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Tony Campisi “How I Learned to Hunt a New Species of Wild Game
Welcome to another episode of Whitetail Rendezvous. This is your host, Bruce Hutcheon. We’re heading into the end of the year. In fact, this is December 31, 2015. You’ll be probably hearing this show sometime late January or mid-February. But today, ladies and gentlemen, we’re heading to Pennsylvania, and we’re going to chat with Tony Campisi. Is that right, Tony?
Tony: Yes, sir, Campisi. Yep.
Bruce: Campisi. You’re in for a treat, ladies and gentlemen, because this young man…and he’s under 30 and over 20, so pick a year. But this man really plays out of everybody’s sandbox. He’s got a different slant on things. In the warm up, he shared some things with me, and I went, “Really?” And he’s an interesting guy, so without further ado, Tony Campisi, welcome to the show.
Tony: Hey, thanks a lot for having me, man.
Bruce: Hey, let’s just start right off with your number one, and I think it’s important for everybody in North America to understand how important conservation is. So I want to get Tony Campisi’s eyes on it, or take on what conservation really is and how it’s integrated to everything of our life.
Tony: Right. Well, first of all, I truly do believe that, as the human race, we are dependent on the natural world. And if you think about it, if you think about what do we really need, we need clean water to drink. We need clean food to eat, and we need clean air to breathe. All of those require stewardship of the land that we live on.
There are a lot of people, I think, that just believe that development can be a ruthless pursuit, and have this idea, “Well, it’s not gonna happen in my lifetime.” And I think that that’s a big problem today, because in the past 100 years, up until the year about 2000 in the Industrial Revolution, we did a ton of damage. I wasn’t even around during that time, but the Industrial Revolution and the ruthless development did a ton of damage. Now we’ve gotten to a point where we are going out of that economy. We’re going out of that time, and we really do have an opportunity to make a huge difference for the next 100 years. It really is so connected to…everything is really connected.
There was a study done, I forget what scientist did it, I forget his name. Monbiot, I think, was his last name, George. And he did a study in, I believe it was Yellowstone National Park, where they actually took the wolves out of the park, I’m guessing, to make it more safe for guests. And they noticed over the year that the deer population would go up. And then the deer would eat everything as they do now, why it’s so important to manage the deer herds now. But they would eat everything, all the browse, and then the birds would leave because they’d have nowhere to go. The bears would leave because they had nothing to eat, and it turned into a barren wasteland, basically.
And then they reintroduced the wolves to see what would happen. The amazing thing was that when the wolves came back, they started to eat the deer. And then the deer population wasn’t able to eat all the browse anymore. And the birds returned, and the banks of the stream became thicker, and the rivers slowed down, and they started to flow more evenly. And the fish were healthier, and the bears returned because they could eat the fish and the berries. Everything was connected. In conservation, especially in the hunting industry, hunters and fishermen do more for conservation than any organization, because they understand the connection between everything, how it’s connected and, basically, what’s gonna happen if we get things out of balance, I guess.
So I think with this new economy, people are either…I believe that the 40-hour work week is completely dead. I believe people are either gonna be working 80 hours or they’re gonna be working about 15 to 20 hours. There’s gonna be a lot more time to focus, for the people who really care about this stuff to focus, and we can really make a difference in the next 100 years.
Bruce: And listeners, I just wanted to share. A lot of different viewpoints will be heard on Whitetail Rendezvous. But Tony is a hunter. He hunts and he harvests and he puts whitetails down. So if there’s a question in anybody’s mind, we’ll get into his hunting experiences. But I wanted to share a really defined slant on how we’re connected through conservation to the health of our forests, our streams, and actually, in my belief, our way of life. It’s all connected in a natural way.
Absolutely. And hunters, we would never be able to get out there after whatever animals that we’re pursuing if conservation was not a constant focus of people
Tony: Absolutely. And hunters, we would never be able to get out there after whatever animals that we’re pursuing if conservation was not a constant focus of people. And that is really when we’re buying our licenses and we’re buying stamps and licenses and all the kind of stuff, that’s where your money is going. It’s going to conservation. So, absolutely, as a hunter, that’s what has built my passion for conservation, conserving the natural world. Without a natural world, we have no hunting.
Bruce: And listeners, Tony is gonna share his hunting tradition. It’s surprising, because he’s in his mid-20s, and nobody in his family hunted. So, Tony, talk to us about how you began your own hunting tradition.
Tony: Right. Well, I grew up in Pennsylvania. I was born and raised in Pennsylvania, and anybody who knows Pennsylvania has a strong, strong hunting tradition. So I grew up all around it. I was surrounded by it all the time. Kids would come into school late, if they even came in at all. We have off in Pennsylvania on the first day of rifle season. It’s literally a statewide holiday. We are surrounded by hunters. We would see bucks hanging off of the trees and stuff in the winter and the fall. And it always intrigued me. I always liked the idea of getting out there and killing my own food, because I knew I had to eat, and I’ve always been a sustainable-minded person. I thought, “This is how I gotta do it.”
So it is really intimidating to get into hunting, with all the rules and regulations and gear and all that kind of stuff. Like we said, there’s no hunters on my mother’s side of the family and my father’s side of the family, on either side. There’s 30, 40 people in total. It’s a very large family, but none of them were hunters.
