How to See More Deer: Aaron Warbritton's Setup Rules for Bow Hunters

This post is based on our podcast episode with Aaron Warbritton of The Hunting Public. Watch the full conversation below, or read on for the key takeaways.

It took us almost 700 episodes, but we finally got Aaron Warbritton of The Hunting Public on the podcast. We drove up to his place in Missouri to talk about one thing: how to get good at just killing deer — not chasing giants, just becoming a consistent bow hunter.

Aaron grew up tagging along behind his dad and his uncles, shooting pie plates off hay bales and killing his first buck with a bow at 13 out of a ladder stand they called Old Faithful. These days he travels the country hunting new public ground and figuring deer out in a week or less.

His central point the whole conversation: the setup is everything. Not your bow specs, not your arrow build — where you're standing when the deer shows up.

The Setup Beats the Shot: Get Them Inside 20 Yards

When The Hunting Public crew calculated the average shot distance across all their archery kills as a group, it came out to 16 yards — very few over 30. That's not an accident. Back in his Midwest Whitetail days, Aaron watched slow-motion footage from hundreds of archery kills and misses, and over and over he saw guys make perfect shots at 30 yards and lose the deer, because you can't predict how much a deer will move at that distance.

"You could be the best shot in the world, you can't predict it. But when they get to 10, 12 yards, that arrow's getting there so fast, they don't have time to react."

The buck he killed last season proves the point. A tornado had blown trees down and moved the trails 20 yards, so he scrapped his original tree, set up to shoot the upper side of the root ball, and drew back and let down three times as the buck walked through openings at 22, 18, and 17 yards — before killing him at eight. As he put it, "I'd rather get one of those chances a year than five of them at 40."

Read the Conditions of the Day First

Before Aaron picks a spot, he reads the day: Is it wet? Windy? Hot? Is a cold front coming? Each answer changes the play.

If it's 15 degrees above average in early season, deer bed differently — north-facing ridges under boulders where it's 10 degrees cooler, or down in the sand of a dry creek bed. If the woods are wet and windy, that's when he slips into sensitive spots in the middle of bedding areas, because deer can't hear his footsteps and everything in the woods is already moving — he's walked within feet of bedded deer in the dark on those days. If it's dead calm and crunchy, every step carries for hundreds of yards, so you have to sound like a squirrel or a deer, not a person.

Build Multiple Setups for Multiple Conditions

Aaron breaks hunters into three categories: the weekend warrior who has to go Saturday and Sunday no matter what, the flexible worker who can call his boss when a cold front's coming, and the week vacationer saving up for 10 straight days. The weekend warrior is at the mercy of the weather — which is exactly why he needs setups for hot days, cold fronts, dead-calm days, and even spots close to the road where a morning hunt won't blow everything out.

"They'll go in there when the conditions are bad or the timing ain't right and the deer ain't in there yet. And all they're doing is leaving their scent in that spot and they're blowing everything out cuz they don't have good conditions."

His system: take your weekends in February and March to backtrack off scrape lines, pick your trees for specific winds, and plan how you'll access them at 3 a.m. Then in season, buzz in for an hour after work to check those scrapes. When they open up and Sunday brings the right wind, you already have a tree picked — and you didn't pressure the deer to find it.

Find Deer Fast: Boot Leather and Speed Scouting

Dropped into new country, Aaron's method is simple: boot leather and deer sign. In Michigan, he and Ted hunted mostly within a half mile of the road — leapfrogging down it, one guy dropping in for 30 minutes at a time, regrouping, and doing it 10 to 15 times a day until they found deer. He doesn't want one spot two miles deep; he wants six options so he can go to plan B, C, D, and E. In Georgia, they keyed on deer hammering red oak acorns at a specific elevation bench, then repeated that pattern across the property.

He's not afraid to bump deer while scouting, either — but he scouts into the wind so deer hear or see him without smelling him. A bumped buck usually goes three or four hundred yards to the next bedding area, and now you know exactly how he was bedded and can find five more spots that look just like it.

Fresh Hot Sign Beats a Lot of Sign

Deer that have fed in one spot for two weeks leave sign everywhere — and they're usually gone. In Missouri, white oaks start dropping in early September, and by the time most hunters pile into that torn-up sign in late September, the deer have moved on. "Fresh hot sign is almost more important than the amount of sign," Aaron says. He'd rather find one rub bleeding sap that was made that morning than a hillside of old ones.

That means hunting the white oak sign right now, even at 80 degrees, because the buck may be bedded 60 yards away. Then transitioning to scrapes on the edge of thick cover in late October, and during the rut, sitting those two or three rubs strung along the downwind side of a cedar thicket — where a buck will cruise through between 8 and 4 even if there's barely a trail.

Go Deeper

This is only a slice of a two-hour-plus conversation. In the full episode, Aaron tells the story of calling in his dad's first longbeard at 15, gets honest about the spot-burning criticism The Hunting Public receives, and shares how he handles run-ins with other hunters on public land. Watch the full episode on YouTube, or find it on your favorite audio platform.

How many setups do you have ready for different conditions this fall? Come swap scouting notes with hundreds of other Southern hunters working through the same questions. Join the community here.

And if you're stacking does for the freezer this year, we've got a Freezer Queen tee with your name on it — grab some merch before season. Y'all Stay Southern.