Thursday, February 15, 2018
By: Ted Nugent
My Spirit of the Wild BloodBrother campfires glow bright and hot forever. As I fidget excitedly preparing for my 70th deerseason in 2018, (and my 55th year of killer Rock-N-Roll recording and touring for my 36th album and 6680th concert!!) my overloaded memory bank flashes a tsunami of happy, heartwarming images of the greatest people in my long life aglow in those flickering flames.
These fires and memories go all the way back to the fall of 1949 as the Nugent family created our annual Up North bowhunting expeditions into the Michigan State forests.
Loaded up with blankets, a cast iron skillet, assorted camping supplies, longbows and quivers full of beautiful handmade cedar arrows in our Ford station wagon, even at just 10 months old, such imagery, spirit and powerfully positive family time and attitude surely imprinted on me to identify a path in life that has guided my American Dream to this day.
So many smiling faces and uppity laughter from family and friends fan the flames of those campfires. Every person has been special, every campfire moving. I see my mom and dad, brothers and sister, sons, daughters, wife Shemane, Uncle John and Uncle Dick, all my cousins, Fred Bear, Dick Mauch and so many special people in every flame. I have shared these fires with soldiers, airmen, sailors and marine heroes of the US Military that have sacrificed so much. The indefatigable spirit and attitude of those special needs and terminally ill kids will remain with me forever and make me a better man.
Recent campfires have once again elevated and escalated that spirit and attitude as we welcomed another very special young man from Michigan into our family.
Austin Jones is 21 years old and was stricken with Muscular Dystrophy at the age of six way back in 2003. Born into a gungho Michigan hunting family, the loss of mobility and muscular function didn’t deter or compromise his love of the great outdoors one bit.
Thursday, February 8, 2018
By: Ted Nugent
I know I’m not alone when I celebrate my hunting as a genuine lifestyle. I know a lot of hardcore, dedicated hunters all across America and around the world, and each and every one of them seriously live for this stuff, and we live it all year long to one degree or another.
Even though I am still pursuing the mighty whitetail deer here at home in Texas through the month of February, for the vast majority of American deerhunters, the season is over and many are already hard at it preparing for next fall.
Immediately following the season is surely the very best time of year to get intimate and updated improved knowledge of our deergrounds.
Shed hunting is getting more and more popular during the post-season winter months, but searching for ground-bone is about much more than just finding those mythical discarded antlers.
Walking our hunting grounds on the open, denuded terrain in the dead of winter gives us the absolute best and clear view of critter activity better than at any other time of year.
Of course any excuse to get out there into the wild is good enough for the joys of just being out there.
Where sheds are found and trails are identified on barren ground gives us a direct contact with where and what the deer were doing at the tail end of the season, and in most habitats, their general habits for most of the fall and winter periods as well.
Way back in the 1960s when I first figured out how educational my winter exploring could be, I discovered more about topography and deer activity than I ever had during the actual deerhunting season.
Thursday, February 1, 2018
By: Ted Nugent Well Happy February everyone! As winter throttles on across the hinterland and we plow head-first into 2018, I hope everyone who is able to wrangle some time in their busy schedules to attend some of the various hunting shows around the country are enjoying themselves. They are always great fun. Over many… Full Story
Thursday, January 25, 2018
By: Ted Nugent Just let me just start out here in our deeranddeerhunting.com world by saying “Happy New Year 2018” again! It really is amazing and deeply gratifying to celebrate the beginning of yet another year and it thrills me no end just to type the numbers 2-0-1-8 everyday! We are already a month in… Full Story
Thursday, January 18, 2018
By: Ted Nugent
Swear to God the thermometer read 72’ below zero! Fahrenheit! No, really! My Alaska bowhunting BloodBrother Dave Widby and I were slogging across the frozen arctic tundra in search of the wooly mammoth musk ox, bundled up beyond the Pillsbury dough boy meets the Michelin man against the coldest of freezing cold mother Nature could possible throw our way!
It was wonderful and exciting, but Good Lord almighty was it ever COLD!
We were nonetheless pretty comfortable and snugged up, fully insulated in our state of the art gonzo muy frio attire of multi-layered heavy wool, down filled long-johns and every imaginable Thinsulate/Goretex goodies known to man back in the 1990s.
In these most challenging conditions possible, we did both get lucky and arrowed two dandy record book quality trophy wooly beasts on this phenomenal adventure. Whenever I might get a little chill and move a little closer to the fireplace, my body tingles and my mind reels with memories of this deadly freezing safari in the iced over North country of the Last Frontier.
As a lifelong Michigan bowhunter, I have certainly had my share of incredibly frozen vigils in dangerously below zero conditions in the last 69 deerseasons. I so remember all those years in the 1950s and 60s when all we had was wool, insulated Herman Survivor leather boots and cotton long-johns. Thank God for those old lighter fluid operating pocket handwarmers eh!
Even now as I wrap up my 2017-2018 deerseason at home in Texas, we are experiencing our share of single digit temperatures to adequately test our resolve to keep warm, persevere and stick with it.
When I went to my treestand yesterday afternoon around 3 o’clock here in mid-January, the temperature was a warmer than usual 63’ even for this part of the Hill Country. Wearing my lightweight Savanah ScentLok jacket was more than enough to handle the occasional yet ever increasing cool wind change from east to north.
