Deer Hunting Secrets White Knuckle Productions – Todd Pringnitz P2

 

Besides mastering deer calling strategies, finding the perfect whitetail hunting spot is fundamental for every hunter. Todd Pringnitz, the CEO of White Knuckle Productions, is back to recount the time he had the banner year any hunter could ever dream of. Todd was fortunate to kill three different seven-year-old whitetails, including a 160-class eight-pointer, a 190-class big, typical 11, and the trickiest big six-pointer buck. Find out how he nailed it as he reveals massive hunting techniques and dives into finding your voice in the woods, setting up, figuring out where big bucks bed, and more. Having been involved in various outdoors businesses, Todd reveals the pivotal part in his hunting career.

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Deer Hunting Secrets White Knuckle Productions – Todd Pringnitz P2

I’m heading out to Iowa with Todd Pringnitz. Todd is the CEO of White Knuckle Productions plus a lot of other interesting endeavors that he’s involved within the whitetail industry. Todd, welcome back to the show. We’ve been talking quite a bit about rattling, noises and luring in big deer. I’m excited to have you on the show.

Thank you very much. This is the time of year that we all wait for. I’ve been out trimming my tree stands and getting everything set up so there’s nothing I enjoy talking about more than hunting big whitetails.

We’ve got a special edition of a warm-up that’ll be part two of this. Todd was talking about sounds and hunting mature deer. Let’s start off with what happened last season and share your success with my audience.

I had the banner year of any hunter could ever imagine. I was fortunate to kill three different seven-year-old whitetails including a 160-class eight-pointer and a 190-class ten typical frame with a kicker. The biggest free-range typical animal I’ve ever seen. It’s an absolute monster. I ended up killing a big six-pointer. He’s been a management buck on my farm, but the trickiest animal I’ve ever hunted. My goal is to always kill the deer that nobody else can kill around me. I’ve got twenty bow hunters within a mile of my place here. These big deer, when they get five to seven years old, that’s when I want to hunt them. I’ve been very successful with it. In the last few years, I’ve killed nine animals that average seven years of age.

I’m doing this in a neighborhood that guys would kill these deer at three or four years old if they had an opportunity. I find dead ones every year that get wounded from different neighbors and different hunters in the neighborhood. In order for these animals to reach that age, they just become and they are different deer. If you expect to use your standard tactics that haven’t necessarily worked on these big mature deer or the way you call and you expect something to magically change and be like, “I’m going to get lucky,” you’re not going to be consistent with that luck. You might get lucky once in a while, but to consistently kill these big ghost bucks, you have to hunt them differently and you have to think about them in a whole different light than you do with normal animals.

Let’s break it down on the three hunts and let’s share with the audience your techniques and how you close the deal.

I always focus on two different things. One is the buck bedding areas. It’s where my bucks are going to be. Usually during the rut, that revolves around where the does are. I use a variety of different food plots. There have been so many different podcasts about food plots. There are so many different opinions on this. What I found is I like to have my grains, some corn, and some standing beans in all my different areas. I like to focus the deer on one particular kill plot. Focus the does because that’s where the bucks are hunting. On average, I have one kill plot per maybe 20 to 30 acres and I focus all of my hunting around that one single kill plot. It can be anywhere between a third of an acre up to an acre. I came to the conclusion here on my farm that if the deer have too many options, it becomes very difficult to pin them down. Instead of having four or five kill plots that a buck could potentially show up on, I want to focus on one. I’ll just be very patient and wait until the time is right before I even start hunting those.

If deer have too many options, it becomes very difficult to pin them down. Share on X

That’s where most guys screw up. They hunt too much too early before these big ones are on their feet. By the time things get good, the bucks already have their number and they’re going to avoid those areas based on the ground scent they’ve been smelling and the different calling they’ve been hearing. With my first kill of the year, it was a big buck and I call it Donnie Brasco. It was a giant eight-pointer. I was set up in a kill plot adjacent right to a doe bedding area where bucks bed. I killed one out of the same bedding area on the opposite side coming out in the evening. This wasn’t a morning hunt so he was swinging back through.

I was sitting at my blind, I called several times, and I’ve seen some different bucks throughout the morning. I was about ready to leave. I have this Tree Thrasher that I invented and I decided, “Before I get out of here, I want to make sure there’s not something standing or bedded close by that I don’t see before I leave.” I gave one last thrashing session, making some noise and some ruckus. I let one grunt out and got bored. I waited five or maybe ten minutes and all of a sudden, here he is. My calling techniques revolve around teasing animals and aggravating them so that they come in a period of time. and they don’t come bombarding in right at the time you call. In the past, anybody who’s rattled enough knows that if you rattle and a whitetail comes in, they are usually coming in either downwind or they’ll come in and hold off at 50 to 80 yards. With a bow hunter, you’ve got to get them close.

I don’t want an animal to come bum-rushing in, stop, look and say, “Where was that animal? Where was that fight?” That doesn’t work. They usually know something is not right and they’re not going to close that distance. I want to tease them and get them in several minutes after I’ve called because then they don’t know exactly where you are. They’re disoriented and that makes them vulnerable. It’s that simple. He ended up coming right in. I shot him at 30 yards and he was a beaut. After that, it took a lot of pressure off so I was able to focus on two different bucks. One was called DL, which was a non-typical giant and another big 190-class that was called Walter Payton. I hunted them throughout the year and played cat and mouse. I snuck into a doe bedding area and I was only eight feet off the ground. I killed them at about ten yards and all self-filming in the middle of the day at 1:00 in the afternoon.

