News Archives

Arrow Heaven

October 9, 2019

By: Ted Nugent Scouting my sacred wildgrounds and shooting my Mathews every day are nearly as exciting as hunting my wildgrounds. It is this year-round nonstop scouting that teaches me much about critter activity and the always changing travel patterns to better zero in on my most advantageous ambush location. And of course, my samurai mystical flight of the arrow addiction is not only thrilling beyond words, but essential in remaining ONE with the path of my arrow for clean kills and backstrap joys! And so it was on this magic fall day 2019 as I carefully snuck up on my chosen treestand setup for the afternoon bowhunt, that the Great Spirit was riding along on my shoulders to assist in my predator/conservation duties. I don’t know about you, but my predator radar glows bright orange DefCom1 fulltime the minute I make the decision to hunt, sucking in every minute detail of the energized wild world around me, even as I slowly stalk through the woods, across the creek, into the marsh edge and up the final ridge to my tree.

Just ShutUp and Hunt

October 2, 2019

By: Ted Nugent Happy happy October everybody! Ain’t it grand! Ain’t it special! Ain’t it wonderful! Ain’t it beautiful! Ain’t it ours! Celebrate October 2019 every day like you mean it! I guarantee I’m going to! Many hunters around the world kicked off the season back in August and September, but you have to admit, there is something rather special about the effervescent month of October. Since my earliest youth, October 1st always represented that much anticipated magic opening day of our Michigan bowseason, and it was celebrated with mucho gusto by the Nugent family and the growing army of deerhunting archers inspired by his majesty, Mr. Fred Bear. So many states have initiated earlier openers and I not only fully support such increased opportunities, but I fight like mad to create such increased attractions for hunter retention and recruitment in every state. The more opportunities, bang for your buck so to speak, the better for the future of conservation participation across America.

Hunt, Hunt, Hunt, then Hunt Some More

September 24, 2019

By: Ted Nugent I may as well have been deep in the bowels of primordial Africa, stalking a jungle ridge hunting for lions or elephants. The goosebumps on my goosebumps were proof of my inner tingling and borderline uncontrollable excitement. But I wasn’t in Africa, and there were no lions, tigers, elephants or bears anywhere nearby. I was sitting quietly atop a glacier cut ridgeline above my sacred Michigan swamp, nestled beneath a towering forest of mature oaks, maples, hickory, beach, cherry, tulip poplars and various deciduous and coniferous hardwoods and softwoods, trusty old Remington Model 41 TargetMaster .22 bolt rifle in hand, scouring the leafy canopy for those pesky bushytails of my youth. Squirrel hunting! Lord I love squirrel hunting! I hunt squirrels with my Mathews bow, an old Remington single-shot rifle, a Smith & Wesson .22 revolver, a shotgun and my daily carry Glock 10mm. And I love it all.

Herd Management 101

September 19, 2019

By: Ted Nugent I gaze lovingly at the mounted button buck and the small doe fawn side by side on my cabin wall. You want to talk about trophies! I remember every soul stirring detail of those two exciting deerkills way back in the 1960s, and though both deer are as small as legal deer can be, they both represent the essence of my thrilling hunting life. I think the most amazing memory of all is the shock and dismay on the taxidermist’s face when I brought the little boogers in to be mounted. He literally couldn’t believe I wanted to pay to have such non-trophy deer mounted, but eventually came to understand my genuine excitement and happiness in finally accomplishing my hunting goal of bagging a deer. As I state constantly on my Ted Nugent Spirit of the Wild TV show for the past 31 years and in all my media interviews celebrating the perfect hunting lifestyle, when approached with a proper mindset and with the proper heart of a hunter-conservationist, every hunt should be all about fun, sport, meat and trophy.

Venison-The Ultimate Sacred Flesh

September 11, 2019

By: Ted Nugent Gamey! You’re darn tootin my venison is gamey! That’s exactly why it is celebrated around the world as the most desirable, delicious, nutritious, natural, organic, healthy food on planet earth. Let us all dedicate ourselves to destroy the bastardization of the once glowingly positive term gamey! Gamey does not mean nasty, rancid or yucky! Originally when describing wild game meat, the term gamey was universally worldwide considered the ultimate positive compliment anyone could use to describe how special and delicious venison is. Somewhere along the line as mankind migrated away from the independent hunting lifestyle of self-sufficiency and rugged individualism, some hunters became increasingly nonchalant and disconnected from the spiritual respect for the animals we hunt and became less considerate on how they handled the hard-earned carcass. That’s when they messed up and foolishly allowed urine, body fluids, bile, guts and all sorts of flavor destroying guck to infect the meat. Somebody somewhere took a bite of irresponsibly mishandled venison and got a suckerpunch of nastiness that turned them off from the flesh of game. Knowing that they had a bad taste experience with game meat, they kneejerkingly pronounced they didn’t like the gamey punch of venison. And it all went downhill from there.

