bit letter weight too, I think, and just anything anytime I can eliminate the chance of that metal and metal contact, man, I'm gonna do it. And that that's a huge because I feel like there's other sticks I use too, and I like other picks. But you've got those buckles swinging around. If by chance that comes off somehow, or when you try and get all set up, just any little variable you can put in your favor. I like to do that, and that's one piece of gear that while there's lots of other good options, when I have my that's my number one set of sticks. If I have to go in to the best spot and off all my sticks are available, I'm grabbing the rope sticks because it's just one more thing I don't need to worry about. So Yeah, they go in and come out with us every time, you know, and most of the time the stands come in and out too. Um. We we usually hunt just the same too, muddy stands all year. You know. We may have eight trees picked out, but pretty much at the time we're hanging and hunt. Yeah. No, speaking of stand locations and stuff. Um. You know, we talked a lot about the buck nest and we've talked about some of the different things you know, hunting these buck betting areas. Um. I know a lot of people and I think a lot of your hunts that we've been talking about have been taking place in October around buck by in areas. But once we shift into November and those rut phases, Um, are you still keying on those same types of spots, or do you guys have a different rut strategy for your public parcels um for the rut. We we we're extremely mobile, and mobile does not just mean standing stix on your back. That means checking out tons of different public areas. So in the rut, we've already scouted all these areas. We kind of know where the deer like to hang out or whatever. But what we'll do, especially in the early part of the rut, is we'll just drive around and monitor pressure, or we'll hang and we'll have trail cameras in late October in spots that are set up to monitor hunting pressure, and some of those do get stolen, as you can imagine on public but we want to monitor where hunting pressure is at during the rut as much as possible because that's when hunting pressure is at its highest point. Now I'm gonna I'm gonna really drill on that. During the rut is when pressures at its highest point. So that means if you find a spot where there's no hunting pressure, guess what's gonna be happening right there? Those bucks will have pushed that estraus dow in there and they're gonna have her corral in that one spot where they they haven't been harassed and you can have some insanely awesome hunts during the rut on public land. That pressure works to your advantage. Most of those most of those folks are just bumbling around the woods or whatever, you know, hunting designed the big timber Um. In our situation, there's a lot of nonresidents, and I would I that's you. That's wrong for me to say they're bumbling around the woods, because they do have a lot of success most of the situations we've had with non residents. They're pretty hardcore, skilled hunters that that do very well here. But the advantage we have is that we know these properties so well and we can bounce around and see which parking lots are getting the most pressure. I mean, we spend more time looking at entry roads for rush tire tracks. Will take a rake or our foot and we'll brush the dirt over the end of that road before we leave, and then check it again in two days. And if there's no new tracks over that spot where we where, we sort of rake the dirt over. We know nobody's been there in the last couple of days, and it doesn't take much in the rut. Like I said, the absence of pressure earlier the absence of pressure in the rut. If you just have a few days where there's an absence in hunting pressure, it can really benefit you. I mean, those deer will move right in there. And uh. And at times if we if if we just can't find a place that's not getting hammered, or if it is, even if there's a lot of hunters in there, we'll just put a stand on our back and we'll just scout and hunt. You know, we'll have our bow in hand and we'll move quietly through the woods trying to I mean, and we're constantly looking for boot tracks and that sort of thing. But a lot of times you can bump into those dear when they're running. If you bump into that dough or those bucks or whatever, yeah, you're gonna spook them and they're gonna move. But if you see them, then you see the direction that they go, and you have all those other betting areas scouted. A lot of times you can make a play on them. You can just you can cut around them and then set up in the area that they or the direction that they headed. Because I mean, if you think about it, she's in heat. If you bump a big buck with the dough she's in heat, and chances are he's not the only one that knows. So you want to go where she's going, even if she's running away from you spooked. That's where you want to end up is in that in that same area, And we we've had a lot of success doing that as well, just cruising around on a windy day with stands on her back until we bump into some deer and then setting up now other than other than actually seeing deer, what stuff would you then look for? Otherwise? Do you pay attention to you know sign and set up on that or are you're just looking for lack of hunter sign or just a terrain funnel other than bumping it? What's gonna make you hang a stand? No, we look at doe betting a lot um. We we concentrate on scouting dough betting at all times of the year, including buck betting, you know. And one one thing we've noticed with doz is there they're much more They seem to be homebodies much more than bucks do. Bucks are more nomadic at times, especially when they're younger, but a dope family group will live in one spot for you know, a long period of time, and you can predict that now if you're hunting