My Worst Year of Deer Hunting Yet

Disclaimer: This post may contain affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission for purchases made through the links. I only recommend products I have personally used or recently purchased but not yet used.

Hope Springs Eternal

This year was supposed to be my year. I bought four deer tags and was convinced I was going to fill my freezer like never before.

Now it’s mid-December, and I haven’t harvested a single deer. And with an overseas trip planned for the end of the year, I may not have any wild red meat for most of 2025.

WTF Happened?!

Early Fall Failures

A lot of what I’ve experienced this season is a combination of logistical challenges and bad luck. To harvest wild food, you need opportunity…lots of it. I thought that my day job responsibilities would yield many more chances to get out and harvest. I made ample time this summer to put over 30lbs of salmon in my freezer, but the opportunities to hunt deer didn’t come as I planned.

Deer hunting from a blind or a tree stand doesn’t take a ton of time, actually; you need to be in the right spot at the right time of day. When the deer are most active, humans are most active. My mornings and evenings are spent with family — working out, cooking, getting ready for the day, or kiddo sports. It’s a challenge working around those regular activities to sit in a blind for 3-4 hours.

Weekends are tough, too, because it’s more family time, and there are a lot of things we need to get done before the next week starts. Throw on top of that the grading and course prep I have to do each week, and there’s not that much time left for other things.

Oh, right, and this content business takes up some time, too.

My buddy and I have been out (four?) times early in the season, and my focus on these hunts was to get her a deer. Last year, I failed to help her harvest her first deer, but this year was supposed to be better. We were supposed to have her freezer stocked by now.

We spent two hunts in our friend’s field, watching deer too far away to shoot, and then two more trips on the opposite side of the field, watching deer come out before the legal shooting time. It’s been a learning experience, but also incredibly frustrating.

We managed to set up a second blind at another friend’s property, but now we’re dealing with a second problem.

Winter has come!

Right around Thankstaking time, it got cold AF in Michigan—lows in the single digits and highs in the high twenties. I’ve certainly learned some lessons in cold-weather hunting, but I’m also not excited at all to hunt when it’s twenty-something degrees.

This past weekend, I helped a friend process a deer that had been gutshot and died on their property. It was a great experience teaching deer butchery and building community, but in the end, I was surprisingly exhausted.

Physiologically, it takes more energy to stay warm in the cold than in moderate temperatures. I know this, but the fatigue I feel after being out in cold temperatures always surprises me. In this case, we were working in my friend’s garage, but by the end of the day, I was ready to pass out.

All that to say, hunting in freezing weather is not something I look forward to, not least because of the toll it takes on the days that follow.

Yes, there are solutions to this, including — and I can hear my hunting buddy say this as I type — sucking it up and getting out there! I mean, do you want deer or not?!

True indeed, but I don’t remember it being this cold this early in winter last year.

Regardless, if I say I want deer, and if I don’t want the money I spent on tags to go to waste, I need to get out here and catch some deers!

The Wild Kitchen and seasonality

One of the reasons I love the pursuit of wild food is that it forces you to prioritize what matters. Aside from access to water, nothing is more important to humans than feeding ourselves. If grocery stores ran out of meat, I’d prioritize being out in the cold, harvesting deer.

But also, had I not had such a good salmon year, and if I didn’t still have a hundred pounds of pork in my freezer, perhaps I’d be a little more pressed to harvest some deer. Prior seasons have been good to me, and while I’m lamenting my lack of success, I’m not in desperate straits right now.

If I were solely dependent upon domesticated foods, I don’t think I’d have the appreciation for previous seasons of wild food harvests. The scope of my food landscape would be narrow in time and space, because my point of contact with what sustains me is the place where all the labor that goes into the food I take is packaged in plastic, just a card swipe away.

I’m already thinking about next year’s fishing season, which I’ll start in Florida in February, and see what the Gulf of Mexico has to offer. This coming February, I’ll also tap our maple trees again, and I can’t wait for that first stack of pancakes.

In May, I’ll be back on Lake Michigan with my big brothers, going after salmonids. October 2026 isn’t as far away as it seems now, and by December, I’ll likely be done with the pork in my freezer and will need to go back down to North Carolina for a re-up.

So, even though I began this week’s post complaining, what a joy it is to be a wild food harvester! It’s never dull, and even when you fall short, you are provided for.

CONSIDER THIS

My new phone case

I loved Mous’s iPhone case. It was stylish and durable, and their marketing videos were epic. But then the newest one I bought broke within months of buying it. It simply came apart, and replacing it would have cost nearly $100.

So, I decided to pivot to a company whose products I love, and whose quality and durability are top-notch. And to my surprise, their phone cases were so much cheaper!

When I put my Peak Design iPhone 15 Plus case on my phone, I was sold 1000 times over. It felt 1000 times better than the Mous case. It looked 100 times better, and the case is guaranteed for life.

As much as I love this case, however, I don’t think it protects as well as the Mous. I also don’t believe the Mous case provides double the protection its price difference suggests.

Never going back.

Thanks for reading!

-Jonathan