The Hunting Public – Zach Ferenbaugh

Jacob Morris for SPLIT REED

Have you ever hunted a turkey so hard for multiple days that you and the turkey’s patterns started to align? Then it finally happens, the turkey gets fired up on the ridge where you have been chasing him on and off for the past few days. You got him, but you turn only to find that you have no cameraman, you lost the main ingredient for a hunting show… the cameraman! The turkey continues to gobble for another 30 minutes while you travel back down one ridge to the other, in search where you last saw your cameraman. Finally, you find him and haul butt back over the ridge only to find the bird has gone “Cold Turkey”.

From sleeping in their vehicles all hunting season to smacking monster bucks on public land and chasing turkeys all over the lower 48. When you combine this with hardcore hunters, you get ‘The Hunting Public’ a name that many millennial hunters admire and love. I had the privilege of talking with one of the founders, Zach Ferenbaugh and the first thing Zach said is, “we like to have a good time no matter what. We love to go on new challenges and hunting places we’ve never been.”

How did you get started hunting?

It seems like hunting runs through Zach’s veins “I was always interested in hunting because my dad and grandpas were always going hunting and even before I was allowed to go, I knew I wanted to do it. My parents have pictures of me with my mom’s curling iron held up like a gun even before I could talk. When I was barely old enough to go hunting, I would go with my grandpa while he squirrel hunted. I would always walk in the woods with my parents. Then when I was around 5 years old, I shot my first squirrel and knew I was hooked, after that I started hunting for deer and turkeys. Being unsuccessful for several years I finally got my first deer when I was 9 and got my first turkey when I was 10. When I was a couple of years older, I got to hunt more with my dad, and he started letting me sit by myself. The interest never really died, I met friends in high school that hunted, and we had our own group of hunters. We would spend a lot of time hunting together from small game to deer. I did play football growing up which was my one love other than hunting. I knew I wasn’t going to play in the NFL, so I asked myself how could I “play” hunting my whole life? I just kept trying to find ways to do it, and the thing I would always come back to was videoing our stuff. When I got ahold of a couple of cameras, it was nothing fancy, my buddies and I started filming and I started teaching myself how to edit and that’s how it began!”

Zach’s big break

“In college, I started looking for internship opportunities where you could basically go film and be a cameraman for a hunting season. My junior year in college I found an opportunity for an internship with Midwest Whitetails, which is actually one of my favorite hunting shows. Unfortunately, I didn’t hear much back. The next year I sent in my application to Midwest Whitetails again, this time when I still didn’t hear anything back. I reached out to them via email, right away I got a response wanting an interview! I went on to work for Midwest Whitetail as an intern for the next 6 months. Then I got hired on full time as a cameraman. Midwest Whitetails was where me, Aaron, and Greg all worked, that’s where we all met. Which is some of the team that started ‘The Hunting Public’. Through that job I still have a lot of friends and connections, it was an amazing opportunity”.

As luck would have it, the internship was actually counted as a college credit which finished out his degree. Going to college for hunting? Sounds like a college class I could get on board with!

Why the Hunting Public?

Hunting on public land has and always will be a new kind of challenge for any animal, as for Zach he told me “that’s the fun part, in our videos we are doing stuff that anyone can do. The main reason we started The Hunting Public was so we could travel and hunt. We weren’t able to do that with our last jobs as much as we wanted to. As we began to film our hunts more and more, we knew that we needed to do something different. Because there are a lot of people out there who are viewing hunting content and all that content is coming from the Midwest, more specifically from southern Iowa. What’s happening in southern Iowa just isn’t happening in Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, southern Ohio, or even Pennsylvania the list goes on and on.” I think we can all agree that southern Iowa is a mecca for hunting. “We just wanted to show something that was more realistic, something that was going to help guys like us, guys that just love hunting, that want to improve their skills at it. Whether we are doing good or bad, as far as success goes, people can hopefully learn from what we are doing. That was really why we started The Hunting Public.”

Besides being great hunter, Zach is also a great steward of the public lands, he went on to say “We also wanted to get more people involved, because if we show that hunting is fun and that it can be done on public land people are more likely to do it. Ultimately the more people that do it, the more people that care about and protect public lands.”

The Hunting Public has been Zach’s full-time job since it started in 2017, he went on to describe that having a hunting show is not all that it seems. That it does take a big toll not only on their family but also on them. Being away from everyone for so long definitely is a big thing to deal with. There are pros and cons of this business, those behind the scene have sacrificed a lot of things that not everyone sees. “We are actually hunting most of the year which has us traveling a lot to different states and you can imagine how hard that is to develop relationships in general.” For instance, on just their turkey tour this year they were chasing gobblers from March Until May. I guess that’s one of the many sacrifices they make to get some of the best content in the business on a consistent basis.

