Meet Pablo Esquivel: The World's Funniest Deer Hunter

This post is based on our year-ender podcast episode with Pablo Esquivel and Daniel Williams of Cedar Ridge Chronicles. Watch the full conversation below, or read on for the highlights.

Some podcast guests break down bedding areas. Pablo Esquivel breaks down laughing halfway through a story about wrestling a bird in the dark.

Pablo was born and raised in Costa Rica, where hunting — and owning a gun — is flat-out illegal. He grew up running off monkeys with a slingshot made from a coffee plant and river rocks "round like marbles." Today he's an Alabama public land bowhunter, a naturalized U.S. citizen, and the reason Daniel Williams answers his phone bracing for one of two things: "He's either done killed a big buck, or he's in a lot of trouble."

He also carries a piece of paper in his pack for whenever he walks in front of another hunter's trail camera:

"Roses are red, violets are blue, that big buck you have on camera — I'm hunting him too."

Here are a few of the stories (and honest lessons) from one of the most fun episodes we've ever recorded.

From a Slingshot in Costa Rica to 90 Days in Alabama

At 21, Pablo was studying sport fishing and dreaming of captaining a charter boat when his mom got the long-awaited call from the U.S. Embassy. Two days later he was on a plane, no English, landing in Alabama. The next morning his stepdad Rick laid it out: he had 90 days to get a job, a driver's license, an apartment, a car, and some of the language. Pablo walked into a Mexican restaurant and told the manager he'd scrub floors and wash dishes — the manager made him a waiter instead, and the girl assigned to train him became his wife. He failed the driver's license test four times, studying the manual on breaks with a dictionary beside it. Then his stepdad told him about public land: "You're telling me there's a spot I don't have to pay, and I can go kill a deer?" He was sold.

Three Seasons Without Seeing a Deer (and the Doe Estrus Shower)

Pablo learned deer hunting from Midwestern TV shows he could barely understand. He watched hunters spraying themselves down — not knowing it was scent killer — so on his first hunt he bought a big bottle of doe estrus at Walmart and hosed himself with it at nine in the morning, gagging the whole time: "That's what real men were doing." He went three straight seasons without laying eyes on a deer. When a buck finally walked in at five yards, he missed, sat down, and cried. Three days later he went back, sat on the ground against a stump, and the same buck came bobbing his head in at 15 yards. Pablo smoked him, then nearly passed out — "They're going to find us both dead right here together." That two-and-a-half-year-old 8-point still hangs in his living room.

Knocking on Tony Meyers' Door

Years later, pouring concrete in Moulton, Pablo saw a living room full of giant bucks at a customer's house — Mr. Tony Meyers. A year after that, he drove back and knocked on the door, a tattooed Hispanic stranger with an accent, and asked to learn. Tony didn't just answer questions. He walked Pablo around the mountain showing him food sources, escape routes, travel corridors, and thermals, then connected him with Michael Perry, Jamie McKay, Daniel Williams, Parker McDonald, and more. Pablo bought a book of Alabama trees because he couldn't tell a red oak from a water oak. "I'm the legit proof of Southern hospitality," he says. "The people just took me in." His advice for finding a mentor: check your ego at the door, expect nothing, do the work first, and never go back to a spot somebody showed you without their permission — he even turned off his own GPS so he couldn't find Daniel's honey hole again.

The Swamp Donkey and the Pigeon in the Dark

Walking out ahead of a storm, Pablo spotted a giant animal on the gravel road 200 yards from the parking area and figured a neighbor's donkey had gotten loose and was fixing to chase him. It was a giant buck. He judged it at 30 yards, it was actually 17, and the arrow sailed high. "He was a swamp donkey, that's what he was." Another evening, walking out in the pitch black, something hit him in the neck — he was sure a mountain lion had him, dropped his flashlight and rifle, and rolled through the briars screaming and throwing punches. It was a dove that had flown inside his hoodie. He came home scratched up and covered in feathers, and Daniel coined the line of the episode: it's all fun and games till you wrestle a pigeon in the dark.

Bikini Bottom: The One That Got Away

Pablo found a swamp nobody else would touch — one step put him six feet under water with his bow and pack, and the day he killed a spike there, a beaver tail-slap dunked him again and he floated out using the buck as a life preserver. He named the spot Bikini Bottom, because like SpongeBob's squirrel, he was fully submerged. On December 22nd, a true giant blew out of the cattails, ran off a good 8-point, and chased a doe past his tree. Pablo hit him back, tracked blood across the swamp with a dog until 10 that night, and never recovered him. He calls losing that buck the best thing that ever happened to him — "the greatest humbling opportunity" — because it kept his ego in check and kept him learning.

The Serious Part: Hunt the Dates

Between the laughs, there's a real takeaway. In a drought year with almost zero buck sign across the Southeast, both of Pablo's Alabama bucks came on annual-pattern dates — one within three days, one to the exact day from a year ago. Daniel tells about a friend he sent to a green field on December 4th, sight unseen, dead cameras and all — two hours later the man had killed the biggest buck of his life. "If anybody's ever killed a big buck anywhere, they need to know the date and the tree to get in." Doe estrous cycles don't care about sign.

"I'm the living proof that the American dream is still out there. You have to go and chase it, because nothing is going to give it to you for free."

Go Deeper

This is only a slice of a two-hour-plus episode. We didn't even get to the rattlesnake Pablo caught bare-handed a mile from the truck (and dumped, still moving, on his living room floor), the runaway trolling motor that sent his kayak spinning like Top Gun, or the .30-06 he hunted with for 15 years without ever sighting it in. Watch the full episode on YouTube or listen on your favorite audio platform.

What's the funniest thing that's ever happened to you in the deer woods? Swap stories with thousands of Southern public land hunters in our free community. Join the community here.

And if you want to look better than Pablo did soaked in doe estrus, grab some Southern Outdoorsmen gear here. Y'all Stay Southern.