that spot quite frequently. If everybody knows how um ornery those mature does are and how good they are walking out of the bedding and staring straight up in your tree and picking you off time after time after time. That's because they live there and they have adapted to your presence there. That doesn't mean that they have to walk down past your stand or not stand there stomp and blow at you. So when when we find those bill betting areas like that, we we stay off of them until the rut, until we get a situation where we can hunt maybe an edge feature on the down wind side of bill betting, or maybe there are maybe at the morning hunt, you might want to hunt entry trails in between bedding and food on along a doe betting area doesn't necessarily have to be on the down wind side, because you know that's not always always the case, but we are usually associating our hunts during the rut with bill betting, and that makes sense. Um. I want to hop back to something you mentioned a little earlier ago that I that I wanted to get a little more clearance on or clarity on which was using your trail cameras to monitor hunting pressure. Can you elaborate specifically, Are you just setting up one camera on the main trail coming out of each parking lot or how how are you doing that? Um? Yeah, I mean that's that's a way to do it, and we've definitely done that before most of the time. The ideal set up is if you follow that trail in, you pull up to your general your generic public land piece, you know, the parking lot there, and then there's the walking trail in. You hop on that walking trail and you walk back far enough, maybe you come across the scrape that's right along the edge of that walking trail. That's pretty common thing to find. And when we find that, we'll hang and lock a camera to a tree over that straight and you'd be surprised how many big bucks you'll get on that straight. They'll be there in the middle of the night most of the time because it's real close to the pressure. But they've adapted to the pressure to the human scent on that road, and that's why they don't show up there until one in the morning. But that's what we'll do in the ideal scenario is hanging over a scrape for a trail like that that intersects with the walking trail, so we can monitor those bucks in the middle of the night kind of see who's around, and we can also monitor who's walking in and out of there. Now, you gotta be you gotta be creative when it comes to camouflaging those cameras or they're gonna get stolen, you know, or use if you use a lock box, that definitely helps, or if what we've been doing more and more lately is using those rope cameras climbing sticks and just climbing two or three sticks up in a tree and then shim and the camera so that it points down at that trail on that and that's great, so there's its way above them. You know, they're on their way in for a hut most of the time, and they look up in the tree and see that camera. They may not go to the effort of climbing all the way up there and grabbing it. And um, to be quite frank, used cameras that aren't super expensive on public those those won't get stolen near as often as you know, you you put one of those expensive trail cameras out there and it don't It won't matter if you lock it or not. If they figured they figure out that the four camera, they may come and steal it at some point, Like they'll make a point of going to the house, getting bolt cutters, coming back out there and taking it, whereas they won't do the same thing with a cheaper camera. And if you do lose an eighty dollar camera, it's not quite the same, uh, not quite as bet of a bullet to take if you lose that five. So right, yep, Now, what about your trail camera just just outside of monitoring hunting pressure. Um, we're talking just trying to understand, dear, are you just are you doing the same type of things scrapes and um, you know, well used trails or anything else as far as setting them up or how often you check them, when you check them throughout the season, that kind of stuff. Well, we kind of separate that into two categories. We call it short term and long term trail camera strategy. Um, I'm a huge fan of long term trail camera strategy. What that is is this time of year when we're doing our last bit of scouting or in midsummer, you know, July, early August, when we're going into those betting areas, we're going in there and we're diving in. We're scouting the heck out of those during that time of year to try to figure out our plan for the fall, and then we're not going back in there until shed season. And those are my favorite camera setups. We'll put them in the betting area most of the time. When you're in the middle of these betting areas, you're gonna find hot scrapes, you know. You can hang them over deer beds, you can hang them over trails entering and exiting the betting area. And we're not afraid to put the camera there in early August and leave it up for the entire fall, you know, and then we'll come back in during shed season, and you can learn so much from that falls trail camera pictures for the next year, and you can learn more that way on just general dear behavior, you know, as a whole, maybe not just the bucks in your specific area, but you can learn so much about about dear behavior and cross and then check it with the historical weather data from that fall and compare those uh each every day with your trail camera photos, and you you'll start to see patterns emerge that helped you capitalize on killing bucks later down the road. Um, then the short term trail camera strategy are the ones that we're checking, the one that this is the strategy everybody likes because it's the one that they get to check every week or two weeks, you know. And and those are the ones that I just mentioned where we hang them most of the time over scrapes. Scrapes are pretty ideal. And that's the