The Basic Hunter is pulled in twenty different directions in life, and it seems like hunting usually gets pushed lower on that list of directions than you’d like. If you’re like me, you do not have large quantities of open blocks on your calendar in the fall. Since I only get a few opportunities in the fall to be in the woods, I need to make them count. The first variable in the Hunting Equation is time, and if you’re on a time budget, here’s a strategy to maximize your time.
Be Honest About Your Life
This may sound existential but I promise you that there has been no greater single impact to my hunting career. Once I was honest about my life and how much time I realistically had to spend on hunting, my level of success improved drastically.
The first thing you need to do is to analyze your state’s hunting season length. For me, that’s the beginning of October through the middle of January with some periods of closed time throughout. All told, that gives me approximately three months of deer hunting. Sounds like a lot, right?
Now, look at the time commitments of your life that take higher priority than hunting during that timeframe. Overlay those time commitments into your hunting calendar. This will give you a good place to start in understanding how you maximize your time. Here’s how that looks for me:
• Full-time job (Monday-Friday)
• Kids and a wife (all different commitments)
• Coach college football from August – mid-November (Saturday afternoon home games, all-day travel on Saturdays for away games. Practice/meetings in afternoons other days of the week)
• Social/community activities (i.e. church on Sunday mornings)
Starting with three months may seem like a long time, but in reality that time gets cut down significantly. In the words of Jack Sparrow, there are really only two things in life: what a man can do, and what a man can’t do. I cannot commit the amount of time necessary to consistently kill mature bucks. Based on my priorities, it’s just not realistic. What I can do, however, is fill my freezer, kill a legal buck of my standards, and enjoy God’s creation. So I am laser-focused on maximizing my opportunities to accomplish just that.
My situation also rules out a ‘rut-cation’, which is to take a week off of work to hunt the rut. I have never done this because my vacation days would be wasted – I almost never get a full day of hunting. That’s not to say that I’ve never taken a day off to hunt, but I might only get to do that once or twice a year (which I did in 2021 and killed a buck on my first, and most likely only, vacation day to hunt. More on that in another letter.) The majority of my hunts amount to a half-day or less time frame.
Let’s look at an example of something I realized I could not do. You may have heard of accessing hard-to-reach areas of public land by boat. I had an opportunity to do that on one of my nearby public land parcels. I had a commitment later that morning (I always do) but thought I would slip out for a few hours. I was attempting to get into what I thought was surefire buck bedding. I had camera pictures as well as encounters in nearby areas, and the direction of the bucks’ travel indicated this swamp was home.
One morning I packed my sticks, stand, bow, waders, hunting pack and life vest into my kayak and took the hour-long kayak ride down the creek. I then walked the fifteen minutes to the spot and set up. Trouble was, I didn’t factor in my return time of tearing down my stand, walking back to my kayak, kayaking back upstream (which takes longer), loading my kayak into my truck, and driving home. After adding it all up in my head, I realized I had a little over an hour on stand for three hours worth of travel and set up. This was not even close to maximizing my use of time. I haven’t done it since.
When are Your Target Deer Most Accessible?
So now that you know when your season occurs and the time you actually have to commit, you need to understand when your target deer are most accessible. Yes, you need to know when before you know where. Jon Eberhart does a fantastic job of breaking down the different phases of deer season in his book Bowhunting Whitetails the Eberhart Way. Allow me to illustrate with my goals of a) filling the freezer and b) killing a legal buck (I enjoy God’s creation all throughout the year).
- Early season (beginning of October through Pre-Rut). There are usually many agricultural crops still standing and mast crops are dropping. I solely spend my time trying to arrow a doe or two during this time. I focus on nothing else.
- Pre-Rut through Rut (Mid-October through late November). Regardless of what weapons are at my disposal during this time, I focus on killing a buck. I stay out of any ‘buck’ spots until this point.
- Post-rut through late season (December through mid-January). This is my clean-up time. If I need to kill a buck or a doe, that’s what I focus on. Admittedly, it is much harder to kill a deer during this time for someone in my situation.
