Hunting is a very exciting sport to be in right now. Art Helin of Own The Season shares the exciting hunting trips he’s been on in Wisconsin and Dakota. A veteran outdoorsman, Art Helin speaks on how hunters can get together and help each other preserve the hunting tradition, as well as the role of technology, particularly trail cameras, on the advancement of hunting. He also shares how parents can instill in their child the love of the outdoors. Society has become so busy that parents don’t have the time to spend time with their children out in nature, which contributes to the dwindling number of next-generation hunters.
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Premier Episode: Introducing Own The Season TV – Art Helin
We’re here to talk to Art Helin to talk about my hunt. He’s with Art Helin Outdoors and he’s also got a TV show on MOTV, Own The Season. Art, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Bruce. Thanks for having me.
I’m just excited to get back in the mountains as you are. I know you’ve got a bunch of hunts and that’s what we’re going to talk about. A number of states that you hunt on, a lot of other people are going to hunt. Where’s the first place you’re going to hunt?
The first place I’m going to hunt is here in Wisconsin. I started with bears first. Our bear forecast here we’ve got a lot of good bears and big bears in the northern part of the state. They’re moving farther south. I’m down in the southwest corner. Every year, somebody within this area would get one on trail camera and they all freak out. Bears get a bad rep. Everybody thinks that a bear wants to eat them. They’re not a grizzly bear. Grizzly bears don’t always want to eat you. They’re defending something or doing something to protect their territory. I interact with bears a lot. I do a lot of wildlife photography work and so I’ve been doing a lot of bear photos throughout the spring and doing a lot of different things. I’ve been doing it for twenty plus years with bears. They just get a bad rep but they’re neat animals. I’m going to start here in Wisconsin. I’m heading up to Northern Wisconsin where I’m hunting to finish hanging stands and put up a ground blind. I’m going to have one spot where we can’t put treestands and I’m going to hunt out of a ground blind.
That’s ballsy. I don’t care how nice bears are. It’s getting dark. They’re coming in and you’re hunting over bait, right?
Yeah. I’ve done it for so long and people look at me and they’re like, “That’s a little crazy.” Guys that are around bears a lot will understand this. I’ve had it before when I’m out with people. I can verify these stories. Bears would come up and they’re curious so they’ll come up to the ground blind and try to stick their nose through that hole to see what’s in there. A lot of times you try to scare them and they just won’t run away so you’ve got to either take an arrow and poke him in the nose if they’re not big enough that you want to shoot them. Take a stick and hit them or crack them with an arrow across the nose.
Most times they’re small bears that are curious like that so they’re going to run off and stare at the blind again and usually leave you alone. Big bears, I’ll carry some either bear spray with me or sometimes I’ll have to carry a sidearm. If I know there are big crabby bears in there, that’s a whole different ballgame but most of the time, bears are just curious. They want to know what’s going on. Once you invade their territory and you do things, they’re protecting it. Most of the time they’re going to run away from you. If there’s a reason for them to stand their ground and protect it, back up, wave your hands, look as big as you can. Don’t run away.
When you run away, they’re coming after you but if you just back up and start yelling at them and back out of there nice and slow, more than likely they’re not going to bother you. They keep doing their thing and walk away. Grizzly bears, that’s a little different story. We went up to Banff, Canada, all these places and we got there, they’re selling these little bells that you’re supposed to wear if you’re not carrying bear spray. They shut down all these trails and they say if you don’t have a group of four or six people, you can’t walk these trails because there are too many grizzly bears in the area and stuff. We always giggle about the little bells that are on there.
That way when you buy those bells, they write numbers on them. They don’t but we’d always make fun of it and say they write a number on it. That way if that tourist goes missing and they find those bells in the bear scat, they can identify which one was eaten. That was always our big joke about the bells. What are they really going to do for you? I don’t know. They just make the bears aware that you’re in the area. I think they get a bad rep, but they’re cool animals. That’s where I’m going to start is here. I was then going to Kansas. Michelle and I both drew Kansas State this year for archery and we were going to go there but I have some prior commitments on the calendar so I can’t get down there right away.
We’re going to start here in Wisconsin for archery. We’ll hunt here. As soon as my schedule clears, we’re going to head to Kansas. We’re going to hunt some of that for a little bit, come home through October, hunt here. Once in November, if we haven’t done any good in Kansas, then we’ll have Wisconsin, Kansas and South Dakota to try to get whitetails. I have Wisconsin, Kansas and South Dakota. She has Wisconsin and Kansas because then she has a mountain lion tag for Wyoming for late December. It will keep us busy.
Let’s start with traveling to Kansas. How are you monitoring the activity down there? That’s 500, 600 miles, ten hours from where we are in Wisconsin, isn’t it?
