Ep. 1038: Foundations – Proximity, Procedure, and the Secret Power of Getting Close to Mature Bucks

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.

00:00:20
Speaker 2: Hey, everyone, welcome to the Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I’m your host, Tony Peterson, and today’s episode is all about the role proximity plays in pretty much all of hunting and fishing and why so many people kind of misunderstand this concept.

00:00:34
Speaker 3: How do you get close to a big buck.

00:00:37
Speaker 2: It’s scouting, it’s prep work, it’s planning, and it’s mostly done wrong. For most of us, proximity to our quary matters a lot, but we often hunt like it doesn’t, and that leads to a hell of a lot of unfilled tags and uncaught fish. We want the deer, turkeys, are largemouth or whatever to be where we want them to be, but they mostly aren’t or won’t be.

00:00:55
Speaker 3: That’s okay, there’s a solve for this, but it kind.

00:00:58
Speaker 2: Of takes a new way of thinking, which is what I’m going to talk about right now. This might come as a huge surprise to you. But sometimes I do really dumb shit. I know, outwardly, it’s all big public land bucks and dead turkeys and giants’ mollies and well a whole bunch of success stories carefully curated to ensure that the real me shows himself as rarely as possible. But I’m dumb, and I do dumb shit, like agreeing to do a new project based around fishing and then deciding it wasn’t enough to just challenge myself, but to really go outside of my element. I thought about this a lot as I was making a twenty two mile run down a lake in South Dakota while it was thirty one degrees outside and I had to catch a big walleye in a very short amount of time, a task I am really not qualified for. When you do what I do, you can get away with not killing on a deer hunting show, even a turkey hunting show, because most to the folks in the audience, at least the folks that I want watching my stuff, they understand the inherent challenge of what we’re doing in the woods. They know that dead deer and turkeys don’t come easy in most places. And that’s just reality. But blanking on a fishing show is a different thing. I mean, who can’t catch a freaking fish?

00:02:18
Speaker 3: Well?

00:02:18
Speaker 2: For a lot of a whole week in the beginning of May, I was a guy who could barely catch a fish, and it was not much fun. I had a lot of time to think while making cast after cast after cast, from sunrise to sunset to cold water that just didn’t want to give up a whole lot. I’m not going to spoil it too much, but while I first fished for big walleyes and then I fished for large mouth on lakes that I had never been on, just enough fish showed up to make me feel like I’m not a total loser. But I’m telling you, my friends, there were a lot of hours packed into that week where it felt like it was a foregone conclusion. It was mostly cold and mostly really windy, and far more challenging than what I thought I was getting myself into, and I knew it would be pretty challenging. But those fish that did save my ass, they showed up, and they gave me a good reminder of just how right you have to get things when the conditions are a total pain and mother nature is just not pleased with your presence. Proximity matters, and I know that might seem like the most obvious thing in the world. I think there is a difference between grasping a concept and actually putting yourself into the motion to fully realize that concept. Though anyone who has been married a long time probably understands this. You know you should treat your spouse really well, like you did in those early days, the dating days.

00:03:37
Speaker 3: But it’s not that easy after a while.

00:03:39
Speaker 2: It’s an easy thing to understand, but a hard thing to put into practice. Those walleyes and those bass and damn near all the turkeys I’ve had a conversation with this spring all reminded me that our job as hunters and fishermen is to understand how to get close to fish and game first, and then the other tricks kind of come into play. I talk about this a lot with calling, where I think, you know, it’s one of the easiest ways to understand this concept. If you want a grun in a deer, being eighty yards away from him is way way better than being three hundred yards away. You want more turkeys to come to you learn how to get as close to them as you can then call them in.

00:04:16
Speaker 3: You don’t always have to do this, but if you hunt.

00:04:18
Speaker 2: Pressured birds or pressure deer or whatever and just struggle to get them to you, there’s a strong case to be made for understanding proximity.

00:04:27
Speaker 3: Or maybe elk is a better example here.

00:04:29
Speaker 2: You think you could just go to Colorado or Idaho or wherever on September fifteenth and just bugle from the ridges as you walk along and get an answer on a ranch where the elk costs twenty grand apiece. Sure, on public land, it’s not gonna happen, My friends. You’re gonna have to sneak into some of that dark timber, you know, where you finally find some fresh sign after five days, and then throw out a challenge bugle and.

00:04:51
Speaker 3: Then you might get a response.

