C h a r l e s a l s h e i m e r Mathews Bowhunting Whitetails
b y D a n i e l e. s c h m i d t Deer hunting is a unique sport. It s a pastime that most us daydream about all year, then enjoy for a few short weeks each autumn. But for Minnesota s Pat Reeve, deer hunting is a bit more complicated. For him, chasing trophy whitetails is a personal passion and a full-time business. Reeve spends countless weeks filming, producing and co-starring in his own TV show Driven With Pat and Nicole. Although it might sound like a dream job, it also means Reeve constantly faces nonstop travel and the extreme pressure of always having to outsmart mature whitetails. Reeve s transformation from a good deer hunter to a hunting industry celebrity didn t happen by chance. This former full-time taxidermist, deer hunting guide and videographer has earned his stripes through a tireless work ethic and 20-plus years of dedicated deer hunting. His keys to success are many, but tree stand placement and hunting strategies have pushed his abilities to a level reserved for the nation s elite bow-hunters. A Tree Stand Phenom I had the pleasure of meeting Reeve in the mid-1990s when he was still guiding deer and turkey hunters in Wisconsin s Buffalo County. What struck me then was his humble approach to hunting and his keen ability to select an ambush site based off of a mere hunch. Later, after talking with some of his successful clients, I learned that Reeve was seldom wrong when it came to selecting Grade A stand sites. He also showed an uncanny ability to find stand locations that required little, if Become a better stand hunter with Pat Reeve s proven whitetail tactics any, preparation such as creating entry and exit routes, clearing shooting lanes, and the like. Fast-forward 15 years. Reeve is still outsmarting mature white-tailed bucks, but he is now doing it in as many as 14 states annually. Does he have access to quality land? Certainly. However, it is undeniable that the tactics he honed in those years of guiding and hunting deer on his own for fun provided him with insights that most hunters will never achieve in a lifetime. I caught up with Reeve recently and asked him to elaborate on some of the finer points of his hunting approach. During our hour-long conversation, the following five tactics kept surfacing as his keys to success on trophyclass bucks. Trust Your Instincts One thing I ve learned over the years is that all good deer hunters have a sixth sense, Reeve said. When you ve been at this as long as I have, especially when you ve worked as a deer hunting guide, you learn how to pick out a spot and immediately know it will produce. My good friend Tom Indrebo shares that trait. Developing that sixth sense is actually a combination of things, he continued. It might be experience, trial and error and/or intuition. Bowhunting Whitetails Mathews
What happens is you learn how to listen to your gut feelings that tell you, This is a good spot. Those feelings are usually the result of past experiences with bucks and how they have reacted in similar terrain situations or similar conditions. Eventually, you build your confidence. You learn not to secondguess yourself. Reeve said confidence issues have ruined many aspiring trophy hunters. Some lack the time to go afield and study deer behavior, while others get into a rut by constantly second-guessing everything they do. Avoid these traps, he said, and you will start enjoying more success. When I was guiding at Bluff Country Outfitters in Buffalo County all those years ago, I got the confidence that s necessary to deal with the pressure of producing close encounters for paying clients. To be a good guide, you have to basically turn your brain into a computer bank. You have to absorb what the hunters are telling you about the stand locations you ve selected. Are they productive? What works? What doesn t? When you do that for a whole hunting season season after season you learn how to listen to that sixth sense. Ins and Outs Selecting a stand site where deer are likely to travel is only one task in a multi-step process for buck-hunting success. And often, it s not even Reeve s first consideration. Aside from finding the right location, devising strategies for getting to and from the stand undetected are critical, according to Reeve. I actually think about stand approach well before I even step foot in the woods to look for stand sites, he admits. You have to learn how to be stealthy. Where most guys fail is when they find their stand site and immediately go to work hanging the stand. That s what separates the successful hunters from the unsuccessful ones. You might find a good spot, but you have to be always thinking about how you are going to get in and out of there without alerting deer. That becomes a science in itself. There are many times when I ll find a good stand site but know I can t hunt it because there s no good way to enter or exit the area. You might have found a great spot S T A N D S E N S E for morning hunts. You certainly aren t going to hunt a spot like this by walking through a feeding area to get there. Even if you do and don t think you ve spooked deer on the way to the stand, believe me, they already are aware of your presence. Nothing slips past a big buck. I ve watched deer so many times actually stop what they are doing and watch neighboring hunters walk to and from their stands. Running Interference Reeve said using all-terrain-vehicles in areas where deer aren t used to them is another common mistake. The best spot in the world can go right out the window if you educate the deer to your presence by driving your ATV in there or parking it too