Don Higgins - Chasing Giants, Hunting the Wind & Being Patient | HUNTR Podcast #40

you know even a funnel where i know they're they're using it mm-hmm that's something i probably need to look at a little more well i think again buy more cameras and have them on both talk to him jeremy buys the cameras [Music] and we're back is this number 40 yes hey there you go i should have got that number 40. ugh well uh yeah i'm just trying to get my mindset this is a good one i'm excited about this podcast for sure um for one i guess if people are listening to this one we are into october at this point it's not october when we're recording this but it will be october yup first week of october we're we're in it seasons are open bucks are falling acorns are falling leaves are falling temperatures hopefully are falling do you know dawn a little bit yep from before yeah uh so we we would write for a lot of the same magazine so anybody listening today's podcast guess if you can look at the title is don higgins um don's been involved in a lot of stuff but yeah so don don's written for a long time in fact i mean authored several books but also a lot of magazine articles and so that's how don and i came across each other probably deer and deer hunting would be my guess is that he and i were writing at the same time for that magazine would you say most well known for real world and he was he a founder of that company yeah so one of the original founders um i you know not the show not the reality show yeah uh soybeans yeah i don't know um i think that a lot of people know don from his writing kind of he kind of like a bill winky and like both of those guys really were just good whitetail hunters great strategy and were writers okay and then i think that as things came about like bill obviously won midwest whitetail don went real world um which i think he's still involved with uh we can ask him but i know he's got he's got a podcast chasing giants is his podcast um and i mean really that's probably what i would say don is most well known for dudes killed i don't know a bunch of two hundos uh i did know that i wasn't aware of the podcast i'll have to check that out yep chasing giants is this possible youtube and spotify sweden yep yeah good podcast he and i'm not sure who else hosted with him um but yeah i mean i think he's killed four five two hundred killed one last year really for sure killed like a two we'll get it from here we will have to get his take on and strauss just informed strauss llama just let me know we got a red moon coming up this weekend i believe he is a moon guy okay i think i tell you what dude most 200 inch killers that i know are moon guys yeah adam hayes coming on next week so uh this will be an exciting one i mean anybody that's in the whitetail space there are certain guys you know that kill big whitetails consistently don higgins is one of those and i believe i mean i'm pretty sure he's um i don't say like married to but he's an illinois guy that's where he hunts i don't know how much don even hunts out of state of illinois that'll be a question to ask him but the dude just kills big bucks and so you know we're not going to get him probably to share his secret sauce necessarily but i'll be interested to see what he does because again going back to what we've said in you know for how long now can't kill big buck if he isn't there you know so is don growing these big bucks or is he finding these big bucks like that would be an interesting piece to to figure out but um yeah don higgins is on the hunter podcast this week awesome excited to learn from him let's bring him in hey don hey how's it going guys doing good man we appreciate you being on the podcast today with us um as we kind of just talked about we had that big front that kind of moved through the whole country or most of the country you know here this week and you know it sounds like as soon as that was swinging through a tornado warning last night i saw that did did any touchdown no okay i don't think so i kind of laughed at it when i saw that yeah we don't get those very often you guys get tornadoes out where you're at don oh yeah we don't get as many as like kansas and the plane states do but you know we get them every year so don um obviously kind of a no introduction for most of the people listening to this podcast but but just for kind of a recap you know kind of give us your background obviously jordan and i were talking with you before the podcast here um involvement in real world obviously the chasing giants podcast i mean the list kind of goes on but but give us a give us a top down i guess on on kind of some of the things you got your hands into wow the list is long um basically anything that i can do to keep from getting a real job and be in the hunting industry i've pretty much done so uh you know about uh 12 13 years ago i started real world wildlife products a company that uh you know specializes in wildlife food plot seed blends and deer nutrition products um then well i've got a consulting business consult with landowners on their whitetail properties last winter i was in i was on 83 properties last winter all the way from kansas to new jersey um then i hold a whitetail master course on my home farm and one other property where basically students come in and uh how about half the time i spent you know in front of a powerpoint presentation and the other half is spent on these two properties uh one of them is my home farm the other one's a farm that i've hunted for years decades really and uh we go right to some of the stand sites where i've killed some of my biggest deer and you know i kind of explained why i put my stands there how i use the wind how the buck is using the wind or the bucks you're using to win um those are probably uh the chasing giants podcast i started a couple years ago as uh just continues to grow i've been an outdoor writer for this past uh summer was my 25th anniversary and my first article published in north american whitetail wow um got a couple of books out on hunting trophy whitetails uh basically if it's got anything to do with land management for whitetails or hunting whitetails i've got my hands in it somehow like i said anything to keep them getting a real job i'll hear you man and you know the the cool thing is and and for anyone listening that isn't familiar with dawn's even hunting background is you know the ability to do all of these writings and and uh you know classes and education processes because you kind of you kind of have the credentials to show for it right you're out there putting those actual methods to the test and and successfully at that in fact last year uh you know you you killed a what over 200 incher last year in illinois yeah i shot a uh well he's a gross 221 he ends up netting uh 197 and 3 h typical um actually is the number six typical of all time in pope and young now wow and then i followed that up about a month later i shot 185 inch buck but uh yeah you know the thing is though that i really try to stress you know every time that i have an audience whether it be my own podcast someone else's podcast or seminars or whatever is that i i don't think that i'm any better than anyone else or anything special i think that you know anybody out there that's really serious about it can do what i'm doing it's just that if the passion's there in your heart um it's gonna take some time don't get me wrong you know i'm not at the same place i was 20 years ago but if he keeps you know pushing towards your goal um you know my goal was to be in the hunting industry and work in the hunting industry and make 100 of my income do my hunting and i didn't do that until i was over 50 years old you know i wasn't i've been working at it for a lot longer than that but i was actually it's only been in the last two or three years that you know all my income has come through the hunting industry so if you've got that dream and you've got that passion you keep plugging away i think anybody out there could do what i'm doing but you know one thing that jared and i constantly talk about because i mean at the end of the day you know we we live to hunt whitetails and it's it's very much in line with kind of your thought process of you know it doesn't stop you and the the off season isn't really an offseason in fact we probably work harder in the offseason than we do during the season itself you know but one thing that kind of keeps circling back for us um is that you know it seems logical but you can't kill a big buck if he isn't there um and so i think one of the kind of the holes that i would like to dig with you out of the gate is you know when you're even entering this season right by the time this drops uh the illinois season should be open right it's first week of october um you know what is your mindset i mean have you already kind of locked eyes on the buck that you're looking to hunt this year are you still looking for him do you expect him to show up but you haven't seen him yet i guess maybe walk us through some of that thought process for you well like you said it's a year-round process it never ends and you know one of my favorite parts of the whole process is running trail cameras and you know like right now i've got trail cameras in three states i counted up the other day i've got trail cameras on 33 different properties wow it's the search the hardest part about killing real giants is finding it there you go they're not easy to kill don't get me wrong but i spend way more time trying to find them than i do really hunting for them once i've found them so um you know this year is kind of different last year i knew that giant buck was around and had him on my hit list and i'd watched him grow up for the previous couple years before that this year is totally different i really don't have a number one target buck um on the latest pod chasing giants podcast you know i told the listeners that i counted up somebody wanted to know how many bucks over 150 inches that i found this summer and i found 32 different bucks over 150 inches but only five of those will make 170 none of them will hit 180. five of those will make 170. four of those five are four-year-olds that i have no intention of shooting those are the future giants a year or two from now yep the last thing i want to do is shoot them they made it this far they're that close i i want i won't let them get a little older you know so i've got one buck that is uh 170 or better that is at least five years old and i'll definitely put some time in hunting for that buck but the other thing is i drew an iowa tag for the first time this year oh wow they got permission on a i think it's a pretty decent farm in iowa and i haven't got a picture of a giant there yet but uh this farm kind of sits right in the middle of three different big sanctuary areas a state park a big industrial complex that's almost 2 000 acres where no hunting's allowed wow and then a big private timber where no hunting's allowed so i'm writing this this triangle and each of these properties is only separated by about two miles at the most yeah and uh so i know i'm in a good area and this farm has got all summer long i haven't got much for buck pictures i've got one buck that's probably in the 160s and another in the 150s but i i just got to feel i'm in the right spot i don't have any past history to go on yeah other than you know word of mouth what people tell me so i'm kind of banking on on a decent buck showing up there and you know i told my listeners on my podcast the other day that uh my goal for this season is just to shoot one buck over 170 inches if i can do that with what i've got to work with this year it's going to be pretty successful yeah it's really cool for me to hear the breakdown of how many properties that you're covering with trail cameras how many bucks you've gotten and you know all the way down to ones that you would consider hunting it just paints a pretty accurate picture i think of how hard uh you know than big deer are to find let alone to kill 100 percent well i i don't think that people realize how much time and effort it takes to shoot these kind of deer year after year after year i mean like i said i'm in three states this year with cameras because i do that iowa tag but i'm always in at least two or three and you know i had a property in ohio that that i was hunting last year so i had cameras in three states last year but um i'm covering a lot of real estate and in the midwest i think uh 150 inch buck is fairly common yeah you know i mentioned that i've got pictures of 32 of them and i've got cameras on 33 properties so you know an average of about one buck per property is going to hit 150. now some of those properties i don't have a single 150 and another one i might have two or three right but it averages out to about 150 inch buck for every property but when you start talking about 170 inch deer that's a whole different ball game there is a lot of miles between 170 inch buck and another one yeah and i think that's the big thing i mean and again part of it and this is no knock to to just hunters in general but first of all most people don't know how to score deer especially visually right i mean how many guys drive by a field and like man i saw a 150 last night and i felt i'm like no i've seen that dear he's 130. you know that's number one but then to literally be able to get eyes on a 170 and then be able to make a hunt on like i hate to do this i have to throw my dad under the bus it was a couple weeks ago he called me he's like jared i just saw a giant on her place he's like i was like how big he's like 170. i was like this is eastern central ohio i was like no i was like dad you know what it takes to make a monster so you put a camera and like two weeks later get a picture of this uh 1 30. 135 i was like is this him he's like i think that's him i was like but she just it's because this is such a passionate hobby lifestyle that you know people just get worked up you know same way in the stand like you could a guy a guy could tell you he's going to say my dad's not the only guy yeah and i've been there too and past three-year-olds all day long the first big three-year-old that comes chasing a doe in he he shoots you know and doesn't in he doesn't even realize that he's like big i don't know yeah that's a big deal yeah yeah that's that's a tough aspect it is so when you talk about those those states you know there's different properties done i think it's some people would be like you know almost discouraged by that a little bit but i think it's just really expectations of it's hard to grow 170 inch whitetail just is no doubt about it you know and you want to when it comes to scoring the bucks you know one advantage i've got is i've got several on my wall that to compare them to so if i see a 10 point buck i've got you know i've got a couple of ten pointers on my wall that score right at 150 153 and then i've got uh three or four that are right there about 170 say from 168 to 172 they're right there so i can look at a buck and i'll compare it to a buck i've already killed that i know the score of and that's kind of how i estimate it but you guys are absolutely right you know the uh tendency of hunters to overscore deer is just amazing it's miraculous yeah it's bad yeah and i mean to be honest you know what nine out of ten deer you'll never get your hands on so you won't know but by this group by looking at it you're kind of like all right yeah listen that's not a that's not a 150. i think what's maybe even more discouraging than those numbers is how many future booners i've seen at two and three that just disappear yeah dead never to be seen again like for like for sure like mid 150s mid-150s three-year-olds i get that was going to be my next question john as you look at these properties across these states and and just your history even hunting these different states have you seen a progressive increase or decrease in the number of let's say five-year-old and older bucks in the last few years maybe just subsequent to that what states are we talking about here illinois obviously i iowa i assume is the other one yeah and you know i've hunted in past in uh ohio actually i was hunting in ohio back in the in the 1980s yep and now i don't hunt there every year um i own the property there which i just sold this summer but uh i think ohio is a real sleeper state for giants but uh yeah right there through