It’s about nine hours to where we hunt and I have some friends that live down there and so they work on the farm that we all have together and that we hunt. They monitor for us. We have cameras. I was down there and we hung all of our stands down there. Once we got done hanging our stands, then we went out and put up cameras. We put eight cameras around. A couple of them are cellular cameras. We monitor what’s going on all the time through the cellular cameras, but the ones that aren’t cellular cameras, he’s picking up once every ten days and emailing me pictures and say, “What do you think of this one?” We see some good deer down there right now. There are some nice bucks but a couple of pretty good deer that we look at targeting.
What is your target buck during the year? I know we’ve talked about this a number of times, but I want to share with the audience. What is your target buck whether Wisconsin, out in Dakota or down in Kansas?
We manage things a little bit different than I shouldn’t say everybody because there are other people who do it the same as we do. For us, we have private land so we can manage things the way we want because we own it. We’ve looked for four and a half plus-year-old bucks. If we have 140, 150-inch, three-year-old, usually that deer gets a free pass. If we have 130-inch five-year-old, that deer is going to get shot before that bigger antlered buck because that bigger antlered buck has potential. You flip the dice because something could have EHD, CWD, hit by a car, predators. There are a lot of different things that can happen to that. You roll the dice and hope for the best but when we try to manage our deer herds, we shoot X amount of does and then usually try to shoot that four-and-a-half-year-old or older.
Grizzly bears don’t always want to eat you; they’re defending something or doing something to protect their territory. Share on XIf I have special needs hunters or I have youth hunters, then that’s a whole different ballgame. For the ones that are experienced hunters, it’s four-and-a-half and older. Usually we then have a list. We’ve started compiling the list because I’ve got so many trail cameras out that we compile a list from year to year so we know how old they are. We’ve got a three-year-old that did the same thing. He comes out and he’s got a big eight-point side or four-point side on his left, but he’s just got two big spikes straight out of his head on the right. That deer needs to come off the farm.
One of the handicapped hunters or one of the youth hunters, they just want to go off, shoot a buck and get their first buck. Deer like that are great. You can come out and we’ve got a lot of those deer that are genetically goofy that we want off the farm. This is a big mistake. You shoot all these, you’re going to get rid of that genetics. You’ll never get rid of that genetics in wild deer. It’s pretty much impossible from every study I’ve ever seen to get rid of that. You do anything you can to try to help move it forward. That’s the way that we do it. We do that in Kansas and we do that here in Wisconsin. South Dakota on the other hand, that’s a whole different ballgame. They have a lot of deer on the property we hunt, so everything goes out the door.
If it’s 130 inches or better, they don’t care. They just want their deer shot. If we’re not going to shoot them, they have other guys that come in and shoot them. They manage it different out there. It’s their farm. You live by their rules like you come to my farm, we have certain rules that you’re going to live by. It’s their farm, we live by their rules. If they say, “It’s 130 inches or better, I don’t care how old it is, you shoot it. If you don’t, I’m going to have another group of friends or people come in right behind you and shoot them anyway because I need to get rid of some of these deer.” Management is a different tool and that brings me into something else that we talked about with hunters. Hunters are not getting along anymore and social media and all these things that are destroying our hunting heritage.
It eats at me a lot and it tears me up, and I know it does for you too, because if we keep arguing like this, we’re done. 10% of people that are truly hunters, 10% are truly anti-hunters. That leaves 80% that could go either way. Some of them may even try to hunt once in a while, “It’s not for me,” and then some are like, “I’m an anti, but I’m not really an anti.” They are other people that we have to sway to keep on our side. The more we fight amongst ourselves and the more we look like idiots out there doing stupid things, the more that these people want to switch and fight against us. That eats at me because this is a sport that I absolutely love. I love the shooting sports. I love the hunting. I love the photography work. What’s going to happen to it if we keep fighting? Where is it going to go? I look at it with this management thing. You’ve hunted in Wisconsin, you’ve hunted all these places and you look at management, I don’t know what you do on your farm. Do they have a management plan on your farm that you hunt, Bruce?
Yes, we do. That is why we’re growing bigger and bigger deer every single year. I’ve been hunting the same farm since 1966. We hunted it and fed the families or five families off the main family. Everybody needed winter meat and during gun season, we hunted it. When we started archery season and everybody started to grow older, then we said, “If you want to shoot a buck, it’s got to be a Pope and Young. It’s got to be 125 or better.” We’ve got a big problem with does. You see a doe shoot it and you’re hunting for the day, shoot it because the bucks are going to be here. Eddie plants probably 200 acres of either beans, corn or alfalfa. We’ve got food plots galore and water. We’ve got everything we need to grow big deer.
Buffalo River is right below it so we get cover food and water. We got everything for it. The family is too big now. That’s the only problem with it. A couple of years ago, Eddie said, “Only the family can hunt on the farm now because it was getting stupid.” I can’t tell you how many old stands we have, those old 2×4 wooden platforms. We don’t hunt anymore. You can go through the woods and go, “That was Burt’s stand. That was the ace-in-the-hole stand.” That’s how Burt goes, but we have a management plan. Does it work perfectly? No, because we got so many families involved.
