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Braxton Byers How to create a YouTube Hunting Channel
Welcome to another edition of Whitetail Rendezvous. We’re heading back down to Texas today and we’re going to talk to Braxton Byers. Braxton, also known as FollowHisArrow, is the husband of Jessica Taylor Byers who calls herself FollowHerArrow. Braxton Byers How to create a YouTube Hunting Channel. They’re quite a couple down there. They’re dynamic people in the great state of Texas. Braxton and his wife, Jessica, with a couple of other folks, are starting a YouTube series called Breaking Wild. Their mission as a team is to provide a resource for others to learn how to be successful hunters. Braxton, welcome to the show.
Braxton: Thank you, Bruce.
Bruce: So let’s just talk about Breaking Wild for a few minutes here and tell the listeners that…probably the age group starts in the late teens and goes up to the oldest segment over 65 people all over North America. I don’t know how many people listen every day but I know we’re represented throughout North America so let’s share with them what’s happening with Breaking Wild.
Braxton: Okay, yes, Breaking Wild is a YouTube series that the HomeCookinHunter got started or had a dream of in his mind. He wanted to set something up with different people around the United States, not only to be a hunting show but to teach people if someone didn’t know how to field dress a deer, they could go to our channel and not just see the hunt or the kill but see steps on field dressing your deer, what to do with the meat after you field dress it and also cook the meat.
So we have…there’s five of us spread out across the United Staes that are putting this YouTube series on. We have FromFieldToPlate in California who is an awesome chef with wild game, Fatal_Impact_Films out of Kentucky who is an excellent producer and predator caller. Again, the HomeCookinHunter out of Tennessee does cooking episodes, processing episodes and things like that. Then they picked up me and my wife Jessica out of Texas who mainly just do a lot of hunting. We don’t even know the processing side of the animals. We take ours to the meat lockers and get ours processed and pick it up.
So it’s a series that we’re all learning on also and we’re going to show everybody our mistakes and how we teach each other in the field.
Bruce: You mentioned you had five states. I had California, Kentucky, Tennessee and Texas. Was there another state that I missed there?
Braxton: No, that’s it. It’s me and my wife are both in Texas.
Bruce: Okay, okay, five people and four states. Got it. Got it. So on the hunting side, what makes you feel that you can bring that to the table at a pretty good level?
Braxton: The people that I’ve grown up around from the time I could walk, people that…my parents asked me what I wanted for Christmas and I wanted Realtree Monster Bucks tapes. All I wanted to do was to sit there and watch hunting shows if I couldn’t be outside. I was extremely lucky growing up to be able to go hunting. My dad took me where he went hunting or fishing, I was right there alongside him. We had access to ranches that were well-known ranches that had hunting guides and professional hunters that came into them so I had always been around people in the hunting industry and I just soaked up every little thing I could to learn everything about it. I’ve always, always been a hunting fanatic so I’ve always just soaked it up like a sponge as much as I could and listened to everybody and the different ways of hunting and producing big whitetails.
Bruce: Now you said in your bio you started bow hunting at the age 13. Was that with a recurve or a Jennings compound? Take us back to 13 years old and how you get started bow hunting.
My dad…actually, when I was around eight years old my dad bought his first bow
Braxton: That was with a compound. My dad…actually, when I was around eight years old my dad bought his first bow. Him and some of his friends were wanting to get into bow hunting so he bought me a bow around eight years old. Well, I could never pull [inaudible 00:05:02] and he just kept…I think he bought me an old bungee cord or something from Walmart and he just told me keep working at it and when you can pull 35, 40 pounds I’ll let you sit in the stand.
So I was about 12 years old when I really…he felt comfortable enough to let me harvest my first animal with a bow and ever since sitting in that tree and killing my first doe I’ve just been addicted to it. I can’t get enough of it. I eat, sleep and breathe bow hunting.
Bruce: Now you do have a regular job, right?
Braxton: Yes, sir, I run a concrete company out of Austin, Texas.
Bruce: So do you own the company or…
Braxton: No, I’m the division manager. I run about 80 finishers, concrete finishers from day-to-day and travel around the state pouring concrete.
Bruce: Oh my goodness. So do you run the pumper or you’re just the guy who makes sure everything works right?
Braxton: Yeah, we’re just the guys that make sure the slab is finished right and beautiful and the owner’s happy. We come in and pour the concrete out of the truck and finish it with machines.
Bruce: Wow, that must get…during the wintertime’s not bad. What do you in the summertime? Holy [inaudible 00:06:22] it must get hot.
Braxton: It kind of works out great because in the wintertime it kind of gets slow if the weather is cold, which is best for our hunting season so I have a little time off during the winter to travel around to our different places that we hunt. In the summertime, we work nights.
Bruce: So you work nights?
Braxton: Yes, sir. Down here in the Texas heat, in the summertime, the concrete would set up too fast, we wouldn’t be able to handle it.
Bruce: Wow, interesting. So take note folks for a concrete job get a hold of Braxton, but you’ve got to work all night long. Hey, let’s go back and talk about growing a big whitetail, a mature whitetail, four-and-a-half years old through strict management. What does that mean to you?
Management means everything to me.
Braxton: Management means everything to me. People make mistakes and stuff and I’m excited for every animal that people kill, but the ranches that I guide on or I help work or just are the ranches that me and Jessica hunt week in and week out, we try not only to kill the right buck in the right age group but also the does. We really try to study our deer herd from bucks to does to fawn at every aspect so that we know that we want to take out the exact deer that needs to go that is producing not what we want in our genetic pool, but…
Also, that’s with protein feed. Down here in Texas, we can’t…it’s not as easy for us to go out and plant a beautiful food plot and get it to grow at the pace that the deer eat. Our numbers are, the numbers of deer around here are just out of control so we feed pellet protein and try to keep the deer, the doe/buck ratio where it needs to be and it’s a year-round job for sure.
Bruce: Now when you’re talking about managing, talk to me about a healthy balance herd, buck to doe ratio, how many fawns are getting recruited into the next year, those type of things.
Braxton: We, everybody around here tries to shoot for two does to every one buck, but that’s really complicated unless you are on a big ranch. A healthy deer herd around here is, I would like to say 1 deer per every 12 acres probably is what you can figure. And that’s really tough to get around here but that’s what you can try to figure on your place, 1 deer to every 12 acres, Then we also, to get those deer that are around to be as healthy as they can be we kind of came up with, we like to have year-round protein feed out of these protein feeders. We call them drop feeders where the deer can come and go as they please. There’s no timer on them. As they eat it, more falls out. We like to put these feeders in areas that the deer will come to all days long and feel safe coming to. We don’t hunt these areas. We don’t go in these areas unless we know we’re going to go in there to give them more feed.
If your deer number is 1 to…unless you have, you’re in north Texas and you’re able to have the grass and the food lots, but around where we like to be in the southern part of the state we like to say around 1 to 12, 1 deer per 12 acres.
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