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, everybody, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which has brought to you by first Light. I’m your host, Tony Peterson. In today’s episode is all about letting the deer be your teachers while you just sit back and absorb information from them. A lot of the hunting industry is built on the idea that you can manipulate deer behavior to your liking, or at least figure out some way to predict exactly what they are gonna do. After all, we scout like fiends, and we buy grunt tubes for obvious reasons. But there is an intangible to deer hunting that can’t be bought or figured out solely by learning to read sign This involves letting the deer tell you what they do and then using that to your advantage, which is what I’m going to talk about right now. How many of you find folks have ever thrown frogs for large mouth not real frogs, mind you, but fake frogs. Frogs we used to just call scum frogs because that was the only option, and boy were they rough compared to the fake kermits that are on the market today.
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Speaker 1: Now.
00:01:24
Speaker 2: If you have you know that it’s about the most exciting fishing you can do while staying in fresh water. If you haven’t, you’re missing out. I love frog fishing, but it’s difficult for beginners, and sometimes difficult for guys who’ve been doing it a long time and should be better. This type of fishing involves tons of aquatic vegetation like the lily pads and arrowhead and duckweed the bass would hide under while waiting for an amphibious snack to venture its way. This means heavy rods, heavy braided line, just, you know, just to have a chance to winch a fish out of the salad. When you get a blow up, the odds are pretty good that eat bass will miss your frog completely, or it’ll eat it and spit it out just as you’re trying to set the hook. The follow up cast in frog fishing is everything, and it’s something that is very, very difficult for newbies to get right. This isn’t because of accuracy entirely, although you do have to be able to hit the blow up spot pretty well and as quickly as you can. But this panic that comes from it often leads to backlashes and swearing because the window for a follow up is often pretty short for whatever reason. The more time that passes, and I’m talking seconds here, the more likely it is that your fish will just vanish. Sometimes you want to throw the same frog back in there, and sometimes you want to give them a look at something else. I recently frogfish with someone who has some experience doing it but still is pretty young, and would miss a fish and then ask me what to do. Sometimes I’d say, get that kermit back in there right now, or I’d say pick up that sinko rod and toss it into the blowhole. Every time my fishing partner would question my advice, it was frustrating because I couldn’t explain why I felt one approach was better than the other. And it changes from fish to fish, sometimes in the span of a minute or two, oftentimes in the same small weed bed. It’s a feel thing that you get after frog fishing a whole lot in your life. It’s the cumulative lessons of hundreds and hundreds of fish doing this, but not that, that, but not this. Over time, the bashes tell you what your best odds are because their behavior falls into a few different categories. It’s not woodsmanship if it’s fishing, so maybe it’s uh watersmanship. That doesn’t seem right any hooters. We are conditioned to believe that we can just understand fish and game behavior, and we can to some extent. We can, also, at least with white tails, curate situations where they are highly likely to offer us up some sort of predictable behavior. I guess you can do that with fish too. I mean, if you went out to a specific weedy point for a few weeks and through in handfuls of injured minnows, eventually the fish would grow real comfortable showing up to feed. Then after a few months, if you were so inclined, you could catch the living shit out of those fish because they wouldn’t see it coming. I don’t know if that’s a poor comparison to managing deer, but it kind of feels right. I guess it’s also beside the point, though, because if enough bass can teach us a lot about how they act in specific situations. Enough deer can as well, and they do if we pay attention. During a recent trip to northern Wisconsin, where I divided my time between trying to bait bears, scout deer, and catch a few bass and muskies, I found myself in a random lake staring at a ridge. It was just one of those spots that looked like white tails would travel it, and while I tried to coax a few large mouth from the pads, I thought about that woods just up the shore from me. Then I heard a splash, which caught my attention because it sounded like a bass gulping a frog or more likely a dragonfly, which I think is the key to great frog bites. I just can’t prove it. The splash didn’t come from a large though, it came from a dough that was tucked under a dead fall standing in a foot of water. She was the least concerned big woods deer I’ve ever met, so I used my trolling motor to close the distance. Then I watched her for twenty minutes while she fed on lily pads. Now, if you don’t believe that, go on over to my Instagram account and check out the reel I posted. I’ve never seen a deer actually eating lily pads, let alone sticking her nose into the water past her eyeballs to pull them out by the root. It was really interesting to watch. And then a realization hit me, like a freaking freight train. I had seen deer at the water’s edge or in the water all week long. I see deer in lakes all of the time, and every single time I’ve thought they were there for a drink. Not once did it occur to me that they would go full moose and eat aquatic vegetation. But why not. I’d guess that lily pads have a different nutrition profile than terrestrial vegetation, and it’s pretty safe to say that it would be a good way to stay hydrated while feasting away if you’re eating stuff that’s growing right in a big bowl