Ep. 951: Debunking Conventional Whitetail Wisdom with Thermal Drone Research

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. This week on the show, I’m joined by Derek Dixon to discuss how his year long thermal drone study has helped him better understand white tail deer behavior and how it’s debunked some of the conventional white tail wisdom that he grew up with. All Right, welcome back to the Wired to Hunt podcast, brought to you by First Light and their Camo for Conservation Initiative. And today we have a very interesting different kind of conversation because we’re going to be looking at a number of you might call it whitetail wisdom, conventional wisdom, you might call it like hunterisms, the typical things that we’ve heard over the years about how dear behave, how they move, how they bed, all that kind of stuff. And oftentimes, you know, expert deer hunters have these deep foundational beliefs based on our anecdotal observations, based on things we’ve heard from other PEP people about what deer do and why they do it and when they do it. But a lot of times that’s just based on our you know, what we’ve seen from the tree, or what somebody in a podcast said. Maybe it’s based off of GPS collar studies that have some real science and data behind them, but that’s kind of rare. Today, we’re going to have a set of insights that are backed up by something pretty different. Our guest today is Derek Dixon, and what he brings to the table is the very unique perspective of somebody who has watched deer from above or days and days and days and days with a thermal drum. Now, if you’re not familiar, Derek Dixon launched a YouTube channel this summer called white Tail Research. It’s taken the Internet by storm. A lot of people have seen these videos. A lot of podcasters have been scrambling to get Derek on the show. I did as well. I reached out to him August and we’ve finally gotten around to having this chat. But I’ll be honest with you, I originally was not sure that I wanted to have this conversation because I was concerned about the Pandora’s box that could be opened with this technology. Because well, let me explain. If you’re not familiar with one of thermal drones, I want to explain to you exactly first why they are so incredible of a research tool, Why Derek has been able to see so much interesting stuff and bring it back to tell us about. But then number two, the really concerning fair chase implications of this technology too.

00:02:42
Speaker 2: Now.

00:02:42
Speaker 1: I actually got to see a thermal drone in use for the first time this summer, and let me tell you about that. I went visited with a friend and he said, I’ve got this thermal drone. It’s pretty incredible. It allows you to see what’s out there in a way that nothing else ever has before. Told me the story about how he showed up on this property the day before, and the landowners said, well, you know, last year I had this booner that made it through the hunting season. So I’m thinking he should still be out here. I’m hoping he’s still here. And my friend said, all right, I’ll find him. He throws his drone up in the sky. Within I believe it was ninety seconds he had found that buck, zoomed in and was filming it so close that you could see like the flies buzzing around the steer’s head. What a thermal drone allows you to do. These are very very high powered drones. These are different than you know, the little dji things that some of us have flown to take pictures and cool videos and stuff. This is next level technology. These drones have, as the name would indicate, a thermal camera, so it will actually show the heat signature of an animal on the landscape. So you throw this drone I don’t know how many feet up, three hundred feet up or five hundred feet up or whatever the max is, You flip on that thermal and then the animals just light up and show on the screen right away. You see where all the deer are right away. And then these cameras, these next level drone cameras have I’m not sure what the optical zoom is, but it’s ten x or one hundred x or something crazy. Just tap on that screen, double tap, and it zooms right into that animal, and all of a sudden, it’s like you’re hovering ten feet above this buck, right over his shoulder, watching everything he’s doing, as if you are I don’t know the CIA on a military emission watching a target. It was, you know, to see that firsthand was fascinating, I guess to say the least, but also scary, like what this could mean if somebody tried to use this technology to change how they hunted. So if you have this technology in the right hands, though in the hands of somebody like Derek Dixon, who is using this tool for research purposes, it’s pretty incredible. Because what Derek was able to do last year, he took the year off from hunting. He decid, I’m not gonna hunt while I have this tool, and while I’m using this technology, and I’m just gonna wake up every day and I’m going to follow deer. I’m going to watch deer from above and track and kind of measure and take notes of everything they do, where they go, how they do it, when they do it, why they do it, and film all this and track all of this. And he did that for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours. He you know, we didn’t get into it here in this conversation, but as I understand it, he lost his job and he had this free time and he decided to devote it to this research project. So he basically took this research project on as a full time job and study these deer all day, every day, all fall, for hours and hours. And so he has a level of insight. He has a window into the world of white tails that’s different than almost anything else. You’re able to see things. He was able to see things and watch things and see how deer behaved throughout a day, watch a single mature buck or multiple mature bucks through many many different days, and watched how they moved through a landscape, watched how they betted, when they betted, how they chose to bed, how they got to their bed, what wind conditions helped them choose where to bed. But about how they approached a feeding hear how do they do that? Do they coming straight in? Do they jayhook in? Do they curve around the downwind side? How do they impact to hunting pressure? How did other deer move in through the area change their behavior. There’s a million different questions that Derek was able to answer with this tool. Absolutely incredible and those are the things we talk about today on our podcast. We cover the many different Aha moments he had as he watched these forty four different deer that he studied, these forty four different bucks. I believe that he studied extensively throughout this project. We’re going to get insight into what kind of impact he saw when it came to cold fronts. We’re going to get into the impact that he saw from hunting pressure from different access route strategies. We’re going to talk through how bucks bed, how they travel in the wind, how they utilize wind, how they utilize funnels. We’re going to talk through how effective trail cameras actually are or are not. This and much much more was illuminated for Derek while using this thermal drum. So that is why it’s such a wildly interesting technology and tool to use in this context. On the flip side, though, can you imagine how inappropriate and unethical it would be if you had this tool, Let’s say on October first, and you were going to go out for the opening day hunt of bo season, and you decide, Okay, I don’t know where to hunt tonight, so I’m going to throw out my drum and I’m going to send it over my property and within a minute, it’s going to tell me where every single deer is on the property. And with this camera, it’s going to be allowed me to zoom right in and identify every deer and then I can say, oh, yep, okay, the one buck I’m after is betted right here in this spot. I’m going to go sneak within sixty five yards of him get down when set up, wambam, Thank you, ma’am. That’s your hunt. Can you imagine that? Is that hunting? Is that what our forefathers trained us, taught us, built this tradition around. Is that what we want to leave to our kids. Is this kind of hunting? As far as I’m concerned, the answer is no. That is not hunting. That is not what we want to pass down to our kids. That is not an appropriate fair chase method for pursuing game in any in any kind of way. So my hope is that by having these conversations, by sharing this technology, it will hopefully bring greater awareness to the fact that this is out there and that it needs to be carefully regulated and managed. I’ve already been working with the National Deer Association on their position statements around drones and have actually talked with them about the implications of thermal drones and how our position statement might need to evolve in the future given this new technology. I hope and I expect that our state game agencies will continue to monitor this technology and take the appropriate steps to make sure it’s not being abused. I know that there is a real case to be made for using this technology to recover deer, and I think that is a great use of it to make sure that we are recovering wounded and mortally hit game, making sure that that meat is being utilized. Absolutely, but we need to make sure that in season use outside of that is, if it was up to me, it would be banned. I don’t think these should be used in season other than recovering game. That’s my take. Smarter people than I will debate this and determine what the appropriate regulations and rules are. But I would ask you, if this is something that you have access to, to think really long and hard about what the appropriate way is to use it so as not to lose the soul of what we are doing as hunters. So that is a long winded on ramp here to our conversation. We’re going to get into this conversation around fair chase and the ethics of using drones with Derek at the end of the conversation, and he has some strong opinions on it as well that I really appreciated hearing about. So without any further ado, let’s get to my chat with Derek Dixon about the many fascinating AHA moments he had as he studied forty four different bucks over the course of last year. With this incredible thermal drone technology, We’re going to learn a lot about how dear actually behave what he saw these deer actually doing. It’s going to maybe confirm some things we believe, but also upend some of them as well. Without further ado, my chat with Derek Dixon of White Tail Research. All right with me now on the line is Derek Dixon. Welcome to the show. Derek.

00:11:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, thanks for having me on, Mark.

00:11:11
Speaker 1: I appreciate you making time to do it. You are a hot commodity right now. I ran across your first video probably a day or two after it came out on YouTube, messaged you right away back in August, and so we started talking then and then life got crazy and we just now got to recording this. But I’m glad we’re doing it. I’ve got to ask you, in the month or so, or maybe it’s been a little bit more a month or two since you kind of started releasing your findings in your first videos, how have you felt about the feedback, about the commentary, about the interest in your work so far.

00:11:49
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was something that I was actually pretty impressed with it. Took quite a long time to start finding the people that were a little more negative towards it. And I feel like the group of individuals that were being negative towards it, they hadn’t actually watched anything that I’d done yet, So it was just kind of seeing a guy with a thermal drone and potentially applying it to a hunting situation, and you know, hysteria hit and other than that, though everyone that’s actually well not everyone, but like ninety nine percent of people that have actually watched the videos that have commented on it and made their their opinion vocal, they’re they’re really positive about it. And that was something that going into it I wasn’t one hundred percent expecting. I kind of felt like I was throwing myself into the fire a little bit by introducing the capabilities of these drones in a research application, but I was hoping that I could do so in a way that everyone would be able to immediately gain respect from it and be like, Okay, like this guy’s intentions are really really pure in what he’s attempting to do, and you know, kind of kind of run with that, And that’s exactly what happened definitely had a massive, amazing amount of feedback and beyond anything that I was prepared for for sure.

00:12:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, well it’s it’s fascinating stuff. And I know folks have told you this already, but you’ve done a really good job with it, so kudos for that. But the pushback, I could see there being two angles of pushback, one being you know, fair chase implications of this kind of tool, which we’re definitely going to talk about. But the second, and I’m curious if you’ve seen this, if you’ve heard from people in this, one of the pieces of pushback I’ve wondered about might be related to your methodology, like the sample size and the process you’ve gone through to you know, accumulate your findings. I could see some kind of wonky research expert coming in and saying, well, you know, this is an end of one. This is too small a sample size, you’re basing your findings off of something that’s too anecdotal. I’m curious what your response is to that possible pushback. And then if you could walk us through in more detail, you know exactly what your process has been here, How did you you know what’s the scale of what you’ve done here. What kind of you know, time and sample size have you explored here to come to your fund Yeah.

00:14:07
Speaker 3: No, And actually to that with with the experts kind of contacting and reaching out and being a little bit potentially skeptical. I’ve heard from many many of the experts in the field already, and a lot of them highly respect what I’ve done so far and they think that I’ve done in a really good manner. So that was definitely a massive pat on my back whenever. It took a while for any of them, you know, the people that I would recognize in that field, to reach out to me, But then they finally did and we started talking about it, and they definitely had a lot of really positive things to say about it. So, you know, I have heard from the experts in that field, but my methodology is going into it. Last season, I was really heavily focusing on mature bucks during daylight activity, and I was just going to gather as much data collection as possible.

00:14:53
Speaker 2: There really wasn’t.

00:14:55
Speaker 3: There were a few times, and you’ll see this in future videos, where I had like a couple individual topics that I went into it really harping on. But for the most part, my goal was to find as many mature bucks as I possibly could and track them for as long as I possibly could until I lost them in that timeframe, and that’s exactly what I did. And then across the board, like say I found one particular buck, this kind of gets into what I was actually doing and what I was actually collecting. Say I went out, I found a buck early in the morning, then I would document quite a few variables about the day, just basics about the day, thirty to forty variables that across every single year that I was researching per day. But then whenever I would finally locate him, whether he was standing or he was betting, then I would mark that as an event. So let’s in this story, let’s say that he was betting, because oftentimes I could find them betting in the morning. Then I would mark twenty five to thirty variables based off of what he’s doing in that particular bed, so and everything in relation to it, so wind direction, wind speed, temperature.

00:15:54
Speaker 2: Time of day, time spent in bed, all.

