Twin Elements Podcast · Hunting Tips & Tactics

Beating Buck Fever: What Actually Works When Your Hands Won't Stop Shaking

A listener named Ethan recently sent us through a voice message. Raising a topic, that I still think about. Months after we discussed buck fever on the podcast, he was on a stalk, a genuine cracking sambar deer stag standing broadside at ten metres, wind perfect, everything lined up — and all he could say afterward was that the antlers alone had his legs shaking and his eyes watering. He got the shot off anyway. The stag dropped within a couple of metres of where it stood. That's the whole point of talking about this openly: buck fever is universal, and it's beatable.

From the Field

What's Actually Happening in Your Body

Buck fever is a genuine fight-or-flight response — the same physiological cascade you'd get from a near-miss car accident or a bad fall, just triggered by the sight of a big animal instead of physical danger. Blood gets redirected from your extremities into your major muscles and organs, which is why your hands shake and your legs tremble. Breathing and heart rate spike to feed oxygen to those muscles. Tunnel vision sets in. And all of that happens before you've consciously registered what you're looking at — your brain flags "big stakes moment" almost instantaneously, well before rational thought catches up.

For me, the intensity scales directly with the size and maturity of the animal — which makes sense, because a truly outstanding animal is instantly, obviously different from anything else in the mob, in a way an average doe or hind simply isn't. It also compounds with pressure you might not even notice consciously: how many days you've invested in this specific hunt, how much time is left, whether it's a paid or guided hunt, even the quiet expectation from a property owner who's given you dozens of chances or a partner asking when you're finally going to bring something home. None of that is really about the animal. It's all just stacking onto the same stress response.

It's not just the physical side either. A few cognitive effects show up too, and I see them constantly guiding hunts up north. Hyper-focus is the big one — clients closing the last few metres of a stalk locked entirely on the stag they intend to shoot, as if the other thirty chital hinds around it have simply been erased from the scene. The moment one of those hinds finally clocks them and barks the whole mob off, they turn back to me genuinely unsure what just happened. Impulse control drops too — hunters skip steps in their own shot sequence without realising it, jumping straight from "draw back" to "punch the shot" and missing everything in between. And short-term memory gets patchy: I've had hunters swear an animal was facing one direction, only for the footage to show something completely different. All of that is the same adrenaline surge, just showing up in your head instead of your hands.

Recognise It, Then Reframe It

The single biggest shift for me has been simply naming the moment for what it is rather than getting swept up in it. When I spotted the biggest chital stag I'd seen in fifteen years of hunting the species, from over a kilometre out in a mob of thirty, I felt every early sign of a genuine buck fever spiral building. What broke it was consciously reframing the thought from "how good is it going to be when he's on the ground" to "what do I actually need to do to get him on the ground." That single shift in framing — outcome versus process — does more to settle the nervous system than anything else I've found.

It sounds counterproductive, but it kills the fantasising — the mental trip to the taxidermist, the imagined phone call to your mates — before it ever starts, and keeps his focus locked on the actual mechanics of the stalk rather than the outcome. Different tactics, same target: get your head out of the future and back into the present shot.

Do the Hard Thinking Early, Not at Full Draw

Practically, almost everything I do differently now compared to ten years ago comes down to front-loading decisions. Rather than fixating on the animal and walking straight at it, I try to remove myself from the moment and ask: if I only had one shot at this, where would I actually approach from? That means identifying the best tree line before I'm emotionally invested in closing the distance, accounting for every other set of eyes and ears in the vicinity — cattle, roos, other deer — that could blow the stalk before I'm even close.

I range constantly and early, get the arrow nocked and the bow up well before I need it, take my boots off if I need to get silent, and clip the release on with tension well ahead of the shot actually presenting. All of this sounds minor, but it means that by the time the animal is actually in range, I'm not frantically ranging, drawing, and rushing a shot all at once — I'm simply watching a pin settle onto an animal that's walking into a shot I already planned. Drawing because you're in the ideal position beats drawing because the animal happens to be in range and now you feel obligated to shoot.

