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In this episode of the DIY Sportsman podcast, Garrett discusses what has become his favorite shotgun setup for specifically hunting turkeys. This is a gun he originally purchased for his wife, but after setting it up and making a couple of customizations, Garrett has been using it for all of his hunts as well. In the episode, Garrett breaks down the actual make and model of the gun, the choke setup, after market stock, pistol grips versus standard sporter style grips, sling mounts, and red dots compared to the standard bead sight. He also mentions a couple drawbacks of the concept that could be noteworthy depending on your preference.
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On today's episode of the DIY Sportsman podcast, Garrett sits down with Mike Funderburk out of South Carolina to talk about the Hunt Better platform. This new content platform puts a focus on teaching and preserving woodsmanship skills through livestreams, detailed video hunt breakdowns, and long format video conversations. Mike explains what initiated the idea, what people can expect, and where things are headed. In addition to talking about the Hunt Better platform, Garrett and Mike talk about hunting in the South and how it differs from the Midwest, what types of deer habitat features that seem to be common across the country, technology, challenge hunts, and how experience can often be one of the best guides for learning skills first hand.
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In today's episode of the DIY Sportsman podcast, Garrett lays out a short and sweet planning method to help you scout efficiently as we get closer to early spring and prime-time for most post season scouting. It's key to remember what the main focus is for post-season scouting, what you can learn, but also what you can't. Then use the amount of available time combined with goals to methodically pre-plan routes and loops and adjust as necessary. It's an easier method to ensure you gather the most amount of good intel in the time you have available.
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On today's podcast Garrett speaks with guest Rendell Erik. He's been on the podcast now a few times to talk about scouting and hunt recaps. Based in Iowa, much of his focus is on finding and targeting the biggest and oldest bucks that he can find across a variety of public land pieces that he keeps tabs on. Today's episode is a little different. It's more about calling audibles, dealing with challenges, trying to make the best decisions on the fly as possible when plans A, B, and C blow up. Often Rendell Erik fills his tag earlier in the season before the rut kicks into full gear. This year, after sacrificing some of his season to scout and hunt with a good mutual friend of ours who had drawn a non-resident tag, he had to dig deep and hunt throughout the rut and even into the later gun seasons. He also saw more pressure this year than in years past, and had dry conditions and crop rotations that made early season patterns less repeatable than normal. This is an insightful episode because because it looks at how you can take a good mental approach and take the right actions when things aren't going your way.
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In this episode of the DIY Sportsman podcast, Garrett recaps his recent trip down to Alabama for the second annual Veteran's Hunt put together by Spartan Forge. This event helped raise money for two organizations supporting vets as well as provide a fun hunt atmosphere for everyone involved. Prior to the actual hunt starting, Garrett had driven down from Minnesota to do a day of scouting and still hunting a vast area of public land, which ended up yielding deer sightings at close range and confidence for any potential future trips going back.
Once the hunt started, Garrett paired up with a marine corps vet to hunt with. They ended up killing deer on back-to-back-to-back evenings, and Garrett describes some of the hunts in more detail which were a combination of pre-sets, hang-and-hunts, and still hunting in the rain. Camp camaraderie, stories, jokes, and food were top notch.
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Today on the DIY Sportsman podcast, Garrett discusses five of the best things you could be doing right now related to hunting. Seasons have ended in most midwestern states, and if you're towards the northern edge of that you've still got 1 to 2 feet of snow on the ground. Seems like ice fishing could be your best bet. But there are some pretty valuable activities that you can still do during the winter months. Some of the items include analyzing certain details of the 2022 hunting season, some are more forward thinking, and others are just a bunch of fun.
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On today's episode of the DIY Sportsman podcast, Garrett does a strategy review and analysis as a baseline for how to improve next year. He doesn't review any of the specific hunt details because those already have their own hunt breakdown episodes. This exercise is one that Garrett does each year with to help review and analyze what did or didn't work to try and improve for the following season. That action is something which can help anyone, and it's a useful tool even outside of deer hunting.
Garrett will plan on doing much of the same weapon type hunting next year, using a combination of traditional and compound hunting across a handful of tags. But there might be a change to the location of the earliest velvet hunt, and there will certainly be a change in the location of any firearms hunting. Garrett also talked about an additional strategy he'd need to employ to help be better prepared to tackle his pre-rut hunts next year.
