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by Beau Martonik
The East Meets West Hunt Podcast is your resource for all things adventure hunting. This podcast is for the hunter that loves planning and preparing for the hunt, just as much as the hunt. Whether it's deer hunting for big woods mountain bucks, chasing elk in the Rocky Mountains, and anything in between, we will talk to successful hunters from all over to provide the EMW community with useful knowledge and motivation to continue to live their life through a series of adventures.
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Beau Martonik sits back down with Lee Ellis of Seek One for the second half of their conversation, which is one long story. Lee saw a buck with heavy brow tines one time in the summer, across a rolling bean field, and then didn’t lay eyes on him again until the first week of November. He spent most of the season putting time into a different deer entirely. Then the season ended in a blizzard. Lee walks through almost hitting that buck with his truck five days before he killed him, watching him feed in a cut cornfield for an hour and a half in cold that left his fingertips sensitive for weeks afterward, and asking a neighbor for access permission rather than hunting permission so he could keep a tree line between himself and an island of timber full of eyes. He gets into the tree he wanted, the tree he settled for, and why the second one is the only reason the hunt happened. Also covered: the does blowing and then coming back, a lung liver hit that looked perfect on camera, backing out for a sleepless night, dragging the deer out a mile on a sled at negative 18 with a frozen beard, and the deer’s other close calls. Part one of this conversation is episode 505. The Wilderness Society - https://act.wilderness.org/a/26bcpledge-eastwest-1 Instagram: @eastmeetswesthunt @beau.martonik Facebook: East Meets West Outdoors Shop Hunting Gear and Apparel: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/ YouTube: Beau Martonik - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQJon93sYfu9HUMKpCMps3w Partner Discounts and Affiliate Links: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/partners Amazon Influencer Page https://www.amazon.com/shop/beau.martonik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Beau Martonik sits down with Jameson Curtis and Kelly McGraw of Wild at Heart Outdoors, the two guys behind Pursuing the Allegheny. It’s their first time on the show in eight years. They walked away from making hunting films, and Jameson walked away from hunting almost entirely for a couple of years. He says getting off social media was the reset button, that seeing 15 guys out of thousands post big bucks had him convinced everybody was killing except him. Kelly puts it more simply: when you drop the ego, you think more freely. What came out the other side is two guys who hunt less and capitalize more. Kelly has been on four mule deer hunts without the big one he’s after, and instead of counting them as four failures he counts them as 28 total days of learning. Jameson laid in the weeds for six hours waiting on bedded bucks rather than push a stalk he knew wouldn’t work. They both stopped hunting individual buck beds off theory and moved to hunting whatever sign is hot that week. The tactical run in the middle is worth the listen on its own. The one hidden corner of a cut cornfield that the biggest bucks hit in daylight within a couple days of the combine leaving, every year, regardless of the calendar. Why bucks buffer off a field edge and sprint 60 yards before they feed, and the young oak Kelly had planted at 23 yards to fix it. What a 2 a.m. scrape picture usually means about the next afternoon. Why Kelly would rather bump a buck out of his bed than stay a step behind him. And the only weather trigger either of them will get out of bed for. In this episode: Why they stepped away from hunting, and what getting off social media did for it Pursuing the Allegheny, eleven years later What changed out West in twelve years, and the advice from Jared Lyle that stuck Kelly’s mule deer math: 28 days, not four failures The lunch break set that killed a buck that same evening What a 2 a.m. scrape picture usually means about tomorrow afternoon The corner of the cut corn the biggest bucks hit in daylight every year Target panic, and a raghorn at 20 yards in Wyoming Where buck bedding stopped working for them, and hunting hot sign instead Bumping deer out of bed and hunting them anyway The only weather trigger either of them will get out of bed for The transplanted scrape tree, and why bucks buffer off a field edge Managing a farm after years on public Hunting for yourself instead of for the internet The Wilderness Society - https://act.wilderness.org/a/26bcpledge-eastwest-1 Instagram: @eastmeetswesthunt @beau.martonik Facebook: East Meets West Outdoors Shop Hunting Gear and