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Nutterbuster's Post-Season Briefing

Nutterbuster

Nutterbuster

Well-Known Member
SH Member
Joined
Oct 12, 2017
Messages
10,066
Location
Where the skys are so blue!
This season was way different than previous seasons for two big reasons. First, I'll have a kid next season and I wanted to save as much money as I could this year and also prepare for what future seasons will probably look like. Second, last year I pushed really hard to travel and while it proved a theory I have about killing big bucks being 90% or better about location...it was exhausting. Conversations with a friend

This season I made 3 goals. Hunt my home county exclusively, with focus on tracts within 20 minutes of the house; hunt from the ground exclusively; and kill 5 deer that way. I succeeded on 2 out of 3. I killed 6 deer from the ground and 1 from a tree, hunted a total of 3 times from a tree, and never drove more than 20 minutes to hunt.

Recap on kills:

  1. Doe in early archery season. Sat in the pacseat next to a hot oak on the edge of some known palmetto bedding on a ridge. Had 5 does come out at 20 yards. Killed the biggest with the mini. Awesome hunt. Clean kill. Deer dead within 10 yards.
  2. Doe in muzzleloader season. Scouted an overgrown clearcut and jumped a deer walking a 4 wheeler trail. Came back the next day and sat that trail in the pacseat. Shot her as she crossed the trail at 40 yards. Dead in 10 yards.
  3. Doe in gun season. Jumped deer out of a food plot one evening. Came back a couple of days later after seeing deer feeding in daylight in a field I pass on the way to work. Jumped deer out of plot. Set up in pacseat anyway. 30 minutes later shot a doe at 50 yards. Dead before she hit the ground.
  4. Button buck in gun season. Same trail and setup as doe #2. Dead immediately.
  5. Seven point from saddle with muzzleloader. Really wish I hadn't climbed a tree. The evening before I found 3 fresh scrapes clustered on a fire break on an isolated corner of the property near a private food plot. Sat 20 yards from scrapes and had a doe come out right on top of me. Passed on her and came back the next day to climb a little further away from scrapes (50 yards) and avoid another really close encounter. Buck came out to work scrapes. Shot and had no blood. 3 days of looking and I found the carcass. He ran about 150 yards. If I'd have sat in the same spot as the day before, I'd have probably hit him better and killed 100% of my deer from the pacseat. :(
  6. Spike buck with rifle. Sat in an area I've killed 4-5 bucks in the past on a fresh scrape. Shot the little goober at 28 steps as he sniffed it. Dead instantaneously.
I also non-fatally-wounded 1 deer with the mini, and missed 2 with the muzzleloader. That's a separate thread, but in short I can't make the thing shoot and probably won't be using it next year.

I usually kill 8-10 deer a year, so on the surface this season looks like a reduction in efficiency. However, I did not travel to areas with more/bigger deer, and I hunted only 2 weekend days. I made almost no evening sits or weekend sits in an effort to spend more time with the wife before the parasite hatches and to prepare for responsible nurturing of said parasite. I also straight-up didn't hunt for 2 weeks in December, and missed a week straight in January. I'd guess I had roughly half as many sits as in years past, which pushed my kills-per-sit ratio up.

Takeaways:

  1. I got really, really, REALLY used to the pacseat. The two times I climbed a preset climber and the one time I climbed in a saddle, it was very inconvenient. The stealth and ease of just shrugging off the seat and sitting down is impossible to beat.
  2. I finally perfected the mental game of ground hunting. Basically, I'm hunting from my 9 o'clock to my 1 o'clock. Nothing outside of that pie slice exists. Trying to look behind you or shoot deer to your right is too low-odds to even fool with (although I did put the crosshairs on a doe that came out maybe 15 yards to my right one evening).
  3. There were some areas I found deer where climbing may have been more advantageous. I never felt like I was "out of the game" though. And, I found many areas where a ground chair was the much easier solution to hunting an area. Net result was positive.
  4. packing a deer out is much nicer when you have a frame pack and no climbing crap to weigh you down.
There were honestly no real negatives for me. I may purge a substantial amount of gear to make room for baby stuff.

For the duck hunters out there, I also finally embraced the fact that we have a lot of wood ducks and not much else. I never carried more than 3 decoys and a jerk rig this year, ditched my call lanyard, and I did 90% of my duck hunting with nothing but chest waders. I bought a nice timber pack and spent a lot of mornings just leaned against a tree in a spot where I'd heard ducks the day before. I killed just as many ducks as I usually do with much less effort. Probably selling 3 dozen floaters and a half dozen motion decoys.

