[UNKNOWN]: Public land so we've got a lot of public land around here everybody wants to get way in the back Because that's where and everybody goes way to the back and the deer know that and a lot of the very best hunting is in some of the most obvious places closest to the parking lot But people don't you know, they think oh, boy better get away from the masses Well, that's where the masses go.
[UNKNOWN]: Why do some of the very biggest deer get killed by novice hunters one?
[UNKNOWN]: They don't get as excited as we do and two.
[UNKNOWN]: They don't do what we do.
[UNKNOWN]: They they do Un
[UNKNOWN]: characteristic things which are what big bucks do.
[UNKNOWN]: You can't get to be old by being lucky.
[UNKNOWN]: Mike Rex welcome to the show man.
[UNKNOWN]: Thank you.
[UNKNOWN]: I didn't really know who you were until we came up here We came up here to hunt turkey hunt with Eddie Saltre and he's like man You all got to talk to my buddy Mike man.
[UNKNOWN]: He killed more big deer than anybody You know and he's like y'all got to go see his man cave and I got to say it It did not disappoint man like every deer hanging up in here
[UNKNOWN]: there are 60 amounts in this room.
[UNKNOWN]: There's 60, 60, 60, yes.
[UNKNOWN]: 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60
[UNKNOWN]: What is, when it comes to the scoring system, what's so special about these deers and from like a book standpoint?
[UNKNOWN]: So every one of these deer make the Buck Eyed Big Buck Club, which is the Ohio State record book, and our minimums by the Boon and Crocket Standard are 140 typical, 160 non-typical.
[UNKNOWN]: So that's how we sort of segregated this room as these are all Buck Eyed Big Buck qualifiers.
[UNKNOWN]: These are all killed by myself and my three sons.
[UNKNOWN]: all in a pretty tight air.
[UNKNOWN]: We don't have to name the county almost every deer in this room is come from within 10 miles right here and almost all of them were killed with archery equipment.
[UNKNOWN]: And there's a handful of them with a gun if you haven't got a crossbow but most of them with vertical bow.
[UNKNOWN]: Awesome.
[UNKNOWN]: There's a lot of interesting things we're going to talk about because we're talking about deer hunting but also I can't remember what you called it but we call it our conservation advisory board for Alabama but you're a chairman up here for now I'm chairman of the Ohio Wildlife Council which is like our oversight committee governing body of our division of wildlife
[UNKNOWN]: So we're pointed by the governor's four Republicans, four Democrats, and we approve or disapprove rule proposals made by our division of wildlife.
[UNKNOWN]: So anytime the division wants to change a bag limit, a season date, anything like that, the wildlife council, we meet and we approve them or disapprove and we will always approve them.
[UNKNOWN]: Okay, so you are like a check on.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[UNKNOWN]: okay that's cool so so y'all don't set your seasons bag limits or anything they do but you approve it correct so the division makes a proposal let's say for example the deer bag is going to be x and then as they propose it to us and we say yes or no and we try to base things based on you know the science and what they tell us and then also the public input that we get and try to balance the two out and usually toward to air kind of air towards the science end of it.
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, well, I was going to ask how much does public input dictate certain things getting past.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, it does.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, I can give you an example of sometimes where public input has changed thought process.
[UNKNOWN]: So, our turkey flock, like a lot of states, especially Midwestern states, and in the South and Southeast, our turkey flock, isn't what it once was.
[UNKNOWN]: And so, we went from a two or two turkey bag to a one turkey bag and we were looking at things that we could do to try to improve turkey hunting and turkey populations.
[UNKNOWN]: and most of the fall turkeys that I knew about me personally and my friends that I knew that people were shooting, I called them incidental shootings.
[UNKNOWN]: They were deer hunters that happened to be in the woods in the fall and they had a turkey tag in their pocket and a flock of turkeys comes by and they shot them.
[UNKNOWN]: And I didn't personally know very many people that actually went out in the fall and just targeted.
[UNKNOWN]: They were out trying to shoot a turkey.
[UNKNOWN]: and so we the division of wildlife proposed cutting our fall turkey season it used to be I think seven weeks long they proposed knocking it down to like four or five weeks and I thought well this will be no big deal you're not many people are going to care about that well when they made that proposal we had people show up in mass and there were a lot of folks out there
[UNKNOWN]: You know, this was like the seventh sign of the apocalypse, you know, and I mean, he thought the world was over, and so anyway, we wound up making an amendment to it.
[UNKNOWN]: Fall turkey hunting in Ohio really isn't consequential to the overall population flock.
[UNKNOWN]: We might kill six, seven hundred birds here in the fall, which really is a drop in the bucket.
[UNKNOWN]: But when your population is hurting,
[UNKNOWN]: and you shoot hands in the fall.
[UNKNOWN]: The last thing you want to do is shoot females of any population you're trying to build them back up.
[UNKNOWN]: And so we have since taken some steps to reduce fall turkey hunting.
[UNKNOWN]: However, there were a lot more people interested in it than I ever imagined.
[UNKNOWN]: interesting now I want to get into bow hunting white tails okay and we'll come back to some some other as policy things with things that's kind of happened you know high of last out 10 to 10 years that you've been uh uh your your tenure with the uh the agency and the commission
[UNKNOWN]: specifically what we need to get introduced to bow hunting okay so i've lived almost my entire life in Ohio but for about 18 months i lived in southeast Arkansas long story but my dad got transferred down there when i was in ninth grade and i moved into a little town war in Arkansas southeast corner of the state
[UNKNOWN]: and there wasn't a lot to do with it.
[UNKNOWN]: There was no movie theater and a bowling alley or nothing really going on there.
[UNKNOWN]: And I got in with some guys that were friends of mine and my dad had some guys that worked with him that were real avid hunters.
[UNKNOWN]: And they invited me to go deer hunting.
[UNKNOWN]: I was 14 years old in 1978.
[UNKNOWN]: And my first morning in a deer stand, I killed a deer.
[UNKNOWN]: And it was the most incredible adrenaline rush I had ever, and maybe to this day, I've ever experienced.
[UNKNOWN]: And I've been trying for the last 48 years to replicate that adrenaline rush that hits as you fellas know that people that don't hunt, you can't explain it to him.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, there's just nothing like it.
[UNKNOWN]: And...
[UNKNOWN]: And so I really got hooked on it.
[UNKNOWN]: They're, I'm really the only person in my family than hunts.
[UNKNOWN]: My father, my brother, fishermen, but they don't hunt.
[UNKNOWN]: But I got hooked on it that morning and it's been an obsession ever since.
[UNKNOWN]: My wife will back that up.
[UNKNOWN]: And with that, was that how you got introduced into just earling?
[UNKNOWN]: Was that bow hunting as well?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, no, I start.
[UNKNOWN]: I was a gun hunt, definitely.
[UNKNOWN]: And then I got into archery hunting that same year.
[UNKNOWN]: You could kill multiple bucks in Arkansas back in the time.
[UNKNOWN]: And I bought a bear, codiac, recur 45 pound bow.
[UNKNOWN]: and I got a deer with that bow also that year and then we moved back to Ohio the next year and I killed my first buck in Ohio in November of 1980 with a bow on public property just north of Columbus and I just been pretty much eight up with it ever since.
[UNKNOWN]: Wow, what a journey.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: Especially coming from a family that there was no hunters.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I mean, my family weren't anti-honors, just nobody hunted, just I shouldn't say that.
[UNKNOWN]: Had a great uncle that was a real habit hunter, but other than that, most of my immediate family, I'm the only one that really likes to know it.
[UNKNOWN]: Okay, and then transitioning, one thing that's interesting, because as long as you've been bow hunting, is how to, uh,
[UNKNOWN]: the onset of new technology in the Bose space, especially like through the 80s and 90s and early 2000s.
[UNKNOWN]: How did that kind of change?
[UNKNOWN]: Because you start out with a bare recurrent, go to a recurrent, and slowly change with the tubs.
[UNKNOWN]: What was it like when you get your first compound?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, so my first compound was a bare white tail 100.
[UNKNOWN]: I had at 1980.
[UNKNOWN]: I was sitting on a tree branch in Alam Creek State Park just north of Columbus.
[UNKNOWN]: And this this nine point buck walked underneath.
[UNKNOWN]: I literally climbed up the branches was sitting on a tree branch and I had this compound but with no sights.
[UNKNOWN]: So I shot it in stink if I was a shaft shooter.
[UNKNOWN]: I looked down in the shaft and I shot that deer.
[UNKNOWN]: And then the next deer, I think I bought a
[UNKNOWN]: a browning explorer and then every year after that I started to get better and then it kind of came full circle and I went back and I had a with a recurve for a while and then I went with a crossbow and then I went back to a compound bow and I've been all over the map.
[UNKNOWN]: I've only killed a handful of deer with a gun that I have anything against gun hunting.
[UNKNOWN]: I just our archery seasons over four months long appear.
[UNKNOWN]: Our gun seasons are fairly short so there's just a lot more opportunity with a bow.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, you know, Jake, when I were talking about that last year, we, these last two seasons we've went to Kansas and Iowa and Boha in the run and just the amount of bucks that we saw, they amount of really nice bucks that we saw and just the opportunity that you have there is just different like we don't really have that in the southeast and it's, we know why it's, you know, because we can shoot multiple deer and we have long gun seasons, which
[UNKNOWN]: I like in the south.
[UNKNOWN]: It's nice to be able to go to other places that don't have that we're talking about bow hunting and to have an opportunity.
[UNKNOWN]: It like really, really big deer consistently, like you kind of have to bow hunt.
[UNKNOWN]: Like if you want to travel and go somewhere, that's where the majority of your opportunity is at.
[UNKNOWN]: Sure.
[UNKNOWN]: And we were talking to you about that earlier about the difference between Ohio and Indiana, and like Ben and Crocodon entries.
[UNKNOWN]: Can you explain that again?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, so Indiana historically was a two-buck state Ohio has always been a one-buck state.
[UNKNOWN]: Indiana was a two-buck state and if you look at Indiana from a geography standpoint, very similar to Ohio.
[UNKNOWN]: Southern Indiana is helly like this, northern Indiana is flats where the glacier melted form the Great Lakes and historically Ohio was heading shoulders better than Indiana for quality for big bucks, but in croquette, qualifying bucks and Indiana went to a one-buck limit.
[UNKNOWN]: 10, 15 years ago, and since that time there, a number of boon and crocken entries is skyrocketed.
[UNKNOWN]: Because when you can kill two bucks, a lot of times people will, oh, she's the first one that comes by and then I'll hold out for a trophy or whatever.
[UNKNOWN]: Those bucks a lot of those bucks are now surviving, getting older, just makes you overall quality and hunting better.
[UNKNOWN]: The only thing that Indiana,
[UNKNOWN]: uh... does that could even in my opinion make their hunting even better they have with guns during the right their gun season comes in the middle of November were a high we always wait till the monday after Thanksgiving on our red is starting to peter off so we don't bother too much with guns although today with crossbow technology uh... that's maybe changing a little bit as far as uh... you know the ability to kill bucks at longer distances during the right but indiana is pretty much neck and neck with a high on now and that a lot of
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: How does Crossbows, this is, you just said, but how does Crossbows affected Harvest success and everything to all season up here in Ohio?
[UNKNOWN]: For minutes.
[UNKNOWN]: So I'll give you some statistics here.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm the Secretary of Treasury of the Buckeye Big Buckleb, which is state record book.
[UNKNOWN]: So all the entries come to me.
[UNKNOWN]: So we give out top three by weapons category, special awards that are yearly banquet.
[UNKNOWN]: 30 years ago, by far, the majority of our big bucks were being killed with firearm, either Mosulot or Mosulot or Mosulot was shotguns.
[UNKNOWN]: Now we can not waste straight wall rifle cartridges up here.
[UNKNOWN]: So we give out top three by weapons, meaning crossbow, vertical bow, Mosulot or shotgun, and then the rifle straight wall rifle category.
[UNKNOWN]: out of 100 non-typical entries, which are 160 or better, last year could not come up with three that were killed with a shotgun out of 100, over 70 were shot at Monday with a crossbow.
[UNKNOWN]: Big, big, big difference.
[UNKNOWN]: Or excuse me, that statistic is wrong.
[UNKNOWN]: Shot with archery equipment, but the majority of those were killed with a crossbow.
[UNKNOWN]: 70 out of 100.
[UNKNOWN]: and that's why I was going to get it.
[UNKNOWN]: I should have actually just before because maybe we could have looked it up.
[UNKNOWN]: Do you know of the ballpark number of the totality of the harvested with archery equipment?
[UNKNOWN]: How many of that percentage is crossbow versus vertical boats?
[UNKNOWN]: I have not looked at that recently, but it not too long ago was about 50-50.
[UNKNOWN]: It's probably now I'm sure it's heavier on the crossbow side because what's happened is a lot of our gun hunters who never archery hunted before have converted to archery hunting because the crossbow technology is so good.
[UNKNOWN]: It's like almost like shooting a single shot gun.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, it can't shoot an arrow through brush and all.
[UNKNOWN]: I still have the crossbow bolt, but the technology is such that sea's crossbows are accurate out to farther distance.
[UNKNOWN]: And our season, our gun seasons are our gun seasons only a week long, our muslim age is five days.
[UNKNOWN]: We have a bonus gun season where our tree season is four months.
[UNKNOWN]: So you got better weather, you get to hot during the ride.
[UNKNOWN]: And so a lot of people that historically hunted with a gun have converted to our tree because of the improvements in crossbow technology.
[UNKNOWN]: Do you have any thoughts on how that could affect the overall deer herd of Ohio the next 10 15 years so yeah, there's a lot going on you come up from a quality perspective exactly so there's a lot going on there.
[UNKNOWN]: Our entries in our state record book have historically mirrored the total kill two years removed.
[UNKNOWN]: And here's what happens.
[UNKNOWN]: So for example, the deer that went in, the club this year at our 2026 banquet, most of them were killed in 2024.
[UNKNOWN]: Meaning they were killed in 2024.
[UNKNOWN]: That's a 60-day drying period by the Boone and Crocodone Standard.
[UNKNOWN]: They're scored in 25, and then they go into book in 26.
[UNKNOWN]: So we're always two years in the rear.
[UNKNOWN]: And historically, the entries mirror the kill two years are missing when the statewide kills up here.
[UNKNOWN]: The entries are up here.
[UNKNOWN]: And the statewide kill goes down two years later, our number of entries go down.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, what's changing a little bit now is that
[UNKNOWN]: 30, 20, 30, 40 years ago, there wasn't near the emphasis on trophy hunting as there is today.
[UNKNOWN]: And the average hunter, deer hunter, went deer hunting.
[UNKNOWN]: And he wanted a big buck, but he also wanted a button buck.
[UNKNOWN]: Now there's a lot more emphasis on trophy hunting.
[UNKNOWN]: And so a lot of smaller bucks are getting a pass, especially a social media shaming, you know, I would you kill that 4.4, you know, that kind of stuff.
[UNKNOWN]: So it used to be a big deal to kill a buck.
[UNKNOWN]: Now, it's a much bigger deal to kill a big buck.
[UNKNOWN]: Everybody wants it not everybody, but lots of people want a trophy buck.
[UNKNOWN]: And so, because of that, more deer are making it to 3, 4, 5 years old, fewer of those younger deer getting shot as a percent of the population of deer that are being shot.
[UNKNOWN]: Also, our land is getting tied up.
[UNKNOWN]: more and more rural property hunting property is getting leased up or bought up for recreational purposes.
[UNKNOWN]: So the days used to be 30, 40, 50 years ago, you could just knock on doors in this area.
[UNKNOWN]: When I first moved here in 1982 to this part of the state,
[UNKNOWN]: probably 50% of the landowners that I talked to.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, yeah, come on.
[UNKNOWN]: You can not now if it's, you know, 2% would be a lot.
[UNKNOWN]: Almost everything you either own it, your family or you lease it, you know, and if any landowner that will let anybody hunt today, you may as well go hunt public because his property is getting kind of really hard.
[UNKNOWN]: So what's changed was.
[UNKNOWN]: 30, 40, 50 years ago, a lot of our deer were killed by deer drives.
[UNKNOWN]: People that, you know, the orange army would line up and they pushed deer from this woodlot over to that woodlot to a waiting, you know, firing squad.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, those guys now have a harder time doing that.
[UNKNOWN]: We'd see very little.
[UNKNOWN]: That not some people still deer drive, but not near as much as they used to.
[UNKNOWN]: However, a lot of our ground has been tied up where properties that used to have lots of hunters now have few hunters.
[UNKNOWN]: And so, more deer are slipping through the cracks.
[UNKNOWN]: So it's sort of evening out, excuse me.
[UNKNOWN]: So...
[UNKNOWN]: Years ago, we had more emphasis on deer hunting, less emphasis on trophy hunting, which helped to grow mature deer.
[UNKNOWN]: Today we have more emphasis on trophy hunting, but we have more difficult access.
[UNKNOWN]: So we have more deer making it to maturity, because you have fewer hunters on larger pieces of ground, more deer and are making it to mature.
[UNKNOWN]: So that's kind of even things out.
[UNKNOWN]: interesting.
[UNKNOWN]: Okay.
[UNKNOWN]: Also, so I just wanted to bring it to the crossbow situation because I've seen some other buddies of mine or residents up here that complain about just how many individuals are hunting the crossbow.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, very, very common.
[UNKNOWN]: Yep.
[UNKNOWN]: And they're worried about not only people taking just, I don't know, get their rights business, but taking long shots and just
[UNKNOWN]: any negativity, specifically from a management strategy with the use of crawl spos.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, I don't know if this is just crawl spos, but one of the issues that we have from management perspective, and a lot of states have this promise, we call it the devaluation of do's.
[UNKNOWN]: So again, people used to just go deer hunting, everybody wants a big bug, not everybody, but lots of people want a big bug.
[UNKNOWN]: And so we've devalued those, and I'm not saying that crossbows are the culprit there, but they probably have contributed because again, you have more people targeting big bucks, you have more gun hunters that have converted to archery, and
[UNKNOWN]: It's first the taking long shots and that kind of stuff to be honest with you.
[UNKNOWN]: I think I would rather have a person that's not going to practice with the vertical ball.
[UNKNOWN]: I'd rather have a crossbow in his hands than I would have vertical bow in his hands because he's probably going to win more deer.
[UNKNOWN]: But the crossbow.
[UNKNOWN]: does give you more range yet you're still shooting an arrow.
[UNKNOWN]: So the fastest crossbows are shooting in like 400 plus feet a second.
[UNKNOWN]: The speed of sound still almost 1,200 feet a second.
[UNKNOWN]: So that sound still gets there three times faster.
[UNKNOWN]: And you guys have video and stuff right?
[UNKNOWN]: You see how deer react.
[UNKNOWN]: And especially when you're out of taking 40, 50 yards shots with archery equipment, a lot of bad things can happen, a lot of bad things can happen.
[UNKNOWN]: So I, me personally, I won't shoot crossbow bow any kind of archery equipment out past 30 yards.
[UNKNOWN]: Just too many bad things can happen.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't care if it's why I don't feel.
[UNKNOWN]: And I've had people tell me before, well, Rex, you just got to, you got to learn to read the mood of a deer.
[UNKNOWN]: I can't read the mood of my wife, you know, how am I going to learn to read the mood of a deer?
[UNKNOWN]: You know what I'm saying?
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, they're all nervous, right?
[UNKNOWN]: That's hilarious.
