We all have an automatic connection which is the love for the outdoors. There are a few that take it to the next level and get as much enjoyment out of bringing it to others as they are doing something for themselves. For Ryan Tervort, Pro Staff for Calm Before The Kill, it’s always great to meet more people that have that same passion. Ryan talks about his trip to Canada and busts some myths about hunting there. He also shares the video setup he uses on his hunts. He says documenting your hunt is all about passing on tradition.
—
Ryan Tervort lives in Colorado, but he’s come out from Iowa. He’s on the Pro Staff for Calm Before The Kill TV with Bill Dease. Ryan has got some great insights. He moved out here from Iowa and knows how to hunt those bucks in ag areas in Iowa. You’re going to love the show, and I’m excited to bring Ryan to you.
Listen to the podcast:
Bruce Hutcheon
Episode # 295 Iowa Whitetails with Ryan Tervort
Iowa Whitetails with Ryan Tervort
We’ve got Ryan Tervort. He lives in Colorado, but he’s an Iowa guy and he’s Pro Staff for Calm Before The Kill. Ryan, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.
Let’s start off with the not-so-successful hunt you had in Canada. Everybody thinks you go to Canada, go north of the border, and the ten-cent 180 bucks. You and I both know that’s not true and most people that travel up there and hunt up there know there are big bucks up there, but they’re few and far between. Tell us about your trip up there.
I was up there with outdoor guys in Ontario. It was a great hunt. We’d spent a week hunting out butts off, but we had warm weather. It was cold frosty a few days before we got there and bucks were moving. While we’re there, things warmed up. We had three days where it stayed 60 or above around the clock. Deer went back to nocturnal pattern. I had a nice buck on trail cam that made a scrape 50 yards from my one stand, but it was 10:30 PM, not much I could do with that. It was a great hunt. We saw a few deer and our last night, we had a good buck bumping some does. We finally got some colder weather again, but he would not step out of the brush for a shot. That’s hunting. It was still a great trip. Definitely, nothing is a sure thing. You go in with an idea that you’re going to walk away with a monster, and certainly there are a couple of bucks that we saw that were pretty decent ones, but things got to come together to get the shot, so nothing’s ever guaranteed.
I was fortunate a long time ago. I went up to north of Lloydminster, up in that province up there, and Saskatchewan and took a very nice buck, but it was 20 degrees below zero every single day I was there. We had to keep the truck run 24 hours a day up there and it was brutal, but I did it. I hung out and I didn’t see that many bucks. That’s one thing I’d like to draw upon. You can go to Canada, you’re going to see monster bucks, heavy mass and some gnarly bucks and everybody’s seen the hunting shows, but talk about the slash, talk about where you’re hunting and the brush or the bush, as they say up there, and the expectations that people up there tell you. In reality, how many bucks you should see and how many shooters? A shooter up there folks is 150 or better, four-and-a-half-years old. What’re your thoughts on that, Ryan?
It depends on the area where you’re at. Unfortunately, due to some health stuff, we didn’t get to go up to the island area that he had that has a lot higher percentage of big bucks, so we’re hunting a little lower down. The average buck around there is still an average of 130 to 140. You got some good ones. The one we did see, I’d put by 155. He was the only one. Literally he is the only buck that we saw the entire trip. I saw does. Almost every set had does literally less than five yards right under my tree, but because of the warm weather, the bucks weren’t moving that much. In one area we saw the buck on two different times, one time out in the middle of the bean field and next time we moved our set up and he came in and bump a doe out 50 yards broadside but wouldn’t follow her.
You get to Saskatchewan and you’re your shooter class is going to be a little higher. Ontario has good bucks, but they seem to be a little bit more few and far between than Saskatchewan and areas like that. The buck besides a huge body deer, massive body and sometimes it can make it a little hard to judge their age because it doesn’t look smaller compared to their bodies. Bob, the guy who I was hunting with, showed me a couple of bucks he’s taken over the last couple of years and the areas they were hunting and almost all of them were 145 and above, so good bucks, just nothing monstrous.