Recruit Retain Reactivate

September 5, 2019

By: Ted Nugent Recruit Retain Reactivate is known as the 3R battlecry for the future of conservation in America. With the tragic, and what I believe to be the self-inflicted decline in hunter numbers across the country over the years, if those of us who truly cherish this extraordinary American conservation heritage and vital lifestyle fail to step up and get cracking to reverse this scourge like we mean it, believe me when I tell you, all is lost. I know all about the dramatic change in the geographical population drift from rural to urban. We all know about the intentional dumbing down of America by leftwing dingbats in academia, media, Hollywood and government to deny the necessity of annual hunting season harvests. It is painfully apparent that certain technological advances in the world have attracted more and more sedentary homebodies to avoid the great outdoors. There are many dynamics at play against us here, but I am convinced that with a genuine, united effort by those of us who care, these unacceptable cultural suicidal trends can be reversed forthwith. More powerful than those negative forces noted above are two areas that we can attack and fix rather expeditiously if strategized effectively.

To Kill A Deer

August 29, 2019

By: Ted Nugent I hunt, therefor I am. I hunt because I am a hunter. Pure and simple. I am nature as pure as the wind itself. Like Cochise, Sitting Bull, Davy Crocket, Jeremiah Johnson, Fred Bear and Crazy Horse, I am but the humble conservation servant of the almighty Creator. Nature is perfect and hunting is perfect. Celebrate it and promote it every day everywhere to everyone. Nature should not be a spectator sport, but rather a gungho participatory dedication. Be one with her spirit and pulse. As The Season approaches, we prepare to plunge spirit-first into that magical time of renewal, a time to return to the life giving pulse of God’s miraculous creation as a genuine dedicated hands on participant, fulfilling the natural tooth, fang and claw call of the wild stewardship responsibility that burns afire in our bellies. It is time to kill.

The Politics of Hunting

August 14, 2019

By: Ted Nugent “I’m not into politics, I just wanna go hunting” sayeth the unAmerican sheep. I cannot imagine many things more unAmerican, in fact downright anti-American, than being so disconnected and apathetic in failing to actually fulfill the #1 American...

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Celebrate and Promote-Never Defend Hunting

August 6, 2019

By: Ted Nugent Well hallelujah, my bowhunting BloodBrothers in California and Florida have already kicked off the backstrap boogie season 2019 and the celebratory SpiritWild campfires are already burning brightly in that not so quiet night. Me, I’m still out here celebrating the glorious American Dream freedom soundtrack with another few weeks to go on the greatest musical adventure of my life. Every song, every concert, every night, every guitar lick continues to be a Samurai out of body fun fest, with Greg Smith on bass guitar and young Jason Hartless on his MotorCity thunderdrums pounding out the best all American R&B rock-n-roll soulmusic the world has ever witnessed, if I do say so myself. And that guitar tone! Lord have mercy! I’m unleashing licks that God has yet to authorize! We are blessed with the greatest music loving audiences in the world and the energy level each night is off the Richter scale charts. I cannot say thank you often enough or loud enough! THANK YOU!

The Spirit of the Beast

July 31, 2019

By: Ted Nugent For my entire adult life, I have celebrated and promoted the spiritual dynamo of the hunting lifestyle and our very special participatory oneness with God’s miraculous creation. It’s all about the Spirit of the Wild! Going all the way back to my earliest musical adventures, spurred on in many ways and certainly paralleled year for year with my bowhunting upbringing, in my own mushybrained, not yet developed youthful intellect, I always felt the presence of The Great Spirit more than I actually understood it. The near impossible task and my indefatigable effort of getting close to wild things with my home-made hickory slingshot, Red Ryder BB gun and my precious yew longbow and arrows taught me much each day afield, that the hopeful act of potentially killing that critter was vastly overpowered, even eclipsed, by the daunting challenge of temporarily overcoming their miraculous design to avoid me.

The Deer Made Me Do It

July 17, 2019

By: Ted Nugent As your read these glowing words of spirit, attitude, independence and freedom, I am settling into the concrete hell warzone of California, about to assault the rock-n-roll stage for my 6721st concert. Oh the humanity! The title of my most recent record is The Music Made Me Do It, and this 2019 tour, 65 years later after my first musical performance at the age of 5 for a family gathering in Detroit, is titled “The Music Made Me Do It-Again!” I’ve come up with some clever wordsmithing over the years for tour titles, “Intensities In 10 Cities” comes to mind, but this year it is both literal and simple, because my American Dream has been powerfully fortified by my intense love of American rock-n-roll, and nothing, I mean nothing could ever get in my way. The music really did make me do it, and it still does.