It’s exactly where I would have expected to kill one of my shooters because no human being has ever tried hunting there because it’s super thick cedars. I could only get eight feet off the ground because the trees are not that big and it’s so thick. The higher you get, the more trimming you go so I had a couple of small holes. They are vulnerable in those spots and they don’t expect any human pressure. Those are the spots you can catch them right in the middle of the day. These big bucks, they know when guys are out in the woods. They’ve been listening to you all these years. They’ve been watching you come and go. You always leave in the mid-morning and you always get back in your stand a couple of hours before dark. They figured out when to move around comfortably and safely so you’ve got to change your system to match the bucks, not based on what you want to do or what you think you should do.

How many acres are you hunting though?

I own 63 acres and I lease a couple of additional farms. All total about 400 acres is what I hunt, but I’m usually focused on a 50 or 60-acre section based on what buck I’m hunting. I’ll be very patient when I go in and hunt those animals. Once I know where an animal is at and a buck that I’m after, I’d rather be aggressive and go into those sensitive areas, do some run-and-gun hunting if I don’t have stands in there and be on the move trying to close the distance. I get as close as I can to where they’re bedding. I’d rather take chances at blowing them out and spooking them than not going in after them because if he’s made it to that age, he’s not going to come out in the open. He would have already died. You have to start doing things that you’ve never done before in order to kill these bucks.

I still have to do that year after year gets very creative in my process of doing it, but I don’t think I’ve ever killed more than one buck out of the same setup. I know a lot of guys have stands and they’ve been hunting year after year killing big buck after big buck and that’s fine. If you’re not killing those ghost bucks that you might only get on nighttime trail camera pictures, the ones that you never seem to see is usually there. If you’re getting pictures of them, they’re there. They’re just not moving around in the areas you’re hunting during daylight. If you’re calling and they’re not coming when you’re calling, you need to re-evaluate the way you’re calling because it’s a natural evolution. Everything you do in the field, they will inherit and they will absorb. Sometimes that’s good and sometimes that’s bad.

The hard part with calling is we’re all hunting in areas where we got a lot of hunting pressure, most of us do, with other guys who were hunting around. You’re not just dealing with what you’ve been doing in the woods or your negative impact calling, you’re dealing with what everybody else is doing and that’s what I’ve come to the conclusion. Less experienced hunters generally call more because they think that’s why the successful guys are killing the deer. They’re like, “They must be calling them in as they do on TV.” That’s not the case. You have to step over the line and say, “I’m willing to try something new.” That’s usually when something happens.

You did kill three bucks so I’m assuming you kill it one with your bow, one with a muzzleloader or shotgun. How does that work?

I get three bow tags here in Iowa. I’m only a bowhunter generally. My late muzzleloader season kill was with a gun and it was the first buck I ever killed with a gun out of dozens. It was a buck that I wanted to get rid of on my farm so I was willing to do whatever it took and I finally got a crack at him. My first two were with a bow and the last one was a muzzleloader. I self-film all of my hunts so all of these will be featured on our White Knuckle Productions Web Show. In fact, we just launched the Walter Payton episode and it’s blown up. It’s got tens of thousands of views and people dig it. It’s the craziest reaction you will ever see from a hunter in the field. It’s one of the best whitetail stories ever told.

How do they find that?

You have to start doing things that you’ve never done before in order to kill those bucks. Share on X

You can go to our White Knuckle Productions Facebook page and we have a YouTube channel as well. We’re on YouTube, CarbonTV, our own Facebook pages, and we also host some on our website as well. We have some of the best whitetail stories around because I have the history with these deer. That was a buck I’ve known for a couple of years now. I cast him as a three-year-old on video and several years later, I found one of his sheds when he was a Boone and Crockett caliber 175 plus inch ten-pointer and now it’s about 195 class when he showed up. The whole storyline tells you the exact story of how it happened, all the pictures I got, and what I did in order to get him. It’s still a miracle and he is absolutely monstrous.

Todd has been in various businesses involved in the outdoors. He and some friends started White Knuckle Productions on a DVD. They filmed their hunts and put it out there, but White Knuckle Productions is a little bit different. Todd, let’s jump into White Knuckle Productions.

I honestly started the company because I couldn’t relate to any of the outdoor television that I was watching. It just wasn’t. I couldn’t relate to it and none of my friends could. We were all super serious whitetail hunters and it felt way too much. Everybody was trying to sell something and it was very infomercial-like and a lot of outfitted hunts and that wasn’t us. We wanted to do something more relatable and tell our story in a realistic way and share both the positive and the negatives. At the time, DVDs were judged by how many kills were on there. There was a 30-second intro, the buck comes out, the guy shoots it, goes recovery, do their outfitter plug, onto the next story. There was no background in how they got that hunt done.

We started showing everything from shed hunting, to summer scouting, tree stands trimming, why we’re hunting and where we’re hunting. We were one of the first companies that showed a buck getting wounded and not recovered, which was a buck I killed or shot in Illinois. We do a realistic approach and we don’t reshoot anything. Everything is 100% as it happens. We’ve never reshot a single segment for anything we’ve ever done and it’s different. We tell the stories of some serious whitetail hunters, but it’s also excellent footage, excellent editing, and the production quality is fantastic. It’s not like your mom and pop’s show. It looks very professional and we’re crazy about it.

We started a podcast as well. Podcasts have become incredibly popular. For me, I liked it because it gives you an opportunity to dive in deeper into some of the tactics and strategies. That’s my passion. It’s hunting and killing big whitetails and helping other guys do the same thing. There is not a better feeling in the world than having somebody tell you, “You helped me kill this buck because I followed your instructions or your crazy tactics and it worked.” That’s my new company Tree Thrasher. That’s where it came from was my own necessity. I felt that I needed a different type of call to fit into my calling strategies and systems for these big old deer. I started the Tree Thrasher company. We’re selling them now on TreeThrasher.com and it’s different. I’m not going to go into a big sales plug, but if you watch our videos, you’ll see where we’re coming from.

Let’s share about finding your voice in the woods. The deer knows what deer sound like and sometimes, hunters don’t sound like a deer.