When you mentioned Ontario, I’ve been up there hunting bear, a lot of walleye and pike fishing and the part of terrain I’ve seen is really tough cover. There might be some ag areas, but for the most part again, heading north of lake of the woods, Nestor Falls and Ear Falls and up in that country, it’s dense. Was that the type of country you were in or you were in more ag and bush country?
It reminded me a lot of Midwest except that the timbers are not open. The underbrush is unreal. It’s thick. You got the heavy stands of hardwood timber in between crop fields, but to try and hunt in the timbers can be difficult. Literally that buck was within range of me but so much brush, I couldn’t get a shot. I only had so many shooting lanes because it was so thick up there that it restricts unless you spend a lot of time clearing brush, but then you worry about messing up how the deer is moving because you cleared everything out so much. Definitely for bow hunting, which is what we were doing, it makes it a little bit difficult to try and get a shot.
With bow hunting it makes it triple hard if they’re in the bush at all. It’s going to deflect and you don’t have a shot with a rifle, you may or may not have been able to find a hole to get a bullet through. Let’s bring it down to where your hunting tradition started. I know you’re from Iowa and you’ve been hunting a long time. Let’s talk about the hunting tradition in Iowa and how that all got started.
I moved there when I was nine or ten years old. Before then, my grandpa got me started back in Nevada, but going to the Midwest, my step dad hunted but weren’t getting kids into it, which is unfortunate. I had to teach myself. It took me a couple years of learning what was where and that and taught myself how to read the cover and everything. I started bow hunting when I was thirteen, and at sixteen, I took my first buck with a bow 158-inch, eight-point, and then hooked ever since. Midwest, especially Iowa is known for monster bucks. The properties that we had, we had some big bucks on them.
You mentioned you’ve taken a 200-class buck. Is that with a bow or a rifle?
A muzzleloader. It was a few years back. I went back to see my mom and dad and did a hunt while we were there. We were able to draw tags for the late season and got in. We had mainly doe tags but we had a couple of buck tags. We knew this one big buck was in the area. It was our fifth day hunting and I was able to get shot on him. He had a big non-typical cactus drop tine on one side, a 25-inch spread. Since it’s the late season, he’s a little broken up from fighting. If he hadn’t been broken up, he’d had 30 scorable points, but a beautiful buck.
Did you take him on a drive? Were you on a stand? Tell us about your setup.
When we’re gun hunting, we have a small group. We do the drive but we walk. Our walkers, we’re still hunting through and we have one or two people set for anything bucks out they can get a shot at, but otherwise we’re moving slow, trying to get the deer to stand up right in front of us. He got up a little bit out there and I fell in a hole and had a couple of does get up, but was able to make shot on him and make it happen even with him not being able to get right up on him. We tried a quick shot gun because we didn’t like hunting around with big groups where we have 20 to 30 guys beating the brush and bullets flying everywhere. We decided that wasn’t for us so we stuck to archery and then we’d wait until the late season when there weren’t many people out there and we can hunt where we wanted and either sit and stand in timber or do small slow walks on the ditches and that.
You were a driver. There were posters and you and one are stealthily walking or inching your way through the cover and then he stood up. How close was he when you first saw him?
When I first saw him, he was about 200 yards trotting up the side of the ditch.
By ditch, is that by a road or is that a creek?
We were probably 400 yards off the road into a ditch bank where there was an old creek running through the middle of a thick corn field and it had a bunch of tree row in it. They hadn’t cleared the trees out completely for agriculture. They’d left everything around the creek bottom thick and full of trees.
They bed, the ditch, and the food is ten steps away.
It’s the whole area where we hunted, we are in Southwest Iowa and there’s timber blocks here and there, but a lot of it is ditches that are 20 to 30 feet wide, but run the whole length of the section.
What kind of muzzleloader were you using?