That’s the thing is management plans, you can do what you want on your own land. If you leased the land, you can make your management plans and hope that your neighbors are good neighbors and do that. However, there are still the neighbors that aren’t into that. They grew up in a whole different area here in Wisconsin hunting and they still just want to shoot a deer. They want to shoot the first buck that walks by. They want to shoot a doe. It’s guys that are truly trying to do management and grow big old deer. The argument start back and forth and it’s like, “Here’s the deal, you don’t pay for their tag. You don’t pay their taxes. You don’t put their food plots in. You don’t do that, so you truly don’t have a right to tell them what they can and cannot shoot off their land.” Would you like to give them suggestions and say, “We’re trying to do this management. We’re trying to grow?” Yeah, you can. It’s not for everybody. That’s not the way hunting is. They may only get to hunt two or three days a year and so let them do that.
I own a land management company, so I go out and help people develop properties. I have people come up to me and say, “I’m going to do management. I’m going to grow big deer. I’m going to do this and that,” then they shoot the first two-year-old that walks by. They call you and they say, “I shot this buck. It wasn’t what I thought it was. It was this, it was that.” They do this for five years in a row and my only thing is I don’t care what you shoot. It’s your own property but be honest with yourself. Instead of asking for advice and doing this, if you’re still going to do whatever you want to do, then just do it. Be honest with your neighbors and say, “I’m really not into management and I want to shoot some deer for meat. I’m going to shoot whatever walks by me.” That’s fine, you as a land manager, then you can change the way that you hunt on your property or change the plans in what you’re going to do on your property. Let them do what they want or we’re going to destroy it. Everybody’s going to be fighting and there won’t be hunting anymore.
That’s a good point because that is land management. They’re managing their expectations because Eddie pays $10,000, $12,000 in taxes a year. We work and do some wood cutting but we don’t do $11,000 worth of work. We’ve got X number of people hunting on the land. We’ve got a big family and they’re good hunters. I liked how you said it, just be honest with yourself. If that’s your plan to have deer, to have a lot of bucks and they’re legal and you want to shoot them, then build your plan because you can build towards that. You can have a lot of bucks running around your property and there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s the thing. There’s nothing wrong with that plan.
They don’t have a problem with you shooting whatever you want on your own property. Be honest. I’ve got a neighbor, he’s really secretive and you ask him, “What did you shoot this year?” “It’s none of your business.” I’m not going to badger him and say, “You can’t shoot that because that’s a deer we let go.” Does it get frustrating? Sure, it does. I’m not going to lie to anybody. I was one of those guys at one point in my career where I was super frustrated with guys for shooting two-year-old bucks when we’re letting them go, they jumped the fence and they get killed. I just pay the taxes. That’s when I was younger and I needed to grow up and say, “I’ve got to understand this whole paying taxes and putting food plots and everything else. It’s their land. It’s their property.” All I’m doing is asking because we have a list of certain bucks and I want to check him off so I’m not looking for him next year or later in the year going, “I wonder if that deer made it. Tell me you killed him so I can check it off. I don’t care if you killed him or not because it was on your property.”
The other ones that really get to me and this one, I always laughed at this. I had a guy years ago who we used to lease some land before we owned our own and the one neighbor always cracks me up. He didn’t care. He says, “I’m strictly a meat hunter. That’s it.” I’ve never seen you shoot a doe in my entire life. If you’re strictly a meat hunter, then why don’t you shoot a doe and let some of these bucks go. He’d never given me an answer for it. “I just want the meat.” You can’t eat the horns. The antlers don’t taste very good, not even an antler soup. Go shoot a doe if you’re truly a meat hunter. I look back on it, Wisconsin, if you look way back in history, they didn’t shoot does. There are still counties because of the wolves, because of some of the predation up north that they even shut down doe hunting right now that you can’t even get doe tags to shoot a doe. I understand that now looking back at it that that’s the way a lot of them grew up and you’re not going to change that mentality or that mindset. Quit arguing with them and move forward with your own plan.
The other one that always cracked up was I had a guy on the opposite side at least. He would sit there and he’d say, “I want to get into management and grow big beer.” Opening day, the first one-and-a-half-year-old deer that crossed the fence and he’d crack it. We’d talk until one day we were sitting there and I looked at him and I said, “I thought you really want to start management?” “I do, but if that jumps the fence, my neighbor’s going to shoot it on the backside of us.” I said, “Yeah.” He goes, “Why should I let him shoot that deer?” I said, “Think about this. You just killed two one-and-a-half-year-olds instead of one.” He goes, “What do you mean?” I said, “You’re part of the problem, not the solution. If you truly want to do deer management and grow big deer, then you’re part of the problem.” If you’re not and you want to shoot whatever you want, back to be honest with yourself and be honest with your neighbors that this is what you’re happy with. If that’s what you’re happy with, I don’t care because if you shoot that deer, you can only shoot in the State of Wisconsin.