That’s the biggest thing. The realism with grunt calls, rattling antlers, hunt calls, and all the other different products out there. It doesn’t sound realistic without the other noises that are associated with a real live animal. If you’re hunting in areas that have zero hunting pressure and they haven’t been called at by other hunters, a variety of calls, including rattling works well. I’ve rattled in big mature bucks and called them in different ways where I’m hunting now. I would guess most or everybody deals with other hunters and you deal with the mistakes they make in the woods and the calling mistakes they make. Most people just over call so I change my strategy to first not sound like a hunter and sound as realistic as I could. I didn’t have a tool that allowed me to make the sounds bucks make when they’re trying to send a signal to other animals in the area that they’re there and that they’re rowdy.

I was hunting a couple of different big bucks. I was hunting outside their bedding areas. I heard them before I saw them in several different hunts. I could hear an animal and they were making an absolute ruckus. It’s an intentional thrashing tree, breaking branches, trying to be loud as they could. I just put two and two together. That’s a form of communication they’re sending out to all the deer in the area to let them know that they’re there. That’s their territory. If any other bucks are in the area, they’d better watch out. The crazy thing when I found out by observing these bucks is making this noise that attracted all deer. It attracted does, fawns, little bucks, big bucks and whatever.

When an animal hears that audible, loud ruckus, it’s an intentional noise they’re putting out there which lets all the other animals know, “It’s safe over here.” The deer is not going to make an intentional noise if it’s not feeling 100% safe. It just creates a security blanket. It turns into a magnet and a deer wants to be around that. I try to figure out how can I duplicate that in my own calling methods. I used to pull three branches up in the tree and break branches while I was calling, but I stopped rattling. I only used one grunt every 20 to 30 minutes and found that less is more in calling. When it comes to calling these big bucks, you can’t call like other hunters so that eliminates 90% of your calling technique right now. With a grunt call, you’re restricted especially if you’re in the timber, it’s quiet. There’s no noise in the timber and you can hear a mouse walk across the leaves. If you’re up there grunting, rattling and there are no other noises, any animal that’s within hearing distance knows you’re a hunter. You just told them where you’re at. You might as well bring a megaphone up and yell at the top of your lungs or sing the national anthem or something. That’s how you’re communicating with those animals.

I started calling uniquely along with my grunt. Now I use my Tree Thrasher. I can make the simple sound of an animal walking with a couple of branch breaks. It makes a branch break noise, leaf noises, and you can mix it up and rub the tool itself on the tree to create the sound of rubbing and do all those sounds together. I like to do little 20 to 30 seconds sessions imitating a buck making a scrape or thrashing a tree. I’ll either lead that thrashing session with a single grunt or I’ll follow it with a single grunt 30 seconds to a minute after my thrashing sessions or before. I don’t want to do too much in a short period of time because that’s unnatural. If you imagine or look at the way bucks make scrapes, rub trees or thrash trees, they usually don’t feel comfortable making a loud noise for more than about ten to fifteen seconds. They take a pause. They stop. They rotate their ears. They listen to other animals. They look with their eyes. They feel comfortable like, “Everything is safe. I haven’t been snuck up on.” They’ll go back to making noise.

Everything you do in the field, a deer will inherit and absorb, and sometimes that’s either good or bad. Share on X

In your own calling methods, you have to duplicate that and try to mimic reality. That’s what I do in all my calling with my thrashing sessions. I’ll make the rubbing sound for five to ten seconds and stop, pause, wait. I’ll make some leaf noises and maybe a branch break and stop and wait. That is realistic. If you go bananas and use the thing for two straight minutes, it’s not realistic. That’s not what deer do. Stop imitating the hunters you’ve been watching on television and start imitating the real animals. It might not be as fancy and you might not get to do it as often. I like to kill big bucks and I like to see big bucks. I’m going to do everything I can to create a situation that I can kill one of those big deer. I’m not going out there to call, I’m going out there to kill.

We talked about finding your own voice. Hunting in Colorado with everybody, they do what they hear on DVDs or TV. We’ve educated the elk in our basins because you only can hunt so much territory. I don’t care if you hike ten miles a day for five days. It’s 50 miles. You only can hit so many basins. The elk you work is in those basins. I bugle only as a locator bugle at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning and all the rest is mews and estrus calls. You have spent so much time in the woods and this is what shocked me. You’ve only heard one dominant buck fight. Tell me about that.

My cameraman and I were hunting in a spot I call the sanctuary. It’s twenty acres of absolute whitetail glory. It is awesome. At the time, I didn’t know how to hunt. I was going right in the middle of this thing and spooking a lot of animals with wind and things. We were sitting in the middle of the sanctuary. We watched a beautiful three-year-old come in and bed by us for about 60 yards or something that I called the Tuna Fish buck. We were having a beautiful morning and all of a sudden, a ruckus broke out adjacent to us in the thick timber. I couldn’t see it and honestly, I thought my neighbor was driving an ATV or a truck through the woods. All I heard was thrashing, slamming trees, the sounds of hooves pounding on the earth, and breaking branches. Occasionally, you could hear the click of antlers. I looked at my cameraman and I was like, “Those are two bucks fighting.”

At the same time, I figured out what was going on. The Tuna Fish buck jumps up out of his bed and goes running in that direction. We got all that on video and it’s beautiful. The deer came running from all directions. I had never seen anything like it. The little bucks, does and fawns from all directions were heading towards that fight. If you could create that sound up in a tree, you could call in some mega bucks. I know guys who team up and have one guy on the ground with rattling antlers smashing the ground and the other hunters are above in the tree. Those are things we’ve all been doing as hunters trying to duplicate those sounds. Until the Tree Thrasher came out, there was not a way to duplicate a lot of that noise. It’s very rare to hear those fights so as soon as you rattle up in a tree stand or out of a ground blind, every animal within hearing distance, it immediately throws up a red flag and says, “Unless I hear the other sounds, there is no way it’s a real fight.” That’s instinctually embedded in their brain.