2019 Is It Fall Yet?

July 11, 2019

By: Ted Nugent This morning, again, I cruised the plethora of trails bisecting my sacred Michigan hunting grounds, and literally wallowed and danced in unlimited spirit. In the first hour of cruising the swamplands in my Roxor offroader, I was blessed with the uniquely massive stimuli factor offered by the numerous deer sightings, beaver, otter, mink, a raccoon, possum, muskrat, turtles, a snake, frogs, red squirrels, fox squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, a groundhog, pheasant, woodcock, turkey, sandhill cranes, ducks, geese, swans, herons, crows, hawks, owls, a bald eagle, a pair of big, hammering Pileated woodpeckers and probably 30-40 species of birdlife, all singing and warbling the intoxicating soundtrack to my favorite life beyond the pavement. I stop often, shut off the diesel engine, sit a spell and listen, then wander off, gorging on delicious wild berries and checking and adjusting treestands here and there. My dogs Happy, Sadie and Coco joined me over the distant hogback ridge to check out a few remote foodplots, all doing fantastic from the rainy spring and summer so far. It was good to see the oak trees are already showing a killer mast crop coming on strong. The many wild apple trees are heavy with fruit again this year.

Happy Independence Day Everyday

July 8, 2019

By: Ted Nugent I smell backstraps on the grill baby, all across America! Afterall, nothing says Happy Independence Day quite like the sizzling sacred flesh fruits of the ultimate independent lifestyle of deerhunting. On this very special and uniquely American holiday, or better put, holy day, it is imperative that we teach our children and remind everyone in our lives just exactly what the 4th of July truly represents. I would like to think that no other lifestyle better celebrates true independence like the rugged individual, self-sufficiency lifestyle of the American deerhunter. Though our brilliant, courageous Founding Fathers and American Revolutionary Patriots that defeated King George’s sheep-like punk army wrote down a killer list of self-evident truths and God given individual rights by which we declared our independence, freedom and sovereignty, I have always believed they forgot as important a right as any listed in the Bill of Rights.

Rad Trad

June 26, 2019

By: Ted Nugent It was a sunny, warm fall day in 1957, and my cousin Mark and I were on safari along the Rouge River in Dearborn, Michigan. The Dearborn Hills golf course was our own little dream wildlife paradise, and we stealthily scooted along the fairway edges with our yew longbows tightly gripped, cedar arrows cocked, locked and oh so ready to rock! At the tender age of 9 I was already alive with the Spirit of the Wild, and my youthful critter radar was always on red alert. Mark and I simultaneously saw the movement above on the towering oak limb as a big bushytailed fox squirrel leapt, ran and scrambled for dear life.

The Fulltime Nature Life

June 20, 2019

By: Ted Nugent Sure. I know. It’s just the beginning of summertime and our beloved huntseason is still a longways off. Unless of course you are ready for the California and Florida deerseasons in July! But lament not my Spirit BloodBrothers of the Backstrap Tribe, for what we do this time of year can and should play a major role in how effective we can be once the season is upon us and we climb aboard our much-anticipated ambush deerstand. Even though the annual rock-n-roll outrage summer tour is about to erupt for this old guitar slaying backstrapper, (and I can’t wait!) I nonetheless remain deeply in touch with the pulse of my nature relationship pretty much every day all year long.

Spirit of the Wild Lifestyle

June 12, 2019

By: Ted Nugent I will be 71 years old this coming winter, and I thought I would share some old man, million adventure miles observations with my fellow deerhunting brethren. So much has changed since I was born in 1948, yet so much has remained the same. I just made a very emotional return trip to my old birth neighborhood in Detroit and stopped by the little house at 23251 Florence Street where I grew up. Though I was immediately jettisoned back in time with a flood of wonderful, stirring, happy memories, in reality the old neighborhood was in no way the same. What were once proudly maintained and manicured lawns and yards were now overgrown weed fields in disarray and embarrassingly unkempt condition. The beautiful little houses I remember were now in wrecked shambles if not outright torched. Most of the trees I climbed and hunted squirrels in the neighborhood were gone.

Ted Nugent Kamp for Kids 30 Years Later

May 30, 2019

By: Ted Nugent Thank God I was born into a hunting, shooting, outdoor celebrating family way back when! I’ve always said if Elvis Presley and Jim Hendrix et al were raised with a bow and arrow in the Great Outdoors, they would still be alive today! Believe me when I tell you how thrilling, challenging and consuming is the mighty mystical flight of the arrow and allthings Great Outdoors! There was simply no way any stoned, drunk, drooling goofball would have ever convinced me that getting high or drunk could possibly make me a better archer, hunter or guitar player.

