I have now been interning at Midwest Whitetail for about a month, and it has been a blast. Here, I will try to summarize what I’ve been doing so far in Albia.
In The Office
I’ve been mostly producing small How-To and Gear Tip videos for the Midwest Whitetail website and Cabela’s. They have been fun to do and have really helped me learn the editing software. Here are some examples of these videos:
In addition to editing videos, I also wrote a short article for the Cabela’s Whitetail Season website, and will probably be writing more throughout the internship.
In The Field
A couple days a week we go out to the chunks of public land in the area to walk the ground, hang and check cameras, film segments for the shows, and film deer at dusk. I’ve also spent some time at some of the properties the guys in the office have permission to hunt, helping with food plots and scouting. If I get anything out of this internship, it will be a pretty solid farmer tan. Though some of the walks can be long and the mosquitoes are terrible, it’s pretty awesome to do this for “work.” The amount of good public land they have around here is incredible and varies from river bottoms, ag land, and big woods. I’ve already learned a ton about hunting these areas from the guys in the office, particularly my boss, Aaron, who is pretty much the king of public land. One evening we filmed velvet on a public piece and saw around 12 bucks, seven of which were over 125″, with one being a giant 170″, which got us pretty excited to hunt the area. This was also the same night that a skunk walked across the road wanting to join us in the cornfield we we filming from (my exact words to Aaron were “I’m getting the f— out of here!”), all while a nice 140s 10-point was eating in the soybean field in front of us.
The most surreal moment of the my time here occurred this past Monday. Aaron, Zach (another intern), and I were going out to scout a piece of public ground, and came across a giant antler. When Zach went to go pick it up, Aaron said “Oh my God. That’s Erik’s deer.” Erik (one of the full-timers in the office) missed a great deer two years ago on the same piece, but about three miles away. Last year’s interns got two pictures of him in November, and he really put on some inches. We were all giddy with excitement that we found this deer’s shed antler in August. We still can’t believe what a giant it is, and hopefully someone in the office can finish this great story with the buck this season! I can’t imagine how big he is this year.
We’ve also been out filming velvet at Bill’s to get some footage of the bucks he will be hunting in the fall. It has been pretty cool to see his farm in person after watching it in the shows over the years. Aaron also got some local knowledge of a giant deer feeding in an alfalfa field, so we set up a tripod in his Hummer (apparently people still drive those), and parked on the side of the road hoping to see the buck. A 160+” 8-point walked out, and I assumed this was the one we were after. Aaron didn’t seem too excited and said he thought there was another in the area. About ten minutes later, a giant, maybe 200″ 12-point stepped out. It was easily the biggest deer I’ve seen in person, and I could not believe my eyes. Southern Iowa is truly in a class of its own when it comes to giant whitetails.
A New Hobby
We need timelapses for the shows that will come out in a couple weeks. With the recent meteor shower and moonless nights we have been spending our nights shooting star time lapses, which look awesome. Setting the cameras at long exposures allows you to see some amazing things in the night sky, particularly the Milky Way. I brought my camera with to shoot the timelapses and just take some cool pictures. I’ll definitely be out doing this as long as I can handle the decreased sleep.
Pretty much the only bad things about my time here are that I’m not able to see everyone (including my dog) in the Dirty RF and there are no trout streams in the area. Oh, and there’s nothing to do in Albia outside of work (think Ellsworth, BUT IN IOWA).
I hope everyone is doing well back home!
