Since I’ve never been one to beat around the bush, allow me to introduce myself – I’m Ryan Rothstein, and I’m a deer hunter.
I was born and raised in Central Minnesota, and I’ve been obsessed with deer since I could walk and talk. I can still remember impatiently waiting around my grandparents’ house all day on firearms opener for the hunting party to get back so I could see what they had harvested. I’ve always struggled with being forced to wait for things. But man, when they would bring that truck full of deer into the garage, that was the coolest thing in the world in my five-year-old mind.
As I got older, I was obsessed with deer to the point where it led me down a career path as a biologist and land manager, and it’s only made the obsession worse. Once I started literally studying deer as a graduate student down in South Texas, I realized how little I actually knew about these critters, despite reading every hunting magazine I could get my hands on. Throughout graduate school, I had many eye-opening experiences that reshaped many of my opinions about how deer move and interact with their habitat, which completely altered my opinions about hunting deer.
I’ve been obsessed with deer since I could walk and talk. I can still remember impatiently waiting around my grandparents’ house all day on firearms opener for the hunting party to get back so I could see what they had harvested.
I’ve also been fortunate that this lifestyle has led to me chasing deer across the country, all the way from North Dakota to New Mexico and nearly everywhere in between. By getting out of my comfort zone and chasing deer in places that were absolutely foreign to me, I’ve had to think on my toes and challenge what I thought I knew about deer hunting. All these experiences have forced me to learn a multitude of habitat types and this has made me even more appreciative of the whitetail’s ability to evade deer hunters.
When I began deer hunting nearly two decades ago, I cut my teeth by consuming every word that I could find on deer and deer hunting. I would religiously read magazines like Deer & Deer Hunting, Petersen’s Bowhunting, and any books I could persuade my parents to get me for Christmas. Literally from day one, I have made it my mission to be a student of the whitetail.
That said, you will never hear me proclaim to be an expert on anything, but I do spend a helluva lot of time hunting and studying deer, so I’m hoping that at least a few of you will be able to glean something from my addiction. My biggest goal is to translate my own learning experiences into something that other hunters can use to improve their success.
I’ve long believed that the only way to consistently be a successful deer hunter is to understand your prey and the areas they call home like the back of your hand. Besides my hunting addiction, I spend a lot of time reading deer research and tinkering with habitat management.
M
y aim with this blog is to cover the entire spectrum of deer behavior and biology, deer hunting, public land hunting, and habitat management. The more you learn across this spectrum, the better it will make you no matter your preferred style of deer hunting.
I’m looking forward to covering a wide swath of ground here, and we’ll occasionally make a detour to turkeys, pheasants, pollinators, regulations/policy, wildlife management, and conservation in general. I hope you’ll come along for the ride, and thanks for reading, it’s much appreciated.
