Whitetail Wizard

This is especially true when the temperature is about 10 degrees, and a 20 mph wind runs the chill factor well below zero. There is hope, and much of what needs to be done can be done right now.

We are cutting hay and putting it up in round bales. We’ve just finished our first cutting, and hopefully our second-cutting hay will help provide high-protein forage for hungry whitetails this winter.

There are many good reasons for building hay-bale blinds now. Some key reasons are:

*A round bale blind is made by putting two round bales together at an angle to form a capital “V.” Put a sheet of on-inch marine plywood over the top, and stack six or eight rectangular bales on top to provide a warm and dry roof over your head.

*A rectangular blind requires quite a few rectangular bales, Pile as many bales up on the left and right sides, and behind you, and put a chair inside to sit on. Stack the bales at least two high in the front, and leave just enough room to get into the blind and enough room to shoot. Cover the top with plywood, and cover with more bales. The disadvantage of this blind is if one or two bales get bumped, the blind will fall like a house of cards.

*My favorite requires about 10 minutes of work with a tractor to position the two bottom round bales. It takes very little time to cover the top with plywood and rectangular bales, and two rectangular bales in front makes the blind ready to go.

*Any hay blind placed before October in a key location will probably pay off when December arrives with its cold and wind. The deer soon get used to it, and by the time the winter archery rolls around, it will entice deer to your area.

*Key spots for a hay-bale blind is near the edge of a cornfield, in an open field where two or more trails converge, or back in the woods where a good trail carries a great deal of deer traffic.

*This type of blind is very warm unless the shooting window faes directly into the wind. Wet hay builds a certain amountc of heat, and hunters can stay warm even in bitter cold weather.

*Human odor isn’t a problem with hay blinds. The heavier odor of hay serves to cover any human scent inside the blind.

*It would be difficult to consider a hay-bale blind as a bait site although deer occasionally eat some of it while the hunter sits inside.

*These blinds offer a straight-out, horizontal shot at deer. There none of the problems of shooting down from an elevated coop or tree stand. Deer often walk right up to a hay-bale blind. The shots can be impossibly easy unless the hunter suffers from buck fever.

*Hay absorbs almost any noise. I’ve coughed, sneezed and made other noises in a hay-bale blind without having nearby deer hear me. Any movement visible through the narrow shooting window can be seen.

The name came about in the fall of 1980 when a story outdoor writer Dave Richey < [url=http://www.daverichey.com]http://www.daverichey.com[/url] > had a story published in Outdoor Life magazine. The magazine needed a title, and they named it and me “The Whitetail Wizard.”

It’s as simple as that, but who would have guessed that 27 years later the nickname would have become so well known among deer hunters.

This area, in those days, was wrapped up in whitetail deer. No one hunted from trees, and everyone hunted from the ground.

Bow hunting was always more interesting than hunting with a rifle, but the nickname stuck. A few people started calling me that, and the name became more popular. It got another growth spurt when I purchased the old Oneida bow company, and its name was changed to C.P. Oneida Eagle Bow Company. The Whitetail Wizard became a small part of our promotional efforts.

It was a nickname that seemed to resonate with bow hunters. I’ve gained a bit of a reputation for solving whitetail hunting problems, and people with questions about deer and deer hunting were always told to go see “The Whitetail Wizard” in Marion, Michigan.

Those problems are often solved because of the time spent in the fields and woods of my deer ranch. I have countless chances to study deer, and I’ve learned that the more study that goes into whitetail behavior, the more successful the hunter will be.

It’s difficult to be a highly successful archery deer hunter unless a great deal of time is spent studying whitetail deer, their habits and preferred habitat.

The basis for deer hunting success revolves around several areas of whitetail knowledge. It’s important to know how to locate game, how to play the wind, where to put up ground blind or tree stand locations, how to hunt rutting bucks and how to accurately shoot a deer.

I have a personal concept of what leads to deer-hunting success. The more we learn, the more we realize there is so much more to learn, and as our knowledge increases, so too does our success rate.

Many people spend two or three days scouting before the season opens, and then go hunting. My scouting is done all 12 months of the year. It is rather amazing how much can be learned by watching deer during the off-season.

Some of my thoughts on deer hunting may fly in the face of conventional thinking, but that is what makes deer hunting so great. My methods work for me and those who hunt with me, and they can work for everyone else. Accurate bow shooting is easy to learn, and it has been covered in the past.

Careful attention to detail is what makes a bow hunter deadly. There is just so much to learn about deer hunting, and all of it is important.

Hunters must learn how to figure out deer problems, how to choose a stand location during various wind conditions, and why the typical deer hunt can become the hunt of a lifetime during certain times and conditions.

Hunting success means a bit of luck and doing everything else right, time after time. If a person wants to learn, they must spend a great amount of time in the field.

There are no shortcuts to bow hunting success. It takes time to learn how to do everything right, and just about the time we figure we have this whole deer-hunting scenario worked out, the whitetail will throw us a curve ball we’ve never seen before.

It doesn’t make me all bad. I could care less about ball ports, Nascar races, or tournament golf. Whitetails excite me; almost everything else is far less interesting.

