Hunting Whitetails: Tower Stand Locations (Episode 83 Transcript)
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GRANT: I’ve had two Redneck Blinds in my yard. You’ve seen ‘em on field trip photos, what not, and what you haven’t seen is my kids playing in ‘em, and pretending they’re calling whiffle ball games out of ‘em. It’s all been fun, but unfortunately, today daddy crashed the party, as we moved the Redneck Blinds out in the hunting locations, so deer would have time to become conditioned to ‘em well before hunting season.
GRANT: Now, Brad, Hunter, and Nathan, and I have been taking our 10 foot step ladder all around trying to pick the ideal positon to the foot to locate these Redneck Blinds. They’re 10 foot tall to the base, about 14 foot tall where I’m seeing out the windows and it makes a huge difference, of where you get it just right. Can you see over the hill? Can you see around the tree?
GRANT: The guys from Redneck Blind were over early this morning delivering a new Predator 360, my favorite tower blind. We’re gonna go put that baby in the field. Now, Nathan and Hunter have been cuttin’ some shooting lanes – getting everything ready. We picked an area right on the edge of a sanctuary.
GRANT: Man. One of the great things about these new Redneck Blinds is you can put ‘em up anywhere. We’re in the steep mountains, here in the Ozarks at The Proving Grounds, and it’s stuff-tough and rocky but there’s a trail over here about 70 yards, or so, and you can see right below me, we’ve cleared a shooting lane. Nathan and Hunter, the interns, helped us this summer cut the hardwood brush out. See almost 250 yards down through here. Even better than that – see into the sanctuaries on the other side of the valley. You can tell where we’ve cut. We’re looking into the brush, so we can clearly see deer moving. The deer below us, over here to the east are never gonna know we’re in the world. So we can come up this road, come around the back door to the blind, and have a view right in the bedroom, and they don’t know it. So I’m not big on violating sanctuaries at all but we’re gonna put this stand up. We’ll hunt it when the times are right and the deer will never know we’re looking right in the bedroom. I mean we’re not the cheap seats here. We’re at the box seats.
GRANT: No way to get a wheeled vehicle there. We weren’t taking the four-wheeler in, or the tractor in, but that’s no problem with the Redneck Blinds. It’s the way they’re designed, they bolt together and unbolt, laser-cut holes so everything fits. You’re not jostling and pulling.
GRANT: We set the blind and we got in there and played camera man and hunter.
GRANT: And I got, you know, quite a bit of room to do this with.
UNKNOWN: Um-hm.
GRANT: You know spending literally 10, 15, 30 minutes doing this is way better than sitting in a blind all fall going, “Man, I can’t quite see out that window.” So, get your blind set right and you’ll have years of satisfying hunts. I’ve set in blinds before you think you’re surfing up there. That’s not the case here. Matter of fact, this is so solid, we can’t really get equipment in here, so we’re just gonna tip this up, set it where we’re already leveled up; stake this baby down, and call it a day. So, you see how solid this is when we tip it up. We’ll try to get a couple, we got a couple cameras rolling at different angles, and you’ll see this maybe, hopefully, just go boom. Now, if it goes “boonk” and on over, and it starts sledding down the hill, we okay.
UNKNOWN: Yep. We’re good.
UNKOWN: You got it?
UNKNOWN: And I just go on like this.
BRAD: Just keep it from going over.
UNKNOWN: There you go. Perfect.
UNKNOWN: I’m pulling down with all I can.
UNKNOWN: Okay.
GRANT: I’m pulling the other way.
GRANT: (Inaudible).
GRANT: Okay. Everybody ready? Here we go.
GRANT: Extremely solid, I think.
UNKNOWN: Yeah.
GRANT: Solid as a rock. No wiggle jiggle. Man, look at this view. I’m looking at acres of a bedding area, looking in at three bedding areas over there – too far to shoot, but I can definitely see the pattern of deer. And for 250 yards right down through here, we got an awesome shooting lane. It ought to be illegal to have a stand like this. I like to watch young bucks that I’m not gonna harvest in their natural behavior where I can learn from ‘em, chasing, making scrapes, interacting, dominance posture with other deer. I like the big mature deer to have their guard down, not on edge, wanting to jump your string, or react to any little sound out there. And that’s what we’ve accomplished by taking time to put the blind in the edge of the sanctuary. It wasn’t the easiest place to install it, but it was the best place to install it.
GRANT: The second setup is what we call Rae’s Field, and it is overlooking a food plot.
GRANT: This is the hole right here. This is the hole. That’s good. That’s good. That’s good. I think that…
GRANT: Now, we needed a tower blind there, because there’s no trees big enough to put a ladder, or a lock-on stand in, and because this field slopes off enough, if you set down in a ground blind, you can only see 20 or 30 yards before it rolls over the hill.
GRANT: The tower stand gives us full view of the whole field and the ability to get in totally undetected. It’s the perfect sniper setup.
GRANT: Now, one reason I chose this particular model, the Predator 360, it has that elongated window and the roof actually goes up. So I can stand in that blind, I’m about 6’1. Pull my bow back, have plenty of clearance and I’m not trying to shoot through the little slit window that you would use a rifle through. I can go up or down the full distance.
GRANT: Second Redneck Blind is up for the day. You know there’s not much more fun than getting a bunch of buddies together and improving the deer hunting of a property. With these two stands, we’re able to hunt areas we previously haven’t been able to hunt effectively. I’ll probably be doing some coyote calling out of this one soon. I can’t wait till deer season, though. Sitting here in the comfort with friends and family watching deer and enjoying Creation.
GRANT: You know on my task list for this week was getting those tower blinds up and in position and we’ve accomplished that. It’s important to be on schedule because I want those deer to be totally conditioned to those blinds, well before hunting season. In fact, I want ‘em conditioned before August because that’s when the velvet bucks are really visible, and I can sort out by looking at ‘em – the dominance. Which is the oldest deer? What’s the best deer? I can start working on my Hit List, even before we do the camera survey. Another reason is, I want to go in and start cutting the brush out and making some hidey holes where I’ll put my Muddys up, my hang-on stands, for bow hunting. The tower stands are big and overt, and deer clearly see ‘em. They have to get used to ‘em. We hang our little hang-ons up in a tree and we don’t make as much disturbance, so that’s the next project on our task list. If the weather stays dry, we can’t do anything in the field. We’ll be clearing some of these hidey hole food plots out – little small, less than a tenth of an acre – hanging our tree stands. It makes a disturbance, but not as much as that big tower blind, and that’s our next project. I hope you’re accomplishing your deer management projects at your Proving Grounds. Thanks for watching GrowingDeer.tv.
GRANT: I love work. I could watch it all day long.