You can only shoot one buck per person. If that buck would’ve jumped the fence and went into the neighbors and he knew that that neighbor was already going to kill it, he shoots it, he’s out of the woods and gone. You can wait for that deer that you truly want if you’re going to do management. Because he shot it, the next year-and-a-half-year-old deer walks by the neighbor, he’s going to shoot that too. You killed two of them instead of killing one and you’re not going to get that older deer. He looked at me and went, “I never really thought about that. I have to rethink this.” He has and since then, he’d let them go. He’s shooting bigger deer and it’s the mentality of how you go about it. If you work together as hunters, everybody can be happy and everybody can make a plan and you can still grow big deer. Even if you’ve got some of that mentality, “I’m just going to shoot the first buck that walks by me,” fine. There are certain deer you have to take certain numbers out anyway or there are too many then you get too much competition at that three-year-old and they start dispersing anyway and are gone off your farms.
Everybody work together, quit bickering, quit fighting. They’re just a deer. Next year, there’s going to be another one. Is it going to be big? I don’t know, but there’s going to be another deer there so knock it off. We all look like a bunch of fools fighting back and forth all the time and the anti-hunters are sitting back and go, “Why do we even need to do anything? These guys are going to destroy hunting themselves.” The hunting right now, you look at it and our numbers are dwindling. Every year we lose more and more hunters. A lot of kids, they don’t have the interest. They would rather sit at home. They all sit on their smartphone and play games, their Xbox or whatever they want to do instead of getting out there. Right now, society is so busy.
Parents are so busy running their kids all over, trying to work three jobs so that they can afford to buy all this stuff for themselves and their family and support their family. They don’t have time to go out in the woods anymore. They have to make time. We have to make time for our youth, get them to shoot, get them to hunt, get them to do things. You played college football. I played college football. I know millions of people that have played college sports and aren’t professionals. It’s such a minute little group that’s actually going to make a living in that. Why spend all your time thinking that this kid is going to be the next greatest All-Star in the world? Maybe they will be and if they are, great, my hat is off to you, but more than likely they’re not going to be. Point blank blunt truth. Whether people get mad at me for saying this or not, it’s the truth.
The more we fight among ourselves, the more we look like idiots doing stupid things, the more that people want to fight against us. Share on XIt’s less than 1% of high school football players that ever get there.
Why take so much and spend all that money when hunting will last forever? Fishing will last forever. Camping will last forever. Outdoors is here. It will always be here. Even if you play football for ten years afterward, is it going to be there for the rest of your life? Absolutely not. I know guys that are 80, 90 years old and still hunting. I don’t know anybody playing football at 80 years old. It’s something we need to look at as a society and say, “If we truly want to save the outdoors and the sport, we need to get these people out there. We need to get our youth out there.” Most of everything that’s out there, the conservation has brought back because of us as hunters. Our money goes back in to saving the wildlife, saving the conservation.
Government programs like Timber Stand Improvement to improve the woods and habitat, burn programs, set-aside, CRP programs. All these different programs are put on because of us as hunters putting all that money back into these programs and saving, bringing animals from different places to reintroduce them to areas and bring them back and make them flourish and grow. That’s why there are regulations on what you can and cannot hunt. People get frustrated. There’s science behind it. There are people actually monitoring this. We have enough that we can hunt because they take in the predation. They take all this stuff into it where that is happening because of our money going back into it.
Case in point, Wisconsin had I think ten tags to hunt elk up by Clam Lake where they reintroduced years ago. Those Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation reintroduced in Clam Lake. Traditional elk are in the Rocky Mountains. They did start in Rocky Mountain. Daniel Boone killed an elk. People on the Appalachians and then throughout the Prairie States, that’s where the elk were. Mankind, we developed from the East to West and pushed the elk into their last sanctuary. That has to be the Rocky Mountains but now the Elk Foundation’s going back in a number of states.
Kentucky has a season. I haven’t drawn there yet. I know Wisconsin has a season. Dakota has a season. There are a lot of places that reintroduction of elk is at such a level. They have been managed effectively that now we have a hunting season for them which is huge. You never hear that in the discussion of anti-hunters or wildlife photographers will go up to Kentucky in the traditional range and there will be a bugle and bull, and they’ll take a picture of it. It’s more than just the hunting part of conservation, which the anti-hunters don’t want to talk about.
That’s true. Unfortunately, I put in for a tag here in Wisconsin and I did not draw for my own. I did put the money into the conservation. If there are only ten tags that are drawn. I think it was $10 or $20, somewhere in that. There were 80,000 or 90,000 people that applied. When you start putting all that math together, look at the money that they raised from hunters trying to draw that tag to put back into that elk habitat and make it better for them. One of my jobs is being a photographer and doing things. One thing that has come about in the years, because there are so many photographers that are hunters also that they’ve worked with a lot of these agencies. If you look at it, if you do it as a professional job, if you’re doing it as a commercial business, like here in Wisconsin, if I’m out taking photos as a commercial business at a state park, whether it’s wildlife photos, taking senior photos, wedding photos, that’s commercial. It costs you a permit.