Apparel: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/ YouTube: Beau Martonik - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQJon93sYfu9HUMKpCMps3w Partner Discounts and Affiliate Links: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/partners Amazon Influencer Page https://www.amazon.com/shop/beau.martonik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Beau Martonik sits back down with Dr. Karl Miller for the second half of their conversation, and this half is entirely about what a deer sees. Karl was part of the original work that got inside a whitetail’s eye to determine whether deer perceive color at all, and he later worked with Sitka on a camo pattern developed around deer vision rather than human vision. He starts with the hardware. A deer’s pupil opens about three times wider than ours, which alone is roughly nine times the light-gathering ability, and a reflective layer behind the retina called the tapetum bounces that light back across the rods and cones a second time to roughly double it again. The pupil is a horizontal slit rather than a circle, and it rotates to stay level even when the deer drops its head to feed, so a deer eating acorns is still watching the horizon. They see roughly 310 degrees, whereas we see 120. Then the tradeoff. Deer have no fovea centralis, they can’t accommodate for distance, and their visual acuity at a stationary object comes in somewhere around 20/40 to 20/60. Karl’s line is that they’d almost need corrective lenses to drive. What they do have is motion. Their eyes stay still and let the image travel across the retina engaging new cones, and they process that visual information roughly four to five times faster than a human does, which Karl suggests means your movement looks to them something like slow motion. That leads into a long back and forth on jumping the string, whether a deer is reacting to the sound at all, and whether it might be seeing the bow flex or even the arrow itself. Beau brings his axis deer footage from Hawaii into it, where the deer were on the ground before the arrow arrived at 25 yards. The back half is camo, and it’s the most useful stretch of either episode. Karl lays out the two jobs camo has to do, explains why pattern detail matters far less than most hunters think and why outline and spectral match matter far more, and gets into whiteners and brighteners in fabrics and detergents that take ultraviolet light and re-radiate it into exactly the part of the spectrum a deer sees 20 times better than we do. He explains why he stopped wearing blue jeans in the woods, why a whitetail’s tail is white in the first place, why old army camo is actually good camo, and why a shiny fabric can beat you even when the color is right. He also walks through how Sitka’s Cover pattern was developed and what it was actually designed to solve. He closes with what he calls the take home: hunt the deer’s brain first. There are only three questions in a deer’s head, and everything it does traces back to one of them. Part one of this conversation is episode 506. Topics: 00:00:00 — Part two intro 00:07:16 — A deer's eye is built for two jobs, and neither one is looking at you 00:11:32 — Pupil size, and nine times your light gathering ability 00:13:31 — Their eyes rotate to stay level when their head goes down 00:14:23 — The tapetum, and 18 times the light 00:21:21 — Blue cones across the whole retina, and 310 degrees of vision 00:24:49 — 20/40 to 20/60: they'd need corrective lenses to drive 00:27:39 — Flicker fusion, and why your movement looks like slow motion to them 00:28:40 — Jumping the string: the sound, the arrow, or the bow 00:34:29 — Drawing on a quartering deer, and why they don't look up 00:37:20 — What camo has to do, and what it doesn't 00:40:39 — Whiteners, brighteners, and camo that glows 00:42:53 — How Cover got built around deer eyes instead of ours 00:50:08 — Fabric shine, old army camo, and plastic blaze orange 00:54:03 — Hunt the deer's brain first Dr. Karl Miller’s published research: Google Scholar, search “Karl Miller deer UGA” Part one of this conversation is Ep. 506 Instagram: @eastmeetswesthunt @beau.martonik Facebook: East Meets West Outdoors Shop Hunting Gear and Apparel: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/ YouTube: Beau Martonik - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQJon93sYfu9HUMKpCMps3w Partner Discounts and Affiliate Links: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/partners Amazon Influencer Page