Thursday, January 4, 2018
By: Ted Nugent
My beloved son Theodore Tobias Nugent was born November 7, 1976, and like all my kids, he brought great joy and happiness into our lives and immediately made the world a better place.
To say he was born into a full-on Gonzo whirlwind high-energy environment as the son of The MotorCity MadMan WhackMaster would be a gross understatement.
But within that swirling dervish Nugent world, far beyond the fiery glare of over the top flamethrowing rock-n-roll mayhem, was a beautiful, loving, down to earth all-American quality of life family dream based on love, individual accountability, being the absolute best that you can be discipline and all the positive elements that go into a serious bowhunting family lifestyle.
As Toby grew up, he showed all the youthful fascination with bows and arrows and BB guns and slingshots and always enjoyed our regular fun walks in the woods with dad. He would join me on a little hunting here and there, but never really showed a real passion for the outdoor sports. Instead he dedicated himself to basketball and became a serious athletic force to reckon with on the court.
I never pushed him to be a hunter or a guitar player, always hoping that his overall disciplined life would inspire and drive him towards his own personal passions and dreams.
It wasn’t until he was in his late teens that he began to show increased interest in deerhunting and I made it a point to encourage him and push a little harder to fan those flames that brought me such immense, deeply spiritual happiness and fulfillment.
As a very thoughtful, clever, intelligent and focused young man, it didn’t surprise me that after only a few outings, young Toby lucked into a monster Michigan swampbuck of a lifetime, killing a 168” mature beast with his Remington 12-gauge slug gun.
It was a moment in time for this die-hard deerhunting dad and his own deerhunting bug exploded in him from then on.
Friday, December 22, 2017
By: Ted Nugent It was kind of dark, another misty dusk, and it came from a tangle down below! That is the opening stanza of the 3rd verse of my magical spirit song Fred Bear, and I cannot tell you how many times those real hunting world lyrics have unfolded for me and many other… Full Story
Thursday, December 7, 2017
By: Ted Nugent
Ahhhhh….. December! At last! This wonderful last month that brings a blazing end to another incredible year that may very well be the best hunting month of all.
Say YOWZA like you mean it!
With sheer joy and a Cheshire grin, I recount the many exciting days, sunrises, sunsets, the many earth shattering deer encounters, the effervescent paths of many mystical flights of many arrows, the humbling spiritual moments of critter recoveries, the sizzling of backstraps on an open fire, all the good, the bad and the ugly of always challenging time afield during our precious hunting season so far this year.
When the deerhunting is all said and done, I believe it really boils down to an amazing series of very special and very diverse hunting memories that we can take with us through life.
And of all the moving memories we are lucky enough to pursue and accumulate, for me the best of the best are the times with special people around those special flame glowing deerhunting campfires.
Sure, at the end of each hunting day, after sitting and waiting and tracking and dragging and loading and gutting and hanging our hard-earned prizes, sometimes there is little opportunity for an actual campfire, but the gatherings around the buckpole or woodstove or just sitting down to the dinner table together are slight yet powerful variations on a campfire theme and we cherish them all.
Since I hunt every day and host and guide 50 to 100 hunters each fall and winter, our extended campfire time reminds us all how this timeless primal hunting life coalesces the absolute best aspects of our very existence.
In a world otherwise gone mad and turned upside where the government, media, Hollywood and academia all scramble to make right wrong and good bad, nothing brings truth, logic and commonsense so powerfully back into focus like a bunch of American hunters around a fire.
Thursday, November 30, 2017
By: Ted Nugent
I hope you are all celebrating every day in the deerwoods with deep, passionate appreciation for this incredible nature lifestyle and calling that we are so blessed to live and embrace. I am here to tell you that I sure am. And yes, it takes serious nerve, energy, spirit, physical and emotional management to get us through some of the frustrations, ups and downs and inescapable hunter fatigue that hits all of us as the season throttles on.
But let it be known by all good hands-on conservationist adventurers across the hinterland, never ever forget that even the most nerve wracking moments on the hunt are still some of the very best moments life has to offer.
I keep telling myself this and force myself to never allow a negative thought or moment to enter or interfere with my sacred sanctuary of pure predatorship.
Ever!
Opening up my 68th deerseason on our sacred homegrounds in Michigan was as thrilling as ever. Good herd rebound after the EHD scourge of a few years ago is proof-positive that Ma Nature can and does take care of her critters in a rather miraculous way.
As usual, way too many carcasses could be seen strewn about the highways and bi-ways, and the corn and bean crops again showed a resurgence of serious depredation.
With dedicated scouting, strategizing and gungho hunting, my backstrap boogie throttled on nicely in the woodlands, swamps, marshes and croplands of southern Michigan and I celebrated many beautiful arrows on numerous stunning beasts.
My Queen of the Forest wife Shemane and son Toby remained skunked after many sojourns afield, but daughter Sasha was able to kill a handsome 8-point buck with her .450 Bushmaster sniper Ruger.
With family scattered across America, we decided to head home to SpiritWild Ranch in Texas for a ThanXgiving holiday feast and the kickoff to our Texas deerseason.
In our absence the deer had no idea that a hunting season was even on. The bucks were rutting hard and the whole ranch was saturated with the lovely nostril flaring stench of black-goo tarsal gland aroma, and I liked it.