If most whitetail hunters would leave their antlers at home, they’d see a lot more deer. The one thing I want to mention and this is not a dig on the hunting industry or anybody who hunts in the hunting industry is that a lot of the hunts we watch on television are outfitted hunts. These guys are going into somebody else’s property and they have five days. In those five days, they’re going to be as aggressive as they want and as they can. They’re doing a lot of calling because they’re trying to produce a television show. They also don’t have to deal with the repercussions of their calling and their education on that property most likely ever again. They’re there for five days and once they leave, they don’t care.

I’m hunting the same property year after year, so I don’t want to educate the deer now that’s going to hurt me next time. Most guys that are in the same boat that I am, they’re hunting in the same farms. You have to be extra careful not to educate those animals now. If you’ve got your rattling antlers and you’re at the end of a morning sit and it’s beautiful November, “There’s got to be a buck around here.” It’s something instinctively. It’s in guys. There is nothing like banging antlers together. It’s fun. It’s a good time and it feels right. When you’re bored and called out of your mind, you want to make things happen, so you start banging antlers together and you don’t call those old mature bucks in. You’ve got to look at it from the standpoint that it’s not that you don’t have anything to lose. It’s that you’re going to educate the deer for next time, especially if you’re going to be hunting in the same area and the same stands.

Those deer, they hear that repeated over and over again year after year and slowly but surely, they will change their patterns around your spots. If they would quit rattling and quit bringing their antlers in the tree, they’d start seeing some of those big mature deer that they might only get nighttime pictures of and that’s the same case on my farm. That big 190 that I killed. I hunted him for three years and I never got a single daylight picture during the hunting season of him ever in three years. I have twenty cameras out. I knew exactly where he lived. He lived there and survived there for a reason. You’ve just got to consider what it takes for the ghost buck in your area, the bucks that nobody seems to be able to kill. Consider how many times they’ve heard you call, your neighbors call, how many times they’ve been called at and been able to pop a guy up in a tree or be able to visually see a guy in a tree and associate that noise to a hunter. It’s been ingrained in them. If they made it to that ripe age of five years old or six years old depending on your area, that might be a three-year-old or two-year-old buck, they are educated. They know what’s going on, so you’ve got to start looking at your calling from a different perspective.

How many times do you sit in a set?

It depends. The first time it is deadly. I’ve tried to create a situation where I’m here on my farm, I have about 30 hang-on set before the season and about six to eight ground blinds. I like to bounce around to where I’m hunting. I can recreate that first time in experience every single hunt, but I do hunt stands more than once. A lot of times, I’ll go into my evening sets. I’ll get everything set up, a hunt that evening, go in in the afternoon or whatever, and leave everything in the tree including my bow unless it’s going to rain or unless it’s super freezing cold where it freezes. I’ll leave everything in the tree that doesn’t smell and come out of the tree. In the morning when I go up, I can sneak into that set and get first light crack without making a lot of noise and without setting up. I got to set up, I bring two Ozonics, a camera arm, a secondary camera, and my bow. By the time it’s all said and done, I look like a gall-dang that’s going to an arts and crafts festival. I got stuff up in the tree hanging from everything you can imagine.

Once I’m set up in that spot, I want to be able to sneak in the next morning and hunt. Most of the time, I’ll plan two hunts. If you have a good food plot set or a good bedding area set, I’ll plan on getting two good hunts out of each set per year. One is usually in late October or early November and one mid-November. I like to hunt them about a week or two apart. Now I’m hunting individual animals. If I’m after one buck, that dictates where I hunt and most of the time, I’m usually hunting secondary properties, so I don’t put too much pressure on. I’m hunting spots just to be out there and see what kind of footage we can get. When I’m hunting one individual deer, everything goes out the window based on what I see for intel. I have all these stands that guys think I’m freaking nuts and sometimes I do it when I have to trim them all. I’ll get on a buck and I’ll be out running, gunning and hanging stand every single hunt until I am on that deer. Usually, I’ll either kill him or blow him out of the area. I get very aggressive when I need to be. Otherwise, I’m very conservative. I always try to let them come to me. If that doesn’t work, you have to go to them.

If most whitetail hunters would leave their antlers at home, they’d probably see a lot more deer. Share on X

How many hit list bucks do you have that you’re targeting this time? We’re way past deer hunting 101. We’re past our Master’s degree. Once you zero in on one buck and make that your buck, he knows you’re there, he knows who you are, and he knows where you’re setting up. Everything is in his favor. How do you beat that?

A lot of it is about access. That word is thrown around a lot. I would never say I’m an expert because the deer are the experts. They school me every year, some of them do, no matter what. I’ve become more perceptive to how I’ve been coming and going out of my spots, figuring out where big bucks bed, and why they bed there. Here’s what I’ve learned in the last few years hunting these big individual bucks. Usually, the big dominant bucks are going to be living among the highest concentration of does or in a doe bedding area where most of the does are at so that they have more deer to breed with traveling the least amount. The big dominant bucks that I’m hunting, they rule the roost. They’re big 300 pounders and they have big racks on their heads. When they’re in an area, they’ll kick out of anything in there. Those bucks move into a territory and they almost set up shop. It’s like a guy going to his favorite bar.

If all of a sudden another guy shows up and starts talking to his girlfriend, a ruckus ensues. It’s the same thing. This is their home. This is where they’re going to breed. They only have one time of year to breed these does. Like us, we only have one time a year to kill them. They’ve got a period of time and they have to make it work. When they move into those core areas, it takes quite a bit to drive them completely out. I’ve been in the bedding areas at the base of my tree and that buck busts me just about to climb up. When they snort, I can almost tell the difference like, “That’s him.” You can hear the frustration in their snorts because they’re like, “Get out of here. This is my spot. You’re ruining the mojo I got going in here.” You’re ruining their game plan, which is to breed the does. If you blow him out once, he’s going to be right back in there because he’s there to breed the does. He’ll set up differently and he’ll set up looking in the direction that he busted you the first time.