Thompson/Center Encore. I shoot 50 cal and I shoot 298 powder belt with 130 grains of Pyrodex. I knew I could shoot a six-inch group at 250 yards with it.
Present yourself. You've got to do the work. Share on XEverybody knows that muzzleloaders are deadly. When I was fortunate to hunt in Iowa a couple of years ago with Judd Cooney and Sheri Yarborough, all their guns would be dead on at 200 yards, all their muzzleloaders. It’s incredible once they are set up right. It’s like anything, you got to know your weapon, you got to set it up right, and get everything right, but when you do, it comes to your shoulder and boom it goes and you know where that bullet is going. Would you agree with that?
Totally. When I first was started with rifle hunting, it was an old cap and ball and 75 yards was about all you are comfortable with, with open sights and that’s especially for all the young kids starting out. With the progression of technology and that, they have these new in-lines which is similar to what I have now. It’s amazing. If you did ballistics on them and know your gun and shoot it, it’s totally to 200 yards gun, no problem.
Do you have to clean it every five times you shoot it or three times? What’s your clean barrel process?
When I’m target practicing, every five I’m swabbing because you’re going to start to get a little bit of flyers in that at that point. It isn’t enough to be a big deal. When I’m out there hunting, I’m usually not shooting that many rounds. I usually won’t clean it until the end of the season, because most of the time I’ve only shot five or six rounds depending on how many tags we had from opening morning to the end of that season.
Do you still go back to Iowa to hunt?
I haven’t in a while. My mom moved out here now. My in-laws still live back there and we would love to be able to put in and go back; we just haven’t been able to the last couple years.
How long does it take to get a late season tag?
It depends. Some of them, if you’re wanting to meat hunt, they have over-the-counter tags for out of state. They are doe tags. Depending on what season it is sometimes it can be one year up to usually within four years, you will get pretty much any tag you want depending on zones obviously. There are some zones that are a little harder to get than others, but if you got your setup to be able to hunt most in these zones, especially in that southwest corner, usually you can get a tag for one of the seasons about every year. If you’re wanting to go back to have fun and fill the freezer, they have the over-the-counter doe tags that you can get.
I’m a muzzleloader hunter, rifle hunter, and I hunt with a crossbow. In those ditches, if the ditch is only 20, 30, 40, maybe 50 feet at max, how do you set up your tree stands in that if you’re archery hunting or hunting out of a tree?
A lot of places I did, I focused more on timber blocks, but I did have a few in my core areas close to where we live that I knew very well and look for pinch points areas where a couple of ditches would come together or a fence line came across and split the ditch to make a crossing in and out of the ditch for the deer, and hang stand, the one that I had it was where the ditch forked. One fork came in from one side and then the main part went down the other way and there was an island there in the middle where the deer had come and drink and there was a fence line on the other side where they would come in from the backside of the property. I had a stand in the center there and could shoot 40 yards any direction to be able to cover most of the entire ditch from there.
It sounds like you know what you’re doing. Getting on a private land in Iowa is getting tougher and tougher because everybody puts it up on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook pictures of their Iowa bucks. I’ve got some trail cameras from my buddy who hunted in Iowa this year, southwest of Des Moines, he said, “Here’s 190 buck for you, Bruce. Good luck finding him.”
That’s where I was out, a little bit farther south, but that southwest of Des Moines that curve down towards the southern tier of the state. I ran for a guide there for a while. We started with pheasant hunting and then I got us into deer hunting and in the height of things, we had 100,000 acres over five counties down there. Unfortunately, the owner wasn’t very good at relationships with the locals, and when I finally got tired of dealing with him, he lost everything because I was the only one keeping the locals because he’d make them mad and they want us off the property and I’d go talk to them and get it back on. I was trying to take this to the next level. I was in negotiation with the Drury’s and he didn’t want to do any type of negotiating whatsoever. I tried to stand the ground on it, but he didn’t want to hear anything of it, and I said, “If you’re going to run your business this way, then I’m out,” and then ended up with the whole thing imploded on him. That’s too bad because we got some of the best land in the entire area.
