by: Rick Hall

Part 1 – Setting the Stage

Let’s set the stage. You’ve been hunting your entire life, obsessed with it from an early age. From your first dove hunt as a little kid, to taking your first deer, all you’ve wanted to do was to be outside, chasing whatever quarry was in season. Your entire childhood was spent living in rural Alabama and having access to good hunting land was never a problem. In fact, some of your nicest deer growing up have come from within a half mile of home. Then, you grow up, begin to raise a family and start a career. Before you know it, you’re moving 350 miles away from everything, including all of that prime land. Now, something that you could do multiple times a week, became PTO days, only happening once or twice a month if you’re lucky and if you don’t mind the long drive.

The story above is mine. As happens with a lot of us, my pursuit for a career and raising a family led me from my hometown of Grady, AL to Jacksonville, FL in 2013. I was 28 or 29 at the time, with a beautiful wife of 6 years and a perfect 2 year old daughter. Once the job opportunity came up, we took a chance and made the jump. For me, family and friends aside, one of the scariest parts of moving was trying to figure out how I was going to hunt. I certainly wasn’t going to hunt these small Florida deer, right? Not when I have bigger deer back home. Plus, I’ll be back and forth often to visit, right? That was my mindset for a year or so, and my hunting opportunities wound up being limited. Honestly, I don’t even remember much about the first few seasons after the move other than the boring drives up and down I-10. The one thing that sticks out was that I was not very successful and I knew I had to find out how to hunt more the next season.

As I started thinking through just how I would find more time in the woods, I kept wondering if maybe I should consider hunting in FL after all. The season started earlier, which meant more hunting and the opportunity to get some “warm up” hunts in before Bama’s opener which was a nice bonus. Plus, I kept driving by this huge national forest on every trip to and from AL. Soon enough, I had made plans to hunt that forest during the opening bow weekend that fall.

Though I probably didn’t realize it at the time, that trip stoked a fire. I spent 3 days grinding my tail off in FL heat and swamps. I didn’t harvest anything on that trip with the exception of mosquitoes and yellow flies, but I did see deer and had enough encounters to cement my plans to hunt it again the next year. I also began to realize that maybe hunting more public land was an option. Not just in FL, but in other states as well. I was already spending a lot of money on gas going back and forth, so sacrificing a couple of early season trips to AL in exchange for a few days in states like Kentucky or Illinois on a piece of public was now an option, and one that I chose to pursue.

While I hunt numerous pieces of public land in several different states, I also still get to hunt some amazing pieces of private land across GA, FL and of course AL. I don’t get to spend as much time on these places as I once did, but my experiences on public land have recently caused me to re-think my approach when I do get to hunt those private tracts. Over the past few years, I’ve actually had more success on public land  rather than private, arrowing mature, public land deer several years in a row. Two of those coming from spots I’d never hunted. My last good private land deer was in 2019. I am constantly thinking about how to maximize my time in the woods and improve my chances at killing mature bucks. So, I began to ask myself why I was having seemingly better success in public land that I’m less familiar with than I was on the private land that in some cases I have been hunting for years. I quickly realized that I had been hunting them with completely opposite approaches, working harder and smarter on public than I was on the private. I had been leaning on the comforts of what I’d always done whenever I was hunting land familiar to me, whereas when I would hunt a piece of public that I had little familiarity with, I was more aware of hunting pressure, willing to walk a little farther, and had to be more deliberate since I was out of my comfort zone. I changed my approach to hunting private land prior to the 2021 deer season and while I was not fortunate enough to arrow a buck on the places I have access to, my mature buck encounters dramatically increased with numerous close calls that just did not pan out. I bow hunt exclusively and have had more shooter deer in the red zone in one season than the previous 3 or 4 years combined. I firmly believe it’s because I changed my mindset and now treat all land like it is public ground.

Throughout this series, I’ll cover my approach to hunting private land through my public land hunting lenses and dive into a few areas that I believe can lead to increased private land success if implemented correctly. Those are pressure, access, scouting, adaptability, and fortitude. I hope you enjoy these articles as much as I have enjoyed writing them. Thanks for reading.

Bio:

Rick is a lifelong outdoorsman, originally from rural AL and now living in Jax, FL. Some of his first memories were bass fishing and dove hunting with his dad, and his passion grew from there. He fell in love with deer hunting and archery at an early age, taking his first whitetail at 11 and first with a bow at 16. That first taste of archery success was enough to create an obsession with bowhunting that seems to get stronger by the day. Rick moved to Jax in 2013, forcing him to leave the comforts of the properties he’d hunted most of his life and to begin looking for other opportunities on public lands. He quickly found that public land comes with different challenges, but also with seemingly endless opportunities. He has since made public land hunting his main focus, one that has taken him across multiple states and turned up some success in each one. 

Rick’s love of the outdoors doesn’t end in the woods or on the water. He has been host of the Southern Game and Tackle podcast since 2020, using that platform to share his experiences and lessons learned with anyone who would listed. He is also on the Board of Directors for 501(c)(3) organization Project Savior Outdoors. PSO’s mission is to fight veteran suicide and PTSD by connecting with veterans through the outdoors and pointing them to true freedom in a relationship with Jesus Christ. 

Rick has been married for 17 years to his beautiful and amazing wife Nicole. They have a 13 year old daughter who is amazing in her own right, and Rick also coaches her in fastpitch softball.