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Jerry Everhart Mock Scrapes & Sunlight
we’re going to meet with a very interesting gentleman today, his name is Jerry Everhart Mock Scrapes & Sunlight co-host of Hunt Fish Journal, an educational podcast on the outdoors. The most enlightening thing you’re going to hear, and you’re probably going to hear this in two parts, folks, part one and part two, part two will be on the show tomorrow, but Jerry has a Rut Functional hunting method that calculates the key days of the rut and hunts over specific pattern of marks scrapes.
The first thing that he shared with me was you had to think like a deer, so to speak. He said that when you go hunting, which was mostly still-hunting in those days, when you go still-hunting in the woods, you have to move slower than the deer does. Jerry Everhart Mock Scrapes & Sunlight
you better be going slower than the deer is if you’re still-hunting
He illustrated that by the fact that we hunters will figure that we need to be back to our truck by noon, and it may be a half a mile away, so we’re going to hunt from point A to point B where our truck is, or vice versa, and we’re going to do it in so many hours, or two hours. And a deer is going to take as much time as he wants to to get through that woods. So, basically, you better be going slower than the deer is if you’re still-hunting, so the deer moves to you, rather than you move to the deer. That was one point. Jerry Everhart Mock Scrapes & Sunlight
The other point was that once that deer approaches you and you see that deer and he’s coming into range, make sure that he gets slightly past you before you draw and shoot, because as he’s coming, he’s going to detect you and you’re not going to get the going away, any away shot that is crucial to harvest that animal. That was number two.
Those are the two additional things that I really picked up from listening to Fred Bear. And basically, this was around the table in I would say in their little meeting room at the archery shop, he was discussing these things. It was neat, it was really neat. Jerry Everhart Mock Scrapes & Sunlight
Fred Bear was very, very adamant about keeping notes
Then the third one, of course, was keeping field notes. And Fred Bear was very, very adamant about keeping notes of what he saw that day, what took place, what temperature, everything. So, I thought that made sense to me, so I’ve been keeping a journal of every one of my hunts, every time I go hunting for the last probably 40 years. The temperature, the day, the time, the weather in the stand, what I see, what I didn’t see. So it’s all that information that led me to calculate when’s the best time to go hunting.
The field notes allow me to achieve analyzing those notes and finding out the key times led up to it. Well, I’ll give you the numbers and then I’ll tell you how we got to the numbers. I think that I’m, well, I know I’m 12 mature bucks for the last 13 years, and the lack of a buck that one year had to do with, I had some poachers and trespassers on one of the properties I hunt. I do not hunt large properties, I hunt, basically now I hunt maybe 2 60-acre properties here in the Midwest. I’ve hunted public land a good bit.
I harvested 5 bucks in 5 years, mature bucks
But the last 13 years, I was 12 bucks for 13 years, and the last 5 years, I harvested 5 bucks in 5 years, mature bucks. And actually we don’t like to tell this story, but we’re telling the truth, I actually lost another buck. So that’s going to be six bucks in five years that I couldn’t retrieve, and I regret that, but it does happen once in a while. And I think, well, I don’t think, I know I climbed a tree during those key days that we’re talking about, I climbed a tree 11 times. So that’s 6 shots at mature bucks, climbing a tree 11 times.
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