misconception with scrapes is that, uh, we'll hang them over scrapes early in the season. You know, they tend to travel through those areas still and use that licking branch at all times the year. Um, they may not use it nearest frequently as they do and in October, you know, after develop comes off and their testosterones going up, but they still tend to travel through those areas. You can get a scrape or a licking branch scrape area that is in a spot where several trails meet. That's the ideal and most of the time where we're looking for in the short term strategy, there is the spot that other hunters are are going to be you know, I mean, we know that the chance to have a buck coming by that scrape and daylighter, real slim. But the good thing with the other hunters in the human centres, they've sort of adapted to that, so they still will come and check the scrape and then you backtrack them to their bedding areas that you've already pre scouted. But those cameras we're not. We don't worry about control anything like that, and we check them once every two weeks, you know, just to get a bearing on what bucks are in the area and are you going in there specifically just check that camera or are you trying to time it to go with a hunt when you already passed by there, or do you wait for rain or anything like that. Now, Um, we do time it with the hunt a lot of the time. Um, we'll we'll go buy it with the stand on on our back in the laptop in our backpack or something, and we'll check it and we'll see what what's been there in the last few days and kind of see which direction a buck may or may not have been coming from, you know, and really, when you when you scout an area completely and you try to understand every betting area, even trail camera pools where you don't get any pictures of target buck can be beneficial, because that's actually what led us to the buck mass last year. We checked that camera and we didn't have a buck on there for the last ten days, and we're like, you know, is it that early October time frame when the bucks are kind of shifting around or moving around a little bit, And we we thought to ourselves, well, if they're not here right now, they've gotta be somewhere else. You know, they were here during the summer, now they're not, So that crosses off a lot of those betting areas in proximity to the camera. So really, you learn you can you can learn something from every single trail camera pool that you have and the ones that don't have bucks on. Okay, we're gonna pause here for our final break of the episode and a word from our partners at the White Tail Institute of North America. And if you're planning food plots this fall, hopefully you already have that seed in the ground or at least have a plan in place, but if not, today we're gonna hear about a great option for you to consider for this fall in your food plots and Spencer, New Hearth. We'll take it from here. This week With White Tail Institute, we're talking to consulting John Cooner about their special blend of Imperial white Tail Peer Attraction, which will have dear hammering your food plot all season if you're attracts. Is one of our annual Forge products that's designed for planning in the fall. Uh, and I would not be overstating it to say that it has brought us a lot of customers. It's dynamite stuff. There are two main parts to it, and the advertising guys say it's a one to punch, but basically you've got early fall uh. And primarily that's gonna be white tail white tail oats, which is an old variety that we were all did to buy some some researchers that was so they were doing a grain production trial and so attractive the deer that they had to had to pull it out of the trials. And we tested it and also found it to be very cold tolerant. That's for early fall moves into the later fall and then uh. The other part of it is the White Tail Institute Braskas, which come up very quickly and the deer will start hitting them. Uh, they'll get even sweeter with the first frosts of fall. So it's the one two punch that takes you from fall all the way through the dead of winter. It is. It is absolutely one of our our big sellers and one of the neat things. Other neat things besides it being extremely attracted deer is with the droughts we've been having in the fall, people who have realized that the white Tail oates oates plus will will come up and provide a good nurse crop with perennials. And for that reason, we've had folks asking us can we take the oats and take white Tail Institute Braskas and plan them together. And the neat thing about this is you don't have to. We've already done it for you and we've are testing has shown that the ratios in that product are optimum to provide maximum attraction. If you'd like more info on White Tail Institute's forage products, check out white Tail Institute dot com, where they also carry some of the top supplements, attractants and herbicides available. How many cameras do you like to try to have on a public piece or I don't know, on a per acreage I mean, if is it one camera per public part property or do you try to have you know, one per acres, hundred acres or anything like that. Oh, ideally you'd like to have one for two acres, but that it's just not possible to do. I mean, if you're hunting various public spots and some of the heat cameras or three quarters of a mile in means your whole life and job would just be trail cameras. So what we shoot for is just a one per area on every area. We'll try to find a good community scrape that we expect about to be using at night, and uh so it's one that we will go in and check frequently, and we'll we'll ideally get a lot of the bucks in that area. You know, maybe only just a picture or two of them, but we're not particularly worried about it. Just as long as they're around, we know the betting areas that there that they could be using or likely are using. This