through the heart of the midwest is basically where i'm talking indiana i've got cameras in indiana each year yeah indiana the management you know approach there is not quite as good as it is in ohio or even illinois so but yeah that's basically the region that we're talking about cool yeah so i guess back to your question yeah it's just kind of what you're seeing in that age and again it varies year to year like maybe you have an ehd outbreak that you know takes out some deer or maybe you don't but um i guess what are you kind of seeing in terms of those numbers of maturity or that that five and older class especially well you know i can go back quite a few years farther than you guys so uh got a few more gray hairs here in the beard i'm 28 don [Music] yeah i've got some great i remember uh 30 40 years ago a guy would would shoot a 125 130 inch buck and it was newsworthy i mean there were very few of those bucks killed in any county in the country and uh the management has just gotten better and better i think some of the the uh state game agencies um i've got a theory behind it but i i don't think they're managing for the older age classes so much anymore and i think it's got to do with cwd um you know the it's been shown that the older males are the ones that are most likely to contract cwd and so i think these state game agencies are trying to cut back on the age structure um that's just my theory nobody said that but uh just based on some of the management decisions i've seen from them i kind of put two and two together but you know it's really the the private landowner who just continues to step it up and take it to the next level and we just see more and more of that with each passing season and and there is no doubt it's having an effect if you've got you know a few landowners in a say a township that are really managing they're going to save some of them young bucks and they're going to move them on to the older age classes where they're going to get bigger so uh you know i think it's real important that if we want to continue to be chasing mature animals it's not going to happen to the state game agencies we're going to have to take it on ourselves as as deer hunters and land managers and do what we can with our properties and it's going to have some effect and and i can see it's already having an effect it just seems like each passing season well if you look at it like five year increments right you know today if you if you look back five years i i think we're we've taken a substantial step forward as far as whitetail management on private properties and it's a trend that i don't see slowing down at all in fact of anything i think it's gaining steam and we've got more and more serious deer hunters jumping into it and it just bodes well for the future yeah i'd agree with that i think the tack on to that and again we've kind of talked this about this in the past and nobody wants to be the guy that says hey like we don't want hunters but there is a decrease in the hunting population that's happening whether it's just because of aging population or not as good of recruitment in certain states so i think as you get more serious hunters and overall you know you get less hunters in some of these states and that is posing a situation that is better to get older age class the year yeah and you know i've seen the the mindset of hunters change over the years too when i was your age i would see during gun season there would be trucks parked everywhere there would be deer drives going on you couldn't look across the countryside without seeing orange dots everywhere people sitting in trees or putting on deer drives and today you know in my area anyway during gun season i'll you know take a break from bow hunting and we we just have a short uh three-day gun season here so i'll take those three days off because i don't want to bump bucks out of my hunting areas and get them killed and i'll just you know go for rides about daylight and dusk and you know just see you know where the hunting pressure's at and things and i i literally don't see 10 of the trucks and the hunters sitting around that i did say 20 years ago yeah and as far as deer drives i know there's still some deer drives that go on but nothing to the extent it used to be and there's nothing more deadly on young bucks than deer drive no i do think at least a percentage of that pressure surely probably a large majority of it has just kind of fallen off or whatever but some of it i think is transitioned to the archery season whether in form of crossbow or transition a true compound bow yeah no i would agree with that you know and i look at a state like where we're at don we're in pennsylvania right traditionally i mean growing up in the in the 80s and 90s like i mean it was it was like that you orange army everywhere you go and it's still a ton of pressure but the fact is it's not nearly i mean we're 300 000 ish less hunters than we were in the mid 90s you know and because of that you know people are killing you know 160 170 inch deer a couple 190s killed in pennsylvania two years ago i mean those deer never appeared you know in years past because they were shot at two or three yeah and you know i spent some time in pennsylvania last winter and i was on some fantastic you know looking properties and i don't see why you guys can't continue to raise the bar and shoot more bigger bucks than than you have in the past and in fact i think it will happen yeah i agree with that i think that just the the way the state's going and it's just it's inevitable like we're you're not going to sustain a million hunters year after year after year right it eventually starts falling off and and that's kind of where we're at and to your point about cwd i mean we've got it in the state there's definitely been a lot of changes that you know whether people are in support of them or not like have affected deer populations especially in the central part of the state um you know we've had some ehd in the past you know four or five years in the southwest part of the state so there have been things that contributed to you know herd reduction which seemed to be the big kind of achilles for pennsylvania for so long is you know growing up when i was a kid sitting with my dad like we'd watch a herd of 50 deer come through and there'd be a spike in the group of all does and fawns you know we may not see 50 deer in a herd now but i'll go out to any soybean field in the in the summer and see multiple you know two three four year old box and that was never the case i think jared really hit on something when he said that transition you know been from from gun hunting to archery that's what i'm seeing here you know in illinois as well is the crossbow had a big impact on that as jared mentioned but uh this year for the first time probably our archery harvest is going to top our gun harvest wow and they've just been coming closer and closer together each year and last year the gun harvest was just barely above archery this year i wouldn't be a bit surprised if archery doesn't surpass gun hunting that's crazy that is crazy do you know what that looks like in other states or not even close usually yeah i didn't think so but they also have a short shorter gun season versus like we have a 10-day 12-day gun season missouri's got 14 days yours is just three days two three days yeah we got three days in november and then we have a four-day season in december so seven total days broke up you know into two different seasons don this might tie into your cwd question so jared and i we typically go out and hunt kansas in november we didn't draw this year part of what we're talking about here is just a huge wave of hunters going in and applying in kansas which you know just limits the number of permits that are going to be successful so instead we're um somebody told so we're going to be down in um uh pulaski and union county illinois uh hunting the second week of november and one of the things that we were kind of discussing is you know again it seems like illinois has and probably will have great deer hunting for a long time but it's very easy it's over the counter right and just go by there's a lot of public you know private you know it's expensive to lease but you can lease ground do you foresee that state ever becoming more kansas or iowa-esque where you know at some point there's a regulation around how many people are coming in no i don't you know illinois is famous for its liberal politics or infamous maybe chicago yeah yeah so the the politicians see the illinois deer herd is nothing but a money source and they're not about to limit that income in fact if anything they'll probably raise the prices and and still leave the door wide open yep if they thought they could get a thousand dollars for a tag and not lose hunters that they would do it they they want to maximize the revenue they don't care about the deer herd it's all about maximizing the revenue yep seems like it would be an easy they don't give them any ideas but it seems like they could just open up the gun seasons a little more and increase revenue substantially well i you know in illinois it's we have big bucks i say in spite of the dnr not because of the dnr yeah and the dnr is you know they're basically controlled by the politicians so i'm not you know directly blaming idnr and the biologist because i know their hands are tied to some degree for sure but it's the illinois politics that's basically ruined the illinois deer herd and as far as a statewide the management of statewide now what saves illinois is that we have so much private ground yep okay and you you get these landowners that and the short gun seasons mm-hmm yeah short gun season does hell because in contrast he got like missouri is open about the same yeah you know just longer gun season you get a landowner that doesn't allow any hunting whatsoever well that's a good thing because his property becomes a sanctuary for growing bigger deer yeah and you mentioned missouri you know here's what i always found really interesting about missouri probably the three best states for whitetails in the whole country are iowa kansas and illinois they all surround missouri yeah missouri sits right in the middle yeah poor management's what it is it's a long rifle season as you mentioned jared in the middle of november and that just kills them just crushes them and it's the same way with indiana really indiana's got about a three-week gun season right in the middle of november and they sit right between ohio which i i think ohio has the potential if they would change one regulation ohio would be the number one state for whitetails which one but the allowing the debating there's so many young bucks that get killed over bait piles i'd be afraid to just eliminate if they'd eliminate that bait pile ohio would within three years be the number one destination because they got a one buck limit yep and they got a gun season in december after the wreck yeah you feeling do you feel the same way about kansas um kansas but but kansas is limiting their hunters right where ohio is not yeah um that's fair and i'm not saying i'm for against bailly i'm not even taking a sign on that irrelevant it doesn't matter to me one way or another but if ohio would do that they would jump right to the top they'd surpass iowa yeah what what i i kind of we have somebody and i'm i would agree with that as well we just had so ben rising as a friend of ours and was on the podcast recently and like great same way ben is a great guy he loves to [ __ ] a moan about debating in ohio though and i understand why because he grew up hunting ohio and had a lot of success and in his opinion which i would agree with is that the more baiting has has caught on and picked up he's like dude you can't find a deer not on some kind of a corn pile pattern on somebody else's property that's it you guys are just bringing truckloads in and just dumping and while i enjoy the benefits of baiting as someone who haunts ohio it's pretty clear to me that if that if that went away we'd have bigger deer and more of them yeah and i mean i like it i mean i'd have no problem saying like yeah i'll hunt over bait i use bait for my cameras all the time like i i don't care if it's legal go for it that said i mean i've tried to hunt mature bucks over bait it's freaking hard it's not easy it's hard it's harder than without it yeah well even if they would just eliminate i mean i'm a fan of supplemental feeding yeah for sure i know some people aren't but i'm a fan of it so i just think they need to eliminate it during hunting season that's it sure yeah i was just i think i was telling strauss this morning it's like i this was just the easiest way that i could put it was like a corn pile is especially if you get like something sweet on top of it is hard to be as far as attractability but i would say it's very easily beaten in terms of huntability well i mean there's been research done and and given it's in the south and you know every property is different but a lot of the research will show that if you continue to bait like let's say through the season eventually the amount of daytime movement you see is just non-existent because the deer knows it's there it's relying on it it can come whenever it wants yeah maybe that's true but i mean dude i can't tell you how many times i've had a daylight pattern on a buck on a corn pile that i've never seen in person when i went to hunt him i just it just seems i eventually i hope i'll learn yeah i'm gonna try it again this weekend you know yeah but uh they're just they're really tough to kill on them corn piles i think i think the other thing that i've seen at least and and you know don i'd like to get your take on this is that not so much in like early season or summer but as you get into fall is those big mature bucks don't want to be around other deer they just they don't want they don't want to be out of corn pow where there's three other two-year-olds here and a one-year-old up in their grill like they don't they don't want to do that stuff until like thanksgiving week they get stupid because they're hungry they're hungry no because they get the last doe coming into their corn piles yeah don knows what i'm talking about oh yeah you know the corn pile is not decimating mature bucks it's decimating young bucks that's it i mean there's a lot of guys sitting on those corn piles that'll shoot year ones oh 100 and the guy you know he might have three earwigs coming into his corn pile and he shoots one because ohio's a one buck limited state so what's he do he calls his buddy and say hey you know i got these two bucks coming into my corn pile every night well then he shows up he shoots another one of those yearlings and it's the young bucks that they're wiping out and they're preventing a lot of deer from getting to those older age glasses you know ohio's got fantastic genetics they've got genetics as good as any place in the country yeah it's just that and the ones that get to the older age classes a lot of them are giants yep if they could move more of those young bucks into the older age classes it would really i mean i think ohio would blow away iowa my property's uh a perfect picture for what you're talking about we're just talking a minute ago about how many just crazy good two-year-olds have got even one and a half two and a half some of them make it through three yeah just stellar box it's like man my dad killed a two-year-old a couple years ago with like two drop tines five inches each just perfect heavy gnarly like just crazy you've got a couple 153 year olds this year and so many of those deer just go they just can't just go missing yeah yeah and unlike the buddies again we were just talking earlier i for us it's it's we're bordered by some amish and uh it's kind of like the one shoots the next one they fall to the side the next one puffs like a row of them but they knock them down for sure it i think that the the state regulate when you start to look at okay ohio that baiting role goes away it's really good you know in missouri i think it's a combination between the rifle during the rut and the ability to kill multiple bucks which possibly could even i mean what do you think don illinois could look like had it only be a one buck state well i remember in the late 80s early 90s illinois was better than iowa it literally was better than iowa it was the best state