What I’ve noticed, Bruce, is where these bucks are bedded during the rut is usually an elevated position adjacent to thick cover, but they’re better than relatively open areas. They want to be able to see not only the humans and the predators coming and going, but they also want to be able to see that does are coming and going. They get up out of their bed, be able to go check a doe and lay right back down all in the security of their bedding area. It’s usually a little bit more open than you would expect as far as timber wise. You can see a distance. What I’ve come to the realization is around by me, there are a lot of access roads to get into these farms. With this farm country, when the crops are standing anywhere else, you’ve got logging roads and you’ve got your access trails. The spots where most humans use, it turns out that a lot of deer use it too.

The does are using those main trails walking up and down the roads. They use your cleared paths and your farm roads. It turns out that bucks are bedded a lot above a lot of those, even if there are a lot of human activities because they can monitor the hunters and the deer in one spot. If they can see you coming, that’s half the battle. You’ve got to start thinking about it as if you are a sniper and you are there trying to kill the enemy. If you make a mistake, you’ll die. The spots that you would position yourself in to hunt humans is very similar to whitetails.

I saw a visual picture of the farm I hunt and how I get in and how I get out to one stand. He’s sitting above me. The big bucks, the one I’m hunting, he knows exactly when I crawl in my stand. There’s no question about it because he’s above me. As a sniper, I want to be above him.

They’ve got you patterned, essentially. Maybe it’s not even just you, it’s your neighbors and all of the other deer or those have been using maybe that little farm road or whatever. You can use that against them because now you know, “This is what I’ve been doing.” I’ve been trying to think how do I get in the back door. A lot of my best stands have two or three different access points where I can come in from a variety of different directions based on whether it’s an evening hunt or a morning hunt, but then also to be able to adapt throughout the season. I’m going to give you one example. Katie’s buck is a big seven-year-old that we’ve been trying to kill since he was three because he was only a six-pointer. We were trying to get him off the farm so he wasn’t breeding and reproducing. We tried to kill that sucker and I could never figure him out every single time. I’d get pictures of him during the daylight in a spot and be like, “This is the night we’re going to go and kill him.” When we go on and hunt that food plot, he wouldn’t show.

Over the years, we came to the conclusion that the joker is bedded right behind my neighbor’s house within 100 yards and he was watching us come and go across this dike. There’s this farm road that we walk up to get to one of our fields and there’s a dam there adjacent to a pond. It’s the only easy spot to access. Right in my backyard, I’m hunting these plots. I’ve got beautiful trails. I will literally go into the stand in a different way and try to eliminate his possibility of even visually being able to see me coming into that stand. If you’re hunting an individual deer, sometimes that means you’re going to have to blow deer out of certain areas to get into that spot from the back door. If my goal is to kill that one buck, I don’t care about any other animal. I only care about that one buck and not blowing him out.

Access is critical. Just change the way you go into your stands each and every time if you can, even a little bit. That’s what bucks do. Big mature bucks don’t take the same trail every time. If they come out into a field, they take a different path every night. They are always doing something a little bit different and that’s how they’ve survived. If they did the same thing over and over again, they would have died as a three-year-old or a four-year-old. If they make it to five or six, they’re already that weird animal. A lot of the time, they’re random so you have to duplicate that same randomness in your own hunting, especially if you’re hunting the same farm over and over again. I live on my farm. I’m out there almost every day doing something for several years now. If I can find a different way of approaching and doing things, so can you. You’ve just got to be creative.

I’m playing the video of different farm roads. We’ve had it timbered. We got a lot of access points. I’m thinking, “To get to the same stand, I have to come down from above him because he’s watching me come into that stand every single time that I hunt him.”

A deer is not going to make an intentional noise if it’s not feeling 100% safe. Share on X

I also have some good friends who hunt around here and who are as nutty so we always compare ideas. I’m always willing to learn. I’ve always been a sponge with everything I do. Knowledge is power. The hard part for most whitetail hunters is where you believe these big mature bucks must be living is in the deepest spots to get to, the toughest spots to get to, and the thickest territory. It’s programmed into us like, “To kill that big buck, I’m going to have to walk twice as far and work twice as hard.” If that’s where you’ve been hunting and that’s where everybody else is hunting, that buck is not going to be there. He’s going to be in the spot he’s never been hunted.

Years ago, I started coming to these realizations. If I wasn’t seeing the bucks I was after, I’d take a step back and say, “Where have I not hunted yet where I’ve seen the most does?” That’s the next place I want to be. That’s when I start hunting does because that’s where the bucks are going to be. You’ve just got to find those strange pockets of areas where they’ve not been hunted. That’s when it’s tough because most of the time, there are not good trees there. Most of the time, you can’t get into those spots because of access. Most of the time, it’s impossible. That’s where I’m very aggressive where I’ll hunt six feet off the ground or eight feet off the ground if that’s what it takes. I’ll do whatever it takes to be in those spots and there’s no such thing as too crazy. The craziest spots I’ve ever hunted are the spots where you look around and be like, “I’ve got to be freaking nuts to be sitting up here.” That’s where you’re going to kill them.

I’ve been hunting on Eddie and Lester’s farm since 1966. We’ve taken two booners off it. It’s one that Eddie took off and it was out of his junkyard. It was ravine where he threw things like dishwashers, washers, dryers, parts and old equipment. At the head of that, he’s in his tractor, going to go spread some manure, and he looks down and sees some tines. He slowly eases off the clutch and goes around the corner. He was rifle hunting. He gets out of the tractor, comes back behind the manure, stands up, looks up and he yelled, “Buck.” The buck threw his head up and he shot him. This is the place he goes by ten times a day. It’s at a header ravine that they’ve filled in over the years to keep it from washing away and the buck was in the junkyard.

