Ep. 783: Does the Moon Impact Deer Behavior?

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
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I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds, no compromise,
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(00:31):
just gear that works. Check it out at first light
dot com. That's f I R S T L I
T E dot com for people. Oh no, the show
is starting right now with this ring. Can it start
with this ring?

Speaker 2 (00:48):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (00:49):
Sounds good dyland Mark Canyon. If he doesn't pick up
where we keep it, you think, I see? Oh, Mark,
you know who I'm sitting here with. I have no
idea you're on you're on the You're not on the air,
but you know what I mean, you're being recorded. Okay,
Uh it's me Mark.

Speaker 3 (01:14):
I'm here with doctor Bronson Strickland.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
Hm hm, great guy. And I'm about ready to start
telling him about the last thing you told me about
deer in the moon and I and I'm gonna like
kind of make you look bad. Then I thought that
that it was a very interesting point I was telling
you about how you know you and I have argued

(01:39):
about whether deer are impacted by lunar phases. Yep, you're
very I mean you're you're very aware of this debate.

Speaker 4 (01:48):
Very aware of it.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
I'm position is, well, I'll tell you what you said
the last time we talked, Mark, and it was a
long time ago, and it's stuck in my head, it's
stuck in my craw you were you were kind of
hinting at that science can't detect the subtle difference. Is
that could the subtle, subtle things that could make a

(02:11):
difference between your success and your failure where you're like,
if that buck steps out of the woods a minute earlier,
that could be the difference and science can't find that. Yes,
So when I say about how you think that, you
still think that, well, that has been not my position,

(02:38):
but my.

Speaker 3 (02:40):
No, you didn't put it to me like a question.

Speaker 5 (02:43):
So I've always said that that is the question that
I feel like science has yet was like, there's all
these studies that show that cold fronts don't impact movement
in a statistically significant way, or the moon in many
different ways has not shown yet to make a statistics
that's a difference. So I've always been curious though, because

(03:03):
on when we see that in all the studies. On
the other hand, you have all these other hunters with
anecdotal evidence that you.

Speaker 2 (03:09):
Know that says that's not the case.

Speaker 5 (03:11):
And so my question has always been, maybe maybe we're
just not measuring in the same way or in quite
the right way to us these tiny.

Speaker 3 (03:21):
Little possible edges that you could get.

Speaker 5 (03:25):
So I'm still like very much on the fence. So
Steel like, I'm just curious. I'm Moon curious.

Speaker 1 (03:29):
That's how I've always described myself.

Speaker 3 (03:32):
We already talked about you being Moon curious.

Speaker 1 (03:35):
I'm Mark.

Speaker 3 (03:35):
I'm Mark curious.

Speaker 1 (03:37):
Ye know.

Speaker 5 (03:37):
And Bronson has done a really good job of a
lot of this stuff. So I'm glad you're talking to
him because he's someone who I listened to a lot
and uh, and he certainly knows better than I.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
I'm simply a guy with questions.

Speaker 1 (03:49):
Yeah. Remember how I said you're on the air, Mark, Yeah,
Well you know what I found all was interested ther
day after the after learning at the other day where
the FCC start like threatening people for say and stuff
they didn't like. Yeah, I was like, the FCC has
nothing to do with podcasts. But then I was like,
do they the FCC has nothing to do with podcasts?

(04:10):
Is that a question of statement.

Speaker 3 (04:12):
No, I'm telling you it's true because you're not on
the air.

Speaker 1 (04:15):
You're not on the air, you're not we're not using
the air, so we can say like things and the
FCC won't threaten us and take the show off the air.
So if they get mad about this lunar phase stuff,
there's nothing to do about it.

Speaker 5 (04:27):
Saying a lot of crazy stuff about the moon over
all these years, I would hate to be brought to
court almose past.

Speaker 1 (04:34):
You can do this the hardware of the easy way mark.
That's what they say. All right, man, we'll talk to
you later. Thank you. When the episode comes out, why
don't you listen and we'll try to find out if
what you're saying is a thing or not.

Speaker 2 (04:47):
I'm looking forward to.

Speaker 1 (04:51):
As we just said, day goodbye to him. Oh, I
don't really do that.

Speaker 6 (04:55):
Never, No, not even if it's your wife.

Speaker 1 (04:58):
Definitely not.

Speaker 2 (04:58):
No, that is a of Steve's is it's a it's
in the name of efficiency that please, thank you, hello, goodbye.
Once you achieve a certain intimacy with Steve follow in
this category as well. That those pleasant trees are out
the window.

Speaker 6 (05:16):
I think, I think that happens to me too, But
and then I watch it happen to someone else.

Speaker 4 (05:23):
If you really want to.

Speaker 1 (05:25):
If you really want to dig it, I'll take a
quick break to take this for you. I like there's
people I talk to. I like the main people in
my life. I like I talked to him. I like
to talk to him a lot, so that anytime we
talk it's only about what we have to talk about.
The minute I go too long and I haven't talked

(05:46):
to somebody, then I dread talking to him because we've
got to do all the parts of talking that I don't.

Speaker 3 (05:52):
Want to do.

Speaker 6 (05:54):
You know what I mean, how's the family?

Speaker 1 (05:56):
So if I keep up like a cadence, like if
I call it Yanni, I don't need to get into like,
oh geez, how you been? Is the householding up? Ye know?
I mean, you know, and like wind up in something
like that. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (06:06):
I come to expect no small talk.

Speaker 1 (06:08):
So I just like if I call you on and
like hey blank blank, and he's like blank blank, and
then we just hang up because we like kept up
on it and we don't have to do like whatever
did happen? To your cousin you know I mean or whatever?
You know what I mean? Like, it's just better that way.
So I just like to. But I tell my wife
I love her, and I can always tell how I
stand with her because I'll do it because I'm just

(06:28):
trying to find out if she's mad at me about
something so big I love you and she says I
love you, then we're cool. If I go I love
you and she just hangs up the I'm like, oh
my god, now what now? Okay, you know what I mean.
So that's how I find out if I got it, like,
if I'm That's how I find out if I'm like
cool or not. When I go home.

Speaker 3 (06:46):
The longer I've been gone, the less likely I am
to get the return.

Speaker 1 (06:51):
You know, things get frosty at home. Join Today by
Doctor Brownson Strickland of University of Mississippi.