there was but then you know the non-residents discovered illinois and are you blaming politicians just discovered the the non-resident money yeah and the flood gates open and outfitters i mean i remember when there was no outfitters in illinois yeah i'm talking you know probably late 80s mm-hmm um and at that time you know illinois blew away iowa wow just blew them away wasn't even close but as the commercial hunting you know the the outfitters popped up the non-residents were not limited yep um it just destroyed the age structure is what it did more than anything and you know pike county i just said on my last podcast that i think pike county illinois is the most overrated place on that planet i i've done a lot of work in pike county i've got open invitations to hunt multiple properties in in pike county for free and i wouldn't drive across the state to sit and stand there wow because it's it's living on its past reputation is what's happening and more and more people are opening their eyes and see it man this place isn't nothing like what it's supposed to be yeah and so the the outfitting and stuff in that area is kind of it's catching on with with non-residents of pike county is not what it used to be and the whole state really isn't either but but it's not bad it's kind of what's holding its own is the fact that that more private landowners are getting involved in managing their their properties yep and that's what's holding illinois where it's at now but uh no no help from the state whatsoever yeah it's an interesting thing i do think i don't see gun season increasing number one is even though springfield runs illinois like think of chicago you can't even have a freaking gun in that city you know so i don't see them increasing that opportunity of gun hunting the other thing i think that's a lifesaver for illinois right now is like you guys still can't use most centerfire rifles right it's muzzleloader shotgun during gun season right you know now given the new modern muzzleloaders and stuff for shooting 500 yards but still it's not guys walking out with a 30 ought six or something like that yeah yep yeah well i i wouldn't be surprised i mean illinois seasons just become more and more liberal i mean they added the crossbow they added a youth season which i'm 100 for but but they added a late winter season for uh antlerless harvest they just keep adding seasons and uh it's all about the income but at the same time i think the insurance lobbies tied in pretty tight with the legislators so um you know they want to keep that deer herd in check to to cut down on the deer car collisions um which costs the insurance company money um i wouldn't be surprised if at some point that we the rifles are allowed i mean indiana just recently saw that allowing rifles ohio to be surprised if illinois doesn't at some point yeah ohio did they also added a season like a late gun season but yeah i saw that in january maybe yeah yeah the weekend it is weird when you start to look at that kind of how all of those different things factors come into play for one single thing which is we just got to get bucks to an older age class right and in most cases across the board it's not complicated it's just difficult it's a lot more difficult than people think and we're at an advantage right now per what don saying more private land more private landowners involved less hunters right what you we talk about that being a negative thing but if you're trying to grow bigger bucks less hunters is what you need less i mean hunting pressure is the number one killer of a big buck you know that's what's gonna do it and so if you if you start to look at these things like we're set up to do it right but there are some things bait in ohio bait in kentucky baden kansas that are killing these two and three-year-old which will be future 170 pluses yeah just how it is and you know the debating issue again i i don't have a dog in that fight because it's not allowed in my state but uh you know i i guess one thing that would irritate me if i lived in ohio is you could be just an awesome land manager you know you could provide the best habitat the best food plots and and spend your entire year working towards that and your neighbor goes out a week before season opens and backs up a dump truck with a pile of corn and boom there goes your deer he's done nothing for the the species he's done nothing for the habitat he's contributed nothing back to conservation but he's there reaping the reward and that's kind of you know the the thing that that really gets me about it is it allows people to you know in this world in all aspects whatever we're in involved in there's givers and there's takers yep and and you know a land manager is a conservationist he's a giver he's providing food for not only the deer but all the other game he's providing habitat you know he's the guy that's out there planting trees whether they be fruit trees or or timber trees you know oak species or whatever um he's providing browse on his property for for game and he's given back and then yet some guy backs up with a dump truck and in 30 seconds he just annihilates everything that guy did in a sense i think uh don just recited your life story yeah yeah well it is it is that's ohio's that's right but seriously again and it's no that is the problem with baiting i think it's it's a little unfair to people who are just investing well see and i do both like i i do all that stuff yeah supplemental feed year round but no and if i see the opportunity to bait and kill a deer i'm sure going to um but there's some other things like let's take the lease so we've got a lease in uh near jared's farm too that we're hunting for the first time this year and we've done a lot of work on it um and we've we've fed for you know several months on it but literally there's a guy next door who brings in like a tri-axle of corn and just dumps a big pile in the middle field and in a single spot 30 tons a year of corn he got and i talked to him he's quite a piece of work you know we're trying to invest you know in in conservation we're putting different like the turkeys you know pollinators everything and like good things to be said for him is he he hasn't stepped foot on his property aside from that box blind in six years yeah so it's i mean it's not pressured and he can only kill one buck so yeah whatever yeah but still if he's got 30 ton of corn just sitting there if he's not hunting that ain't doing us any good either no i don't know though i mean we just it seems like he's got his own little deer herd and they just stay there and our deer are just different deer like he doesn't have pictures of our deer and we don't have pictures of his deer for whatever reason like those deer just seem to have grown up and they live and die by that corn that's why now their antlers look very good mm-hmm they're just i don't know yeah in the interest of full disclosure you know i mentioned i had the ohio property i did have feeders on that property you know during season sure yeah i didn't dump corn pile i prefer to have a feeder keep it out of the weather yep and that and uh but i had three feeders on uh i forget how many acres of property was about 160 acres we had a about 20 acres in food plots and then we had three feeders as well and the reason for those feeders more than anything was that if the neighbors started dumping out corn we want to be able to compete with it and hold some deer too yeah and that's the thing that i see in ohio i spend probably more time in ohio than any other state except my home state of illinois when it comes to consulting and what i'm seeing is guys are baiting because they feel like they have to bait 100 if they don't the neighbors are going to have the deer so they've got to yeah frankly that's what i kind of feel like in kentucky too like i'll go i've got a place in kentucky that i'm at every two weeks sometimes there's larger gaps if i've got to work more but if i go three or four weeks and i don't fill my feeders up it'll take two weeks for the deer that have been on my property to come back because they'll just go to somebody else's you know and it's not that i want to keep buying feed it's expensive right but if i don't it literally they'll just be off the property now eventually they'll come back door and run and stuff but if i'm trying to protect those deer there's no way can't do it unless i'm feeding were you in like the southern part of ohio don yeah i was i was in pike county not far from uh yeah waverly i was real close to the town of waverly ohio gotcha i'm more like eastern central mm-hmm okay well and we've got i've got a place in uh right outside columbus i'll be hunting this upcoming weekend it's a killer spot i mean classic it's not that it's any better because teams got to do 200 there but it's i think those bucks get old because it's right outside of columbus there's nobody hunting yeah you know and so if you get into those areas that like there's a state park sanctuary right next door oh dude what the best live there what better example than the seek one guys i mean killing yeah there you go genuine booners every single year like in people's backyards because they don't get hunted yeah yeah i i think that you know just kind of reflecting on what what you talk there about how much ground how many acres would you say ballpark those 32-ish farms that you're covering are total well that's a tough one but you think it over over 3 000 acres over 5 000 acres oh yeah yeah yeah i mean some of those properties are actually public hunting areas too sure so i'm not just looking on private farms i'm looking everywhere i possibly can to find a giant and if i can get permission to stick a camera somewhere i'm sticking a camera somewhere yep and uh no yeah it's it's thousands of acres no doubt about it i think that you know at least what we saw in the southern part of illinois we've got a couple small leases down there but frankly some of the public that is near the leases seems to be at least for both season better ground than even our leases in some cases just the way that the terrain or the funnels set up it's just so thick yep yeah and it's just islands inside thousands of acres of crop fields yeah i jokingly said it seems like that's where the term swamp donkey originated from it's freaking gnarly down there yeah and it is cypress swamps yeah yep yeah and i think that's where and i don't know i mean maybe with the the guy who is hunting a little harder here's here's where you get kind of two angles of it i think there's guys like us who if somebody says hey you gotta walk two miles in and there's a little island there and if you get under that island you're gonna find a giant we'll go there there's also the serious hunter who will spend as much money as possible to manage his property but that's where he lives in that bubble he doesn't he won't go outside of that bubble to go find a big deer you know it's either there or it's not and so i think it's kind of neat when you compare those two because you've got guys like i think the three of us who yeah you tell me there's a potential for a giant i'll go put a camera there i'll go hang a stand there don't get well don't get me wrong though like if if i had the opportunity 100 own the ground and i and i knew there was a 200 a giant there yeah that's right but if you just have that piece of ground and you invest in it and they're not there yeah you gotta get somewhere else but i don't think i think a lot of these guys aren't they're just gonna hunt what they have you know and there's nothing i agree with that you know but i see that with my clients all the time yeah and i get it you know i have it's more satisfying for me to sit on a stand on my property and i'm watching deer that i provided the habitat for i provided the food plots and to see the watch those deer utilize something that you created yeah there's a degree of satisfaction there that you just don't get you know popping yourself down on a permission property or public land 100 yeah and i think that's the and again you know no knock to those guys but if you want to kill big deer consistently you got to burst that bubble you got to get outside of it yeah i mean it's just just being versatile like you can you can manage for deer you know for years and years and just depending on where you're at what the hunting pressure is how that fluctuates you just might not have a deer to hunt every year and so i'd say like i ideally every you know every hunter has a piece of ground that they can call home and they can invest in and that they can be hopeful for but if that doesn't turn something up you know i mean if your goal is still to kill a big buck like you have to go to where they're at sure i mean that's that's the reality i think one thing i'd like to kind of flip on its head here and go on a management attack a little bit is um you know we've had a bunch of other guys on the habitat side jeff sturgis with bronson strickland mississippi state we've all kind of everybody has their their kind of viewpoint on how to let's say build out a property especially when it comes to the nutrition side of it you know and and jeff's a guy not that he's not going to provide nutrition um during the summer but because he looks at the midwest a lot and says well you know there's a thousand acres of soybeans here and 500 acres of corn here you know he really optimizes food plots and plantings for the hunting season to draw those deer his like term that he's coining and applying to that is called the herd influencer and so like you know who jeff sturgis is right oh yeah it's his opinion that he shared with us that um you know basically whatever october to january or whatever months it is basically the hunting season is a hunter or land manager's greatest opportunity to influence what that herd is going to look like from from year to year and you know we took that conversation and stemmed it all the way down into what types of food plots he's planning what his hunting strategies are et cetera i think where you're going is you'd like to know what don's opinion is on on that or yeah essentially if you're looking at it from whether it's your own property dawn or a client property in particular areas that you know maybe aren't all ag but you've got ag around you like you know what would be your approach there to say here's some of the things that from a planting or or management level that i would want to do to sustain that problem maybe a really literal example of that is he doesn't plant beans doesn't at all uh and his reason is uh i don't need summer food which i think completely overlooks the the winter aspect of you know of beans that's what i want to get into with dawn is is just yeah because i think a lot of people think of beans and they're like oh i don't need summer food well if you leave them standing you explain exactly so that's that's kind of where i wanted to get at don well it's ironic that uh i i think soybeans are my favorite plot they're my favorite plot hands down but i don't even look at them as a summer food source you talk about properties in ag country that's exactly where i'm at i mean i've got literally thousands of acres of soybeans corn whatever around my farm i don't have to provide summer food but i i think as a as a land manager trying to maximize the potential of a property first of all i want food sources there 365 days a year and secondly i want those food sources to be as diverse as possible so in my plots you know i want to provide the grains from soybeans and corn throughout the entire winter i'm not just looking from october to january or whatever i'm looking for until spring green up if a deer shows up at my place to spend the winter and he shows up in october i don't want him to have to leave in january because i ran out of food right i want him staying there and eating the best food he can possibly find anywhere until spring and then what happens on my place is the deer you know i don't have bucks on my place in the summer occasionally i'll have a year and a half old buck you know wander through or something i've got a handful of dough resident does that stay and they have their fawns here but in the fall as the crops get harvested and as hunting pressure picks up around my farm you know out two or three miles out as as that pressure picks up and as those crop fields disappear deer just slowly migrate into my place and