How Cameron Derr Fills Tags Every Single Season

Some guys kill a deer. Cameron Derr fills tags, season after season, and that’s a different thing entirely. Luck can hand you one buck. It can’t hand you a track record. So when Cameron sat down with me, I wanted to get past the results and into the decisions that keep producing them.
We started where every deer camp eventually ends up arguing: the moon. Everybody has a theory, and most of those theories line up suspiciously well with the days we already had off work. We dug into whether moon phases actually move deer or just give us a story to tell ourselves, and where the moon belongs on the list next to the things we know matter.
Cameron also just launched his own podcast, and his approach caught my attention. Keep it digestible. Give people something they can use on their next sit instead of an hour of theory they’ll forget by the parking lot. That’s a good rule for a show, and honestly a pretty good rule for hunting.
Then we got to the part I was most excited about: ground hunting early season whitetails in the Dakotas. No big timber, no perfect tree, just open country, summer patterns, and deer that can see you coming from a long way off. It’s a high-wire act. Some days it comes together fast. Some days a buck takes one wrong turn and the whole plan is dust. That unpredictability is exactly why it’s so addictive.
The back half of the conversation went deeper into what really separates consistent hunters from everybody else. Patience. Observation. Watching deer long enough to understand what they’re doing instead of guessing. We talked wind, and how one bad sit with the wrong breeze can undo weeks of careful work. We talked about adapting when the ground changes under you, including what happens when the loggers show up and the woods you thought you knew turn into something else overnight.
Cameron shared stories about specific deer, the lessons those bucks taught him, and the preparation that goes into a hunt long before he ever walks in. None of it is flashy. All of it is the kind of stuff that quietly stacks up into filled tags.
If you’ve ever wondered why some hunters seem to connect every year while you’re still waiting on the right moon, give this one a listen.
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