[UNKNOWN]: So, okay, well, I want to get back into that.
[UNKNOWN]: That was a little segue, but you brought Cross was I just want to ask you that.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: I want to get more into, and hopefully you can count work some stories in.
[UNKNOWN]: When you became up as a bow hunter, like really in the 70s, but really getting into the 80s and 90s before I'm going to say, kind of mastering your craft to be successful ever seeing a year, killing a big deer.
[UNKNOWN]: What was your,
[UNKNOWN]: not really transition but what was the story line of you growing as a bow hunter to put yourself in more and more positions to get opportunity because that's a challenge I'll think a lot of you have starting out I agree so here was my personal progression so I have a friend of mine who he's painfully honest he just says what he thinks and it doesn't matter if he hurts your feelings or not and so
[UNKNOWN]: Through the 80s, I just, well, when I first started hunting, I just wanted a deer.
[UNKNOWN]: And by chance, the first several deer I had opportunity to kill were bucks.
[UNKNOWN]: But I was shot a doe if I had to opportunity.
[UNKNOWN]: I just happened to kill bucks.
[UNKNOWN]: So then, through the 80s, I killed, what's the one in a bucket of your state?
[UNKNOWN]: I killed a buck every year through the 80s.
[UNKNOWN]: But most of them are younger bucks, smaller bucks.
[UNKNOWN]: And I had a friend of mine walking my house back about 1980, 1980, 1990.
[UNKNOWN]: And he looked at my trophy wall and he said, you know, you've killed a lot of deer, but
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, you're right.
[UNKNOWN]: Thanks.
[UNKNOWN]: So then I said, I really want to poke in y'all, which is the archery world record book, which is 125 typical 150 non-typical.
[UNKNOWN]: So I killed one of those, and that first year I killed a pope in y'all, and that I really got serious about trying to take a better buck.
[UNKNOWN]: Then I said, okay, I want a buck, I big buck.
[UNKNOWN]: and I got one of those.
[UNKNOWN]: And so then I said, you know, I want to boot and crock it.
[UNKNOWN]: Then I got one of those.
[UNKNOWN]: And so through the through the 90s, I really, my goal was buck I big buck.
[UNKNOWN]: I really wanted to kill one that netted over 140 typical or 160 not tip.
[UNKNOWN]: That's kind of how we drew the line.
[UNKNOWN]: And then in 2005, I killed the buck of a lifetime.
[UNKNOWN]: And that's a blessing in a curse.
[UNKNOWN]: So after that, I mean, I killed a 200-inch non-typical, with a 200-inch typical friend.
[UNKNOWN]: And so I had killed a bunch of 160s after that, and it really wasn't as exciting as it would have been had I not killed a 200-inch.
[UNKNOWN]: Fortunately, for me, I have three sons.
[UNKNOWN]: And right about the time that happened, they started getting interested in hunting.
[UNKNOWN]: So I funneled a lot of my enthusiasm for the sport into my boys.
[UNKNOWN]: And I used to tell people, here's how you know you really love somebody.
[UNKNOWN]: When you've got one really hot stand and you're sitting in a truck waiting to pick up the guy that's hunting in it, you understand?
[UNKNOWN]: That's how you know you care about somebody, right?
[UNKNOWN]: When you put them in your very best spot.
[UNKNOWN]: And so what I did was I funneled a lot of my enthusiasm into the sport.
[UNKNOWN]: into my kids.
[UNKNOWN]: Unfortunately for me, my kids are, every bit is ate up with it as I am.
[UNKNOWN]: So every time they would get close to a big gear and as I watch their growth as a hunter, I got a lot of satisfaction out of that.
[UNKNOWN]: And so I was very lucky and I've sort of come full circle now and I'm really at the stage of my hunting career now where the experience is most important to me.
[UNKNOWN]: It's not.
[UNKNOWN]: so much how bigger the antlers as much as what did I have to do to get him.
[UNKNOWN]: That's really where the, that's where a trophy has kind of landed with me is, you know, as a public land, what weapon did I use, how much effort I mean?
[UNKNOWN]: So I tell people this, my voice and I, we have not taken a buck since 2004,
[UNKNOWN]: 22 years that we didn't know about, meaning either have a trail camera photo, we saw it somewhere, you know, we had some reconnaissance on it.
[UNKNOWN]: Not to say that if a giant mystery buck walk by wouldn't shot it, but just every deer we've killed, we knew something about it.
[UNKNOWN]: And so,
[UNKNOWN]: There's a lot more to me.
[UNKNOWN]: There's a lot more satisfaction into pursuing a specific animal, getting within archery range of them, and then taking them versus just looking into one.
[UNKNOWN]: Just having to be sitting out there and it's big.
[UNKNOWN]: Don't get me wrong.
[UNKNOWN]: They're both exciting, but to me there's a greater level of satisfaction of kind of putting the puzzle together and then making the plan work than versus just killing a big gear.
[UNKNOWN]: I used to tell my sons a lot that, you know, these mounts in our house, all these are styrofoam and marbles, right?
[UNKNOWN]: It's really, it's a memory, it's a memory of the hunt.
[UNKNOWN]: That's why you mount it, you know, what, what did I have to do to get it that makes it a trophy, more so than how big a is antlers?
[UNKNOWN]: I'm, I'm going to grab this rack right here.
[UNKNOWN]: Is that everyone?
[UNKNOWN]: Okay.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, you want to hold, of course you did it.
[UNKNOWN]: So, well, of course you did it.
[UNKNOWN]: This is insanity, this deer.
[UNKNOWN]: So this is a deer you found behind your house.
[UNKNOWN]: Yes.
[UNKNOWN]: And the reason I wanted to show this is because when I've always thought of Ohio, I'm thinking of like,
[UNKNOWN]: cornfit, like agriculture, flat land and everything.
[UNKNOWN]: Where we're at right now is very wooded and very hilly.
[UNKNOWN]: It's a lot like places that we have back home in Alabama.
[UNKNOWN]: And I just bring that up to say that, when you think of, I was telling Eddie this yesterday, when you think of a deer of this caliber, this is what a 180 inch deer.
[UNKNOWN]: When you think of a deer of this caliber, I always think about them in an agricultural setting.
[UNKNOWN]: Things like this come through timber is just.
[UNKNOWN]: I can't even imagine what that never happened to me.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know.
[UNKNOWN]: I can't imagine what that would be like.
[UNKNOWN]: And it's just, it's really cool that y'all get to hunt deer this caliber in this kind of setting.
[UNKNOWN]: And you're talking about your progression as a hunter and how you were, you wanted to get a pope and young, then you wanted to get a buck, I big buck, then a boon and crocket.
[UNKNOWN]: In those early years, I mean, how were you figuring things out?
[UNKNOWN]: Did you have some really good mentors?
[UNKNOWN]: Were you reading articles?
[UNKNOWN]: Or what was it?
[UNKNOWN]: You know a lot of it was just trial and error.
[UNKNOWN]: I have a PhD in the wildlife management school of hard knocks because I've made like every mistake You could possibly make and you know, I think some of the better hunters and fishermen and any any endeavor like this are the people that You know learn from their mistakes.
[UNKNOWN]: Don't do the same thing twice
[UNKNOWN]: Um, I, I was very fortunate I've had some good places to hunt.
[UNKNOWN]: Obviously, the best deer hunter in the world will not kill a giant buck in a place that doesn't have giant bucks, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So that's, that's everything.
[UNKNOWN]: The same thing.
[UNKNOWN]: He's told me the best bass fisherman in the world can't catch a 10 pound bass and Lake doesn't have 10 pound bass.
[UNKNOWN]: So we're very fortunate that this part of the Midwest, we do have some pretty good hunting.
[UNKNOWN]: Also this specific part of the Midwest Southern Ohio,
[UNKNOWN]: is really kind of unique in that.
[UNKNOWN]: It's a benign area from a weather standpoint.
[UNKNOWN]: So you get up in northern Ohio, northeast Ohio, especially east of Lake Erie.
[UNKNOWN]: They get really heavy snowfall.
[UNKNOWN]: They get 100 plus inches of snow a year up there.
[UNKNOWN]: They're winners.
[UNKNOWN]: That's stressful on the game.
[UNKNOWN]: Down here, we get snow, but it doesn't get real hot for very long down here.
[UNKNOWN]: It doesn't get real cold for very long down here.
[UNKNOWN]: It doesn't get real wet for very long down here.
[UNKNOWN]: You know,
[UNKNOWN]: We also have one of the nice things about having all this cover in all these woods is when I have a lot of open agriculture areas where deer are exposed and can be seen by people and so there's places, there's pockets where deer can get age.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm that's probably in the Midwest, that's the number one of the three real variables that dictate how big a deer is going to get.
[UNKNOWN]: One is obviously age, excuse me, one is genetics, one is nutrition.
[UNKNOWN]: All areas of Ohio have good genetics, some better than others.
[UNKNOWN]: all areas of Ohio have some good nutrition, some better than others, but some areas of Ohio it's really hard to get age on a deer.
[UNKNOWN]: And so a lot of times, and these big wooded settings like this, these deer can grow to, you know, 3, 4, 5, 6 years old, easier than they can in an agricultural setting where everybody can see them.
[UNKNOWN]: that makes perfect sense.
[UNKNOWN]: And just to tie it back for our southern audience, you know, we've, we've interviewed a friend of ours several times in Alabama, Alan Summerford, who hunts around Alabama.
[UNKNOWN]: He's got small properties in Alabama.
[UNKNOWN]: He's in good parts of Alabama, but
[UNKNOWN]: these properties that he has control of he puts a big emphasis on letting the deer get old and he's got of Alabama deer.
[UNKNOWN]: He's got a wall full of Alabama deer that are comparable to a lot of these deer that you have.
[UNKNOWN]: They just have the mass.
[UNKNOWN]: They've got the gnarly basis nontypical points.
[UNKNOWN]: He's killed.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know how many drop time deer he's killed in Alabama.
[UNKNOWN]: But he always says that it's uh...
[UNKNOWN]: it's the age and specifically letting them get past where most people would think so like he's not shooting him at four and a half a lot of times he's trying to let him get five plus five six seven is like once they get that mature that's when you start seeing that's when they really blow up and we've talked to biologists who have said the same thing where especially when it comes to nontypical characteristics they don't they might have that in them but they don't express it until their six years old basically so you're saying you see the same thing
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, and to your point about when deer get older and non-typical.
[UNKNOWN]: So in the state of Ohio, officially scored every year, we'll kill 20 plus 200 inch non-typical.
[UNKNOWN]: Some years we'll kill 40 plus non-typicals.
[UNKNOWN]: That's at our officially score.
[UNKNOWN]: And that's not a lot of smart score.
[UNKNOWN]: So it's way more than that.
[UNKNOWN]: But on a good year, we'll score maybe three or four that net over 180 typical.
[UNKNOWN]: It's much easier to get a deer to 200 inches non-typical than it is 180 typical.
[UNKNOWN]: Because when a deer gets to be 5, 6, 7, 8 years old, they start growing all that stuff.
[UNKNOWN]: They grow kickers and stickers and drop tines, and they just get non-typical.
[UNKNOWN]: Usually your very biggest typicals are only four or five years old.
[UNKNOWN]: I believe the Hansen Buck, which was a world record typical, was only four years old.
[UNKNOWN]: And it was just clean.
[UNKNOWN]: It just had, you know, perfect genetics.
[UNKNOWN]: So, and to the point about your friend, chances are if you turn him loose on a woodlot and me loose in a woodlot, he'll hunt circles around me.
[UNKNOWN]: A guy that can kill deer like this consistently in the south has his stuff together.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean really, because we we spoke about this earlier, because the long gun seasons you guys have, and you don't have the genetics that we have.
[UNKNOWN]: You got different strain of deer.
[UNKNOWN]: And, you know, you know, it's just a totally different animal.
[UNKNOWN]: Killing a 13040 inch deer consistently in the South East is like killing a 16170 consistently up here, maybe even better.
[UNKNOWN]: Mm-hmm.
[UNKNOWN]: So just a different, completely different animal.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, it's, it's crazy.
[UNKNOWN]: And up here in these hills, how did you, how did you go about like in the early days again when you first got started?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, how did you go about finding the deer?
[UNKNOWN]: Cause that was before trail cameras.
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: So I think I was talking earlier, my history of killing record book deer.
[UNKNOWN]: I killed my first pope and young in 89.
[UNKNOWN]: I killed my first book, I big buck in 91.
[UNKNOWN]: Kill my second book, I big buck in 97.
[UNKNOWN]: kill my third buck I big buck in 99 and then from like 20 or 21 to 2016 I killed one every year and by far the biggest game changer with trail cameras because in this wooded settings like this there woods in the eyes or there eyes in the woods all the time because I don't have a lot of agriculture fields to glass I couldn't find was there I used to just go sit over scrapes and
[UNKNOWN]: and pinch points and just hope that a big deer came by and my reconnaissance was somebody saw, I saw a big deer, somebody that I trust that knows what a big deer is, saw a big deer.
[UNKNOWN]: And so with these trail cameras, if you were to take something away from me, that would really hinder my ability to get close to a big deer, trail cameras are by far the number one variable.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: That was the biggest chain.
[UNKNOWN]: And then wireless trail cameras, you know, that's real time information.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: And another thing that you mentioned earlier, which I'm kind of jump around a little bit that was very, very interesting is when we first met you the other day, we were talking about coyotes and bobcats moving into this area over the years.
[UNKNOWN]: And we first talked about how that changed the turkey and the turkey hunting and everything.
[UNKNOWN]: But you mentioned before we got started here, how it's changed the deer hunting and how the deer were bedding specifically.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: So how is the proliferation of this predators changed the deer behavior here?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, it changed it a lot.
[UNKNOWN]: It's like I said, when I first started hunting in late 70s, early 80s, when we would jump deer, it was in thick stuff, rabbit cover.
[UNKNOWN]: We call it a grass cover.
[UNKNOWN]: It's back when we had grass.
[UNKNOWN]: We don't have her any grass anymore.
[UNKNOWN]: But really thick stuff, stuff that's knocking your hat off every other step.
[UNKNOWN]: And today, our deer still browse in that stuff.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, you'll find him in that.
[UNKNOWN]: But they do not lay down in it and they do not lay down it because that's where the coyotes in the Bobcasts spend most of their time and they're now the apex predator.
[UNKNOWN]: They're working on them 365 days a year.
[UNKNOWN]: We used to just work on them during hunting season.
[UNKNOWN]: So the deer are now, it is changed where our deer bed.
[UNKNOWN]: Not necessarily where they feed, but it's changed where they bed.
[UNKNOWN]: They tend to bed now more, especially the mature bucks.
[UNKNOWN]: and more open cover wooded ridges with little pockets or little patches of cover, maybe a tree top, a fallen tree, a snag, something where it gives them a little bit of breakup, but they can hear approaching danger, they can see approaching danger, they can smell approaching danger.
[UNKNOWN]: Because coyotes in Bobcat are with their nose,
[UNKNOWN]: you know they they can sneak up on them a lot easier in really thick stuff and so now that doesn't apply to the whole state of Ohio either what i'm telling that mostly applies to the unglaciated hills which is about two-thirds of Ohio and so in the farm country where they have CRP big you know yeah the deer almost always bed because that's the only cover surrounded by thousands of acres of agriculture so that really applies to these these wooded hill sites our deer used to bed in really thick stuff
[UNKNOWN]: Now, not so much anymore.
[UNKNOWN]: It's really changed the way that we think about honey.
[UNKNOWN]: We're going to jump around so much, but we're just we're on this topic.
[UNKNOWN]: So we're going to stay on this topic for a little bit, but remember, we're a child care and we're changing.
[UNKNOWN]: Okay.
[UNKNOWN]: Do you remission in one of your buddies earlier on talking about
[UNKNOWN]: the lack of socialization with mature bucks with the other deer.
[UNKNOWN]: Yes, and then I'm kind of want to be above themselves and then which I'd love for you to kind of maybe rehash that force on here, but the idea of you would always try to focus on that thick cover, figure out what the bedding is and focus on that thick cover and that's where you set up an hunt.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: And then you kind of figure out a little bit later on that, um,
[UNKNOWN]: You know, the whole food source transitions and areas that put yourself in a lot better circumstances for targeting that mature book versus seeing a bunch of those.
[UNKNOWN]: Could you kind of hash that out force a little bit from like what your friend told you, but also like what you're seeing how you transitioned, how you were approaching hunting?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, so the real epiphany for me was historically, you know, it was the eyes to figure out where they're feeding, then where they're betting.
[UNKNOWN]: and i used to for years i was i was a student of trying to figure out where i do bed we get a lot of snows up here and i would take off walking after a fresh note and look for beds and then the really the only common denominator i could come up with in a winter time up here after snows were
[UNKNOWN]: south-facing slopes because warmer in the snow melts quicker and that's where you'd find a lot of deer beds but there was really no rhyme or reason to up on the ridge down low you know whatever I had a hard time piecing it together but getting back to the Sussoreau sun earlier about deer and deer being anti-social so historically my philosophy was okay so I assume they're bedding in that thick stuff over there and I know they're feeding in this food plot or apple tree or whatever the heck it is over here and so I'll try to get in between the two.
[UNKNOWN]: What has changed from that perspective is I no longer try to get in between the the feet the food source and the thickest cover I try to get to the food source and then I just go out the spokes from that meaning the The most logical path to get there and I think I I mentioned to you the real epiphany I had was when this fellow's name was David Moore Seems to take a body you stone North American white tail magazine.
[UNKNOWN]: He was telling me about
[UNKNOWN]: how when a deer gets to be five, six, seven, eight years old, they become quote anti-social, meaning that they don't like crowds of any kind.
[UNKNOWN]: They don't like lots of chipmunk squirrels, birds, whatever.
[UNKNOWN]: They don't like lots of other deer.
[UNKNOWN]: They're very solitary creatures.
[UNKNOWN]: They only trust their eyes.
[UNKNOWN]: They only trust their nose.
[UNKNOWN]: They only trust their ears.
[UNKNOWN]: He brought this up to me about trail cameras.
[UNKNOWN]: He asked me if I was getting pictures of any good bucks.
[UNKNOWN]: I said, yeah, but it's almost always in the middle of the night.
[UNKNOWN]: And he said, well, where are you putting your trail cameras?
[UNKNOWN]: So I'm putting over high traffic areas and putting them over food sources and places where deer coming.
[UNKNOWN]: And he said, well, then why do you think they show in the middle of the night?
[UNKNOWN]: I'd like, well, that's because that's when big deer moves in the middle of the night.
[UNKNOWN]: And he said, well, it was just a covered darkness.
[UNKNOWN]: Why aren't they the first deer there as soon as it gets dark?
[UNKNOWN]: And I thought about, I said, don't know, and he said, that's because that's when the masses are there.
[UNKNOWN]: That's when lots of deer are there and deer and tie social, they don't like crowds.
[UNKNOWN]: So they wait for the crowd to thin out and then they come and feed and I want, wow, when he said that.
[UNKNOWN]: So that's exactly what I have witnessed all these years.
[UNKNOWN]: But I just, you know, never really put two and two together.
[UNKNOWN]: But I knew that it also fit with my previous strategy of going out the spokes, catching them coming to it.
[UNKNOWN]: But the other problem with hunting right over a food source of food plot or anything that
[UNKNOWN]: Obviously mature bucks are rarely the first deer there.
[UNKNOWN]: You get an old nanny dill around you and she's probably gonna get down where the wind's gonna swirl Something's gonna happen if she's around you long enough She's gonna pick you off.