Here’s another great tip and it’s something that goes against what you would imagine. A lot of times we focus on sign. When you get into your stand and there are 500 shredded trees around, you’re in the right spot. That’s a killer spot. Sometimes that’s not always the case. Sometimes where I’ve killed the big ones, there hasn’t been very many deer at all because some bucks, as they get older especially if you think about an old Labrador, an old dog or your grandpa, they don’t want to be around a bunch of young kids yelling, screaming and making noise. It scares them and it keeps them alert. They’re more of a secluded type of animal or they live a life of seclusion the whole year, except during the rut. They’ll move into different areas.

Don’t hunt only based on the rubs, scrapes and stuff you’re finding. A lot of times, I will just follow my gut like, “This is a spot I think no one has hunted before.” If you’ve been hunting at mid-season or you’ve been hunting on a farm throughout the season a little bit, you’ve got to maybe break away from that sign. If you’ve hunted it more than once and you didn’t see him there, he has your number and smelled your ground scent as you’ve come and gone. Sometimes you’ve got to hunt the spots even if the sign isn’t there and even if there is not a lot of deer there. Those are spots I’ll kill big bucks. They’re usually not taking the trails that everything else takes. They’re taking weird paths through different areas or the same areas, but they’re always doing something different.

A lot of times you’re forced to get off from the main trails and the main areas where most of the deer is because that’s not where those big ones are going to walk through. Most likely, it’s downwind of it if they can be or elevated above it where they can watch below them. We put a lot of emphasis on their nose and their scent, but their vision is a huge factor and their ability to survive as well. You’ve got to consider it from their standpoint. When you’re laying in bed at night, we all have covers on. Even if it’s warm, there’s something about the comfort of even having a sheet over your body or whatever on your sleep. I don’t know what it is. It’s human nature, but the deer is the same way.

If you lived out in that woods every day of your life and you were laying down there, you’re going to pick the spots where you can relax, where you can take a nap, and where you can get a little bit of sleep. It’s all about stress. They don’t want to be around that stress so they’re going to be bedded in those spots where they feel comfortable, where they feel relaxed, where they can take a nap. You’ve got to consider all the factors. They’ve got to have the scent in their favor. They’ve got to have a visual advantage. Usually, it’s a height elevation advantage where they can see a distance. If it’s not that situation, other deer like to be in a thick cover where they can hear something coming from a mile away. There’s a bunch of different varieties for certain bucks and other areas, but that’s the way you’ve got to look at it. If you haven’t killed the buck you’re after and you know he’s around on your farmland, stop doing what you’re doing and start changing it up that will put the odds in your favor.

It’s amazing when you talk to people who got their PhD and getting busted and getting beat by deer. Todd shared that he doesn’t win all the time. He’s hunted one deer, Walter Payton. How many years did you hunt him?

I hunted him for five years. Here’s a great story about Walter Payton. Trail cameras are another huge source of information, not just for getting pictures. You learn a lot about an animal through their travel patterns, what direction they’re coming from, what direction they’re going to, and what time of day it is, etc. I was in hunting Walter Payton on a Halloween night and he came in on a field edge about 100 yards away. I put my binoculars and I looked at him and I instantly thought, “We have a goofy three-year-old running around our property that has a third main beam.” I looked and he was standing against the brown corn so I could see his rack. He’s a 190-inch so you’d think you’d see it. I looked and be like, “There’s that three-year-old.” I threw one grunt at him. I should have let him go. If I had known it was him, I would’ve let him make his first move. I threw a grunt at him, he turned, he came right to the bottom of this ravine, but it was so thick I still couldn’t see him. He came to that ravine, he stopped, looked and listened.

He couldn’t see that buck up there so he knew like, “Something doesn’t seem right.” He turned and started moving away and as soon as I saw him, I was like, “It’s Walter Payton.” He’s a monster. I got some footage of him and it’s all in our video. That night, I have pictures of him. After that hunt, I never saw him. He boogeyed out of there. He knew something wasn’t right. That night, I had a trail camera on an adjacent scrape where I always got pictures of him. It’s a big community scraped and it’s the spot. I have pictures of him coming up to that scrape, looking at my trail camera in the tree, freaking out a little bit, coming back looking at it, walking out into the kill plot, and catching my ground scent. I have pictures of him following my ground scent into the tree right to my tree. After that night, he disappeared for thirteen days and never came back.

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You killed him. Is that correct?

He had my number in that spot. I hunted in that spot so that I would drive him out to a different area and I ended up killing him in a different area. With Walter, I had to use a technique I’ve never used before, which is being extremely creative. I knew where that deer was living and calling home. It was on an adjacent piece of property that I could not have access to. He’s a farmer and I’m friends with him. He has other guys who hunt, but I knew where that buck was and I had gotten to the point where I knew I had to do something, otherwise, I wasn’t going to kill him. I called up the landowner and said, “I was wondering if there’s any way you might let me go in and hunt this buck. I’m hunting the biggest buck I’ve ever seen. I know where he’s living right on your farm and I want to hunt one small area.” There are some other guys who hunt right in that same area, but I know how they have to come in to access the farm. He said, “Not right now.” As soon as I realized, “I’m not going to be able to hunt there,” I knew I needed to let somebody else do the work for me and drive that deer out of that spot.