Beau Martonik sits down with Dr. Karl Miller of the University of Georgia, where he spent 40 years leading deer research and mentoring close to 100 graduate students. Karl grew up hunting the Pennsylvania big woods before he went south for his PhD, and much of what hunters take for granted about rubs and scrapes came out of his lab. The core of this conversation is signpost communication. Karl walks through why bucks make rubs in the first place, and what one of his students found when he ran a chemical analysis on forehead gland secretions: 67 different compounds, and not one of them in higher concentration in dominant bucks than in subordinate ones. No dominance signal at all. What varies is the mix, deer to deer, which means every buck is leaving something closer to a name than a rank. He also explains why the loser of a sparring match will walk up and lick the winner’s forehead. Then he gets into scrapes, and the finding he clearly loves most. Scraping activity peaks about two weeks before peak breeding in almost every study ever run on it. Karl’s hypothesis is that this isn’t coincidence or anticipation. It’s that buck urine deposited in scrapes may be acting as a priming hormone on the does, pulling their cycles into synchrony, and the two-week lag matches the length of a doe’s follicular wave. He and a graduate student demonstrated the same mechanism in Eld’s deer using a control group and a group exposed to male urine, and the treated group entered estrus together with enhanced hormone profiles. Then he flips it and explains flehmen, the vomeronasal organ, and how a buck taking doe urine into his mouth routes it past the smelling part of his brain entirely and straight to the part that runs his reproductive physiology. Both sides priming each other. Also covered: 3,600 rubs per square mile on an unhunted Georgia herd, roughly six per acre; the interdigital gland and the 11 compounds that actually do track with maturity; why a tarsal gland’s smell comes from bacteria and not from the gland; the staph and listeria living on it; the castrated buck that ran an entire rut in two weeks on a testosterone dose they overshot; young bucks making 15 percent as many scrapes as mature bucks; and a stretch where he and Beau land in different places on whether there’s any point in doctoring a scrape. This is part one of two. Part two is deer vision and camo, and it’s out Tuesday, September 1st. Topics: 00:00:00 — Intro 00:19:25 — What everybody had wrong about rubs in the seventies 00:25:04 — 67 compounds, and why a rub isn't a dominance display 00:26:09 — Why the loser of a sparring match licks the winner's forehead 00:38:32 — 3,600 rubs per square mile, and how many one buck makes in a year 00:49:08 — The three things a buck does at a scrape 00:52:56 — Why a tarsal gland actually stinks 01:01:45 — 39 bucks on one scrape, and 85 percent of visits after dark 01:04:30 — Scrapes peak two weeks before the rut 01:06:24 — Priming hormones, and synchronized estrus 01:10:09 — Flehmen, and the does priming the bucks right back 01:21:59 — Adding scent to a scrape, and whether it does anything 01:35:00 — What a broken age structure does to the rut you're hunting Dr. Karl Miller’s published research: Google Scholar, search “Karl Miller deer UGA” Instagram: @eastmeetswesthunt @beau.martonik Facebook: East Meets West Outdoors Shop Hunting Gear and Apparel: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/ YouTube: Beau Martonik - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQJon93sYfu9HUMKpCMps3w Partner Discounts and Affiliate Links: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/partners Amazon Influencer Page https://www.amazon.com/shop/beau.martonik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Beau Martonik sits down with Lee Ellis of Seek One, who has been at this since 2015 and says roughly 90 percent of the deer on his wall are deer he had more than a year of history with before he killed them. Lee is upfront that it’s very rare for him to kill a deer he hasn’t been following, and this conversation is mostly about what that actually costs. They get into the buck he called Derp, four years of waking up every day thinking about that deer, and the night after he finally killed him when it hit him hard enough that he couldn’t sleep. Lee explains why he thinks a fresh camera picture of a buck working a scrape means you’re already behind him, and how finding one center point in a deer’s rut range beat chasing that deer across seven or eight camera locations. He also talks about a 188 inch public land buck he knew for about four hours and why he says a 140 would have gotten the exact same reaction out of him. Also covered: taking February through May completely off from deer hunting for the first time in years, patterning Pokémon card restocks with the same brain that patterns deer, what changes when your team grows and other families depend on the season going well, deer that show back up on almost the exact same date year after year, the summer reconnaissance lap he sees in the third week of August, twenty years of door knocking for 95 percent no’s, and why he doesn’t think you call a truly big deer in. This is part one of two. Part two is one long story, the buck Lee killed in a blizzard at the end of last season, and it lands September 15th, right after Seek One’s film on that deer. Topics: 00:00:00 — Intro 00:14:16 — The room, and what