[UNKNOWN]: She's gonna start snorting in your hunts over and then you can't you know You can't get out of the stand now.
[UNKNOWN]: It's dark.
[UNKNOWN]: I've got 15 deer in front of me.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't want to see me climb down
[UNKNOWN]: And so it's, uh, it was really eye-opening when he told me, you know, basically when he clued me in the fact that these old deer, when they get to be five, six, seven, eight years old, they, they really don't like crowds of any type.
[UNKNOWN]: All right.
[UNKNOWN]: So we've, we've heard from a lot of different guys, especially guys who target the bigger older bucks, specifically about them being more solitary.
[UNKNOWN]: And they don't like to spend a lot of time around.
[UNKNOWN]: Other deer, I mean, we've heard that now.
[UNKNOWN]: Obama, we've heard it all across the southeast, the Midwestern guys that we've
[UNKNOWN]: My question to you is someone who's been successful targeting those books for so long now is how does that change your approach when you're hunting those deer?
[UNKNOWN]: Do you have to unlearn some things to then switch over and to hunting that older age class?
[UNKNOWN]: Yes, I'd say that yeah, I've evolved and might be techniques of change some over the years again You know, there's there's also so much information out there like podcasts and TV shows and so when I first cut my teeth doing this a lot of it was trial and error a lot of it was trial and error
[UNKNOWN]: and now there's so much information readily available so i i i use this example by turkey hunting so i'm a real out of turkey and i hardly ever missed a day and i turkey hadn't stayed all over the country and and and just about every place it has them
[UNKNOWN]: And I used to feel like, you know, I got to know Eddie Solter and Matt Rett 30 plus years ago.
[UNKNOWN]: I used to feel like I had intellectual capital.
[UNKNOWN]: Like I knew stuff that the average guy didn't know not today.
[UNKNOWN]: Everybody knows what I know.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, between all the information, the podcast and all the stuff that's out there, there are guys that just picked up a mouth yelper three years ago, call circles around me.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, I mean, they're just gifted like that.
[UNKNOWN]: And there's so much information out there.
[UNKNOWN]: The only difference between,
[UNKNOWN]: me and the average turkey hunter in this area is I'm out there every day and one of the things that you really, there's no shortcut for this is a lot of the places where I turkey hunt.
[UNKNOWN]: I know that when they roost over there, sometime this morning they're going to wind up over there.
[UNKNOWN]: When they do that, that's learning and it's interesting.
[UNKNOWN]: I have a couple places that I hunt and find it since the mid-80s.
[UNKNOWN]: that these turkeys always roost in the same place.
[UNKNOWN]: So you fellas deer on a lot, you know that they're certain areas based on topography where deer will scrape every year in the rub and they just you always find scrapes over on this flat and has something to do with the wind currents and you know whatever makes it just right for them.
[UNKNOWN]: And the same thing with turkey roots, there are some trees into the branches, they like pine bows, pine trees come out, certain kinds of oak trees, they have a certain kinds of branches or elevation, whatever, and the turkey's like to roost over there.
[UNKNOWN]: And so I'm fortunate in that I've hunted a lot of these areas for so many years that
[UNKNOWN]: Boy, if I hear one goblin on the roof over there and even I know where we need to be in the morning based on the topography of the land.
[UNKNOWN]: That's really the only intellectual capital that I have over the average guy because there's so much information out there today.
[UNKNOWN]: So to your point about the deer, I've learned a lot on social media over the years and debating these topics with people and I've met a lot of people via social media that I would have never met otherwise, that have shared a lot of information with me that has altered the way that I
[UNKNOWN]: And so, and it's because, you know, I learned from their mistakes, and it's like a cave and like that David Moore store, I told you, someone will tell you something, you're like, wow, I've seen that, I just never paid attention to it, you know?
[UNKNOWN]: But what a great idea, and I'm sure that's happened to you fellas.
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, yeah, definitely.
[UNKNOWN]: Like, so with the big bucks, is it, are you having to find areas with less deer in them to find those big bucks?
[UNKNOWN]: You know, no, I don't know that I've, I'm,
[UNKNOWN]: that deep into it.
[UNKNOWN]: So I also tell people this, usually the difference between a great place to hunt from a dysthramatrophy perspective.
[UNKNOWN]: A great place to hunt and not so great place to hunt is usually just one deer, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Some of you're trying, you can write, I mean, and here's the other part about really big mature bucks.
[UNKNOWN]: They don't tolerate each other real well.
[UNKNOWN]: They spread out.
[UNKNOWN]: So when I told you to have a Ph.D. in the Wildlife Management School of Hardinox, I've made every mistake you can make.
[UNKNOWN]: So about 35 years ago, I was able to between what I owned, I bought
[UNKNOWN]: that owned a bunch of ground in behind me that he let me manage form at about an 800 acre block of deer habitat behind my house that I had complete control over and it was surrounded by public hunting on a couple sides and a landowner and absentee landowner and the other side that let anybody hunt.
[UNKNOWN]: So I had a lot of hunting pressure around me but I had this square mile and a third that I had complete control over and I thought to myself boy if I can just keep the masses out of there I'm going to have a boon and crock at behind every bush.
[UNKNOWN]: And that's what I learned.
[UNKNOWN]: You can have quantity or you can have quality.
[UNKNOWN]: You cannot have both.
[UNKNOWN]: So you have to take your pick.
[UNKNOWN]: And so I by keeping a lot of people out that had once hunted that ground.
[UNKNOWN]: I made a lot of enemies out of people.
[UNKNOWN]: You're stunned there.
[UNKNOWN]: And because we weren't shooting enough dows.
[UNKNOWN]: So when a when a male white tail deer gets to be a year and a half old his mother displaces him to keep him from breeding his sisters and cousins and aunts and all that stuff.
[UNKNOWN]: And so those year and a half and two and a half real bucks were being displaced by these dows
[UNKNOWN]: They weren't being replaced because the hunting pressure around me was so intense.
[UNKNOWN]: So what happened was over time, my habitat started to implode, some clerk cuts that were back there, grew up in a pulse-ized timber, one cut in any timber, one doing the things I needed to do from a habitat perspective, one killing enough deer.
[UNKNOWN]: And my hunting over time got when I took me years to figure that out.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm kind of a slow learner like that.
[UNKNOWN]: And I had the same instance with a lake.
[UNKNOWN]: I used to own a 28 acre lake.
[UNKNOWN]: That at one time produced the 34th largest bass in the history of Ohio.
[UNKNOWN]: Out of a 28 acre lake, a misplaced was a bass factory.
[UNKNOWN]: It was real shallow.
[UNKNOWN]: The deepest spot was only eight feet.
[UNKNOWN]: And it held back a bunch of flood water.
[UNKNOWN]: It was built by the Army Corps of Engineers back in the 60s to hold back flood water.
[UNKNOWN]: And it grew fish.
[UNKNOWN]: The growth rates in the lake were really just astounding.
[UNKNOWN]: and it got a lot of fishing pressure because it belonged to an absentee landowner and I wound up buying it from this person and I thought, man, if I can just keep the masses out of here and keep everybody, keep on, I might have a five pound bass underneath every log.
[UNKNOWN]: And that's the second time I learned where you can have quantity or you can have quality.
[UNKNOWN]: What happened, I wouldn't take enough fish out.
[UNKNOWN]: Now, the interesting thing was anybody that ever asked me for permission to fish I gave it to him, but I wanted to be asked.
[UNKNOWN]: And not many people asked me, but I did let some people fish there, but we weren't taking enough fish out.
[UNKNOWN]: And so after four or five, six years, the lake, the population's just exploded and I had a bunch of stunning fish and my growth rates just dropped off the table.
[UNKNOWN]: And that again, that's when I learned that many, if you want big fish, you've got to take fish out.
[UNKNOWN]: You've got to manage that, you know, that that aqua culture or whatever they call it.
[UNKNOWN]: And the same thing with deer, if you want to have really good deer, you've got to take those out for sure and you've got to keep that population
[UNKNOWN]: and it it makes all the difference in the world.
[UNKNOWN]: And so I took a very simplistic approach and it was the wrong approach.
[UNKNOWN]: It's interesting to me how you keep drawing comparisons to other forms of hunting or fishing.
[UNKNOWN]: We're talking about deer, but we're also talking about turkeys and bass and everything.
[UNKNOWN]: But that's interesting to me because to me that's kind of the quality that's like a trait of banal woodsmen is that when you're out there and you do multiple things, you can draw comparisons from for sure.
[UNKNOWN]: From other chases that help you out in your deer hunting.
[UNKNOWN]: And, you know, who he reminds me of just with that statement is you're talking about it's Allen Summerford.
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: Alabama.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: Allen has the same approach.
[UNKNOWN]: He's talking about, has much different land across the state kill some exceptional Alabama deer.
[UNKNOWN]: He is a believer.
[UNKNOWN]: You have to hammer the nose because your neighbors typically aren't, because everybody's every state is just more and more focused on just killing, but it's across the board.
[UNKNOWN]: Exactly, so there's less and less of those that typically get killed and a lot of neighbors just don't really want to kill me Do's and that's what he focuses on and he's like that's an integral part of his management strategy You know, it works extremely extremely well But it's a lot of work because shoot knows this isn't the shoot knows he ain't let him lay you got to do some of the meat Whether you donate somewhere you're taking it you're giving somebody yeah, and if you're trying to harvest a bunch of those It's a it's a lot of work.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah
[UNKNOWN]: We're here in Ohio, so we have bonus deer bonus do tags or antlerless tags, and we work cutting it off.
[UNKNOWN]: I believe it gun sees in which is right after Thanksgiving.
[UNKNOWN]: Then we have a bonus gun, season in the middle of December.
[UNKNOWN]: We moved it to there and I've had people complain to me about, hey, you know, Rex, why don't we take that bonus season to make it the whole year?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, the problem is, on a four month season,
[UNKNOWN]: If you can take those bonus dough, while I wait till the weather's right, we took cool off, you know what I mean?
[UNKNOWN]: And all of a sudden, wow, that bowl game's next week, and I don't want to watch too cold out or whatever.
[UNKNOWN]: If you make it in a finite window of time, it creates a sense of urgency for people and it gets them to actually...
[UNKNOWN]: Do some little way that my permit's going to expire and another week I better kill that dough versus if I got all season to do it by the end of the season you'll come up with enough reasons to not do it.
[UNKNOWN]: And so that's one of the reasons, one of the ways that we encourage people to shoot more doughs.
[UNKNOWN]: But it's a real problem and I don't have a good answer for it, but for the future of the sport and for the future of our heritage, we need to come up with the way to, I don't want to say,
[UNKNOWN]: value dose more, but we need to really emphasize some avenues and ways to get people to shoot more doves.
[UNKNOWN]: Manjaga, we're fighting over questions now.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, so on that same subject, quality versus quantity, one, we've heard from several guys who are consultants, lane managers, that in some of these big buck hot spots that are just famous for big bucks, like you think about Iowa, for instance.
[UNKNOWN]: Yep.
[UNKNOWN]: We've been told I don't hunt there so I don't I don't know if this is true or not I'm the same brave one.
[UNKNOWN]: That's exactly.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, yeah, okay So the these some of these areas since they've become so popular for big deer They're starting to go downhill for that reason because big money guys are they're coming in They're leasing up a lot of land.
[UNKNOWN]: They're buying a lot of land.
[UNKNOWN]: They coming hunt for
[UNKNOWN]: 10 days in November and all that care about shooting a big buck, they're not shooting the do's.
[UNKNOWN]: They do food plots and everything they might manage it, but they're not doing the boots on the ground like killing enough do's or anything like that.
[UNKNOWN]: And so it's sending those areas downhill like on a slow decline.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: So you're basically that's what you've seen as well.
[UNKNOWN]: I was gonna say, as those guys were talking about, they had landowners that they were consulting with, that were selling forms, and I was going to parts of Indiana that had a lower-deer population, but a good book to do ratio to build up a property and the money could stretch further in parts over there.
[UNKNOWN]: They could buy bigger track, do more management, but have a quicker turnaround on producing bigger deer, than what they could in Iowa, which is crazy to think.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, to me, and this also ties into the fact that you guys had the worst HD outbreak ever.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, no, there's no way to prove this, but right here where we're sitting in southeast Ohio.
[UNKNOWN]: We're in Athens County, Ohio.
[UNKNOWN]: We had for sure one of the worst DHD outbreaks known, HD outbreaks in the history North America.
[UNKNOWN]: There have been some other bad ones, but what was unique about this one was, we've been dealing with the HD in this area for about 30 years, 30 plus years in pockets.
[UNKNOWN]: We'll have it.
[UNKNOWN]: And this drainage, that ridge, this township, but there is around it for whatever reason,
[UNKNOWN]: This year it blanketed hundreds of square miles.
[UNKNOWN]: It blanketed almost the entire county Washington county, which is just east of here.
[UNKNOWN]: It blanketed about two thirds of Meg's county, which is just south of here.
[UNKNOWN]: in about two-thirds of Athens County where we're sitting, to the tune of, they use a statistic, they say about 10% of the deer that die from PhD get reported to the DNR.
[UNKNOWN]: So it has a lot to do with the time of year they die, they die in August, September, nobody send the woods, hot mosquitoes, and they die around water sources and creeks or whatever.
[UNKNOWN]: Just not a lot of activity, people out there too find them.
[UNKNOWN]: So they estimate that about 10% of the deer that die,
[UNKNOWN]: get reported.
[UNKNOWN]: So in these three counties, there were about 5,500 deer reported.
[UNKNOWN]: You extrapolate that times 10.
[UNKNOWN]: That means we lost roughly 55,000 deer in three counties.
[UNKNOWN]: It was so bad that there was very few areas around here that you could get out of your vehicle and not smell death.
[UNKNOWN]: It was just unbelievable.
[UNKNOWN]: And, uh,
[UNKNOWN]: A lot of areas, I don't want to say they were wiped out, but they were almost wiped out.
[UNKNOWN]: The majority of the deer that survived were yearlings or that year's fawns, and the thinking is the colostrum and the mother's milk gave them some immunity, but almost all of our adult deer were killed or died from that disease.
[UNKNOWN]: It was just awful.
[UNKNOWN]: But what was unique about this was it blanketed just a really big area versus spotty and pockets like we normally see it.
[UNKNOWN]: in the whole state of Ohio in 2023.
[UNKNOWN]: There were 18 reported cases of VHD in the whole state.
[UNKNOWN]: I personally found 72 last year within five miles of right here, myself.
[UNKNOWN]: I found four times as many deer one guy as the whole state found in 2023.
[UNKNOWN]: So I was just, it was just really off the charts.
[UNKNOWN]: And there's a lot of thinking as to why that happened, but most likely what happened, we had a very unusually wet, may, June and July.
[UNKNOWN]: So we average like,
[UNKNOWN]: These are rough numbers, like 4.3 inches of rain in this county in July.
[UNKNOWN]: My range had about 14 inches of rain in July.
[UNKNOWN]: So we had standing water everywhere, because of all that rain.
[UNKNOWN]: Then in August, the faucet shut off.
[UNKNOWN]: We went like three or four weeks, no rain at all.
[UNKNOWN]: So the water receded, exposed mud in those midges, which are little like no seins and hats, that spread that disease.
[UNKNOWN]: exposed all that mud and so the midges were just off the charts when I'd mowed my yard and the afternoon you'd have to like wipe the midges off they were just everywhere and they'd bite us too but obviously we don't get the HD thank God and it was just it was just terrible.
[UNKNOWN]: We also we had the first lab case confirmed in the lab in this county right around July 4th which was over a month earlier than we've ever seen it in the history of Ohio so it got an early start and it's a kind of a dear density dependent disease
[UNKNOWN]: eight 1632 so it got a really early start.
[UNKNOWN]: So it took off and it just literally just decimated our deer population.
[UNKNOWN]: Now, hopefully the silver lining to that is, is that areas of the country that have an even of this state that have seen the HD outbreaks, severe HD outbreaks, historically come back stronger than ever.
[UNKNOWN]: And so in this area prior to last year, we had more deer in this area than I'd ever seen.
[UNKNOWN]: I'd been here since 82.
[UNKNOWN]: I'd never seen we had deer just we'd probably we had too many deer to balance with it.
[UNKNOWN]: I want to say too many.
[UNKNOWN]: We weren't beyond the carrying capacity to land, but we we just had a lot of a lot of deer and basically mother nature just said, hold my beer.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, I'll take care of that for you.
[UNKNOWN]: And that's that's what happened.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, let me ask a before the HD breakout and you're saying it's more than you've ever seen in this area.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, was there a noticeable browse line in the woods?
[UNKNOWN]: No, no, maybe Metro parks and places like that in the city, some of the towns.
[UNKNOWN]: But no, not out here.
[UNKNOWN]: I never saw true browse lines like some other states that really have a lot of deer.
[UNKNOWN]: But it was not uncommon.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, I live out here in the country.
[UNKNOWN]: It was not uncommon to see 10 or 15 deer just in your ride in between here and 10 at two o'clock in the afternoon.
[UNKNOWN]: not just in the evening, you know what I mean?
[UNKNOWN]: They were literally deer bedding in yards and all over the place.
[UNKNOWN]: We just had a lot of deer.
[UNKNOWN]: And actually, our deer program at Administrator just retired, which he was our head deer biologist for the state.
[UNKNOWN]: He's my neighbor here and he's one of my good friends.
[UNKNOWN]: And he had been telling me for the last four or five years he said, Mike, we're heading for cliff.
[UNKNOWN]: We're heading for a cliff, and what he meant was, is that our dear densies are getting so high, and our division of wildlife is losing levels.
[UNKNOWN]: It used to be we could add more season dates and more permits, but when you have more people interested in just trophy bucks, you can issue all the permits in a world, and it doesn't really matter.
[UNKNOWN]: And if access continues to get more and more limited, that doesn't mean you.
[UNKNOWN]: if nobody can get at him right it doesn't matter the seasons and the permits and all that stuff and so our division of wildlife is losing levers to pull to rain that back in and he'd been warning me for a while that you know we were headed I don't think in the state of Ohio what we saw here last year I don't think it's the last time we'll see it I think we'll see we're going to see outbreaks in other areas of the state just like that I mean I can't say that for sure but I just feel like that's going to happen.
[UNKNOWN]: Now, also one thing you're talking about with the HD bad bad HD breakout, some other areas in the country.
[UNKNOWN]: You said a lot of times it comes back stronger than ever.
[UNKNOWN]: Yes, what do you mean by bad?
[UNKNOWN]: So when it's strong from a quality perspective.
[UNKNOWN]: So here's an example.
[UNKNOWN]: Harris, Jefferson and Harrison counties, which are on up the river from here in 2017 had a pretty substantial.
[UNKNOWN]: Not as bad as this one, but they had a pretty strong HD outbreak that blanked it a pretty wide area up there.
[UNKNOWN]: and historically those counties are they're not great from a record but perspective but they're good but they're not top tier.
[UNKNOWN]: They're just kind of middle the road.
[UNKNOWN]: So at this last year's buck I big buck club bank with which most of those deer were killed in 2024.
[UNKNOWN]: So six years after a really bad EHD outbreak.
[UNKNOWN]: out of 88 counties in Ohio, Jefferson and Harrison were number one and number two in record book entries six years after a terrible EHD outbreak.