Lessons learned is keep relationships on hunting properties, even if you’re leasing it, even if you’ve been in it for 100 years, keep those relationships up because they can change. If somebody dies, somebody gets divorced or something happens and all of a sudden, you’re going, “I can’t hunt X anymore.” Food for thought or lessons learned on that one, that’s for sure. Talk to us about Calm Before The Kill TV, and before you do that, how can somebody get in touch with you, Ryan? How would you like them reach out to you?
I’m on Facebook, so you can look me up on there and then through my personal page or then also through Calm Before The Kill page. You’ll be able to see my stuff on there and message Bill. Bill will get a hold of me or if I’m able to see the message before he does, I can get a hold of you. The easiest way would be my personal Facebook page, because I have it set for anyone to be able to contact and follow me if they would like.
Are you on Twitter or Instagram?
I am on Twitter although not so computer literate redneck that I am, I’m not 100% how to use it, but I do have one.
Let’s go back to Bill Dease and Calm Before The Kill TV. What’s up with that?
It has been awesome. I’ve been with them since January. It was when we got things ramped back up and I was one of the three Pro Staff that Bill chose to get things going again. It has definitely been a challenge, the video camera. I’ve never done a whole lot of videoing before, so using the video camera and hunting at the same time, especially I don’t have a camera guy, so most of all my stuff is self-filmed. It’s been a lot of fun, but definitely challenging. It has been cool. My oldest son is ten, and I got him out on his first turkey hunt this year and he killed two birds on film this year. It was on our fourth episode. It’s been a journey and I’m looking forward to where it’s going go from here.
If an audience says, “I’d see people on YouTube and Pursuit Channel, how do I get into that and how do I get connected with somebody that’s already got a show running?” What advice would you give them?
I would join Facebook and then make connections, make friendships with people. Even if you don’t think anything can come of it, the more friendships and connections you can make, the more people that they may have a contact with. Also present yourself. You’ve got to do the work. You can’t expect someone to put you on the staff if you’re not doing anything to put yourself out there or show them that you would be an asset to them. That’s what I’ve done. I’ve gone to make connections, Facebook friends, cleared up with Tyler Jordan and Phillip Vanderpool. I’m friends with all those guys on Facebook and made connections and finally got an offer. I’ve had a few offers.
I’m a Pro Staff for Outdoorz Guyz, which is a radio show up in Canada, and I’m working for a couple of companies as well. This one came along because I was friends with Bill Dease and I followed his stuff for Calm Before The Kill, and made sure that stuff I posted was ethical and represented the way I felt I wanted to represent myself. That’s how they’re going to pick their people. They’re scrolling through those pictures and that stuff and the ones that are representing themselves the way they want their company represented are who they’re going contact to give them a position.
You’ve been on since January of 2016, is that correct?
Yes.
Audience, you got to work at it. People ask me about my show, Whitetail Rendezvous, and why people would come out in the show is because it’s a discussion. We’re sitting on the front porch and Ryan and I are sitting talking about some hunting adventures and that’s my show and I want to bring that content to your home because some of you folks have had the same experiences as Ryan and I have or Bill Dease. There’s hundreds. We’re coming up on episode number 300 and almost up to 100,000 downloads. People like to hear the stories, they like to learn and I’ll put a plug out. If you want to be on the show, contact me at WhitetailRendezvous@Gmail.com. I’d love to talk to you, meet you on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram and then see where it goes. I love having people on the show to share the stories because it’s so much fun.
We all have an automatic connection, we all have love for the outdoors, and there are a few of us that take it to the next level that we get as much enjoyment out of bringing it to others as we are doing something for ourselves. That’s great and it’s great to meet more people that have that same passion. I love taking new people out, especially kids and people that have never done it before. If you come to me and say, “I’ve never done this before and I want to get out there and do it.” I’m not a guide anymore, I’m not licensed here in Colorado, but if you want to come hunt with me, I’ll take you hunting and show you what you need to do.
