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Deer Hunting – Whitetail Underground – Eli Gesell
We’re heading to Central Minnesota. We’re going to visit with Eli Gesell. Eli is the author of Whitetail Underground, which is a blog. You can go to WhitetailUnderground.com and read some of his exploits. I’m happy to have Eli on because he does a lot of public land hunting, even though there’s a lot of agriculture around and they’ve got their family farm, but it’s not that private because his family hunts it also. Eli, welcome.
I’m happy to be here, Bruce.
It’s going to be exciting because we talked about a lot of things. I’m going to start off with your blog and why you have that up there. Talk to us about what you want to share on Whitetail Underground blog.
A couple of years ago, I had a little bit of an accident that put some things in perspective. You grew up watching these guys like Michael Waddell and other guys. It was always something that I thought I’d like to get into is that outdoor industry and work at something I’m passionate about. When I had that accident, it left me wanting to make sure that I didn’t at least try. That was in January of 2015. I’ve been having a blast. It was a little bit slower than what I would’ve thought, but there are a lot of guys out there trying to do the same thing.
Everybody wants a piece of the industry. We’re all unique and that’s why Whitetail Rendezvous exists. I’m unique because I’m the only guy there is. I’m the only Bruce. You’re the only Eli. Nobody can see the hunt through anybody’s eyes but yourself.
A lot of the stuff that you get to watch on TV is not relatable to the regular guy. We don’t all have a bunch of acres. Most guys are on public land hustling, dealing with pressure and a lot of other people.
In your blog, do you have lessons learned? I’ve seen some videos on it and there’s a lot of information. You mentioned there’s a guy that you’ve adapted some of his techniques. Let’s talk about that a little bit.
That’s Dan Infalt. He runs The Hunting Beast Forum. He’s a legend in the Midwest here as far as guys hunting on public land. His system is to scout hard behind the buck bed, sneak in and try and take that deer out of his bed. That’s what I started trying to do. I struggled pretty bad. I got humbled quick. He makes it look easy and it’s not. I found a few more things this spring here that I’m starting to feel good about coming fall, but we have to see what happens.
You mentioned hunting swamps. Talk to me about that.
A lot of the property that is public around home here is big cattail and willow brush swamps. It’s easy to find good bedding. It’s a lot harder to try set up and hunt. There are a lot of short trees. There is a lot of stuff that’s tough to get through. There’s a lot of water. It’s a struggle to try and put the puzzle together.
You think about that, how do you do that? You know this is public land. You know it’s a swamp. There might be some ridges, old bridges have something on it. For the most part, it’s 90% water and tamarack, hemlock or stuff like that. How do you go about that? Let’s talk about your technique. Let’s share that.
I do a lot of scouting online. You try to find stuff where you think beds would be out on some islands or big long peninsulas. What I try and do is if I locate something, sneak in quietly, what would be an off wind to where my scent would be going not right directly to the deer. I have pinpoints in a bed, but past it. That deer feels like it has everything in its advantage with the wind, but it’s off so that deer will come to walk past you using the wind to his advantage. You have to try and set up to let your scent getting past that deer before it gets to you. It’s a bit tough to explain without a visual. That’s how I go about it.
The point, let’s say little ridge of the swamp and northwest to you. You’re in the southeast corner and you’ve got to navigate that swamp. Now the winds come on up on the northwest. It’s going away from you, but there’s going to be a point in time where it’s going to your scent which is going to get picked up once you hit the timber and start swirling. How do you work that out?
It's easy to find good bedding. It's a lot harder to try set up and hunt. Share on XI use a lot of milkweeds. You grab it on your way in. A lot of times I’ll have a big stockpile of milkweed. You drop the seeds as you’re walking and the wind will carry those milkweed seeds. You can always see what your wind is doing 50, 60, 70 yards away if you have the visibility. That’ll help you be able to navigate your way through there without having your scent get to that deer before you’re able to set up an area where you feel comfortable with. You want to get as close as you possibly can. That’s the hard part because a lot of the matured deer that are on public land that’s been hunted for a long time, they’re going to get up and they’re not going to move far during daylight. They’re going to move in that last 20, 30 minutes. You want to be within 100 yards, but it’s hard to get set up that close without tipping them off.