The point is to be laser-focused and not hem and haw about why you are out in the field. Want to fill the freezer? Find the absolute best spot to kill a good doe. Don’t set up halfway between where you want to kill a doe and somewhat close to a field edge scrape that might get you close to a buck. Hunting both means you’re hunting neither. If I’m hunting does, I hunt the absolute best spot I have. Which brings my to my next point…
Only Hunt the Absolute Best Spot
This is another critical point that opened my eyes as a big difference to the big-buck hunters – hunting THE best spot. Many big-buck hunters will do observation sits, move around an area for a few hunts, move in closer and closer, until they get their shot. I call this the ‘satellite strategy’ because they orbit the best spot but never hunt it. This requires time on stand and obviously I don’t have time for that strategy.
The opposite end of the spectrum is what I’ll call the Zach Ferenbaugh approach of dive into an area, go to the best spot possible and if it doesn’t work out, move on to the next area and repeat. This is not to say that Zach isn’t careful, he’s just willing to accept way more risk than most. Again, I don’t have time to scout and hunt numerous spots in a season. I can, however, apply the fundamentals of both approaches to my strategy.
There’s a great lesson to learn from the satellite strategy: gather as much possible intel as you can to make a good decision without educating the deer you’re after. There’s also a great lesson from the dive-right-in strategy: increase your odds of success by hunting only the best spot because if you blow it, you probably won’t be back in enough time for it to make a difference. They seem to be contradictory but, in reality, compliment each other perfectly.
Identify the Absolute Best Spot
I have a specific funneling process to identify the Absolute Best Spot (ABS) regardless of the season I’m hunting. I’ll dive into the specific detail of this in a later message, but essentially it goes:
1. Do I know (not ‘think’) my target deer are in the area? (This is the most important piece of the process)
2. Can I make the wind work for the time I have available?
3. Are there conditional factors that increase my chances of a shot?
4. Tiebreaker – time on stand.
Let’s walk through a simple example. It’s early October and I’m looking to shoot a big doe. I have a list of early season spots that are good spots to fill the freezer.
Step 1 is to look at my list of spots and know my target deer are in that particular spot. The importance of this cannot be overstated, more on the word ‘know’ will come in another article. If I know, through recent and historical intelligence, there are target deer in the area, the spot continues to step 2. If I do not know there are deer in the area, I rule it out. This step eliminates most of my spots immediately.
Step 2 is to look at the wind forecast for the time I have available to hunt and understand if I can make the wind work. Important note – the amount of mobility you have in your hunting set up will drastically increase the amount of ‘yes’ answers to this question. All of the ‘yes’ properties move on to step 3.
Step 3 is to determine the conditional factors that increase my chances. Maybe that’s a standing corn field, a water source during a drought, or heavy pressure. Once again, the ‘yes’ properties move on. By this point, I’ve usually narrowed it down to one spot. If I happen to have two spots left, the amount of time I can spend on stand (considering drive to the area, the walk in, set up, etc.) will be my deciding factor.
What this process does is significantly reduce the number time that I go out and get skunked. It doesn’t mean that I kill a deer every time I go out, but it significantly increases my chances. Luck is still a factor in hunting, and I can’t count the number of times I thought ‘if only the deer had walked this trail instead of that one, I’d have a much less empty truck bed right now’. The point of hunting the Absolute Best Spot is that since I am committing my most precious commodity (time) to a hunt, I can at least say that I’m giving myself the absolute best chance to have success.
Take More from the Woods than Anyone Else
One of the best ways I have found to decrease the number of ‘wasted’ trips to the woods is to never waste a trip to the woods. Learn something every time you are in the woods. I was recently scouting a piece of public land and it was clear that there was way too much pressure between cameras and stands hanging every 200 yards. I could have written off the trip as a waste. Instead, I learned something about how bucks use young pine growth from the forest of rubs I walked through. Maybe that particular spot is no good for me, but if I’m looking at potential parcels to hunt and I see a young pine planting, I’ll know it’s worth a look.