Speaker 4 (07:00):
Mississippi State University.

Speaker 1 (07:02):
Is that a big mistake?

Speaker 4 (07:03):
That's a pretty yeah.

Speaker 6 (07:06):
It's not on to make up for say, hot Toddy,
it's right.

Speaker 3 (07:15):
Where do I see it on?

Speaker 7 (07:15):
Here?

Speaker 6 (07:17):
The bigger?

Speaker 1 (07:20):
Doctor Brownson is the Saint John Family Professor of Wildlife
Management and the Extension Wildlife Specialist for Mississippi State University.
And what do you say when you.

Speaker 6 (07:31):
Say that that that's that's another mess up. You've offended
more Mississippi State folks.

Speaker 1 (07:39):
Yeah, what does it mean? Hot?

Speaker 3 (07:40):
Hot like Christmas drinks?

Speaker 6 (07:42):
I do think hatty toddy means anything. It's a different school.

Speaker 4 (07:45):
Yeah, that's old. Miss we booze it up.

Speaker 1 (07:51):
Mississippi State University. Did his did his BS degree in
forest resources in the University of Georgia. Did a master's
degree Texas A and m Kingsville PhD from Mississippi State University.
Bronson is the co director of the ms Here's where

(08:12):
things get interesting. He's a co director of the MSU
Deer Lab, a certified wild wildlife biologist, and professional member
of the Boone and Crockett Club. We're this is We're
here to make this is the most important podcast ever
ever done. I would say, because this is going to

(08:35):
be the final answer. This is gonna be we hope. Yeah.
Dudes out there that are like are they argue about
like the moon phase? And if I'm talking to Jay Scott,
We're going to go down to Mexico for Ko's Deer
And he's talking about what dates to go and he's

(08:56):
talking about what the moon's doing on those dates. Is
all of that true or not true? Every old man,
young man, not even old man, every hunter has an
opinion about what is the moon doing and how does
it effect dear movements.

Speaker 6 (09:13):
Jay Scott is one of those guys.

Speaker 3 (09:15):
I don't know where he stands now. Everybody changes.

Speaker 1 (09:18):
I used to just believe it too, because I like, well,
I used to believe that squirrels, that red squirrels bit
the nuts off gray squirrels. That's what I was told.

Speaker 2 (09:28):
He will definitely push us one way or another in
January according to what the Moon's going to be doing.

Speaker 1 (09:35):
When you know, so, I have a lot of I
have a lot of friends that are lunar guys, moon guys,
and like, here's the deal. And when we started playing
It's out, I had a conversation with Krint about it,
and I'm like, it's not ridiculous, Okay, I mean, what's
not ridiculous about is look at all the wildlife that
that absolutely one hundred percent is driven by moonface. Okay,

(09:59):
Like turtle nesting, like when turtles hatch turtles, like like
shore nesting turtles that lay eggs, their eggs hatch on
a new moon. Some species hatch where it's real dark. Okay,
what are the kind of examples we have? I mean
there's tons of things, man, fish, tides and fish. Yeah,

(10:22):
think about it's huge. Well, here here's another one for you.
I remember they You ever hear the writer Barbara King Salver.
She had a book called High Tide and Tucson, and
it was a book of like science writing. Was it
King Salver? Was it? They took these mollufs and brought

(10:44):
them to Tucson to a university what what universities in Tucson?
Camera They took these clams whatever the hell it is asu.
I believe it was clams. I'm sure it was clams.
They had these clams in an aquarium and Tucson, and
they didn't need the ocean to tell them what the
tide was doing. Their whole groove became tied to their

(11:07):
whole feeding groove became tied to the moon. And it's
not even enough, like it's an imperceptible Like the effect
on an aquarium is like imperceptible, right, But those suckers
tuned in and stayed on a lunar. They stayed on
a lunar cycle without even being where there's a giant
tide swing. Right, they just knew. So it stands the

(11:29):
reason with all these different creatures migratory birds, right, it
stands the reason, Like, yeah, the moon impacts stuff. So
for someone to say that the moon impacts how bucks move,
it's not crazy.

Speaker 4 (11:44):
It's not like dumb, it's not so Yeah, there is
a lot of evidence for some species. And I think
the species you mentioned that does make sense. The gravitational
pull affecting the tide or moonlight affecting visibility, all that stuff,
to me makes perfect sense. And I think there's a

(12:05):
lot of examples in the literature for that and it
being useful. But what I come back to is, but
what made it that way? How did the story begin
for white tail deer? Where has there ever been evidence
that its influencing whitetail deer except for Paul Paul the

(12:28):
stories that are passed down from grandfather today, you know,
and it just becomes part of the story, and it
makes it fun and it makes it interesting. And humans
are always looking for patterns, and we're really good at
looking for patterns even when they don't exist, and so
it adds I think this element to making it more

(12:48):
interesting when the bottom line is, in my opinion, I
think the evidence is very strong they're not influenced by
the moon whatsoever. And then you think about the natural
history of deer and you start asking your question, why
would they be.

Speaker 3 (13:06):
Uh, something to do with visibility.

Speaker 1 (13:11):
Well, like in reading like historic texts, you'll often find
people pre flashlight and stuff, people traveling by horse. You
read historic text you'll often find people planning trips to
have their trip coincide with a full moon for better
nighttime travel.

Speaker 3 (13:29):
So I used to think I'm the deer thing.

Speaker 1 (13:30):
I'm like, maybe just historically, when it's a full moon
and you're out at night, because there's more light, you
become aware of deer around you, so you can see
you can see them, and so you think in your head,
maybe you wind up thinking. Maybe people wind up thinking
when there's a full moon, the deer out.

Speaker 4 (13:53):
They're always out just because you seeing them.

Speaker 1 (13:55):
And so you're like, I'm out because I'm out traveling
at night because it's a full moon, I can see
I see deer because it's a full moon, and therefore
I don't know. People land on on that idea that
that's a wild I'm like, I'm grasping at straws big,
where did that come from? But but I like, like
probably the other guys in the room you can like,

(14:16):
I'd love to hear Yanni and Spencer like, how if
you can remember where it come from, where your idea
about this came from? And then and then and then
doctor Stricklan, I'd love to hear when you guys did
the survey, if you could talk about how eighty three
eighty three percent of hunter of surveyed hunters, eighty three

(14:41):
percent agree it affects moon, the moon affects deer movement.
What they don't agree on is why and how right right,
They don't agree on like what it does, how it
does it, but they believe it does something. But do
you remember, Yanni?

