tooln
5 year old buck +
Yea go ahead and rub it in. :p
MENOMONIE AREA - AMMO SPORTS EXPO & GUN SHOW
- Thread starter shawnv
- Start date
Steve Bartylla
5 year old buck +
for the last 3-4 yrs, at the end of every seminar, I give the audience a "mini-rant" on how hunting is supposed to be fun and you should shoot whatever makes you happy.
Coming from someone like me, that is extremely spoiled on 50ish % of the ground I hunt on and have put a lot of inches on the wall, I can state with some authority that "stats" (inches) is about the worst measuring stick there is for success. it is sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much more dependent on where you hunt than your skills as a hunter. To put it in perspective, I consulted for an outfitters years ago in IA. Their guide, who wasn't even drinking age yet, had shot 6-7 bucks over 160 already. Though he got to be a lot better in the time I knew him, he had next to no hunting skills at all when we first met. All he did was pass bucks under 160 until he eventually killed a 160+. Sure, that takes a smidge of discipline, but it takes no hunting skill at all to watch bucks walk by. In an effort to accelerate his learning curve, I'd ask him to pick where he thought stands should go in the various areas he helped me on and then explain why. That first year, I can't recall a single one he picked that made a lick of sense at all. Lots of times there is more than one "good" tree, but it isn't that I thought this or that tree was better. It was that his suggestions simply had no reasoning behind them in the least little bit, yet he'd killed 6-7 "bucks of a lifetime" without having a clue what he was doing.
As Gordon Whittington (North American Whitetail editor) has told me many times, "I'd take a bad hunter on great ground before taking a great hunter on bad ground every time." Most of the people on this site will never shoot a 160" buck in their life, and I'd bet everyone here is a better hunter than that kid WAS when he'd already rolled 6-7. Most will never kill a 150 and a good number will never kill a 140, no matter what they do to their property. If they aren't there, you can't kill them no matter how good of a hunter you are. If 4 are there, it's a lot easier to kill 1 than if there are 3, which is a lot easier to kill 1 than if there are 2, which is easier than if there is just 1.
In order to gauge how "good" a hunter is or isn't, the only way to use kills as a benchmark is to weigh their success against where they have been hunting and how much time they can invest in trees. The problem is that too few really grasp that, and book, articles and TV almost never address it.
Coming from someone like me, that is extremely spoiled on 50ish % of the ground I hunt on and have put a lot of inches on the wall, I can state with some authority that "stats" (inches) is about the worst measuring stick there is for success. it is sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much more dependent on where you hunt than your skills as a hunter. To put it in perspective, I consulted for an outfitters years ago in IA. Their guide, who wasn't even drinking age yet, had shot 6-7 bucks over 160 already. Though he got to be a lot better in the time I knew him, he had next to no hunting skills at all when we first met. All he did was pass bucks under 160 until he eventually killed a 160+. Sure, that takes a smidge of discipline, but it takes no hunting skill at all to watch bucks walk by. In an effort to accelerate his learning curve, I'd ask him to pick where he thought stands should go in the various areas he helped me on and then explain why. That first year, I can't recall a single one he picked that made a lick of sense at all. Lots of times there is more than one "good" tree, but it isn't that I thought this or that tree was better. It was that his suggestions simply had no reasoning behind them in the least little bit, yet he'd killed 6-7 "bucks of a lifetime" without having a clue what he was doing.
As Gordon Whittington (North American Whitetail editor) has told me many times, "I'd take a bad hunter on great ground before taking a great hunter on bad ground every time." Most of the people on this site will never shoot a 160" buck in their life, and I'd bet everyone here is a better hunter than that kid WAS when he'd already rolled 6-7. Most will never kill a 150 and a good number will never kill a 140, no matter what they do to their property. If they aren't there, you can't kill them no matter how good of a hunter you are. If 4 are there, it's a lot easier to kill 1 than if there are 3, which is a lot easier to kill 1 than if there are 2, which is easier than if there is just 1.
In order to gauge how "good" a hunter is or isn't, the only way to use kills as a benchmark is to weigh their success against where they have been hunting and how much time they can invest in trees. The problem is that too few really grasp that, and book, articles and TV almost never address it.
Steve Bartylla
5 year old buck +
they have me speaking at 11 and 1, and are cool with the idea of a "generic buck hunting/area specific" topic.