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On today's episode of the DIY Sportsman podcast, Garrett sits down with Troy Fowler (aka the Ranch Fairy) and Darrel Barnette, who some of you may have also seen on either the Ranch Fairy channel or watching the Hunting Public. Garrett put together a string jump timeframe dataset corresponding to arrow speed and time of flight for discussion. The data was derived entirely on video footage Garrett had from deer shot at inside of 30 yards, but mostly inside of 20. Much of the string jumping debate seems to revolve around longer shots and whether or not speed is irrelevant compared to how fast deer can react. But rarely do you hear people talk about the relationship for close range shots. The group discusses that topic and also some of the longer range unknowns. There's not really any agenda pushing in this episode. It's just open dialogue discussing a data set, how it might apply to your own decision making, what limitations are there, and what type of additional questions we still have and data we'd like to collect and analyze to continue to learn.
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On this episode of the DIY Sportsman podcast, Garrett breaks down his archery hunt success out of state. This hunt was during a firearms season as well. That pressure did play a role in strategy, but so did timing in proximity to the peak breeding timeframe of the rut. Garrett describes the thought process and strategy going in, how that changed over the first several hours in the woods, what type of sign he found to trigger setting up in a tree right away, and the play-by-play of the hunt. In addition, some of the details related to the frontal shot were broken down in this episode.
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In this episode of the DIY Sportsman podcast, Garrett reviews the hunt strategy and breakdown of his Wisconsin buck. In addition to discussing terrain features, setup relationship to bedding, and the actual hunt unfolding, he discussed some unforeseen challenges through late October that required a change of plans, strategy, and goals heading into the rut. This was also the first deer in a long time Garrett had shot using a lighter arrow and big mechanical, so he gives his performance observations there.
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On this episode of the DIY Sportsman podcast, Garrett does a recap of the season thus far, including early season hunts with the recurve, some things that really surprised him about observations in the woods and on camera the past couple of weeks in October, dealing with nearly record high warm weather in the pre-rut, and a breakdown of Sam's recent successful solo hunt on public land.
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In today's episode of the DIY Sportsman podcast, Garrett breaks down clothing for the rut. The rut entails two major considerations - wild ranges of potential temperature and weather along with sitting all day. In just the last couple of years in the upper midwest, temperatures have ranged from as warm as 70 degrees to below zero. True all day sits don't give much of an opportunity to recharge your metabolism throughout the day, meaning that it's easy to feel like your clothing warmth is underperforming if you don't plan correctly.
Garrett covers keeping your feet dry and warm, choosing appropriate base layers, layers worn into the woods, and layers packed in along with accessories to keep hands and head warm and dry. For the purposes of the rut, Garrett's general plan and recommendation has shifted somewhat over the years from being more efficient while packing to being more functional while in the tree while making minimal compromises.
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On today's episode, Garrett talks about bowhunting in the month of October, which has become his favorite month overall to hunt in the Midwest. September can be nice because of the mild weather and of cover to help hide you in the tree. Bed to food patterns can be easy to identify, and deer can be less on edge. And of course November can also be incredible, though the second half of that month is usually the heaviest hunting pressure of the entire year with the various gun seasons, so often the best rut hunting is isolated, it can be very cold, and you can still put in long hours and slow days waiting for that one key flurry of activity.
October seems to blend the best of both months. Dressing for the weather is very manageable. Deer movement can be average to very good, and it steadily improves over the course of the month. Deer movement is also much more predictable than November, both from a bedding perspective as well as year-over-year repeatability. The cover has been knocked down a bit since September which improves shooting lanes, but not so much so that the trees you're hunting out of are barren. Hunting pressure usually isn't too bad either. So in this episode Garrett covers eight tips to keep in mind to help making October hunting successful.
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In this episode of the DIY Sportsman podcast, Garrett discusses his mobile hunting gear along with key considerations to make when choosing between popular styles. While weight, noise, and bulk are items hotly discussed, a very key influencing factor for Garrett is versatility, function, and ease of use in a wide variety of scenarios, habitats, and states.
