The tactics below come from a conversation with Matt Zirnsak, owner of The Push Archery, recorded for the Trad Hunters Podcast.
Matt Zirnsak has a rule he applies to every farm he hunts, no matter how well he knows it: last year doesn't count. It's a rule that's changed how he hunts, and it's the same rule he's now building into how he's teaching his son to hunt from scratch.
Every Season Is a Clean Slate
Matt's core philosophy is that hunters get burned by relying on memory instead of current sign. It's a clean slate every single year you walk into the woods. He never assumes that last year's behavior is going to repeat. He has a fresh example from this season alone. A property he'd hunted successfully the year before, built around a white oak grove that had been dropping heavily and drawing deer to bed nearby, produced nothing when he went looking for the same pattern. The deer were not using the area at all. No acorns in the branches. No sign on the ground. Nothing.
When Last Year's Pattern Produces Nothing
Most hunters, in his experience, don't adjust when this happens. They hunt the perimeter and burn up two weeks of their season based on last year's intel, instead of going in to find out whether the deer are actually using that area anymore. Matt's answer is to treat the whole property as unknown territory every season and go find where the deer actually are right now, not where they were twelve months ago.
Cover Every Square Inch, Not Just the Familiar Spots
That search cost him real time this year. Working off historical data because he hadn't had time to fully re-scout, he got into a tree blind and connected on his first doe of the season. But instead of treating that as confirmation his old intel still held, he went back out the very next morning and scouted every square inch of the property. The doe was luck. The old intel wasn't holding up anywhere else on the farm.
That scouting turned up a completely different hot spot: a white oak grove tucked into a bedding area with clean, scent-friendly access. He could get in from the downwind side and be within shooting distance of every white oak that was dropping. But finding it required walking ground he had never bothered to walk before.
The Two White Oaks Nobody Else Would Have Found
Most of the property's oaks weren't producing this year. After covering every square inch of the farm, Matt found two white oaks loaded with acorns. They were the only ones on the entire property. He would never have hunted that area, never, if he hadn't covered the whole farm looking for them. That's the find that only comes from being willing to go everywhere and assume nothing.
Hunt It Like Your Family's Life Depends On It
Matt credits Andre D'Acquisto as the popularizer of the aggressive, mobile approach he now runs, and he doesn't soften how intense that approach is meant to be. You're hunting them like your family's life depends on it. That's not a mindset reserved for the last week of the season. It's the standard for every single sit. If you've gone two hunts in a row without seeing a deer closer than 200 yards, and you haven't covered every square inch of that property to understand what's happening this year, something needs to change immediately.
The Rut Most Hunters Fall Into and Can't Get Out Of
This is a real departure from how Matt used to hunt, and he's direct about the pattern he used to fall into. Sitting a core area that has always produced deer movement, waiting for an opportunity to come through at some point during the season. That approach can work, eventually, through sheer persistence. But it leaves a lot of the season on the table waiting for a historical pattern to repeat itself instead of actively hunting what's happening right now.
Teaching a Kid to Hunt Aggressively From Day One
Matt's son Jude is in his second season bowhunting, and Matt has built his education around skipping the passive, wait-it-out phase entirely. On the hunting side the approach is deliberate. Jude goes in with a Lone Wolf on his back, with Dad, looking at animal behavior and animal movement. They target specific groups of deer based on where they're seeing them. They get aggressive, tear down, and move in.
The difference, as Matt sees it, is which habits get built first. Rather than learning to sit one spot and wait years for results the way Matt did, Jude is being taught from the start to treat scouting and repositioning as part of every single hunt. He's being introduced to a completely different method of hunting. By the time he's Matt's age, he's going to be so much better. There's no doubt about it.
The Hunter, the Archer, and the Tracker
Matt places this aggressive scouting mindset inside a larger framework he uses to explain complete bowhunting success: an equilateral triangle with three equal legs. The hunter does the scouting, hangs the stands, moves quietly, gets into the right spots, and understands deer movement. As soon as the shot is imminent, he passes the baton to the archer. The archer executes the shot, then hands off to the tracker, who reads the hit and recovers the animal.
Most hunters overinvest in one leg of that triangle at the expense of the others, and it caps their overall potential no matter how good that one leg gets. A hunter who finally finds where the deer are, only to short-draw under pressure or botch the follow-up, has still left most of the triangle's potential on the table. All three legs have to be built equally for the whole system to work.
Answer the Phone When Someone Needs a Tracker
Matt applies the same instinct to the tracking leg that he does to scouting. Real information comes from putting in the hours on the ground. Be the person in your circle of bowhunters who always answers the phone. When someone hits a deer that night, call them, offer to come on the track. If you've only been on two or three successful track jobs, you should be going on a hundred of them if you want to become a good tracker and understand how to follow up deer properly. You can learn more about animal behavior from a hundred track jobs than from any book or video.
Whether it's a grown hunter re-scouting a farm he's hunted for years or a kid on his second season learning to move instead of sit, Matt's approach comes down to the same instinct: treat every season and every sit as new information rather than a rerun. Cover the ground. Follow the sign that's actually there right now. And don't let last year's success talk you out of finding this year's answer.
Matt Zirnsak is the owner of The Push Archery. If you would like to learn more about The Push, their products and courses designed specifically to help improve your performance as a traditional bowhunter visit www.pusharchery.com