People question how I can only think about these two items most of the time. It must be easy because both passions have consumed my thoughts for many years.

Both thoughts are of equal importance, and without the study, there would be less success at hunting. A number of years ago, Dave Richey, the outdoor writer with Michigan’s largest blog < [url=http://www.daverichey.com]http://www.daverichey.com[/url] > was asked a question while waiting to get a new string put on his bow.

Another customer recognized him and asked if the only thing he thought about was writing. He gave the man a straight answer.

“Writing is what I do,” he said. “It’s what I do for a living, and to do my job properly, I’m always thinking about the next story. It has to be what I think about on a daily basis. I’d be dead in the water without the next story idea.”

I could easily steal his answer, but why? My answer is based on the same reasons he gives people. For me, hunting whitetails with a bow, and studying the animals at every opportunity, is what I do. To stop studying deer is to stop learning about whitetail deer. To stop learning means less success.

When I hunt, I become totally focused on my surroundings, and what the deer are doing. I never lose my concentration on the deer, but I continue to focus and watch other deer. I can solve all kinds of deer hunting problems while sitting in my ground blind or elevated coop.

When working, my thoughts are always on deer hunting or trying to figure out why a particular deer did what it did the night before.

Some people find it hard to think about two things at once or have trouble chewing gum and walking. That often happens when deer hunting: I’ll be trying to solve a knotty little deer travel pattern problem, and a nice buck walks out. My reflexes take over, and I can shoot the buck while shifting gears, and then I will shift back to the mental problem.

Solving any problem with either the machine shop or the archery business is always easier while bow hunting. Any hunting area always has some natural noises, but out there, the phone doesn’t ring unless I take the cell phone with me. I often manage to leave the silly thing home.

Years ago Richey told me that many of his award-winning articles and columns came to him while he was asleep. One part of his brain kicked in, he would wake up, slip out of bed, head for his office and write it while the idea was fresh in his mind.

The same thing happens to me. A problem may bother me for weeks, and then one night while sound asleep, the answer to the problem wakes me up. I suspect that being asleep allows the subconscious to kick in, provide the needed answer, and usually the answer is so simple I wonder why it didn’t come to me much sooner.

I’m able to study deer, think about various deer patterning problems, and be ready and able to shift gears automatically, and shoot the buck. It’s what I’ve trained my body and mind to do, and anyone else can do it providing they’ve learned the basic fundamentals of drawing and properly aiming a bow and making a smooth release. Do those things long enough, and do them properly, it becomes simple.

And, if you trust nothing else, know this: hunting success can get worse. Success depends, in large part on wind, weather conditions and hunting pressure. It’s easy to control hunting pressure on my land, but I know other people always hunt on federal or state land. Wherever we hunt, we cannot change the wind or weather conditions.

Anglers have the same problems. Too much rain or snow can affect how deer move. The same happens when the wind swirls, or when lightning and thunder start shaking up the sky.

So our hunts have been planned for a week and the weather doesn’t cooperate. We spit and sputter, gripe and complain, and then we go out and hunt angry.

Hunting angry doesn’t help a thing. If anything, being mad about something we can’t control doesn’t do anything except mess up our hunting judgment. It makes us make mistakes.

We mess up. We get mad, and that makes us feel worse, and we begin to fidget. We move around, make the occasional noise, and any deer that may have come to us is long gone.

Why get mad? I’ve hunted deer for too long, and over many years, have become somewhat philosophical about bad weather. Learn to take the good with the bad, and think happy thoughts than thinking how angry you are. That line of thinking only make people madder, and that only increases their problems.

Don’t sweat the small stuff. Instead of focusing on the things we can’t control, change your thoughts and thing about those things that can be changed.

Climb a tree, if need be, and set in an elevated coop and do whatever can be done to beat the wind. Or ... do what some hunters do and that is to go home and take a nap. There is always tomorrow.

Taking the good with the bad doesn’t always mean that a bad day can’t be productive. I’ve sat out, and had the wind ripping leaves off the trees, and about 30 minutes before shooting time ends, the wind gusts taper off and die. It then becomes whisper quiet, so quiet you are soon wishing for a soft breeze.

If some light rain falls when the wind dies down, there can be some very good deer movements. It seems as if the deer are happy to see the weather change as they move out to feed.

Caution often is more likely when deer move after a strong wind and rain storm. Hunters must learn to keep their cool,
and take the good with the bad even though we seem to be having more bad weather in the early season than ever before.

Last-minute weather changes have paid off for me more times than I can remember. Heading in to the house, and skipping the evening hunt, often means hunters quite possibly will miss the finest 30 minutes of the day as the wind and rain dies.

It’s far better to consider the weather, whether good or bad, as part of the deer-hunting experience. Such last-minute weather changes don’t happen often enough that we can plan around them, but they can pay off often enough that they should be one more trick in our deer-hunting repertoire.

It’s an awesome feeling when we’ve rode out the bad weather, and than see the last-minute change that we’ve hoped for. We no longer are mad at the weather, and things start looking up. When the bad weather suddenly changes, and the good weather moves in and the deer start to move, we fell blessed as we sit in a ground blind or tree stand.