00:15:56
Speaker 3: These different things, and then I would mark all those down and as soon as he would stand up, I would time stamp it and then that would be his movement pattern from then on, and then I would document twenty five to thirty variables depended upon all of his movement patterns and what he was doing throughout that time frame. And really during movement you potentially get more because there might be a scenario where he hits a rub or he hits a scrape, and he’s doing these types of activities while on his feet or he’s feeding, and you can document that as well and also time stamp every single one of them. But then as soon as he beds back down, then you mark that variable as again it’s an event, and then the time stamp it, and then twenty five thirty variables once again. You just repeat that over and over and over every single day and crossed every single buck, and in the end you end up with over one hundred and fifty variables per day per year that you research, and it gets pretty overwhelming. But all of that stuff becomes filterable in a spreadsheets where it just kind of automates itself and kicks out, and then you have like a master sheet where you have deer one, two, three, four all the way. I think I think I have forty four bucks that I researched last season, and then they all have filter bowls based off of like yards per hour, So this buck travels at an average yards per hour in the early season kind of in October, November, December, January. If I was able to watch him that often at this rate of speed in terms of yards per hour, here’s like his general tendencies here. Did he have any injuries? Did those injuries seem to have an effect on the way that he was behaving? All these types of things, literally anything that you could possibly think of. I was attempting to document it across the board, but I wasn’t entering it with an individual goal in mind except for just document as much as you possibly can, and then later on after the season’s over. And obviously there’s a few things I noticed during the season where it’s like, okay, maybe maybe start focusing on that a little bit more. But in the end, I was trying to just get as much data as possible so that way, whenever season was done, I can go back and I can really harp on it and kind of like phone in on those individual topics like deer betting on the leeward side of the ridge, deer moving and coordinates with wind, and all these types of things and see if there was a correlation with any of that. And in the end, yes, my sample size isn’t crazy large, but still there’s forty four deer that I recorded, and I recorded mature bucks moving for over twenty one hundred hours, which it’s quite a long timeframe. I don’t know anyone else that has visual movement of twenty one hundred hours on mature Bucks. If you do, then contact me. I’d love to see it. But that’s quite a bit of time. And I think that the experts also agree that, like, that’s a pretty big sample size, especially for my area, and that’s where that’s where you can start getting into the where maybe it’s not as applicable a lot of the things I talk about.

00:18:36
Speaker 2: It’s very very applicable for my area.

00:18:39
Speaker 3: But you know, maybe going down into Florida or southern Alabama, Mississippi, those areas or big agg country where there’s little pockets of timber and it’s just flat as can be and you can see forever. You know, it might a lot of the topics I talk about may not apply in those areas, and I would love to go to those locations and do research on them. But there’s also only one me, So I’m trying to figure that out in terms of how we can kind of expand this a little bit more in a really healthy way.

00:19:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, have you heard from any institutions yet about wanting to take this idea and scale it? You know, has Mississippi State University reached out or any one of these deer programs said hey, this is a great idea, how can we do this within our program?

00:19:18
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:19:18
Speaker 3: I’ve had a couple of universities reach out, But my problem with teaming with a university is I don’t personally want to get involved in a situation where you have to rely on government funding because at the moment that you do that, then you kind of have to fine tune your ideas and projects towards what they’re wanting because they’re the ones providing the funding. So I have been been in talk, like I said earlier, with some pretty big names. I feel confident being able to.

00:19:45
Speaker 2: Throw one out. We’re going to collaborate later in the season. Bronson Strickland.

00:19:48
Speaker 3: I think everyone probably knows his name, so so yeah, we’re going to be collaborating later in.

00:19:55
Speaker 2: The season, and we have some ideas going to the future.

00:19:57
Speaker 3: But really the big, the big goal is going to be trying to gain private funding for large scale research projects over government funding, so that way we can choose what we’re going to be researching and really make it a little bit more applicable for our space, and also still retain that science side of things, like we’re really it’s going to be science based, but in the end it’ll be able to spin off better for the hunting community and really just to allow people to.

00:20:24
Speaker 2: Gain more confidence and what they’re doing.

00:20:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s great, so wonderful. Segue Bronson has done a great job of discussing many of the different studies around deer movement and how various atmospheric weather, moon factors, different things like that all may or may not impact deer movement. Just came out with a report last year looking at the moon in quite great detail and kind of breaking down some of the different myths and whatnot. And I’m curious when you consider what you’ve seen compared to GPS collar studies, the conventional wisdom, the popular science out there right now, I’m really interested about what you have seen that’s diverged from what those studies have shown. Because the big thing that comes up time and time and time again. Is that when you talk to serious deer hunters, you hear wow, cold fronts man, they get deer moving. Or there’s everyone’s got a favorite moon theory about how this thing or that thing might impact deer movement, or a high and rising barometric pressure. There’s all of these different variables that such and such expert deer hunter says, well, that’s the thing that’s really going to get a mature buck on his feed and moving. But every GPS color study to date has never found a statistically significant impact on movement. None of those things have lined up in a statistically significant way. So you watched forty some different bucks for twenty one hundred hours over the course of so many different days. Have you found anything different than what those studies indicated? Is there some variable, Is there some factor that did have a statistically significant difference make a statistically significant difference on the chure buck movement?

00:22:14
Speaker 3: Yeah, And in relation to all the topics you just mentioned, like moon and temperature and whatnot, I have not found anything that correlates kind of similar basically, like you said, a statistically big enough difference that it was worth worthy of being able to, you know, kind of parp on and talk about I haven’t seen anything, but the one thing I have seen is wind shifting in the middle of the day. That’s been one variable that actually had you know, they mature bucks in particular, seemed to stand up very, very consistently with a mid day wind shift.

00:22:46
Speaker 2: And that was the first time I recorded.

00:22:48
Speaker 3: I actually started kind of freaking out because I went out there with the intention of recording that, and then as it was it was sprinkling a little bit, and as the wind kind of started wrapping around him from the south off to the west, then he just stood up like right right on whenever my phone kind of I had documented where I thought he was going to stand, and he stood within five minutes of that. And I remember just like spam texting.

00:23:09
Speaker 2: My wife like he’s up, He’s up. He actually staid and so watched him do that.

00:23:13
Speaker 3: But I watched that across the board multiple times, and over time I started trying to piece together why why are they getting up out of their bed whenever the wind is shifting in And this is kind of a it’s a really interesting topic because you initially would think it’s it’s it’s because of the wind, and they’re wanting to reposition their bedding location because with that wind shifting, it’s putting them at a potential disadvantage in their current location, so thus they need to relocate. But I don’t think that’s exactly why, and maybe maybe some scenarios that’s why they’re doing it, But I think the reason that they’re shifting dependent on wind. And the reason for this before I say it is I’ve recorded multiple times in mature Buck bed it kind of in like a thermal hub type situation on a south facing slope with a south facing wind. He’s betting on the windward side of the ridge and the wind wraps all the way around to a north wind ten to fifteen miles per hour to the cold front moving in, and he decides to get up and move based off of that. But in that scenario, he would have been in a perfect betting location for that because he’s in a thermal hub, he’s on the leeward side of the ridge. Why why are you getting up and moving out of that scenario? And the only thing I’ve been able to piece together from that is I think they have a predetermined idea as to where they want to spend that evening movement period, and whenever the wind shifts based off of that, then it kind of makes that location that they were going to be going to not as viable in their mind. So therefore they have to shift dependent upon where they want to be that evening and not so much as where they need to be betting for safety and to have everything to their advantage. I think that it’s really dependent upon where they’re wanting to be in that evening time frame. And that was pretty veastinad.

00:25:10
Speaker 1: Interesting. So you in some of the videos and some of the conversations I’ve heard you had in recent weeks, one thing that has come up a lot is is how deer use wind. And this is something that I think there’s a lot of conventional wisdom around. There’s a lot of beliefs. You know, some people have got hard set beliefs around how bucks use the wind to bed. Other people have hard set beliefs around how deer use wind when they’re traveling. So I want to throw a couple of these pieces of conventional wisdom at you, and I would love to hear some detail around what you’ve seen in real life when you’re watching these deer right So a big one is that, as you mentioned just a second ago, deer prefer to travel into the wind. If they’re going to approach a food source or if they’re going to approach somewhere of importance to them, maybe a betting ear, they want to smell what’s there first, So they’re going to try to move into the wind in some way, whether that be right in their face or quartering two. Does that Does that track true as you’ve watched all these deer, Yeah, no.

00:26:10
Speaker 3: Movement and betting in relation to wind is something that I have not been able to see much of a correlation to. And that’s actually the second fascinating thing that I found, And I started kind of having to force myself to ask why and what, Like why am I seeing these weird scenarios? And I’ll give you one of my favorite scenarios, and I’ve used it before, but it’s just it’s such a fascinating one where I had recorded a mature about betting on the leeward side of the ridge pretty consistently. He’d been doing it for maybe three or four days in a row, and it was like, okay, maybe there’s maybe you know, percentage wise, we’re starting leaning towards leeward side of the ridge here, which is is becoming, you know a little bit more like what people had said. And then one day there was a cold front that was moving in. It was twenty five mile per hour north wind. It was spitting ice. It was like five degrees think it felt like negative one. It was disgusting that day, and he was betted on the windward side of the ridge facing the storm. And he’s just laying there. His antlers and everything are just getting piled with ice, and he’s just facing the storm. And as soon as I saw that, I just kind of took everything about leeward sides of the ridge and I just like threw it out the window because I had no idea and I still to this day really that particular example, I have no idea why he was there. I don’t know if maybe he was moving back towards his evening bed and he got tired and he just decided this is where I’m plopping down, and it’s like, well, there’s a storm too bad, like I’m just going to stay here, or really why he decided to.

00:27:28
Speaker 2: Bed in that location. But I’ve seen that multiple times.

00:27:31
Speaker 3: Where they bet on the windward side of the ridge with a storm kind of coming in and it didn’t make much sense. And then in coordination with moving up to a feeding area in the evening timeframe and kind of trying to wrap the downwind side of it prior to entering up nearby it or kind of into a staging area location. I haven’t seen that correlation hardly at all, and I think that the reason why is because thermals are kind of king. I think thermals are number one for what a deer is attempting to utilize in terms of how they’re moving and whenever they’re gaining access to an area that they want to be able to smell, if the wind is not volatile enough to be able to actually disturb the thermals at the top in that area, then I think that they’re really trying to position themselves at a thermal advantage way more often than they are in a wind advantage. I think a scenario like from a hunter’s perspective, where you’re going to see and I didn’t record this much because I didn’t record hunters a lot across last season, but everybody’s seen it where you rattle out of buck and he just completely ignores you who walks away wraps down.

00:28:30
Speaker 2: Wind of you, and then he moves in.

00:28:31
Speaker 3: So like, they will attempt to use wind to their advantage whenever there’s something that is outside of the norm that occurs and they need to go out and check it. But in terms of wrapping dough bedding to go and get down wind of every dough bed and every single food source, you have to think about it from the efficiency mindset of how efficient and how inefficient actually a mature buck would become if say, on a morning travel route, he wanted to scent check I don’t know, eight groups of doughs all the way across a mile on a high stretch that he’s going to walk of train diversity, and in that stretch he’s going to try to wrap downwind of every single group of doughs along the way. He’s not going to that would be extremely inefficient for him in terms of how many steps he’s going to be taking. So for him in that scenario in the morning travel, he’s going to try to intersect every single dough trail along the way and he’s just going to scent check the ground versus wrapping downwind of every single group, and that makes him extremely efficient at that point, and it allows him to stay back further and cover away from where those dough groups are. So yeah, And in the end, the answer to that is, I think they utilize thermals far more often than they do the wind.

00:29:42
Speaker 1: So tell me, then, let’s talk thermals. You’ve emphasized that numerous times as being maybe the big aha. Is that accurate to say, like the thermal impact was maybe even bigger than you thought originally?

00:29:55
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think I think definitely a big aha moment. And also it’s it I’m not one hundred percent on it still, but I think that it’s really dependent upon the wind and how volatile that wind is. So if you have a really harsh wind that’s kind of eight to fifteen twenty miles per hour that’s going to shove and swirl and mess with everything, then I think in that scenario, wind might become a little bit more important. But I’m not one hundred percent sure, but I do. I do definitely see quite frequently bucks utilizing thermals to their advantage in a scenario where there’s just really low winds that are steady and they’re not volatile, You’re not having gusts up into the fifteen mile Prower range. Ever, they’re just kind of like in that two to eight mile Prier range and just very very steady. I think at that time frame, that’s whenever mature buck is the most confident to be able to get up on its feet and be able to utilize thermals to his advantage.

00:30:45
Speaker 1: So, how have you seen mature bucks do that? What does that actually look like in real life?