It’s $50 per year per park in the State of Wisconsin. That money then is going back into that habitat, that restoration, everything at that park to help make things. They’re doing that now in the national parks where you have to get certain permits to shoot commercial photography. When I went to the national parks to do a bunch of photography work, I had to buy permits for those national parks. You’re not going back in there and now they’re starting to get everybody involved because they’re finding out that the numbers of hunters are dwindling so they need money from somewhere else. They’re taking all the wildlife enthusiasts and starting to put fees on different things, which I don’t have a problem as a hunter paying. I hear people crying about it all the time, “Our tax dollars already paid for that.” No, they don’t. Everybody’s tax dollars pay for certain parts of it.
You were making money, why should you be able to make money off the next guy who’s paying taxes for that? His tax only covered so much. You go in there and you want to take photos of everything that’s really cool that has been reintroduced by hunters or by tax dollars, whatever. Maybe you should be a little part of this. I don’t have a problem with it. I’ve been in a couple of arguments over that where people are like, “I think it’s stupid.” Instead of you making money off of that, how about you go do something and then I want to make money off you for free? All of a sudden, they’re like, “That doesn’t work that way.” That’s essentially what you’re trying to do, isn’t it? You’re trying to have everybody else pay for it and then make money off of it. It doesn’t quite work that way. That’s not the way the system in the United States work. Too bad, get over it. Pay your $50 or your couple of hundred bucks and move on.
I’ve had this discussion and this photographer had all Swarovski. It was just like, “Are you kidding me?” I know how much it costs. It’s thousands and thousands of dollars, their lenses and everything. They’ve got binoculars, spotting scopes and lenses and you’re talking $20,000 at least. Yet they’ll go challenge about paying a fee of $50 because they go and shoot cranes at Horicon Marsh. I know that is where the cranes are, but there are a lot of cranes there. They go down there and all of a sudden, they have to pay $50 for that right. I consume, you’re a non-consumptive user and there’s more of you and there’s going to be more of those people and they travel around the world.
These people are going to Tierra del Fuego, that’s the bottom of South America, and take pictures of rare birds when they come off Antarctica and are flying up there for the summer. I don’t know how much it costs to fly down there, but these people have the money. What I’m trying to say is it isn’t a matter of money. It’s perception and we haven’t managed it as the DOW, the state and the federal government hasn’t managed it to say, “Everybody’s in this game and it’s about time for these other people to pony up.” Robinson started a long time ago and we have funded everything that these people are now using. That’s my two cents on that. I don’t want to get cranked up on it.
It’s good to see some things finally changing though so we can keep everything going if the numbers continue to dwindle, which I think we can recover. It’s just a matter of getting the youth back outdoors and saying, “The kids want to start this when they’re young.” That’s why you’re starting to see all these age limits go away in all these states. They know that we’ve got to get these kids started because football starts early. Baseball starts early. Get them out there hunting earlier and see if that might be what they truly want to do. Get them started early. They may disappear through high school and want to play their sports but get them to come back. That’s what we have to do with our younger generation to try to get things out there and keep the hunting alive per se.
Conversations like this and going on a podcast and a lot of work are being done for youth and women because we’ve seen an explosion of women in the outdoors. That’s for a lot of reasons. One, some want to feed their families. That’s just flat simple. The husband has left and nobody’s left and she wants to do it. The other thing is building confidence in people and individuals, “I can do this.” We have women in sports that are increasing and they’re helping to bring their kids along because all of a sudden, they see mom bringing home the deer and feeding the family and go, “I want to do that.” I have a number of friends that that’s happening. Women are carrying the males right now. Hats off to you ladies. Thank you. Guys, step up your game. Quit being so false testosterone and what are you telling me I can’t do. Get over yourself. How do people reach you, Art?
They can go to either my website, www.ArtHelinOutdoors.com. My Facebook page, which is Art Helin Outdoors and Instagram, @ArtHelinOutdoors. If they’re interested just in photography work, they can always check out my stuff at Wild Reflections Photography. The website is WildReflectionsPhoto.com and the Facebook page and Instagram are both Wild Reflections Photography. They can check it out there and get a hold of me there. Email is on there too. [email protected]. Shoot me an email. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
You’ve been hunting for so many years. About ten years ago, what do you wish you knew then that you know now? The one big thing that has turned around your hunting over the years and you said, “If I only had known that ten years ago, I would have been able to do X in the hunting world.”
A lot of work is being done for the youth and for women because we’ve seen an explosion of women in the outdoors. Share on XThere are a ton of different things out there and a couple of things that really come to mind is hunting smarter. Back then, maybe ten years ago, I did know it and I was pretty successful then but even go back farther I wasn’t hunting smarter. I wasn’t playing the winds right. I wasn’t developing food plots in the right areas or ingress-egress to and from my stands. I’ll be doing seminars about hunt smarter, not harder for whitetails. I bring to light about using trail cameras and using how to get through and from your stands properly, things like that. That’s one big thing. It might’ve been even more than ten years ago, but I wish the trail cameras would have been here way back. We had them way back then, but the trail camera truly is a tool. A lot of people use them and want to show all their buddies their deer. That’s not truly what it’s used for.