Some of the main choices discussed are platform size, platforms versus ring of steps, multiple climbing sticks versus single sticking, fixed aiders compared to moveable aiders, minimalist packs against more rigid hybrid-frame packs, and self filming options. This podcast is also supported by a link which contains the gear talked about in more of a broken down list view: https://diy-sportsman.com/2017/12/29/deer-hunting-gear-list-2017/
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On this episode of the DIY Sportsman Podcast, Garrett sits down with Bill Thompson, owner of Spartan Forge, and Johnny Stewart while at hunting camp in North Dakota. While Garrett's done this trip a few times of the past couple of years, a bunch of members all got together this year to share camp near some of Bill's old stomping ground. Garrett and Johnny recap what exactly they've been keying in on in terms of sign while the primary food source is shifting day by day and how they've adapted to pressure. Johnny goes over the moves he made while reading sign to set up in an area where he got an opportuntiy at a giant, Bill provides some historical detail and reference for how things have changed in this area since he hunted it growing up. The group also dives into one aspect of hunting which can really help drive success in low odds situations which is how and why to maintain a positive outlook and have confidence feed off of it.
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On today's podcast episode I have Shane Simpson on as a guest. While Shane has hunted a ton of different public hunting properties over the years, in the past two years he's begun a focus to try and learn a new, large piece with the intent to build a library of information and continue to focus on it for years to come. It's somewhat similar to what I've done on a couple properties. So the episode focuses mainly on the multiyear strategy to learn as much as you can each year while also having realistic expectations about what can be achieved each step of the way. We cover summer scouting, spring scouting, trail cameras, talking with other local hunters, focusing on rut vs bed hunting, the fall shift, and more.
We also touch on some of the tracking data collected from over 150 deer recoveries with Shane's dog Callie. Shane and a friend of his had distilled the information down to determine what factors for broadhead and shot style led to the highest chance of recovery along with what some of the key findings were for order of operations with grid searching.
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In today's episode of the DIY Sportsman podcast, Garrett talks about some of the items you should do your best to check or do prior to the season actually opening. With some exceptions, your first tag might be starting as soon as three weeks from now. Or it might be a little less than two months if you have an October opener and aren't traveling. Regardless, it's right around the corner, and checking some of these items as soon as possible can help give you time to make any corrections prior to the season actually opening.
In the podcast, Garrett breaks down down key details regarding archery and gear checks, practicing with your climbing gear, double checking hunting properties even if you hadn't planned on glassing or using trail cameras prior to the season, and reviewing and analyzing the goals you've set for the season.
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On this episode of the DIY Sportsman podcast, Garrett discusses results from an in-depth round of testing different arrow weights and speeds for hunting. These ranged from setups shooting over 315 fps down to setups shooting around 200 fps. Test data included energy and momentum readings both out of the bow and at 40 yards, time of flight to the target, bow noise, arrow noise, broadhead grouping with both fixed and mechanical heads, and range estimation forgiveness for misjudging yardage around 30 yards as well as 60 yards. With Garrett's setup, he learned that the "happy medium" arrow setup he had been using probably wasn't the optimal choice for whitetails.
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On today's episode of the DIY Sportsman podcast, Garrett has a part-two discussion with Rendell Erik. They talked about summer work in the last episode, but this one focuses a lot more on early season hunting and strategy. It's a conversational format, where they just talk and throughout the process dive into quite a few specific rabbit holes. The recording starts talking about hunting fresh sign versus hunting spots that you found in post-season without fresh sign. But then they shift to talking about crop rotations and early season ag field setups and bedding, how many deer will bed corn but you can still glass or set up on them while they're in that pattern before the harvest. They also discuss hill country, including how to take advantage of wind switches, learning to identify key transition areas in river-bottoms to set up on, primary versus secondary food and browse in staging areas, what to do differently in areas with a high tonnage per acre of browse, using wind and thermals, and even set up specifics like height in the tree on early season hunts among other things.
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On today's episode of the DIY Sportsman Podcast, we're talking summer scouting and strategies once again. This time, I'm talking to Rendell Erik who hunts primarily public land located in Iowa. This is a good contrast to the episodes I posted with Steve Sherk since the terrain is different. However, you'll still see similar tendencies in many cases for what deer are doing throughout the summer months and how to capitalize and maximize your intel. We talk about boots-on-the-ground scouting versus minimizing intrusion, running trail cameras, where to place them, how often to check them, whether it's better to cluster them or spread them way out, mock scrapes, glassing, and even how to start to transition some of the intel into early season plans.
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