[UNKNOWN]: So the thinking behind that is so the other problem with the trophy hunting craze is we're targeting the best genetics and in a one buck a year state we're letting those five points and little you know it's scraggly six points lived to be 78 years old because nobody wants to burn a one burn their buck tag on that deer they want that three and a half
[UNKNOWN]: And so Mother Nature comes in and chlornates the gene pool.
[UNKNOWN]: She's not, she's indiscriminate, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So you have, you start from scratch, and you have fewer deer on the landscape, which makes for better nutrition less stress.
[UNKNOWN]: When you have lots of deer on the landscape, they straighten out, they fight all the time, and they're interacting with each other all the time.
[UNKNOWN]: So everything about it is good, and it points back to the low deer densities.
[UNKNOWN]: So you have low deer densities usually equals better quality.
[UNKNOWN]: And that's, I think, what was seen in Jefferson and Harrison County
[UNKNOWN]: They came back stronger than ever because fewer deer on the landscape, better nutrition, less stress, and not necessarily better genetics, but they got rid of a lot of those, quote-unquote scrub bucks, started from scratch, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And so now you had a bit more better record book, Trophy, or excuse me, record book class deer.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, that's the press.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm actually, I'm where you saying that dinner, a couple nights ago.
[UNKNOWN]: Hey, it was shocking because that's cool because you had that information because, you know, you deal with that all the time.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: So you're able to see that in real time and see the performance.
[UNKNOWN]: So it's not, you know, it's unfortunate like what happened with the HD breakout, but it gives people a little bit of hope if you had the patience.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, one thing of the toughest, if you're a landowner or even if you least ground up here,
[UNKNOWN]: Um, you know, if you're stuck with that property, you just know for a few years, it's going to be pretty rough.
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: As the population's trying to make a comeback, the age structure's trying to get some age on and everything, but like you said, within that four to six year range, you ought to see something pretty substantial happen.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, in theory.
[UNKNOWN]: So I think the biggest fear is, and I've seen, you know, some other areas of the country where they've said that, you know, every two, three, four years, they have any and that's obviously a real concern.
[UNKNOWN]: Now, if we can go six, seven, eight years without another way out of great hunting, but boy, if it's every two or three years, that'll be demoralizing.
[UNKNOWN]: We've actually seen a reduction in real estate values year over year in this area because of that EHD outbreak.
[UNKNOWN]: And a lot of leases that
[UNKNOWN]: that you know guys had had for years came up because they didn't want to pay to come lease you know the ground this year and so this is actually a great time in this area to invest in ground because real estate prices have have been depressed a little bit and there's a lot of leases available.
[UNKNOWN]: I've talked to several landowners that have said that the guys that could have they're going to tell them to pound sand you know if they come back so this is actually a pretty good time if you want to if you know if you want to hunt in an area like this
[UNKNOWN]: very, very interesting.
[UNKNOWN]: So is there anything else about EHD conversation that's worth noting to get people whether there's a little bit of hope or a little bit more understanding if because at some point this summer we're going to get reports from somewhere in the country with EHD and Breakouts.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, in theory, if you have fewer deer on the landscape, so they're not exactly sure how EHD overwinters, you know, where's it come from?
[UNKNOWN]: And the one theory I've heard is the, they called the Typhoid Mary theory, which 100 and some years ago when Typhoid spread all around the globe, there was this gal Mary who was, she was like a maid to a very wealthy guy that traveled and she was infected with Typhoid but didn't get sick and so she spread it around so there's some theories that
[UNKNOWN]: Some deer.
[UNKNOWN]: are infected with the HD can be contagious, but don't get sick.
[UNKNOWN]: And so, a mid-bites that deer, then it bites another deer that doesn't have that same immunity.
[UNKNOWN]: It gets sick and then another mid-bites that and that's how it explodes.
[UNKNOWN]: And so, there's some other theories that the midges go down and they actually survive the winter.
[UNKNOWN]: They go down below the frost line and they're able to survive the winter.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm not exactly sure if anybody really knows how that disease lives year over year.
[UNKNOWN]: But I can tell you that, like I said, we've had it here in this area for at least 30 years, but conditions last year were just, it was just a perfect storm.
[UNKNOWN]: Just a lot of a lot of deer, a lot of rain made a lot of midges equal to a lot of death.
[UNKNOWN]: And so, in theory, we shouldn't have a problem for a while because we just don't have the deer densities that we have.
[UNKNOWN]: and see what's interesting is because we've never really had a discussion about EHD, but an interesting thing is always thought it was something to do with drought.
[UNKNOWN]: Just overall drought.
[UNKNOWN]: To be the thinking, yeah, but it's baloney, but yeah, that used to be the thinking.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, so that's not that's not true at all, but you have to have a lot of moisture in danger.
[UNKNOWN]: So the drought theory was this that the deer would congregate at watering holes, so they would all get together because water was limited and then the midges were there and they bite all the deer.
[UNKNOWN]: But, and there are also used to be a theory that it would pick on bucks more than doves because you find more dead bucks than doves.
[UNKNOWN]: And the thought there is that, well, bucks are in bachelor groups in the summer where the doves are spread out in family units across the landscape.
[UNKNOWN]: And the bucks all go to that one watering hole where the midges are and they all get bit now.
[UNKNOWN]: I'll get sick.
[UNKNOWN]: I've heard other theories that, you know, when an antlers are growing, they're blood running through them.
[UNKNOWN]: There's more surface area for the midge to bite.
[UNKNOWN]: And I'm not exactly sure, although I will say, in this area last year, I did not see any discriminatory.
[UNKNOWN]: They just killed them all, you know, there was no bucks versus does.
[UNKNOWN]: It just killed almost everything.
[UNKNOWN]: Wow.
[UNKNOWN]: Okay.
[UNKNOWN]: Done.
[UNKNOWN]: not something we do with very much.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, on the south, you guys have had it longer, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And so I read something not long ago where in Texas, an area in Texas where they were testing they were doing serum samples on deer, like 80 plus or 85% of the deer.
[UNKNOWN]: in that area tested positive for antibodies to EHD.
[UNKNOWN]: So in most areas of the south, you have EHD in the south.
[UNKNOWN]: It just doesn't wipe them out like it does up here.
[UNKNOWN]: You lose about one at a 10, we lose like 9 at a 10.
[UNKNOWN]: So it's just much more pronounced up here.
[UNKNOWN]: You would not notice it down there because 10% of your deer on a bad year is still not noticeable.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, it's very rare for us to see because when they survive it, there's something happens with their hooves.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, they slough off.
[UNKNOWN]: And they get, oh, it's called a fever line.
[UNKNOWN]: We actually, so in this county and in this area, the division of wildlife did serum sample tests and they did some tissue sample tests.
[UNKNOWN]: I actually provided about 10% of the samples form from friends that I knew that killed deer in the during the hunting season.
[UNKNOWN]: And 54% of those deer, these are the deer that survived
[UNKNOWN]: the outbreak tested positive for EHD and antibodies, meaning that they got it and lived through it.
[UNKNOWN]: They were the 10% that lived through it.
[UNKNOWN]: And I got trail camera photos of several deer this year that were walking in their backs were like hunched up and their hooves looked like elf shoes.
[UNKNOWN]: Like they like curved up where the end of their hooves were sloughing off where you could tell they had survived it.
[UNKNOWN]: Most of the mature bucks that I saw killed in this area were EHD survivors.
[UNKNOWN]: Then what's called a fever line.
[UNKNOWN]: It was like a line through the hoof.
[UNKNOWN]: and the ends of their hoofs were all like cracked and broken.
[UNKNOWN]: That's a telltale sign that Adira's had a HD and lived through it.
[UNKNOWN]: I've seen that I could count on one hand how many times I've seen that in the South Eagles like the first time a buddy killed one a couple years ago I want to local management area that I'll live close to and he sent me pictures of it and he was all skinny and a Maciated look and this was in November and His hooves were like that hit the elf shoes and everything He's like what is wrong with this deer?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I'm like I think that's a EHD.
[UNKNOWN]: That's the first I'm not ever seen in Alabama
[UNKNOWN]: So the HD outbreaks appear in the Midwest and North, they usually end with the first frost, which is usually middle end of October.
[UNKNOWN]: So that would make sense in the south.
[UNKNOWN]: You have probably hadn't had a frost.
[UNKNOWN]: That's why the humans still amazed you.
[UNKNOWN]: Might have still been sick at that time, because you had nothing to kill those midges off.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, here's afraid to eat it.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I bought humans can't catch it, but I still know that I'd want to eat one that looks sickly like that.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, probably wouldn't get much meat off of them, honestly.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: So I want to transition and talk in trail cameras.
[UNKNOWN]: Like, get back.
[UNKNOWN]: We talked about this earlier, and you mentioned the phrase that if there's one thing that changed that would drastically affect the way you hunt and what you're targeting it would be trail cameras.
[UNKNOWN]: 100%.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: What has the evolution trail cameras done for you from like a, how did you first start implementing?
[UNKNOWN]: How did you start refining it?
[UNKNOWN]: Okay.
[UNKNOWN]: I used to be an avid trapper about my wife's engagement with foxbell.
[UNKNOWN]: She doesn't like her that.
[UNKNOWN]: But so I kind of likened setting trail cameras almost like a sport within a sport.
[UNKNOWN]: So getting a picture of something you're interested in is really cool, right?
[UNKNOWN]: It's exciting.
[UNKNOWN]: Wow, there it is.
[UNKNOWN]: So and then wireless trail cameras started screwing with my sleep schedule.
[UNKNOWN]: Because I started getting up to a clock in the morning and what's going on?
[UNKNOWN]: What's going on?
[UNKNOWN]: And it's actually altered the way that I hunt, where I hunt.
[UNKNOWN]: and so it's really made a huge difference because again these areas that I hunt I really can't glass so it's just eyes in the woods all the time and you learn so much about deer and their travel patterns in there.
[UNKNOWN]: It's been by far the greatest tool that I've seen in the years that I've hunted.
[UNKNOWN]: And with trail cameras, the implementation, again, going from something that you had if it's glued to that, probably starting out with film cameras, if you started that earlier.
[UNKNOWN]: Film, develop film.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: Right.
[UNKNOWN]: So film cameras and transition to SD's, SD cards, and now with wireless cameras or cell cameras, that's changed a lot.
[UNKNOWN]: But how have you evolved?
[UNKNOWN]: What like what are let me ask what is your approach to trail cameras now that it allows you maybe the last 10, 15 years that's allowed you in your sons to be extremely successful targeting specific bucks because we get a lot of questions of it guys like you know some of those are opportunistic you know mature but they try to kill mature buck but doesn't matter about these specific one just a nice mature buck first target in a specific year I think a lot of guys like Andrew's guy idea he's been drooling for two years in Alabama that is exceptional
[UNKNOWN]: that he gets photos of, but it's like the difference between getting a photo or two or some videos of a deer, where it's actually being able to harvest and kill that.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: What have you done in order to progress to be able to do that going from photos to actually like, hey, I killed that deer.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, first thing I'll tell you, knowing that there's a deer there that you're interested in, gives you the confidence to sit longer and hunt more and hard.
[UNKNOWN]: So if you're just hoping that there's something out there, I mean, I'll start.
[UNKNOWN]: coming up with reasons why I need to get down and, you know, I really got to go do this or my wife need that or whatever, but if I just got a trail camera photo recently of, you know, a deer that I'm interested in, it raises your level of enthusiasm and interest because you're, you know, you've got a pretty good idea that there's something out there.
[UNKNOWN]: It also allows you to evaluate deer better, although trail cameras will fool you too.
[UNKNOWN]: We've killed deer that we thought were better than they were and we've killed deer that weren't as good as we thought they were, you know, based on a trail camera photo.
[UNKNOWN]: But as far as strategy goes, just especially with the cell cameras, the real-time information, you know, it just makes, I'm absentee landowners.
[UNKNOWN]: That's been huge for people that don't live in the area that have eyes and, you know, in the woods and they know how to, you know, they normally would just, I'm gonna take the first week in November off or whatever, I'm gonna hunt no matter what happens and that's it.
[UNKNOWN]: Now they can,
[UNKNOWN]: say, wow, boy, the real activity on my property is really picked up.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, last week or so, why need to get up there now?
[UNKNOWN]: I need to be out there now.
[UNKNOWN]: It's been huge for the, for the absentee lander.
[UNKNOWN]: And it's also, or the absentee hunter, the guy that doesn't live in the area.
[UNKNOWN]: But for me personally, you know, it's, it's, it's really been a complete game changer.
[UNKNOWN]: Again, because without it, you were just, hoping,
[UNKNOWN]: You know, you were just in, and, and, and, and, without some real reliable person, you know, because, like, to a big dear to you and me might be two different things, right?
[UNKNOWN]: For sure.
[UNKNOWN]: Some people tend to exaggerate.
[UNKNOWN]: Man, he was this wide, he was that tall, you know, and stuff.
[UNKNOWN]: And so, you know, trail cameras are very definitive.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know if that answers your question or not.
[UNKNOWN]: It does, but I want to get into the weeds of approaching camera placement.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, we're talking, we're talking steep hill country.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: This is the egg that there's no open ground really.
[UNKNOWN]: Yep.
[UNKNOWN]: So when you're looking at that, especially if you say you picked up a new permission piece.
[UNKNOWN]: what is what are you doing going into a place like that of how you're starting your regiment of course oh how is a bait state so yeah it could be that as he's just dumping some corn out into seeing what's there yeah yeah but how do you evolve from the first time you're there put it come cameras up to moving cameras around to give you the best opportunity to learn and how much information are you trying to learn from cameras in order to put yourself in the right position and kill it here well so getting back to
[UNKNOWN]: Right.
[UNKNOWN]: So human intrusion is big too.
[UNKNOWN]: I think Don Higgins talks about this a lot of people do and I couldn't agree more.
[UNKNOWN]: The we have as someone a mess this number up, but we have roughly 4 million olfactory sensors in our know something like that.
[UNKNOWN]: a bloodhound that can track you 12 hours after you walk across my driveway has like 120 million old factor.
[UNKNOWN]: These are rough numbers.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, I tell you, there's about 240 million old factory sensors and it's no.
[UNKNOWN]: So I used to tell people in seminars like this, you know, we had a bowl of vegetable soup, we smell vegetable soup, a deer, smells, corn, peas, carrots, you know what I mean?
[UNKNOWN]: There, sense of smell is so keen, we can't even imagine how sensitive.
[UNKNOWN]: Every year, especially in ag areas or areas of fields where you can see deer, the deer, the mature bucks out in the fields all summer long, and then all of a sudden about two three or four weeks before the season, they started to get real sporadic.
[UNKNOWN]: And I was wondering how the eight corns are dropping, you know, all this stuff.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, they are, but let me tell you what else is happening.
[UNKNOWN]: There's this strange predator that hasn't been in the woods all summer long, and all of a sudden, we're in there.
[UNKNOWN]: We're prune and branches, we're clearing shooting lanes, we're scouting, we're this, we're squirrel hunting, we're doing whatever,
[UNKNOWN]: Right, so they learn pretty quick.
[UNKNOWN]: Hey, you've got this new predator and you're all air in a daylight right and then when they get to be older I call these deer VFW's their veterans of foreign wars.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, they've been through that before us exactly what happened last year, man And these guys are gonna be in your only here.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, and so I think if you can set wireless trail cameras out and just forget about them and just check them and don't have to physically go there Oh my gosh, what a
[UNKNOWN]: what an asset that is.
[UNKNOWN]: It's eyes and you know it's eyes in the woods all the time real time information and you don't have to go there and mess up the area.
[UNKNOWN]: Dear no, they know days after we've been there that we've been there.
[UNKNOWN]: You know what I'm saying?
[UNKNOWN]: It doesn't necessarily scare them and dear I've had people tell me this well gee I spoke to deer over on that ridge I need to go hunt over here now.
[UNKNOWN]: Not a
[UNKNOWN]: If a deer didn't go to every place has ever been spooked, he's got no place to go.
[UNKNOWN]: Coyotes bump them 12 times a day, right?
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, they don't not go back to an area because there was a coyote there.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, they don't go there because you were there, or whatever, they'll absolutely go back to it.
[UNKNOWN]: But they also absolutely know when you're spending a lot of time there and you haven't been there all year.
[UNKNOWN]: And so wireless trail cameras kind of alleviate a lot of that.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, something else, I want to get more depth on this conversation.
[UNKNOWN]: We've had people talk about, and guys talk about like, man, have you read that situation?
[UNKNOWN]: We put a camera out the first evening or afternoon that big book comes about and you don't see him again.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, so I have a good friend who's killed a lot of big deer and statistically the first time you hunt a stand is the best chance I'll ever have for killing that deer because you've burning it up over time, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So my argument to that is though that deer doesn't do the same thing every day.
[UNKNOWN]: So if you were there the first time, you know what I mean?
[UNKNOWN]: You might have missed him on a third set.
[UNKNOWN]: But statistically, if you're just trying to play numbers, the best time to kill a deer is the very first time that you sit in that stand, same thing with a trail camera.
[UNKNOWN]: Now I will tell you this as far as baiting and feeding goes.
[UNKNOWN]: If you get a daytime photo of a deer at a bait site, your best chance of killing him is within one or two days of that, and then he becomes almost completely nocturnal.
[UNKNOWN]: Almost completely.
[UNKNOWN]: After that bait site gets established, then your chances of killing him over that bait go way down.
[UNKNOWN]: Your best chances are within 48 hours of that first picture.
[UNKNOWN]: and your best chances are not necessarily right over that bait site, but the spokes leading to it.
[UNKNOWN]: If you can get away from the problem with honey over bait, food plot, apple tree, acro whatever or food source, anything that's bringing deer in is it brings deer in, they bring it in they stay.
[UNKNOWN]: And so if you can get away from it, you can get in and out undetected, you're not spooking everything when you leave and your chances of encountering at that mature buck are greater farther away from not way far away, but farther away from the food source out the spokes.
[UNKNOWN]: All right.
[UNKNOWN]: So let's get more into the progress of progression of how you move trail cameras around.
[UNKNOWN]: Okay.
[UNKNOWN]: Again, you pick up a permission piece or you feel when are you starting to put cameras out?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, I mean, I've got 29 cell cameras out right now, but I'm messing around with turkeys with those things to use them a lot for turkey scouting too, which I think I was telling you guys yesterday people think I'm crazy.
[UNKNOWN]: I put decoys.
[UNKNOWN]: I shouldn't be telling this because now everybody's going to do it, but not everybody's doing it anyway, but I put turkey decoys up out in fields and I put wireless trail cameras over them and
[UNKNOWN]: Hawks beat him up in owls and eagles and bobcats and coyotes and other turkeys knock him over every damn stand him up.
[UNKNOWN]: But if a turkey or turkeys are inhabiting that area, they will instinctively come over and investigate that decoy and have had people tell me while you're desensitizing the turkeys to your decoy.
[UNKNOWN]: No, I'm not.
[UNKNOWN]: Turkeys are not smart.
[UNKNOWN]: Turkeys are wary.
[UNKNOWN]: They're incredibly wary.
[UNKNOWN]: They know how to get away from things that want to
[UNKNOWN]: they survive by eyesight.
[UNKNOWN]: I believe Turkey sees something that we don't.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know if it's UV rays, I don't know what it is, but it's something.
[UNKNOWN]: There's something in our clothes, the dyes, and our camos, or whatever.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know.
[UNKNOWN]: I can't prove this other than I've had turkeys around me and I'll blink my eye and they see me.
[UNKNOWN]: Or how many times have you had to mean that my favorite strategy for turkey hunting is to keep a hump in between me and the gobler.
