From my teenage years through my 30s I spent about 100 or more hours a year actually hunting, not counting hunting-relating activities. It was my primary lifestyle. Most everything else I did in life was just to service hunting. I was raised that way. My family spent most major holidays in deer camp so many of my best memories are hunting related. Sometime just before 40 I started to cut back, and this last season I’ve hunted no more than 4-5 times.
Besides having a family later in life, a primary cause for me to lose interest has been me moving to the woods. Hunting used to be an escape to the woods. Now I get the same escape sitting in my yard watching the chickens forage and maybe seeing a deer feed through my woodlines in the distance.
Also, I no longer take pleasure in hunting if it isn’t productive, and productive to me means harvesting the maximum amount of meat with minimum time and effort. I have a tendency to now only care to hunt for sustenance. The sport aspect means little to me. When I was young I could sit for hours like a praying mantis for the pleasure of seeing a nice buck for 30 seconds. Today I don’t have time to play cat and mouse with a mature buck for an entire season. I rather stack up 5 yearlings in a weekend and have a full freezer. Sport be darned. Yet Florida now makes us trophy hunt to some degree with antler restrictions and limited doe harvest.
To that end, I keep my stands set up year round in spots that consistently produce bucks. I leave them alone and only sit in each one a small number of times during peak solunar and weather times. Ironically, I get more shots a mature bucks now simply because I don’t overhunt areas like I used to. I can see a mature buck today on just a few hours of stand time a year.
Besides having a family later in life, a primary cause for me to lose interest has been me moving to the woods. Hunting used to be an escape to the woods. Now I get the same escape sitting in my yard watching the chickens forage and maybe seeing a deer feed through my woodlines in the distance.
Also, I no longer take pleasure in hunting if it isn’t productive, and productive to me means harvesting the maximum amount of meat with minimum time and effort. I have a tendency to now only care to hunt for sustenance. The sport aspect means little to me. When I was young I could sit for hours like a praying mantis for the pleasure of seeing a nice buck for 30 seconds. Today I don’t have time to play cat and mouse with a mature buck for an entire season. I rather stack up 5 yearlings in a weekend and have a full freezer. Sport be darned. Yet Florida now makes us trophy hunt to some degree with antler restrictions and limited doe harvest.
To that end, I keep my stands set up year round in spots that consistently produce bucks. I leave them alone and only sit in each one a small number of times during peak solunar and weather times. Ironically, I get more shots a mature bucks now simply because I don’t overhunt areas like I used to. I can see a mature buck today on just a few hours of stand time a year.