I have a lot of trail cameras out and people are like, “Why do you have so many cameras out?” I’ve got five and I can take inventory. I’ve got more than that because I will put them on food sources. I’ll put them next to bedding areas. I’ll put them in oak flats. I’ll put them on waterholes. Every year, I deal with Moultrie a lot. They have the Moultrie management system where you can go on and you can look at year, moon phases and temperatures and everything else. The deer I killed was strictly because of monitoring everything on that trail camera. I looked at it and I said, “This deer, he disappeared.” I was hunting him one end of my farm and I’d had him there for three days in a row, about a full draw on that deer twice and I can never get the shot on him and then he disappeared. I was like, “Where did he go?”
I went in the middle of the day, started checking trail cameras. I pulled my cards, I got home, I checked one and I’m like, “Here he is. I’m wondering when he was here last year because I remember seeing pictures of that same buck up here last year.” I went back through all my records and I’m like, “This deer was here on the exact same day for the next two days on that ridge and then he’d disappear again. If the winds are right, I’ve got to get in here and hunt this deer now.” That’s what I did. I climbed in that stand at 1:00 in the afternoon. I shot that deer 3:30 that afternoon. I would’ve never hunted that, but it was all because of that trail camera and using it as a tool. That’s the biggest thing even years ago. We had the technology several years ago, but we didn’t have it like we have now.
Why was he up there? Why did that deer change location?
When he got up on this ridge, there’s a big flat ridge and on both sides, it dropped off. In both sides, I had done a bunch of timber stand improvement in and it was a thick, nasty bedding area. That deer would run in through there the first couple days of rut getting past the pre-rut into the breeding. He was running that ridge, pushing those bedding areas out, looking for those hot does. He’d spend those days in there just running circles, waiting for hot does who come in there to bed. That’s all he’d do. I’d get him on one end, three hours later I’d get him on the other end.
Pretty soon he’d run 20 to 30-acre area and he’d do that for a couple of days. He’d go out at night and hits a food plot and feed but most of that was at night. During the middle of the day, he would just run and checking for does. That’s probably the biggest thing that I wish I would have known is trail cam technology and what it truly was used for. Several years ago, I used it to look at deer and go, “This is a really big deer so this is a deer I want to try to hunt. These deer, I’m going to let go because they look like young deer.” That’s what I did years ago. Now I actually look at them and I can monitor and say, “This time of year for the last three year, this deer has been in this specific area on these dates. That’s where I want to be during those dates.”
This deer has been over here during these dates. That’s where I want to be. It’s an early-season because of the food source and that’s where they are during that season. As season progresses that food disappears and they move to here and that’s what you use that for. That would be my answer is trail camera technology and what they truly are used for as a scouting tool and not just to look at your deer as inventory. They help doing that but if you truly pay attention and put down exactly where they are and keep them in folders from year to year, they’re going to help you actually hunt that deer a lot smarter and easier. It makes your life easier going, “This is when he’s here, so why do I want to hunt this stand for the next two months and burn that standout when that deer is not even there?”
You see that all the time. I don’t care what part of the country you’re from. Deer transition, because the food sources, it might only be 40 acres or 20 acres bedding areas. There are some of them in huge areas out west like South Dakota. They can go miles up and down those river bottoms. It all depends on food, water, bedding. There are so many things that it does and what time of year it is. Do they need thermal cover? Do they need summer bedding areas? What kind of water do they look for? What kind of food? Is it over in alfalfas for early? Is it radishes, beets, turnips and whatever for late season? What kind of food source because they’re going to change? They’re going to move. That’s what you use that camera for is to monitor where they’re at. It makes your life that much easier to try to kill those old mature deer.
Most maybe are going to laugh at this, but there was a time that you would put up a string across the deer trail and then you’d have to monitor it and then actually put up the string and then the deer would go through and knock it off. That’s the first form of monitoring. Was it a buck? Was it a doe? You didn’t really care because you were just looking for deer and you could see the prints. I don’t know why the string came up, but that became a fashion or our technique long ago.
That was used a lot for bear hunters. Bear hunters would get two, three or four of them and they’d put them all the way around the bait sites, then they would know what time that bear was coming in.
Also in what direction.
I remember those little strings to take that thing. The worst part was if you didn’t have crease close enough, you’re trying to break sticks off in the ground and knock the stick over. Once you’re at the timer, you didn’t know what time it was. A squirrel would run through and knock it. I remember that back in the day. That would have been probably the late ’80s when they came out.
Folks, it’s an evolving sport. It’s great to get with Art and talk about that. Let’s talk about the Dakotas. People know Kansas and people know the upper Midwest, Wisconsin. Look at the record books for Buffalo County, it will tell you everything you want to know about big bucks. Hunting out west is a little bit different and you touched upon it. I first hunted Wyoming river bottoms probably late ’70s or early ’80s. We were gun hunting and we can take mule deer or whitetails and we ended up whitetail hunting just because they’re hellacious bucks nobody was shooting. Everybody wanted to kill a mule. It was like, “You’d be killing these 130s, 140s, 150s.” We wouldn’t hold out. We were too young.
