Ted Nugent and Tony LaPratt

Nugent: Old Hunting Dog and New Tricks  

I was jamming away on my Gibson Byrdland guitar again this morning after doing my chores, shooting a few hunting arrows, running my varmint trapline and working my Labrador retrievers. Something very different happens musically when one comes straight from the enchanting Spirit of the Wild swamp directly into the guitar room with dirty, earthy essence of the wild under the fingernails.

Ted Nugent and Tony LaPratt
Ted and land-management guru Tony LaPratt discovering the secrets to new deer hunting spots and making plans to create better hunting grounds.

With Happy and Sadie all tuckered out resting on the floor, I turn up the amplifiers and unleash a flurry of exciting notes, patterns and licks that truly have a life of their own.

Stream of swamp consciousness makes the best music ever!

My adventurous near 70-year clean and sober being instinctively goes for sounds and rhythms heretofore undiscovered, and the sonic experimentation is thrilling beyond words.

Not a jam session transpires where I fail to discover new, strange and always enticing licks and sounds, and the newness of it all inspires me even further into uncharted territory to seek notes and grooves that I have never attempted before.

It is a lot like seeking and discovering new hunting grounds and ideas, and like everything worth-while in life, variety is indeed the spice thereof and therein.

Way back in the early years of my hunting adventures on public lands, I was always motivated to go far beyond my past explorations, looking for that magic piece of ground with more spoor, more critter sign and that mystical out-of-body sense that only a gungho deerhunter understands.

Not having the faintest idea what I was doing, my mushy minded youth nonetheless was not afraid to stumble and fail, learning all I could along the way with the driving goal to figure out just how in the hell a sneaky bowhunter could possibly penetrate the alarm zone of these miraculously evasive creatures.

I learned a lot in those exploratory years and was blessed beyond measure to learn from the masters like Fred Bear, Howard Hill, Marv Leslie, George Nicholls, Ron Chamberlain and others.

Just like my guitar dreams, my hunting dreams force me to try new ideas and never allow myself to stop learning or become complacent with anything resembling predictable status quo methodologies or procedures.

In my recent writings I have mentioned a gentleman by the name of Tony Lapratt and his amazing Ultimate Whitetail BootCamp.

Last week I had the privilege to spend the day with this over-the-top, hardcore, gungho, obsessed deerhunter, and I am here to tell you that it was the most eye-opening day of unimaginable deerhunting lessons I have ever spent.

Tony LaPratt is my new whitetail deerhunting guru, and I have been to the mountaintop!

Ted Nugent and Tony LaPratt
Ted and Tony LaPratt have created a plan to work on deer habitat improvements for the Nugent hunting grounds.

Tony, along with my son Toby and I walked our hallowed Michigan deerhunting paradise that is made up of the most phenomenal swamps, marshes, fens, bogs, lakes, rivers, streams, ridges, forests, groves, orchards and fields where Toby and I had figured we had a serious understanding of our deer and deer habits.

Ted Nugent Hunting Land and Pond
The hunting grounds are incredibly diverse, but have plenty of room for improvement.

Surely our annual sagging buckpole and endless flow of sacred backstraps indicate a reasonable grasp of deerhunting basics, but what we learned from Tony LaPratt that day had us doing a doubletake on heretofore presumed understanding of the most basic deerhunting truisms.

We figured out scrapes and rubs and licking branches a long time ago, or so we thought!

Tony educated us on an array of mind-dazzling details regarding these proven methodologies that really suckerpunched our entrenched deerhunting beliefs.

More and more hunters across America are getting more and more aggressive in their habitat manipulation to enhance and maximize deer holding conditions through agriculture uses, foodplots, timber harvests and native grass restorations.

Ted Nugent Hunting Land
Deer hunting land is a sacred gift, and to work to improve it for deer and all creatures, is a wonderful task to undertake.

It is true that not every deerhunter owns his own chunk of hunting land, but more pursue and do so each year.

Tony conducts his amazing Ultimate Whitetail Bootcamps across the Midwest and beyond, and the testimonies from his graduates can best be described as earth shattering!

With 49 mature trophy buck bowkills to his credit, the exacting details of Tony’s bootcamp education literally transforms a deerhunter’s grasp and understanding of buck and doe relationships to the lay of the land and how a hunter can take simple steps to create deer control zones that will hold more deer, and incredibly, more mature bucks than anyone would have ever believed otherwise.

I was already anticipating the best hunting season of my life this year, but what I learned from my new best deerhunting friend Tony LaPratt has kicked up my excitement level exponentially, and Toby and I are already implementing as many of Tony’s ideas and lessons as possible this summer.

I couldn’t recommend more highly Tony LaPratt’s Ultimate Whitetail Bootcamp for all my gungho backstrap BloodBrothers out there who want to increase the joys of deerseason with more mature buck encounters and kills.

There are myriad details involved in Tony’s lessons, so if you can possibly swing it, get ahold of this high-energy deerhunting strategist and prepare for the best deerseason and fun of your deerhunting life!

New tricks for old hunting dogs! Give Tony a call at 269.832.0990 and visit his website at https://www.tonylapratt.com


With more than 40 million albums sold, rock legend Ted Nugent is equally well known as the nation’s most outspoken proponent of our 1st and 2nd Amendment rights, conducting thousands of pro-gun, pro-freedom, pro-American interviews in major media worldwide. Nugent is a New York Times best-selling author whose works include Ted, White & Blue —The Nugent Manifesto; God, Guns & Rock ‘n’ Roll and Kill It & Grill It.This year, his award-winning Ted Nugent Spirit of the Wild TV show celebrates its 500th episode! For all things Nuge, visit www.tednugent.com

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Fred Bear & Public Relations

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