Speaker 2 (14:55):
Sure, I would say for me it didn't really come
down generationally it wasn't because basically for me growing up
before I came out West and started hunting professional, really
it was maybe five to ten days of archery in Michigan,

(15:15):
two or three days of shotgun, and then I'd get
three days of rifle in Wisconsin. That was like my
entire big game hunting year. So we're gonna be hunting
no matter what. Those days you know.

Speaker 1 (15:29):
You never got I'll take an opening day off this year.
I'm not hunting the opener because the looter phase just
no way, right.

Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yeah, exactly. And my dad just never got into it
to that level either, which is where I would have
got it. So I just started learning about it once
I started reading hunting magazines.

Speaker 1 (15:46):
And doing research on my own, and you would encounter it,
yeah as fat Yeah, I would say that.

Speaker 5 (15:53):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (15:56):
Where I felt like it actually played a part in
my hunting was that when I was an elkhunting guy
in Colorado, usually the second rifle season would coincide with
the pretty big moon. It would also coincide a lot
of times with some warmer weather, extreme amount of hunting pressure,

(16:16):
and it was always our hardest week of hunting. Would
still kill some olt, but man, it was always our
hardest week. So a lot a lot of factors that
play there, but it always would seem like that week
would also have a big moon, And in my mind
it was like, of course, they're just up all night
feeding and by the time we get to the meadow

(16:37):
half an hour before daylight, they're long gone.

Speaker 1 (16:39):
They're you know in bed. That's the version I was
raised on. Yeah, I was raised on, but again I
was raised on a full moon. They feed all night,
so they don't need to feed in the daylight hours.
But it had zero It was just an observation. It

(17:02):
was an observation, but it did not dictate your dictate
your habits. Right. It was like you had a two
week gun season, you were gonna hunt, you know whatever.
We weren't like going out or not going out based
on it, But it was just like you'd be like, oh,
it's too bad that there's a full moon on the opener.
They'll be out.

Speaker 6 (17:22):
Less because they convenient excuse, or if you're successful, you
did it in spite of a full moon, Like damn?

Speaker 1 (17:30):
Was that your awareness of what the moon was doing.

Speaker 6 (17:32):
I think when I was a kid, there was a
communal anti full moon take from like the deer hunters
in my area, and it was just a very rudimentary
understanding of like what moon, what moon phase would do
to deer movement. And it was like today and I
feel like in the last twenty years, there will be

(17:52):
very like hyper specific moments of the moon that are
good or bad for deer movement. It's like if a
new moon is rising under in the morning, Like that's
a thing people will say when I was a kid
that it was just like full moon bad, and it was.
It was not that they were up feeding all night.
It was that they were chasing tail all night. So
they were tired. They were like exhausted come first light.

(18:14):
And so now you're actually going to get some movements
like late morning, early afternoon, and so that is like
a stronger time to be in the woods, or it's
now as good as the morning or the evening. That's
like a take.

Speaker 1 (18:28):
Can you hit me that again?

Speaker 6 (18:29):
If if it's a full.

Speaker 1 (18:30):
Moon, since he's been chasing does all chasing does.

Speaker 6 (18:32):
All night, he can see things so well, it's like
it's not that no one even turned the lights off tonight,
you know they can. They can chase them all through
the hardwoods, all out in the cornfields. So now they're
tired come sunrise at seven thirty am, so they're just
bedded down somewhere already got it. But now they're getting
a little restless come like eleven am, and so they're
gonna be on their feet a little more from that

(18:53):
eleven am to one pm. Period kind of unorthodox. It's
been so long, yes, yep, and then you know, now
it's really thrown off his schedule, and that that like movement,
it's probably not going to be as good for like
that last you know, thirty minutes of shooting light either,
because his whole schedule's just off at this point.

Speaker 2 (19:12):
You know, what's coming coming to my mind is like that.
We always think about how the full moon would be
beneficial to these animals, right, like they can chase mortel
or they can feed better all night long. Right, but
they're prey animals, so like really the wolves can see
them better, the coyotes can see them better.

Speaker 1 (19:33):
Let's hear from the experts. Okay, let's start out. Tell
us about your survey. We just we just gave you
three really read Yeah, we just gave you two of
the things that are floating around out there. But tell
tell us about the survey he did.

Speaker 4 (19:49):
Okay, So before I get tops, so we did a
a buck movement project for a complete dealy different reason.
And so seven or eight years ago, I thought, uh, well,
this is going to be a great opportunity. We have
all these daily movement rates, and so I'm going to

(20:10):
tinker with this, real simple analyses. I'm gonna take these
daily movement rates averaged for the population day by day
by day and daytime movements nighttime movements, and it was
very apparent that when you plotted that from September all
the way to six weeks, two months or a month

(20:34):
plus post rut, all the variation in movement was apparent.
Is the rut, there is the right difference in daytime
movement nighttime movement. So so here we go. I'm gonna
put this on Facebook. So on top of that movement graph,
I plotted the oscillation of full moon, new moon, full

(20:55):
moon new and had those superimposed on each other. And
so you can see that from from the phase of
the moon from new to full in that period there's
a little there's no variation in deer movement whatsoever. And
so I put it out there on Facebook. Appears to me,

(21:15):
you know, the biology and and the science is very
clear that that there's nothing going on with the moon phase.
What state Mississippi?

Speaker 3 (21:25):
Yeah, come on.

Speaker 2 (21:27):
This is the thing, people, this is a.

Speaker 6 (21:29):
Thing you will yeah, okay, they will to be like,
well you didn't study the deer in Wisconsin.

Speaker 1 (21:35):
Well, what the typical things you can't win. You can't win.

Speaker 4 (21:39):
They won't even say in my state it will be
but my deer, yes.

Speaker 1 (21:49):
And so the fact I got I got it because
one thing that you got I never encountered it before.
So when you're talking about that, you're graphic movement. Can
you is this the yards per hour? Which great? M okay,
keep explaining that to people, like when you say, like
you're measuring movement, like, what what does that mean?