I told him, “He’s living right down at the creek.” I described exactly where it is. It was very easy to describe to him. I knew that there were a couple of ladder stands that these guys hunt him. He has a farmhand that hunts with a couple of friends, but they’re the traditional hunters. They hunt out of the same ladder stands year after year. They had a couple of good ones in the right area, but they couldn’t access it except from one direction, the top of this guy’s farm. In order to get to those stands, they’re going to blow everything out. I knew that most of those guys were going to be in their calling and making a ruckus. I told that guy exactly where that big buck was and I told that was the biggest buck I’d seen in years. A few days later, I killed that buck in an adjacent bedding area. I’m willing to bet that he went and told his guys who were hunting there that’s what I plan on him doing. They went in there and they blew that deer out of there and I was able to kill him 500 yards away.

Todd is not just hunting. He’s thinking and saying, “what’s my strategy? What are all the connecting points and all the things that enter into it?” I’ve got a friend, Jeff Hemmers. He has 40 acres outside of La Crosse, Wisconsin on the Mississippi River Trempealeau County. He and his daughter hunt three days a year and kill mature deer in those few days. They’ve figured it out and they’re surrounded by people that know there are big bucks there. They can’t hunt them and he lets them push everything off their land and his land becomes a sanctuary because he’s in and out. He’s a ghost himself, I believe.

Whether I’m doing a seminar or when I’m talking about these goals, is your goal to kill one of these big bucks or is your goal to spend two straight weeks out hunting? If you’re hunting a small piece of property, those two things don’t coincide for you to be able to kill that buck.

Unless you just want to be in the woods hunting, which is fine.

The hard thing to come to terms with this is here on my own 63 acres farm, I only hunt it maybe six to eight times the entire hunting season for three months. It’s right in my backyard. I look at it every day. That’s the discipline you’ve got to have. If you want to be out in the woods hunting every day, just hunt more ground and find other areas where you can go put pressure on and bust your chops. Learn your process of how you’re setting your stands, running and gunning. Do it in areas that aren’t critical. Save your best hunts or your best kill days for those farms where you know the deer are and they haven’t been touched. That’s the other thing. In the job that I have in killing all these big bucks and putting that out there with all my neighbors, they catch on at some point. My philosophy is the same way. Let them pound the crap out of their farm too early because they’re afraid I’m going to kill those bucks. They do all the work for me. They drive those deer into those sanctuaries that I have not hunted so when the first time I go in there, they’re stacked in cordwood.

What are your best dates coming up?

Whether it’s a very critical thing to me, October 31st and November 15th are my two favorite days. I’m going to tell you why. October 31st has been consistently about the first time, sometimes it can be earlier. It can be the 28th, 29th or the 30th, but the 31st consistently has been a day where the big mature bucks will be on their feet for one of the first times of the year looking for hot does. Right around the 31st is when the first does will come into heat. Quite honestly, these big mature bucks, they’ve been around the block long enough where they don’t waste their time chasing deer that aren’t ready. They wait until the time is right just like you have to hunt them.

October 31st is a vulnerable time for a buck because they want to find that first doe in their area. That’s when they’re most killable. I saw Walter Payton on the 31st. I went in on a whim without any intel. My gut told me, “My best opportunity is going to be tonight.” I didn’t check trail cameras. I just followed my gut and my experience, knowing where they’re going to want to be based on previous years. The 15th of November is my second favorite day. I would take November 15th over any other day of the year because, generally speaking, most does come into heat the first week of November through about the tenth, eleventh or take twelfth. That’s when most bucks will breed their core area does. It’s the spots where they call home and where they hang out. All the does that are in that area, they’re going to hang out in that area for a week or so.

The first week of November is the worst time to hunt a single big mature buck, in my opinion. I’ve killed them on every day of November, but they’re hooked up with a hot doe during that whole first week. They’ll go from doe to doe without having to go anywhere because they’re all in that bedding area where they’re calling home for that time period. Around the 15th of November is when I start to see the big buck start leaving those small core areas and start bouncing around and going from the doe bedding area. They go from point A to point B in the easiest, quickest and fastest route to get to those spots in whatever they feel most confident. A lot of times, it’s midday movement. That November 15th is so special because bucks have been having sex for the last week or two. They’re horned up and they’re tired. They’re out of their minds and more vulnerable than they will be at any other point of the year.

You can find that with a kill plot or a green plot where they’re starving at this point because they’ve been doing nothing but humping and chasing for a week or two. If you put all those things together, November 15th can be gold because you’re catching them where they’re moving more than they normally do throughout the entire year. They’re more vulnerable when they’re out of their core areas because they don’t know every specific tree and every hunting pattern in that area. They’re going to new territories so that’s when they’re vulnerable. You’ve got to be in those doe bedding areas around that time. Most of my best hunts are in that time period. If you think about it, by then, most guys are out of vacation or tagged out. That’s when the big ones are going to move.

You’ve got to be patient with your tags. If you want to kill those big ones, you’ve got to be willing to eat those tags in order to get there. Over the years, I’ve eaten dozens and dozens of Iowa tags and I usually only kill one buck a year. Sometimes I’ve had luck where I’ve killed two and the last time I killed three, which is uncommon. My ability to kill these big bucks first starts with my ability to pass nice young deer. For me, I film it all so I get to kill them with my camera. It makes it more fun because I don’t have to kill that deer at three or four-year-old when I’ve got other bigger and more mature deer running around, but I can film them and have that encounter with them. To me, that’s as much fun as killing them. Maybe it’s not as much, but it’s exciting and it’s so fun to be able to document.

What’s one big thing you know now that you wish you knew a few years ago that would have made you a better deer hunter?

The number one factor is you’ve got to hunt where these big bucks live if you’re going to kill them. I hunted in Michigan for sixteen years and killed the biggest buck ever. It was about 125 type four-year-old and a beautiful eight-pointer. It’s still one of my most treasured trophies because it was one of the biggest deer I’d ever seen in Michigan. To give you an example, I hunted up there for sixteen years and I only killed a couple of rack bucks in all that time. In the last season, I hunted in Michigan and passed 46 bucks from October 1st to November 15th. All dinks are one-year-olds and two-year-old. That’s what was around so I passed a lot of deer. My buddy invited me to Illinois in 2003 to go hunt a farm. It was a random thing. He met a guy fishing on a river in Michigan and they ended up exchanging numbers.