00:30:51
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, one of the first times I started noticing that there was definitely a correlation with thermals and when mature bucks were moving was in the evening timeframe. I was seeing whenever the thermals switch. And whenever I say thermal switch, I don’t particularly mean that they were rising, you know, all day long with the sun and then all of a sudden they just switch and out now they’re dropping. It’s more so whenever the thermals switch, and thermals in that particular location that their betting area or that they’re betting in should start to start swirling. And that swirling effect can take quite a long time before it actually switches and it starts to drop. And in that particular instance, I think that they realize that they are at a massive advantage whenever thermals are swirling in the section that they’re going to be moving in, because they’re able to gain intel from everywhere around them in that setting. And that’s whenever I’ve noticed that, whenever thermals switch in that area kind of based off of my estimation, But my estimation for that was really where they were betted at, because really you have the sun that rises in the east and then it kind of wraps in the wintertime kind of on the south side, and then it moves back over in the west, and you can depict where the sun is going to be hitting. You can also see it with thermal drone fun fact, but you can depict where the sun is hitting on those ridge systems in relation to where they’re bedding, so what ground is potentially being heated, So that way, the thermals can start rising in those areas, and then whenever the sun leaves that location and it starts to become shaded, and then that you know, at that moment it might take a while, but then everything’s going to start swirling in those locations. And I was seeing whenever you related it to temperature as well, kind of within five to fifteen minutes of the peak temperature for the day as it kind of just started to get back off. You could just look at your weather app and see it. For whatever reason, they were standing within five to fifteen minutes of that range, or five to ten minutes somewhere in there, and it didn’t particularly mean that they were going to move off of that. Sometimes they would just stand and they would just browse around, kind of clean themselves, ruminate a little a little bit, and then all of a sudden they would just kind of head off and decide to move on with their evening pattern. And then in some scenarios they would get up and they would immediately move off with their evening pattern. I don’t really know that correlation between why one or the other, but there was definitely something in relation to the thermals starting to switch in that area and swirl and then deciding to get up.

00:33:11
Speaker 1: Did anything you saw from a thermal impact standpoint change the way you would hunt one of these deer?

00:33:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean probably quite a bit.

00:33:22
Speaker 3: I think there’s a different There’s a ton of scenarios that you could come up with, but I think the number one thing that you need to start trying to pay attention to as a hunter is how those thermals are going to play into not you know, really a lot of times whenever you traditionally, for me, especially whenever I would try to place the stand location, even in hill country, I was always trying to think of ways to position myself with an advantage with the wind. But there are some scenarios where you can have a disadvantage with the wind, but you can have a thermal advantage in that particular location because you’re going to be getting heated by the sun still kind of late into the evening, and your thermals are going to be able to potentially rise out of the area. And there’s there’s quite a few very depend on that.

00:34:01
Speaker 2: You know.

00:34:01
Speaker 3: If you’re in a situation where it’s early season and there’s a lot of green foliage, and it’s a south wind, and you’re kind of hunting off the off down towards the bottom of this kind of southwest facing slope, and that south wind is going to be kind of it’s gonna be edging you you’re scent up that ridge, but there’s a lot of green foliage, then your sen is going to probably roll up underneath the green foliage and start swirling up the ridge and at some point it’s just going to become a kind of a big ball of nastiness where yeah, mature Buck’s gonna be able to sent check you still because your thermals never actually left the canopy, they got trapped underneath it. So there’s a lot of ways to apply it. That’s it’s going to be probably my biggest video that comes out someday, and it’s gonna be like forty five minutes or more long, and it’s going to get really nerdy and that pickular topic, but just because there’s so many different variables that can take place across the season in relation to thermals, but definitely trying to find ways to not just look at wind direction to put yourself in an advantage with the wind direction, which is a massive thing to be able to do if you can put the wind to your advantage, because that that just helps shove your scent in that particular direction. I do think that as a hunter we can utilize wind more potentially more than a mature baccan to your advantage. But trying to position yourself at a thermal advantage, and you know, for me, one of the one of the coolest things that you can do is try to find locations where there’s pockets of like a really steep drainage that’s impassable for a white fild deer, especially in hill country, and you’re you’re always trying to push your scent into a location that’s impassable by white tailed deer or it’s very very very unlikely that they’re going to be moving by that location. And if you can find a scenario where you can do that, where you can shove your scent in an area where they’re not going to pass through, but you’re also in a high traffic zone, then you’re pretty much undetectable that entire hunt if you’re able to get your scent to go down there, and then they can just move past you, and yeah, et cetera. So the hardest part for a lot of those areas that is gaining entry and exit.

00:35:54
Speaker 2: That’s yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:35:57
Speaker 1: You talked about this entry and exit thing a few times as well, and I heard you you mentioned this summer. I can’t remember where I heard this, but you mentioned that you had been studying a little bit of the impact of different kinds of entry and exits and that you found that the well, let me let me take a step back and describe two approaches. And you guys were discussing this, but I have often thought to myself, well, should I try the really sneaky and slow way to get into my tree stand? Or should I try to rip the band aid approach off? Which is like, you know, imagine a frosty cold morning in November when there’s no wind and the leaves are so crunchy, and every single step you take seems to echo for a mile. I just hate those mornings getting in because you just know it. It seems like every deer in a mile or two must hear you walking in. So I’ve sometimes thought, on those days, maybe I should just sprint to my tree stand, rip the bandit off, be loud, but get it done with in five minutes, rather than a slow and still kind of loud forty five minutes. I heard you say that you think the rip the band aid approach might be better. Can you hear that right? Can you describe what you saw and what you’ve learned about that?

00:37:11
Speaker 3: So I’ve done a lot of research worth prefacing on private land, and on a lot of the private lands. A lot of these guys, they’re gaining entry in it, or you can gain entry an exit by use of tractor, truck, UTV, et cetera. And in a private land scenario, the best way to gain entry an exit, just a super fast answer for it, is by whatever means you use to travel that property. So if you use an ATV all the time, have someone drop you off with an ATV. Do you use a truck all the time, have someone drop you off of the truck, And in that scenario, you’re you’re gonna have extremely minimal impact. But if we kick it back over to public land where maybe you can’t have a truck drop you off for a UTV, then you’re gonna have to be walking in And in that scenario, I haven’t documented it enough. I’m not sure which podcast. Maybe i’d misspoken on it, but I haven’t recorded either of these events take place a lot. But I have gone in and intentionally bumped here multiple times by use of giving them your scent, or by use of showing them that you’re a human and really letting them know that you’re a human, or just kind of trying to sneak up on them and bump them that way. And I think I think that the brip the band aid off approach is going to be the best because you’re running in, you’re giving them something audible to hear at that moment, so they’re going to hear it, and then they’re going to kind of get a little bit interested in it, and then they just see a blazing hunter, you know, darting through the woods and kind of ducking and dodging timber.

00:38:33
Speaker 2: They’re really not able to piece together that’s human.

00:38:35
Speaker 3: And if they’re not able to piece together that’s human, they’re just going to bump back off one hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty yards. And this is in a scenaria where you would actually bump them. And then by the time you get to your tree stand, coast is clear, and then they’ll they’ll they’ll they’ll wrap away for thirty minutes to an hour, and they’re going to be on super high alert and high high edge, and they’re going to be looking back in the direction that the event had just taken place. But after thirty minutes to an hour, if nothing’s chasing them from what I’ve seen, they cool right back down and it’s as if nothing ever happened. And then they just go right back to kind of normal activity. And one of the things that we’re going to be studying this year actually, we’ve all probably seen the Zach Barrenbaugh kind of joke of darting through the woods and popping a pop grun trying to sound like a deer essentially running through the woods, and we’re going to try to record that this season and see if that could be potentially the best way to gain Andrey nexit. I think it would be hilarious to see like fifteen guys on public land all running out the same time trying to sound like a deer. That might not be the most applicable setting for this, so hopefully, you know, I don’t know how that’s going to work for public but I think if you were to run in and try to sound like a deer and you’re on the ground and you just immediately get set up with your bow and you’re able to actually kind of sound like a mature buck running through the woods, then I think you’re gonna have to get ready to shoot within like the next five minutes, because I would I feel like I feel like at least he’s going to move in on you and see what the crap’s going on so interesting.

00:39:58
Speaker 1: So speaking of deer moving around and and moving from where they were to where you are, I want to I want to rewind just a little bit back to some of the conventional wisdom of like what hunters believe versus what the studies believe. And let’s talk cold fronts. Cold fronts are something that just we all seem to experience it. We’ve we’ve felt those days that just seem to be on fire, and oftentimes it’s it’s with that cold front moving through. But the studies don’t back it up. I’ve seen in your work you described the numbers that you are measuring maybe are different, and I’m curious that they’re different than what many of these other studies have because I’ve often thought to myself, well, these studies aren’t finding something statistically significant about the total amount of distance traveled. But maybe you know a little bit more movement a little bit earlier is enough for it to matter for a hunter, but it wouldn’t show up in these studies. I’ve seen you take a look at two different things, one being like the total distance a deer has moved in daylight. But then you’ve also looked at something you call net displacement and how you’ve maybe value that as a more important variable. Can you describe what net displacement is and what you’ve seen with that. And I’m curious, like, is there a higher net displacement when a cold front does come through, or the day or two after a cold front or anything like that. Might that showcase? Oh yeah, there is an impact here possibly. I know you mentioned you still haven’t quite seen the correlation, but I’m just curious if you’ve looked at that.

00:41:24
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:41:25
Speaker 3: And one thing also to think about prior to mentioning net displacement in relation to people seeing a higher priensity of deer moving in a cold front and over the cold front hents. It’s if all you do is you go out and you hunt those cold fronts, then naturally you’re going to see deer activity on cold fronts because that’s the time from that you’re hunting. But as a hunter, and probably likewise for many other people, you’ve hunted those days prior to the cold front and not seen a lot of activity, and then all of a sudden, the cold front moves in, and that that’s kind of where that the idea comes from and stems from a little bit more but still just worth noting. Is like, I think there’s a lot of hunters out there that are probably trying to fine tune themselves around those high you know, those high odd situations because they don’t have the time to go and hunt, and then they go out on a cold front they see really peak in their mentality activity and it’s like, well, yeah, it’s because that’s the day that you went out in the woods, so you’re gonna definitely yeah. And then you make that correlation with it was the cold front or maybe maybe you were waiting for that perfect moon phase or whatever and you went out on that you know, that particular day and then you saw deer movement, so it’s like it was because of the moon.

00:42:21
Speaker 2: It’s like, no, it’s because you were in the woods. But anyways, back to well.

00:42:26
Speaker 3: You said with net displacement, Yeah, net displacement I started focusing on in the morning. In the morning, it’s really whenever you locate them where they’re bedding, and then where they move to and then bed back down. What’s the displacement between those two locations just in a straight line.

00:42:39
Speaker 1: The straight line distance from point A to point b.