i i've got more deer on my place the last day of season than i do at any other time and even during the rut i've got bucks showing up late that we're not there during the rut and the reason for it is because they know they can always find food there and one theory i've got is that you know my place is like the premier property in like the township let's say so all the deer in the surrounding areas they know when food gets scarce where do they go they go to dawn's farm to dawn's place and uh know what i think happens is a lot of those doe i mean i'll have you know basically more than half of the deer that are in this township will live on me in the winter and those does come and they bring their fawns and you know you know we know how fawns disperse you know when they get about a year old or so i think what happens is even like my resident does the fawns they have i think those bucks disperse and then when rough winter sets in you down the road that buck may be three or five years old or whatever i think he remembers where he had plentiful food during the winter as a fawn because i see these bucks show up in the winter that i have no idea where they come from and you know i have cameras not just on my property but i've got cameras surrounding my property miles around me that i talk about you know i don't have bucks here in the summer but i have the same bucks coming back every fall well i know where them bucks some are at because i find these bachelor groups that are out away from my farm a mile two miles whatever and i'm getting these bucks pictures in velvet and then boom they show up in the fall but then i've also got these bucks that that show up in the winter time that i have no idea where they came from i didn't have their picture in the surrounding area in the summer when they were in velvet in their bachelor groups but and they were not there during the rut but boy when them actually they start showing up about the first of december you know when the rut's tapering off those bucks really get back onto the feed yeah i start getting new bucks in and it's to the point where unless i get a chance we're allowed two bucks here in illinois and i always want to keep a a open box tag for the late season because i have no idea what's going to show up now if i get a chance to shoot two giants i'm going to do it sure but before i burn that second buck tag he better be something pretty special because i want to have something you know you know a tag left because i have no idea what's going to show up later but you know when i talk about diverse food sources i'm not just talking about food plots either now my food plots i think i counted up the other day and you know i have like over 15 different plant species in my plots you know a dozen of those come from the real world's deadly dozen blend which is a fall planted blend it's got cereal grains and brassicas and such but besides that i've got you know clover alfalfa i've got corn and soybeans and then on top of that i've got the the mass trees yep so i'll have you know i probably got i don't have any idea over 10 different varieties of apples i got pears i got crab apples i got chestnuts i got persimmons persimmons are not common where i'm at at all now you get south of me just a little bit there's a lot of them but i'm kind of like on that that break that cutting point you know where north of me there's hardly any south of me there's a lot but i've got a bunch of persimmons on my farm and i just think year-round diverse food sources are very important on a whitetail property yeah yeah i would agree how um you know i think one thing that and mainly because it's not as common as obviously like hard mass we're talking about you know acorns or something like that but when you talk about your soft mass side of things do you see that being um you know a big attraction point in that early season or or you know when do you see that use the most i guess from from the deer that you're looking at most of it is early season to be honest october yep um i mean they're hitting them right now um but our season's not in i mean they'll start in september say but uh yeah through october for sure i mean if i would go out and look underneath any of my fruit trees and i i don't even know how many i've got on my property but you know dozens if not 100 there's probably very little i could probably put the fruit that's on the ground in my hands yeah they're just cleaning it up here just clean it up as soon as it falls they're there every day to clean it up yeah i think it's important you know a lot of people i know will get discouraged um because they're driving around they're seeing bucks you know and in that september time period right before the season starts you know and and they get frustrated like man i'm not seeing anything but like they have to realize like you know if if it came push to shove i don't want to see the buck in september i want to see him in october november or december right i don't care if i see a shooter you know through july to september but i want to be ready in october november because that's when it counts you know and i think that a lot of people kind of get down on themselves and they're like well you know it's uh next next week's the opener and i just you know i haven't seen a shooter yet and it's like that's fine they're going to be changing here real soon anyways so don't worry about it yeah i think people would be absolutely shocked if they knew how few bucks i have on my property from say about first to april through this time of the year they're just now starting to show up i mean i the biggest bucks that'll be here on my place this fall are not here yet yep and uh you know it's people get the idea that these bucks are are staying on this property year round and they're not i mean but when they do show up i've got everything here to keep them here and when i talk to my consulting clients i always tell them to uh think of your property as one square on a giant checkerboard and you're in an airplane you're 30 000 feet up and you're looking down at your property you got one tiny square on a giant checkerboard and you need to do everything you possibly can to make that square the best square on the whole board and that means making it different than every property around it and having all these diverse food sources is a good way to do it because as i just explained with the persimmons for example you know my neighbors don't have persimmons because they're just not in this area right or if they are it's very very rare chestnuts i've got a lot of chestnut trees i don't know any of my neighbors have chestnut trees apples pears whatever and it goes right down to your food plots i want something grown in my plots that the deer can't find anywhere else in my neighborhood you got to make your square different than all the squares around it and diverse food sources is a great way to do that yeah i think that's a really good point i mean you know and i know a lot of guys who have good bucks on camera right now and two things number one is they'll set all their stands or all their sets to where they're seeing bucks right now all of a sudden those deer move off these crop edges and start going into the timber because acorns are falling and deer are moving back into that stuff and the next thing they're like yeah i'm not seeing anything i don't know where they all went it's like there's a there's a habitat shift here and you got to pay attention to that i mean if you don't and you're still hunting summer food sources in october like you're [ __ ] out of luck just the way it is yeah i know that uh a lot of a lot of the stands on my place like we used to do that a lot like i've got probably 30 stands hung on this you know thousand acres that we've got in ohio and uh we've hunted all of them a fair amount and some of them are you know good rut stands but like anymore it seems like i've gotten to the point where it's like i just don't i'm not real i wouldn't consider hunting any of them except like the known rut spots like those seem to be the only ones where like a fixed position tree stand is like makes sense to me anymore um just because like their pattern seems to vary so much from year to year and from from buck to buck depending on food source and what what any specific deer is doing um they're just kind of there to you know appease the guys that are hunting hunting our property and stuff but i mean even that deer this year that i've got on a pattern it's just it's very situational he showed up a week ago and i'm gonna hunt them out of a saddle just because that's i can get in there and do that yep yeah i think i think as you start to look at that kind of transition and and even what you're seeing don from you know now through october to december 1st when all of a sudden all these bucks that you know some of which you've never seen before getting sucked into the property you know people and it's and i get it right as much as we prepare for this thing year-round like we've got essentially 12 weeks like that that's what it is here's the 12 weeks and if we can't get it done in those 12 weeks season's here and gone before it's kind of like a hurry up to wait hurry now it's here it's like okay let's wait and see how it unfolds and i think people just get impatient you know and i think that's i think that's part of the reason that some of these younger bucks even get shot from guys who say that they want to hold out us because like al sudden it's halloween staring you in the face you're like man like you know am i really gonna pass this theory if it comes in and then you know that's just where it goes but i think if you have a complete property set up kind of like what you're talking about here don like you extend some of those chances i mean for a lot of guys the moment you get past november 15th i mean it's kind of a downhill roll from there you know especially if gun seasons have kicked in like all of a sudden it's high pressure like you can't find these deer food sources are are limited you know but if you're managing your property to be ready for that winter time period like december could be a better time to kill a mature buck than october november was i think that i think my property will be better this year like throughout the fall than it maybe ever has been just because of the food that i've got established there and stuff the years of tsi have been doing i just feel like it's got better fall and winter habitat than i've i've ever had so i'm optimistic to see what we'll we'll pull in this year don you said when we were talking about this earlier and just saying that your camera's lighting up you said you were using cell cams how much have those changed the way that you hunt throughout the year well this fall will be my 44th deer season and in 44 years the biggest game changer i've seen in deer hunting as far as success is a success on the mature bucks is the trail camera absolutely hands down i'll be the first one to admit that i wouldn't have nearly the big box on my wall if it wasn't for trail cameras and what they do more than anything is they make me or allow me to be so much more efficient with my time right when i'm sitting in a tree i know there's a shooter in somewhere you know i'm within the range of a shooter the home range of a shooter bug and before the trail camera it was all a matter of scouting glassing looking for shed antlers you didn't i mean you could have somebody tell you they they seen a giant but what's one person's giant i mean that hasn't changed yeah and you had to physically either see the deer yourself or find his antler or there would be just a small core of people whose word you trusted and that's the only way you knew a giant existed well today you know i mean look at me i've got 50 trail cameras in three states 24 hours a day those cameras are my eyes telling me what's going on and it trail cameras are the ticket if you're gonna i mean i don't see how you can kill giants on a consistent basis without them i agree yeah i i mean i know personally prior to even the cell cam side of things which i don't know we've been using cell cams for five years now probably yeah you know i 100 checked cameras and was just in the woods moving or checking cameras more than i hunted in the fall just because i was always trying to find how to get the most recent information to stay up on you know what was happening because if i go and check it four weeks later like great he was there four weeks ago what could that do me now well and what i'm doing is quite a bit different and i don't know i've heard anybody really talk about it to much degree is with all these cameras you know i'll find a young buck a three-year-old buck for example and i may not hunt him until he's five or six but i'm picking up on his habits you know when is he showing up at a certain place and i actually wrote an article back in 2003 titled same time same place it was published in peterson's bow hunting and in that article basically i i detailed how i noticed that the tendency of bucks to show up in the same place on almost the exact day definitely within 48 hours year after year after year and you know like when these bucks when a bachelor group breaks up and a buck leads the bachelor group to head towards his fall range i guarantee it year after year that buck is going to do it within 48 hours if he leaves his bachelor group on you know september 3rd next year he's leaving that bachelor group on either the third or the maybe the second or the fourth but it's within it's real close to the third and i've seen it even with these bucks that show up on my place late in december when they show up you can mark it on the calendar that's when he's going to be there next year if he's still alive and he does show up next year um and the trail cameras basically tell me when they're showing up it's not my observation it's when i get his first picture next year i'm going to get his first picture about that same day and so i'm using my trail cameras to put together like an annual pattern on a buck um before i even hunt him years before i hunt him so you know i've killed three different bucks on the first morning i ever hunted for mature bucks uh the second buck i shot last year the 185 inch block first day i ever hunted for that deer and i shot him in the first 15 minutes but i'd ran trail cameras on that property for the previous three years and had an idea what he's going to do and i think most deer hunters don't use their trail cameras to their their most efficiency they're always a step behind they go out and they check their camera and oh he's in daylight now he's hitting this scrape in daylight um it's time for me to start hunting no you're a step behind you should have been there when that [ __ ] was there and you got his picture yeah so what i'm doing is i'm using this intel from previous seasons i try to stay a step ahead of him so okay i got him on this scrape you know last year on november 5th first time he hit that scrape i get my stand there i stay the heck out until november 4th and then i start hunting that buck at that location and uh i think everybody wants to use that intelligence they gather from the trail cameras immediately but it's used a lot better a year down the road interesting two things real quick the date for me dawn that i've seen on our place is october 18th seems to be the one day that i can overlap and it's in a specific spot down there at the pinch the other thing is just a comment about trail camera information versus like intelligence and actual information that it provides like i think i see a lot of guys running trail cameras that get pictures of stuff but that they don't understand what it means like they they don't know what to do with it um you know from all the way from they don't know how old the deer actually is to how to even hunt how to interpret yeah where he's coming from where he's going why he's at that specific location and so i think you know trail cameras i agree with you are uh especially cell cameras are 100 percent like the most recent information is what kills deer but you have to know what to do with it the only uh exception to that might be a corn pile because you can get lucky yeah and i mean even i think with a cell camera to dawn's point you're still a step behind you know and i saw that last year yeah unless you're a year ahead yeah i was hunting a 170 inch deer in pennsylvania