one per area. I would say we probably only run six to ten total, okay, throughout you know our whole I mean we've got I don't know a dozen public plan pieces that we hunt, so about one per Okay, so zooming out a little bit here. I mean, we we've covered a whole lot of different things as far as different parts of the season, how you're finding these places, how you're hunting these places, how you're getting in out um from your experiences so far, and then kind of from the outside talking to so many other hunters about some of these things. What do you think is is probably the biggest mistake people are making when they either consider hunting public land or when they start hunting it. What's where people getting tripped up there the most? You think, can they consider hunting it or start hunting it? Mm hm? You think here, probably the amount of scouting time, let's say, has a has a big deal or a lot to do with it, um And and it's it's possible for you to go in and just hunting area and have success, but most of the deer that we're killing or getting on, we're not necessarily just walking in there, you know and picking a spot. The scouting is such a huge deal, and not just boots on the ground scouting, but you know, lots and lots and lots of areal scouting. That would be the number one thing. And and the second thing would be the typical stuff that you that you see people sit and field edges and that sort of thing. When they look at an aerial photo, they'll think, well, here's a food stores. There's gonna be deer around it, and they're probably here, but there may not be a mature buffer on it. Yeah, and and they get intimidated by the pressure. You mean, I was gonna ask have you found in all your public land experiences? Because to your point, I think a lot of people assume that if you're gonna hunt public land, you're gonna be dealing with other hunters all the time. It's gonna be paying the butt. It's not gonna be as much fun because you're dealing with other people messing up your hunts. Have you found that to be the case? Or is it not as bad as a lot of people think. No, it's not near as bad. Um. We definitely have hunts that are messed up. I mean, it happens frequently, but most of the time it's honest. You know, it's not somebody intentionally screwing you up. You gotta keep that in the back of your mind. It's not just you that's out there me. You're sharing this resource with everybody else. And uh, once you accept that, it actually is pretty cool, you know, um, because you can work together with those guys if you have an open mind. Um, you can. Especially in our situation, we run in a non residence all the time, and they want to know, like good places to go hunting because they've been waiting for a long time to draw the tag. So why not help him out? You know, we have the luxury of living here and scat it all. So we help him out a lot of times and tell them give them some pointers on maybe where to try to go, and uh, more times than not they returned the favor and they tell us what they saw and like it helps us down the road. People just have that And yeah, people have that misconception that that hunting pressure is is bad and that it can that it can ruin things. It can. But when you really think about archery hunting pressure during bow season, most of the time it's just a it's just one guy going into an area hunting it, climbing down and leaving. It's not like it is a gun season when there's two dozen in a group that are just wide swath going across you know everything and and form for the most part and most of the seasons that we have in in the White Tail States, the gun season is pretty short and placed towards the end of the season most of the time. And and the like I mentioned before, the pressure a two yards is a long way to abeded deer. Yeah, yeah, it's it's a nice situation. You guys have an Iowa with that late gun season. Um, I know, in Michigan or even your homestead of Missouri, that mid November opener is kind of a bummer. But when you don't have that, You're right, you can definitely take advantage of much less pressure during this time periods, that's for sure. Yeah. And the good thing with Missouri is that the season opens early. Know, you can hunt one of September, whereas we can only hunt on the first here in October. And if you're onto this buck betting stuff, uh she may find that hunting that first two weeks of them the very season is more productive for you than hunting hunting the rut. Really early season is often overlooked, that's for sure. Oh yeah, so I've got I've got one final question for you. We've we've taken a lot of time of your time here but you've got a unique opportunity I think in that you get to, you know, work closely with someone like Bill Wink. You obviously has a lot of knowledge and experience and perspective when it comes to white tail hunting. And then you also be able to do these things that are different than kind of what Bill does these days and work with some other people on the public side and hunting in this type of different way. I'm curious, on one hand, what do you think is the greatest lesson you learned from Bill about white tail hunting? And then number two, what do you think is the biggest thing, if any, that he's learned from you guys, or has anything he's thought previously been proved wrong by your experiences. Oh, I don't know. Um that I'd be a hard conversation to have with me and him. I'd say, um, yeah, he I think he said it in an ask Winky not long ago. He said that those guys kind of do their thing and I kind of do mind, And that's probably true. Um, you know, and we have our opinions and to how you know the deer move around on his property, because we've done a lot of time out there and he's got his own. Um. But you know, like we were talking earlier, you don't you don't have to hunt one way to harvest uh good buck or to kill deer, do do