00:42:41
Speaker 3: From point A to point B and then Likewise, for the evening movement, what I was doing is whenever they get out of their bed in the evening, so that’s point A, and then where they were shooting light ends in most cases because a lot of cases they’re still on their feet going to the dark. So I would mark all the way unto where shooting light ended for me, and then that would be point B. And for this to make it more appable for a hunter, I also did continue to document until they bedded down in most cases, but that’s not appable for hunters, so I didn’t I don’t include that. But anyways, Yeah, what I was noticing was that in the morning time frame across the board pre rut, post rut, late season, that morning activity, especially in some individual characteristic bucks, but really the average, the average out from all forty four year that I studied, it’s almost four times greater the amount of distance from a net displacement versus their evening net displacement, and in terms of total hours traveled and total total time traveled, the morning is a little bit greater in my scenario, but it’s not a great enough difference worth talking about, but it is. It is a little bit. You know, they are traveling for a little bit longer during daylight hours from what I’ve seen in the morning. And then the last thing is total yards traveled. That where they’re actually, you know, every step they’re taking and in total and in terms of total yards travel, that numbers actually really similar in the morning and the evening, because in the evening they’re still traveling that entire time, they’re just walking back and forth and browsing, and it just seems as if they’re a little bit more lazy. But their yards per hour is pretty similar, and their total yards travel’s pretty similar, but their net displacement is way closer to their to their betting location, whereas the or in the morning it seems very missional driven, really very missional mindset, where they had a determined location where they wanted to be, and they’re they’re trying to intersect dough trails all along that travel route and scent check as many as they can, and then oftentimes for whatever reason, And I don’t know if there’s a correlation with this yet, I don’t think I have a large enough sample size to really speak and say that it’s true. But for me, I was seeing a lot of bucks hitting their scrapes, in particular rubs. They just make rubs all the time. There was really no especially in staging areas, rubs are extremely common, but scrapes. I was seeing those being made, oftentimes at the end of that morning travel route. And the only thing that I’ve started thinking about off of that is maybe that’s why some guys try to You know, if you’re hunting near a scrape or over a scrape and you kill a buck kind of like around ten am or ten thirty am, and then you start placing it in your brain that like, you killed him on a midday movement pattern. In my opinion, you killed him at the end of his morning travel route. You just picked him up at the very tail end of it in that scenario. So I think that’s a lot more common than some people might think, where bucks are moving deep into the morning nine am to ten thirty am. And there’s a lot of people for me from like conventional hunting wisdom just where I grew up, particularly in how I was taught. You go out the morning, you hunt, that kind of light comes up, et cetera all the way until about eight eight thirty and it’s like, all right, get out of your stand and head back to the cabin. And I think that’s a pretty bad idea, and just based off what I’ve seen, because I’m seeing a lot of bucks almost always moved past nine am, but I’ve seen them move all the way into like ten thirty ten forty five am before betting back down. And like I said, a lot of times those scrapes that were being made happened to be And I don’t know if there’s a correlation with that or as the orphan’s just this particular property but happen to be at the very end tail end of that travel route.

00:46:15
Speaker 1: Did you have any ability to under to know about pre existing scrapes and if they were ever going to visit scrapes? Like I guess what I’m getting at is sometimes we think like bucks will go where, we wonder will Bucks go out of their way to check a scrape or are they going somewhere because they already want to go somewhere, And if there happens to be a scrape right there, they’ll hit it or they’ll happen to swing down wind of it. I’m curious if you’ve found anything related to that.

00:46:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s actually a really good question.

00:46:47
Speaker 3: I haven’t had anybody asking that question yet, and it’s probably something I need to bring up more often, because I think that I have noticed mature bucks. And once again, I think the sample size is probably too small to say for sure, but there are some bucks that I have where I know their home range probably too will like I really know where they bed, I know where they move, I know where they frequent and then all of a sudden, I would be going out to find this particular buck and he would be outside of that home range, kind of off in a different direction, and he’s kind of walking this and oftentimes it happened in the morning, but he would be walking this somewhat semi straight line, just a more missional morning travel route, and at the end of it, he would make it to a scrape where you had to think he knew where that scrape was.

00:47:30
Speaker 2: He didn’t just run into that scrape.

00:47:31
Speaker 3: He walked out of his way, like you said, to get to that particular scrape location, hit the scrape, moved off of it, betted down for a while, and then moved right back into his home range after that. So I definitely think there’s something to be tapped into on that topic.

00:47:46
Speaker 1: Interesting. So you were just discussing how there’s maybe more morning movement than a lot of hunters. Give these bucks credit for two questions for me coming out of that One, was that consistent throughout the year or was that just during their rut or during a certain portion of the year. That’s that’s question number one.

00:48:05
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, that was consistent from really whenever bucks split from their bachelor groups all the way unto the end of season. And I think whenever you make it into late season kind of from my area, that would be December twentieth, twenty fifth and then onward into January. I think whenever you make it into late season, it starts to become a bit more of an individual characteristic. Because I had some bucks, some mature bucks that would just settle back down and they became really calm, and their home ranges shrunk dramatically, and they were really focusing kind of on themselves, browsing on acorns, drinking water, not really going out and sent chicking does. And then I had some bucks that were lunatics the entire season, and they just continue to travel all the way across the property every single day in the morning, and they never cooled off. So I think that in the late season in particular, that can become really an individual characteristic. But across the kind of pre rut timeframe, peak rut, post rut, and even into that like maybe lateish late rut time frame, then you’re you’re still gonna see more movement in the morning. And even on the bucks where they did shrink their home range, it’s like, for I have one really good example where he shrunk into an eighty acre home range, and he was very consistently inside of that eighty acre home range. The only time he left that eighty acre home range was in the morning, and in those morning travel routes, it was just as if he was making a pre rep you know, post rep peak ret type of movement. His yards per hour traveled was identical. They met, the type of terrain that he was walking, and how it was trained driven in the semi straight line and path that he was taking. It was almost identical to those early season or to the you know, kind of pre rep post rut peakret timeframes. But he was doing it in the late season and he was being marked by me as a very sedentary Bucks. He’s living in such a tight range, but he still did every once in a while. I think I think I recorded him doing it four or five times, leave that small home range to go out and check for intersect dough trails all along that way, and it every time it happened in the morning.

00:50:04
Speaker 1: When it came to you know, outside of this uh checking for does the long morning movements of the late morning movements is this My first instinct was like, Oh, this must have all happened in deep like sanctuary bedding cover and people just don’t see that because they’re usually not hunting in that back there in the thick stuff. So, yes, these deer are still moving, but it’s you know, deep in these safe places. Is that true? Or was this late morning activity happening in maybe surprising places.

00:50:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, most of the times it was happening in surprising places. But I think that a lot of the properties for my area where I’m researching, there’s a ton of mature timber. And it’s like, in terms of thinking from the mindset of like deep thick, you know type cover, we don’t really have a lot of areas that have deep thick type cover because there’s not a lot of a lot of guys going out and doing a you know, heavy TSI and then you know, doing controlled burns in the timber to be able to make those areas really and green and thick. We just have a ton of really old, mature timber in this area. So you know, I guess that’s probably a bad question for me to be able to answer at the moment because I just haven’t been able to be in a type of train where there is truly that you know, betting sanctuary type thing. But I definitely have properties this season where I’ll be going in different states that are going to.

00:51:19
Speaker 2: Have that type of habitat interesting.

00:51:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, after having watched forty four different Bucks for hundreds of hours, do you lean more towards oh Bucks or all individuals and they do a lot of things that are just unique personality type things or is it more well, yeah, there’s a lot of things that are almost like rules. They do this, they do that. There are strong trends. Where are you leaning more towards now or what’s that percent split if you had to say, well, it’s like forty percent predictable and sixty percent. Man, every Buck’s different. Yeah, do you have any sense of that after looking at this data?

00:51:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would say that it really heavily leans towards the individual buck characteristics. I think that in particular, mature bucks, if you backed it off from ature bucks and you started looking at younger deer kind of two three year old bucks, maybe even four year old bucks, but I think that they’re going to get shoved off into the mature side of things in terms of individual behavior, especially during pre rut and peak rut and post runt and then dough groups and whatnot. I think dough groups, for sure, you can lean that back towards the side of like they’re not really that individual they all kind of do the same thing. And then younger deer they’re kind of leaned on the they all kind of do the same thing. And it seems like they’re really curious into mature bucks, by the ways, which is maybe something if you want to do, we could get into. But mature bucks in particular, they seem to all be very individualistic in terms of how they behave, and I’d seen that across the board, and I think almost every GPS color study that’s been done in the past it kind of backs that as well, saying that individual buck behavior is extremely common and that’s kind of the standard for mature bucks.

00:52:58
Speaker 1: So what have you seen with these young being curious, because I’ve seen a few of your videos where there’ll be these bachelor groups of young bucks that go and like almost seek out the big old buck and kind of bump him or butt or bug him. Is this is this a consistent thing you’ve seen and b having If that’s the case, is there any way to take advantage of that? Is there anything that a hunter can use with that knowledge?

00:53:20
Speaker 2: Yeah?

00:53:21
Speaker 3: Yeah, I haven’t thought about it from the hunter’s perspective, where if you’re seeing young bucks move through the timber, how they might be potentially trying to seek out that mature buck for you, I haven’t thought of that yet. That’s a pretty good idea, but yeah, now I’ve definitely seen them intentionally seek out mature bucks, whether it’s in the peak rut time frame, post rut late season, like a in a peak rut time frame, you’ll have a scenario where a buck has mature buck has a dough kind of vetted, and she off down and what would be a thicker area from my area, and then he’s betted within fifteen to twenty yards of her, just kind of pending and waiting and backed off from him. Thirty to fifty yards away, there’s like three or four younger bucks all just kind of like waiting in line or sitting back to observe and watch what event’s about to take place. I don’t know if it’s like a if it’s a learning situation, or what all they’re exactly doing. But I’ve also heard from some perspective, and I haven’t recorded this yet, and I would love to, or if somebody else could, where there’s an idea whenever there’s there’s twins in a particular dough, that it’s actually two bucks breeding that one dough, And in this scenario, it would potentially make sense where the mature buck would move in and breed that particular dough at that time and then move off, and then one of those younger bucks, potentially the most dominant out of that group that’s kind of sitting back on the bench waiting, they step up to the plate and they kind of went out the fight, and then they take over and then they potentially breed that exact same doe again. And that’s how sometimes twins are able to come from that. And that’s something I’ve heard from guys like Bronson and others that have asked me whether or not I’ve recorded that, and no, I haven’t, but I think that would be a really cool thing to be able to capture, and that might be what’s taking place there. But I’ve also seen the peak rut where a mature buck will be bedded in his kind of in his morning bed at the end of his travel house, so there’s his midday bed, and a younger buck will move in on him, and in my opinion, in that scenario from what I’ve seen a lot, the mature buck generally doesn’t like to be messed with, but sometimes and take their bucks. I’ve seen where they let the younger buck move in next to him and he’ll bed down five yards away, and they’ll just stay bedded next to each other for that entire midday time frame, and then they’ll get up together and oftentimes the mature buck gets him up, which is a really fascinating thing to watch where and some people have probably seen this in the early season whenever bucks are bachelored up where if they’re all bedded out, you know, kind of beyond an aggfield, the big one will get up and he’ll kind of walk over and get the other bucks up onto their feet. I’ve seen this in peak rut timeframe with a mature buck and a young buck, where the mature buck will walk over to him, get him up on his feet, and then they both kind of sit there for fifteen to twenty minutes and just clean one another in the middle of peak rut. And I watched that and my brain just kind of is, like, what relation do you guys have in the past that’s causing you to be able to have You know, he is very uncommon from what I’ve seen, but I have seen it happen multiple times. And then going to the end of the late season, you have a scenario where a mature buck like the main one that I recorded last season that I call Winter Big Main Forrin ten, he’s six or seven years old, where he traveled individual on his own almost all the time, and there were quite a few scenarios where he would be bedded next to a staging area next to food or food source or something where he’s going to make his evening travel route and bucks that are down wind of him will move in on him in a bachelor group of like five to ten bucks in some cases.

00:56:42
Speaker 2: I think the biggest one I seen.

00:56:43
Speaker 3: Was nine or ten, and they will move right up into his bedding area and get him onto his feet, and then oftentimes, for this particular year, he didn’t enjoy that at all, Versus the other one where he kind of seemed like he was being a teacher. This one was kind of a jerk, and he’d pin his ears back and let them all know that he was about to plant them all but if they didn’t.

00:57:00
Speaker 2: Move out of his way types of situation.

00:57:02
Speaker 3: But yeah, no, it seems like younger bucks are even four year olds, are highly curious into what that most dominant buck in the area is doing.

00:57:12
Speaker 1: Did you notice anything unique about how the dominant buck in the area would bed or travel compared to the whole rest of the buck herd in that zone. Was there anything like, oh, yeah, the top buck would always get this spot where the top buck would always come in last, or any of those things that sometimes we believe.

00:57:32
Speaker 3: Yeah, I, as a hunter, I feel like there has to be something in relation to that, but I haven’t been able to see a massive correlation. I mentally, I feel like he since he is the dominant buck, he’s probably claiming the best zones that in that particular area. But then I’ve seen him in situations where quite a few mature bucks will bed down in an area that puts them at a complete disadvantage from a me being a hunter perspective, and it’s like, why are you in that location? Maybe maybe he’s not in as much of a disadvantage as I think, but from what I see, I think that he’s in a complete disadvantage based off of where he’s going to probably move in that evening travel route. And uh, that’s that’s one thing I’ve seen. But no, I would like to think that mature bucks, definitely the dominant buck in the area kind of gets to pick the best location that he that he wants to be in. But I think there’s some scenarios where whenever they’re moving back into their evening bed or to their midday bed or whatever, where they just sometimes they just get kind of exhausted, kind of in that post rud or late red timeframe, and they just bed back down wherever they are. It’s like, screw this, I’m getting off my feet.