last year which is few and far between and and i knew date wise i'm like it's 20 yours is the 18th mine's like 23rd 24th i've killed several bucks on this property mature bucks on that day and i there was a front coming through on the 23rd so i picked morning of the 24th to get in there and damned if he wasn't walking by evening of the 23rd and you know got his picture but too little too late right didn't see him the next day so i think that that's a really good point and i mean you know i know i've stored camera pictures for years and years but most guys i mean check the camera and there's a couple good bucks maybe send them to the buddies boom format the card and they're on like i don't even they don't even keep the information you know you know i don't mean to jump ahead of you don if you're gonna say something here i just what i do is like i save all those and they're on my phone gallery and so just as often as i'm like updating my you know my stealth cam app now to see new pictures come in i'm scrolling back to see what happened a year ago today and then the upcoming week i'm like what was happening and then i go to the year before that and i like in real time like right now i can go back and tell you what was happening on september 23rd 24th and 25th last year and the year before and kind of make some assumptions about like oh yeah like that that box might show up over here or i could do this i can do that i think that's a good point yeah i store my my camera or my photos by location so all the photos i get at a certain location or on a certain property are stored in one folder and then i can and they're on chronological order you know as they were taken so you know i don't i'm one guy that don't think it's possible to age a buck by a picture a mature buck i'm sure you can tell a young one but what i can do a lot of times is you know a buck shows up that i'm interested in all of a sudden and uh maybe he threw on 20 inches from the year before well i go back through that file and i see well there he was the year before oh yeah well there he was a year before that he was obviously a two-year-old that year which makes him a four-year-old now and if you hear me throw out an age of a block it's because i've got history and i can go backwards to at least when he's a two-year-old i mean you can tell a two-year-old a yearling 100 once they get to three it becomes a whole lot harder and uh having that history and by location makes it a whole lot easier you know there's a really a great tip for every listener that's listening to this podcast today right here if you're hunting a buck this fall and you have his trail camera picture from a year ago just look at the dates on those previous um photos from last season and you know where those were taken well that's where you need to be this season at that date so i mean that's something real simple that anybody can do it seems so logical but i would say most including myself sometimes just don't you know i get too wrapped up in the what's happening now and not the what had happened last year well and because i don't think it's you can't like uh take it as bible ever every he's not going to do literally exact same everything you know sources change different does come into weather fronts there are definitely variables to that but there's definitely a percentage of overlap i don't know don what do you think it is like 20 of the time he's gonna do exactly the same thing he did last year well i think it's close to 100 of the time he's gonna be in that area sure so that doesn't mean he's gonna walk by that camera sure that makes sense like you said wind directions are different and everything else but it's very most of the time he's gonna be really close yeah that's turning you got a picture hey yeah no i i think that's kind of um i think that's one thing that and we've talked about it before you know i love trail cameras i mean again i i don't know how many cell cams were running too many right now but not enough at the same time um we're coming up on you i think we've got 30 or 40 30 or 40. uh in like seven or eight states though but i think that one of the things that you know you have to keep in mind is there's still a large chunk of hunter instinct intuition groundwork that has to be put in play there because i've over hunted the information on my trail cameras too much and missed opportunities it yeah it's the same thing i'm saying about not being able to read the like you still have to have some intuition and just apply what you know about deer to actually hunt them you know the trail cameras are a great piece of information but they don't tell you everything and it can be pretty humbling to see you from a stand a mature buck just walk right behind it and you're like oh never would have got pictures of him yep yeah well don't take what i said too literal i mean if you see a box picture you know from a year ago that doesn't mean that he's going to be right in front of that camera sure but he's going to be close i guarantee he's going to be close and i think that's the important thing because to go back to the beginning of this conversation can't kill big buck if he's not there so at least if you know he's around and you're in the area well hell man you're in the game which is all you can hope for anymore yeah yeah i think that's a big one how about um and i know we've obviously gotten some decent fronts coming through here recently when you kind of look at the overall aspect if we look at that single you know block on a checkerboard you know obviously food is a huge piece um how value do you have cover and water in that equation well covers number one it trumps everything freedom of human intrusion ruins more properties than anything so you need that cover without human intrusion got it and so you in in a lot of cases you're putting that cover ahead of food for sure because a mature buck that's what he desires more than anything is security yep he can wait till it's dark and he can walk a mile to the food but when the sun's up he wants to be where he's safe i think that's a big piece of kind of what we've talked about here in the past and that like you know for a lot of things um people look at food and what they're providing on that but maybe their their woods are wide open they're not doing any kind of tsi or they don't have warm season grasses or whatever it might be and the fact is is you're not going to provide what that buck needs like maybe he passes through your property or maybe he comes and feeds on it but it's in the middle of the night and he's heading a mile back to the betting after that yeah just that lack of human intrusion is is tough to find these days like even on so a place that i hunt my parents live there and you know they run a ministry and stuff and they always have people over and um it's their property and so obviously they're going to use it however they want but i think there's a an undeniable effect that it has on the deer population there well and yeah i mean i think whether it's just from driving around yeah whether it's human pressure or just people just don't want to be where people are yeah they just don't they don't want to be around that you know unless they're in suburban columbus ohio and then yeah okay that's true they're just used to it at that point yeah um they're pretty adaptive you know they'll they'll find that little pocket where the there's no human intrusion it may not be that big but it may be in some guy's backyard but yeah yeah i i think that one thing that you know people overlook especially and we've had this conversation a lot is even when you have everything right let's say cover's there food's there you feel like you've got the strategy right the way that you get in and out of your stand or your spot is so critical um and and to the point where i've seen guys that have some of the most beautiful properties i've ever seen that have big bucks on them and you know they'll ride their damn utv within a hundred yards of their stand and then walk in and i'm like what are you doing like you know and they just that's just how they are i'm undecided on that because those i know guys like that that kill big gear and maybe it's because they just they do that frequently enough maybe i don't i don't seem to know like there seems to be a few different schools of thought you know and i mean it's the argument of is it is a vehicle or utv or atv less intrusive than people i would say yes your thoughts on cases on vehicle intrusion they're done well access is everything yeah um if you don't have access good access you don't have a good stand now yeah a tractor utv whatever is not going to disturb a deer as much as somebody walking yeah and but the thing of it is that back on my farm i'm always riding around on a four-wheeler side by side a tractor or something but on the when i go hunting it's not like that at all i'm slipping in undetected interesting because you know a big buck he might just lay there and let you drive by on a tractor but you've alerted him enough that he's not going to stand up and move before daylight or before dark while it's still daylight so even though you didn't bust him off of the property you might cause him to stay in his bed later than he might otherwise here's my dad's theory and it's one that i do i actually i like it um so it's you know big bucks are obviously aware of these tractors and stuff but they they can't necessarily count um so like if you can drive in have somebody drive you in on a tractor or a vehicle and drop you off once they're past the field of view of that deer and then drive back out you know that deer is like oh okay one and one out good to go i agree with that 100 yeah there's no doubt about that i think the drive-in in park is this the the error right made you know let me drive in here i'll park you need a tuck and roll method yeah yeah well and i mean i i think it also to dawn's point about walking through i mean that's that's the other thing and it it you know in several the spots that i hunt you know depending on the wind it'll be a different axis in you know or i just can't get into that spot right if it's if it's this wind i just can't access that because it's going to blow right back into this bedding area and i think a lot of guys may even think that they have a clean access but they'll just regardless of when they use that same access right in and out you know and oftentimes they don't even know it but they're just messing it up spot's done you know that's why probably i've killed most of my mature bucks on the first sit or a hanging hunt period not frequency i think deer hunters are quick to jump to conclusions too they'll see something like one time they're right and if they see it one time well and i'll give you an example is that uh mode pass yeah you know deer will follow a motor path there's no doubt about it deer will follow a mode path but your box will sometimes follow a mowed bath i've seen them do it but there's been two different bucks that i hunted that refused to walk and mowed back and one of them was smokey the buck that i i shot in 2017. um i i watched that buck more than once cut across the motor path but he would not follow it for anything and uh you tell somebody that you know bucks don't i tell my clients don't be mowing paths instead go in with a sprayer yeah and spray a pass yeah those bucks there's some bucks that want to feel that that brush or those weeds up against their side sure it just makes them more safe now you could mow a path and still kill mature bucks but there's a certain percentage of them that you're not going to kill on a mowed bath yeah and i want to do what i can to kill the highest percentage i possibly can so instead of mowing paths i will spray paths where those deer i i can lead them wherever i want to go with that sprayed path but there's still those weeds that are right up against the deer side that that'll just about any mature buck will follow that and that's just one example you know we was talking about access and how you want to access yeah there's some mature bucks that you could drive out there you know with a you could land with a helicopter and you know blow the leaves off every tree in the woods and drop a hunter off to take off and here he comes it's time to eat he's coming to the food plot but there's also going to be a percentage of them that are going to tuck their tail and crawl under a log and they're not coming out till midnight yeah so uh we got to be careful about observing something once or twice and thinking that's the rule for all mature bucks because very seldom is that the case that's good advice yeah yeah i it sounds like dawn and don't let me put words in your mouth on your strategy there but using yeah using your kind of back history with a lot of these deer you're it's not like hey it's october 1st opening day i'm in the woods you're very selective on the days that you hunt specific deer correct yeah you know today i mentioned earlier it's my 44th deer season and i'm as crazy about deer hunting as anybody you're gonna meet but i probably hunt less today in a season than i ever have in my life but i probably spend more time preparing to hunt today than i ever have in my life yeah and a lot of it goes back to those trail cameras telling me when and where i need to be and a lot of it's just experience too you know you we learn as deer hunters you know overall traits or whatever habits of mature bucks but each property you got to learn as well so you know it used to be said that you really don't start seeing the best bucks on a property until your third season hunting there it takes you a couple years just to figure out where to get your stands how to get your stands in the right tree or what tree you need to be in and you know to this day i'm still learning my own property and and i'm fine tuning things every off season i'm fine tuning things just a little bit to throw the odds in my favor just a little bit more and it's a never-ending process yeah i think that's something that you know growing up i mean i remember you know the day before the opener it was like christmas eve right like i couldn't wait to get out on whatever was end of september early october for the opener you know and you just go sit the stand and you know sometimes you'd see something maybe saw a few doze maybe you saw a good buck but it it you know to now where it's like i'm very like almost in some cases over critical of all right here's where this front's coming through based on history here's with this here's the two days i'm gonna hunt and maybe they're two weeks from now right now unless something changes from cameras like i'm i'm just not gonna hunt like i have no intentions of doing it maybe i'll take the kids out because we're hunting one and two year olds or whatever but at least for my sake you know i just i know when i'm gonna start hunting and most of the time it's the 22nd 23rd of october is typically the first time i'd really go after something i'm curious i'm curious don what so you've got all these trail cameras running and relying a lot on those to determine what days you're going to hunt are a majority of those on would you scrapes or how do you have those laid out so that you get the best information possible um it's a lot of marlin scrapes but uh you know funnel areas you get some kind of terrain feature that funnels deer movement uh in the summer i'm i'm focused mainly on food sources uh where the deer are entering those food sources because here in illinois we can't bait or mineral out or anything um but yeah probably right now most of them are on funnel funnel areas and scrapes interesting see i have a hard time like uh getting away and this is a negative the concept of like this camera has to be on this one distinct point that this deer is coming to like a scrape or a corn pile or a mineral and like i've always had trouble justifying not putting a camera on something like that to put it on you know even a funnel where i know they're they're using it mm-hmm that's something i probably need to look at a little more well i think again buy more cameras and have them on both talk to him jeremy buys the cameras well i think that that kind of goes back to the the fact of you talk to a lot of guys right now and and just via trail cameras a lot of these guys will tell you that they're seeing less bucks and i would say i'm seeing more bucks now but two