Newbie question: How to get into hunting

[Harvest the Land]

YouTube is your friend. There's so much excellent informative hunting content on there and you could learn so much in the off season by educating yourself with a bunch of those videos. And then you can apply what you learned in the field. Lots of great books out there too.

There's a number of folks on here who didn't have someone to teach them how to hunt while growing up. I had lots of anglers in my family but no hunters and had to learn everything on my own. Its a steep learning curve but extremely rewarding.

Like you were mentioning the best way to learn is to immerse yourself, so after you educate yourself on the basics, pick an area and get out there and start practicing the basics (like moving extremely slowly and silently and constantly looking around and recognizing sign etc). The more you practice these things the more natural they become.

Now is a great time of year to get out there and do some scouting to find an area that holds animals. Once you find that area you should become extremely focused on learning everything about that area and figure out how to hunt it. This can take years to learn but its vital if you want to be successful you need to learn the best ways to get in and out of your hunting spot with as little disturbance as possible, knowing the prevailing winds and thermals and where the animals like to hang out and when they're there.

Get a couple trail cams once you've identified your hunting spot and set them up where game trails intersect or near a food source or bedding area. Don't bounce around to new hunting areas every few weeks until you've got your first hunting area really well dialed in.

These things take time to learn so don't get discouraged - that's the nature of the beast. Good luck and go get em' tiger

[zfamz]

YouTube is your friend. There's so much excellent informative hunting content on there and you could learn so much in the off season by educating yourself with a bunch of those videos. And then you can apply what you learned in the field. Lots of great books out there too.

Do you have any specific books or channels that you would recommend?

[Harvest the Land]

Do you have any specific books or channels that you would recommend?

Sure. Since you're on the sunshine coast and/or lower mainland, you'll most likely be hunting blacktail deer and black bear. Scott Haugen (out of Oregon) is a master hunter for both species. He's written over 100 articles (you can search online for them) and a number of books like "Trophy Blacktails" and I would highly recommend that one. Another good one is "Mastering Mule Deer" by Wayne Van Zwoll. "Mule Deer Country" by Valerius Geist will teach a ton about mule deer in general. For bears the "Ultimate Guide to Bear Hunting" by Doug Boze is a pretty good one. "The Complete Guide to Hunting, Butchering, and Cooking Wild Game: Volume 1: Big Game" by Steve Rinella is another good one. There's tons of other books that I'm forgetting but those are good ones to start

Some good Youtube channels are by Randy Newberg, PN Wild, The Hunting Public, Meat Eater, Beau Martonik, Nock on Archery, GO HUNT, Stuck N The Rut, and I really like Troy Pottenger (out of Idaho - hunts mountain whitetails in thick timber and kills booner bucks every single year) and the Hunting Beast (Dan Infalt)- he's based out of Wisconsin but he truly is a serial big buck killer and you can apply a lot of his tips/tactics out west. Learned a ton of stuff from listening to his podcasts and watching his videos (like using milk weed as a wind indicator). Highly recommend watching any/all of these channels. I know I'm forgetting to list a bunch of other good ones (haven't really been watching too many hunting videos lately) and hopefully other members will offer more suggestions (there's 100's if not thousands of great hunting channels on youtube)

Good luck and keep asking questions - that's how you learn