Dakotas, they’re hidden states. Guys like my buddy Mark Kayser. He grew up in South Dakota and now he’s in Wyoming. He killed some great deer out there. Myles Keller, I grew up doing a lot of shows and different things with Myles. Myles is a good friend. You look at some of the places that he hunted. Some of his big deer were taken in the Dakotas and people don’t realize that. There’s a lot of big deer that are shot out there, but a lot of people don’t talk about it. It’s an early-season, so you can actually go out there and shoot velvet. My wife killed a really good velvet whitetail in North Dakota years and years ago. The problem out there is the country is so vast. It’s different from here. People I think get lost, not physically lost, but just lost. “Where do I start? What do I do?” It’s so big and it’s pockets here and there of timber. You’d be amazed at how many deer are in there, but you look for water source, you look for prints, river bottoms, those deer on those because that’s where your trees are. That’s where your cover is. It’s thick and nasty.
Deer transition because of food sources. Share on XThe difference is those deer are going to travel a long ways. It’s the same in South Dakota. One day we might see a deer two miles downriver from where we saw him the day before. They move a long way. It’s different than when you get into Ohio, Wisconsin and Iowa where there are big blocks of timber where those deer don’t leave. You get out there, they do. They move greater distances. They have the same types of food sources we have here. They’ve got corn. Sugar beets is a big thing in North Dakota. It’s a different way of hunting because number one, you’ve got to have treestands that go around cottonwoods. These cottonwoods are so huge. That’s where ground blind hunting comes in. You’ve got guys like Keith Beam and Brooks Johnson that came up with the double bull blinds years and years ago. I’m still fortunate I worked with those guys years ago when they had the ground blind with double bull. Keith Beam now is working for New Archery Products in GSM and developing another blind that came out with last year called the Mantis by New Orchard Products.
It’s a great blind. It’s another ground blind that Keith is working on. Because of that development, it changed the way we hunt on the ground altogether. It helps contain your scent. You can brush them in easier. That whole ballgame has developed and progressed so far. It’s unbelievable. There are a lot of places out there were ground blinds come in really handy and you can go out and pop them up, brush them in, and you’re good because the river bottoms are so thick out there. It’s hard sometimes because those cottonwoods are so big that you don’t have ratchet straps big enough with you. It’s nice to be able to do that with those ground blinds and get in there. It’s a whole different type of hunting.
We’ve hunted 100, 105 degrees before and tried to sit in the treestand. You go and buy a bug suit and black underwear and you put your black underwear on and a bug suit over the top of you. That’s all you’re wearing because it’s so hot out that it’s crazy. I shot a deer in North Dakota with a buddy of mine. It was 37 below zero when I shot that deer. It was absolutely insane hunting how crazy it was and the whole story leading up to that deer. There is a lot of good deer out there that people don’t know. Not just a lot of good deer, but a lot of deer and a lot of good public land. You get in and start checking the maps along a lot of those rivers and there’s a lot of really good public land in both of those states that you can go on and hunt.
If you’re a PWD person, if a person is qualified for a handicap or disabled crossbow hunt in one state, make it easy. I can literally hunt out over my truck in Wisconsin. Colorado, I can hunt with a crossbow during archery season. South Dakota, I talked to them and they were very nice. The lady was very nice. She said, “I’m sorry, that’s just our law,” so I have to go to the doctor, fill out another form and send it. Unfortunately, I do have some issues. I can’t hold the compound anymore. I have to hunt with a crossbow. PWDs, make it easy. We were talking about keeping older people, younger people. There are a lot of young kids, military people, women that can’t use a compound for whatever reason. Make it easy for people, not harder. That’s one solution. Don’t have a fire sale and don’t have people saying, “I want to shoot with a crossbow because it’s more accurate.” It is, but it isn’t. We can talk crossbow versus compound, horizontal versus vertical all day long. I’ll simply say a crossbow makes it possible but this guy at my age to continue to archery hunt.
My dad’s in the same boat. He tore his bicep a couple of years ago. We sent his application to South Dakota because he’ll be going out with me hunting. He had to fill his back out and send that again. The first time they thought that the bicep might heal itself and that he’d be able to shoot a regular compound again. They only gave him a temporary permit. It never healed and so now he had to reapply again a few years later for a permanent one.
If a person is doing everything possible, get together with some of these other agencies and just make it easy. I don’t know what that looks like, medical records, I know HIPAA and all that stuff, but make it easy for people to get tags. I have a place along the Missouri River to hunt but I can’t hunt it until I get that permit. If I don’t get the permit, then they lose revenue. What does it cost to travel and to buy a steak, hamburger, bacons and eggs in the morning, gas and a hunting license? It’s a couple of bucks. We’ve talked a lot of stuff and thanks for sharing about hunting the cottonwoods because it is different. The biggest tip that I can give people about hunting out west and hunting Western whitetails is if you’ve never been on the ground before, long distance scout and sit up, get as high, get on a ridge overlooking a river bottom, get there before the sun comes up and stay there all day and you can move as the sun moves.
