Show notes
At 76, Ron Poole has been shooting bows for 70 years. He grew up running wild on a game management area along the White River in southeast Arkansas. He has 5 Boone and Crockett bucks and about 27 Pope and Young bucks, and he's never run a trail camera for deer. We drove to his place and sat down in his trophy room to talk about how he finds big bucks: hot feed trees, fresh sign that only lasts a week, open-woods bedding, and leaving a target buck alone until it's time to kill him.
In this episode:
- Shooting bows since age 4
- How he met Richard Fought, after passing nine bucks before 9 AM
- Why every feed tree tastes different and the sign only lasts 6–7 days
- Why bucks skirt feed trees downwind, and where to set up
- Grunt calls that sound like a deer, not a hog
- Rattling: tangle the antlers, don't bang them
- The 233-inch Iowa buck, runaway mules, and a blowing doe
- Why big bucks bed in open woods, not thickets
- How a river can split the rut
- Leaving your target buck alone until the pre-rut
- Finding acorns in the mountains by elevation
- Red oaks vs. white oaks in a dry year
- Persimmons, locusts, mimosas, and other overlooked deer food
- Fertilizing a white oak to make deer pick it first
- The doe figure-eight: where to hang during the rut
- Reading bottomland timber on an aerial map
- Why killing big deer consistently isn't luck
- The only scrapes worth hunting
- Walking in like a squirrel hunter
- Waiting for daylight to walk in, then hunting all day
- Carrying a climber and walking until it feels right
- Finding one tree in the dark with no GPS
- Trapping as a kid and the $27 possums
- Hunting with knapped chert heads
- Self bows, bamboo bows, Osage, and hickory
- Tuning arrows to a stick bow, arrow weight, and broadheads
- The 85-pound recurve that outran the compounds
- Shooting compounds with no sights at the world championships
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