Ep. 1030: Foundations – Dissecting the Day-to-Day Lives of Deer

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.

00:00:20
Speaker 2: Hey everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I’m your host, Tony Peterson, and today’s episode is all about how we often think of deer in a way that doesn’t give them enough credit for just their day to day lives and what they do.

00:00:35
Speaker 3: You know why most hunters don’t kill big bucks.

00:00:37
Speaker 2: Well, there’s a lot of reasons, actually, but one that stands out is that they just don’t really think about how deer lived their lives. They think about how the seasonal timing or the weather should get deer moving. But that’s about as deep as it goes, and honestly, most of the time, that’s just not deep enough. I’m going to tell you exactly what I mean right now. This Turkey season started off with an absolute whimper.

00:01:06
Speaker 3: For me.

00:01:07
Speaker 2: I’ve had this happen before, especially when it starts out with colder than average weather. You know, when those temps are low, the hens like to go eat for most of the day, and where they eat for most of the day, most of the toms will beat. You just don’t get a lot of the flocks busting up. You don’t get a lot of that two year old cruising type stuff. But when it breaks, you tend to have a lot of good hunting real quickly. That’s what happened to the girls and I this year. For the first days of the season, we put in a lot of blind time and saw exactly one hen. I didn’t have a bird gobble within three hundred yards of me during those early days, and it was rough. Then we went out for an after school sit while the wind was coming in hard from the south, and the birds just started gobbling. And when that wind died down, just about when the turkey should have been thinking about getting back to roost, we had a tom come in behind us that really distracted us from a pair of jakes that came in front of us. By some miracle, both girls made good shots and we went from a dud of a season to celebrating a double. The following morning, I grabbed my bow and filled a yetti full of coffee and went out to see what I could do about filling my tag. I had one bird to work with off the roost, but he met up with a couple of girlfriends and never showed himself, despite me thinking he was going to. And when he finally gobbled away, I actually watched a group of three bucks on a ridge in front of me.

00:02:28
Speaker 3: Watched those birds leave.

00:02:30
Speaker 2: Now, those bucks were all feeding on just fresh grass, and so were the four dozen fawns that went through. Later, I managed to call in a couple hens and then get a bird to gobble close enough that I could hear him spitting in drumming. For some reason, he didn’t come in, and when he sounded off maybe seventy five to eighty yards away, I hit the panic button, grabbed a slate in two mouthcalls, gobbled once myself, and then set off a hen party with as much enthusiasm as I could summon, which is a lot. Then I shut up and totally zoned out, only to be snapped back to reality by a full strutter in my decoys at six yards. He didn’t make it more than fifteen yards from my blind before piling up, And I’ll tell you something.

00:03:11
Speaker 3: It was frickin’ awesome. I love shooting turkeys.

00:03:14
Speaker 2: With shotguns, but it is just so satisfying to thump them with an arrow at distances you could almost kill them with a sword, which, by the way, my buddy and I decided earlier this year, after spending twelve birdless hours in a blind, that we could accomplish in a full season if you let us use decoys and calls. We also debated how long it would take us to get a pheasant or a buck with a sword, and couldn’t come to an agreement on a reasonable timeline. That morning that I shot that turkey was full of animal sightings, and it was just fun to watch and photograph those scruffy looking shed bucks just mowing down on the fresh greenery. And it kind of made me realize that I didn’t have a clue where they would head off to bed, or where they had spent the night feeding, or really anything about them, probably because I don’t really need and neither do you. What the bucks are doing in April isn’t all that important to what they will be doing in October or November, but it doesn’t mean there isn’t some value to thinking about them. There are three things I think about a lot that might sort of frame this up. The first is just people and their lives. You can know someone, you can be married to someone, you can raise someone as your child, whatever, and still not know their everyday lives. We have interactions with people and places we like to go and things we like to do that no one in our lives will ever really know about. For example, if you offered my wife ten grand to name this podcast, she definitely wouldn’t be able to. Our work lives are separate lives from our home lives, just like our social lives vary and on and on. We can’t know everything about everyone, and we often know almost nothing about most of the people in our lives. Maybe a more relatable example comes from the fishing world. I’m about to embark on some new fishing content for me this year, which will involve a lot of planning around lakes and rivers I’ve never been to while fishing on a limited timeframe with a fairly lofty goal in mind. Most people who buy fishing licenses don’t really think a lot about whether the croppies should be doing this or that, or the walleye should be shallow or deep or whatever. They just go fishing and they try to catch something, usually by fishing the way they were taught growing up. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, and fishing is a forgiving sport generally, so it’ll work out, you know, good enough. But if you talk to someone who’s totally ate up with it, they’ll speak in far more specific details. You know, they’ll say something like the water tamp is in the low fifties, so the bass might just start to whack a buzz bait in the shallows.

