Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting Tiredness

How does it effect you guys?

It should be a great time to be out but after 4 days solid hunting with early starts and late finishes I'm taking a break tonight to have a beer with the wife.

Time was I'd have toughed it out but I couldnt face packing a buck out if I scored and will enjoy the rest of the week more for a break.

When I get this tired little things get on top of me and I start to feel negative. The physical side gets harder too.

Sometimes taking a morning or evening off is definitely needed. Enjoy a beer or a few and also recharge the mental energy is what helps the most.

I think deer activity plays a role to. Two or three days of limited sightings creates boredom. I always take a shotgun to Maine to break up the monotony with a little partridge hunting.

There's no sense in making work out of hunting. If you're running on fumes, heck yes – take a break.

I'm a simpleton so I rarely tire of it and should the slightest of notion cross my mind, I remind myself that I wait all year for it and it's a miserable, agonizing wait until next season.
The worst day hunting..........

Hunting hard kicks my azz these days. 4-5 days on followed by a rest day keeps it fun. It is nice to not have a rigid schedule or a lot of pressure. The last week of Oct. We head to Wyoming for a month. I have been training pretty hard and expect to be pretty fit after a month in the mountains. Nothing beats hiking w/ a pack in the mountains for a tune up.


mike r

Being old and out of shape make hunting harder to enjoy

I used to be a hunting fool. Hurry home from work, throw on my camo & hurry out to sit in a tree until dark. Year after year I couldn't get enough. The last few years with seniority at work and my choice of vacation time I was hunting longer, weeks at a time if I wanted. Lately I found myself getting tired & since I can hunt in my back yard I was no longer participating in 'deer camp'. I started to realize how much more there was/is to 'deer camp'. My Dad & his family hunted hard the first few days at camp. It was a years long tradition. After the first few days they stopped getting up so early and they started coming back to camp for lunch. They even seemed to find excuses to stay in camp. I never understood it, now I do.
It's not all about the pursuit of a trophy, some of us need to take a break once in a while and remember why we love to hunt. Lately I find myself hunting a few days and then taking a few off, before I know it I have that urge to get back out there. There's nothing wrong with taking a break.

Since my best and favorite hunting partners are typically teenagers, we have this discussion a lot. They’re tired constantly. . I get a nap in when I can, maybe sleep a bit later one day on a trip, but still get to the woods each morning.

Like Skane said, we wait all year for these few months. It’s a long wait. I always feel like I want more after the season ends. It would be worse if I was skipping good hunting days.

Usually hunt a day, skip one or two, then back again, except during the rut. Now that I'm working out, maybe I can hit it harder, but honestly it doesn't seem quite right until the leaves start to turn and it cools a bit.

Archery opens tomorrow, but it's going up to almost 90 in the afternoon. Gonna give it a few hours in the morning. I've got three months to make meat.

I have the tired days myself! One thing that helps me hunt more, is being comfortable at camp! I don't like to do the drive out early and back late hunts. When weather is good I take the camp trailer. When weather is snowy and cold I take wall tent! At 69 being comfortable is important!

A rest day helps but getting in shape before season helps mo better.

Pace yourself. I am 73 now and hunt about as much as I ever have (almost every day of the season). I just do it different then I used to. I sit more and walk less. I can remember a time when I couldn't sit at all. Had to see what was over that next ridge.

I can relate to this! I pace my self when we go to Wyoming. I still have to see what’s over the next hillside, but I do it slowly! In Michigan I have to sit. Lack of acreage!

I’ve been known to check the inside of my eyelids while in my chair that’s inside my blind. I usually do this on day 3 after coming off of the night shift I used to work. Working a goofy schedule will do that to a guy. At least I’m not working and doing something I enjoy.

Interesting. I'm in shape and the hunting is not very physical, its the lack of sleep that gets to me after a while.

Dragged one out of the Thicket From Hell this morning. I'm pretty tired. Next big one I get is getting the gutless treatment!

I understand that not gutting a deer before getting it out of the woods is a Southern thing, but frankly I don't understand why you would want to pull out 21-23% more body weight than you have to? Add to that it is probably warmer where you hunt and it seems to me that for the quality of the meat that you would want to open them up and get them cooling faster.

Sitting in a tree stand and nodding off is life threatening unless you are tied in better than most of us typically are. An acquaintance went to sleep, fell, broke his neck and his sons pulled him out of the woods three days later. You can't fall off the ground comes to mind every time I'm debating a tree stand or ground blind.

It's like that where I hunt, but it's seasons not days. (and "any", not "limited")



Yes, I always say, I enjoy hunting too much to turn it into work.

Oh, she was gutted, but the first 200+ yards of the 3/4 mile drag was through a jumble of fallen trees, briars, head-high weeds, and other crap that caught on her (and me) at every opportunity. The gutless method I was referring to is where the game is parted out, or even boned out, and the meat placed in game bags for packing on a frame. You leave about half the weight or more behind, and have very little to dispose of at home. Pretty common method with backcountry Western hunters, and also legal here. Probably just as fast as dragging, when you factor in the frequent rests required when doing that, the skinning easier, and the meat gets cooled better, sooner.

I never drag a whole deer out.

Paragraph 1..... I hunt on my land and can drive my 4 wheeler anywhere I want to. After I shoot a deer, it takes 3 minutes to walk to the house or 4 wheeler (depends on where I'm hunting) and less to drive to the deer. Load it on the 4 wheeler and drive to the house. Total 15 minutes, maybe. That's why I don't gut the deer, also, it draws coyotes.

Paragraph 2.... I fell out of a climbing stand, I wasn't asleep, and I was lucky, I'm still alive. I still use them, but now I also use a good harness. Wont fall out of one again. Some of the places I hunt, if I'm not elevated, I can't see more than 20'. Nothing against ground blind, but it's not practical where I hunt.
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