every mount in it represents 00:18:16 — Obsession, Pokémon, and stepping away from deer hunting 00:31:05 — Burnout, and what changes when people depend on your season 00:40:13 — Branching out, and why a 140 hits the same as a 188 00:48:36 — Derp: four years, and the night it finally hit him 00:57:08 — Why hunting one deer makes you better on every other deer 01:04:01 — Storytelling, the two and a half hour video, and putting the phone down 01:20:41 — Does Lee track any of this, or is it all in his head 01:26:45 — Deer that show up on the same date, and the third week of August lap 01:32:11 — Twenty years of door knocking for 95 percent no's 01:36:24 — Leaving a camera a full year, and the spot in the middle of a rut range 01:44:29 — Cell cameras made a lot of good hunters worse 01:47:56 — Deer personalities, communication, and why you don't call in a big one 01:55:16 — Part two is coming Lee's IG: https://www.instagram.com/the_roy/ Seek One IG: https://www.instagram.com/seek1productions/ Seek One YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SeekOneProductions Seek One Website: https://seek-one.com/ Instagram: @eastmeetswesthunt @beau.martonik Facebook: East Meets West Outdoors Shop Hunting Gear and Apparel: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/ YouTube: Beau Martonik - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQJon93sYfu9HUMKpCMps3w Partner Discounts and Affiliate Links: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/partners Amazon Influencer Page https://www.amazon.com/shop/beau.martonik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Beau Martonik sits down with Adam Foss, the youngest bowhunter to complete the North American sheep slam and a photographer and filmmaker. Adam grew up west of Calgary in an archery only zone, killed his first ram at 18, and says his main focus right now is backpack hunting stone sheep with a bow in northern BC. Most of this conversation is about the mental side of hard hunts. Adam is upfront that he's never run the numbers on his own sheep success, but figures it might be under five percent, and he thinks the pressure to define a hunt by whether you killed something is something we build in our own heads. He walks through how he keeps himself in a trip on day eight when the pull to go home gets loud, the 20 steps and five breaths method he and his wife used packing a ram uphill through shale, and why he thinks any of this applies just as well to elk hunting, running a marathon, or being around more for your family. Also covered: the SITKA photo contest where he critiqued Beau's finalist photo back in 2017, a mountain goat he shot at 31 or 32 yards on Kodiak Island in a whiteout with his hood covering one eye, the whitetail does he ground out on pressured southern BC public land on the last day of the season two years running, and Migrate, the travel and bowhunting company he launched with his hunting partner Luke. Adam hid a code word in this one. First person to comment it wins an arrow case from Migrate. It's near the end, so listen for it. 00:00:00 — Intro 00:04:20 — The SITKA photo contest where Adam tore up Beau's photo 00:10:03 — Subalpine, Barklow, and the early SITKA years 00:12:38 — Youngest bowhunter to take the North American sheep slam 00:14:43 — Growing up in southern Alberta with a bow and a camera 00:27:08 — Frankie, the three hour flight, and the shoot he couldn't say no to 00:35:03 — The hardest anyone has ever worked for a whitetail doe 00:41:24 — Hunting low density sheep country on purpose 00:48:07 — Letters to outfitters and 30 day pack strings 00:50:28 — Jack O'Connor, and looking up from the book to see it 00:53:35 — 16mm sheep footage from the sixties 00:55:51 — What makes sheep hunters this obsessed 01:04:24 — Is grit something you're born with or something you build 01:05:45 — It doesn't have to be sheep hunting 01:07:32 — Beau's first elk hunt and getting humbled by the steepest deepest 01:09:30 — The float plane leaves and you make the next best decision 01:15:21 — Aging a ram, and what the horn rings tell you 01:16:36 — Nobody cares if you kill a ram 01:18:41 — You picked it because it was hard 01:19:17 — Beau's 14 days on an Alaska moose hunt 01:22:52 — Snack times, burpees, and 20 steps at a time 01:32:22 — The Kodiak goat stalk in a whiteout 01:44:01 — Migrate, and the problems nobody was solving 01:48:19 — The unforced error that costs people animals 02:00:11 — Why five arrows beats no arrows 02:03:41 — Where to find Adam and Migrate Adam's IG: https://www.instagram.com/fossman8/ Migrate IG: https://www.instagram.com/migrate_gear/ Shop Migrate in the EMW Gear Shop: eastmeetswesthunt.com Migrate Website: https://www.migrate-gear.com/ Instagram: @eastmeetswesthunt @beau.martonik Facebook: East Meets West Outdoors Shop Hunting Gear and Apparel: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/ YouTube: Beau Martonik - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQJon93sYfu9HUMKpCMps3w