weeks ago it would have been flip flop right because none of my cameras were sitting on ag and entryways into these bigger fields and stuff i was sitting on scrapes back in where the acorns and the terrain is and now all of a sudden i'm starting to feed in deer that i've not seen before and those guys are losing deer they're not seeing anything that they were seeing two weeks ago and you know this is the adjustment that has to be made as deer hunters right as like the season approaches i'm not i'm not scouting and hunting for deer in september i'm scouting and hunting for deer in october november so even when we were out in illinois in july we placed all of our cameras for what we think would be best in october november so from july to a couple weeks ago we didn't see [ __ ] yeah there was nothing you know and it's like man like these things have been out and all of a sudden just like that in the last week or two oh there's a nice buck hitting the scrape up there's another good buck moving through and so you just i think that's where that hunter intuition comes in is you know you may only get out especially if you're hunting out of state you may only get there a couple times a year you have to be thinking forward of this might not be the best place now but come october these bucks are going to be cruising through this area yeah i've got a habit or a tradition if you will of every labor day weekend i i spend that weekend shifting my cameras again from summer feeding patterns to fall running areas and that's about the time the bachelor the bucks are starting to shed veil but the bachelor groups are starting to break up and uh it's about a month before season opens so i can get in there and do that any disturbance you know is is forgot about a month later so that's my labor day weekend tradition is i'm shifting my trail cameras it's so surprising how many people just don't like and i don't know if it's um kind of that invested hope of like man you know they were there in august like he's gonna show back up and maybe he will but surely not in any consistency because you're patterning him based on when these this entire 200 acres was green soybeans how about the time you hit the end of october those beans aren't even there they're picked they're gone you know so i think it's just that mindset that you know get people in a rut and and frankly they'll hunt those places and then i'm like yeah you know i'm just not seeing anything i'm just not seeing anything and it's like well yeah man i mean we know plenty of guys who will not hunt the woods they will only hunt the edge of a field that's just who they are and and frankly half the time like we're hunting in the woods we're like yeah man we're seeing bucks chasing and cruising all over the place and he's like yeah i didn't see anything i'm like you're 200 yards from the truck on the edge of a field like you're not not right now at least well you know the deer's patterns or habits change throughout the season throughout the entire year really and if you don't understand those changes and know when they're gonna happen and it goes back to being a step ahead of the deer or step behind you you know they're going to shift from a summer feeding pattern to a fall rutting pattern you shift your cameras before that happens and then you're going to catch those bucks as soon as they show up into their fall range you're going to catch them then instead of waiting for the buck to get there then you go in and put your camera up and you put disturbance on the area and i just i think it's really critical with these older mature bucks is that you got to be a step ahead of them yep i agree um i want to look at kind of let's go from this macro level of all right let's say on a particular property you've got a you got pictures of this five-year-old 170 plus buck as you start to think about where i'm now hunting that deer um on a micro level um are you looking mainly at terrain wind direction etc or are you looking at you know sign on the ground scrapes rubs etc like that you'd be shocked at how little attention i pay to sign anymore interesting and i i went through that i mean i was i was a young hunter struggling to kill a two-year-old deer just like everybody else has been through that stage and uh when i was younger that's what i was looking for i was scouting looking for sign the more sun i seen the better i like it and that's where i put my stand yeah and uh the older i've got though i and the more experienced i've got i've recognized that today i put my stands based on terrain features more than any that's that tells me terrain tells me where to put the stands when direction tells me when i need to hunt there and wind and terrain is it dictates everything i do today so i mean i know jared and i do this a lot like we'll pull up whatever whatever your favorite mapping software is right and literally we'll study an area to be like well like here's a saddle like this is clearly a point these deer across in here yeah my favorite spot to hunt during the rut especially um is the downwind edge of bedding cover because those bucks will just cruise that cover they can use their nose to smell any doe that's bedding in there that dope could be a hundred mile or a hundred yards in in the thickest stuff you could ever imagine and if that buck's walking that downwind edge he can smell it and if you can be right out there on the edge of that thick stuff on the downwind edge and uh that those bucks just cruise through there without ever following a trail you may not have to rub a scrape or a trail inside of your stand and it takes a lot of faith to do that at the beginning for sure it uh was a pretty tough move for me and it took me seeing a few bucks before i really uh accepted it as a viable tactic you know and and one that i really embrace today but uh i don't hesitate to put my stand where there's no sign whatsoever based 100 percent on the cover and the train i would assume that makes you pretty efficient at going in and being able to hang a set and get out of there without stomping around an area and really making your presence known right oh for sure yeah i mean when i go to hunt i know exactly the tree i'm going to it's not i'm going in and searching for a tree and i try to have for the most part most of my stands up way before season but there's always those situations you know where um you know you get some intel on a buck or whatever and you don't have a stand set for that situation and you got to set a stand but when i do you know i know exactly where i'm going now i may not know the exact tree but i know within a few yards of where i'm going and i think that's a big one because like even when we get into some new areas and we've tried to spend more time during shed hunting season or even in the summer time but like the last thing i want to do in october to november is go into an area where i know there's a buck and then kind of have to like poke around looking for sign and thinking like is this where i need to stand or should it be 200 yards this way should be 100 yards up this hill because i mean all you're doing is just dropping scent and disturbing the whole area at least if i can go in and be like hey by terrain feature maybe i don't know the tree but it's there's a group here one of these is going to be the tree that i'm getting into and i can b-line right to it hang it and hunt it yeah exactly and then you factor in the wind at the same time you know i think a lot of people expect a buck to uh commit suicide and be walking around and not utilizing the wind and you know there was a an advertising slogan one company had years back forget the wind just hunt well the buck don't forget the wind i mean i guarantee you a mature buck does not forget to win and that's what i really show in my whitetail master course when these students come and and we go to the standsides that that's what the comments they made is that's what was the the eye opener for them because i'm describing why that buck would even walk past that stand you know what would make him walk past that stand on any given day and it's all based on the window actually he's walking past because when he walks past there he's using the wind to his advantage to do this or that either to keep himself safe or to search for hot does and probably both yep can you explain to us don maybe even in the month of like october like what type of a scenario would you be looking for where a deer is using the wind to his favor that you can capitalize on well the other thing is you you gotta you gotta have an idea where that buck is coming from and where he's headed to it's not just you know when i started years ago when i was a deer hunting i would just go in the woods and wow there's a nice trail here's a tree i'll sit in this tree by the trail uh the wind is blowing my scent away from that trail all's good well it it's not because you got to figure how's it working for the buck so in an early season situation you know you know a buck is bedded at point a and he's gonna in the afternoon he's gonna get up and feed and the prime feeding area is over here at point b so he's walking from point a to point b he would like to do that with the wind at his advantage but if you've got instead of just a straight nose wind if he's got a quartering wind that's kind of hitting his his nose quartering into his nose that allows you to get off to the side of the trail he wants to use yeah he still has a quartering nose wind but there's no way he can smell you because you are on the right side of the trail where your scent's flowing away from that trail kind of down the trail but away from the trail i'm with you and that's exactly what i used last year on the second buck that i i shot i've got a youtube channel um chasing giants youtube channel and there's a buck on there joey i called the buck joey and i i described you know that hunting on that uh video and everything but that's exactly what he was doing that buck was coming down a trail the the wind was quartering into his nose and he almost caught my scent but that that trail turned and he turned and when he turned if he would have kept going straight he would hit my scent but right before he hit my scent stream he turned and that buck was doing everything a mature buck should to stay alive he was using the wind the way a mature buck should and yet i was to the side um in such a way that he couldn't smell yeah man there's some cool spots like that when you find them it seems like you just killed deer there year after year as long as that food source remains i was talking with jeremy even before the podcast so in your situation where if we know buck is coming from point a uh wants to make it to food source b if if c is us the hunter our setup it seems like that buck will come from point a and parallel the food you know the food source b for as long as he possibly can on the downwind side so he'd be on the eastern side uh you know walking it all the way out until he feels like he smelled almost all of it and if i can find a terrain feature that is at the very end he's like okay i can see the end of this wood lot and here's the food source i've been paralleling i'm good i've got everything covered and he'll turn up right before you and i'm in that last 20 30 section you know sections of wood with the wind coming a call from remington uh you know right out of the food source um even over into more bedding area below me and stuff it doesn't matter because that buck used that parallel trail all the way out and so he's good but i've still got him yeah and that's exactly what they do and a lot of times these bucks when they're coming back to bed in the morning they know where they want to bed and what i've noticed i picked up on it years ago just tracking a buck after a rain it rained the whole night before and i was going into a stand to hunt one afternoon and i seen a single set of big tracks i knew it was a buck figured it was a mature buck and i just followed those tracks in the mud to see how that buck entered his bed and it just a light bulb went off and it i've seen it so many times since then but what these bucks like to do is they know they want to bed somewhere and they'll run the downwind edge of that just to scent check that whole bedding area and then once they get past they will j-hook right back into bed and if you don't see them making that downwind sweep of the area first and you only see them after they've made the turn yeah i mean you'll swear that buck's walking into bed with the wind at his back and that's not what's happened at all he's already scent checked and then made that j-hook to come back in and uh and then he can watch his back trail once he's in his bed exactly yeah yep yeah i mean i think when you start to look at you know and again evolution through the season but if you think about that october time frame like i killed that buck behind jared was a 162 inch deer here in pa i knew where he was betting and he was heading to a scrape that he had hit and so my idea was if i could get him between him was in the evening we had a big front through my basically the thermals were pulling my scent back behind me but the way that there was just a slight win is i knew if he came off of that because the wind had switched and midday when this front came through but he had already bedded down he was going to come off this hillside and basically make a cut right right in front of me around the terrain to get to the scrape and he did you know and you start to look at that and say you know okay that might be in october maybe it's a food source maybe it's a scrape maybe it's both and then as it progresses towards november it becomes these bedding areas right and and checking for does and downwind and stuff and so again just you know you got to break this thing down and and i think the hard part for most people especially the people it's no knock not everybody can live deer hunting and management 365 you know a lot of us think it so much year round but you have to be so responsive in your thinking because you know this week is different than next which is different from the next week like every week is changing so fast that if you can't think intuition and respond you're gonna you're gonna miss out on opportunities well i think as deer hunters a lot of us get too hung up on beat down travel corridors paths deer pass and we go to the woods and we think well there's no deer path here there's no deer a deer the only place a deer walks is on these trails and if there's not a trail there's not there well that's not the case especially with mature bucks and these mature bucks will walk right through the woods where there's not a trail there's not a rub there's not anything but they're doing it with a purpose they're doing it with the wind at their advantage and there's a public hunting area you know not far from me that's it surrounds a big lake and the friend of mine is a very he's probably one of the best deer hunters that's ever hunted that that property and he i mean he's really good he he played he's playing the win and he'll tell me that some of these bucks that he kills go to such an extreme to play the wind that they actually he hears them coming splashing in the water because the wind is blowing out from the woods out across that lake and those bucks want to get the wind to the umpteenth degree so they will actually go out to the edge of the water so they can totally smell you know all that woods and that doesn't surprise me whatsoever based on some of the things i've seen is a mature buck sure you're there's going to be examples where they weren't using the wind but if you want to kill them consistently you need to figure out how they're using the wind on the properties well and i think that's that's it it's one thing to be able to say let me look at this stand i think the deer here here's it's a west northwest wind or whatever i'm in a safe spot here it's going to blow back behind it's a whole different you know look when you'll suddenly look downwind of that stand and you're like there's 600 yards of of possible corridor that these deer could be coming in behind you and so just because you think you're safe because the deer bedding up here he jay loops around you and he's easily downwind of you before you know it right and they probably do that more than we even know exactly they don't always start blowing and snorting yeah a lot of times