Today, when you get to the woods and everything goes to plan effortlessly, very few lessons are learned. Take this past turkey season, still fresh in our minds. If my plan had gone well, I would have been at the Waffle House by 7:30 AM. But I wouldn’t have learned anything. Instead, the bird I roosted woke up shortly after the whippoorwill stopped talking. Then a barred owl greeted the morning with its "who cooks for you, who cooks for you all" call, immediately answered by a gobble, gobble, gobble. Everything seemed perfect. I let him do his thing in the tree, and after he was on the ground 100 yards away, strutting, I made the sweetest fly-down call ever heard.
At least, that’s what I thought. After gobbling at everything I did for an hour, I heard the all-too-familiar sound of a hen clucking her way down the ridge. She picked up the gobbler, and off they went. Game over! This might’ve been a wasted morning if I hadn’t walked down to where the gobbler had been strutting. I found three huge dusting bowls that all the turkeys in the area had been using. Now, I have a piece of knowledge that paid off in spades when I collected that bird’s spurs the next morning.
We pick up little pieces of knowledge every time we fail while hunting and fishing. Little things sometimes, like when to draw your bow when a deer is approaching, when to move your gun when a turkey is in range, or how to cast past a fish you’re trying to hook. We learn the most from the mistakes we make if we examine what we could have done differently and apply those lessons to our next hunting or fishing trip.
Sometimes, we find our equipment is not up to the challenge and we have to adapt or head to the pro shop to get retrofitted for success. With today’s technology, we can go on our phone right from the field. Bingo! Amazon has us covered. New boots? (Buy on Amazon) Poof, add to cart. New reel? (Buy on Amazon) Poof, add to cart. We now have the ability to customize our hunting and fishing skills and equipment at the touch of a button on a phone. Apps that let us interact with the environment like never before—OnX, Hunt-stand, Deer Cast, etc. This technology allows us to use our mistakes to change the outcome of future hunts by documenting the places, signs, and variables of past hunts to analyze.
We can learn from our mistakes like never before. I hope you can make some life-changing mistakes this year and learn some of life’s great lessons.
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