Partner Discounts and Affiliate Links: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/partners Amazon Influencer Page https://www.amazon.com/shop/beau.martonik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Beau Martonik sits down with Joel Burham of Whitetail Fit, who moved to Iowa, got his residency, turned down an invite to a phenomenal private farm, and hunted public ground and only public ground for the whole season to see what it would teach him. They get into the full self-filming rig Joel runs out of a saddle, the buck he figured at 160 that he had broadside at 20 yards and lost to the camera, the two public land giants he found that will never show up in a video, and what happened when he came to full draw on a three-and-a-half-year-old and let down. Joel also lays out the only test he uses to decide whether a deer is worth his tag, which has nothing to do with a score. Also covered: starting from zero with no hunting family, three miles deep on Kansas public on the last day of a 10-day hunt, hiring his brother as a cameraman and then telling him he'd outgrown the job, and why time is the one thing in hunting you can't shortcut. 00:00:00 — Intro 00:07:09 — Starting with no hunting family 00:12:04 — First deer off a lawn chair 00:15:22 — Where "Whitetail Fit" came from 00:19:57 — Three miles deep on Kansas public 00:22:16 — How fitness changes your access 00:38:13 — What this job really looks like 00:47:49 — The 160 at 20 yards he passed 00:58:28 — Hiring his brother, then letting go 01:11:16 — Self-filming rig for a saddle 01:16:38 — Bodies, lenses, and low light 01:29:56 — Arm height, ISO, shutter speed 01:39:10 — Iowa public land only 01:46:57 — The bucks that never made the film 01:49:56 — Pressure and older deer 01:54:43 — The 190 and a wind switch 02:01:29 — Full draw, then let down 02:10:00 — What makes you grab your bow 02:19:34 — Where to find Whitetail Fit Joel's IG: https://www.instagram.com/whitetail_fit/ Whitetail Fit YT: https://www.youtube.com/@WhitetailFit Instagram: @eastmeetswesthunt @beau.martonik Facebook: East Meets West Outdoors Shop Hunting Gear and Apparel: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/ YouTube: Beau Martonik - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQJon93sYfu9HUMKpCMps3w Partner Discounts and Affiliate Links: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/partners Amazon Influencer Page https://www.amazon.com/shop/beau.martonik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Every time a mature buck shows up on your trail camera, GPS collar research says he's probably been in that area six or seven times. That one stat changes how you think about cameras, bedding, and whether you're actually hunting the right spots. This is from the Mountain Bucks Scouting Camp where we break down big woods buck bedding from every angle — GPS home range data, how mature bucks choose beds, doe bedding patterns, morning hunting strategy, and why mid-October may be the most underrated window for killing a mature buck. Topics: 00:00 – Intro 00:51 – Buck bed characteristics — size, shape, rubs on entry and exit 03:06 – Why mature bucks have the best spots (and what happens when one dies) 04:10 – Hunting mornings aggressively over beds 06:28 – Finding scrapes on the fringes of bedding to hunt 07:04 – Camera placement near bedding 07:35 – GPS data: for every camera appearance, a buck's been there 6-7 times 08:44 – The egg-shaped home range — how wind orients a buck's entire world 09:50 – Buck excursions — why they disappear and where they go 14:09 – Buck bedding: smell, auditory, visual 17:37 – Doe bedding — why it's overlooked and how it changes your rut setup 20:01 – Mid-October: the most underrated window for killing a mature buck 24:32 – Second estrus cycle Enter the Deer Camp Giveway! - https://eastmeetswesthunt.com/pages/deer-camp-giveaway Instagram: @eastmeetswesthunt @beau.martonik Facebook: East Meets West Outdoors Shop Hunting Gear and Apparel: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/ YouTube: Beau Martonik - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQJon93sYfu9HUMKpCMps3w Partner Discounts and Affiliate Links: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/partners Amazon Influencer Page https://www.amazon.com/shop/beau.martonik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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The East Meets West Hunt Podcast is your resource for all things adventure hunting. This podcast is for the hunter that loves planning and preparing for the hunt, just as much as the hunt. Whether it's deer hunting for big woods mountain bucks, chasing elk in the Rocky Mountains, and anything in between, we will talk to successful hunters from all over to provide the EMW community with useful knowledge and motivation to continue to live their life through a series of adventures.
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