00:05:45
Speaker 3: That kind of thing.

00:05:46
Speaker 2: Now, my third example here, which I’m both baffled by and eternally grateful for, is the pheasant thing.

00:05:53
Speaker 3: I see.

00:05:53
Speaker 2: Almost all hunters go after pheasants the same way. Now, if you do this enough, you know, walk enough of the easy grass along the outer perimeter where the birds can get to the neighboring cornfields, you’re going to kill some roosters, particularly if you’re there late enough for the birds to be walking back into the cover for the evening. But that plan isn’t so great at I don’t know, noon most of the time, and it isn’t so great if the wind is blown fifty miles per hour, or it’s raining, or if you’re the third hunter to get there and try that same trick on some Saturday in late October. And all of this stuff applies to white tails too. Now I’m going to cover curiosity in hunters in a couple of weeks, so I’ll skip that for now. Instead, I want to use one last example that occurred to me very recently well bow hunting turkeys down in public land in Nebraska. There was a big flock of most of the birds on that property that I was interested in, but they weren’t really interested in me at all. Then there were a handful of jakes and a few tombs and a few loner hens that weren’t part of the flock. They weren’t all that responsive. They’re pretty cagy. They required a lot more finesse in the decoy spreads and blinds and calling than I gave them at first, and it showed in my results. I was thinking about spring turkeys as a whole, and not about the specific birds I was dealing with in a very specific situation, those kGy jakes and Tom’s that probably had come out on the losing end of all the fighting that establishes the spring pecking order. They needed a soft cell approach because they’d been booted out over weakness. Most likely that made me realize something about deer, which is not all that revolutionary, but might be for some of us.

00:07:29
Speaker 3: Think about this.

00:07:29
Speaker 2: Think about sitting on a stand in the early season, I say, mid September, and a buck steps out into the field. Let’s say he’s at the bottom end of what you’d consider shooting, and maybe he’s one hundred and five or one hundred and ten inch eight pointer, a great deer to a lot of people, and a foresure shooter to a lot of people, but also not a sure thing for many hunters. He’s big enough to get your attention either way, though, and he’s the first deer in the field. Now, maybe he was just super hungry, and maybe that explains why he’s there then, or maybe he’s not the top dog, which is really likely, and he just has to bed closer to the field in a less advantageous spot than the bigger, tougher deer that use that bench on the hillside way back in the cover. You look at that buck and you don’t think about that. You think there’s a pretty good one, and he’s not in range, but i’d like him to be So maybe you throw out a contact grunt three and you get a neutral reaction, so you grab your rattling antlers, or maybe you decide to snort wheeze at him because your favorite deer podcaster talks about snort wheezing as if it’s magic. Then you get a negative response. He walks away. Now instead of him being one hundred and twenty five yards away, you can barely see him in the far corner of the field, and as it gets later, a much bigger deer, one that you would no doubt shoot, steps out. But you’ve already influenced the scene to a degree where one of the confidence deer has walked away from you. Instead of thinking about why that buck is there and how receptive he might be to calling, you called to him like you would all bucks that you’d consider shooting, and worse, you try to call to him like maybe it was late October or early November and not in the middle of September. Look, that’s okay, we all do stuff like this. But when you get that neutral reaction in the first moments of contact, pushing it to make something happen is usually not a great move. But if you’d just taken his temperature and decided it would be best to play it cool, he might have stayed closer and when that bigger deer came out. Now you have that situation with two bucks, which makes them so much more callable for some reason, especially in the early season, at least it usually does in my experience, a better bet might have been just to not make contact at all, unless you were positive you wanted to shoot that first buck. Watching an early season buck and then two early season bucks hit a field in a certain.

00:09:59
Speaker 3: Spot like that is just to gift.

00:10:01
Speaker 2: And if you have a way to be mobile, which includes sitting on the ground, so you definitely do have a way, then making a move to them might have been a much better approach than trying to get them to make a move to you. This is dependent on a whole bunch of outside factors too, you know, like how much hunting pressure they’ve experienced, not only that season but in their lives, because they don’t forget that shit, even if they get a little dulled up on their game over the summer. Now, if you follow this thread just a little further, you run into something I’ve talked about a lot, which I truly believe, and that is for most of us and the deer we hunt. If you want to call them in, you should go get to as close as you can to where they feel secure. Grunting in a buck in late September and the timber back where he.

00:10:42
Speaker 3: Likes the stage.