We Can’t Give Up

May 23, 2019

By: Ted Nugent As powerful a healing force that nature provides us outdoor families in America, now is not the time to let her often intoxicating healing powers deter us from critical cultural life and death concerns and inherent duties that are all around us. Our sacred outdoor recreation time does not only re-create our energies and spirit, but should always bring a clearer focus to life’s many demands on our priority list. When I constantly repeat the American quality of life battlecry of God, family, country, it is always gratifying to witness how it resonates with my family, friends, neighbors, hunting buddies, and quite honestly everyone in not just my close inner-circle, but literally everyone everywhere in my everyday walk of life. But as we painfully see and hear the abject decay of goodwill and decency in increasing segments of American society, not to mention the war on truth, logic and commonsense in the nasty world of fakenews, academia propaganda and runaway criminal corruption in government, the best Americans, ie; hunting families, must step forward now more than ever to counterpunch all that negativity and fight for God, family and country like we mean it, like never before.

Deerhunting Turkeys

May 16, 2019

By: Ted Nugent Growing up and hunting in Michigan throughout the 50s 60s and 70s, there were no wild turkeys to be had. My first encounter with the mighty Thunderchicken was in the Manistee National Forest up in the northeast area of the lower peninsula around 1975. Trekking mile after mile of wonderful rugged wildground habitat pursuing the elusive Ruff Grouse and Timberdoodles with my amazing Irish Setter birdmasters, we stumbled upon a flock of about twelve Eastern turkey hens one afternoon, and I was rather surprised and delighted to say the least. A few years after that we could apply for a spring gobbler permit, and my exciting hunting for this magnificent big game bird was off and running.

The Future Is Now

May 9, 2019

By: Ted Nugent I remember it like it was just this morning. I couldn’t have been much more than six, maybe seven years old. We lived on Florence Street in Redford on the northwest edge of Detroit, and right across Hazelton Street was the winding wildgrounds of the mighty Rouge River that called my name loud and clear and all the time. It may have well been the uncharted jungles of Mozambique for all I could have known or cared, for its big timber, towering forests, snag-nasty tanglezones of thick scrub and impenetrable bush, tall, steep hills and deep, dark valleys, all its magnificent wildness and mystifying critters lured me as powerfully as anything can lure a human being. At first, pre-dating Whamo’s and WristRockets, I had my trusty old handmade slingshot, cleverly fabricated from a geometrically perfect forked hickory branch, powered by old bicycle innertube strips fastened by tight shoelaces with a sturdy patch of worn canvas for a projectile pouch. Many a painstaking hour was dedicated to picking out the perfect sized, as round as possible pebbles and stones for my arsenal of ballistically coefficient ammo, and Lord knows the passion with which I relentlessly practiced my aim small miss small discipline to be the best marksman I could be. And let me tell you, I was murder! Chipmunks, squirrels, rabbits, quail, birds of every description and species, river rats, snakes, frogs, turtles, coons, possums, skunks, nothing was safe from the WhackMaster in the making.

Conservation Gang Warfare

May 3, 2019

By: Ted Nugent The National Rifle Association. Hunter Nation. Gun Owners of America. Ducks Unlimited. Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. National Wild Turkey Foundation. Delta Waterfowl. Pheasants Forever. Trout Unlimited. Quail Unlimited. The Grouse Society. Gun Owners of California. Texas Rifle Association. Jews For the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. The Zelman Partisans. The Wild Sheep Foundation. The National Trappers Association. The Boone and Crocket Club. Pope and Young. Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife. The Audubon Society. National Wildlife Federation. The Arbor Day Foundation. Safari Club International. The Dallas Safaris Club. The Houston Safari Club. Shikar Safaris. Michigan Conservation Clubs. Michigan Bowhunters. Wisconsin Bowhunters. South Dakota Bowhunters. Nebraska Bowhunters. Alaska Bowhunters. I’m sure I could go, but this is a partial list of absolutely amazing conservation and freedom organizations to which I have over the many years supported in one way or another. All 50 states and all Canadian Provinces have various hunting, conservation and gun-rights organizations, and in equally various ways, do wonderful work on behalf of conservation, hunting, fishing and trapping rights and very important freedom-based gun-rights.

Back To Basics-Wildlife Management 101

April 25, 2019

By: Ted Nugent I’m just a guitarplayer and I never went to college. I was too busy learning stuff; really important stuff! You know, all that radical stuff like self-evident truths, logic, commonsense, reality, earning your own way, living within your means, saving for a rainyday, self-sufficiency, accountability, frugality, utilitarian pragmatism, independence, work ethic productivity, responsible conservation, honesty, resource stewardship, giving instead of taking, leaving things better than I found them, hands-on down to earth natural world stuff that remains to this day the basics of quality of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness and allthings American Dream. Oh, radical, radical me! It is my 70 years of clean and sober ultra-aliveness that has taught me to believe that no other lifestyle available to mankind will teach these things better than the life of a hunter, especially the life of a bowhunter. The higher level of awareness and demanding stealth discipline of bowhunting eliminates the failures of stumbling and bumbling along in hopes that luck will win the day.