00:58:34
Speaker 1: So these bucks that you got to know over the year, would you say that most of them you could eventually like write a bio of, like a summary of like Okay, winter, he likes to do X, Y and Z, and pretty consistently he’s gonna do X Y or Z, and then the six by five he’s usually going to do X Y or Z. And you kind of know that. Is that the case with all the bucks that you studied very well, that eventually you could pattern them to some degree or were there some deer that were just random deer like their personality trait was they throw a dart at the wall and they’re going to do something different every day. You can never correlate it to anything. Was there one of those or other one or the other of those more common?

00:59:19
Speaker 3: Yeah, that is something that I tried to do pretty consistently throughout the season because I actually have a video idea going into this season where I’m going to try to pattern the buck and then go out and hunt him with my wildlife camera and see if i can get, you know, within sub thirty yards of him in a hunting situation and take pictures of him in video them, et cetera. And I think that it’s actually going to be a lot harder than most people think. Andre where the advantage comes in more for the hunter side of things, isn’t as much being able to predict these deer, because very few times was I was I able to see where a buck was betted and then say, for sure he’s going to be making this move, which I all. I mean, I st trying to do that a lot of bed for if it’s what’s that you start now?

01:00:00
Speaker 1: Oh I just said, I’d imagine that I would be tempted to do that a lot, Like you walked with the steers and like, Okay, where’s he gonna go? I think he’ll be here. Did you play that little game with yourself a lot?

01:00:10
Speaker 3: Sorry you cut out again on that. You’re really e stat Okay, I think you’re better now though.

01:00:14
Speaker 1: Sorry. I was just I was asking if you had, you know, played that game yourself, like Okay, he’s betted here, I’m gonna guess he’s gonna go to this field tonight or whatever.

01:00:23
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:00:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, I played that game all the time because whenever you sit there and you watch a buck bed for four hours, like you constantly thoughts are going through your head that entire time. And sometimes I’d put on a podcast or something so I could learn something else other than sitting and thinking about why this year is betted in that particular location. But oh yeah, every single time I watched one bed throughout the middle of the day, I would I would try to make guess as to what he was going to be doing. And I feel like in most cases I was probably wrong, I just but and also even in the scenarios where I was right, oftentimes I would be wrong in terms of how he was going to do it and the specific route that he was going to take to get there. So yeah, I think I think even even with a thermal drone patterning one and trying to really narrow down on exactly what he’s going to do every single day and every single move, I think it’s still a pretty difficult thing to do. But in terms of utilizing that scenario where you watch a buck for as much as I have and then being able to position yourself in a high odds hunting situation, I think you can definitely do that because of train driven type features where you see he’s being forced to travel, and whenever you start to piece together those areas where he’s being forced to travel, then you just go hit hunt these areas on high high odd situations and oh yeah, no, it’ll make you it dramatically better. Hunter. I think there’s a couple of spots on the property that I could one hundred percent guarantee if I sat there for five days undetected in these locations during the kind of pre rut or post rut timeframe, that there’s no way I wouldn’t kill mature buck in those areas, which is actually kind of sad because to me, it makes it to where I can’t hunt that property that I grew up on my whole life, and that’s the main property I did research on.

01:02:00
Speaker 2: But that’s just the way that I feel.

01:02:01
Speaker 3: I don’t I don’t think that it’s ethical at this point because I’ve seen with the drone exactly how these deer are train driven on this property. I don’t feel like it’s ethical at that point to go out and sit in those locations. But in terms of actually truly patterning one, I think it’s a lot harder than people think.

01:02:19
Speaker 1: So if you were, well, when most people think about trying to pattern a deer, I think they are usually thinking about two different things, or using two different sets of variables. One they’re going to take like their own observations of that deer and trying to learn something from that, and then Number two and probably the thing most people lean on the most these days, it’s trail cameras. People love to look at trail camera data and use that to pattern a deer or attempt to pattern a deer, especially these days with sell cameras and people getting a picture of a buck in there this morning, they make Okay, I’m going to hunt them tonight there, et cetera. You’ve explored, at least preliminarily in some of your videos how effective trail cameras may or may not be with patterning deer. Can you walk me through what you found as far as like what the actual efficacy of these cameras actually are. Are they really as effective of patterning tools we think or maybe not?

01:03:17
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don’t think they’re near as effective as a lot of people think, especially in the way that it’s at least the people that I know personally that utilize them and the level at which they rely on them, I don’t think that they’re near as effective as they believe. In that that probably correlates with why, you know, when they were younger and they were going out and just hunting these high odd scenarios and high odd situations and really good locations they were having more success, and then all of a sudden they started becoming reliant and really emotionally driven off of these trail cameras and what they’re being what’s being sent to you in the morning, like you think about it from the perspective of a hunter. And this is one thing I started noticing with this trail cam study that I did where you know, in the evening timeframe of particular, I saw this a lot because we had a lot of acorns and deer were browsing in the woods a lot where I had the trail cameras where I would see with my drone thirty plus deer all moving through the timber in right next to this camera, within one hundred yards of it, and I would get a trail cam picture of two, three, maybe four deer but in that scenario in and none of them were mature, none of them were even bucks. And often cases there were just groups of dose because we have a kind of does But from a hunter’s perspective, if you receive that trail cam picture, especially me in the past, I would view it and go, Okay, well, the woods are kind of dead this evening, like not that much activity, but if you were out in the woods that day, you would have seen almost thirty deer if you were if you went undetected, and it would have been like the woods were popping off that entire timeframe. And that kind of goes back to the you know, the cold front idea of cold front moving in, then you only hunting those peak timeframes, and that’s whenever you’re seeing a lot of activity. It’s like it’s just because you put yourself in the woods and you saw a lot of activity. It’s really hard to really narrow that down on one particular variable that’s causing that than to take place. So yeah, in terms of trail camera effectiveness though, I just I think people really especially on a private land scenario, but kind of across the board, you need.

01:05:10
Speaker 2: To take it for what it is.

01:05:11
Speaker 3: Is So if you get a picture of a mature buck then and maybe a target animal that you’re wanting to really go out and potentually hunt, then take it for the fact that he is alive and he’s out there, he’s kind of in that area and maybe that’s part of his home range, and kind of hunt based off of the fact of all the variables that you know as a hunter, and from infield scouting and from infield you know, activity that you’re able to find versus that individual trail camp picture, I think the only scenario that you can really and there may be some more, especially if you’re on like fifty on one ridge, and then I think in that scenario, like sure, yeah, you might you might be able to start patterning a deer at that point, because your bank account might not like it, but you might be able to start pattern on. But is trying to utilize the trail camera to determine buck behavior because, like we talked about earlier, bucks are individuals and that’s kind of across the board.

01:06:02
Speaker 2: Everyone’s seen it.

01:06:04
Speaker 3: And if you can utilize a trail camera to get pictures of a deer say a mile and a half apart, or even if you just have neighbors, so like say you have forty acres and you get in the know with all of your neighbors and they start getting pictures of that buck on their property, but they’re a mile away and you guys are getting pictures pretty consistently. That buck probably falls into a very highly mobile, highly active kind of category. And you can use that to your advantage by knowing that you can go and hunt these situations that are potentially terrain driven if you have terrain and get lucky at some point. But if you’re only getting a picture of a buck and you’re really small core area and it starts to seem like you know, you might start narrowing down on his home range. A great example I’ve seen this with was Bill Wink, which not only did he utilize trail cameras, but he also was in the field all the time because it’s what he does. But still he was able to narrow down that this one particular buck lived in such a small home range, and once he realized that, he used it to his advantage. Instead of going in and hunting right in his core area and pushing him out and stressing that deer out, he was able to fringe hunt that particular deer’s location. And at some point, kind of like I said with the it was a six by five, he lived in that core eighty acres. At some point he decided to move outside of that small home range, and whenever he did, Bill got lucky and he was in the right spot and he was able to get a shot on him. So and he probably moved out more often than what Bill had seen. He just that’s kind of in that particular location that Bill happened to position himself. But that’s a I think that’s a use case where you can use one is trying to identify the individual, characteristic type behavior of that vigor.

01:07:52
Speaker 1: So it seems though that if we were to break two overall schools of thought, if we were to break kind of the hunting community into two schools thought on killing bucks, there’s one school of thought that is, like they want to aggressively punch in and take a killing strike on a buck when they think it’s the right moment, Like they think this special set of circumstances, the cold front, plus I got a trail camera picture of him in here last night, plus the winds just right, so I think he’s gonna take this route. He’s going to be at this little inside corner on this night, so I’m gonna punch in there and kill him. That’s one approach that some people take, and they might be very selective about how many days they hunt because of that. So they’re gonna hunt the four perfect days in the four perfect spots. That’s guy A, Guy B is what I think you’re describing, which is someone who says, well, actually, I’m gonna hunt a lot because these deer are pretty darn random, so I’m gonna have it’s a numbers game, So I’ve got to be out there fifteen times to finally get one time when our paths intersect. But I’m gonna do it in a place that I know is a very safe for me as a hunter, so I’m not detected, so I can get away with hunting fifteen times and be in a place where terrain of some kind is going to disproportionately funnel deer traffic through here. So eventually, you know, even though I can never predict what this buck’s going to do on any given day, I can predict that at least once within these fifteen days he will come through here. And if you can do that, you will kill that buck that might be Guy B. Do you think that A or B is the better approach based on what you have seen with your own.

01:09:25
Speaker 3: Rise, Yeah, I think it’s I think it kind of depends on you and the properties that you’re hunting. If if your Guy A, then you probably know your area like the back of your hand.

01:09:35
Speaker 2: You know you’ve hunted that area before.

01:09:37
Speaker 3: You know, how do you have to travel it and you can position yourself in those scenarios that you believe, in your opinion, you know, make you the highest odd hunter. So, whether it’s in relation to moon phase, cold front, et cetera, then you go out and hunt on those particular days, and being that you know that property so well, it’s probably going to position you in a pretty good location, especially since you’re going to fine tune when you’re hunting, Like say you’re they want to hunt that area kind of a you know, late October early November from my area, so pre rut. Anytime you can be in the woods in a pretty undetectable location in a high travel area in the pre rut, it’s probably going to be a good time to be in the woods. So I would agree, Yeah, going out on that high odd situation, maybe even correlating it with a cold front and the moon phase, et cetera, you’re gonna put yourself in a great spot. But I’d like to think the guys that are having success with that strategy of only going out four times, et.

01:10:25
Speaker 2: Cetera, they really have their system dial.

01:10:30
Speaker 3: And then the other side of that is if you’re somebody that’s just very aggressive, and you’re going into these public land scenarios where maybe you’re only going to be able to hunt that state for a couple of days or five days, maybe two days, and you have to go in and just be hyper aggressive in that scenario. I think that it makes sense to be able to do that as well. And in that situation, you’re probably going in and you’re looking for extremely fresh buck sign and then you’re hunting over that extremely fresh buck sign. But I guess in that scenario, you’re really not waiting for the correct conditions. You’re just you’re just kind of full seen. So it’s really not you’re you’re kind of like a guy see. I think maybe yeah, but yeah, and then then guy B I think is the greatest, greatest hunting approach if you have the time availability to do it, if you can, I mean, yeah, the more times you get out in the woods and that you’re undetected consistently and you’re hunting in these really good locations, you’re you’re going to just continue to up your percentage of seeing that mature back every single time barring that you’re undetected, you know, pretty consistently. I do think that there’s a room for you know, the whole idea of being undetected on entry and exit. I like I said with utilizing UTVs on private land or trucks, et cetera, that that’s definitely a great way of doing it of constantly pushing out the deer of the area that you’re in so that way you can gain entry and exit without them really knowing that there’s a human in there. But I think that’s the most important part is is trying to be even if like say you’re walking into your tree stand and there’s a dough just bedded like ten yards in front of your tree stand and you spot her before she spots you, trying to get her to bump out of that spot, or maybe just don’t go hunt that tree stand, but if you feel like you have to be in that spot for whatever reason, try to bump her out of that spot without her knowing that you were a human. Just act like anything in the woods and just crawl around on the ground and try to look like a gigantic armadillo or something to where she has no idea what you were, and she’ll bump away fifty to one hundred and fifty yards for doze, especially because they seem to be a little more curious than bucks in some cases. But and then you just rush to your stand and get up, and she’ll probably be back in the area and try to figure out what you were. But if you were an advantage where you have thermost your advantage or the wind to your advantage in an area that she’s not gonna be able to detect you, then you should be able to remain undetective in that scenario. But now I think there’s a lot of different situations that you can craft up in your brain.

