Beau Martonik sits down with Lee Ellis of Seek One, who has been at this since 2015 and says roughly 90 percent of the deer on his wall are deer he had more than a year of history with before he killed them. Lee is upfront that it’s very rare for him to kill a deer he hasn’t been following, and this conversation is mostly about what that actually costs.
They get into the buck he called Derp, four years of waking up every day thinking about that deer, and the night after he finally killed him when it hit him hard enough that he couldn’t sleep. Lee explains why he thinks a fresh camera picture of a buck working a scrape means you’re already behind him, and how finding one center point in a deer’s rut range beat chasing that deer across seven or eight camera locations. He also talks about a 188 inch public land buck he knew for about four hours and why he says a 140 would have gotten the exact same reaction out of him.
Also covered: taking February through May completely off from deer hunting for the first time in years, patterning Pokémon card restocks with the same brain that patterns deer, what changes when your team grows and other families depend on the season going well, deer that show back up on almost the exact same date year after year, the summer reconnaissance lap he sees in the third week of August, twenty years of door knocking for 95 percent no’s, and why he doesn’t think you call a truly big deer in.
This is part one of two. Part two is one long story, the buck Lee killed in a blizzard at the end of last season, and it lands September 15th, right after Seek One’s film on that deer.
Topics:
00:00:00 — Intro
00:14:16 — The room, and what every mount in it represents
00:18:16 — Obsession, Pokémon, and stepping away from deer hunting
00:31:05 — Burnout, and what changes when people depend on your season
00:40:13 — Branching out, and why a 140 hits the same as a 188
00:48:36 — Derp: four years, and the night it finally hit him
00:57:08 — Why hunting one deer makes you better on every other deer
01:04:01 — Storytelling, the two and a half hour video, and putting the phone down
01:20:41 — Does Lee track any of this, or is it all in his head
01:26:45 — Deer that show up on the same date, and the third week of August lap
01:32:11 — Twenty years of door knocking for 95 percent no's
01:36:24 — Leaving a camera a full year, and the spot in the middle of a rut range
01:44:29 — Cell cameras made a lot of good hunters worse
01:47:56 — Deer personalities, communication, and why you don't call in a big one
01:55:16 — Part two is coming
Lee's IG: https://www.instagram.com/the_roy/
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Seek One Website: https://seek-one.com/
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