Some hunters refuse to hunt various wind directions. Anything from the east is bad. For years, October featured south and southwest winds and then west and northwest, and by December we were hunting northwest, north and northeasterly winds.

My philosophy is that a deer hunter won’t get much hunting in if they sit out every day that features a bad wind. I hunt but switch from an open tree stand to an elevated and enclosed coop on such days. A few stands are set up primarily for an east wind, and they are in demand when the wind goes sour.

Many are the deer hunters who believe they should only hunt during the dark of the moon. Others only hunt the week before the full moon, and others never hunt during a full moon.

There are those who believe in hunting around the Harvest Moon, the Hunters Moon, the Rutting Moon, and some who will only hunt just before the second full moon after the autumnal equinox. The nice thing about living in a free society is each of us can indulge such pleasures.

I personally don’t care which day of the week it may be, which way the wind blows, what the moon phase happens to be, or anything else. I find it difficult to kill deer while sitting in the house instead of hunting.

There are others who place great emphasis on hunting the rut. Little do they know that the 10 days before the full rut begins, deer go through the chasing stage or the pre-rut. It is a wonderful time to be hunting.

Many feel the rut begins Oct. 20-25, and that is the beginning of the chasing stage, and it will last for about 10 days before the full rut begins. It’s possible to find many people who would disagree on when the rut actually begins.

The peak of the rut near my ranch will occur on or about Nov. 3-4, and it is winding down before the Nov. 15 firearm season kicks off.

There are variations, depending on where you hunt. Weather conditions and people pressure can alter these dates a bit.

Some hunters are addicted to the Solunar Tables. These tables, first invented by John Alden Knight many years ago, are based on the sun and moon and their effect on tides and the earth. They contend there are normally two minor and two major periods each day when fish bite, and when wild game move about.

Some sportsmen who hunt according to the Solunar Tables and kill deer, and I know others who hunt whenever they can, and they too have good hunting success while hunting outside of these major and minor periods.

I’ve hunted many years with great success. Good hunting habits bring wonderful hunting success, and simply being afield whenever possible is a good reason for being more successful.

I forget about all this other business, and go on doing what works best for me. That means that I hunt whenever possible, and try to hunt every day of the season.

Every outdoor magazine worthy of the name will run cover photos of some great huge bucks. Most of the television bucks seen would be considered a trophy buck to all but the record-book hunters.

Big-buck photos or videos sell television shows. Sadly, for them, the average 8-point is not considered a trophy buck.

I own a deer ranch. I can shoot whatever buck I want, but hunting should mean something more to a hunter than shooting a buck with huge head gear.

If someone want a big buck, and is willing to pay the freight, I’ll let him take it. It takes a tremendous amount of money to run an operation as big as mine. Big bucks bring in big bucks.

I’ll shoot the occasional big buck but I also shoot small bucks as well as does and fawns. There are some bucks that do not fit the criteria of what I want my breeding animals to be. An 8-point with a basket rack of scraggly antlers is a cull or management buck. It is a small buck that tells me that it is not, nor will it ever be, a trophy buck by anyone’s standards.

So what defines trophy status? Whatever you or I think may be miles apart from what others consider a trophy buck.

A youngster on his or her first hunt may consider a doe or fawn a trophy, and wisely so. For most hunters who can count on one hand the number of deer they have shot and have fingers left over, may consider a forkhorn with a six-inch spread to be a trophy. Perhaps it might be a buck with 10-inch spikes.

On the other hand, many seem to set a standard of 8 points. Whether is has heavy mass or is a 1 1/2-year-old with a tiny basket rack makes it a trophy buck to some people. Frankly, I believe any buck should be considered a trophy.

Setting goals is OK but for most people, once that goal is met, they ratchet their standards up another notch. Say they want an 18-inch 8-point with heavy tines, and get it, then they will probably want a 10-point with a 20-inch spread.

If they score on such an animal, where do they go next? Many then lust for a 200-point buck. If they don’t get it, they are disappointed and upset, and therefore have lost track of what hunting is all about. The hunt is, and always should be, something more than a dead deer and a mass of antler bone.

Such people soon learn their hunt for bigger and supposedly better bucks will eventually end. It’s hard to keep climbing that bigger and better ladder.

The challenge of the hunt is far more important than the size of the animal taken. Want a really tough challenge?

Start hunting the oldest doe on the property. She will run a bow hunter around in circles. Taking an old doe that knows she is being hunted is a challenge worth taking up.

Hunting is not about winning or losing but it is about how the hunt plays out. It’s not about winners and losers. Hunting is so much more than just dead meat and big antlers.

Some sportsmen compare hunting to a game. This is not a game but it is a matter of life and death for the animal. How we look at hunting is an important part of the experience.

If we are to kill an animal, we must show it all due respect, and utilize that meat to nourish our bodies. We must hunt with a passion; respect that which we hunt and kill; and make any deer we kill a trophy, regardless of its size, antler spread or the number of points.

We are hunters, and to us, a trophy doesn’t have to be a huge buck or a buck at all, but it must represent a personal challenge. We must be ever mindful of exactly what that animal is and what it truly means to us.