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The Two Top Lessons From a Lifetime of Bowhunting

When it comes to hunting strategy and shot execution, these two tips for future success rise above all the rest.

The Two Top Lessons From a Lifetime of Bowhunting
I shot this buck in the spine after it dropped at least a foot before the arrow arrived. I got lucky in this instance, but more often string jumping ends with a miss or a poorly hit animal.

The purpose of this column is to create a place for me to pass along as many lessons as I can from a life spent bowhunting. With that in mind, I am going to jump right to the top of the list. Here are the most important lessons I have learned about bowhunting strategy and making the shot.

Hunting Strategy

Game animals are hard to kill if they know they are being hunted. Keeping them from knowing is the key to bowhunting success. This simple truth should find its way into every corner of your hunting strategy, down to the smallest detail. How this affects success can be something as innocent as where you park or something as obvious as how well you play a swirling wind when hunting around heavy cover or rugged terrain.

Game animals (I am most familiar with whitetails) are so good at detecting danger that you have to go to almost ridiculous extremes to preserve the element of surprise. It is the small stuff that gets you, and most of the mistakes take place when going to and from your stand (again, I am thinking specifically about hunting whitetails). It is so easy to make a wrong choice, and you have so many of them to make it is hard to get them all right.

Here’s an example: One of my best stands is at the top of a long, timbered draw. There is no really good way to get up there, because you have to get past deer no matter which way you go and no matter when you make the trip. On calm days, that stand is unapproachable without the deer knowing I am there, because they hear me crunching in the dry leaves and see me creeping along. But on windy days I can hunt that stand much more easily without alerting deer. The wind covers my noise, and the moving vegetation partially covers my movement.

It is that simple; I have learned the hard way I just can’t hunt this really good stand on a still day, no matter how badly I want to or what date is on the calendar.

Now, let’s look at another situation. Let’s take that same stand, but now it is the end of the evening hunt, and I have to get out of there. The wind died and now it is super still (something that often occurs at the end of the day). Now every deer in the area is either going to hear me leaving or react to the running of other deer that did.

I am going to make that spot worse by simply heading back to my vehicle at the end of the day. In the future, deer will not move as naturally there because of my clumsy exit. So, what should I do? Should I just take my lumps and figure the spot will need time to recover and hunt it anyway? Should I only hunt it when the forecast is for the wind to blow until well after dark? That may not happen during the times of the season I want to hunt it. Or should I arrange for someone to drive in and pick me up with an ATV or vehicle (if possible). Maybe I need to just sleep at the base of the tree and not leave at all. See how something as seemingly simple as walking away from your stand can have a significant effect on your success? Every decision you make is like that. They all affect your ability to stay undetected in some way, large or small.

So, my point — and the bigger lesson — is this: you have to go to ridiculous extremes to keep the deer from knowing they are being hunted. If you can do that, your success over a lifetime of bowhunting will be very impressive. I could list dozens of other situations where you can easily compromise your season with a single poor choice.

Shot Execution

String jumping; ah yes, my old nemesis. I suppose the most lasting lessons are the most painful ones, and when it comes to pain, nothing in the field has dealt me more pain than “string-jumping” deer. I don’t think I really appreciated how bad this can be until I started filming hunts, for two reasons.

First, filming forced me to change the way I shoot at game for the worse, and that increased the likelihood of string jumping. More about that later. Second, filming allowed me to slow the action down with editing software to see just how quickly some animals react to the sound of the shot.

I will briefly cover point one first. Before I started filming my hunts, I always took shots at deer while they were walking, as long the range was moderate and the pace steady. I never stopped walking deer for three reasons. First, I primarily hunted from stands I put up that day or the day before; rarely did I hunt from stands I put up before the season. Thus, I barely had shooting lanes. I had to shoot through holes in the foliage, and it is really tough to stop a walking deer precisely enough that its vitals line up with a hole. Walking shots were way easier in that situation. Second, I never wanted the deer to be alert when I shot at them, an obvious outcome when stopping them. Third, I didn’t want to take the chance of spooking them when I made the noise required to lock them up.

I grew up shooting a shotgun at birds and throwing a football. So, hitting moving objects was instinctive. It was easy for me. When I started filming my hunts, however, I had to make wider shooting lanes for video purposes. Additionally, I didn’t want to send the wrong message by taking walking shots that some viewers, without the needed experience, would try to copy. So, rather than taking those straightforward walking shots, I stopped deer with a mouth bleat. That’s when I learned all about string jumping, which isn’t actually jumping at all. Despite the commonly used term, string jumping would be more accurately referred to as string ducking, as deer react to the sound of the bowstring releasing the arrow by lowering their legs so they can spring back up and flee.

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I had no idea deer could move so quickly to drop and load their legs before bolting. I aimed at the vitals, and by the time the arrow got there, the vitals were 10-12 inches lower! I was stunned. Having the video allowed me go frame by frame and really analyze this reaction. I learned that with the deer I hunt in the Midwest, the reaction time is such that they start dropping by the time the arrow is 20 yards from the bow. Anything past 20 yards requires a low aim on a deer that show signs of being alert or otherwise inclined to react to the sound of the shot.

Over the years since I started filming in 2008, I have shot hundreds of deer. Now I am inclined to say that even some standing deer that are seemingly relaxed (especially does) will drop to load before bolting. Figuring out where to aim is the hardest part of making a good shot at a stationary whitetail. It is even harder in the South, where the deer’s reaction time is even quicker than our comparatively sluggish Midwest deer.

I wish I had the perfect solution that would work in every situation, but I don’t think it exists. Some deer you think are relaxed will drop and others won’t. All you can do is aim increasingly low on all the stationary shots past about 25 yards. Yes, unfortunately, you will miss a few of them (the ones that don’t drop) low, but that is better than hitting a few of them high and wounding them.

Now I aim bottom brisket on 30-yard shots and below the deer on shots past 35. Though my skills with a bow may be good enough to take longer shots, I restrict my maximum range to 40 yards, just because it is so hard to figure out where the deer will be when the arrow gets there.

Obviously, both my lessons this month are wide-ranging topics that could easily support a series of full-length features to really hash out all the details. But at the very least, I hope this column got you thinking. What may seem like a few simple words to you represent the distillation of a lifetime of bowhunting mistakes and lessons for me.

A wise man learns from his mistakes, while the really wise ones learn from the mistakes of others. It’s time to be really wise!




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