Actually, when I turned 20, when I developed the confidence…I actually wrote about this on my blog, and developed the confidence to go out and learn this all by myself. I went and got a license, and I just went into the woods. Basically, no one was there the whole time, the first year. I didn’t see a thing. It was just a big learning process, and I’ve read and studied, and it really was a big commitment to just learn pretty much everything myself.
Bruce: What was the name of that blog?
The blog is TCampisi.com. I write articles on that blog so that is one…I actually wrote an article called How I Learned to Hunt a New Species of Wild Game
Tony: The blog is TCampisi.com. I write articles on that blog so that is one…I actually wrote an article called How I Learned to Hunt a New Species of Wild Game, and it just goes through the process that I developed out of necessity to learn how to hunt, because I was never a one season hunter. I was never a one species hunter. So I had to learn how, and then I explained a little bit more on that. So that article was called How I Learned to Hunt a New Species of Wild Game.
Bruce: Thanks for that. Let’s jump right into…I’m reading your bio and an amazing story. “A big, mature seven-point buck was the first experience I had with killing a deer.” Take us through that. Take us through what led up to you getting the shot, and then let’s talk about the after shot.
Tony: Right. Well, this was, I believe, the third year into…I didn’t rifle hunt at all. I only got into bow hunting. It was the third year…or, no, the second year, I guess it was. I was hunting a private piece of property. I had permission. It was a buddy of mine. His father gave me permission to hunt on his property. And it’s actually a very, very large piece of property that was not used for anything. It was really overgrown, and it was like an enormous 500-acre bedding area, for the most part. It literally looked like a maze. There were trails going in every direction, but it was so thick that you couldn’t hardly see anything, unless you sat on the outer rims and watched the deer come in and out of the fields.
We had been watching a six-point come in and out during the morning, and then actually my younger brother almost…he drew on it, held it, and I was glassing it. I wanted to make sure he took a safe shot on a legal buck, because we do have antler restrictions here. And I didn’t decide that until it was too late, and he ran away. But we’d seen him a couple of times. And I sat there throughout the morning. This was the day I committed to sit all day, because that’s what I read. I read during the rut you wanna sit all day. This was November 11. I was sitting on the outer edge of this huge property, and I had seen nothing that day. It was actually quite warm. I think it got up to 62 degrees in November, and that’s not typical. This year it has been, but it’s not typical.
At about 10:00 in the morning, I remembered something that I had read. They said that the big boys always come out in the middle of the day, like the ones that you’ll never see otherwise. And it said that most people will leave the stand and go get lunch or whatever. I forget where I read this, but I remember it, and it stuck out. Most people go out of the woods, come back in the evening. So I went, and I just started bushwhacking into the thickest part of this property I could possibly find.
As I was walking, I looked down this…it’s basically what used to be a Christmas tree farm. It’s so thick, but this was like a tractor path in the middle, and in this tractor path the grass was up to my chest. I saw two deer looking straight at me, and I pulled out my binoculars. I saw a doe, and I looked at her. She didn’t get up. And I said, “Okay, well, if I walk anymore, I might spook her.” And I heard that big buck travel around the bedding area to find the doe in the middle of the day.
Remember, I had nobody to tell me this. So I was really just going off of books that I had read, and this is just basically what I learned out of books. No one ever told me this. So I said, “I’m gonna sit down right here. I can see her. When I sit down, I’m not gonna be able to see her, but I know she’s there. So if a buck comes from my left, or comes through her and pops her up, he might follow her and come out right in front of me.”
So I sat there for a couple of hours. It was up until, I think, 1:15. I heard some rustling about 50 yards away. I see some movement, and then I see, in my naive eyes, what looks like a moose running through. It is wide and just huge. I was so excited. My heart was literally beating out of my chest. But he wasn’t even close to me yet. But I was thinking, “This is the biggest deer that I have ever seen alive. Nobody I’ve ever met has shot a deer bigger than this, and this is the first deer I’m ever going to even be able to pull my bow back on. This is insane.” So I hit my grunt a few times. About 10, 15 minutes go by and nothing. I hear nothing.
Sure enough, within ten minutes, I literally am sitting four yards from a trail. A doe comes flying down that trail just panting, panting. I could have reached out and grabbed her tail. She looks at me, and she spooks, and she runs straight up into the trees, straight up into the woods. There’s literally woods right to my right shoulder. I’m sitting right along an edge. There’s a little clearing and then thick, thick, thick stuff to my left. It is literally right in the thick of it, right in the middle. So there’s not very much room at all.
I’m thinking, “This buck is gonna be right on her tail, and he’s gonna end up four yards in front of me.” And I’m just going nuts, so I clip my release onto my d-loop, whatever that thing is called on your bow, and I am just shaking. I am shaking like crazy, and I just know it’s gonna happen. And sure enough, this buck comes flying out of the trees, nose to the ground. He does not even look at me. I’m sitting on the ground. I’m not in a stand. I’m literally sitting in the ground. He comes…I’m getting excited talking about it right now.
Bruce: So am I. Keep going.
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