of water. A one off encounter with a dough eating something I didn’t know dear eight was cool, But on the drive home, another freight train slammed into Mynothers, how important are lily pads to Big Woods bucks? Do lily pads green up first or stay green later in the fall when other food sources brown up and yellow up and dry up. I honestly don’t know, but I’m interested in trying to figure that out. Last year, over there, I watched a dough in August eating raspberries with the intensity of a stoner sitting down to an episode of South Park with a bag of Cheetos and a big glass of chocolate milk. She went to town on those raspberries, and it answered a question of why I often see deer in that specific overgrown pasture. I thought it was the apple trees, and it certainly sometimes is, but it’s more than that, you know. In a few weeks after I saw that dough, my daughter killed that bear over there that was chock full of gray dogwood berries, and I have to assume that deer mao down on them when they ripen as well. I just don’t see a situation where a bear would eat him and a deer wouldn’t. I’ve preached the woodsmanship game a lot, and I hear it from a few hunters who I really respect, but it’s always sort of a blanket statement that might ring hollow for a lot of hunters. What does it even mean? And how does that matter to someone looking to level up their white tail game. I can’t answer that specifically for anyone else, but I know one thing. The more deer that I watch, the more of my questions get answered. And then the more questions come up that I didn’t see coming that I don’t have an answer to. I look at this kind of like good dog trainers. You might have a trainer who handles a dozen well bred pointers a year. That’s freaking great. But that trainer is starting with a good source and has more time to devote to each dog than a lot of other trainers. He’s going to get really good at training well bred pointers, but might struggle when a re triever shows up at the kennel or a pointer does that just doesn’t have the best blood. But then you have these trainers who take on all kinds of dogs. They get experience with a wide range of breeds, a wide range of socialization, a wide range of bloodlines, and a wide range of owners who have had big time influence on their dogs in a huge variety of ways. They deal with outliers all the time, but also just expand their understanding of general dog behavior and general dog owner behavior in a way that allows them to understand what path to put their clientele on. Now, I guess that’s dogsmanship. I know, I’ll stop. But truthfully, how this relates to deer is that if your exposure to deer is through trail cameras and hunting encounters, you’re training well bred pointers and not very many of them. But if you get into the woods to read sign and have all of those encounters with deer that just happen when you’re in the woods with them. Now you’re working with pointers and retrievers. Add in some long range glassing. Now you’re training shelter dogs that might be totally neurotic lunatics or resource guarding nightmares or whatever. The key to this is to watch deer whenever you can encounter them, be with them, be where they live. I mean that when you’re on stand in September and you have that dough with a fall and walk out in the far corner of the beans, that might not interest you very much, but what she does should interest you. Get those binos to your eyes and watch her use that to your advantage. Watch how she crosses the field, how she observes the field, what she does when another deer starts to come out of the wood lot. How long does she spend out there? Last year, I watched a really good buck cross a wide swath of sage grass in North Dakota before he eventually waded through a river and then covered another mile of grassland to bed in a chunk of brush a rocky cliff. Now, I’ve seen deer do that before in that spot, and I hope to watch them do it again. I’ve actually killed a few deer that have done that, and I always think about the gift it is to be able to watch a deer walk across two miles of his territory from an elevated position. So think about that for a second. If I were to run cameras for that deer, or at least that buck and other bucks that travel the same route, I would get a snapshot of them, you know, coming down on the river and crossing it, or passing through a patch of timber. That’s valuable, especially for the times I can’t be there to glass. But watching how he walks across the landscape shows me not only what he does to get from two seemingly unrelated points, but all of the ambush sites he passes on the way. This is the gift that is western white tails, but Midwestern and Eastern and southern deer often don’t live where you can post up and put your eye to a spot or to dial them in. This makes every encounter with deer valuable, as the confines are tighter and the opportunities for long duration observation just don’t exist nearly as much. But is that an excuse to not pay attention. I don’t think so. I know that one of the things that has helped me kill big woods deer is simply by watching them whenever I can and just paying attention to every encounter while trying to tie that into the sign I’ve found. I’ll give you an example here. I’ve talked about that encounter my daughter and I had on public last year with a buck that was probably pushing one thirty. The whole thing started with a midday scouting trip which led to us finding a lot of fresh rubs and scrapes on an old logging road. They were visible from a gravel road, which allowed me to track check it. While it wasn’t pounded with sign, it showed enough tracks that I knew deer were crossing the road quite a bit, which made the scrapes and rubs just make more sense to me. Roads are just a part of the deer’s world, and when and where they cross is usually not random, and sightings from the road can teach you a lot. So right there we had two data points and we hadn’t seen a deer yet. That night at the cabin, while planning our morning hunt, I noticed a hayfield on private land half a