Every time you lift your boot up, it’s going suck in branches. There are no logging roads, that’s for sure.
You’ve got to take your time, go slow and be as quiet as possible. You’ll hear stuff walking through the woods all the time. It’s that if it’s a constant steady walk, they’ll pick up on that. If it’s a couple of feet here and there, you take your time and slow down, they’ll dismiss that as some other wildlife because that’s how they move through them.
You can’t charge. Some of us like to say, “I want to get there by this time.” That’s the biggest mistake in the world because you’re not thinking about the animal.
A hunt like that, you have to give yourself a lot of time. In a few hunts that I was able to get out in October, I was leaving home here about 12:30, 1:00 so that I can be set up by 4:00. That would be about a 20-minute drive and hour and a half, maybe a two-hour hike. Another twenty minutes to get my tree stand and camera gear set up. I hopefully stop for that last two hours.
Are you’re taking in the hang on or a climber?
I have a lone wolf and a set of four sticks that I use. It’s a hang on.
You get to learn how to do that quiet. No clangs.
I got a pair of cord wrapped around what would be the perimeter of the stand to help with anything like that. I have some camouflage athletic tape that I wrapped around each one of the sticks. You trying to knock down on anything that can make any noise. Get that wrapped up.
I’ll give a shout out to Adam Lewis with Sound Barrier. You might check that out because he’s got a good system for dampening sound on equipment. I don’t know if you’ve ever checked him out. Check out Sound Barrier. He’s a great guy. He came up with some wraps and different things that help eliminate noise. It helps eliminate because you can’t eliminate everything. You’ve got a bow, you’ve got to stand and you get some sticks and whatever else you might have to drag along. It’s tough. How close have you got to a better buck then?
I didn’t get a bunch of scouting done. I was setting up on what I felt there be better deer. I can’t answer that question.
Did you see any bucks?
Did I spook any? No, not on my way in anyway.
Are you saying spooked some underneath your stand or near your stand?
No, it happened. A deer getting downwind of you that you don’t know are coming in from different direction or catch your way even if the wind swirls.
How high up are you?
A lot of it depends on what tree is available. I set up as low as ten feet and as high as probably 23, 24.
I don’t hunt swamps anymore because I’m too old to do it. When we used to do that, you get a deer down and you get them taken care of. You’ve got to get them out of there. It’s hard. How do you handle that?
You have a couple of buddies on standby.
Do you have a sled or anything?
No. What I do is I have a couple of buddies on standby that’ll help me drag whenever I need it. I’m there for them too whenever they need a hand.
That’s 180, 200-pound deer, dragging that sucker through the water. I have a little plastic deer sled. It’s a big toboggan and all the plastic and that helps. When it’s frozen or something, it’s easy.
I work at a metal fabrication shop and my plan was to build my own deer cart. That way, it cuts down on some of the long walks. There are a couple of spots where I go in where it’s probably a mile and a half. It’s all high ground. As long as you could get the deer there, that cart would come in handy. When I was out, there’s little two-track that splits the one piece. On each side of the road, it’s water and cattail. As long as you get to the road, you’d be fine. It’s cattails and water that’s the difficult part.
It’s more than a little bit difficult. It’s a lot difficult. You said you’re enamored with private land hunting and you’ve got some good techniques. What’s the allure of private land hunting rather than hunting the places you got permission on private land or your own home farm?
Do you mean public land?
Yes, the public land. Why do you like hunting public land?
There's a lot of ways to get things done. You've got to fine tune what works for you. Share on XPart of it is after I’ve done it a little while, it’s the sheer amount of land that’s available. I grew up on a 240-acre dairy farm and I love to hunt there. It’s 240 acres. Most of that’s cropland. Any direction I drive within a half-hour, there’s probably another 5,000 or 6,000 acres that I can hunt. I like to see new things over and over.
What about the competition on public land? You get to take your stand-in, you get to set it up and you can take it out every night unless someone lets you leave them.