01:12:42
Speaker 2: I can run down a rabbit hole pretty quick on that.

01:12:46
Speaker 1: So this gets me thinking about another topic, which is, you know how dear movement and behavior changes throughout the season. And we have a whole set of kind of conventional wisdom around this. Like I could tell you, I could, I could give you a one minute. I’ll tell you right now. If I were to say, if a new hunter came to me and they’re like, hey, how does a buck behave? How does buck behavior change throughout the year? I might say, well, uh, you know, in the summer, he’s on the standard bedding to feeding pattern, he’s pretty comfortable, he’s going to move in daylight in the evening, you know, as he goes out to feed, they’re pretty visible. That might continue into the first handful of days of the hunting season. That’s a great time to kill a buck. And then all of a sudden, the hunting pressure has an impact on him. They they start being much more you know, risk averse. They’re going to be back in the cover more. They’re not gonna move quite as much in daylight. Uh. Some people might tell you there’s an October lull. Some might say it’s a hunting pressure impact. Some might say it’s changing habitat. But things tend to slow down a little bit. And then we ease into late October and the pre rut gets closer and closer, and then that ramps up, and then he gets to November, then there’s the rut, and then there’s all the chaos YadA, YadA, YadA, And then we go into the late season and deer get back on their feeding patterns. But they maybe are more risk averse because they’ve been hunted for three months. But when you get that really good cold front or big snow event or whatever it is, man, they can really get out there on those good food sources. So that’s like my sixty second over generalized over bee of deer movement, right, a buck activity. What have you seen as you watched forty four different bucks live out a hunting season themselves that was either right in line with the conventional wisdom on buck behavior throughout the season or surprising from that, Like, was there a period of the year where like, oh wow, everyone says that in mid October their movement goes down, but it didn’t, or everyone says that in the early season, whatever, did anything like that stand out that was a surprise.

01:14:42
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that one thing that is really useful to apply to conventional wisdom is what took place throughout the summer and the spring in your particular area. So if you went through a heavy drought like my areas this year, that’s going to dramatically affect the way that deer act throughout that you know, the course of the generalization that you just made. Whereas last season we had a lot of rain, so they had a lot of available forbs and a lot of a ton of acorns, which that’s kind of seasonal dependent, but still there was a ton of acorns last season, and we had a lot of native brows on the ground, and that kind of dramatically changes the way that they’re going to go throughout the early season. And then you know, during the during i’d say right up against the peak rut and then peak rut and post rut. I think you’re going to see consistent types of movement patterns. But the one interesting thing about the peak rut is that even though form my area, you know, experts kind of state that peak rut happens November tenth to November twentieth, a lot of hunters know that that is a constantly shifting variable and GPS collars have also back to that where you know, for my area, one season, I could have peak rut starting on November two, and then the next season it could start November eighteenth, and it’s just completely shifting around, and you really have to be active in the woods or maybe just have a ridiculous amount of trail cameras to be able to identify. I win that peak red is going to actually take place in your area, But I think the number one factor in terms of what’s going to change what you’re doing throughout that season. And I’ll be super excited to see this year with the drought that we had is the amount of rainfall that you get across spring and summer and if you don’t have available native forage going into October and November. Because this season I think we have just from what I’ve seen, I can make an estimation that we have like a quarter to a half of the amount of acorn mass on trees that we did last season, So that means we’re gonna have dramatically less acorns. We already don’t have native brows. They’ve already picked native brows pretty much clean. There’s a sweetheen field that I’ve been scouting in person where a month and a half ago I have pictures of This might include in my next video because it’s that amazing where this twenty acre field was just flush and green and beautiful and there’s been over one hundred and fifty deer in that field every single evening, and that field now it looks like a wasteland. I mean, they have eaten that entire field off nothing, and they’re kind of, you know, barring any other little native brows out there, they’re kind of out of native forbes and anything that’s green and moisture rich. And because of that, it gets me into a whole thing with microbiome. I can get into that if we want to, but basically, yeah, why not, I’ll get into it.

01:17:18
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:17:18
Speaker 3: Basically, throughout the summertime frame, they’re browsing on moisture rich, kind of easy to digest types of food sources, especially if you have some moisture in the area. But whenever they convert that and they start browsing on acorns, then there’s a microbial transition that has to take place in their gut. Because deer have four chamber of stomachs, they have a room in and basically they have micro microbes that digest the food for them and convert it into energy.

01:17:41
Speaker 2: That’s the basic way of putting that.

01:17:43
Speaker 3: But in this situation where you have summer greens, like these deer that were just eating on the soybeans, now they’re out of summer greens. So when acorns start falling, which they’re probably going to start falling earlier, and I think today’s first day of season for my area, I think acorns have already been on the ground a little bit. But as they transition in eating acorns, it’s a completely different style of food. It’s a lot more woody, and fibrous, and it’s going to cause their microbiome their gut, they’re going to need a different form of microbes to be able to.

01:18:10
Speaker 2: Process that food.

01:18:11
Speaker 3: And what takes place is when they start eating acorns, their body starts realizing they need different microbes and it takes seven to fourteen days you look this up. Take seven to fourteen days for this for their gut, for their women to be able to switch and change the types of microbes that are inside of it, and across that timeframe, whenever they start browsing on acorns, they’re not extracting near as much energy initially as they were whenever they were eating the moisture rich.

01:18:39
Speaker 2: Easy to digest food.

01:18:40
Speaker 3: So you have a period where when deers start making that transition and they start hitting acorns, they have to do it at a much higher frequency. They have to fill their roomen much more so that way, since since their body is unable to extract as much energy, they need more food intake. And then if you start mixing that in with a mature buck in this setting where he just sheds his velvet simultaneously, that means his testosterone is going to start increasing. As testosterone starts increasing energy output starts increasing and his metabolism starts increasing. Therefore he needs more food. But he’s also changing his brows at the same exact time. So not only is he going through a microbial transition in his roomen where he’s changing the type of food he’s trying to digest and extract energy from, but he’s also shedding velvet and having higher testosterone rates, which is going to cause him to go out and browse more frequently and really hyper focus in the first two weeks of season in most cases just dependent upon when acorn when they make that transition, but really hyper focus for around two weeks on one individual food source as their gut makes that transition. So I don’t know if that has to do with anything we were just talking about, but I.

01:19:50
Speaker 1: Well, as I hear that, it sounds almost like hyperphasia, which is something that bears go through when they’re preparing for hybernation for a different reason and in this case, but does that has that I’m curious if that leads to like an increased opportunity or maybe that explains why we see a better opportunity in the early season because you have this transition occurring. Have you observed that yourself last year when you watched deer doing this.

01:20:18
Speaker 3: As I feel like, yeah, I feel like I’ve observed it myself, and I feel like I’m definitely observing it right now with the drought that’s taken place and how they’re having to make a pretty quick transition from because they just haven’t had much available green forbes, and I think that that will definitely cause him ature buck to be more active to try to get out and get his brows. But we’re also simultaneously being hit, you know, opening day of season in Missouri right now, the fifteenth, it’s it’s ninety degrees outside. It’s hot, So I think that I haven’t flown today, but I would assume I did see on trail cameras. I would assume that a lot more activity is going to take place kind of in the really really early morning timeframe where it’s seventy seven degrees outside, whereas a lot of guys in the early season they’re kind of waiting to go and hunt the evening time frame, kind of that late evening whenever they’re going to be moving. But I think they’re going to move kind of at the start of dark or really really close to the end of shooting light in these really hot days, and then in the morning timeframe, they’re going to be pretty active because it’s just so much cooler. And whenever you have a mature buck running around in eighty five to ninety degree weather and his body’s trying to put on a new coat to prepare for the winter for the Midwest area, then that’s not a good situation.

01:21:30
Speaker 2: It’s actually kind of.

01:21:31
Speaker 3: Dangerous for them to try to move around a lot in these peak heat timeframes. So you’re going to see a lot more activity in the morning while this heat’s still here. But in five days, it’s going to change because a little bit of weather’s going to come in. It’s going to be seventy seven degrees outside. Evening movement might start to ramp up at that time frame where they’re consistently going to acorns or woody brows. And yeah, but there’s so many variables across the board for all this type of stuff, So to be able to give like a blanket answer on anything, it’s very difficult because things change season by season basis, and you have to realize that as a hunter.

01:22:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, so I believe I heard you mentioned somewhere that you’re going to be releasing a video soon about the early season to some degree and making the claim that the early season might be the best time to kill a mature buck. Is that right? Is that how you feel? And what have you seen in your research that makes you feel that way?

01:22:22
Speaker 2: Yeah?

01:22:22
Speaker 3: And the heavy distinction on that is, I think it’s the best time to kill a specific target mature buck, not just immature buck. I think that if you’re wanting to target an individual animal, then the early season is the best time frame. And that’s that has to do with a lot of the stuff that I just talked about, with how he’s going to have to be forced into browsing on these really hyper focused scenarios, which in the Midwest is oftentimes on white oak corns in the early season. But it also has to do with one their visibility is pretty easy in this timeframe, and they’re betting locations. It seemed everything just seems to be a little bit smaller and a little bit tighter, and they’re oftentimes still bachelored up for this first like especially the first week, some of them have already split. I mean, I don’t know if that comes down to an individual characteristic thing. But some bucks have already split from their bachelor group. But oftentimes the ones that are still bachelored up, especially they I just think they’re a lot easier to hone in on where they’re bedding and where they’re moving to in the evening, and it just it makes that it opens them up to a lot more availability to be hunted. Whereas you start getting into the pre rut and post rut timeframe, everything starts getting haywire a little bit and all the bucks are moving all over the property every single day.

01:23:35
Speaker 2: And in terms of just killing a mature buck, yeah, I would say in my.

01:23:38
Speaker 3: Opinion, I think be rut or the post rut is the time frame if you’re hunting with a bow, if you’re hunting with a rifle, wait until light late season on a drought season, have a food plot of something that’s slightly green outside, Go sit in a tower, you know, hide in the bottom of the tower until the last thirty minutes of shooting light, pop up with a muzzleloader and fling a bullet at the first thing you see. I think that’s the best way to kill mature buck if you want to do it with that.

01:23:59
Speaker 2: That why that means.

01:24:00
Speaker 3: But as a bow hunter, I think pre ret and post rets really the best time frame if you’re just trying to kill a mature back. But early season, if you’re targeting an individual one, I think it’s I think it’s the best time.

01:24:12
Speaker 1: Did you see when watching these handful of individual mature bucks last year in the early season, were they more consistent with the food source they would choose? And I guess by that, I mean sometimes we might say, well, man, this is the best food plot in the area. I really think this buck’s bed in here, So I bet you he’s coming and hitting this food plot every night, or something like that. Maybe we overgeneralize or we make an assumption like that. Did that hold true in any case? Or were these deer man one day it’s here, one day it’s there. They weren’t as locked in as we maybe wish that they were.

01:24:47
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you were relating that to early season.

01:24:50
Speaker 1: Early season food. Yeah, but I’m curious if that applies anywhere else.