anything. That's the beauty of what we do is you can you can skin the cat a million different ways. And I guess, uh, yeah, I don't. I don't know how much he's taken away from what we do on what we do on public. He told me the other day that he that he would get if he went to hunt in public. He would just hang two trail cameras around the woods until he started picking up the day like mover. I was just like, good luck, You're not gonna have very many cameras in a few weeks. But uh, but yeah, I mean that's that just goes along with our with our point that we made earlier in the podcast of you know you you just uh you try to adapt to lots of different methods and and take little bits and pieces from every one of them and and try to sharpen your own skills. But any anything that you've taken from Bill, oh yeah, I mean his access theories are all are all proven true. Um. And that was sort of whenever I was first watching Midwest White Tail like back in two thousand and eight, you know, before I'd even got here. That was one of the things that you know that I made a lot of sense with and identified with back in those days, you know, using using a creek to your advantage or a ditch or whatever it is. Um. You know, he's wrote, I think he's written a couple of books on that, um, that tactic and strategy. Now here's the rub whenever you start thinking about that as far as buck's bed and how they bed, um, if you if you marar those two strategies together, you start to realize that some of these creeks, some of these ditches are buck betting. You know, they bed right there in the ditch or right along it, maybe not maybe not in in a lot of situations. So that that tactic and strategy still works. And that's something that we employ all the time. But as I mentioned earlier, if you can if you can anticipate where those bucks are gonna bed, you're gonna know how to get in and out of those areas. And then if you use those that creaks and ditches strategy that he kind of coined years ago to your advantage and move around those bucks and places where you can't be seen, you can, you can definitely get in tight on them, and that's what we're trying to do. Yeah, you guys just bumped a couple of nice bucks out of the creek earlier this month scouting, didn't you. I think I just saw a video showing that. Yep, yep, And that was a unique situation. Like like we continue saying, every every place is different, and every spot is different. That location we've been in a drought, as you know. Um, not so much in the last week we've had rain, but back when we were scouting that creek, we were in a pretty severe drought. And when I got to that creek, I noticed it still had water in it. It was the first creek that I'd seen in almost a month that had water in Everything else had been dry on all these different areas. And as soon as we noticed there was water, and we started picking up buck tracks in the creek, and I looked at Brody, the intern who was who was filming with me that day, and we both were like, you know, there's gonna be bucks in here, probably right on top of the creek, and no more than ten seconds later we crept around the corner. Sure enough, one got up out of the brush pile. He's betted in the creek and moved off. But there was a reason he was better there, you know what I mean. It was it was so dry and it was drowning so bad that all those bucks moved right down on the creek. It's hot, so they want to be right next to that water where that that ground moisture kind of keeps the temperature a little bit cooler. And he was in a in a spot up up against a brush pile where he could look up and down that creek and he saw us coming. Yeah. I think that brings up a good point, which is to always realize to always ask why whenever you see something, whether that be a trail camera photo or an observation while you're hunting or something while scouting. It's not enough just to see the thing. You also want to ask why. And you just described the why there for that deer. And I think that's a great just surminder for all of us to to always take a step back from the observation and then try to understand the bigger picture, because the bigger picture is what tells the story. Oh yeah, especially with matured bucks and even mature does like if they do something, they're probably doing it for a reason. And uh yeah, once you start figuring figuring that that out, just by asking yourself that question, like you said, it will definitely help you. Yeah. Well, Aaron, this is uh, this has been a lot of fun. I know you've got stuff that you should be getting to get scouting to do, or stands to hang with a season coming up, so we'll let you go. Um, but if people want to stay up to data and all the different things you guys have going on, Um, where can they go on line to find everything? Um, just check it out at Midwest yitel dot com. We've always got new stuff going up there. I think the first episode just came out. Um, what today's Monday, isn't it. Yeah, yes, yeah, just came out today for the this fall. So you can check out everything there on our Facebook page or Instagram. We're always posting new stuff whenever we whenever we get in the field and try to keep everybody kind of updated throughout the fall. So awesome. Well, we'll make sure to have links on the website for all that stuff. And uh man I appreciate you taking the time and do this, Aaron, and good luck this season. Thanks Mark, you too, and there you go, folks. Episode number one sixty five is in the book. And before we go, though, I want to send out a big thanks to our partners at Sitka Gear, Yetie Cooler's Matthews Archery, Maytheon Optics, the White Tail Institute of North America, Trophy Ridge and Hunt Terror Maps. And finally, of course, thank you all for listening. I appreciate it. I hope you got a kick out of our public land discussions today. Until next time, stay what you're to hunt.