Speaker 4 (22:06):
What's the metric? Yeah, yeah, we typically do yards per
day or yards per hour. That that's the measurement, and
that's from the sequential GPS locations, So we're getting a
location from them every fifteen minutes and so it's just
the sum of that over whatever period of time and
you come up with a rate of movement from that.
So put that out there and a couple of people
where yeah, I knew nothing was going on with this.

(22:29):
What's but the overwhelming response was this guy's an idiot?

Speaker 1 (22:35):
Me this guy sure?

Speaker 4 (22:37):
And that has nothing to do with the moon phase.
That's what Grandpa talked about. What was moon phase. It's
moon position. It's the so lunar aspect of it. That
that's what's driving it. So it's what time of the
day is the moon overhead underfoot? Setting things like that,

(22:59):
where is the moon on the horizon, and the supposed
gravitational pull and how that might be impacting. That is
what got people interested in that. So that was all
the deal. And I didn't have any data at that
point to refute it, so I just tucked that away
like this just.

Speaker 1 (23:17):
Another eggheaded college guy about the mood.

Speaker 4 (23:21):
Yeah, a lot worse than that, but yeah. And so
that data set sat there and we you know, I
was holding that we got to do this, We've got
to do something more sophisticated. And I was very lucky
to have a coworker, a research analyst at POSTOCU named
Natasha Ellison. She has a PhD in mathematics, so undergraduate

(23:47):
masters PhD and mathematics with the application to biology and
movement ecology, and she actually tinkered with quantum mechanics for
her master's degree. One of her famous statements is the
math really wasn't that challenging for physics and quantum mechanics
with their master's degree. So she's at the tip of

(24:07):
the spear and understanding how to disentangle all this and uh,
I'm sure she chuckled and rolled her eyes when I
told her, it's like, Natasha.

Speaker 3 (24:16):
We got a problem with Bucks.

Speaker 4 (24:18):
We gotta we gotta do. We've got an opportunity and
this is going to be something No other academic is
going to spend this amount of time and emotion going
into this life. But we've got a real opportunity to do,
hopefully to do something special. And so she analyzed it
at a way a level of detail that had never

(24:39):
been done before. And so, but when we were digging
into that, and when we were trying to figure out
what we're gonna do, how we're gonna do it, et cetera,
we thought, you know, what, we need to do a survey.
We need to we need to figure out what what
people think and what are their expectations from If there

(25:01):
is a moon effect, how big is it? And so
we use the term in science called effect size, and
so is something statistically significant or not? That's what people
hear all the time. So it's really not as important
as effect size. Effect size just means the difference between
the treatment and the control. You get a one percent increase,

(25:23):
fifty percent increase, one hundred percent increase. That is what's
the most important people. So we did survey and got
to say this, this was not a sociology sanctioned, sophisticated
survey and that department. This was the MSU dear lab
us doing social media survey and just saying, hey, all

(25:48):
you people out there, what do you think about this?
So what came back was yet eighty three percent eighty
three percent of the people that responded thought the moon
is affecting deer movement in some way. And then a
subset of that, which was always more than half. You say, okay,
if it is affecting deer movement by how much and

(26:12):
the effect size they reported or the differences they reported
for something like betting, the difference in bedding was at
a minimum, they're on their feet thirty minutes earlier, or
they're on their feet up to two hours earlier. The
moon is stimulating them to get up out of their
bed two hours earlier. The distance that they were moving

(26:37):
in terms of velocity was always at least fifty yards
per hour, two greater than two hundred yards per hour.
So these people that are believing the moon is stimulating movement,
they're all in God, Yeah, they're different animals under a

(26:58):
specified moon condition.

Speaker 2 (27:00):
Ronson Were those respondents were they all from that general
area in Mississippi or were they nationwide?

Speaker 4 (27:06):
Nationwide?

Speaker 1 (27:08):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (27:08):
Nationwide?

Speaker 1 (27:09):
Certainly.

Speaker 7 (27:09):
Was there a specific concentration among you know, was twenty
five percent although nationwide twenty five percent respondents from like
Texas or.

Speaker 4 (27:19):
So difficult for us to tell because that was I
can't remember it was Facebook or Instagram and you might
be able to disentangle that. I can't.

Speaker 1 (27:32):
When they did the survey and you had eighty three
percent say that it did something, was it did you
find that there was a lot of that they had
contradictory opinions, meaning some people thought they moved earlier, people
thought they moved later, or did you find like was
let me put it a different way instead of exploring
all the exceptions, what if you had to synthesize it

(27:55):
and make it that like the general impression was what
among survey people?

Speaker 4 (28:02):
So during the day they betted less, meaning they're on
their feet more. They are on their feet if you're
thinking about an afternoon movement, about they're on their feet earlier,
and when they are moving they are moving at a
greater rate of speed. All of that which would result
in greater observability.

Speaker 3 (28:23):
When there's what happening with the moon.

Speaker 4 (28:26):
Name it.

Speaker 1 (28:28):
Oh, okay, so it's an idea that there's more movement,
but there's But like the general conception is, the general
perception is that what depending on what the moon is doing,
it drives more movement. But there's not a lot of
a there's not a lot of agreement about what the

(28:49):
moon needs to be doing to drive more movement. Yeah,
it's not like a it's not like a full.

Speaker 3 (28:56):
Moon gives more dear movement.

Speaker 1 (28:58):
People might disagree about the detail, but something happens and
there's more movement based on the moon. I'm not doing
a very good job of articulate.

Speaker 4 (29:06):
There is a moon situation for every person and their
pet hypothesis for when I want to go hunt. Okay,
it's either I'm going to go with the moon overhead
or the moon underfoot, or the moon is setting or rising,
or it's a full moon, or we're in the perigy
or apogee because of the gravitation, it's closer or it's
further away. Every single day you can pull out a

(29:29):
scenario of what the moon is doing.

Speaker 1 (29:31):
Got it?

Speaker 3 (29:31):
And but whatever that is, it's driving movement. No, it's
not you know what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 (29:37):
No, No, in their mind, yeah, and they're sold and
then and then in their mind yeah, in the mind
of a And I'm not trying to dog on them
like in the mind of because, like I said, I
used to I used to think there was something to it.
Is it fair to say that that people that believe
it also believe that there's like the opposite effect. Meaning

(29:57):
let's say you're a full moon or like you're a
full moon guy, You're a full moon guy, Like I
see more deer movement at a full moon? Do they do?