they smell you they they'll lock up and then they just turn and just throw it away or duck tuck their head you know walk away or whatever well and i think that that does go back to the fact that and again for a lot of people probably including the three of us like there's a lot of luck still in this game right of being able to kill a big mature buck but it you can do all the prep as possible and there are there are people that just will get damn 100 luck just that they kill a big mature buck because we could go in and hunt that thing to a t and never kill them just because that's just the way he is um and i think it's it's important for people to kind of understand that is that just because you finally have seen one right and the strategy to actually kill that thing is a whole different to get eyes on it i mean there's plenty of mature bucks that i've watched for four or five years i've never even seen them in person and it's not that i haven't hunted them i've hunted them i just i've never seen the deer in person well i think that's pretty common i mean these bucks that i'm hunting a lot of them the joey buck i just described the morning i shot him was the first time i ever laid eyes on him i had his picture you know for several years yep but i've never seen him yep and i think that's you know and oftentimes i think probably that one time you do see them you better make it count because that may be the last time you see them and i agree with your statement on luck there's luck involved in every buff that's ever shot including the ones i shoot but what i found is the harder i work the luckier i get yeah that's a that's a good equation on that side and and i think to that downwind point it you know i think the trails thing has been something that probably all of us had kind of embedded in our brain from a you know a young childhood of hunting like i remember you know being taught like deer would take the path of least resistance and and so of course that seemed like the mode trail or the beat down trail but then all of a sudden you start to observe more the more you're in the woods i've seen some deer take some resistant paths i watched that for sure that buck that i shot in kansas a couple of years ago jumped off like a 20-foot fall cliff like into the river i have no idea how he got down it next thing i knew he was walking across the other side of it and that's what any you know i think that as you see that because i've had for no reason at all i've been on the tree on the edge of a cliff that drops down into a creek bed right and i'm like okay like he's not gonna get behind me damned if that thing won't just jump down in the greek bed behind me you know and it's like you you can't understand until and every one of those hunts makes us better right because you can't picture it or fathom it until it happens and you're like you know yeah no deer is gonna come off that hillside and he's like well i saw one dude last year and came right off and right up here so i think that the more time they spend in the woods the better but you just have to make those sits count and i think far too often and i get it man there's nothing more than i love in the fall than sitting in a stand and hunting but the more you hunt the more you are in an area the more pressure you're probably putting on those deer whether you know it or not true and pressure just ruins more properties than anything yep so yeah and that's hard that's why you know i say i hunt less than i ever have it's because i'm picking and choosing my hunts where yeah it's like comparing a rifle to a shotgun you know i used to hunt the shopkin method you know you pull the trigger and you got 200 and some pellets going out and you're hoping one of them connects yeah with a rifle you're shooting one bullet and you've got to be more precise yeah kind of two different approaches i mean i had a good friend years ago that was the hardest hunter i ever ever met i mean this guy would go out opening day 90 degrees and he would sit you know daylight till dark every opportunity he was out in the woods sitting in a tree and i thought you know sooner or later this guy's gonna kill a giant because he's just out there so much he's bound to kill one just be because the odds are gonna eventually catch up with him he's gonna kill a giant well you know what that guy never did and to this day never has killed a giant buck because he burns out every he burns out his stands and his arrows he's in there so much he burns them out yeah and he's lucky to kill a young buck i think that's a tough lesson for people to to process to understand like you know yeah maybe that buck's in the area but if the timing's not right you're just doing more harm than good by getting in there i hate that saying you can't kill them from the couch so much yeah that's exactly where i was going next with my next comment that's it right i get it get just so abused yeah yeah well and i mean yeah and the thing is you sit on that couch long enough and and he knows you're there you know and that's what happens i mean again the the two the two oldest bucks i've killed in the state of pennsylvania i literally went in first time in the area hang and hunt later in october i mean could i have went in and hunted those spots in october for sure but it there's no way i mean all i would have done was just put pressure on him you know the the one that i killed in kansas last year on public land went in first time in there sat it killed him you know and i i firmly believe out of anything that a lot of people will say you know the more you hunt that stand and you're in the game the better the chance i think it somehow starts to decrease after sit one that's just my opinion though i 100 agree yeah just what i see you know and it's from personal experience more than it is what everybody else does but you know i've killed more deer more mature bucks at least on sit number one then it feels like when i start to go through the the year like the more i sit that stand i feel like my chances are slipping through i don't know uh there's definitely something to it that first time in the stand is the best time yeah and that's why i i want to be a step ahead of that buck and you know if i go in there if my trail camera history has told me a buck is going to show up at a certain place say the first week of november i don't want to go in there in october and i'm burning out the stand you know the does leave and everything else and you ruin it before the time is right and that's what i used to do i mean i've burned out more properties than anybody you guys ever met i mean i just ruined them because i just bombarded them with human intrusion and i finally caught on and today i put so little pressure on a piece and when i do go in and hunt it's like you're almost hunting unpressured deer yep i think that's a big point that um again it's hard for people to comprehend because we all love hunting so much like we're literally telling you don't hunt he's really making me want to get rid of that ohio lease but the landowner's in there every single day you know cut and stuff i mean we do have pictures of mature bucks but yeah and i think there there is a difference though not a ton but there is a difference between just vehicle pressure people in there and yeah hunting pressure um and it's not to say like on the november 1st if i go in to hunt a buck and like i don't see him that night that like i feel like i'm like i'm done like that it's over i do feel like i've decreased my chances you know and that the next set may not be as good yeah so i mean i guess i say this with far less experience probably than both of you guys certainly combined but um like when it gets to the especially like second and third week of november like i've seen a lot of deer get killed after spot's been way over hunted and totally messed up and it just seems like at that point it's for the same reason that i think like you know a good stand is way more important during the rut than a pattern on a specific gear the same way i think you get away with just time on that stand eventually deer mess up and one will run by it i guess that's what i was going to look at don if we break down like let's say late october to start right if you're hunting a buck and you're like okay you know this late october day in the month of october i couldn't agree more with you guys there's for me it seems like there's a tipping point whatever it is like that first second whatever whenever they're for all day's hits and just yeah whenever you would start all day sitting at that point like i feel like man it's hard to overhunt a spot unless you you literally are bumping a deer out of his bed or whatever you know you're doing wrong what what's your strategy there don like when you get into a late october or is it like are you still afternoon hunting mainly and and kind of just planning your day out or i guess at one point what point to jared's you know comment there do you start to say all right i just need to be in this spot and eventually he's gonna make a mistake well usually about the first of november yeah is when that starts i'll start hunting mornings hard yep and uh you know the seventh and the eighth are probably my favorite days there's more booners killed on the november 7th and 8th than any other dates and that's that's when those big bucks are really cruising that in most situations there's not a hot doe yet and those bucks have built up to a fever pitch and those those big boys are now on their feet they know it's just about to break loose um so i start a little bit before that i get a lot of questions every year you know when's the best seven days of should i take my vacation you know got one week of vacation and my standard answer is the best seven day period i think for killing a buck is november 5th to the 12th you want to get as many of those days in your week as you possibly can and uh to be more specific for giant bucks i think the seventh and the eighth are the two best dates and then the second best time i think is thanksgiving weekend at the end of november when the rut's winding down those big boys know it's about over for another year and you know they've been with a hot doe pretty much consistently for the previous two or three weeks and they leave one hot though after she goes out of heat they go to look for the next one and it doesn't take them very long to find them there's very little down time from one hot dough to the next but uh as the rut starts winding down that that down time between one hot dough to the next hot dough is longer and that's the period of time when that buck is vulnerable when he's really on his feet moving searching once he's locked up with a dough he's tough to kill yeah it's that search between the hot doses when he's really vulnerable and when you get towards the end of november those search periods between hot does are a lot longer and uh that's a fantastic time that's it that's that corn pile weakness time frame i was talking about because it's like you've seen that a lot they've forgotten about it at that point they're just willing to just stumble right into a group of does just running around a corn pile that week in november just to check every one of them which unfortunately is first week of gun season for us yep yeah i mean i think that um for whatever reason that there's that small window and it's not huge but it's that 23rd to 27th or 8th jeremy and i have been kemp oh you're talking still november no no i'm talking about october jeremy i've been campaigning for the 25th of october would be like your 7th of november yeah but it has to correlate with a weather event it does and it's it's more of just having them on their feet usually hitting a scrape in conjunction if you've got a hot scrape that you've been seeing them on even if it's at night that's that tends to be where he is but you know i've also seen um the buck that i was hunting last year was the 23rd of october i mean he was all over a doe at that point so very well she had just come into estrus like first dough in the area type of thing i will also say maybe don can put some pieces together for us here after and i've had some guys teach me the opposite of this growing up so i thought it was interesting after about like the like first to third of november i've had success with like blind calling especially rattling just go right off that the deep end that last week of october it's like i can rattle in anything and everything i've had rattling's big bucks killed one on october 25th last year and then it seems like as soon as they start getting onto does like they don't care maybe you catch one on the right moment i've grown a deer in and the early dozers there's no doubt yeah but in terms of blind calling and stuff like i think it goes back to what dawn's saying is like they're either on a doe already or they just came off and it's not hard to find the net yeah in october you're not competing with a lot like it's just they're looking to whoop somebody's ass or to find the first doe and there isn't very many of them yep you know but come november they got a lot of all that and i actually do very little calling i carry a grunt call with me um i used to have carry antlers with me all the time and i just think that uh most in most situations for every mature buck that you're able to call in you're probably going to spook 10 or 20 others and not even ever know it it's just like you're banging your antlers together and you're telling the mature buck here i am don't come over here because there's a i'm going to shoot you and it's almost the opposite effect of what you really think now if you catch one in the right mindset yeah he's sure i've rattled in bucks but uh i just think that it's more counterproductive than productive most of the time i can probably guess by your response to that how do you feel about decoys i've used decoys i've shot deer over decoys but i'll tell you what i've spooked more deer with a decoy than i've ever pulled in yeah um i i just won't use them anymore it's yeah they're risky i think that's interesting i mean because i um trying to think back i don't know i bet i could count the number of mature bucks big bucks that i've rattled in on one hand that said in terms of grunt and snort wheeze that's helped me close the deal on several yeah big mature bucks yeah you know i think once you're once you're in that visual you know range of that mature buck you know letting out a a good deep grind or snort wheeze atom can be the difference to him committing or not um but from a from a rattle standpoint whether seen or blind yeah i mean i've rattled in a ton of bucks don't get me wrong but i would say most of them were probably three and younger would be my guess well i i agree 100 on the grunt call being more effective than rattling i i've grounded in a lot of bucks and i still carry a grunt call and you know if i see a buck that's out of range i won't hesitate to pull the gun call out give it a shot and i've had it work and pulled them in and shot them yep so uh just i would much rather try a grunt call than rattling it or so what kind of grunt tip you got there uh i've got more grunt tunes than you could count probably somebody don't even make any more uh my favorite i've got an old night and hail from way back one of the first ones that came out that i really like and then i've got a couple of custom ones that uh some fans have made and sent me that sound really good too very cool yeah for whatever reason and again obviously no like no sponsor to us it's just that uh primo's buck roar has just been like the one that has closed the deal like i literally have the same grunt call that i've shot i don't know seven or eight mature bucks with it just seems like the same thing is wrong with all the other ones like they've got a reed in there and if you blow too hard it just flattens out and for whatever reason whatever primos has in that it just doesn't do that you just rip on it and it sounds great as loud as you want to get it i want to sound like a four or five-year-old not a two-year-old yeah or like a dying goose is what the rest i'm selling you blow it too hard i bet the custom ones would be good yeah i'd be interested to hear that yeah yeah i think that's a and again i think probably arguably more overused than underused in the hunting community grunt calls i mean i'll be sitting on public land and it sounds like