Most of our public lands here in Minnesota, it’s illegal to leave any private property on this. We can’t hang trail cameras or anything. Part of it is I enjoy to work and the challenge. A lot of our public lands here too are in some better areas than a lot of the private lands that I have access to hunt, as far as trying to take a maturity deer. I wouldn’t say it’s easier on private that I do have access to. There’s a lot of pressure there too. I always looked at it as when I’m on a piece of state land or on the other pieces of private land that I had access. It’s almost the same as far as pressure goes. I have two boys that can hunt and my wife. I like to leave those pieces for them. A little bit less pressured if I can. I try to be as good to them as I can.
What I’ve learned from public land access points, typically states have parking lots. There are not a lot of places that you can have an actual parking lot. A lot of guys put their car or truck in the ditch and go on from there. How do you access the public lands?
It’s a little bit of both. There was a couple of spots where I ended up parking on the road. There’s a lot of parking lot. You’ve got to put miles on that way in order to try and get away from where guys are setting up 50 to 100 yards away from that parking lot.
Talking to the people I do. A lot of guys, parking lots and they go in a mile, mile and a half. The deer know that so the deer within a quarter-mile, half a mile of the parking lot. Have you ever seen that?
It depends a lot on the terrain. I feel like if there’s a good ridge close to the parking lot, those are great bedding areas because the deer can use the wind to their advantage and look down on that parking lot to see if there’s anybody coming in.
If you think about it, especially if you go in not the afternoon hunts, but the morning hunts. Even though you know where you’re going, the deer can hear you because you’re a lot noisier. They see lights, headlights, helmet lights and stuff like that. I’m amazed. One, the people that hunt public land have it figured out because there’s some beautiful, huge deer that come off public land every single year. There’s no question about it. What do those people know that the rest of us don’t?
A lot of times the guys get lucky and the 3% or 4% of guys that do it consistently have a system that they figured out that works for them. It’s funny because you listen to one guy and he does this and he’ll get in an argument with another guy who is successful all the time. Their strategies are 180 degrees different from each other. There are a lot of ways to get things done. You’ve got to fine tune what works for you.
The public land, typically, it isn’t the best land. It may be a good habitat. You’ve got ridges. I know in Wisconsin, there’s a lot of small that is public land because you can’t farm it. The deer has to go someplace. I know the browsers. They love everything else, but if there’s clover, soybeans, corn and oats or whatever’s growing in the area, they have to get up and they have to feed. The big bucks are going to be nocturnal. That’s why you have to get into the swamp before they cross the road, get out to those lands.
That’s where they’re trying to locate that buck bed that comes into play because they’re going to get out to the egg fields at 9:00, 10:00, 11:00, but it’s going to take them a few hours to get there. If you’re able to pinpoint a couple of buck beds and you’re able to hunt them a couple of times, maybe one-time early season, maybe a couple of times during the rut. Once late season, hopefully, you’re able to capitalize on that before they either vacate that area or they make a mistake during the rut, taking it out somewhere else.
I’m liking when I hear about September, early October. Once a rut happens, all bets are off. Do you love to travel five miles or ten miles during the rut? It all depends on where the does are.
Each area is a little bit different.
I’m going to look for heavy traffic, crossing traffics, land barriers, tunnels and pinch points. If I do an all-day sit, I’ve got up a better 50/50 chance of a deer coming by, a buck coming by. He’s going to use that travel because when they’re cruising, they’re looking and they want to find them. They’re going to use the best topography they can. The easiest to go through their home range and intersect with other bucks in their home range. They’re seeking and chasing. They’re getting the lockdown and it’s post rut. It’s a pretty big game, isn’t it?
It’s huge. It’s a big chess match. Whoever makes that first mistake is the one who’s going to lose.
They are. People wondered how a four and a half, an older deer make mistakes, but they do. It’s not during the rut. If you figure it out and study them and key on a couple of deer on your hit list and focus. I’ve been talking a lot of people, Todd Pringnitz, Dan Johnson about running and gunning. Bill Winke had a good thing for Redneck Blinds. A farmer cut the field. He had this blind on a trailer and he never could get to the buck. They cut the field. They moved the blind to the other side of the field. They killed the buck that night because you had the flexibility to move. That’s the part that I get more and more enamored about is you have to be flexible. You’ve got to be flexible.