Speaker 3 (30:07):
They usually then believe.

Speaker 1 (30:08):
That there is a opposite effect, So a new moon
equals yes, an extreme on the other example, like much
less movement.

Speaker 4 (30:18):
Yeah, that's the reason the deer weren't moving today.

Speaker 1 (30:21):
Yeah, because of the opposite gotcha. So it's not just
it creates a spike, but it's sort of this like
trend that moves in and out.

Speaker 4 (30:28):
Yeah, and it has a top and bottom. Ya, a
spike and then a suppression. Yeah, God during daylight hours.
And that's what we focused on. What hunters are going
to see?

Speaker 6 (30:37):
What did your study find that did impact deer movement
just the rut.

Speaker 4 (30:43):
Yeah, so crepuscular periods. So nothing supersedes this, Nothing comes
even close to superseding sun up and sundown and the rut.
There is a subtle, subtle effect of temperature, and that
is what Natasha, It's really complicated in this multivariate all

(31:07):
these variables are interacting, but there is a subtle effect
of temperature. Meaning in our neck of the woods it
would be different up Nora, uh huh, and our neck
of the woods, when you start getting sub forty degrees,
we will see a little bit more higher of a
movement rate during daylight hours.

Speaker 6 (31:25):
I feel like you're saying that is like the hottest
take a dear biologist has ever had on deer temperature movement.
And yeah, yeah, deer movement based on tempera.

Speaker 4 (31:35):
Well, this is the guy right here that said for
more than a decade, it had nothing to do. We
do not see any signature whatsoever of temperature. But it
took more data, and it took the right type of
person analytically to tease apart very very subtle differences, a
skill set that I didn't have.

Speaker 1 (31:56):
Yeah, can you lay out you do the survey, and
then you got to start pulling data, like the surveys
just kind of a.

Speaker 3 (32:07):
Side project to see where you're at.

Speaker 1 (32:08):
Yeah, so to go get a definitive picture of this.
What are you doing? Like how many deer are you monitoring?
How do you monitor the deer? Like what is the
sort of scale of the project?

Speaker 4 (32:20):
Yeah, so, yeah, this is one thing we wanted to
do different and probably one of the issues in the past,
including the stuff I did in the past, is treating
the population as the population and not looking at individuals.
There's a lot of individual variation and buck movements. Some
of them are homebodies, some of them have very disjointed

(32:43):
home ranges that we call a mobile buck personality home range.
Some of them move a whole bunch, some of them
don't move a lot. So we don't want to just
put all of that together and come up with an average.
We want to be able to look at every single
buck and what is his movement profile, and then look
at when you evaluate all these different moon conditions, is

(33:07):
the buck's behavior movement behavior deviating from the norm that buck.

Speaker 1 (33:12):
Yeah, you're looking at I see like what is he?
What is it buck a or buck.

Speaker 3 (33:18):
One twenty one?

Speaker 1 (33:19):
What is buck one? Twenty one's normal groove. That's right,
and then how does Buck one twenty one's groove switch
at the moon?

Speaker 4 (33:27):
That's right?

Speaker 1 (33:27):
And then Buck one twenty eight, same thing. And one
of those bucks might be like a dude who likes
to cruise, and one of those bucks might be a
dude who likes to stay home.

Speaker 4 (33:35):
Yeah, So the guy that cruises, does he cruise more?

Speaker 1 (33:38):
You know?

Speaker 3 (33:38):
There is a stay of home guy cruse more?

Speaker 1 (33:39):
Yeah? Yeah.

Speaker 4 (33:41):
And so Natasha went through and so for every single buck,
she created a fourteen day window. So this is a
moving window. And so for every fourteen days, she looked
at the seven days prior seven days and it uh
behind and calculated for every single hour of the day.

(34:05):
So for this buck at ten am, she has a
movement profile of what the average response for that buck
will be at ten am, calibrated for the prior seven
days and the future seven days. And so when we
have some moon alignment or phase or whatever, we then

(34:27):
look at does that buck's ten am movement pattern deviate
because of the moon. And so then you do the
sum of those deviations for every single buck that is
in the population to come up with a mean response
and that's how we are able to work through A

(34:50):
Saturday occurred, big hunting day, a Saturday, the rut occurred.
It was a really warm period, we had a really
a cold front. By doing that and having a moving
average for every single buck, you account for all the
extraneous noise. Sure that can be going on.

Speaker 1 (35:07):
Huh okay, off the moon because now just you brought
it up a Saturday, a lot of guys hunting. You
mentioned it crepuscular period. So sunrise, sunset impacts, the rot impacts,
temperature impacts.

Speaker 3 (35:24):
Pressure's got to make them not move, right, sure?

Speaker 1 (35:26):
Okay, yeah, so that's true.

Speaker 4 (35:31):
I think it's less about it's not that they're not moving,
it is where they choose to move based on hunting pressure.
And so in another study that we did conducted in Oklahoma,
we and that was set up differently. So that was
a treatment area where there was hunting pressure and treatment

(35:53):
area too heavy hunting pressure, and a control area. And
in those places the deer were collared, the hunters were
collared carrying a GPSHW and so could we could monitor
where they were going on the landscape and so forth.
Then we're watching the bucks be able to move around them,
and it literally took three to four days, and three

(36:15):
to four days of there are hunters on the landscape,
it changed. Something is different. Their the bucks movement behavior changed,
not as much as total distance moved during the day,
but where they went on the landscape. And the academic
term is called their tortuosity, meaning the complexity of their

(36:40):
movement path changed. That we think was because they had
to avoid all these different places on the landscape that
they had three to four days of info was going
to be associated with hunting in danger.

Speaker 1 (36:55):
Oh but his yards per hour, his his yards per
stay up, stay consistent.

Speaker 4 (37:02):
In that experiment. Yeah. Yeah, their movement behavior really didn't
change other than the tortuosity and where they went. So quote,
they did not go nocturnal. They were still on their
feet because they got eat They're on their feet, they're forging.
They're just going to areas where they determine there's not

(37:23):
going to be hunting pressure, no evidence, no memory of
human activity.