mile away that was almost directly in line with that sign, and you know, kind of the whole line of travel where they crossed the gravel road. That was the third data point, and it really started to tie the whole thing together. When we slipped in well before first light, we walked up on a lone dough fon who happened to spook, but also came back later to browse her way past us. As we sat, she was locked onto that area, and we watched her put on a browse clinic, which made even more sense because old logging roads are basically travel roads with different food sources than much of the surrounding timber, especially if the timber harvest activity didn’t happen too many years ago. Now, When that big buck came wandering back from the Hayfield an hour into the morning. He nearly made a huge mistake, even though we only got to see him for a few seconds. He showed us something that I fully intend to use this year, the corner of the woods instead of traveling down the full length of the logging road to a small landing. Why he did that at that time was a total mystery until I walked that route and saw several rubs we had missed on our first scouting mission there. This spring, I walked that route again and followed it to a creek bottom that is just surrounded by benchi goodness and ideal bedding cover more data points. If I had been able to run a camera for those deer, I certainly would have gotten some pictures and that would have been valuable, but I probably wouldn’t have learned about how they cut that corner to take a shorter route to the thick stuff along the creek. The buck had to teach us that despite leaving tons of sign and tons of tracks in that area, and if that little fawn hadn’t showed us what the browse situation was like, we probably wouldn’t have put the whole thing together either. The cumulative effect of watching deer can’t quite be summed up effectively as long as as we do our job with scouting. That final part is what teaches us the most about deer behavior, and it comes directly from the deer. There is no other source for it, although trail cameras certainly help. Now you can listen to the best deer hunters drone on and on forever about how they kill bucks, and there will certainly be valuable to that too, But that doesn’t replace your time in the woods and your time spent watching deer in your areos. It just doesn’t. So how can you be a good student to the white tail right now? The easiest way is just to pay better attention. Do you often see bucks crossing from one waterway to another on your way to work in the morning. What are they doing if they aren’t where you can hunt, which is pretty likely? Is there anything you can draw from that to apply to the spots that you can hunt? There? Probably is? How about the dough group you always see eating apples this time here? Anything actionable there? Maybe it’s nothing more than a possible explanation for why your trail cameras have been pretty dead lately. The reason for everything they do. You just sometimes need to gather up as many data points as possible to draw a real conclusion. Now, while I realize this isn’t groundbreaking, the takeaway I want to leave you with is this. The more deer you encounter, the more you watch them in real time, the more you jump them while scouting some random part of your farm that you usually don’t pay attention to, the more they’re going to teach you something. They just will. They’ll help you understand general deer behavior better, which is always a huge plus. But then you’ll see a dough eating lily pads or gnommbing on some raspberries, or you’ll see your target buck half a mile out in a soybean field suddenly stand up for a mid afternoon snack, and what you knew about deer will become something different because you now have more answers and more questions. If you’re wondering how to facilitate this, consider two options. Force yourself to pay attention to the deer you do encounter in your everyday life, which should include some scouting, of course, But then consider doing something a little different. I know I say this all the time, but I mean it. If you want to get better at this stuff, scout where you normally wouldn’t, scout when you normally wouldn’t, and try to put yourself in a position to not do what you usually do. This is really the difference maker between climbing into the box blind to look at the food plot again versus walking into the oak ridge with a saddle and some sticks. You can learn a lot from both, and the more you do both, the better you’ll be. At deer hunting in general, The more we default to what we think we know, the less likely we are to learn anything new because we aren’t generally open to being wrong, or at least not as informed as we’d like. Find a way to let the deer teach you about their lives, and you will have a leg up on most hunters. That’s the key to filling more tags, and damn near a requirement if you want to kill more mature bucks. Think about that and think about coming back next week, because I’m going to talk about what happens when bucks shed their velvet and go hard antlered, but what that means to us no matter when our bow opener is. That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson and This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for your support all of us here at Mediatter. We truly appreciate it. You guys showed up huge for our season opener sale a little bit ago. You’ve always been there. If you need more content, if you’re here because you’re like, I got a learner, I need to be entertained, what do you got, Well, we have a lot. The medeater dot com has recipes, articles, films, tons of podcasts on there. We drop new content every day. We have some of the best writers on staff right now covering the latest issues in the outdoors. They’re getting the scoop on all kinds of stuff. I don’t know how they do it, But we also have just peer entertainment and peer education and everything in between, fishing, hunting, and cooking, you name it, go check it out at the medeater dot com
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