somebody's playing a trumpet next to me you know yeah yeah all right yeah yeah for sure no doubt about that yeah i i think that as you and again so donna in that situation obviously what what i'm kind of taking from that is you're pretty damn confident about the spot that you're in that he's going to pass within bow range yeah for sure and you got to remember that i'm hunting a lot of farm country you know small wood lots drainage ditches or creeks with a few trees along the creek and um usually if i see a mature buck um he's either way across the field way out of range or even rifle range or he's coming if he comes through the travel corridor where i'm honey and i'm i've got i'm playing the wind he's usually right in my lap i usually don't have to call him in i think that's again i'm not talking like the uh i don't know what part of you said what southeast ohio eastern central yeah eastern ohio southwest pennsylvania yeah so you know that that area is you know big woods hilly terrain where it's like a transition area um between like to our east we've got you know big timber and it holds a lot of big bucks i know guys that hunt that um we would be just out of it even more on the like ag pasture side of it so like my farm at one time was primarily a big you know cattle ranch and so it's maybe 40 timbered and sixty percent pastured at one time and so now there's no cows on it now and i'd say it's 40 percent um ag 40 uh tsi timber you know five to ten percent food plots and a remaining ten percent use useless acreage essentially you know warm cool season grasses and stuff yeah i i think that that's um and it's tough to hunt i think that's probably why i would say not that i overuse it but i utilize my grunt call a lot is i'm in a bigger block usually so i may be in the game but you know he could come out 150 yards for me or 100 yards for me and so to get him into bow range you know he's going to need a little coaxing well and that's a you know there's a good lesson here too for the listener is that you know there's a lot of guys throwing out advice that kind of contradicts each other and i that doesn't mean that one guy's right and one guy's wrong i think that you know i'm sharing advice that's applicable to my experience and the terrain that i hunt in that doesn't mean that some guy in a different terrain different state a different type of property can apply everything that i'm saying but uh you just kind of kind of you got to look a little deeper than the advice and where's that advice coming from and what's that the person giving advice what's his experience been where he's hunting at and see if you can apply it to your situation yeah i think that's that's probably a big take-home point is like you know we're talking about situations and everyone's a little bit different in terms of what we get into there but you know there's some commonalities in terms of doesn't matter what kind of terrain you're hunting or what state you're hunting well you know just be skeptical of everything like in in life first of all but even deer hunting whether it's observations that you have in the field or what people you know talk about on podcasts or tell you directly like you should heat it you know look at who's who's talking about it and then question it and test it out for yourself and yeah you'll learn along the way that's what we're doing yeah i mean i think that's it and there is again it doesn't mean just because we're saying at least the three of us are sitting here saying like hey don't be in the stand every chance you get doesn't mean that we're telling you not to go out and hunt we're just saying you know use that time wisely to study to strategize to make a plan of attack of kind of what you're doing versus just going out and sitting in the woods you know because if it that's if you want to go it's way more fun that way if that's if you want to kill mature buck because then when you were whether you were right or wrong if you'd eventually kill one at least you could feel like you did something right yeah yeah well you know a lot of times uh i i don't do this as much as i used to but when i finally figured out that i needed to stay away from a stand until the time was was absolutely right for that stand i would spend a lot of time in observation stands yeah you know out on a field edge where i could see a lot of terrain but still have a chance to have a buck walk by now very rarely did it ever happen like that but i did get to do a you know see a lot of deer from a distance and observe how they you know traveled across the property or whatever where they was entering a feeding area or what whatever it may be if you're one of those guys that just has to be in the woods every day that's fine just don't burn out your good stands until it's time for them to spend your time in observation stands yeah that's that's good as well uh or go mule deer hunting yeah that's it right on a different state um well don listen man we appreciate you coming on the podcast um we appreciate you spending some of your morning and afternoon with us here and and uh we'd love to get you back on maybe after the season here and and kind of hear how everything went from you and really you know be able to put kind of the season together with the the strategies and stuff that we talked about here but i guess the last couple things that i wanted to touch on for everybody obviously you got the chasing giants podcast um in terms of like the season and as you're doing things is there is there anywhere that those guys are able to go and like see your content or or hear what you're talking about here throughout the season yeah um i try to make social media posts on a daily basis you can go uh my facebook pages higgins outdoors as is my instagram i've got the uh the youtube channel chasing giants youtube channel as well as a podcast something that i've done the last few years on social media that's really exploded is that i do a daily rut report during the month of november and you know i basically detail what i saw that day because during the rut i'm hunting every day somewhere and you know i detail what i've seen as far as buck movement or whatever what i've seen from my trail cameras i try to share a photo or a video every day on that report so uh if you follow either my instagram or facebook you'll see all those daily reports a lot of videos on the chasing giants youtube channel so awesome man appreciate everyone's support appreciate you guys having me on and um you know respect what you guys are doing i'll be glad to come back any time you want to have me man thank you anytime we can sit down and just talk dear with somebody who's as passionate as jared and i i mean we we eat it up man and and you know it feels like a deer camp and you know it's good just to sometimes it's good just to bounce ideas and have a discussion i mean that's really what this this whole podcast is about is there's no real track on it it's just we just want to talk to you and hear people's opinions and what they've got going on and how it can make jared and i better hunters and anybody that's listening and maybe gives them a tip that just says ah you know what that's that's what's going to kill this deer well i i'm still learning you know it doesn't matter how many decades i've been a deer hunter or what i've accomplished as a deer hunter i'm still a student of the whitetail and always picking things up and you'd be shocked at how many times a beginning hunter will have a conversation with me and he'll say something that triggers something in my head i'm thinking and i'll see something from a new angle and uh become a you know pick up a tip and become a better hunter just for something somebody had and mentioned in conversation well if i'm uh that's why i enjoy these podcasts so much yeah if i'm a giant uh midwest whitetail and i just heard you say you're still learning i'd be scared shitless at this point [Laughter] well we appreciate it man and uh yeah if anybody's listening to go check out dawn's stuff on the chasing giants podcast and youtube channel and look at the higgins outdoors social media accounts and and again don we appreciate you coming on man and and really admire what you've been doing and jared and i always are you know staying in tune with what you got because i do think that it's a wealth of information um you know for anybody that's just passionate about deer management and property management and whitetail hunting well like i said thanks for having me on you guys get to illinois look me up i'll buy lunch all right buddy a little bit north of where you're hunting at but uh i don't know how you take interstate 70 out we do i'm i'm not far off at 70 here just as you come into illinois so uh when you're coming out look me up and uh maybe i can meet you and buy lunch we'll hope we'll hold you to this all right maybe on the way back with some racks in the back there you go that'd be awesome all right buddy we'll talk to you don thank you man all right take care guys we'll see ya okay i am the man kills giants like to see can we pull something do you have some of this i want to see the one he killed last year i know i know he's killed some giants he's at a 221 gross yeah that's all right yeah i think he i think i remember reading this he watched it for three years potentially man i'm jealous of some of that luxury to like be able to watch a deer for three look at that wow toad that's brute yep and he killed a 185 last year too that's a jump 221 and a 180 that's the 197 and three has net yep yep 221 girls that's crazy man that's a big old buck bagel buck yup it's interesting when you first of all i mean how cool is it to be able to have nothing like say hey come subscribe to this podcast but if you haven't subscribed those podcasts how cool is it to have guys like um don higgins and jeff sturgis and like we're literally bringing all of this information together and everybody's got different oh it's a jaunt you know do you see this this is the deer transition this is two three four that's him but four oh they kill that four oh that's the sheds that's him when he killed him 221 that's insane oh my he'll do you kill this deal on film i think so i think it's on the uh chasing giants youtube channel or it should be this year i think he i think maybe it's a year out giant oh there you go view complete video of mel here's this youtube video click that link yeah we gotta pull that up we're recording the screen still right or no recording oh it's 25 minutes jump ahead like three quarters of the way through it to get some video footage of that buck you got that summer in velvet he was hanging out in a bachelor group with another big six and a half year old buck that i ended up killing that fall but uh whatever somewhere every noise a buck could possibly make that morning um but no male but i a couple of times i caught glimpses of mel in the brush but he just wouldn't come in these deer were around me were basically under three or four giants that was a monster really thick under those big trees and mel kind of skirted that he kind of stayed out where the brush was thicker right on the edge and uh i had one buck at one point come right under my stand and i'm filming him right below me and he hears something coming he tenses up and turns and i heard it too at the same time and i look up here comes mel right at us oh my god oh my god [Music] what an amazing animal [Music] wow oh that'll do it he's still filming wow don higgins the man man that's unbelievable seven yards he shot wow that's crazy man that's it cool um so that's on the chasing giants youtube channel if anybody wants to check out the full hunt of mel um but even just from what we saw see i think what's cool with dawn too is he builds per what even said there he builds relationships with these deer you know and and he's watching them and watching them watching him patterns and identifying and like getting to know these deer which probably goes in tune with what he was just saying there in that in that film and that you know it gets and we've kind of had this a little bit it gets bittersweet unfortunately it's usually not because you or i tag them it's just because he dies or disappears but we invest a lot into these deer and understanding them and learning them um you know this will be the first year and four that i won't be hunting that buck on the mountain at least i don't think so because he seems like he's dead he's not around you know and and it's bittersweet because man i like i finally thought i was getting close to him last year and so i was like okay next year like i know what he's gonna do he's gone eventually that time runs out you know and it's i think that's where um again this isn't anything negative against people who just love to hunt and kill bucks or just like to kill mature bucks but there are a certain group of hunters and i don't want people to look at us as trophy hunters or look at us as different but we we very much study and try to understand a single particular buck in an area and then we declare war on him and it's just us against him and it doesn't mean that we wouldn't kill another buck but like we are really really trying to hunt this buck and outsmart this buck and to me that's where i'm at in my hunting career is man there's nothing better than trying to outsmart him and by the time i make the move to go hunt him like man i've done everything to put myself in a position to win that that game yeah and it's it's a different way of hunting it's a cool endeavor and it's just you know it's a unique set of circumstances i think that people get to go out and do that you know because to try to try to accomplish that like in a group hunting setting or on a you know piece of public land very hard where you almost impossible yeah you already control so few of the factors on a property where it's just you and the deer you know so so many things can happen and when you introduce other you know things like hunting pressure and uh super hard whatever it is it's yeah and maybe it isn't possible for everyone i i would encourage um anybody that has i guess private land or or big chunks of public like attempt to dedicate yourself um to try to kill a buck study a buck and i think that ultimately your success rates are higher whether you end up killing that buck or another buck the way that you study that deer and approach that deer will make you a better hunter overall and probably more successful but it isn't necessarily a long-term stability for everybody because hunting pressure other people hunting public land whatever it is but it definitely is um is a somewhat of a a passion project that you can really appreciate when you try to outsmart a single deer uh and sometimes i think it um cleans up the mess of hunting where you're like this buck's here this buck's here he's going here like i could hunt here or maybe if i'm here i'll see both of them like just streamline on like i'm just gonna kill this deer um but you know it is what it is and uh i think dawn was pretty awesome uh it was great to have him on the podcast i look forward to getting him back at the end of the season and kind of reflecting on what he what he encountered and uh it's october so let's go hunting we'll be hunting this weekend go time go time well we appreciate everybody listening to uh episode 40. with don higgins um from chasing giants in real world um if uh you like this podcast give us a subscribe we appreciate it um we got plenty more coming i think the next one that you'll be hearing is adam hayes that's right um so another guy who's killing multiple two hundos moon gun baby yeah and anybody who's been pen up waiting for us to really get into this moon stuff what better way than to do it with the moon guide himself the moon guide himself we're gonna get into it call me the moon guide well we appreciate it uh thanks for listening to hunter podcast and we will see you next week [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Applause] [Music]

Channel: HUNTR

Views: 99,533

Keywords: HUNTR Podcast, Hunting podcast, Jared Prusia, Jeremy Flinn, Don Higgins, Chasing giants, Chasing Giants with Higgins Outdoors, Higgins outdoors, Chasing Giants Podcast, how to hunt the wind, Mel, 220 inch whitetail buck, buck shot at 7 yards, Hoyt, Hoyt archery, Muddy Outdoors, DeerGro

Id: 1CXjrzOfs1g

Length: 134min 53sec (8093 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 05 2021