Speaker 1 (37:28):
Yeah. Old Lady Thompson's house, you know, doesn't let anybody hunt.

Speaker 2 (37:32):
Oh yeah, I was just telling my buddy Seth. We
came out of the woods after we killed the bull.
I was telling you about earlier. The next night dead,
not that it was on fire the night before. I've
only heard like four or five bugles before that bull died.
But the next evening we hear like a bugle. It's
just just dead, still quiet. And I'm remarking to my

(37:53):
buddy's seth. I'm like, yeah, it was kind of hot,
no wind. You know, it's just like, you know, they
don't want to run when they got that big winter codeon.
He goes, well, where I was at yesterday, We're the
lasting a big herd out in a private hayfield and
at four thirty they are ripping. Yeah, you know.

Speaker 1 (38:13):
So it's like, yeah, they found a good place to
go exactly. Yeah, they're going to do their thing. Huh.
So the going nocturnal from pressure, they just go do
what they.

Speaker 3 (38:24):
Want to do somewhere else.

Speaker 4 (38:25):
Yeah, yeah, they just changed their behavior on where they
spend time. Now, I will say this, there have been
cases at the deer conference we go to, you know
every year, there have act there have been some cases
with GPS or VHF collared bucks where in heavily heavily

(38:46):
hunted places, a buckbedded all day long. But I literally, Steve,
I remember that one time. In the thirty years i've
been going and learning about deer and thinking, I've heard
of one instance where objectively a buck had a mark,
a radio caller on it or a GPS collar, and
it did not move during daylight hours because hunting pressure

(39:10):
was all around God and all these other instances. They're
up on their feet and moving. Now they may not be.
You have to look at what's called the step length,
the movement path. So step length is a surrogate for velocity.
So if you're getting a ping from that collar every
fifteen minutes, if he's got a really high rate of speed,

(39:32):
you're going to cover more distance in fifteen minutes. And
so what you will see is that their yards per
hour can slow down, but they're still on their feet
and they're foraging and moving.

Speaker 3 (39:46):
The other day, we were watching a bull moose.

Speaker 1 (39:50):
Doing his like rut wander, and he was going through
this big alpine area and we watched them, I mean,
we watched him go a couple miles fast, and we're
waiting for him to stop. He was so far away
where like, well, when he stops, we'll try to call
and see if he registers the noise at all. We

(40:13):
watched him go a couple of miles and never stopped once,
just moving, just cruising, and you're like, where what you know,
what is his concept of where he's going? But just
moving and yeah, he's not afraid of anything. Yeah, I'm

(40:33):
not afraid of anything.

Speaker 6 (40:34):
Yeah. Whitetail hunters have this time period between October ten
October twenty they refer to as the October Law. And
if you were to if you lived in a state
where the deer season is September one to December thirty,
first they would tell you that is the hardest ten
day stretch to kill a buck because they're nocturnal. What
are your movement studies say about that?

Speaker 4 (40:57):
There is no lull that that does does not exist.

Speaker 6 (41:01):
Not in any form. Like they're not only are they
not nocturnal during that period, but they're also like they're
moving more in that period than they were October one
to October Tenen.

Speaker 4 (41:11):
I can't say they're moving more, but they're moving. And
this is just sit in the Mississippi State data here.
This is over and over again that there is no law.
But what can be going on at that time is
you have got a shuffling, so to speak. It's a
little bit late in October. So think about bachelor groups

(41:32):
during the summer box low testosterone velvet, and then we
get into September October, testosterone is surging through their body again.
They start getting into hard antler and then they start
shifting and moving around and setting up their fall winter
rut home ranges. So I think what's going on a
lot there is you've had a couple months or a

(41:55):
couple weeks of seeing the deer that you're normally seeing,
and then you get into that period in October where
a shuffle is coming and so they're moving in different
areas or they have left your area where your trail
camera is at, but they're still moving.

Speaker 1 (42:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (42:13):
I think like if I was speaking to hunters in
eastern South Dakota where I grew up, I bet they
are seeing less movement in that period. But it's because
now there's combines in the fields. It's because there are
acorns on the ground. It's because pheasant season just opened
and that's kicked deer out of some beds. In CRP
like that, there is a lull happening that's very specific

(42:34):
to them, but it's not because the buck is now nocturnal.
It's because he's just moving in a different way in
a different place.

Speaker 3 (42:40):
You're in a strategic.

Speaker 1 (42:41):
Low, yes, where like all summer, these five bucks come
into that beanfield and all of a sudden they're not
there anymore.

Speaker 6 (42:49):
Yeah, And I think it can be true that that's
like maybe the hardest ten day window to kill a
mature buck. But it's not because he's unkillable.

Speaker 4 (42:57):
Yeah, he's just in a different place. Yeah, you got
to go look for him. Now Here's us really interesting
to me is we we looked at So we had
to have deer where we had to have two years
of them being collared. So we had a lot of
deer come and go, you know, why is.

Speaker 3 (43:17):
That that you had Why two years? What's the significance.

Speaker 4 (43:21):
Because the question, like Spencer was alluding to, is do
they have fidelity for a site the following year? So
if you see it in a particular place this October,
what are the odds you're going to see it next year?
So we had to limit our data just to bucks
that so it's a subset of that that we had

(43:42):
two years of data and it was really amazing. Is
that on the average when you got to after that
October kind of break up and shuffling, and when they
went back and started settling into that area, the average
distance on a daily scale. And so what we did is,

(44:05):
where is this buck at five pm October ninth, twenty
twenty four. Where is it at October ninth, five pm,
twenty twenty five? About a thousand yards apart?

Speaker 1 (44:17):
Is that right?

Speaker 4 (44:19):
About a thousand yards apart?

Speaker 1 (44:21):
See, if you're hunting ten ac or parcels, that's a lot.

Speaker 4 (44:26):
And that could absolutely be off property and you may
never see it again. But he's in the neighborhood. If
he's alive, he's in the neighborhood.

Speaker 1 (44:34):
Yeah. God.

Speaker 6 (44:36):
I used to work with a lot of fish biologists,
and I found that there were equal number of fish
biologists who were hardcore anglers as there were guys who
never fished a day a year, like they just literally
never wed a line. And I found that they would
ask very different questions when it came to what they
were studying. What do you notice for what percentage of

(44:57):
dear biologists are hardcore hunters? These guys who just like
never fill a tag?