When the excitement does hit, I've learned to tell myself I have more time than my brain wants me to believe — then slow my breathing and my heart rate down from there. In all my years hunting, I can count on one hand the times moving faster actually helped. It's almost always the other way: I wish I'd moved slower, waited longer, trusted the approach a bit more.

Play the Odds, Not the Moment

This is the mentality shift that's changed the most for me over the years: work less on trying to kill the animal right now, and more on simply staying in the hunt for as long as physically possible without blowing it. If a stalk feels like fifty-fifty, I'd genuinely rather wait three more hours for the wind to swing and turn it into seventy-thirty than force it now.

That impulse to rush in the moment you spot the buck of your dreams is exactly buck fever talking — and it can trick you into committing to a stalk that's actually sitting at twenty-eighty against you. Sometimes all it takes is two extra minutes of calming down, without changing anything else, to shift those odds back to fifty-fifty. Wait a little longer again, and you might watch him split off from the mob and walk a trail straight toward your position — suddenly you're sitting at ninety-ten. That said, even when a stalk feels like a hundred-to-one certainty, there are always unseen factors you haven't accounted for. It's never reasonable to get overconfident.

Don't Look at the Antlers

This is the simplest, most literal piece of advice I can give: don't watch the antlers or horns as the animal comes in. Watch its path, and pick a spot on the hide. The moment you start admiring points and mass, you've handed the moment over to the fantasy rather than the shot sequence — and that's exactly where hesitation or rushing creeps in. Every hunting stalk is, for me, another software update: every blown opportunity and every clean one gets filed away and adjusted for next time, and after enough repetitions that update genuinely changes how calm you are in the moment, even if the adrenaline itself never fully disappears.

Build a Shot Sequence Until It's Automatic

None of the mental side matters if you can't actually execute when the moment arrives. A shot sequence comes down to being genuinely comfortable with your weapon, and then a mountain of repetition on top of that — practised so much it becomes automatic rather than something you have to think through under pressure.

James sent through his own sequence recently: spot picked, draw back, wiggle the jaw into anchor, nose on the string, close the right eye, let the pin float onto the target, then pull through the hinge. Simple, but it works precisely because it's the same every single time. Whatever your version looks like, the goal is a routine reliable enough that you don't have to consciously think about a single step of it in the moment that matters.

The best practice for hunting is hunting — shooting foxes, rabbits, goats, pigs, or does in the lead-up to a serious hunt does more for your composure than any amount of range time alone. No professional athlete walks straight into the biggest game of the season with zero lead-up; there's always a pre-season, a warm-up, lower-stakes reps before the real thing. Hunting smaller, lower-pressure game beforehand is the closest thing we've got to that.

Stay Humble — Nothing's Guaranteed

Even when everything goes right, there's usually some unseen variable you haven't accounted for — a branch that deflects an otherwise perfect arrow, a hind or wallaby you never spotted that spooks your target animal at the worst moment, a thermal that swings for no obvious reason. Being calm and prepared maximises your odds; it never guarantees the outcome. The goal isn't to eliminate buck fever entirely — even experienced hunters still feel real nerves on the animals that matter to them. The goal is staying in the stalk long enough, and controlled enough, to give yourself the best possible shot when the moment actually arrives.

I like to think of that final stretch of a hunt a bit like the last shot of a high-stakes basketball game. It sounds like an odd comparison — one's just you and a target animal, the other's played out in front of a stadium full of chanting fans — but the underlying mechanism is the same adrenaline response either way. The only real preparation for that moment is the hundreds of arrows, or hundreds of free throws, you've already put in long before you ever stepped into the hills or onto the court. I've never walked away from a hard hunt thinking I'd practised too much. I have plenty of times walked away wishing I'd practised more.

Massive congratulations again to Ethan on that stag — hearing tips translate directly into someone else's success in the field is genuinely the best feedback James and I get from doing this podcast.

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The Adventure Continues

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