We went down to Effingham, Illinois on a hunt and started hunting this farm. It wasn’t that good. I had found a decent spot within a day or two. I had another guy that was with me within 100 yards of my stand. I deal with the same stuff everybody else deals with. It rained one morning and we didn’t go out. We were on our way to the grocery store and we were driving just the country in Illinois and looked on this field edge. There was a big buck working a scrape a couple of hundred yards off the road. For Michigan boys, this was a big deer. It was 130 inches eight pointer. We went into town and the whole time it was eating at me. I was like, “I did not drive seven or eight hours down to Illinois and spend all this money to sit and not have an opportunity or not try to make something happen.” It drove me nuts. I told my buddy, “We’re going to stop and talk to whoever lives at that house on our way back.” We stopped and talked to this lady. She was an anti-hunter, but she said, “It’s not up to me, I don’t own the property. It’s this gentleman and he lives in an adjacent town.”

She gives me directions like, “You’ve got to take a left over here, you’ve got to go down about eight miles, and then take a right. When you get to the town, look for the big corn silos. Behind there, there are two houses. You’ve got to go to this one.” By the time we even got to this guy’s house, I didn’t even know if I was in the right spot. My buddy who was with me is older than me and he was too chicken to go talk to the guy. Against all instincts, heart pounding and adrenaline pumping, I went and knocked on this dude’s door. The guy turned out to be the nicest guy in the world. I told him, “We’re from Michigan and we’re down here until the end of the week. We saw a nice buck on your farm over there and we didn’t know if we could hunt.” He said, “I’ve got a father and son that hunt there. How long are you going to be in town?” I said, “Just until Friday.” He said, “Don’t hunt our other stands, but you can hunt there until Friday.”

We went there that night, did a quick scout and hung a stand. I shot a 130-inch eight-pointer that we saw working that field edge that next morning. My buddy shot its twin brother the following night about 100 yards away and it was like, “If you want something, you have to go and get it.” To this day, it was the pivotal part in my hunting career when I realize that to kill these bucks, you’ve got to be on the right farm. What do I have to do to get on the right farm? That’s when I totally went completely crazy in my world of whitetails and ended up moving to Iowa for that reason to relocate where I could put myself in the bedroom of these big bucks. That’s half the battle.

In my belief, it’s 80% of the battle because once you get into elk, they’re relatively easy to hunt if you get into them. They only live in 10% of 10,000 acres at any time and you have to get there where they haven’t been pressured. You’ve got all these odds stacking up and I think Colorado archery runs about a 17% success ratio so figure it out. It’s no different than the first time I came out to Colorado and hunted elk. We got into elk, I had one shot, I missed but I learned a lot about whitetail hunting by elk hunting because they’re very similar animals. Bulls they need cows. Bucks need does. They don’t hear them up, but there is vocalization and there are so many similarities. Somebody like you that’s dedicated their life to being a whitetail hunter, the knowledge that you have is incredible and that you’re willing to share. Tell people again how to get to White Knuckle Productions.

Everything is run through our Facebook page, White Knuckle Productions on Facebook. You can also go to my personal page. It’s a professional page called Todd Pringnitz. I’ve been maxed out on Facebook friends for a long time. That’s where you can follow me personally. With the Tree Thrasher thing, we’ve got a Facebook page there but all three are connected. We always keep everything updated. If you want to see a great whitetail story, check out the hunt. It’s called Sweetness. I named this giant whitetail after one of my favorite football heroes growing up, Walter Payton, who was my hero when I was a kid. This buck is the most magnificent and majestic animal I’d ever seen in the woods over all these years. When I killed him, I couldn’t believe it and I still can’t. If you think you’ve seen somebody freak out before, you’ve seen nothing until you see me recover this deer because it was a miracle that it all happened. I was so fortunate to be able to capture it all on the video to be able to share it.

I’ve got such a great editor named Kyle Reinders that lives in Michigan still and he did the editing for our video. It’s gotten quite a bit of attention and quite a few people are saying it’s the best whitetail story they’ve ever watched. I would have to agree. I’ve watched a bunch of them. It has everything. It’s just a lot of time and energy and a lot of sacrifices over the years. You don’t get on these big deer and kill them year after year unless you put in the off-season time. That’s where I’m fortunate to live where I hunt, but I literally had to make that happen. I had to move from Michigan, leave everything behind, and go after it. I didn’t know anything else. That’s the way I’m wired. I don’t regret anything at all over the years. You’ve got to keep moving forward, even if you’re moving the wrong direction. If you’re not moving, you’re not going to change and you’re not going to learn. Learn to adapt. Never think you have the number of a big buck because I’ve been schooled so many times and that’s what keeps me coming back.

Thank you so much for being a return guest on Whitetail Rendezvous. I can’t wait to catch up. I hope we don’t have to wait a year and a half. I’d like to invite you to be on some time and tell us about your hunts. It’s a joy to listen to you and hopefully one of these days, I can be a guest on White Knuckle’s podcast.

I apologize to the world, including my family and everything else. The last few months, getting Tree Thrasher ready has been nonstop. I’ve been overwhelmed with work for so long. I was a guest on our own show for the first time in five months. Don’t feel bad. We rerecorded one and a couple of videos because I finally had pulled my head out of the clouds and got Tree Thrasher in production and rocking and rolling. It takes a lot of effort and time to get these new products and stuff out on the market. Now we’re working on all the videos, media and stuff. It’s a lot of fun. I’m very lucky to be able to do what I do. I’d love to share more with you, Bruce. I appreciate you letting me come on.

Thank you.

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