Speaker 1 (45:04):
Good question, are.

Speaker 6 (45:06):
You a big hunter?

Speaker 4 (45:08):
I am? I am?

Speaker 6 (45:09):
Which do you think that's normal.

Speaker 4 (45:12):
Yeah, yeah, I do. I guess hardcore is a scale,
you know, I would say probably seventy five percent. There
are absolutely some that love deer and just ungulates, you know,
and study that type of stuff, that aren't big hunters.
But I would say on the white tail side, at
least the ones I'm thinking about off the top of
my head, they all hunt.

Speaker 6 (45:33):
Until like that twenty five percent. You don't think those
folks hunt at all?

Speaker 4 (45:38):
Probably not, okay. I think they're enamored with the deer
and ecology of it. The system really excites them. Yeah,
But then picking up our bow or rifle just in
their things.

Speaker 6 (45:49):
And do you notice anything different with like those biologies? Yeah,
the questions okay.

Speaker 4 (45:53):
The questions I asked typically that type of part and
this isn't good or bad, it's just different.

Speaker 6 (45:59):
But I think it needs both, like the field needs
both of those.

Speaker 4 (46:02):
Yeah, yeah, right. I would say they're more the theory
type of stuff, which is really important ecological grounding in theory.
And then people like me is more about the application,
and you know, my roles extension. So then what's the application?
How do I tell people about it? What does it
mean to you for hunting? Your land or managing your land.

Speaker 1 (46:24):
Yeah, I want to hit you with a bunch of
once we cover off on them. We sold this pretty
heavy on the moon thing. But let's let's put the
moon thing to bed. So I want to get into
other things that drive I want to get into other
things that drive changes of movement and other things about
Like you mentioned that different deer have different personalities. I'd
love to hear more about that. Let's close out on

(46:46):
this moon thing for a little bit out put some
numbers to us, or put some way of expressing the
how much which you can rule out and how much
could still be up for grabs. Meaning Mark thing is like, hey, listen,

(47:07):
if a buck comes out. If I'm watching a buck
and I can't catch him out in the daylight and
he comes out five minutes early because of the moonface,
that's a big deal to me.

Speaker 3 (47:17):
Are they catching that in the research?

Speaker 1 (47:19):
You know? That was his question, right, like, when they're
looking at these general things, like they generally don't change
their behavior. But he says, but let's say it's just
five minutes, right, That to me matters, Like when you
look at it, how like what degree of certainty are
you comfortable putting on that there is there isn't any

(47:40):
impact because you're always going to have guys that are like,
he doesn't know what he's talking about, yeah, yeah, or
he's not detecting what I'm seeing because I'm seeing things
at a micro scale and he's looking to macro.

Speaker 4 (47:50):
And I don't ever think we can produce anything that's
going to affect that person. So when you get in
got feedback from people, and this was part when we
when we reached out initially doing this survey. We had
and I would call them the saddle bow hunter. I
mean they are just locked in. They they're trying to

(48:11):
hunt close to cover. And so if if that buck
is walking out thirty seconds earlier and five more steps,
I got a shot.

Speaker 1 (48:21):
Yep.

Speaker 4 (48:22):
So what we looked at is, of course, like we
explained earlier deviation from normal. We did eighty five different analyzes,
so we we made eighty five different comparisons of all
the different moon stuff you can put together. And the
the average response for bedding time deviations were less than

(48:47):
a minute. A couple of them were two or three minutes.
But and not to get too deep in the stats here,
when you run that many analyzes you're gonna you're gonna
hear your results are gonna follow a bell shaped curve.
You're gonna get some results that were positive. You're gonna
get some results that were negative. And so when you

(49:11):
look at the body of everything that we did, we
had a couple instances where the deer were on their
feet a few seconds earlier, maybe a minute earlier. We
had some results where they stayed in their bed a
few seconds or a minute longer. We had some results
where the yard per hour and so think about that.

(49:31):
Put that in your terms. My pace, one of my steps.

Speaker 1 (49:35):
Is a yard.

Speaker 4 (49:37):
And so when you talk about, yeah, we found a
big result on such and such a moon condition, they
were moving three yards per hour more. That's three steps
and one hour three steps. Now, if that motivates you,
and that does get back when I'm given this as
a seminar and people are ready to throw beer cans

(49:57):
and rotten tomatoes and all that stuff at me. If
it makes you feel good, man, if this is your
placebo effect, yeah, roll with it. If it instills more
confidence in you, that's such and such moon condition, and
I'm gonna be more alert and I'm gonna get to
the stand thirty minutes earlier, because this is a red
moon day. You know, then, by God, keep doing it

(50:21):
if it makes you happy, but the evidence does not
support it.

Speaker 6 (50:24):
In college, I would get the field in Stream magazine
and they would always predict the rut, the best days
of the rut. And I think it was maybe a
sophomore and I had saw that, like, the best day
of the rut this year was on a Saturday. I
was available, So I did what you're talking about. I
sat in my best stand that day that I had
saved for a week leading up to it because I

(50:46):
knew it was the best day of the rut. I
got there earlier, I packed lunch to be there all day.
I was more alert because I was like, it's going
to happen. And then a buck showed up and the
killed him, and so I was just more confidence and
I was a better hunter. That day was going to
optimistic and so that that I think that that can
work for people.

Speaker 4 (51:05):
That can be a thing, and keep doing it. If
it keeps working for you, keep doing it, keep taking
the placebo. Placebo effect is really really powerful. There's some
cool science behind that as well. Sure, but yeah, you
took the words out of my mouth. But I wonder
if you had gone five additional times under those exact
same conditions and you didn't have a good day.

Speaker 6 (51:27):
Totally, if you remember the good ones, then I was like,
it was because this was the best day of the rut,
as Field and Stream had deemed it. You know, looking
back now and since I've like formed my own white
tail opinions, I recognized I was just very confident that day.

Speaker 4 (51:41):
And Field and that was throughout the range of the
white tailed deer.

Speaker 1 (51:44):
Yeah, but this was going to be the day.