01:24:55
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:24:55
Speaker 3: No, I mean for early season, especially whenever acorns start dropping and they make that transition and they’re going to be hyper focused on it. And that’s where the whole ideology of finding the feed tree comes from if you can find the feed tree, then you can hunt the feed tree, et cetera, which is a really difficult thing to do. In big timber settings where there’s thousands of trees, good luck finding the first one that’s dropping acorns. So in that scenario, I think it’s going to be harder this season for a lot of people to be able to find the feed tree. But oftentimes, from my perspective and what I’ve seen with the drone and what I’ve seen in the past of the hunter is finding those trees that are isolated outside of timber, kind of on a field edge location. If you have that, and if you do, then that isolated tree that’s allowed being allowed to get more sunlight and put on a higher amount of acorn mass. Oftentimes, I believe they drop acorns sooner from what I’ve seen, And in that case, that’s why I’ve seen a lot with the drone and in person of mature bucks and in just deer in general moving out into these field edges and browsing underneath these these acorn trees. And I think another thing you can potentially mix in whether you’re in big timber or not big timber, is areas where there’s a tree positioned in a bit of a depression. So if you have a field edge and it’s in a little bit of a depression, then that area is going to naturally retain more moisture and it’s going to put on more acorns. So, especially in a drought season like we are now, that particular tree in a depression might be able to put on a higher acorn mass. But in a scenario where you only have big timber and you don’t have pialle edges, try to look for those natural types of drainages and in types of depressions where there’s oak trees in that particular location. And oftentimes you can actually see it on topography where if you look at the imagery from a top down perspective and the leaves are on in your imagery, then you can see the leaves are greener in that location where there’s depression, and that’s because it’s naturally retaining more moisture, which allows the leaves to retain more floor fill. Acorns are going to be bigger, potentially healthier, et cetera. And I would like to think that you’re going to funnel those particular areas over anywhere else. But I don’t know about the big timber setting, but definitely field edges. That’s a that’s a big thing. If you can find trees just outside of the outside of timber, it seems to be that they really like walking into those fields and browsing on those larger mature oak trees.

01:27:12
Speaker 1: Makes sense. You bring up topography a lot, and at some point in our conversation, I think you alluded to the fact that you know that can sometimes be more dependable for predicting or patterning deer than anything. In being able to watch all of these deer over the course of the season, I know that you have seen them use a whole slew of different kinds of topographical features. You’ve watched them use saddles, us benches, use thermal hubs, use points, use ridge lines, whatever. Is there any one particular topographic feature that was more important than you realize or maybe the very most important? And was there anything that ended up being a dud which you were like, Ah, I would have thought that this would have been much more important for how these deer use their world, and they just didn’t.

01:28:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, I think I have good, pretty good answers for those.

01:28:06
Speaker 3: Two one, saddles or saddles are really good. But in my opinion, from what I’ve seen, if you can position a saddle right up against a habitat transition where there’s maybe a clear cut and then maybe some mature timber, like a thin stretch of mature timber, and then a field edge, and they’re all kind of up against or next to a saddle, that little thin stretch of timber or by thin stretch of timber. It could be two hundred and fifty yards wide, or it can be fifty yards wide, but that thin stretch of timber I think is going to be heavily active by especially mature bucks right up against the clear cut edge, and not especially not up against the field edge, but right up against the clear cut edge. I think they utilize those clear cut edges kind of wrapping nearby saddles very very consistently from what I’ve seen. And in terms of the dud, I’ve seen some areas where I mentioned in a video where there’s a topographical feature where it from a map it looks like an extremely amazing funnel for like a hunter. You see it and it’s just like, oh my gosh, every single deer in the area that crosses this area, I’m going to be undetected all the time, and there’s no way it’s going to smell me. And it’s such a tight funnel thirty yards or something, and like you just you’re going to have a shot everything that walks by you. And I had one of these, and I don’t know the exact term for this particular topographical feature. It was more of like a if you had two large sections of land on either side, and then there’s this thin thirty yards light thirty yard like bridge that connects the two together. And in this case the one that I had, it was a little over one hundred yards wide. I think it was one hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty yards wide, this thin stretch. Deer would not walk on that thin stretch, this bridge that connected these two pieces of land.

01:29:50
Speaker 2: Versus walking on it.

01:29:51
Speaker 3: And I have seen them walk on it before, but more often than not, they would take the travel route that went down into a drainage over to a clearcut edge and then on the other side, essentially four xing the amount of distance that they were going to have to travel to avoid the thin stretch of a bridge that connected these two pieces of land and too tight.

01:30:10
Speaker 1: Too tight of a funnel.

01:30:12
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was too tight of a funnel. I think in this scenario maybe it was too long as well. Maybe if it was shorter and it was like twenty or thirty yards, they’d be willing to take the risk. But since it was such a long funnel and there’s a bluff on one side and there’s a cliff on the other side, it was pretty much like a suicide mission where if you get on it and then you have two I guess it’s not good terminology to utilize. But and you have two predators come on either side of you in that scenario, then the only place that you can go to is right off the cliff, and then you know, good luck have fun with that. So I think they avoided those scenarios more often than not because of just how tight that they were.

01:30:46
Speaker 2: It was too good to be true type of situation.

01:30:49
Speaker 1: That’s really interesting. You have put out five videos now, I think, unveiling some of your findings. You have been on for five different podcasts talking about all of these different things you’ve seen. You’ve had ostensibly hundreds of comments with people kind of looking at what you’ve shared from your observations and giving them you know, they’re sharing with you their thoughts on it or their questions. I’m curious when you take everything you’ve heard so far, all the questions you’ve gotten, all the comments you’ve gotten, what is the one thing that people are missing? So you’ve you’ve shared all this information about your observations, about what you’ve seen, about what you’re learning about these trends that maybe you’re identifying. What are people getting wrong after they’ve consumed everything you’ve shared. Either they’re just not they’re not understanding you correctly, or they’re just ignoring You’ve you’ve said this important thing, but nobody seems to bring it up, or no one seems to be remembering it. Does anything stand out as that thing that you wish people we’re paying more attention to from the you know, this thing you’ve put out into the world.

01:32:05
Speaker 3: Yeah, I’m it might not be a perfect answer for it, But the person that comes to my mind is kind of people that are a little more woodsmanship, kind of you know, outdoorsy mentality. They really like hunting like it used to be type situation, a little bit borderline anti technology, and they see what I’m doing, and they immediately dive in on it like he’s utilizing technology. This is unethical, unethical, unethical, like this needs to be banned across the board and for hunters and everything like that. And I think that they’re missing the fact that this is scientific research for one, but two, really the main one of the main goals for what I’m doing and the way that I’m pitching it and showing it to people is that you don’t need to be heavily reliant on technology. It’s actually a disadvantage in most cases to become heavily reliant on technology and to be able to kill mature but consistently year after year, you have to become a woodsmanship type hunter. You have to be able to go out and apply yourself on the property and do a lot of research and study topography prior to going in and map all these certain variables, and then go in person and verify all these variables, and then take all the infield activity and scouting and everything that you’ve been able to apply and apply it at a whole picture setting to be able to hunt property as a hunter should and especially how hunters used to hunt, so literally exactly what they’re wanting to be able to do. My work is showing why you have to do that. If you want to be able to consistently kill mature buck barring, you know in states where you can pour out corn piles, et cetera, etc. Stuff like that, you need to become this woodsmanship time intell They literally exactly what these people are wanting if they see the technology and they initially just jump on it in the fact that like, oh, how dare he in this unethical setting? And I understand it from like a hunter’s perspective. If you’re buying a thermal drone and you’re going out and you’re attempting to utilize one to hunt with in that situation, then that is the most unethical thing that I think you can do in the hunting community right now. I think that that is a terrible, terrible thing because you can go out and you can locate exactly where a deer is betting, and then you can position yourself directly off of that location, and yeah, you’re going to increase your odds dramatically In terms of patterning one, I think it’s difficult, But in terms of going out and locating one and hunting directly off of that intel. Oh that’s one hundred percenter, Like, yeah, you’re going to have a much higher odds of getting a shot on them. I still think it’s difficult. A mature buck is still mature buck. It’s not going to be easy, especially if you’re using a bow. In fact, most people are probably still going to fail if they’re using a bow, But if you’re hunting with a rifle or etc. You’re probably going to start succeeding. And I know I’ve heard things of people already attempting to use them in hunting situations, and it’s really I like to get my opinion out there on how I feel about it. And in my opinion, if you’re willing to go and spend ten thousand dollars on a thermal drone to go out and locate mature bucks and hunt them directly based off of what you’re seeing and field, then I would highly highly recommend you to go and find a high fence property. And I don’t mean a high fence property that’s where the animals are still wild on it and they’re actually like still difficult toun.

01:35:13
Speaker 2: I highly recommend finding the ones.

01:35:15
Speaker 3: Where they release one out of a pin around fifty yards in front of you, and they pour kind of like a corn pile, or they have some type of food source within twenty yards of your stand location, and that deer walks. You can see the fence still, you know where you’re sitting. That deer walks a straight line to the food source and you take a shot on it. I would highly recommend you utilize that style of hunting versus buying a thermal drone and going and ruining everything for everybody else on public lands or even your private land.

01:35:39
Speaker 2: So yeah, that’s my feeling. It’s a pretty strong opinion, but.

01:35:42
Speaker 1: I appreciate you sharing that. I have had similar concerns when I have started to see how these tools can be used. Scare the heck out of me, honestly to see it and to imagine how somebody could use this during the hunting season. And so the first thing I started wondering was, Okay, how do we put guardrails on this? How do we reckon with this? Because it’s it’s not like this is just going to go away. These tools are only going to become more affordable and more widespread, and so how do we as a hunting community figure out where this lives within our world. We’ve kind of figured out where trail cameras lived within the fair chase world, although technology keeps on changing there. But I’m curious if you were to sit with the Missouri State Game Commission and they would say, Hey, Derek, you’ve been using these thermal drones. You know what they can do. You know how incredibly effective they are at finding deer so quickly and zooming right in on them and seeing everything they do all day. If you or us, how would you recommend managing this, regulating it in some way to preserve fair chase hunting in the future of our tradition here? What would you tell them?

01:36:55
Speaker 2: Yeah?

01:36:55
Speaker 3: Recommending Yeah, I would think that from a hunter’s perspective, they need to be tamped down completely, pretty much banned across the board from a hunter hunter’s perspective, And I know you start getting into a kind of iffy error whenever you apply that private land. It’s like to my private land, and I can do what I want to on it. So that would be something that maybe they’re going to have to figure that one out, because I don’t know the answer in relation to public and private. But one hundred percenter for public land, absolutely no use, no use case policy. I do think that they are extremely effective and should remain used for deer recovery activities. I think that that is a very good way to utilize one, and and I think dogs are equally effective and in some cases they’re even more effective in a situation where you have extremely dense foliage on trees. But I think that especially going to the late season where if you’ve got a you know, a single lung or a or a gut shot on one and they’re going to be living for a long time, a dog could potentially bump that deer up in some situations, and thermal drone you’re not having any impact on that particular deer. So it’s actually a very very ethical way to go about tracking one. I know that my state in particular, if you track one and you locate it, you’re not allowed to go in and finish it off at the moment. And I don’t know what, you know, what application you could do for that. I’ve previously thought the idea of like being able to contact a conservation agent as a pilot and then kind of narrow out the fact that like this deer really is shot, this deer really is wounded and we should be able to go out and finish it, and then they accept that. But at the same time, most conservation agencies are underemployed, and like the idea of that is just not something that’s applicable. So I don’t know where that falls in line. But as someone who has tracked a deer before, and I’ve seen one wounded laying there in a position that you could go and finish it off, but legally you’re not allowed to. You have to sit back and wait. That kind of hurts me mentally from an ethical standpoint. And the reason that’s put in place is because somebody could hire a pilot to go out and locate a buck that they just shot, and then they never actually shot them, and then you give them that pin location and then they go and hunt based off of that. So that’s why it’s in place, which makes complete sense. So I don’t know where you know that that needs to be fixed, but I do think it’s unethical to locate one that’s clearly wounded and more mortally wounded and just watch him die over the course of six eight hours. I think it’d be cool if you could go finish one off but I just don’t know the application for that.

01:39:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, from the what I’m doing perspective, I think.

01:39:17
Speaker 3: It needs to be heavily regulated, especially on public land, and in a similar way like think about how you can’t buy a GPS color and go out and trank your deer and track them with a GPS CARR.

01:39:28
Speaker 2: So it needs to be sanctioned to the point that it’s it’s really utilized by groups.

01:39:33
Speaker 3: And organizations in a controlled fashion for scientific research purposes, and it’s not really something that’s publicly available at that level. And that’s once again where you get into the public land versus private land, and you know, people, if there’s still something that you can buy and you want to utilize it on your on your private land to go and do dota buck I think that’s a great application as well, dota buck analysis and whatnot for private land properties where they’re potentially overpopulated but they really don’t know how how much overpopulated they are.

01:40:01
Speaker 2: Thermal drones an extremely.