00:10:43
Speaker 2: That’s a different thing than seeing him pop out in the field twenty minutes before dark and trying to call him in once he’s finally gotten to the groceries and knows he’s in more of a dangerous zone. You kind of have to try to not only think like deer, but think like the individual deer you’re working with. This isn’t uncommon advice in the deer world, but it often gets mixed up in the pursuit of a single buck. This is one of those topics that drives me nuts for a few reasons. Figuring out individual bucks on really good ground isn’t that difficult, and that’s where this strategy comes from. But it gets a lot more difficult when you don’t have the keys to the gate. But you do have a lot of other people influencing the deer. If you want to focus on a hit list buck, that’s great, but don’t think about just him like you often see on hunting content. For most of us, we have to think about all of the deer and what they should be doing, and all of the other people who might come into play on the pursuit of just that deer. It’s not just where does this buck bed and eat, which you can partially figure out with trail cameras, although you’ll get a very small window into a much bigger deer experience, but it’s also where are the deer going to go once the hunters show up, and once the hunters have been there for a week and for a month and on and on. I know there’s nothing revolutionary there, but you know, most likely a few spots where the buck on your mind is going to end up feeding, and maybe roughly where he’ll spend his days when it’s shooting light. But there’s a lot more to it, and this is one of the reasons why winter scouting is so important. When you don’t know where to find him, now you can think about where he or other bucks left their sign last year when you can get pictures of him but can’t lay eyes on him. Thinking back to the clues from last season and what they might mean in the moment, that’s.

00:12:31
Speaker 3: A big deal.

00:12:32
Speaker 2: When I watch those bucks feeding the other morning while turkey hunting, they didn’t do anything that gives me much to work with until they left to bed, and they all followed a route that I’ve seen fall bucks follow and come to think of it, quite a few strutting tongs. That’s actionable. Trust me, I’m going to use it. So what this is, or what I’m trying to tell you, which is clear as mud, is that the more you think about the animals and the fish as individuals and slight sense, but also what they should be doing in their day to day lives, the more successful you’ll be. Those peasant hunters who walk the fence lines and never wait into the thick cover where the pressure birds are not only most likely to be found, but also most likely to flush within shotgun range. They’ll tell you that the bird numbers are okay, but they are really really jumpy. They’ll have a view of the roosters and the rooster’s world that fits their style, but it’s a false read. The dude sitting on his stand in September trying to grunt or snort weeze in one hundred and ten inch buck that won’t go for it. He’ll tell you that that buck isn’t a fighter where the bucks aren’t really going yet, with no more thought than that, the whole thing will be dismissed with a most likely false declaration on dear temperament, you know, just done and done. That’s one way to look at it, but it doesn’t teach you anything. Sure, maybe that buck is a natural pacifist and a loner, but what are the odds you think in nature if you don’t get the chance to win a fight and garner some better resources that you don’t take it? Do you personally ever turn down a raise or a good career opportunity. I think what I really want to say with all of this is that you have to condition yourself to think about this differently from your competition, because then you can make better decisions. Most hunters are going to approach deer in turkeys and pheasants and whatever very similar to one another, just like most fishermen will do the same kind of thing. But the folks who are successful don’t. And if those folks are successful on hunting land that is similar to yours, you can bet they think about it differently. They solve for something that most hunters don’t solve for, and that often is as simple as where the deer go when the pressure is heavy. That’s it a lot of times, and it is a different game than figuring out where they might like to feed or bed or grab a drink late in the morning. Although all that stuff is good info to have, and you can have it and more. But if you’re not thinking about what they do do in their day to day lives year round, you’re probably not going to get as close as you need to. This is one of the reasons I preach the message of going hunting over not so often, because the idea that not hunting will make the deer easier to hunt doesn’t jive with the idea that going into the woods will make you a better hunter. What’s more in your control how the deer react to pressure, or how you can react to pressure deer. What’s more in your control helping yourself undoubtedly level up by spending more time in the woods hunting whatever and scouting for whatever, than staying away and hoping your absence makes the bucks a little dumber. Look, there’s some nuance here, but the game being played is mostly one against ourselves because we think we know the deer well enough. We don’t and we never really will. But we also really never will if we don’t think about them in a better way and then get out there and use that thinking to not only influence our actions, but also keep us motivated to learn and grow as hunters. I don’t know if there’s a better way to get better than that, my friends, it’s that important.

00:16:05
Speaker 3: That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson.

00:16:07
Speaker 2: This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation’s podcast. I know you listen to this podcast, so I know you know how to find podcasts. If you want a podcast that’s going to blow your mind and you haven’t listened to it yet, go check out Jordan Siller’s Blood Trails podcast here on the mediater network. He does such a good job with that podcast, is so cool. Uh.

00:16:26
Speaker 3: Check that out.

00:16:27
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