All in all, it was a very simple, very effective season. I spent less money and stressed the wife less than I have in the last 7 years, spent more time with family, slept in more, was more comfortable, and burned less mental bandwidth too. 10 out of 10, would highly recommend.
 
Glad you found what worked for you, particularly before the little one comes.

Interested to hear your opinions on if your 9-1 pie slice theory is due to doing more ground hunting, and if being elevated gives you a larger radius of shot possibilities (one of the reasons lots of us start saddle hunting in the first place) or if scent is scent and movement is movement and that rule hold true regardless in your opinion/experience
 
@Nutterbuster know this is a bit of a sensitive topic, but mind sharing what you consider to be your personal max range with the Mini? With minimal tuning and fiddling this year I had 30 yards in mind, and with some off-season work probably 35. Some content about deer post shot movement in the past six months has probably taken me out of the 40 yard game forever, but appreciate your thoughts.
 
MLs can be frustrating. What load are you shooting? I was about ready to toss mine then switched to blackhorn 209 with PT gold Harvester with crush rib sabots.

Night and day difference!

Killed this one a few days ago on the late season primitive hunt. Killed from the saddle in a tight area, could have set a lock on or ground hunted but no climbing trees, which led to the area not being hunted, which led to the deer being there avoiding pressure.

db04610fbea63a57085d5da07d6c7935.jpg



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
@Nutterbuster what would you say the age class of the does you killed? Full mature? 1.5? Seems like you were out to fill the freezer. On any of those hunts did you let some walk to see if something bigger comes along? Did any walk by not bothered by anything like you were never there?
Seems your mind set was kill any legal deer?
Was any of those hunts set on killing a bigger one?
 
thedutchtouch said:
Interested to hear your opinions on if your 9-1 pie slice theory is due to doing more ground hunting, and if being elevated gives you a larger radius of shot possibilities (one of the reasons lots of us start saddle hunting in the first place) or if scent is scent and movement is movement and that rule hold true regardless in your opinion/experience
Click to expand...
I think depending on height/cover, an elevated position definitely increases your ability to survey more of the pie without being compromised due to movement, yes. As far as wind and scent, I've found that generally due to backwashing and swirling there is a narrow part of the pie where your scent doesn't blow. That doesn't change on the ground or in the air.

neonomad said:
@Nutterbuster know this is a bit of a sensitive topic, but mnd sharing what you consider to be your personal max range with the Mini?
Click to expand...
Not a sensitive question. 30 yards hard cap. I can foresee a future where I swap a mini out for a whiz-bang, 500fps supercrossbow and push to 40 or 50.

Gator said:
I'm hearing the pacseat needs to make their seat silently swivel.
Click to expand...
It just turns into mice and cookies.

shwacker said:
MLs can be frustrating. What load are you shooting? I was about ready to toss mine then switched to blackhorn 209 with PT gold Harvester with crush rib sabots.
Click to expand...
Not getting into it because the frustration is real. I've shot multiple powder/load combinations. I've killed about a dozen deer with it, but that's with maybe a 4" group at 50 yards.

SILhunter said:
@Nutterbuster do you use a ghille suit while using the pac seat?
Click to expand...
Nope. I have played with them in the past but don't see a benefit.

MattMan81 said:
@Nutterbuster what would you say the age class of the does you killed? Full mature? 1.5? Seems like you were out to fill the freezer. On any of those hunts did you let some walk to see if something bigger comes along? Did any walk by not bothered by anything like you were never there?
Seems your mind set was kill any legal deer?
Was any of those hunts set on killing a bigger one?
Click to expand...
I killed 2 very big does that I'd guess at 3.5 years or better. The 7 was a 2.5-3.5 if I had to guess. Spike was a yearling, and two of the does were younger. I let 1 doe walk because I knew i was in a good area for a buck, and I shot him the next day. I did have 2-3 deer walk within 30 yards that I could not get a shot on due to thick brush or where they approached from. The only times I got busted were from scent this year, and that only happened once that I'm aware of.
 
I am super interested in your statements about duck hunting and the no need for way ton of decoys etc. I have six wood duck decoys a dear friend bought for me many years ago and have never used them or gotten into it much because I thought I needed to go down another rabbit hole. But now I'm thinking these six will suffice for what I want to do. My buddy just put a nice pond on his property last summer and there are two other puddles nearby where woody's frequent...... what's your strategy for you limited decoys etc???? I really know nothing just remember back in the day a buddy and his dad and I would go to nearby beaver ponds and shoot some puddle ducks off it for fun..... and it was fun. Would like to do that again on a limited basis next season.
 