[UNKNOWN]: because if I can see him from a long way off, he can see me from a long way off.
[UNKNOWN]: And I want him to have to be within range, pop up on that hump and bang.
[UNKNOWN]: It's too late.
[UNKNOWN]: I try not to get set up where I can see him coming from 300 yards away, because he can see me.
[UNKNOWN]: And there's something about me that I think just glows to him.
[UNKNOWN]: And so anyway, get him back to the turkeys.
[UNKNOWN]: They're not smart, but they're incredibly weary.
[UNKNOWN]: Now, a coyote.
[UNKNOWN]: or a deer, an old doe, a buck.
[UNKNOWN]: They learned from their mistakes.
[UNKNOWN]: I tell you, you call in a pair of coyotes shoot one that survivor has a Ph.D. and a hundred awareness.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, they learn, but Turkey will make the same mistake nine days in rough.
[UNKNOWN]: You don't kill it.
[UNKNOWN]: Again, they're just really nervous and so I have gobbers come in and beat up my decoys and they'll come back seven days at a row beat up my decoys You know, they just don't learn they just don't know, but anyway, it's a great way to scout and so when I go into a new area to Put cameras up for deer hunting I mean, first thing I'm looking at I just instinctively looking at travel corridors High traffic areas pinch points, you know, places that I think I'm most likely to get food sources are probably the easiest
[UNKNOWN]: And also, so it used to be flash cameras were big in the beginning, and so here's, you guys are friends with my good friend Eddie Salter.
[UNKNOWN]: So 30 years ago, Eddie Salter and I were hunting up here in Ohio, we were deer hunting, and I was filming Eddie was the hunter.
[UNKNOWN]: And we were on a lease that I had in the landowner.
[UNKNOWN]: He leased the property to me, but he let a friend of his who lived out of state hunt there a couple of times a year.
[UNKNOWN]: So I agreed as part of my leash.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, that guy can hunt.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, that guy was up and we didn't know it.
[UNKNOWN]: And he put a trail camera over a scrape about 30 yards from a stand that Eddie and I were hunting.
[UNKNOWN]: And we didn't know it was there, and it was a flash camera, and we're up in a tree, and all of a sudden, deer walks over to that screen.
[UNKNOWN]: We did splash a light, and he was saying, lightning, what a cloud in the sky.
[UNKNOWN]: That's not what a lightning, anyway, we get down, and so anyway, the guy got a picture of that day of the moon.
[UNKNOWN]: That day, a little bit day, also, I'm mooned his trail camera.
[UNKNOWN]: But anyway, yeah, so used to be flash cameras and so I did some some field testing in my backyard with flash cameras versus infrared cameras and
[UNKNOWN]: There were some deer that did not like that flash.
[UNKNOWN]: That flash would go off and like they'd been shot with a cannon and there were other deer that paid no attention to that flash.
[UNKNOWN]: But there were some deer that didn't like that infrared camera because it would click and make a sound.
[UNKNOWN]: There are some deer that just don't like cameras.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know why.
[UNKNOWN]: So a lot of times, I'll position my cameras up, looking down.
[UNKNOWN]: So they're out of the deer's site plane, and I tend to have better luck if I can get that camera kind of concealed or up in elevation, I have a little bit better luck than just placing them at eye level with a deer.
[UNKNOWN]: That's really interesting.
[UNKNOWN]: We grew up with flash cameras and I remember the day I shot my deer, actually the track it walking down the food pot and it was in some pines.
[UNKNOWN]: You just saw that light flash and there's already deer.
[UNKNOWN]: There's another deer out there walking around.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I brought back some memories and I'm about a flash camera and a long time.
[UNKNOWN]: But so a lot of time, like you said, with your camera placement, it's trying to get elevated, or conceal it, but try to get out a lot of sight, so that makes a lot of sense.
[UNKNOWN]: But in a lot of times, if I urge you correctly, you'll place your camera tip-around some kind of food source, or leading to it, leading to it.
[UNKNOWN]: So that could be a food plant bait pile.
[UNKNOWN]: We call them feed trees, but like you said, apple trees, oaks, anything, anything.
[UNKNOWN]: Lots of you.
[UNKNOWN]: Exactly.
[UNKNOWN]: Now, what is, I'm very interested in asking, when you get a target buck on camera.
[UNKNOWN]: And let's say, let's say, it's, again, it's before season.
[UNKNOWN]: So I don't know, when you all open up your October 1st?
[UNKNOWN]: No, we come in the last Saturday in September and we go out the first Sunday in February, okay?
[UNKNOWN]: Actually.
[UNKNOWN]: So say, it's a week or two weeks before season.
[UNKNOWN]: You finally get this target buck to show up.
[UNKNOWN]: Maybe you just didn't know about it, or you finally just reappeared.
[UNKNOWN]: What are you going to do with anything in order to move that camera back?
[UNKNOWN]: It was not necessarily there in daylight, whereas right there on the edge of it, morning or even.
[UNKNOWN]: What exactly is your thought process in a situation like that of, Do you just leave the camera there and then you just kind of scratch your way back?
[UNKNOWN]: Do you move the camera back?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, I would set another camera.
[UNKNOWN]: You know what I'm saying?
[UNKNOWN]: I would leave that camera there and then set another camera.
[UNKNOWN]: If I was going to make that kind of move, but I would prop.
[UNKNOWN]: So statistically again, the Secretary of Treasury,
[UNKNOWN]: The best times to kill trophy bucks in Ohio are our first week of season.
[UNKNOWN]: That's number one, or suggestions to number one.
[UNKNOWN]: The majority of our record book books are killed end of October 1st of November during the right, but the great big deer, the boon and crocket class deer, a lot of those are killed, or the majority of those are killed the first week of the season.
[UNKNOWN]: or they're killed at the end of our just before our gun season.
[UNKNOWN]: And I have a theory on that, I can't prove this, but a lot of the breeding is done by the three and four year old bucks, which three and four year old deer up here will tend to be between 130, 150 inches.
[UNKNOWN]: So a lot of those deer make the big buck club.
[UNKNOWN]: But the Boon and Crocodile class, the 170, typical is the 195, not to those are usually 4, 5, 6, 7 year old deer older deer.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't think they do near as much of the breeding for one.
[UNKNOWN]: There's fewer of them out there.
[UNKNOWN]: Um, they don't run out in front of cars.
[UNKNOWN]: They don't make a lot of mistakes like the deer that are cut crazed.
[UNKNOWN]: And I think that a lot of people hunt the end of October, first of November, and the masses tend to slow down by the middle of November, towards the end of November, which is toward the end of our rat.
[UNKNOWN]: And I think those bigger deer realized that and they feel a little more comfortable moving around.
[UNKNOWN]: That's just a theory of mind, but by far the first week of the season when they're still on a summer pattern Still on a feeding pattern a lot of those during and that's almost exclusively and afternoon hunt again It's really difficult to tell where they're betting.
[UNKNOWN]: It's a whole lot easier to figure out where they're feeding so the early season afternoon hunt
[UNKNOWN]: peak right or pre-wrote peak right doesn't matter just being out there matters and then the best time again then to kill a really big buck with archery equipment is the tail end of the rut be the second half of November okay now is there any other emphasis on how you'll move camera as I move cans place more cameras out there when you have that buck show up like I'm just trying to get a better understanding you said trail cameras are huge emphasis for you
[UNKNOWN]: How is that the case and how are you going about placing them in order to like are you killing this one try Are you killing dear Directly within I side of these cameras or a lot of times you're moving back a little bit further away from a camera down the path You think he's walking in order to get shots Yeah, I don't know that I've ever really thought of it like that.
[UNKNOWN]: I I think
[UNKNOWN]: I try, okay, so because I'm hunting a lot of the same areas year after year after year and you get to know how the deer use the terrain over a period of years.
[UNKNOWN]: Now, if you're a question about I go into a new place and I don't know it and I don't know how the deer use them.
[UNKNOWN]: Trail cameras help me learn that.
[UNKNOWN]: They help me learn that a whole lot quicker than I can.
[UNKNOWN]: It takes years of trial and error sitting there watching them to do it.
[UNKNOWN]: But if I know the area that I'm hunting and I have a pretty good idea how the deer using it,
[UNKNOWN]: I try to be as non-invasive as possible.
[UNKNOWN]: I try to be stealthy.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't want to go in here and cut a bunch of trees down.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't want to make a bunch of racket.
[UNKNOWN]: As I've gotten older, my sons who are a little more agile than I am, they helped me with stance.
[UNKNOWN]: It's funny.
[UNKNOWN]: They've come full circle.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm saying all their stance.
[UNKNOWN]: And now they help me a lot.
[UNKNOWN]: And so I don't mind climbing high up into trees.
[UNKNOWN]: hanging the stands for the most dangerous thing that we do, so my boy's helped me with that stuff.
[UNKNOWN]: But a lot of my stands, I usually, and most of the places I have multiple options.
[UNKNOWN]: So that's the other thing about wind.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm a real big proponent of playing wind, which in Hill Country is hard because so if you're hunting flat agriculture ground and winds out of the west,
[UNKNOWN]: out of the west.
[UNKNOWN]: And when these hills run north and west and east and south, you get a west wind that comes over a ridge at the runs north and south.
[UNKNOWN]: It hits that wind now.
[UNKNOWN]: It's like a tornado.
[UNKNOWN]: And I just tell people this from a prove it to yourself, don't it can't fire time times you've got to move?
[UNKNOWN]: Because it smokes in your eyes.
[UNKNOWN]: Because it's constantly swirling.
[UNKNOWN]: It's telling about thermal currents too.
[UNKNOWN]: So I've tried to use thermal currents to my imagine.
[UNKNOWN]: They're really, really, it's really interesting to try to figure it out.
[UNKNOWN]: But in theory,
[UNKNOWN]: So these deer learn, especially the old deer, they learn to travel with some kind of an advantage, with some type of wind in their face, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And so if you're hunting in Hill Country,
[UNKNOWN]: at first light this year on a morning height.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, it's coolest right at the end of the night, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So that cool air is sinking down into the bottom of the valley.
[UNKNOWN]: Then all of a sudden the sun comes up, hits that force floor, temperature starts to rise and that thermal current changes 180 degrees, right in the middle of your hunt.
[UNKNOWN]: You know what you're gonna do, get down and go to it.
[UNKNOWN]: It's real, which that's what makes it challenging.
[UNKNOWN]: That's what makes it fun because in the deer know that too.
[UNKNOWN]: Especially the old deer, they absolutely know that.
[UNKNOWN]: And so,
[UNKNOWN]: Um, I, I was hunting a deer on a national force.
[UNKNOWN]: I think I was telling you guys about it a couple of years ago, and I, I hunted them for seven weeks and saw them one time in seven weeks of hunting.
[UNKNOWN]: I saw other deer, I saw some other good deer while I was hunting, and it was really it's big, mostly big mature hardwoods, and I could see pretty good, it was late season, I could see pretty good, and it was really interesting to see how those deer used that typography.
[UNKNOWN]: And I've always been in, in Hill Country, I've been a big proponent of saddles.
[UNKNOWN]: in between two high points is the easiest path of resistance.
[UNKNOWN]: Boy was that that brought home hunting that national force.
[UNKNOWN]: Those deer absolutely use those sats.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean that's how they cross and that's how they travel from one area to that.
[UNKNOWN]: And especially it starts during the rut too where the trail is kind of parallel all the ridges and so the deer when they go up and over they're crossing more and more trails and they're interacting with more and more.
[UNKNOWN]: Doze or more do trails really kind of interesting.
[UNKNOWN]: So getting back to your point about trail cameras and how to use them Of all the deer that we've killed.
[UNKNOWN]: There's one buck that stands out as being I want to say our greatest trophy as a family and my oldest son Ryan killed him in late January of 2009 my son was 16 years old
[UNKNOWN]: And this deer lived in an area he and most of his home range was public ground.
[UNKNOWN]: But we had exclusive permission on 78 or's a private ground that was off the front of this.
[UNKNOWN]: And there was a high wall and the high wall was three quarters of a mile long and it had two cuts in it where we could go up and down and the deer could go up and down.
[UNKNOWN]: They were classic textbook funnels.
[UNKNOWN]: And so I spent about six weeks up on top of the high wall, a big hardwoods up on top hunting.
[UNKNOWN]: And one afternoon in November, I was up there and hunting targeting this deer that my son wound up killing was 180 inch non-typical.
[UNKNOWN]: And there was about a hundred and forty-hundred forty-five class, really nice buck.
[UNKNOWN]: That I watched was a warm afternoon.
[UNKNOWN]: I watched him come down his hardwood flat.
[UNKNOWN]: and he got right to that cut and he bedded down.
[UNKNOWN]: And he actually fell asleep when he was one.
[UNKNOWN]: A few times I've ever seen you actually rolled over on his side and he was sleeping.
[UNKNOWN]: And if you ever watch a dog when he's dreaming, he'll like run in like something's chasing him.
[UNKNOWN]: He was doing that, he was running, he was having a dream and he was out for probably at least 10 minutes.
[UNKNOWN]: He was sound asleep and then he'd get up and he'd look around, he'd start chewing, you know, and how they do.
[UNKNOWN]: And he stepped out of that cut for probably two hours, and a dough came up and he got ours gone.
[UNKNOWN]: I thought to myself, he's doing exactly what I was doing.
[UNKNOWN]: He went to that cut.
[UNKNOWN]: He knew that was a pinch point, and he waited for a dough to come up that bank insurer enough, you know, it worked.
[UNKNOWN]: So this was back in the early days of wireless cameras.
[UNKNOWN]: We had this camera, these cameras called Smart Scoutters, and they were about to size them a football.
[UNKNOWN]: They were a great big, big, big, big, 12 volt battery, and we had Smart Scoutters at each
[UNKNOWN]: And the target buck that we were trying to kill that my son wound up killing, we had over a hundred events, not necessarily pictures, but a hundred events of him coming down off of that rock, off that cut, and all but two.
[UNKNOWN]: were under the cover of darkness.
[UNKNOWN]: And when the season was over, I went back.
[UNKNOWN]: There's a website called Weather Underground, and you could chart the weather, the wind direction, the historical wind direction, and that cut runs east and west, which means the wind, if it was out of the north, the south will be at his face or his back.
[UNKNOWN]: So I took an Excel spreadsheet and I charted it out.
[UNKNOWN]: And of those 100 events we had of him coming down off that rock,
[UNKNOWN]: he came down off that rock in average of two and a half hours later all after dark but two events when the wind was at his back versus when it was in his face so if the wind was in his face if the wind had an ass in it was coming out of the south.
[UNKNOWN]: He weighed, he'd come down two and a half hours earlier than if it had an an and an a north.
[UNKNOWN]: Meaning he was at his back because he couldn't smell what was down there.
[UNKNOWN]: It was really interesting.
[UNKNOWN]: There were a couple of times, so I wound up shooting another buck.
[UNKNOWN]: I made a mistake and I shot a buck that looked very much like him, only smaller.
[UNKNOWN]: It's like a 145-inch buck, very similar frame.
[UNKNOWN]: But it wasn't that deer and it was split shot.
[UNKNOWN]: He came by me real fast.
[UNKNOWN]: I shot and I thought it was him wasn't him That's when I handed the baton to my son So I was up there for a while trying to film my son take this deer and I wound up it towards the end of the season Which said it's more important for him to get an opportunity because you know camera guys twice as much sent twice as much movement all that stuff But anyway
[UNKNOWN]: There were multiple times when my son and I would come down off that rock.
[UNKNOWN]: And before we could get to our truth, there was a picture of him.
[UNKNOWN]: He was watching us.
[UNKNOWN]: He was absolutely watching us, come down off that rock.
[UNKNOWN]: And my son wound up killing him in a level three snow emergency.
[UNKNOWN]: We had a ice storm.
[UNKNOWN]: It was snowed in an ice on top of it.
[UNKNOWN]: And he was actually below the rock.
[UNKNOWN]: And the stomach got the better of him in the late season 29th of January.
[UNKNOWN]: He came down off that rock in the daylight to feed
[UNKNOWN]: and my son wound up getting him and all it was quite an emotional hunt, but as a family we hunted that deer for an entire season to get an opportunity out of the 29th of January, but we learned a lot from him too.
[UNKNOWN]: And those trail cameras were those wireless trail cameras were really interesting.
[UNKNOWN]: We would have never known any of that stuff without him.
[UNKNOWN]: That's one area I was going to go straight to was the wind currents and hill country is so hard to get them right Yeah, and especially when you got real steep hills like we have up here.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean just yesterday We were when we were talking on and we were going around.
[UNKNOWN]: We were trying to find areas that were a little bit out of the wind And we're like, oh, we got a south wind right now I remember taking it being like well, we got south wind and I was looking at my map when he said it I'm like this wind is hitting me in the face out of the north right now And it's just because it swirls around up there
[UNKNOWN]: And these, and these deer like to use those wind currents in that just, what do you have to look for in a setup to be able to take advantage of that with a, with a buck?
[UNKNOWN]: Okay, so the only thing you can really do is get up on a ridge is you hunting down in the valleys of hill country is really hard because the wind swirls.
[UNKNOWN]: It just does.
[UNKNOWN]: There is no good wind direction.
[UNKNOWN]: And so you really, at least my strategy is I try to run up as high as I can, because if you're up on a ridge and it's a west wind, you've got a west wind.
[UNKNOWN]: The other problem you have though, is hunting big country.
[UNKNOWN]: So if you're hunting ag country and you've got a 15 acre wood loss surrounded by 500 acres ag culture, you know he's coming out of there, right?
[UNKNOWN]: But when you're hunting this big country, hi, oh, I got a west wind today, that's good.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, how you know which direction he's coming from.
[UNKNOWN]: You don't know, right?
[UNKNOWN]: That's what makes it, that's why they're trophies.
[UNKNOWN]: Right.
[UNKNOWN]: If they were easy to get close to, we go to Walmart and buy one or whatever.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, I mean there.
[UNKNOWN]: That's what makes some trophies is because as they get older, they really learn to use these, these went.
[UNKNOWN]: So I'll tell you guys another story.
[UNKNOWN]: My greatest trophy as far as hardest year to get close to was not the 200 inch deer.
[UNKNOWN]: I call that deer was really hard to get close to you, too.
[UNKNOWN]: But.
[UNKNOWN]: I killed a deer in 2013, that my boys and I, we nicknamed the Teflon Dodd.
[UNKNOWN]: We called him the Teflon Dodd as I saw him killable.
[UNKNOWN]: But he was at least eight and a half years old and we based out on trail camera for we had five years of trail camera for him.
[UNKNOWN]: And his rack, basically the only weight could not have been eight and a half years old as if he was dropped out of the wooden with 140 inch rack.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, I mean, he had to be at least eight, he was eight and a half years older older.
[UNKNOWN]: So my middle son, I
[UNKNOWN]: Shot him in 2011, hard-coordering away from me tried to sneak in behind the last rib and either he pulled a shot of the deer, something shot him into butt, and he didn't hit the femoral artery, and the deer wound up surviving.
[UNKNOWN]: In the next year, my oldest son was hunting him.
[UNKNOWN]: and had him abroad side at 30 yards and shot him in the armpit right below the heart right here Oh, I know all that exactly.
[UNKNOWN]: So the next year I get the baton.
[UNKNOWN]: Now he's, you know what I mean?
[UNKNOWN]: And in those years we had two encounters with them and both times the boys messed it up.