close to the stand before walking the rest of the way. If you have to use your ATV, go in early; you can train deer that an ATV is not a danger, but you have to be consistent with it. You always hear in farm country that deer are used to tractors that s mostly true, but you can t take an ATV into an area where they have never been before and expect the deer not to notice it. Although Reeve believes vehicle traffic alters deer behavior, it is not nearly as bad as foot traffic. I have learned over the years that walking to the stand and leaving your scent out there is much worse. A tactic I now use is to have someone drive me in and drop me off right at the base of the tree, and leave the engine View Pro Staff Bios online at mathewsinc.com running the whole time this is happening. If the vehicle stays running and leaves immediately, deer seem to believe that the danger has come and gone. Reeve uses the same tactic for exiting stands, especially near food plots, crop fields and other food sources. This will also help flush a deer out of there when you need to exit your stand. Bumping them with an approaching vehicle is much, much better than getting busted walking out. Deer get used to it, and it keeps your stand fresh. Reeve added that if you don t think deer notice when you walk to and from your stand, watch what happens when your tracks are visible in the snow. After walking out from an afternoon hunt, take note of your boot tracks. Check them again the next time you hunt the stand. Invariably, they will be littered with deer tracks. Deer are absolutely curious animals, he said. They investigate and smell everything. A mature buck will immediately learn to approach downwind of that area. Keep Adapting Many hunters are deeply committed to hanging their tree stands in spring or early summer so the area has time to rest after the intrusion. What are Reeve s opinions on this topic? That works, if you have the luxury of getting those stands in early. However, deer movements change throughout the year and from season to season. Yes, I know guys who hunt the same tree year after year and have success, but that is often the exception. Food sources change. Logging operations affect deer patterns. Trees fall down in storms and might block a favored trail. A lot of things can happen over the course of a year to deviate how deer travel. Because of these factors, Reeve constantly looks for new locations that offer good cover and stealthy access routes. We travel so much, we often only have five to seven days to hunt a particular location. Therefore, we don t have the luxury of hanging our stands early. So, we take the first day of the hunt to do some speed scouting. That day is when I need to go out there and get stands up as fast as I can for different wind scenarios and fine-tune it after seeing how deer Mathews Bowhunting Whitetails
Bowhunting Whitetails Mathews
move through the property. Reeve s fine-tuning approach can best be described as a blitzkrieg. It s an offensive approach. A southern Illinois hunt from late last year provides a good example of why this approach works. We were hunting a cornfield, and deer were all coming out 100 yards away, Reeve recalls. I immediately knew I had to get in there and move the stands. The only problem was that deer were bedded close-by and, because it was late season, they don t move much. There was a high chance of bumping deer. The only way I could go in there effectively was to go in the middle of the night. Going in right after dark wasn t an option, because they would still be feeding. We drove the truck in at about midnight and left it running. We drove to our stands, dropped them into the back of the truck and drove the 100 yards over to the tree I had picked. We bumped deer, but we didn t leave any human scent on the ground. Reeve shot a mature buck the next afternoon. S T A N D S E N S E Leave It Be Reeve doesn t believe in cutting shooting lanes. Instead, he looks for shooting windows near his tree stands that take advantage of natural holes in the canopy. If adjustments are needed, he tries to bend a few branches out of the way without breaking them. A mature buck will always know when something has been messed with, he says emphatically. Plus, you leave your scent all over the place when you start doing that. If you have to cut shooting lanes, you should do it very early in the year. Even then, the more you cut, the more you will expose yourself. Yet, Reeve does employ a saw in his tree stand preparation because he is constantly using brush, limbs and other vegetation to hide his tree stands. The secret, he says, is to import the natural camouflage. If you are going to go through all the work of hanging a stand, why not brush it in? he asks. The little amount of time it takes is well worth it. I cut the branches elsewhere, then bring them with. Oaks limbs work well, because they don t lose their leaves. I fill the back of my truck with them and I use zip-ties to brush in my stand. Tree Stand Success After putting more than 50 Pope-and- Young-class bucks, including two gross Booners, on the wall, it would be easy for Reeve to declare himself a bow-hunting expert with nothing else to learn in the whitetail woods. He said nothing could be further from the truth. Heck, I m still learning, he says. I don t know how many times over the course of a season I literally want to kick myself. I m constantly saying, I should know better! But that s what happens when you hunt totally wild deer in wild situations. And for Reeve, that s what keeps deer hunting exciting and fun. Daniel Schmidt is the editor of Deer & Deer Hunting. 10 Mathews Bowhunting Whitetails