How the hunting industry changed

I can tell you, just from growing up watching Roger Raglin that the hunting industry is definitely on the upswing and we as hunters owe a lot of that to innovative people like ‘The Hunting Public.’ “Most of the hunting media just wasn’t relatable, I can still get on the outdoor channel and nothing really resonates with the average hunter. We are all on the same team with promoting the same sport, if we get people to love hunting it’s going to help everyone in this industry. Like us, others are stepping out of the box and that’s a good thing for this industry as a whole. Like YouTube, it was a great opportunity that we saw and nobody else we saw was doing it at the time. There are no limitations with it, I don’t have to make a video that’s 25 mins long with X number of commercials. I get to make the video how I want to, post it, and move on. We are also on Amazon Prime, Instagram and the new IGTV has some extra content. We always had the podcast but in the last year we have made it more consistent, I am in charge of that, so we try to do one a week.” Nowadays not everyone has Direct TV but everyone has YouTube. The Hunting Public saw an opportunity to reach the younger generation.

The Passionate Hunting Traveler

We all have many passions when it comes to the outdoors, for a lot of us it comes with the seasons, most of us it’s either traveling or hunting. Not Zach, he blends his passions of traveling and hunting with the cultures of the different areas he visits. “I think my passion is traveling. Really when I look at what I like more, it’s traveling. I love seeing something different and the thrill of going into a new challenge. As for a hunter, I think if you don’t continue to challenge yourself in new ways, you’re not going to grow. I don’t want to keep hunting the same states and places over again. To me, that’s not putting myself in a situation where I feel out of my comfort zone, and that’s when I feel I am at my best.” An example Zach gave me, was him hunting Iowa where he moved and has lived ever since his internship. “I have been doing it so long I feel like I know how deer and turkeys live in that habitat, don’t get me wrong every time you go out it’s a new experience but when we get to hunt new states on public land in areas like Nebraska, Ohio, or Minnesota, those hunts are forcing me to learn something new, forcing me to grow as a hunter. Like when I played football, I knew I wasn’t going to be the best in the world, but I wanted to be the best I could be based on the work I was willing to put into it. I feel the same way about hunting, one of the ways I feel like I get the most out of it, is if I am traveling, going somewhere new and experiencing something that is really going to make me think and learn.” When asked about his favorite state to hunt Zach said “I don’t have a favorite state to hunt I like everywhere I have been and the unique challenges that come with them. My least favorite place to hunt is a place I hunted over and over again for years, like your home turf.” I really liked his answer, he wasn’t giving grief to any state, but all have something valuable to give.

Public Land Success 

Zach gave some really great tips that did cross my mind to be selfish with, but that’s not the purpose of the interviews, I was inclined to share. “Some advice I would say is, that you have to get away from people. There is an art to it though, you have to think about what most people are doing, and what’s their mentality out in the field. I think most hunters have the right mentality when it comes to the thought of working harder and walking further than anyone else, but you have to be able to think like other hunters to get away from other hunters. If you’re going to walk 2 miles in before daylight right off the main access trail, other hunters are probably going to do that as well. If you can think of ways to access places creatively then that differentiates you.” 

An example he gave me was to look for high points because you can hear more turkeys gobble, like a lone logging road that is far away from people. It may be harder to access because of rougher terrain but if you can work that much harder and get there. The chances are slim that you will run into other hunters.

“Even on small parcels of public land that you can just drive around, like in Pennsylvania, I hunted on some smaller game lands. Anytime you could get a little bit deeper or walk a little bit further than most people were going, you could hear stuff you could not hear from the road and you could be alone. It was crazy how everyone was doing that same thing. You learn how people are acting, and how most people are accessing it, there seems to be a trend on public land, as long as you just do something different, that is what puts you in the game!” 

In closing some last advice, I wanted to leave you with, that Zach shared with me. If you really want to travel and hunt you have to make a plan for it. Budget and try to minimize cost like at gas station (spending money on snacks) little things add up quick, so pack your own food. Camp, instead of hotel stays, a lot of public land is free or a very minimal fee to camp. “There is a lot of resources out now like OnX hunt maps where you can get on your laptop or phone and break down a whole state based on the game you are hunting, the population of those cities (go where fewer people are), major roads and even the type of habitat they are going to be in.” Again, he emphasized being able to get away from people. I hope you got as much from this conversation as I did. I know I will be putting this advice to use come this fall. Remember that when that turkey starts gobbling make sure your cameraman is with you, so you don’t have a case of “Cold Turkey”.