That’s what I hunted, one time out of a pre-hung stand. I felt like I saw more deer in a limited number of hunts. I coach youth and high school football. My time in the woods is cut down quite a bit until the high school season is over with.
When’s the conference? When are the playoffs?
Our playoffs start on October 20th. Win a couple of games there, you’re already looking at November.
Sometimes the 7th, the 10th, you can play it a lot of different ways. I like to start hunting hard during the rut, Halloween and go from there. That’s seven to ten days of conservative hunting. What I found during that period, this should help you with your coaching, if you can spend an hour in the woods during that timeframe, you may get a buck.
The thing with the rut here in Minnesota too is that’s right when our rifle season opens up. In a perfect world, I’d like to be able to hunt on the last week of October before the rifle season comes in on that first week in November. I’ve talked to a guy about Thanksgiving. He said public that I was hunting quite a bit. It was a small parking lot, a room for probably three or four vehicles. He said that on the opening morning of rifle season, there were 27 trucks in there parked up and down the side of the road. Our public lands, there’s a ton of pressure during the rifle season. I liked that last week of October when stuff is starting to click in, especially if you can get a weather front deck to help with that, to get that rut started.
When there’s a cold front, take the day off.
That’s what I have to do. I almost can’t call in sick. I haven’t called in sick for several years now.
It doesn’t matter. You’ve got sick time. The more you talk to people a cold front coming through or a Delta 20, 30 degrees, you’ve got to be out there all day. Because the odds of daylight moving, it’s so much higher than dawn to dusk. If you look at the trends and everything, I’m taking a deer stewardship class from QDMA and you look at the activity trends. You see a cold front come through. It spikes. There’s no question about it.
Weather is a big key. Whether it’s warm or cold, you’re planning as far as whatever your forecast is. Whether you need to be out there, whether you can take a day here and catch up on stuff around the house.
How do you get ready? Let’s go into your prep for the season. You’re starting to prep obviously on public land. You can’t hang stands. You can’t hang trail cameras. You can throw some seed around maybe or not and have some kill plots but somebody else will find them. I don’t know if that’s a good idea. What’s your preparation for the deer season?
Hunting is a big chess match. Whoever makes that first mistake is the one who's going to lose. Share on XI’m still doing a lot of scouting. I spent about five or six hours on one piece and we’re getting some food plots put in here at the home place. I’m going through my gear, making sure that I’m going to fix if there’s a creak in a stand. Making sure that I found any noise that I can. I run in trail cameras out at the home farm and double checking that everything’s good to go over there. A lot of looking at aerial maps, trying to kick out a spot where I feel good about. All summer long, I’ll be looking into the public to trend and see if we can find that one magic spot a good buck is going to be bedding.
On the high ground or on a ridge where the sunlight, one, you need a ridge, two, you need access to sunlight. Can you put seed down, some fertilizer and see what happens and make a kill plot?
On a public land?
I’m talking 10×10, 100 square feet.
I don’t know what the ruling would be on that. I wouldn’t think that you’d be able to do that because you can’t leave any private property on public land here for the most part.
All of this is a seed. You take in a little rake and you rake it up. Turn it over, put some seed down, a little fertilizer. Put some, for lack of a better thing, clover or something hardy and shade tolerant a little bit. I’d be interested in finding that out because on the ridges where there’s open stuff, you’re going to have mass. If you’ve got oak trees, you’ve got tree stand availability. It’s close to intercepting that buck between the bed and his groceries. It’s just a thought. I don’t know if it’s legal or not. Don’t go out there and say Whitetail Rendezvous said to set up kill plots on public land. Check the rakes because it doesn’t take much time.
It’s definitely worth something to look into. One simple phone call to the conservation office and a guy would know.
With a rake, a little bag of seed and a little bag of fertilizer. As long as you have sun, you’ve got to have sun. You can’t be 100% shade, but there are a lot of things that’s shade tolerant.
It wouldn’t take much. You brought it up.