Meaningless but Fun stats:

  • 138 bucks reported as harvested on public land in my county
  • 57 does reported as harvested on public land in my county (I suspect it's lower due to many areas only allowing buck harvest on designated gun days, and most hunters hunting on gun days)
  • 195 deer reported as harvested on public land total in my county
  • human population of 239,294 in my county
  • Estimated public land deer hunting county population of 2,552*
  • total public land acreage of 125,333 acres
So that gives us these figures:

  • 1 deer reported killed per 642 acres of public land over the course of the year in my county
  • 1 estimated hunter per every 50 acres of public hunting ground
  • 1 deer reported killed per 13 estimated hunters over the course of the year in my county
  • Yours truly killed 3% of the deer reported, while making up only 0.0003% of the deer hunting public

If I'm not mathing more terribly than usual, and most hunters kill 1/13th of a deer and I killed 6, that makes me 78x more deadly than the average public land hunter in my county... ;)


*Roughly 4% of the country's population hunts. So that gives an estimated 9,571 hunters in the population. Using this article (https://www.whitetailproperties.com...ivate or public,both public and private lands.) that summarizes hunter stats published by the USFWS, we can estimate that 80% of that hunter population is hunting deer or other large game (7,657 deer hunters). We can estimate that only a third of them (2,552) hunt public land exclusively or partly.
 
woodsdog2 said:
I am super interested in your statements about duck hunting and the no need for way ton of decoys etc. I have six wood duck decoys a dear friend bought for me many years ago and have never used them or gotten into it much because I thought I needed to go down another rabbit hole. But now I'm thinking these six will suffice for what I want to do. My buddy just put a nice pond on his property last summer and there are two other puddles nearby where woody's frequent...... what's your strategy for you limited decoys etc???? I really know nothing just remember back in the day a buddy and his dad and I would go to nearby beaver ponds and shoot some puddle ducks off it for fun..... and it was fun. Would like to do that again on a limited basis next season.
Click to expand...
I can't speak outside of my experience, but for me, it paid off massively to just walk/paddle/troll flooded woods and listen for wood ducks. Triangulate their position and come back the next day with no decoys or 2-3 on a jerk cord and wait for them to show up. Shoot 3 and leave. Rinse and repeat.

Next year I plan on committing to no decoys, no calls, and just being where they want to land. Kinda like deer hunting.

I can do that because I have close access to thousands of acres of habitat and a lot of hunters that push large concentrations of vocal wood ducks into secluded waters. They do not get messed with if the hunter has to go more than a half mile away from a vehicle...period. May not pay off as well in other places.
 
Nutterbuster said:
This season was way different than previous seasons for two big reasons. First, I'll have a kid next season and I wanted to save as much money as I could this year and also prepare for what future seasons will probably look like. Second, last year I pushed really hard to travel and while it proved a theory I have about killing big bucks being 90% or better about location...it was exhausting. Conversations with a friend

This season I made 3 goals. Hunt my home county exclusively, with focus on tracts within 20 minutes of the house; hunt from the ground exclusively; and kill 5 deer that way. I succeeded on 2 out of 3. I killed 6 deer from the ground and 1 from a tree, hunted a total of 3 times from a tree, and never drove more than 20 minutes to hunt.

Recap on kills:

  1. Doe in early archery season. Sat in the pacseat next to a hot oak on the edge of some known palmetto bedding on a ridge. Had 5 does come out at 20 yards. Killed the biggest with the mini. Awesome hunt. Clean kill. Deer dead within 10 yards.
  2. Doe in muzzleloader season. Scouted an overgrown clearcut and jumped a deer walking a 4 wheeler trail. Came back the next day and sat that trail in the pacseat. Shot her as she crossed the trail at 40 yards. Dead in 10 yards.
  3. Doe in gun season. Jumped deer out of a food plot one evening. Came back a couple of days later after seeing deer feeding in daylight in a field I pass on the way to work. Jumped deer out of plot. Set up in pacseat anyway. 30 minutes later shot a doe at 50 yards. Dead before she hit the ground.
  4. Button buck in gun season. Same trail and setup as doe #2. Dead immediately.
  5. Seven point from saddle with muzzleloader. Really wish I hadn't climbed a tree. The evening before I found 3 fresh scrapes clustered on a fire break on an isolated corner of the property near a private food plot. Sat 20 yards from scrapes and had a doe come out right on top of me. Passed on her and came back the next day to climb a little further away from scrapes (50 yards) and avoid another really close encounter. Buck came out to work scrapes. Shot and had no blood. 3 days of looking and I found the carcass. He ran about 150 yards. If I'd have sat in the same spot as the day before, I'd have probably hit him better and killed 100% of my deer from the pacseat. :(
  6. Spike buck with rifle. Sat in an area I've killed 4-5 bucks in the past on a fresh scrape. Shot the little goober at 28 steps as he sniffed it. Dead instantaneously.
I also non-fatally-wounded 1 deer with the mini, and missed 2 with the muzzleloader. That's a separate thread, but in short I can't make the thing shoot and probably won't be using it next year.