01:40:02
Speaker 3: Effective way to go out and locate how many deer you have on a property at that exact moment in time, and then you can kind of manage your dough population based off of that. In most situations, people are highly overpopulated and they don’t realize that. So I think that’s a that’s a really good use case. And I know a lot of conservation agencies are trying to get people to kill more does because they just don’t realize how many are actually out there, and a lot of people just kind of they don’t really want to and they want to focus on antlers, but they just don’t realize the implications that they’re having. So maybe there’s a way to still be able to apply that at a at a private level. But yeah, no, in the end, it’s a it’s a tough question to be able to ask and to really narrow down on what to do. But from a from a hunting perspective, especially a public land hunting perspective, I think it needs to be harped on and really narrowed down and tightened as to the capabilities of these things and people’s availability to go out and do them, and and actually the ramifications if someone’s caught doing one, utilizing a thermal drone hunting on public land, et cetera.

01:41:03
Speaker 2: I think that needs to be hype dramatic.

01:41:05
Speaker 3: You need to be getting held accountable at a very high level or if you’re going to be doing that in my opinion, yeah, well, like.

01:41:12
Speaker 1: You said, you can’t be tranking deer and putting collars on them and tracking them, So why should you be able to track them even more closely with video camera all day throughout the year and then hunt them right then? I think that’s raises incredible red flags. I would love to see the use of them in season banned, with the exception of recovery. It seems like in season use of this tool is just full of really, really dangerous implications. I have a friend who has one of these, who has said that he is going to lock his thermal drone in a safe and give the code to his wife so he is not tempted to get it out in season and look at deer because it’s it seems like so fascinating to do it and so tempting. And then honestly, he said, it’s like addicting, just like every day you want to go and see where they are, see what they’re doing, watch them, and we love deer. We love watching deer. It’s so interesting, so it’s very tempting. I would imagine if you had this power that you would want to use it, but I think that I think we have to be really, really, really careful about it. And I’m glad that you are, that you proactively chose to not hunt while using this tool, and that you are speaking out so firmly on the concerns sitch. I think that’s that’s that’s very admirable and I appreciate that, so thank you. Derek.

01:42:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I definitely have had scenarios where like I’m human as well, right, So, like I’ve had situations where, in particular, I see some of the bucks that I love hunting are like a like one hundred and twenty to one hundred and forty inch kind of gnarly mainframe seven or eight, just like a disgustingly massive, mature dominant fact.

01:42:45
Speaker 2: I love.

01:42:45
Speaker 3: I love those deer, and I would see one with drone and it’s like, man, you’d be fun to hunt. Like if I could go out and like actually just sling an er at you, I would I would really enjoy that. But then at the same timeframe, I kind of recollect myself and it’s like, you don’t be really fun to research and observe and see how you behave versus this one hundred and seventy inch mainframe ten that I’ve been observing as well, and because he had a lot more aggressive and dominant tendencies to just be.

01:43:10
Speaker 2: Able to analyze that.

01:43:11
Speaker 3: So you kind of had to reel yourself in whenever you’d see stuff like that and realize, you know what you’re doing. And I think that one thing that started hitting me as well was a couple of months into the research, it became a normal thing for me, like analyzing deal with this thermal drone because no one knew about it. It was just me, and analyzing deer with thermal drone became a very normal event for me.

01:43:32
Speaker 2: It was just it was what I did.

01:43:33
Speaker 3: Every day, and I had to like re realize what I’m doing and how important and how amazing it actually was, and how this was like the first time anyone’s done this at this level, and just continue to remind myself that, like, this is why you’re doing this, this is why you’re focusing on research and in an extremely ethical way, and don’t go beyond that boundary, like stay within your realm of possibility.

01:43:55
Speaker 2: And that’s that’s exactly what I did. So, yeah, it’s fun.

01:43:58
Speaker 1: So how do you plan on navigating this in the future, like are you are you going to hunt this year? Are you going to set aside the drone so you can hunt again? Are you going to do something different in the future, Like what does that? What does your future look like?

01:44:12
Speaker 2: Yeah?

01:44:12
Speaker 3: No, I’ve been asked as well, like if I had to have the drone or bow hunt, which one would I do? And at the moment, for me personally, I would I would throw the drone away and I would just focus.

01:44:20
Speaker 2: On bow hunting for the rest of my life.

01:44:22
Speaker 3: But being that I still can’t have the drone and I can fly it, I’m going to focus on really individualistic kind of scientific research and I’m going to use that research from this season in coordination with some other people and some other names in the industry, and be able to pitch larger scale, privately funded research projects moving into the future. And as for me hunting, I’ve already mentioned that I don’t believe it’s ethical for me to hunt, especially the property that I researched probably seventy percent of the time, which makes me sad from the perspective that, like I grew up on that farm, That’s where I did a lot of my hunting growing up, and now I’m I’m I don’t think, especially until a massive habitat change happens, like say we go in and do some big per cuts, et cetera. In the next ten years. I think at that point it might become viable for me again. But even then, in my heart of hearts, like I know some terrain driven locations where there’s it’s just a what, like, there’s no way I wouldn’t kill mat your buck no matter what the habitat changes. We’re like, they are just that good of a location. And then that’s another thing, you know, moving beyond me, Like I have a son and a daughter, but especially my oldest son whenever he hits age to start hunting, and I want him to be able to go and enjoy that property at the same level that I did whenever I grew up. It’s like, how do I how do I feel that do it? Definitely can’t give him the you know these locations that I know, so in my brain it’s kind of as if I’m just going to have to let him figure it out and we’re going to go in, We’re going to rifle hunt in the middle of a food plot in a field and a tower in the beginning, and then we’re going to kind of start expanding beyond that if he’s interested, and start you know, maybe helping him position himself and learn those locations. But I can’t just give the keys to the kingdom and be like, go sit in this spot everything like that, because you’re going to kill a big buck. So you have to kind of like feel that for not only myself, but future people as well. And there’s also other people that watch the channel that still hunt that property and kind of safeguarding how de youer actually utilizing it, but still making it extremely accurate for the video and not giving away those locations that, in my opinion are those like top three locations across the property, so that way people aren’t able to take advantage of it. So, ye know, it’s a very interesting err And that’s one thing I’ve thought about going to the future as well with research is researching a property and then finding a similar property in terms of terrain features, and then mimicking the types of travel routes that the buck was doing on the property that I was researching, especially if it’s private land, and displaying it on YouTube in a different format on a different property, so that way, the people that hunt that property aren’t able to gain any extra edge for their hunting strategy. Thankfully, the main properties I’ve been researching, the guys hunt like two to three days during rifle season in their food plots, over a tower and in a tower, and that’s that’s also it’s not going to have that big of an effect for them. They’re not going to go out of their way. They’re they’re kind of old men and they just got they.

01:47:11
Speaker 2: Go sit in a tower.

01:47:13
Speaker 3: But still there’s just a lot of things to kind of keep in the back of your brain as you’re giving out this information. That’s especially in a private land setting where people can go out and access it, that that might have access to hunt property.

01:47:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know, I don’t.

01:47:25
Speaker 3: I don’t know, But for me as a hunter, I think that I’ll start focusing more on public land and then there might be some other private land, you know, situations where I haven’t I haven’t done research before or hunted in the past, where it’d be fun to go out and hunt those maybe least properties or hunting clubs or something. But definitely kind of leaning more towards public land, and in terms of my personal hunting that I do. And then still on the private lands that I’ve hunted, you know, my whole life. I think I’m fine to go out and manage those on those properties, like going out and shooting them with my bow or a rifle in that setting. But yeah, positioning myself in a location and where I know mature buck is going to be forced to travel on that area, I just don’t think that’s I don’t think that’s acceptable.

01:48:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, So on this these future places you hunt, public land or other private what is the single biggest change you and vision making to your hunting strategy based on what you’ve learned so far?

01:48:20
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, the number one thing that I’m going to look for is habitat diversity. If I can find habitat diversity on any public land or new private land that I’m going to be hunting, then I will start immediately hyper focusing on that area. And then if I can put that habitat diversity in correlation with potentially a small micro thermal hub or a large thermal hub or saddles, et cetera, in these locations where deer are going to be more likely than to travel, then I’ll continue to hyper focus on that more than anything, and where those habitat diversity areas are. And then on top of that, that’s whenever you start getting into the train driven type features, especially if I’m still hunting a train I’m not hunting in like hill country terrain, I think I become like a seventy five percent worse hunter automatically. But if I’m like in my hill country type stuff, I think that I’m pretty stink and lethal right now. But yeah, no, I would be focusing on habitat diversity and in relation to terrain features and kind of you know, thermal hubs, saddles, et cetera. These really high hot areas. And also it’s highly dependent upon season. You know in early season that where I’m going to be hunting is not where I’m going to be focusing on during the post rut, et cetera. So kind of finding that that balances to where I’d be. But really, the main thing that I would be focusing on, especially where mature bucks are going to be moving, is areas with habitat diversity, especially if you can find a clear cut for an edge, because it seems like when they’re moving through the timber and heading into location, if say he walks through a funnel that’s two hundred yards wide, and he walks up this ridge, which in my opinion, a two hundred wide section where he’s forced to travel. That’s still funnel. It doesn’t have to be thirty yards wide. Anywhere where he is forced to travel, in my opinion, is a fumbel is a funnel. And in this in this case, let’s say’s two hundred yards wide, and he walks up that ridge anywhere within that two hundred wide section. But every single time when he makes it to this habitat edge, it’s as if he just like walked into a brick wall and he made it to his destination and then he moves based off of that. So he’s kind of using these habitat features and edges as kind of key like things to focus on and be able to kind of re engineer his brain as to where he’s located and then move based off of that.

01:50:29
Speaker 2: If that makes sense. So that’s why I would be looking for habitat adversity.

01:50:33
Speaker 1: Very interesting. Well, there where can folks go to see these videos you’ve shared so far and everything else is to come?

01:50:41
Speaker 3: Yeah, White toil research across the board. Actually, if you google mam. I’m at the top now, so I made it. I’m at the top for white Tail Research gradulations, So yeah, I feel great about that. I bragged to my wife every day about that topic. But so yeah, white Tail Research across the board. My main platform is going to continue to be YouTube. I might start posting for talk because I am a wild life phtographer, might start posting photography and stuff to Instagram and whatnot in the future. And then I also have a website, white Tail Research dot net. It’s actually going to be changing here soon because I’ve made a new one that might have merchandising and I might be able to sell drones, et cetera. And then I have a Patreon coming out soon white Tail Research as well, where I’ll kind of give because as you’ve seen, I haven’t put many videos out across the time. Permit’s because I’m really particular about the style of videos that get put on white Tail Research. They have to kind of be a little bit of research oriented, and if they’re not, I don’t want to put them in that application. So the Patreon ideas, it’s going to kind of focus on things in the background that I’m doing and actively so that way the people that are wondering where I’ve been for the last month, it’s like, well, you can go there and that’s where that’s what I’ve been doing. So it’s going to and there’s going to be more stuff like live poals for research ideas and all sorts of randomness. But yeah, white tail research across the board though, for everything that I’ve got, and in terms of socials, I think I have every one of them.

01:51:55
Speaker 2: I don’t really like social.

01:51:56
Speaker 3: Media, so like TikTok and all that type of stuff, I’m not very active on.

01:52:00
Speaker 2: But maybe someday I will be. I don’t know, we’ll see.

01:52:02
Speaker 1: So you’re not missing out, yeah, I think so. Well, Derek, I appreciate you sharing all this. I appreciate the work you’ve done so far, really really interesting stuff, and we’re looking forward to seeing what else you’ll be sharing in the coming weeks and months, and whatever new research projects you and Bronson get into this year or next year we will be particularly excited about. So thank you and best of luck this year with the next version of the research.

01:52:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks for having me on, man. I appreciate it.

01:52:34
Speaker 1: All right, And that’s a wrap. Thank you for tuning in. I appreciate you listening to this episode, joining me for this conversation. Really really wild stuff. It’s going to be interesting to see how further studies expand on our understanding of deer another game. I love the fact that Derek is going to be working with you know, respected well trained researchers such as Bronson Strickland. I think that’s going to really give us further depth of understanding of what we’re dealing with here, and I can’t wait to see what they uncover. So until next time, thank you, and stay Wired to Hunt.