00:04:53
Speaker 2: Now, those bass that I chased down in Iowa when it was forty degrees out and the wind was blowing thirty five miles an hour, they did not want to eat at all. I know it because I saw them, and they saw my senkos and my dice baits and my dropshots and my jigs and my flukes and my net rigs, and they didn’t eat any of them. Only after three days did the condition stabilize enough for them to remotely start eating, and even then I had to thread the needle and land every cast on their nose in the most subtle way possible. It was the kind of fishing where you use eight pound tests to senko and then you target a very very specific spot while feathering your line on your cast, so it just barely breaks the surface when it lands that proximity to them. If you make the cast count along with a very subtle presentation, that was mostly the ticket I found. I think you could have thrown a thousand swim baits and spinner baits and crank baits and you take your chunk and wine pick and not caught any one of those fish. So you have proximity, but then you have procedure once you’re close. Then what Well, when it comes to this seems so obvious, I mean, who is it looking for the exact spot that most of the bucks will walk through and then just planning on going in there to shoot them. Except most hunters aren’t doing that, and the ones who are are really really successful. Compared to the general population. We’ve pretty much passed the winter scouting mission window. And the fawns are already dropping in some place, and the bucks are already growing new sets of antlers.

00:06:25
Speaker 3: So where does this leave most of us?

00:06:27
Speaker 2: Now, how do you work right now to put yourself into closer proximity to bucks’s fall, you know, aside from the most common direction for most folks, which would be just to do some food plot work or something, you know, which is really kind of the opposite of what I’m talking about, even though it’s not bad. You have some options right now that don’t involve manipulating the land. You can find plenty of interesting in deer hunting spots right now in the woods if you want to, but it’s mostly a matter of fighting bugs and heat and you know, looking for tracks on trails right now out there. But that’s okay if you want to do it. It’s also not what most hunters are going to do during this part of the summer. And I get it. This is the one stretch of the year where I don’t care about whitetails a whole lot, and the woods are about as uninviting as they are going to get the entire year. But the question of proximity remains unanswered, and an easy way to address it is to think about where you usually hunt. If you’re on private ground, think about your go to setups, why do they work, and how often do you see deer not doing what you expect them to do on those spots. I’m not sure how relevant of an example this is, but I’m bound and determined to get some south wind setups going on a property I own in Wisconsin. The layout of that property makes it ideal for north winds because of how I have to access it. But we don’t always get a lot of north winds, especially when I’m hunting with the girls in the early season. And when we do get north winds, the deer have to give up their number one defense to get to us, or at least sacrifice a good percentage of it, so it’s not ideal. A south wind setup is going to be a game changer if I can figure it out, But the problem with that is they will have a much higher chance of smell telling me or the girls, So the approach has to be money and the setup has to play off of where they are most likely to travel to get to me. I’ll probably get it wrong, but I’m going to try because it’s an issue that has plagued me on that place for eleven years, and it just generally pisses me off. I think maybe this lesson is one most hunters aren’t comfortable with, but I think it’s crazy important. You have to try stuff that probably won’t work to get close to deer. I mean, the reason it’s hard to get close to deer is because they are very good at keeping us from getting close to them. We look at a risky ish setup as if it’ll ruin our season, you know, spook our target bucks and all that jazz. But we don’t look at how risky it is to keep hunting the way we’ve always hunted. Volume hunting a kill plot because that’s where your camera is, and it’s easier than trying to figure out where the deer like to travel on their own volition, is risky in its own way. A different way to approach the proximity problem is to not mostly give up the wind and cross your fingers, but to understand what time grants you during the deer season when it comes to fishing, or turkey hunting, or pheasants and of course deer. The more time I have personally to figure things out, the more likely I am to do just that, and well, duh, but we are all busy and we don’t have tons of time to go out there for days and days on end until the secret patterns of the deer reveal themselves to us. But we also, at least most folks can string together something, and you should plan for that. Two days in a row is exponentially better than going out for one day. Two evening sits in a row is exponentially better than one evening sit. A morning sit followed by an evening sit, or my favorite, an evening sit followed by a morning sit is better than a one off sit. The problem most hunters have with this is that they look at the rut or they look at cold front sometime in the back half October, and they think about the conditions as warranting a whole lot of effort. That’s what’s a decider for you. That’s just insane to me and might be the biggest reason most weekend warriors rarely ever kill big bucks. The deer are out there just waiting to be hunted every day of the season, and you have the opportunity to hunt them, or if you do have the opportunity to hunt them, you should, but if you have the opportunity to hunt them for two days in a row, you really should, or three or whatever. This allows you to do a couple of things. First off, it allows you to take some risks, As I’ve mentioned, that’s important. It also allows you to form a plan in real time according to what the deer are showing you right now. This can’t be replaced by trail cameras, but they certainly can help you through this process, and they can help you make decisions. Seeing deer and not seeing deer both tell you a lot. When you hunt a couple of days in stable conditions, you’re getting a crash course on what your deer do during those conditions. If they aren’t on the oak tree you’ve found that’s covered in siine, where are they? If they don’t seem to visit the pond you want to sit over until super late in the evening. Can you get in there in the morning, Can you back off and set up for them as they make their way to the water, or can you sit that pond for three days in a row off the wind’s right to eventually catch a buck, you know, coming in at daylight to the drinking fountain on a lot of the public land trips I take, I either kill almost always on the first day or somewhere like four to six days into the hunt. If it doesn’t work out quickly, which is pretty common, it takes me time to work the deer enough to get clued into something that will pay off. When you travel out of state on a hunt like that, the motivation is high to stick with it and keep scouting and keep hunting.