I usually kill 8-10 deer a year, so on the surface this season looks like a reduction in efficiency. However, I did not travel to areas with more/bigger deer, and I hunted only 2 weekend days. I made almost no evening sits or weekend sits in an effort to spend more time with the wife before the parasite hatches and to prepare for responsible nurturing of said parasite. I also straight-up didn't hunt for 2 weeks in December, and missed a week straight in January. I'd guess I had roughly half as many sits as in years past, which pushed my kills-per-sit ratio up.

Takeaways:

  1. I got really, really, REALLY used to the pacseat. The two times I climbed a preset climber and the one time I climbed in a saddle, it was very inconvenient. The stealth and ease of just shrugging off the seat and sitting down is impossible to beat.
  2. I finally perfected the mental game of ground hunting. Basically, I'm hunting from my 9 o'clock to my 1 o'clock. Nothing outside of that pie slice exists. Trying to look behind you or shoot deer to your right is too low-odds to even fool with (although I did put the crosshairs on a doe that came out maybe 15 yards to my right one evening).
  3. There were some areas I found deer where climbing may have been more advantageous. I never felt like I was "out of the game" though. And, I found many areas where a ground chair was the much easier solution to hunting an area. Net result was positive.
  4. packing a deer out is much nicer when you have a frame pack and no climbing crap to weigh you down.
There were honestly no real negatives for me. I may purge a substantial amount of gear to make room for baby stuff.

For the duck hunters out there, I also finally embraced the fact that we have a lot of wood ducks and not much else. I never carried more than 3 decoys and a jerk rig this year, ditched my call lanyard, and I did 90% of my duck hunting with nothing but chest waders. I bought a nice timber pack and spent a lot of mornings just leaned against a tree in a spot where I'd heard ducks the day before. I killed just as many ducks as I usually do with much less effort. Probably selling 3 dozen floaters and a half dozen motion decoys.

All in all, it was a very simple, very effective season. I spent less money and stressed the wife less than I have in the last 7 years, spent more time with family, slept in more, was more comfortable, and burned less mental bandwidth too. 10 out of 10, would highly recommend.
Click to expand...
Sounds like you need to join a pacseat forum! Lol!
 
Nutterbuster said:
All in all, it was a very simple, very effective season. I spent less money and stressed the wife less than I have in the last 7 years, spent more time with family, slept in more, was more comfortable, and burned less mental bandwidth too. 10 out of 10, would highly recommend.
Click to expand...
Great outlook.
I strive to post a similar recap one year. I spend too many sits/ hunts to ratio of deer sightings / kills.
I had a similar plan this past year of focusing on my home county and within a 20 minute drive as there are always plenty of bucks on camera or sign in the woods .
I haven’t yet found a better ratio than heading out of state to higher density options.
NH is not AL but I think I can get to 2 bucks in a season (at least one w a recurve…)
 
I’ll have to say I was on killable deer most every hang and hunt and hunt I went in this season. Shooting the targets was more difficult but I did end up with one of the target bucks. Overall I’m happy with what I’m doing just need to really refine my early season game on a patterned buck.
 
Nutterbuster said:
This season was way different than previous seasons for two big reasons. First, I'll have a kid next season and I wanted to save as much money as I could this year and also prepare for what future seasons will probably look like. Second, last year I pushed really hard to travel and while it proved a theory I have about killing big bucks being 90% or better about location...it was exhausting. Conversations with a friend

This season I made 3 goals. Hunt my home county exclusively, with focus on tracts within 20 minutes of the house; hunt from the ground exclusively; and kill 5 deer that way. I succeeded on 2 out of 3. I killed 6 deer from the ground and 1 from a tree, hunted a total of 3 times from a tree, and never drove more than 20 minutes to hunt.

