Thursday, August 17, 2006
Should Hunters Ever Stop Learning New Tricks??
A thought came to me the other day that I’ve been hunting whitetail deer for over 60 years. Friends, that is a long period of time.
Do I consider myself an expert. No way. I’ve been fortunate to have hunted in many areas, but hunting my own land is the most fun of all.
So what has hunting taught me over 60 years? Go back and read the past 10 months of daily blogs, and you’ll get some kind of idea about some of the things I’ve learned.
But it dawned on me that hunting whitetail deer, and being successful at it, is a never-ending passion for great knowledge. I still learn something new almost every day, and it’s my desire to do just exactly that.
When a hunter stops learning, and stops caring, it’s when he or she stops being a very effective hunter. Learning something every day doesn’t need to be a never-fail method of hunting rutting bucks or how to lure bucks closer to your stand.
It simply has to be something that makes our hunts more enjoyable. It can be a certain nuance about setting up on a buck that we’d never tried before, but after trying it once,and if it produced a good buck, it becomes a meaningful discovery. That doesn’t mean it will produce again next year, or ever again, but it means it work once and deserves to be remembered.
Learning new things should be an ongoing part of the deer hunt. People can learn hunting tricks by reading about them, but until a sportsman puts that knowledge and technique into play, they never know whether it will work or not.
I make it a point to learn something new whenever I plant my backside in a stand. Sometimes what we learn is something we really knew but hadn’t seen it work for several years.
Some hunters like variety, and others are most content to sit in one place, hunt a certain way, and never change. I’m just the opposite. My idea of a successful day afield doesn’t necessarily mean shooting a big buck, but it does necessitate learning something about deer, deer habits, deer habitat, how and why deer travel certain ways on some days and a different direction on other days.
I want to know what deer are doing, and why they are doing that, and I enjoy moving from one stand to another. It’s one way that I keep track of deer movements, and it helps me keep pace with whitetail movement on different parts of my ranch.
How can this help someone who hunts on a small wood-lot or in an area where deer travel is constantly messed up by humans moving around. Constant hunting will teach sportsmen providing they pay attention to different nuances of the hunt.
The hunters who go out, sit in a ground blind or tree stand, and never determine why deer move to that spot as they do, are the ones who are missing out on something that is fascinating. Such knowledge is the stuff of which venison dinners are made.
I try to keep all this information crammed into my skull but I know several people who keep a daily log of every facet of every hunt. They mark down where they hunted, how many deer they saw, hight off the ground, the wind direction and how deer reacted to it, the number of bucks versus does seen, if the deer were traveling alone or together, and many other things.
This daily log, when continued for many years, will slowly develop a pattern that hunters can use to their advantage. Something from these daily notes will jog a memory on a specific day when all the conditions match up, and if it can be remembered. a certain little trick can pay off.
Hunting is a continuous learning process. Hunters who stop learning, or forget what they learned 30 years ago, often are doomed to failure. That’s why I go hunting every day, and my idea is to learn something about deer that I never knew before.
That little tidbit of information, learned on a day-to-day basis, may result in a big buck.—The Whitetail Wizard