When we think about passing on traditions, it’s important because I love seeing all the pictures on Facebook. Here’s Bob, Johnny, Susie, Meredith or Scott and they are ten or twelve years old, whatever the legal age is in their state, and they shot their first doe or spike buck, it doesn’t matter. They’re out there hunting and I get charged about that all the time.
My cousin, her husband’s little sister, she is twelve, there’s quite an age gap between them, but they took her out on her first hunt. They hunted in Nevada and she killed a buck. It was 33 inches wide 5×6, an absolute monster. Her first year ever and kills an absolute giant.
I’ve killed a couple decent. What I call decent are not bad. I’ve never killed one over 180, and so I still got that to look forward to, that’s for sure. On Calm Before The Kill, what kind of video setup do you have?
I’ve got a pretty simple set up. The main thing is it is good quality HD. I shoot with a Canon VIXIA HF R62. They replaced it. The 700 is the newer version of mine. It’s a little tiny compact camera, it doesn’t weigh much, but films in full 1080. It has a capability of recording right into MP4, which for editing for the show is great because I don’t have to do any conversion with it. It literally goes right into its editing software and you can cut it apart and put it where it needs to be.
A setup like that costs $400, $500, $200?
My full setup is about $400. You can get it on Amazon with an external microphone and a tripod. They have a package. It’s $400 or $450, and you get all the stuff ready to go with extra batteries, you get your external mic, you get your tripod, pretty much everything you need to get started.
There are some other units that are a little harder to draw that probably have a little more cover on them and you'd have a better chance at. Share on XYou mentioned a tripod. What kind of mounting bracket do you have if you’re up in a tree?
I use Muddy Outdoors tree arm. Main thing on that is make sure it’s got a smooth fluid head on it. Some of them can be a little jerky and that messes with your footage when it’s sitting there across the screen. I looked at several different ones and Muddy has your basic one like mine, which is $50. You can get the real expensive ones for the heavy cameras that are a couple of hundred dollars so they have something for every level that you’re at.
Ryan, we’re at the point of the show where you get to give shout-outs.
Definitely shout-out to Bill Dease. I can’t thank him enough for this opportunity. It’s probably a dream for any of us to be able to hunt and film and hopefully one day, we’ll be able to turn this thing into a career for us, but main thing is we’re all out here having a lot of fun. A shout-out to my cousin who killed his once in a lifetime desert bighorn in Nevada, so pretty awesome. I guided my other cousin to his last year and then my other cousin drew this year and he got his.
If I put in for Nevada and draw, I better call you.
Depending on where you’re going, I got a couple of units I know right where to go. The one we were after for my cousin was an easy 160 to 170. We didn’t hit on him but he’s still got one and then my uncle and my cousin both killed one out of the same unit that were both mid 150 rams.
How hard it is to take a big one with a crossbow?
Based on my experience, I would say that’d be pretty difficult because the areas they in are wide open. There’s no cover whatsoever. If you had a lot of time to spend on the herd we were on, you could have probably gotten close enough to one because there was a lot of rock outcroppings and stuff in the area where they were bedding, but you would’ve been spending a lot of hours up there to have them within 100 yards of you and not coming close enough because they were milling around up there. That area that we were hunting, there’s a bunch of mazes, and there’s literally nothing. It is flat. There are steep cliffs but once you get on top of them, it is flat for miles. Trying to get all of those boys in Nevada with a crossbow, that would be quite a feat if you could pull that off. I’m sure there are some other units that are a little harder to draw that probably have a little more cover on them and you’d have a better chance at, but the units I’ve been in, it’d be pretty difficult.
On behalf of thousands and soon to be 100,000 audience here at Whitetail Rendezvous, Ryan, thank you so much for being on the show.
I appreciate you having me.