Recap on kills:

  1. Doe in early archery season. Sat in the pacseat next to a hot oak on the edge of some known palmetto bedding on a ridge. Had 5 does come out at 20 yards. Killed the biggest with the mini. Awesome hunt. Clean kill. Deer dead within 10 yards.
  2. Doe in muzzleloader season. Scouted an overgrown clearcut and jumped a deer walking a 4 wheeler trail. Came back the next day and sat that trail in the pacseat. Shot her as she crossed the trail at 40 yards. Dead in 10 yards.
  3. Doe in gun season. Jumped deer out of a food plot one evening. Came back a couple of days later after seeing deer feeding in daylight in a field I pass on the way to work. Jumped deer out of plot. Set up in pacseat anyway. 30 minutes later shot a doe at 50 yards. Dead before she hit the ground.
  4. Button buck in gun season. Same trail and setup as doe #2. Dead immediately.
  5. Seven point from saddle with muzzleloader. Really wish I hadn't climbed a tree. The evening before I found 3 fresh scrapes clustered on a fire break on an isolated corner of the property near a private food plot. Sat 20 yards from scrapes and had a doe come out right on top of me. Passed on her and came back the next day to climb a little further away from scrapes (50 yards) and avoid another really close encounter. Buck came out to work scrapes. Shot and had no blood. 3 days of looking and I found the carcass. He ran about 150 yards. If I'd have sat in the same spot as the day before, I'd have probably hit him better and killed 100% of my deer from the pacseat. :(
  6. Spike buck with rifle. Sat in an area I've killed 4-5 bucks in the past on a fresh scrape. Shot the little goober at 28 steps as he sniffed it. Dead instantaneously.
I also non-fatally-wounded 1 deer with the mini, and missed 2 with the muzzleloader. That's a separate thread, but in short I can't make the thing shoot and probably won't be using it next year.

I usually kill 8-10 deer a year, so on the surface this season looks like a reduction in efficiency. However, I did not travel to areas with more/bigger deer, and I hunted only 2 weekend days. I made almost no evening sits or weekend sits in an effort to spend more time with the wife before the parasite hatches and to prepare for responsible nurturing of said parasite. I also straight-up didn't hunt for 2 weeks in December, and missed a week straight in January. I'd guess I had roughly half as many sits as in years past, which pushed my kills-per-sit ratio up.

Takeaways:

  1. I got really, really, REALLY used to the pacseat. The two times I climbed a preset climber and the one time I climbed in a saddle, it was very inconvenient. The stealth and ease of just shrugging off the seat and sitting down is impossible to beat.
  2. I finally perfected the mental game of ground hunting. Basically, I'm hunting from my 9 o'clock to my 1 o'clock. Nothing outside of that pie slice exists. Trying to look behind you or shoot deer to your right is too low-odds to even fool with (although I did put the crosshairs on a doe that came out maybe 15 yards to my right one evening).
  3. There were some areas I found deer where climbing may have been more advantageous. I never felt like I was "out of the game" though. And, I found many areas where a ground chair was the much easier solution to hunting an area. Net result was positive.
  4. packing a deer out is much nicer when you have a frame pack and no climbing crap to weigh you down.
There were honestly no real negatives for me. I may purge a substantial amount of gear to make room for baby stuff.

For the duck hunters out there, I also finally embraced the fact that we have a lot of wood ducks and not much else. I never carried more than 3 decoys and a jerk rig this year, ditched my call lanyard, and I did 90% of my duck hunting with nothing but chest waders. I bought a nice timber pack and spent a lot of mornings just leaned against a tree in a spot where I'd heard ducks the day before. I killed just as many ducks as I usually do with much less effort. Probably selling 3 dozen floaters and a half dozen motion decoys.

All in all, it was a very simple, very effective season. I spent less money and stressed the wife less than I have in the last 7 years, spent more time with family, slept in more, was more comfortable, and burned less mental bandwidth too. 10 out of 10, would highly recommend.
Click to expand...
I'm curious if you feel like your transition away from a vertical bow was a factor in your transition to the ground? It looks like a change in weaponry has allowed you to use a less stealthy method (during the kill) to change things up? Not that I blame you just curious what lessons I can take from your season. I killed my buck this year tethered in on the ground but I also tried to sit on the ground a couple other times and was busted by deer I was passing on.
 
woodsdog2 said:
I’ll have to say I was on killable deer most every hang and hunt and hunt I went in this season. Shooting the targets was more difficult but I did end up with one of the target bucks. Overall I’m happy with what I’m doing just need to really refine my early season game on a patterned buck.
Click to expand...
I know it’s been said many times before, but on most properties mature buck hunting or specific buck hunting sure is a whole other level of effort, strategy, and luck. I could’ve shot a deer on about 2/3 of my sits this year and that’s the best % I’ve ever had. Still didn’t shoot the target buck I was after, who I have multiple years of patterns on. I had a good early season plan but he didn’t follow the script. I learned a lot this year but there’s no telling how much of that will even apply next season! It’s a blessing every time we get to give it a try though.
 
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