Stay there all day and glass. Take a big glass, sit there, put your window mount up, and glass and glass and don’t just say, “We’ve got to go hunting.” You are hunting by long-distance scouting. Keep the sun at your back and keep changing and keep washing that river bottom because you will see more deer than you ever believed if you spend eight to ten hours sitting in one place and glassing. People don’t believe that, but I can tell you if you do that, then you’re going to have an idea of where the deer are, how they’re running, what times they’re are running. You’ve got to keep a notebook or keep your notes on your smartphone, but then start building a thing and say, “The bucks are running this time. I serve those hours.”
Get the hang on stands, just put a popup blind. Have one of those, take it with you, brush it in and then hunt. Watch the morning, watch the activity then when they’re at noon time, put it up, brush it in and be ready to hunt that nighttime and you will kill a deer. In Wyoming where we hunted for many years, we were out there for mules and there are so many gorgeous whitetails. We ended up deciding whitetails. It was great. We saw more deer per hour than we saw in Wisconsin. I’ve seen some big herds of deer in Wisconsin, don’t get me wrong, but we saw more deer.
I think that’s because we’re more congregated too. They’re on those river bottoms and they’re in what woods are there. When you find them, you find them. The problem is with food sources, just like in Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas. It doesn’t matter, when that food first changes, scout. That’s the best tip I’ve heard in a long time from a lot of people. It’s something that I would say is we used to sit on these ridges, scout and watch deer for two days before we’d make a plan because early season they’re congregating in those sugar beet fields. That’s where they’re at trying to find those alfalfa fields. We’re a little bit later because their winters are so harsh. That same deer might be four or five miles away. You can’t count on, “I’m going to go back to where I was last year this time because the food source might have changed and they’re going to change.”
That’s great information to get out there and do your scouting and figure it out first. Spend that day or day and a half or two days, scout, make a plan and then go in. If you go in blind, you more than likely are going to mess it up and then it’s going to be a long week sitting in that stand. If you can do the scouting, make that plan, go ahead and hang the stand. You’ve got a better chance of shooting something or seeing something close than you would by just going in blind and then end up messing things up. That’s the biggest thing too, is not necessarily always big deer, but getting out and the camaraderie and the fun and the enjoyment of talking to other hunters, talking to guys like yourself, talking to women that love to hunt. Get out there and enjoy that part of the sport as much as I do actually getting out there and hunting. It’s neat to listen to other people’s stories and their success stories. I appreciate you having me on here.
It’s always a pleasure to have you on the show, sir.
Thank you. I appreciate that.
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About Art Helin
I began hunting over 30 years ago under the instruction of my father and grandmother. What started as small game and deer hunting in my home state grew to an obsession to hunt nearly every big game species across North America. Thus far, my adventures have allowed me to successfully harvest many animals including six different big game species and four turkey species. Although I enjoys any type of hunting, I am crazy about whitetails and turkeys!
My hunting success and passion for teaching others has led to my pro/field staffer positions for Realtree, New Archery Products, Knight & Hale, Moultrie and Vortex. I promote these and other companies and the great outdoors by working trade shows, attending retail store grand openings and providing in-store training to their employees, conducting seminars, and writing stories for outdoor media. My wife, Michelle, and I have filmed for the Archer’s Choice and The Choice TV shows and Archer’s Choice Media and Double Bull Archery video series. I have also been featured in many articles in magazines such as Wisconsin Sportman, Petersons Bowhunting and North American Hunter.
When speaking with people, I draw upon my own past experience, successes and failures, as well as the over 150 days per year in the field hunting, guiding and scouting. To assist me in scouting, I take advantage of the tools and technology available including aerial and topographical maps and trail cameras. I have planted food plots for years, which started out small and often failing, and now just keep growing and getting better year after year! I practice woodland management on our 40-acre property and have recently completed timber stand improvement and pond projects, and I’m eager to share what I’ve learned with others.
I am busy promoting archery and hunting in the Dodgeville area when I’m not afield. I am president of the local National Wild Turkey Federation chapter, which hosts a highly successful, award-winning Learn to Turkey Hunt event. Since it began in 2003, the event has grown from 9 to thirty new turkey hunters each year, primarily women and youth. Participants have also included children with chronic or terminal diseases from the United Special Sportsmen’s Foundation. I also teach classes as a National Bowhunter Education Foundation instructor.
I live in rural southwestern Wisconsin with Michelle, and our daughters, Alana and Elizabeth. While I love hunting, what I have really come to enjoy, even more, is hunting with family and friends. My proudest moment came when Alana shot her first longbeard turkey. When I’m not in the woods or working as a real estate appraiser, I enjoy fishing, watching football and UFC, and driving my motorcycle and ’67 Mustang.