[UNKNOWN]: So then I get the baton in 2013 and there's a place where I could hunt that
[UNKNOWN]: it was you couldn't script a better pinch point than this it was a there's about a five acre field on a ridge cap and you got the end of the ridge cap and it tailed off down into a valley and at the court at the back left corner of the valley which would be the south end of the of the field was a real steep ravine so yet an inside corner.
[UNKNOWN]: with a ravine just beyond that.
[UNKNOWN]: So you've got a trail restriction over here and you've got a trail where you've got to open field over here and about a 70 yard wide patch of woods for the deer to travel.
[UNKNOWN]: So anything that was over here that wanted to come here and vice versa had to walk right through there or they had to cross that ravine or had to go through an open field.
[UNKNOWN]: Perfect pinch point.
[UNKNOWN]: We killed over the years a lot of really good bucks in that pinch point.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, that was also the area that the Teflon Don inherited or not inherited but he inhabited.
[UNKNOWN]: My first encounter with him was Halloween, and when was out of the north, I had two stands.
[UNKNOWN]: We had to stand at the inside corner, and we had to stand at the head of the ravine, and again, about a 70-yard gap in between.
[UNKNOWN]: And both in great trees were up real high, lots of cover.
[UNKNOWN]: really well hit.
[UNKNOWN]: So the first encounter at him on Halloween, I'm at the South Stan Wins out of the North and I see him skirt in the edge of the field and he's about to pass through that cut and he gets probably 60, 70 yards out and he stops and like big books to he starts throwing his head up and he's smelling and he's trying to figure out for anything front him but the wind's at his back and he can't and he starts looking around and I'm at least 30, 35 feet in the air and a really good
[UNKNOWN]: and his eyes got like saw he spotted me in that tree.
[UNKNOWN]: Now now forget I've never seen a deer do this.
[UNKNOWN]: He started walking backwards.
[UNKNOWN]: He started taking such backwards and he got to the edge of that field and he just very, nonchalantly walked a big circle all the way around me and disappeared.
[UNKNOWN]: And I remember I texted my boys and I said, I just beat me.
[UNKNOWN]: Fast forward to 16th of November.
[UNKNOWN]: By the way, I'm not very good at anniversaries and birthdays with stuff like this.
[UNKNOWN]: I got it.
[UNKNOWN]: So the 16th of November, now the wins out of the south.
[UNKNOWN]: So I'm at the north stand at the inside corner.
[UNKNOWN]: And I look off to my left and here comes the tough line down.
[UNKNOWN]: Everything's perfect.
[UNKNOWN]: So he doesn't have a bad wind.
[UNKNOWN]: He's got a crosswind.
[UNKNOWN]: So the wind, he's coming from the east, the winds out of the south.
[UNKNOWN]: And I'm in the north.
[UNKNOWN]: So everything's perfect.
[UNKNOWN]: That's how you'd like it.
[UNKNOWN]: A little bit right for him.
[UNKNOWN]: A little bit right for me until it gets too close.
[UNKNOWN]: And he gets like 78 yards out, he stops, he throws his head up.
[UNKNOWN]: This time he doesn't spot me, but he just doesn't like it because he doesn't want to pass through that cut.
[UNKNOWN]: So I watch him, he goes all the way down that drainage.
[UNKNOWN]: Crosses over, it makes a big loop all the way around me.
[UNKNOWN]: And I text my boys, I said, I think this deer is unkillable.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, not the way I like to hunt him.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't think he can be killed.
[UNKNOWN]: And about 20 minutes later, from out in the field, which was a food plot.
[UNKNOWN]: I hear it in a doe comes right under my tree with her tail up and in behind her I hear a map that when I look here comes the Teflon dog got a set to the ground Just like a kum dog you know what I mean he walks right underneath my tree I should blind luck.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean without that doe I don't think he ever passes through that cut
[UNKNOWN]: with the less the conditions were right.
[UNKNOWN]: And that's how you get to be eight and a half years old.
[UNKNOWN]: And this was interesting too.
[UNKNOWN]: We took him to a meat processor.
[UNKNOWN]: And he had the scarred is around for where my middle son shot him.
[UNKNOWN]: He had the scarred is armpit for where my oldest son shot him.
[UNKNOWN]: And he had somebody else's broad head and his brisket.
[UNKNOWN]: We're gonna get shot him straight on.
[UNKNOWN]: He'd been shot four times in his life to make it to eight and a half years old.
[UNKNOWN]: but he was quite a care and he was 150 inch deer, not by far, not my high scoring deer, but he was the hardest to get close to for me.
[UNKNOWN]: So it's funny you're talking about it to seem like he didn't want to pass through that cut.
[UNKNOWN]: He won't pass through that pin point.
[UNKNOWN]: Yep.
[UNKNOWN]: We interviewed Derek Dixon from Whitetail Research on the YouTube last year.
[UNKNOWN]: He's got a flying drone.
[UNKNOWN]: He's probably seeing him on YouTube flying drones and greet just now.
[UNKNOWN]: I've been hunt not hunting just watching to your every single day Yeah, it's your the game.
[UNKNOWN]: Yes, and just learning their habits fall on deer around at all hours the day to sing with her Do he said that he believes that there's some pinch what's there so good for a hunter?
[UNKNOWN]: Like it is the ultimate pinch what that mature books will absolutely not use them and he had a place on one the forms are really tight
[UNKNOWN]: We're a really tight spot on this ridge where everything just pinched down super tight.
[UNKNOWN]: It's like 30 yards wide where pinched down and it opens back up.
[UNKNOWN]: And he said there were certain mature bucks that would never walk through it.
[UNKNOWN]: They would never go through that pinch point.
[UNKNOWN]: He's like most hunters.
[UNKNOWN]: You'd find out on the map or scattered like, oh, this is the spot to kill him.
[UNKNOWN]: He's like, you could kill some three or four year olds.
[UNKNOWN]: And that's what we killed there.
[UNKNOWN]: We're three, four, five year old deer, but he with this deer happened to be an eight year old deer and he's exactly what happened there.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, and he said he'd seen bugs.
[UNKNOWN]: These big, some of these really old bugs come down once other ridge, get within a hundred yards and then do a loot down and be willing to walk through kind of a ravine off saw that ridge and cross that big steep drainage and come up the other side to not walk through that pinch point.
[UNKNOWN]: That's exactly what I saw, yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: That's crazy.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, well, you know, you can't get to be eight years old, you know, like lucky, right?
[UNKNOWN]: You just can't, you know, you can't rule snake eyes every time, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So you just,
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I think David Moore says it's also on its true.
[UNKNOWN]: When a deer, when a white tail deer gets to be six plus years old, there's really something unique about him.
[UNKNOWN]: If they did what they were supposed to do, we'd kill him, right?
[UNKNOWN]: There's something unique about him.
[UNKNOWN]: There's something different about him.
[UNKNOWN]: They don't do.
[UNKNOWN]: So I used to write for Ohio GameFresh Magazine.
[UNKNOWN]: And one year they gave me an assignment to interview people that had killed the biggest highest scoring bucks from the year before.
[UNKNOWN]: and i interviewed these people and it gave me a story gave me an idea for another story of why are these giant bucks getting killed by relatively novice hunters and so i interviewed this one guy killed a 240 inch non-typical oh well i just took my full wheeler and got off the stand and just walked away just right there and i shot and so they're gal you know killed this 190 inch you know whatever
[UNKNOWN]: Well, there was this little clump of stuff out in the field there and it just, you know, I mean, it was not an area that you would have thought, yeah, you're, but again, that's how you're get to be old, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And so it made me think that a couple things are in play there.
[UNKNOWN]: One,
[UNKNOWN]: guys like us that think about this stuff year round.
[UNKNOWN]: It means a lot to us.
[UNKNOWN]: There is no way to practice for the adrenaline rush that hits you when you see something.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't care it's a dough, whatever.
[UNKNOWN]: That's why we do this, right?
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, this would be the worst job in the world.
[UNKNOWN]: You know what I mean?
[UNKNOWN]: If you didn't like doing this stuff, right?
[UNKNOWN]: There's no way, I don't care.
[UNKNOWN]: How many times you practice with your bow?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, let me tell you a story to preface this.
[UNKNOWN]: Miles Keller, aren't you guys ever heard that name, but so back in the 80s he had killed more Pope and Youngs than anyone.
[UNKNOWN]: And I happen to be at a sporting good store in Columbus, Ohio, when he was doing an in-store promotion.
[UNKNOWN]: And after it was over, a bunch of us were around asking him questions and I said, Mr. Keller, I said, why?
[UNKNOWN]: I said, how do you prepare for that, you know, that moment of truth?
[UNKNOWN]: How do you get, he said, well, you know, once you've been around enough big deer, your nerves will start to calm down.
[UNKNOWN]: And I remember thinking then, if that ever happens to me, I'm a quit, because this is way too much work, you know, I mean, it's that excitement, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And so no matter how much you practice, I'll grant it.
[UNKNOWN]: a good archer, a person of practice is a lot, is going to be more proficient, but a good archer cannot practice for that adrenaline rush that hits you.
[UNKNOWN]: So I use that as one point.
[UNKNOWN]: So why do novice hunters kill some of the biggest bucks killed in the country every year?
[UNKNOWN]: One, they don't get excited like we don't.
[UNKNOWN]: Why there's a deer over there?
[UNKNOWN]: The biggest eight point buck I ever scored was killed by a guy a few years ago, no, not a few several years ago,
[UNKNOWN]: typical 4 by 4 netted right at Boon and Crocket and he was going gun hunting during gun season.
[UNKNOWN]: He put his car hurts on his orange jacket and he walked out the back porch and he looked across his cow pasture and he saw deer legs.
[UNKNOWN]: Anyway, here's a deer, pal, hey, look, it's got horns on it, you know, they're that big.
[UNKNOWN]: And so, you know, why does that happen?
[UNKNOWN]: And it happens because you didn't get nervous and you didn't get excited.
[UNKNOWN]: So, people that it means a lot to, we tend to get really excited.
[UNKNOWN]: And, big deer don't do what they're supposed to do, because if they did, they'd be dead.
[UNKNOWN]: And so, novice hunters don't necessarily go where,
[UNKNOWN]: public land so we've got a lot of public land around here.
[UNKNOWN]: Everybody wants to get way in the back because that's where everybody goes way to the back and the deer know that and a lot of the very best hunting is in some of the most obvious places closest to the parking lot but people don't you know they think oh boy better get away from the masses well that's where the masses go.
[UNKNOWN]: And so I use that to write another story about why do some of the very biggest deer get killed by novice hunters.
[UNKNOWN]: One, they don't get as excited as we do.
[UNKNOWN]: And two, they don't do what we do.
[UNKNOWN]: They do uncharacteristic things, which are what big bucks do.
[UNKNOWN]: You can't get to be old by being lucky.
[UNKNOWN]: That's I was hoping you would say that about novice hunters kind of going to areas that a more experienced hunter would not think about going Yeah, because it's too obvious or it's like too easy to get to Exactly stuff like that because we've interviewed so many people and that's come up many atoms And it's not and like stories of you know guys getting invited to a hunting club that never been there before
[UNKNOWN]: you know, the club president or the whoever they're going with puts them in a spot no one's hundred ten years.
[UNKNOWN]: It's not good.
[UNKNOWN]: It's not worth it.
[UNKNOWN]: And that is where that buck is spending some time and that, you know, the biggest buck in the probability it killed for that year on at that spot by that brand new person.
[UNKNOWN]: They were been there before.
[UNKNOWN]: and I think that's a common factor and we hear this, we see this all the time and you probably see it right in articles and here reports and scoring a bunch of big gear being part of somebody's big gear at scored is a lot of kids kill and deer, whether dead or uncle or someone drops them off in a spot that's easy to get to and a lot of times they shoot the deer as the guys leave and whoever the mentor is kind of they're leaving out they haven't got to the stand they shoot that buck and that buck heard or smelled or saw something that
[UNKNOWN]: And that happened to me as a kid.
[UNKNOWN]: I shot a nice book, not a big deer, but a nice deer, especially as a kid.
[UNKNOWN]: There was like that my uncle literally just dropped me off.
[UNKNOWN]: I was climbing up the ladder and that sucker stood up and was walking right to where he had heard the commotion of us getting off and get out of there.
[UNKNOWN]: So I think that's another factor.
[UNKNOWN]: And there's no way to practice that.
[UNKNOWN]: Because we're not doing that, but it happens all the time.
[UNKNOWN]: My youngest son, I dropped him off once I literally drove him to a stand and pick up truck.
[UNKNOWN]: It was on the edge of the field, and before I could get, I got about halfway across the field.
[UNKNOWN]: I got a phone call, I stopped, ticked phone call, before I left the field.
[UNKNOWN]: I said, got him, got him, got him, got him, got him, got the field.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, you got to be kidding me.
[UNKNOWN]: You exactly what you said.
[UNKNOWN]: Do you saw me leaving?
[UNKNOWN]: Figure that, yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: So I'll tell you a quick, funny story about getting nervous.
[UNKNOWN]: So in my life as a, as a deer hunter, I've seen two deer from a, from a tree stand that I considered to be exceptional, you know, buck of a lifetime.
[UNKNOWN]: So I saw the one that's mounted in here, which, which is a spectacular deer.
[UNKNOWN]: And I saw another one.
[UNKNOWN]: And again, I'm not good with anniversaries birthday, but on October the 18th, 1998, I was in a tree stand about three miles from here.
[UNKNOWN]: And I was in, I was at the head of a big bowl and there was a meadow in the middle like a, there's like a triangular shape, maybe an acre meadow.
[UNKNOWN]: and there were this is before range finders but there were three scrapes at the corner of that meadow.
[UNKNOWN]: And I had stepped them off that the middle scrape was 21 big steps for my stand which made it about 24 yards if you go like that.
[UNKNOWN]: And I was in a perfect, perfect tree was an old fence line oak tree white oak that went up and it broke into three trunks and I was cupped in the middle of that trunk.
[UNKNOWN]: I was in an API Baby Grand Twister tree stand.
[UNKNOWN]: I had lacrosse boots with my mossy oak canvas tucked down into lacrosse and I'm watching these three scrapes and up the the ridge behind me this hardwood flat.
[UNKNOWN]: I see the biggest typical bug to this date I've ever seen in my life.
[UNKNOWN]: I spectacular deer and I see him coming towards me and he's browsing he's feet on acorns.
[UNKNOWN]: and he's taken his time.
[UNKNOWN]: And I used to like to shoot sitting down, especially if the deer's off to my left.
[UNKNOWN]: And he's been at the waist and you know what I'm saying?
[UNKNOWN]: And so, anyway, I'm not sure why, but when I saw this deer, I just,
[UNKNOWN]: and I tried to stand up.
[UNKNOWN]: And I won't stand up because it'll mess up your mic, but I got three-quarter standing.
[UNKNOWN]: And when I did, the, or excuse me, the API, Baby Grand Twister, Tristan Seat, clip the top of my lacrosse boot, and went, Copink, and it was just enough that that deer went.
[UNKNOWN]: And he started scanning their horizon.
[UNKNOWN]: And I'm three-quarter standing,
[UNKNOWN]: shaking like a dog passing bones.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, I'm really, I mean, this is the deer of a lifetime.
[UNKNOWN]: And he looks around, which what seemed like forever.
[UNKNOWN]: And it was maybe 30 seconds or any wags this tail and he keeps right on walking.
[UNKNOWN]: And he comes down to that center scrape.
[UNKNOWN]: And at that time, I had one pin on my bow out to 30 yards.
[UNKNOWN]: He's 21 yards from the base of my, I know the distance.
[UNKNOWN]: His heads in the licking branch, doing that stuff.
[UNKNOWN]: Dead broadside to me, I draw back, I touch my release.
[UNKNOWN]: He milkicks, which is what you like to see, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And he runs off, tailed down.
[UNKNOWN]: I immediately sank into my seat and thought, I just killed the bigs typical.
[UNKNOWN]: Anybody's ever seen a picture of this thing.
[UNKNOWN]: It's just, he was so big, so impressive.
[UNKNOWN]: Got that out of my stand, loaded my bow down, got that of my stand, walked over to the scrape.
[UNKNOWN]: There's my arrow in the ground.
[UNKNOWN]: Clean as a whistle.
[UNKNOWN]: I was so shook up after that comping and all that stuff happened and that shaking and I'm not sure what happened.
[UNKNOWN]: I felt as I've replayed it a million times in my mind.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know if I shot under him, shot over him, all the indicators were I hit in my center punched him.
[UNKNOWN]: When he milk kicked and ran off with his tail down, those were all great signs.
[UNKNOWN]: I just thought and I thought my pin was right in the center of his chest care, right in the middle of the room and I just fell apart.
[UNKNOWN]: And I immediately thought, man, I must have there for two weeks.
[UNKNOWN]: And now, wait a minute, he never saw me.
[UNKNOWN]: He heard something, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And it, but he didn't.
[UNKNOWN]: I actually wound up seeing him about two or three hunts later.
[UNKNOWN]: I saw him one more time, but he was up on that ridge, and he never did come down to those scrapes.
[UNKNOWN]: So, funny part of that story.
[UNKNOWN]: I've got some good friends from Louisiana that come up here and help me every year.
[UNKNOWN]: Their own guy was a college guy, the classmate of my area.
[UNKNOWN]: The other guy, we worked for the same company.
[UNKNOWN]: based out of Chicago and they live in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Baton Rouge.
[UNKNOWN]: So anyway, these guys have been hunting with me forever and they're great guys, but their expectations aren't what mine are because where they live a 130-inch buck is really a nice deer.
[UNKNOWN]: So they'll shoot the first pope and young in the amin opportunity and I don't blame them because that's great buck for them.
[UNKNOWN]: But anyway, so the next month or actually maybe two weeks later, they're up hunting with me.
[UNKNOWN]: And
[UNKNOWN]: We go and pick the one, well, I picked the one brother up, their brothers.
[UNKNOWN]: I go pick the one brother up and then the brother comes down off his hillside in the same area where that giant buck was.
[UNKNOWN]: And he's crying.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, ball like a baby.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, just alligator tears, like we thought somebody died, something really bad and really bad.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, he's crying, grown man.
[UNKNOWN]: his name's Vincent and his president, Vincent, he said, laughing, he goes, certainly goes, I just messed up the second biggest buck I've ever seen in my life.
[UNKNOWN]: And his brother killed 150 inch deer the year before he was, it was smart and when I killed lashes, no, it was smart and when I messed up 15 minutes earlier.
[UNKNOWN]: He had that giant buck, he had a good buck come by and he screwed up.
[UNKNOWN]: and he had that giant buck come by him and he drew back and when he touched his release his hair went, team right off the deer's antlers.
[UNKNOWN]: He was staring at the antlers, he shot the deer in the antlers.
[UNKNOWN]: The deer was that big.
[UNKNOWN]: It was that big that just when you saw it, it just take your breath away.
[UNKNOWN]: It was just phenomenal.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't want to tell you, because to my knowledge it was never killed or whoever killed it, never had it scored, which was really unusual.
[UNKNOWN]: So I think the deer either died of natural causes or it was poached or something, but it was just just phenomenal
[UNKNOWN]: You probably don't want to say it, but you've seen a lot of big deer.
[UNKNOWN]: How does it compare to some of the big deer you've seen in the past?
[UNKNOWN]: A big tiff goes.