00:11:46
Speaker 3: What other choice do you have.

00:11:48
Speaker 2: But when you’re home and you don’t expect any big deer to be moving on the lease, you won’t put in the effort to figure out where they are moving. And yes, they are always moving, and they’re always offering up a chance for someone. A lot of hunters get into the season and they say to themselves they’re going to wait for the weather to get right and then they’ll go to their favorite setup, you know, the one they believe in, and they’ll think the conditions will solve the problem for them. It works enough to talk us into it. But there is a better way, I mean, a really simple way to understand this is to hunt field edges in the early season and to try to start out where you have a lot of visibility. If the bucks come out on the other end of the field, get just move, you know, move there. The next night, if you can find a good tree or tuck yourself into the ground somewhere, try to kill them right where they showed you they like to walk. We believe this will work, and it does work, largely because we believe that early season bucks are patternable and that we can capitalize on their habits, which is somewhat true. But most bucks are patternable to an extent all season long, even deer on public land, and I’d say sometimes especially deer on public land, because if they find a survival strategy there, it works. It usually works really well. But that doesn’t mean you can’t figure them out. You probably won’t if you only dip into their world sporadically when the weather is just right, you know, just right enough to get all your competition out there as well.

00:13:14
Speaker 3: You need a little bit of time.

00:13:16
Speaker 2: Now. If you want to get close to deer, and I know you do, you have to understand that there is no way to truly get good at that which doesn’t involve getting out there with them to let them show you what they do. You have to understand that to get close to deer and especially big old bucks. Means you have to carefully follow through on a plan for every sit, which gets a lot easier if you know that that very sit can be followed up by another and another. So if you blank, it’s no big deal. You tried something and it didn’t work. But now that you know that didn’t work, you could follow it up with a sit somewhere else that allows you to address some of the things you might think conspired to keep you know, your deer liss on the first sit. It’s sort of a process of elimination thing that resets itself every time you have a few days away from the woods, because things change out there. Instead of just going where you want to hunt, you go where you think the deer are going to be, and you figure out if you’re right. You’ll mostly not be right, but that’s okay. That’s how it goes, and you’ll really mostly not be right if you want to shoot a mature buck, but again that’s okay. It’s more of an exercise in keeping with it and trying to figure something out that matters. This is kind of a strategy to kill what we think we know about deer and show ourselves what is actually true about them.

00:14:35
Speaker 3: It’s also about a.

00:14:37
Speaker 2: Better way to approach things, because I promise you that if you can string together, you know, however many sits all season long, you’ll realize that you’re actually working the deer, not just crossing your fingers and hoping they’ll come by. This is how you get in close proximity to them, and how you figure out how to just often enough get in close proximity to mature. I’m not saying this is the only answer, because you should be scouting a lot, and if you do that and you run cameras while staying truly curious, you’re gonna have real data points to plug into your hunting plans. You’ll make better use of your time when you do have an evening and then a morning to sit, and then on the weekend when you can do four sits in a row, if you can sneak away from the house just enough. I also feel like this strategy has worked so well for me, in large part because it allows me to just kind of get in the zone. If I have a random sit and nothing for a while, I feel like an uninvited guest in the woods. But the more time I get to be there. You know, the more days in a row, the more I feel like I be along there. And when that happens, I’m always better at getting into my stands, you know, a little quieter, getting them set up a little quieter, or just sneaking in and just being more comfortable with the process. And when any of that happens, or all of it happens, well, I usually have good encounters if I have a reasonable enough timeline to work the deer. I know this is sort of an abstract and hard thing to put into practice now, but it’s something to think about because it’ll help you be a better hunter and fisherman no matter what you’re trying to shoot or catch. It’s not a get rich quick thing, but a sneaky way to develop some woodsmanship and to just plug into their world while watching, learning and priming yourself to make the next move, and then the next move, until one of them proves to be the right move and you find yourself in real type proximity to the kind of buck you really want to shoot. Do that, think about it, and then come back next week, because I’m going to talk about more deer hunting concepts, strategies, philosophies and failures. That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation’s podcast. I want to thank you so much for all of your support, and I know we put out a ton of content here at metire. We ask a lot of you guys, and you show up for us. We truly appreciate that. Thank you for that. Now, speaking of that content, if you want to see more of it or listen to more of it, the medieater dot com has you covered. We drop new podcasts dang near every day, or drop a new film, new videos, tons of articles. If you want to keep up on conservation news, Maggie over there at the site’s doing a great job of getting those breaking stories about public land selloffs and all kinds of new rules and all kinds of things happening out there. You can really really scratch your outdoor itch at the meadeater dot com, whether that’s hunting or fishing, So go check it out.