Not only can I learn from my experiences, I can learn from hundreds of other hunters’ experiences through podcasts, books and videos. We truly live in an unprecedented age of information, particularly when it comes to hunting. The trouble is finding the signal through the noise. There is so much content out there that a Basic Hunter can get completely overwhelmed. This is why it is critical to be honest about your life and understand the strategies that are realistic for you to use. Just as important, particularly when it comes to consuming and applying hunting content, is to understand which strategies are not realistic for you to use.
Here’s an example of what I mean by finding the signal through the noise. Traveling out of state to hunt has increased in popularity, as has the amount of content describing each person’s process to do so. For me as a Basic Hunter, the idea of hunting out of state is a pipe dream at this point. That does not mean I should ignore content about hunting out of state! There are many lessons such as map scouting, boot scouting, camera use, and hunting tactics that I can apply to my situation. I just might not pay attention to the type of camping gear someone uses to hunt out of state. Since I know what I can and cannot do, I know when to pay attention and when to skip forward.
My Native American Name Would Be ‘Hunts with Crossbow’
Just like everything else about my hunting, I maximize my gear in order to maximize my hunting opportunities. Let’s get the big one out of the way: I hunt with a crossbow. I’m not injured. I’m not elderly. I’m not physically immature (socially is another matter). I’m a healthy thirty-something man who hunts with a crossbow. By choice. Hemingway would have some choice names for me.
Why would I bring such dishonor to my family and disappoint my father like that? Simple: crossbows maximize my opportunities. That’s the name of my game. I have killed multiple deer at forty-plus yards with a crossbow that I would never have even considered with my compound. I simply get more opportunities with a crossbow. A full freezer is my goal, not a full ego.
There’s also a secondary time benefit to using a crossbow – practice. I have to practice less with a crossbow than I do with a compound. That’s not to say I don’t practice with a crossbow, I absolutely do every year, both in and out of season. I practice from different heights, angles, weather conditions, etc. But I don’t need to shoot 10 arrows a day between March and September to feel confident, like I did with a compound.
I attribute this to the fact that I grew up shooting guns quite a bit. Between rifle hunting, small game hunting with a .22, and working at a gun club in high school, it is second-nature for me to shoulder a weapon, acquire a target, and shoot calmly. Practicing with a crossbow helps my rifle shooting and vice versa. I am practicing the same essential muscle memory movement with both weapons. This increases confidence while saving time.
In no way am I saying you have to hunt with a crossbow. I am saying that for me as a Basic Hunter, I get more opportunities with a crossbow. No doubt about it. Hunting with a compound bow is fun, too. If you’re a diehard compound hunter, that’s great. Just make sure you’re doing it because it supports your desired outcome and not because comparing draw weights seems to be translated to winning a contest measuring the size of your…ego.
Geared Up for Time
All of my other gear serve the specific purpose of maximizing my opportunities. Besides my crossbow, I have found that my Tethrd Saddle is the most important piece of gear I have in maximizing opportunities. No longer do I have to look for the perfect tree – or even worse, rule out a hot spot because there was no good tree. I have found that a good set of climbing sticks and a saddle will get you in just about any tree big enough to hold you.
I do have some permanent stands hung in spots that have historically been rut hot spots. I know these spots will turn on at some point every year, so I hang them prior to the season and leave them up. I only have a handful of these compared to the number of hang and hunt spots I use with my saddle.
I also hunt from the ground quite a bit. I’ve hunted from the ground with a rifle, a bow, spot and stalk, and ambush. This was a hard barrier for me to break, particularly when archery hunting, but dang is it fun. It all goes back to maximizing opportunities. If my Absolute Best Spot doesn’t have a tree that will work due to terrain or wind direction, I still have to figure out a way to hunt it. It is now unfathomable (and almost laughable) to me to leave the ABS and hunt a lesser spot simply because I can’t find a living piece of wood. When you don’t get a ton of opportunities to hunt, you push yourself to make it work.
I will say more in future letters about clothing, optics, cameras, and all sorts of gear. Just like hunting content, hunting gear can be overwhelming when you consider everything that’s out there. What it really comes down to is this – given my strategy and life situation, which gear will help me maximize my opportunities?
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