[UNKNOWN]: I honestly think that the deer would have netted, I mean, well, here's what was unique about it.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm drawing a blank on the guy from Indiana that killed a great big typical Dustin Huff.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, Huff, Huff, but I honestly think it was in that class.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, I mean, the big ones get away are always that big, right?
[UNKNOWN]: But I'm just telling you, I've seen a lot of big things in my life.
[UNKNOWN]: You've killed, and yes, yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, it was in the same.
[UNKNOWN]: The typical frame was similar to the deer that the 200-inch non-typical that I killed, only the difference was, and this was the guy who cried, what he said, the same thing.
[UNKNOWN]: The times looked like baseball bats.
[UNKNOWN]: They were the times were really heavy.
[UNKNOWN]: So everything about the deer was big,
[UNKNOWN]: For lack of a better word, it had shock value.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, it took my breath away.
[UNKNOWN]: It was, I guess I've seen two deer in a hunting situation while I was in a tree stand.
[UNKNOWN]: I've seen two deer that I thought were exceptional.
[UNKNOWN]: That was one of the two.
[UNKNOWN]: He was, oh, okay.
[UNKNOWN]: I saw him as, you know, how many years later I stopped nightmares about it.
[UNKNOWN]: And this is one of them, so my dad, my dad is not a hunter, as I said, but he's my best friend.
[UNKNOWN]: And so, I'm here at a Nokia Flip phone.
[UNKNOWN]: And I'm walking back to my stand.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm at Metton Cusswords.
[UNKNOWN]: Every other word, son of a guy who does it.
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, my God.
[UNKNOWN]: He frees that.
[UNKNOWN]: And I call my dad and I'm like, I tell him the whole story and he gets kind of quiet and pardoned my friend from my dad, guys.
[UNKNOWN]: That's a **** kind of like,
[UNKNOWN]: Dad, you don't understand, this is a life altering of me, you know, he's like, sorry to hear you know, that kind of, but if you don't, huh, you don't know a big deal that is.
[UNKNOWN]: It's like, I'll be another one.
[UNKNOWN]: So I'm not worried about it, you know, is it a deer, you know, no, what just a deer is a deer of a lifetime?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I have another friend of mine who, well, those two brothers actually had two encounters with that deer that week, the one brother, they were hunting about 500 yards apart and one brother jumped the deer and ran over to the other brother who was halfway up the tree climbing in his stand and he just got to see it go by.
[UNKNOWN]: Then I had another friend that was hunting ground next door to it.
[UNKNOWN]: He had a couple, not necessarily encounters, but he physically saw it a couple times.
[UNKNOWN]: We all agreed it was just the biggest deer we'd ever seen.
[UNKNOWN]: It was really, really impressive.
[UNKNOWN]: Now, one thing you mentioned in that story is your hunting scrapes and, you know, a buck came in and worked worth that looking brand at the front of the shot.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: What is your history of hunting scrapes?
[UNKNOWN]: So historically they're hitting primarily at night.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, I've had, I've, we've killed deer.
[UNKNOWN]: I've killed deer over scrapes before, but they, what trail cameras taught me, here's the other thing about trail cameras, too, is so you don't put a trail camera over a scrape until it becomes an active scrape unless you make a mock scrape and get them to start hitting it.
[UNKNOWN]: And I have learned that that'll shut that scrape down quicker than anything, putting a scrape to just get close to it and setting up a trail camera, close to it, will make that scrape going active.
[UNKNOWN]: A scrape that's hit all the time, you put a trail camera over all sudden and dries up.
[UNKNOWN]: And I think it's that human intrusion.
[UNKNOWN]: I think it's that, you know, I was putting all that center out to the deer to stop using it.
[UNKNOWN]: Now what is your history when it comes to hunting scrapes and how long have you been doing it and what do I have that play well okay so the father I can't I can't say this matter faculty but I believe the father of scrapes is from Ohio his name's Roger Rothery passed away several years ago but he's from northwest Ohio I know he's the father of not necessarily trail camp technology but back in the 60s they used to make alarm clocks or clocks that when you pull the plunger out it would stop the clock
[UNKNOWN]: so he would take like a thread and put it over a deer trail with a clock over here and a deer would walk through and hit that thread and pull the plunger.
[UNKNOWN]: So he didn't have a six clock at night or six clock in the morning, but he knew it six clocks something walked through there and tripped that.
[UNKNOWN]: Roger Rotterr wrote a couple of books one was called White Tail Magic and I figured what he was called back in the 80s.
[UNKNOWN]: There's to this date probably the best literary works I've ever written about this the sport of.
[UNKNOWN]: deer hunting or bohunting for trophy deer.
[UNKNOWN]: He was a student of him.
[UNKNOWN]: He invented a brought head called the snuffer brought head the wroth there snuffer.
[UNKNOWN]: He was a machinist at the Timken Rollerbury company in northwest Ohio.
[UNKNOWN]: And he really, a lot of the things that we take for granted today, like Scrape hunting, he was a guy that figured that out.
[UNKNOWN]: That, hey, these are deer communication.
[UNKNOWN]: He watched deer make scrapes, and then he realized that they would come back and revisit them.
[UNKNOWN]: So I can't say matter faculty, but I believe he was the father of Scrape hunting back in the late 70s, early 80s.
[UNKNOWN]: But I have, we've killed deer over scrapes, but I think I was telling you earlier today, back when I hunted scrapes, a lot of used to move scrapes.
[UNKNOWN]: would take a clean five gallon pale going to an area that I wasn't hunting, find a fresh scrape, dig up the top couple inches of dirt, put it in that pale, take up like a kitchen trash bag and put it over top of the licking branch, very careful rubber gloves not to touch anything, take snips, cut the branch off, then go into an area that I'm hunting, find a good place for a scrape that grounds flat and the right kind of treat with the right branches of the
[UNKNOWN]: And then take that licking branch, take zip ties, tie it on to that branch, then make a scrape with your rubber boot or a sticker, whatever, take that dirt from that other scrape that you move mixed in in and now you've moved to scrape from five miles away.
[UNKNOWN]: And the deer has got other deer's urine in it and all those glands and all that stuff and I used to do that a lot and those deer would take it over immediately.
[UNKNOWN]: But, uh, I don't, I don't hunt scrapes too much anymore again because the trail camera just just changed the game as far as scouting goes.
[UNKNOWN]: The one thing though about moving the scrapes, I'm just real curious about.
[UNKNOWN]: What time the year would you typically move a scrapes?
[UNKNOWN]: So, in this part of the country, scrapes start popping up late September.
[UNKNOWN]: the earlier the better and then deer historically the hit scrapes like after a storm rolls through and the leaves blow off and when the leaves are dropping cover up then then that pre-write right before the rut starts to peek and when the rut kicks in scrapes you really the the usage really trails off pretty quickly then it becomes just a question of being out there but yeah yeah probably up here I would do start doing that late September and you know through October
[UNKNOWN]: but it all varies by that, you know, and down to your way, you're right and kick in till Christmas, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Or later, so it'll be different.
[UNKNOWN]: Okay, interesting.
[UNKNOWN]: Let me just ask you, because I'm always interested when someone has the expansion on the scripts, even though you said, again, based on trail cameras, you can't stop doing it.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: Was there anything that you learned about specific scripts and that get more used than others and maybe if there is any commonality between elevation, location, just stuff like that?
[UNKNOWN]: There are certain areas that deer scrape in every year and there's something about that topography and those trees.
[UNKNOWN]: So in this part of the country, deer like to scrape underneath sapling beach trees.
[UNKNOWN]: Then beach trees hold their leaves longer and I don't know if it holds a scent longer.
[UNKNOWN]: Just like
[UNKNOWN]: We don't have a lot of cedars now in south west to high and can tuck a lot of cedar trees, but this part of the country, not a lot of cedars, but we have a lone cedar tree in the woods.
[UNKNOWN]: Every buck comes by and we'll rub that cedar tree.
[UNKNOWN]: They just do.
[UNKNOWN]: You'll see cedar trees, you know, rub this big, wow, that could be a spike that did that, you know.
[UNKNOWN]: That's the other thing about rubs.
[UNKNOWN]: I've seen, I've seen big bucks.
[UNKNOWN]: destroy little trees.
[UNKNOWN]: I've rarely seen small bucks hit a bigger tree.
[UNKNOWN]: Usually if you find a tree out of this rubbed on a bigger tree, tends to be an older deer, not a sort of a big rack deer, but an older deer.
[UNKNOWN]: I rarely see spikes in yearling deer hit big trees, but I have seen big bucks tear up small trees.
[UNKNOWN]: It's more of a violence thing, you know, I'm saying.
[UNKNOWN]: The three and four year old deer seem to do a lot of that in this area.
[UNKNOWN]: They're the ones that make laid out most of the sign.
[UNKNOWN]: very interesting, is there any, when it comes to bucks on, is there anything that you put more value in than other types of bucks on?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, sightings, obviously, number one.
[UNKNOWN]: But, you know, yeah, if you see an area that is obviously tore up with sign, that usually means or signals that you have bucks of a similar age class competing for dominance.
[UNKNOWN]: You're going to an area and there's a bunch of robes there.
[UNKNOWN]: That's bucks are trying to make a statement.
[UNKNOWN]: They're trying to tell what it is, you know, I'm here.
[UNKNOWN]: And so that's usually really encouraging, obviously, if you see a lot of scrapes, a lot of robes that usually says there's overlapping territories there.
[UNKNOWN]: And there's bucks that are trying to make a statement to each other that, you know, I'm the man.
[UNKNOWN]: I was gonna ask about tracks because as we've been turkey on up here, I've just noticed that there's a lot of good track dirt up here Even in the woods, I was finding tracks.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah correct.
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, yeah, do you ever find or do you ever look for just like a real big track when you're trying to figure out a bus obviously a good sign a big track, but I have
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know that I put, again, I hate to say this, but I'm kind of hung up on because I'm really interested in buck-eyed big bucks, I don't pay that close to the tension.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, I've killed some big deer and had a little feet, and I've seen some, not so big deer have big feet, so I don't know that, that I've really paid, I have seen some unusually large.
[UNKNOWN]: Now, if I take funny story about tracks, so,
[UNKNOWN]: I've got a college buddy in mind that I used to hunt with a lot, but I still havent was summoned.
[UNKNOWN]: We went turkey hunting up in northern Michigan, just this side of the mac and all bridges for you crossing to the U.P.
[UNKNOWN]: and they have elk up there.
[UNKNOWN]: And the year I took him turkey hunt up there.
[UNKNOWN]: I didn't not tell him there.
[UNKNOWN]: I just didn't think to tell him there were elk there.
[UNKNOWN]: First day we got there, we're walking down his two track.
[UNKNOWN]: He looks next.
[UNKNOWN]: Oh my gosh, the size of these deer tracks, you know, like, wait a minute.
[UNKNOWN]: He doesn't know.
[UNKNOWN]: And then we went a little farther and we found rubs on like telephone poles.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, he's like, we had to come deer right now.
[UNKNOWN]: I believe.
[UNKNOWN]: And then I told him, no, no, no, no, no, no.
[UNKNOWN]: There's Alka up here, man.
[UNKNOWN]: And he, he thought, my gosh, they got giant deer up here.
[UNKNOWN]: Which they do, but yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: That's, that's amazing.
[UNKNOWN]: with the trail care.
[UNKNOWN]: So one thing that we've heard a lot from guys who hunt in hill country, mountainous terrain is when you're going through these pinch points, you're looking around in the woods, you'll find deer trails that are kind of carved into the side of the pillar, whatever.
[UNKNOWN]: And a lot of times, you'll find like these big, just...
[UNKNOWN]: for ancient neutrals.
[UNKNOWN]: Like, it's probably been there forever.
[UNKNOWN]: It's all it out.
[UNKNOWN]: Yep.
[UNKNOWN]: And I'm curious, if you've seen with your trail cameras, if the, again, the upper echelon orderage class to your, are they using those big trails or do they have their own little trail?
[UNKNOWN]: I believe they use the secondary trails.
[UNKNOWN]: Again, I can probably ties in with that, that solitary, tight, trait.
[UNKNOWN]: I think you rarely see really older deer on well-worn beaten trotting the masses of deer use those and I think those bigger books use those secondary trails.
[UNKNOWN]: That's been my observation.
[UNKNOWN]: So, again, that all came to light when I was clued in on the fact that
[UNKNOWN]: You know, big books are such solitary creatures.
[UNKNOWN]: Right.
[UNKNOWN]: So when you're placing your truck cameras out in the woods on everything that we've talked about.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: What is, how do you know that you're like really on top of that deer?
[UNKNOWN]: Do you need a picture of that deer twice a week, three times a week, four times a week?
[UNKNOWN]: Well.
[UNKNOWN]: So getting a picture for one, it boosts your confidence, he's still above ground, right?
[UNKNOWN]: He's still alive.
[UNKNOWN]: Because if you go a long time without getting a picture of a deer and that you're hunting, you start to uh-oh, you know, is he moved off, or do you?
[UNKNOWN]: Now I can tell you this, I have seen this many times.
[UNKNOWN]: the demographics of a deer neighborhood change from year to year.
[UNKNOWN]: So a two year old becomes a three year old a three year old becomes a four year old and vice versa.
[UNKNOWN]: And so what happens is we've had deer in areas that we hunt disappear for years.
[UNKNOWN]: And we swore they were dead because they were regulars.
[UNKNOWN]: See them all the time.
[UNKNOWN]: And then they're gone and he's dead.
[UNKNOWN]: And he shows back up the next year.
[UNKNOWN]: Sometimes two years later shows back up a
[UNKNOWN]: Man, it's him.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, you got some feature about him or you know it's him, right?
[UNKNOWN]: What happens is that three year old becomes a four year old.
[UNKNOWN]: So it's like this.
[UNKNOWN]: They if you're
[UNKNOWN]: in the dating market and you're going to nightclubs or bars where you're trying to meet women and you got this this one bar that man's got a lot of girls in it but you got to fight every time you go there you're not going to go to the bar down the road maybe doesn't have as many girls in but you got to fight every time you go there right so a lot of bucks get displaced by bully bucks so that's something else in a one bucket year state i have absolutely seen this
[UNKNOWN]: We have had over the years that I have been able to keep track of deer in this area.
[UNKNOWN]: We have had a handful of deer that we know have made it to 10 plus years of age or older, which is ancient in deer.
[UNKNOWN]: And the reason they made it to 10 per is they wouldn't have made one 30 on their best year.
[UNKNOWN]: But they were aggressive, they're bullies, you know what I'm saying?
[UNKNOWN]: And in a one buck a year state, you can't take them out unless you want to
[UNKNOWN]: And in a lot of times, you can't trust someone else.
[UNKNOWN]: Hey, I got this scrubby eight point in there.
[UNKNOWN]: Go kill him and you send him in there.
[UNKNOWN]: And he kills this three and a half year old eight point that you didn't want shot.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, because he just doesn't know.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, that kind of stuff.
[UNKNOWN]: So it's tricky by doing that.
[UNKNOWN]: And so deer will dis-bucks will display.
[UNKNOWN]: So here's an example.
[UNKNOWN]: Back in the late 90s, 98, 99.
[UNKNOWN]: I let the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division while if radio call or dose on that 800 acre block, I was telling you about.
[UNKNOWN]: and they were doing a fawn mortality says really pretty interesting.
[UNKNOWN]: They would put a transmitter up in the birth canal of pregnant doze and when the doze would give birth that transmitter would drop out and when it would change temperature five degrees it would start to emit a signal.
[UNKNOWN]: Well the first day of a fawn's life it doesn't move anywhere.
[UNKNOWN]: So as soon as that thing started to emit a signal the biologist could walk right to it and it'd fawn to be right there and they were putting a lifetime colors on these deer that would expand and grow with them.
[UNKNOWN]: They were able to radio call it like 36 phones on my property over a two-year period.
[UNKNOWN]: One of those male offspring phones that they radio call it was killed by a friend of mine, 10 miles from my house.
[UNKNOWN]: 10 miles as the crow flies from my house.
[UNKNOWN]: where he got displaced by his mother because we weren't shooting enough does back there and he just kept right on roll one.
[UNKNOWN]: And four and a half years later, or four years later, he was killed 10 miles away.
[UNKNOWN]: Really, this was kind of a funny story about this, so the very first night these guys came out.
[UNKNOWN]: Again, this is 1998, so the technology isn't what it is today, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So they had to speak thing, look like a VHS antenna and he got headphones on and so we set
[UNKNOWN]: And what they were doing is they were darting these deer with tranquilizer darts.
[UNKNOWN]: And the anesthesia that they would give them was only good for like an hour.
[UNKNOWN]: And then a deer would wake up.
[UNKNOWN]: So they would dart them, and then they would go out, catch them, and that's when they would put the, and they would also put a near tag in the dose.
[UNKNOWN]: So they'd know which doe had been darted.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, the very first night they showed up.
[UNKNOWN]: I said, guys, can I go with you?
[UNKNOWN]: And they said, sure.
[UNKNOWN]: So I got set up with them and this dope came in and bang they shot it and took off over the bank and they got put the headset on on stuff and they got this tackle box full of stuff with the with the collars and all the other stuff They were going to tags and all that and so I'm carrying a tackle box and we get down in this valley and the guy goes
[UNKNOWN]: Man, I am getting a hundred percent signal right here.
[UNKNOWN]: This deer has got to be close and we're looking around and we don't see it.
[UNKNOWN]: Now starting to get dark and he goes, maybe the signal is bouncing off this hill so we go down across the valley and get up on the other side.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm still getting a hundred percent signal right here and there's no deer.
[UNKNOWN]: And I'm like, well, how many of them transmitters you got and he goes, that tackle boxhouse carried had another transmitter in it.
[UNKNOWN]: They were tracking me, I was with them.
[UNKNOWN]: Anyway, that deer got away.
[UNKNOWN]: We never did why that deer.
[UNKNOWN]: This funny, I called the next day I called because the anesthesia they were using was actually toxic to humans for like 24 hours.
[UNKNOWN]: So had that deer been hit by a car, something happened and somebody would eat it within 24 hours could make them sick.
[UNKNOWN]: So the next morning I called the Division of Wildlife Office and I disguised my voice and I said, yeah, I was out there on a scattered region.
[UNKNOWN]: I just saw deer's got a harpoon in its butt.
[UNKNOWN]: I said, is it okay to eat even?
[UNKNOWN]: But anyway, yeah, it was funny.
[UNKNOWN]: But they darted 36 of them on my property.
[UNKNOWN]: This was interesting also.
[UNKNOWN]: They lost a third of those deer to coyote predation.
[UNKNOWN]: That's right when the coyote population really started to explode in this area.
[UNKNOWN]: And I honestly think that was a little high, and here's why.
[UNKNOWN]: So the first few days of the fall on life, one of their primary defense mechanisms is they're pretty much sent free, their mother kills them and they don't smell like anything.
[UNKNOWN]: So by those guys handling those fonts and putting those colors on them, they were putting human scent on the font.
[UNKNOWN]: And so their argument was, well, humans sent should repel coyotes.
[UNKNOWN]: And I'm like, yeah, but anything that makes a coyote look over there is a bad idea.
[UNKNOWN]: Anything that draws a coyote to tension and there's a fawn there.
[UNKNOWN]: So that number may have been skewed, but they did lose a third of those fawn that never made it to the Hannibal population because a coyote predation.
[UNKNOWN]: I've always wondered that because a lot of other fun studies, and they have super hundreds more talented great when they have some kind of colors on it.
[UNKNOWN]: I know a lot of them do get eaten, get killed, but it's like, because of you handling it, you being in the air, say I think with turkey nest, walk up to a turkey nest you fall in your hand and you walk up to it.
[UNKNOWN]: There's a raccoon coming there, find your center or pause them whatever and kind of fall into that same spot because they're just a curiosity thing I'm not sure but you never really know because there's no way to know what other phones are out there without putting a collar on them and where they're at and what they're doing so it's an unfortunate situation but I've always wanted the same thing
[UNKNOWN]: I can fall, I can forward to you guys a slide if you want to use it on this podcast of a slide that was given to the wildlife council and a presentation back in October about hand mortality here in Ohio.
[UNKNOWN]: We've radio colored like 300 and some odd hands and what what our biologists are looking at is when are they actually into the mean date when they're starting to set on those nests and so we can kind of gauge the seasons at two early to two late and there's some other states around as cooperating, we're doing the same thing.
[UNKNOWN]: and the mortality of what's killing these hens.
[UNKNOWN]: So they're in Ohio's broken into five districts, one through five.
[UNKNOWN]: You're in district four, which is southeast Ohio.
[UNKNOWN]: Southwest Ohio is district five.
[UNKNOWN]: Northeast Ohio is district three, and that's where they radio-called these hens.
[UNKNOWN]: So I'll send you the chart.
[UNKNOWN]: You can look at it, but if you look at district five, which is Southwest Ohio,
[UNKNOWN]: There's a little section of it, maybe 20% of it, which is avian predators.
[UNKNOWN]: That's Hawks' owls, eagles, things like that, they're in.
[UNKNOWN]: And then a big section of coyote, which is canine, and then maybe a little section of hunting pressure, something like that, or of human predation.
[UNKNOWN]: Then in District 3, same thing.
[UNKNOWN]: Avian predators down here, coyotes, and then District 4 where you are here where our bobcats are, the biggest swath by far is, Felines.
[UNKNOWN]: Bobcats are just drilling our hands, drilling our hands, big top.
[UNKNOWN]: Probably you can look at the slide, but probably 60-70% of the hem mortality in its Bobcats.
[UNKNOWN]: They're really hard.
[UNKNOWN]: Kylo, it's not like a dog.
[UNKNOWN]: Obviously, they run things down, catch it, eat it, kill it.
[UNKNOWN]: We're a Bobcat.
[UNKNOWN]: Here's a henna-up, a gobler-golly.
[UNKNOWN]: So it's a weights, a real patient, they get behind.
[UNKNOWN]: Stumps and logs and things like that and they're tough on them.
[UNKNOWN]: And plus the climb trees to work on them at night, they're just just tough on them.
[UNKNOWN]: Absolutely.
[UNKNOWN]: One of the things I was going to bring up, and we talked about that earlier, I wanted to rehash it.
[UNKNOWN]: I was mentioning to you in a little break that we had talking about, going back to the whole crossbow situation, that there's some people out there that we know through social media who are anti-crossbows because when you look at some of the detailed,
[UNKNOWN]: 100 success, 100 harvest deer during our tree season in Ohio, there's a large portion of them.
[UNKNOWN]: I think at the time, some of the information he said it was just over 50%.
[UNKNOWN]: that those deer were killed with crossbows, not with vertical bows.
[UNKNOWN]: And he was talking about how big of an issue that is, getting people out there and expanding, hunting opportunities, expanding range, people that weren't currently previously bow hunting, getting into archery hunting through crossbows.
[UNKNOWN]: And just was not, you know, a couple of these guys are just not a fan of it.
[UNKNOWN]: And you had an interesting rebuttal to that I'd love to kind of maybe have you ever had.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, it's so hard to be this this.
[UNKNOWN]: A lot of the folks and I'm not done at saying this is everyone, but some of the people that I know that are anti-crossbow feel that if we rained in the crossbows we would have a better age structure we'd have more big bucks which would in turn make big bucks more huntable for them.
[UNKNOWN]: So they want to make someone else's life harder
[UNKNOWN]: to make their life easier.
[UNKNOWN]: They make someone else's hunting harder to make their hunting easier.
[UNKNOWN]: If we had more big bucks, they'd be easier to kill, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Because there's more of them.
[UNKNOWN]: So if we had less crossbow hunting and theory, anyway, that's the thinking.
[UNKNOWN]: So it's one person wanting to impose their desire on someone else.
[UNKNOWN]: My biggest fear.
[UNKNOWN]: So,
[UNKNOWN]: States are going the opposite direction.
[UNKNOWN]: Illinois just allowed crossbows.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, a lot of other States are just allowing crossbows.
[UNKNOWN]: There's a contingency of people here in Ohio that want us to go back into town.
[UNKNOWN]: There's some people who want to chunk spirits out of me.
[UNKNOWN]: They want to make it really, really hard.
[UNKNOWN]: I am not in that camp.
[UNKNOWN]: And the reason I'm not in that camp is one,
[UNKNOWN]: You cannot convince me that if we, so let me, let me, let me back up for a second here.
[UNKNOWN]: There is a contingence of people here in Ohio that think that we can, and don't get me wrong, we could do things to get better.
[UNKNOWN]: We can always get better.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm not saying we're perfect, but I'm saying that we're pretty good.
[UNKNOWN]: And they, they like to use, there's a couple people on social media like to use the Iowa model.
[UNKNOWN]: They say, man, if Ohio,
[UNKNOWN]: If we had a lottery on non-resonance and we were stopping these non-resonance, we were coming here in masses.
[UNKNOWN]: And if we get red across bows and we got rid of baiting and that all this stuff, we could be just like Iowa.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, not true.
[UNKNOWN]: And the reason it's not true is one, Iowa is a rural state.
[UNKNOWN]: It's mostly rural.
[UNKNOWN]: Ohio is not a rural state.
[UNKNOWN]: We're an urban state.
[UNKNOWN]: We got a lot of it.
[UNKNOWN]: big cities here.
[UNKNOWN]: We got more people in the country, Columbus area, they got near Holstie.
[UNKNOWN]: Then they'll say, well, yeah, but Iowa doesn't have all the woods that you have.
[UNKNOWN]: They still don't have the people spread out all over like we do.
[UNKNOWN]: So it's an apples and oranges comparison.
[UNKNOWN]: Iowa has never allowed baiting, okay?
[UNKNOWN]: Never.
[UNKNOWN]: Ohio is always allowed baiting.
[UNKNOWN]: So if you took baiting away from us, we got an entire generation of hunters right now that would struggle to kill deer.
[UNKNOWN]: And these folks, well, yeah, but then they would become lustra.
[UNKNOWN]: And the guys from out of state wouldn't be able to do this and that it out.
[UNKNOWN]: And I still think that we would become more like Michigan.
[UNKNOWN]: My biggest argument about Ohio is if you're a landowner in our U.K.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, I would could learn from us.
[UNKNOWN]: There are people.
[UNKNOWN]: I have friends and I with a like, man, why can't we be like Ohio?
[UNKNOWN]: Why can't we just kill one buck and they got people and why can't we be like, Iowa?
[UNKNOWN]: So I'm not saying that maybe some time out in the future, some kind of, I don't want to say a lottery, but maybe a reduction in non-resident hunters might be something we want to look at, but here's the argument on the other side of that.
[UNKNOWN]: For one, non-resident hunters in Ohio, these are ball parks statistics.
[UNKNOWN]: Make up about 10% of our hunting population.
[UNKNOWN]: they pay 57% of the bill, meaning that our division of wildlife and a money for conservation, 57% or 50 plus percent of conservation money is paid by non-resident licenses and tax, but they only make up 10% of the population.
[UNKNOWN]: So if we were to limit that, we would definitely have to raise those rates to offset, if we want to keep the same level of conservation that we have now for a monetary perspective, we would have to raise those rates and I know a lot of
[UNKNOWN]: But you know what, if you own a restaurant in a small town and these non-residents feed, you know, come to eat, you don't want to see them go away.
[UNKNOWN]: If you own Airbnb's and cabins and, you know, I have people tell me, well, non-residents are leasing up all of our ground and they're displacing local hunters.
[UNKNOWN]: That's true.
[UNKNOWN]: But it's not just non-resonance leasing our grants.
[UNKNOWN]: It's people from our metropolitan areas coming.
[UNKNOWN]: It's local people leasing up our ground that are displacing.
[UNKNOWN]: So our farmers and landowners are not, if we some half, non-resonance went away.
[UNKNOWN]: And all these leases came up.
[UNKNOWN]: are not our farmers are going to say well you know what I don't want that money anymore come on everybody can come on baloney they're just going to get least up by other people in state so that same number of people are still going to get displaced by deeper pockets right and and and and and I don't know how you combat that but limiting not so then they say well if we did away with the big excuse me the baiting uh... they wouldn't come here so i i use this example a couple years ago i was talking to some guys my son's own some air being
[UNKNOWN]: And my son has won up the road here, and there was some guys from New Jersey that were here during our Mosulotor season, which is late and after the first of the year, which is late for us.
[UNKNOWN]: And they were packing up, they had killed deer here, and they were going to one guy, they were going to Illinois, they had a least there.
[UNKNOWN]: And I said, you guys are leaving a state that allows baiting,
[UNKNOWN]: in January to go to another state that doesn't allow baiting.
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, yeah, the farmer where we hunt there.
[UNKNOWN]: Before we get there, he brush your arms a bunch of corn out in the field for us.
[UNKNOWN]: And we see more deer out there than we do here where we bait.
[UNKNOWN]: So guys, get around that stuff anyway.
[UNKNOWN]: And even in states like in Michigan and Pennsylvania where they don't allow bait, people bait anyway.
[UNKNOWN]: And I use this example a lot too, getting back to bait.
[UNKNOWN]: So there have been two states that I'm aware of for sure in the Midwest.
[UNKNOWN]: That have once allowed baiting.
[UNKNOWN]: that have taken it away.
[UNKNOWN]: Michigan's actually done at twice.
[UNKNOWN]: Michigan's one of those states, the other is Wisconsin.
[UNKNOWN]: So Wisconsin outlawed baiting about 20 years ago with the idea of suppressing the spread of CWD.
[UNKNOWN]: They didn't outlaw baiting for quality and big bucks and all it.
[UNKNOWN]: They did it because the idea was we're going to slow the spread of disease.
[UNKNOWN]: Did it work?
[UNKNOWN]: No.
[UNKNOWN]: C-W-D is ramp.
[UNKNOWN]: C-W-D is rampant in Illinois.
[UNKNOWN]: They've never allowed big.
[UNKNOWN]: C-W-D is rampant in Iowa.
[UNKNOWN]: They've never allowed bating.
[UNKNOWN]: C-W-D is rampant all over the West.
[UNKNOWN]: They've never allowed, you know, the states have never.
[UNKNOWN]: So to say that banning bating is going to slow or stop disease.
[UNKNOWN]: hasn't anywhere else.
[UNKNOWN]: Michigan outlawed baiting first because of a bovine tuberculosis outbreak like 20 some years ago.
[UNKNOWN]: Then they brought it back because they realized their real problem was they couldn't kill enough deer.
[UNKNOWN]: Then that lot of to gain, I believe, in 2018 because of CWD, and now it's in their legislature, their house is already past that they're sent it, talking about it, to bring it back again.
[UNKNOWN]: Why?
[UNKNOWN]: Because they can't kill enough deer, they've got too many deer.
[UNKNOWN]: And so I kind of, I kind of struggle with that.
[UNKNOWN]: But getting back to
[UNKNOWN]: A lot of people don't like them.
[UNKNOWN]: I get that.
[UNKNOWN]: A lot of people think it's too easy.
[UNKNOWN]: I get that.
[UNKNOWN]: They think that hunting was never about that and quality.
[UNKNOWN]: But my argument really to those people is hunting in practical terms is not about big bucks and trophy.
[UNKNOWN]: Hunting is about hunting.
[UNKNOWN]: The reason the masses who don't care one way or the other about hunting tolerate hunting is we're a tool to keep deer and check, we're not hunting, we're not from deer and we're a tool to keep deer and check and I don't believe that making that harder
[UNKNOWN]: help anything.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, I know some people believe that it do.
[UNKNOWN]: They think that Iowa doesn't have it.
[UNKNOWN]: They use this example.
[UNKNOWN]: We have a problem with attrition here in Ohio.
[UNKNOWN]: We've lost almost a quarter of our deer hunters in the last 15 years in this state.
[UNKNOWN]: For a lot of reasons, we've lost them because of access as harder.
[UNKNOWN]: We've lost it.
[UNKNOWN]: So the average age of a hunter in the mid-80s in Ohio was like 26 years old.
[UNKNOWN]: The average age of 100 today is like 54.
[UNKNOWN]: so grandpa has now taken a state you know saying and so there's a lot of reasons for that the erosion of the american family single parents you know don't have time to take their sons and daughters even families that are cohesive the boat parents work
[UNKNOWN]: So now it's up to Grandpa, take kids hunting.
[UNKNOWN]: And they say, well, Iowa doesn't have this problem.
[UNKNOWN]: Again, Iowa is at rural state, farm kids.
[UNKNOWN]: You know what I'm saying?
[UNKNOWN]: It's a rural culture.
[UNKNOWN]: Ohio is not so you can't compare the two.
[UNKNOWN]: We're more of an urban culture.
[UNKNOWN]: So you make hunting harder in Ohio?
[UNKNOWN]: I disagree with the folks that say that, oh yeah, more people will gain hunters if we make it harder.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't believe that.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, I think that I don't have all the answers, but I don't think that's the right answer.
[UNKNOWN]: That's a great discussion, and I think you did a good job explaining that.
[UNKNOWN]: It's nice to have somebody Like with a state like this that I think a lot of people look at Ohio as a trophy state From our from a quality standpoint.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, to be able to have that kind of perspective on it because I also I hear that conversation about like anti crossbows and The more you think about it
[UNKNOWN]: it's kind of comes back to the idea of like maybe it's a little selfless like let it back on to what they want you know we're out there to hunt joy yeah people want you know harvest big gear but also goes back to states kind of like Alabama there's people in Alabama trying to push for making us a one-book state and right now you can kill two days on private line you killed two days of that two days a day from October 15th the February 10th
[UNKNOWN]: and there's not many people, I don't know anybody that does that, but they want a lot of deer taken because of the amount of the deer population, and the thickness of cover, you don't have the visual all the time, you know, you know, hunting big agriculture, there's areas like that in the state, but there's a lot of it's not.
[UNKNOWN]: It's a try to, you know, manage that herd and there's guys like man we need to go to one buck because you know what have more bucks there You have to be more selected because a lot of people shoot you know one or two of their bucks is a meat deer And then they try to hold out for a bigger deer and I think kind of comes back to what you said earlier is People want to make one person's heart harder to make their hunt easier which their hunt is easier is I want more bigger bucks So it's easier for me to kill a bigger buck
[UNKNOWN]: exactly.
[UNKNOWN]: And after people, so, so here's something about baiting that is real, that is bad.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, and I'm looking around, there are, I'm not saying that congregating deer nose nose is a good thing.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm not telling you, I'm not sure it gives it a sure comment sense tells you that it could, it could accelerate and spread a disease all day.
[UNKNOWN]: It makes sense to me that it could.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm not saying it's good, but I'm just saying that they use like
[UNKNOWN]: but they say that Afletoxans on corn on grain can make turkeys sick.
[UNKNOWN]: And again, and I guess some of the newest data and the newest studies are showing that that's true if you're feeding in warm weather months, like May, June, July, when it's damp and warm.
[UNKNOWN]: But if waste grain were toxic to turkeys, there'd be no turkeys in the Midwest because there's corn laying.
[UNKNOWN]: all over these fields all winter long so it's not they use those as excuses but again their real motivation is is more big deer for me more big most of the people that complained to me about that control large chunks of land that either own it or lease it or whatever and they're mad because they have neighbors around and have small chunks of land that are baiting the deer off or shoot them across those or whatever and they're mad about it and I get that and I've been
[UNKNOWN]: on the flip side, you take a lot of those tools away from the average country's going to quit.
[UNKNOWN]: And then we'll have more people watching football and playing golf or doing whatever and fewer hunters.
[UNKNOWN]: And that's not good for the for the future.
[UNKNOWN]: If you truly care about the future of hunting, you want to recruit people into this sport.
[UNKNOWN]: You want to bring more most people hate hate to see more hunters coming, not most with a lot of hunters hate it when they hear about other hunt.
[UNKNOWN]: No, no, no, no, for the if you're truly concerned about the future of this sport, you know, we want to recruit people into it because there's the other reason for that.
[UNKNOWN]: As we lose numbers, our hunting numbers, and we age out, we lose our swag, we lose our stick with the legislature, and one of those folks understand, they understand votes, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So we're already outvoted by a lot of people that really don't like hunting, and we can't afford to lose more.
[UNKNOWN]: The more people we lose, the more swag we lose with the legislature, the worse the future of the sport is going to get for our kids and our grandkids, for sure.
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, perfect.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, Mike, I think that's a great point of wrap up the podcast.
[UNKNOWN]: It's been a while.
[UNKNOWN]: It's been a very long week.
[UNKNOWN]: A good one.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, keep an eye on it, but greatly appreciate your time.
[UNKNOWN]: If you guys come back anytime.
[UNKNOWN]: Hey, that'd be awesome.
[UNKNOWN]: That'd be awesome.
[UNKNOWN]: We were already talking about.
[UNKNOWN]: Maybe at some point try to do your hunt, um, right now, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh,
[UNKNOWN]: I don't really care, I don't know, highs, I mean, all I hear about is non-reson said we're talking about public land.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, non-reson everywhere, everybody's complaining about how bad it is, but there's big gear, but man, I rather go somewhere else.
[UNKNOWN]: They actually haven't always come and say, she's like, you know what I mean?
[UNKNOWN]: Yes, she's like, man, we should, I don't know high.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, yeah, I'll convert it with me here's a stat we talked about earlier so in the last 10 years in Boonacrockett entries in this in the world record book Ohio's number two of all states and provinces and we're number one behind Wisconsin and Wisconsin is number one all time not just in the last 10 years
[UNKNOWN]: and I had people tell what yeah, but I know so and so he got 22 boon and cry.
[UNKNOWN]: He just don't enter.
[UNKNOWN]: Whenever someone tells me that, I always said, no, you know a guy with 22 big deer.
[UNKNOWN]: The difference between a boon and cry in a big deer is a tape official scores tape.
[UNKNOWN]: I scored a million big deer in my life that were big deer, but they don't score boon and cry.
[UNKNOWN]: And so anyway, when you look at the record books, oh, how is number two?
[UNKNOWN]: That's a head of Iowa.
[UNKNOWN]: That's a head of Illinois.
[UNKNOWN]: That's a head of Kansas.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, all these great
[UNKNOWN]: had no idea that was the case but yet we allow crossbows and we allow baiting we allow we gotta do it on the board one buck state we have good genetics good habitat and and and and and it's our hardest managed pretty good now does everybody that kill a boon and crock and enter it no but that's always been the case thirty years ago everybody killed a boon and crock and didn't enter it either you know i mean so that's never changed so when you look at the data the actual numbers well house pretty pretty steady
[UNKNOWN]: mature bucks go I mean we we we're not the I'm not going to say we're the best but we're certainly among the top states in North America and really easy access easy to come here so that's a comparison well Mike greatly appreciate your time so no problems at any time and for all the audience members out there thank you all for watching thank you all for listening we'll catch you back in the next episode of the Southern Outdoorsman and remember guys y'all stay southern