Speaker 6 (51:46):
Yeah, yep, yeah, so that should totally. I got one
more moon question before we move on. Charles Allsheimer he
had developed like the rutting moon theory in the nineties
that caught on with a lot of guys, and the
running moon theory is that the second full moon after
the autumn equinox is what triggers the white tail rut.

(52:07):
That's like, this is the beginning of it. And in
his theory he had determined there are three types of
white tail ruts. You could have it a given year
based on when that second.

Speaker 1 (52:16):
Moon fo Okay, bag, I want to make sure I'm
tracking autumn equin second full.

Speaker 6 (52:21):
Moon, right, not the first one, the second one.

Speaker 1 (52:24):
When I got that part, but then you said another
thing that threw me off.

Speaker 6 (52:26):
So that that second full moon could land in late October,
it could land in mid November, okay, based on when
that would fall. You could have one of three ruts.
You could have a synchronized rut, which is if it's
between like October thirty one and November five. You could
have a classic rut, which is like November six to thirteen,

(52:47):
or you could have a trickle rut, which is November
thirteen on.

Speaker 1 (52:51):
Huh.

Speaker 6 (52:51):
And it's it's basically saying that like some years, if
you have a trickle rut, for example, maybe that Bell
curve you're talking about is flat at the top and
it's just wider, Whereas if you have a synchronized rut
where you get that full moon on November third, now
the Bell curve has a really tall peak in it,

(53:12):
and it's skinnier. Is that anything you've ever seen that
some years the rut was longer or shorter.

Speaker 1 (53:18):
No, no, no, never even outside of the moon, like
never mind the moon.

Speaker 4 (53:26):
Yeah, not from from year to year in a place.
And so when you talk about a you know, a
protracted rut or a trickle rut. All that stuff is
related to sex ratio of the population, so we can
manipulate that with management. Here it has nothing to do
with the moon. It is about the availability of dozen

(53:50):
estres and enough box to serve them when they are
in standing heat. If your sex ratio becomes so biased
that the dozen estres there is not a buck to
copulate twenty eight later days later, she's going to cycle
and come into heat again, and there is your trickle
or your extended rut. Or if you have dough fawns,

(54:13):
dough fawnts will typically the proportion of them that do
come into estres are going to come in a little
bit later.

Speaker 1 (54:20):
So adult adult that has a faun with her and
she's trying to get rid of it in the fall,
she'll come into estris later than adult that did that
didn't was not carrying a faun.

Speaker 4 (54:32):
I'm sorry, I misspoke, though, uh not everywhere. This varies
depending on where you're at in the US. In Mississippi,
for example, ten to fifteen percent of dough faunds or
do funds will reach sufficient body size and condition to
come into heat. They're never going to come in at
the peak of the rut, it'll be two three weeks

(54:52):
a month later by the time they've reached physiological condition
where they can come into estras.

Speaker 1 (54:58):
Got it, so that we'll be part of it, and
that can drive a little late rut action.

Speaker 4 (55:02):
That's your trickle.

Speaker 6 (55:03):
If you do believe in the rutting moon. This year
twenty twenty five, it is November fifth, so you're you're
like straddling a synchronized rut and a classic rut, meaning
that like November five to ten.

Speaker 2 (55:15):
Period.

Speaker 4 (55:16):
Wow, it's gonna be November five to ten. All right,
let's back it up like those.

Speaker 6 (55:23):
To be clear, I don't believe in this either. I
just love that, but I throw out this thing because
some people do.

Speaker 1 (55:28):
But then he and then he, he says that's not right,
and then you alert everybody what day.

Speaker 6 (55:33):
To be Because because I love that people do believe it.
I really appreciate that those folks have taken the time
to develop a theory and to spread that theory around.

Speaker 2 (55:42):
Reason you have bigfoot experts on radio the other day.

Speaker 7 (55:45):
Exactly, we need a new believer hat it's not just
the black bucket of moon.

Speaker 1 (55:51):
Yeah, exactly, that's great idea.

Speaker 3 (55:53):
Oh, core full moon buck, That says believer.

Speaker 4 (55:58):
What's the purpose of the timing of the ruts when
the fawns will hit the ground in spring? Yeah? Yeah,
Why would mother nature? Why would evolution have that affected
by some moon. So the most reliable clock, of course,

(56:19):
is photo period. They can be calibrated so well, and
so it's so important over time of when the dough
needs to be bred seven months later, when that fawn
is going.

Speaker 2 (56:30):
To be dropped.

Speaker 4 (56:32):
Why would evolution fold in any of the moon stuff
to tinker with that at all, I mean, biologically or ecologically.
That just doesn't make sense. However, we did test this,
and so we did it two ways. We did it
at an individual scale and we did it at a
population scale, individual scale with our captive deer herd. We

(56:55):
looked at records of estrus and copulation for all of
our does so population of doze over many, many, many years,
and so we know when they were coming into heat,
and we knew when they were bred. So we have
those records. We then line that up with this rutting moon.
And so every year you know that rutting moon is

(57:16):
moving back and forth a week or fifteen days or whatever.
And so we should have seen if it was influencing
when they are coming into estrus, we should have seen
them moving towards that or moving back.

Speaker 6 (57:29):
Zero.

Speaker 4 (57:30):
We then go to let's go to wild populations, and
we looked at wildlife management areas and our state Wildlife
Agency is very good at doing what is called spring
health checks. What that does is they harvest doze post
deer season, typically March, and they will look at the
condition of dose and then also look at the number

(57:52):
of fetuses that they are carrying. So along with all
the general hunter harvest data, that is a way for
them to look at what's the condition of this population statewide,
so forth. So we know where the rut is in
all these places, we know where the peak of the
rut is, and so we then line that up with
the rutting moon zero no effect whatsoever. So individually population

(58:17):
wise logic, Yeah, doesn't make sense to.

Speaker 6 (58:20):
Me because of the Mississippi deer.

Speaker 4 (58:23):
That's why maybe it's just those Mississippi deer.

Speaker 2 (58:27):
Would it be worth just taking five minutes to tabrons
and explain what confirmation bias is and how that shows
up in hunters?

Speaker 1 (58:38):
Sure?

Speaker 2 (58:39):
I think so?

Speaker 1 (58:40):
Yeah. My favorite analogy about this is you go, I
don't know, surprise analogy, Like you go out and you
fishing small mouths and you're throwing shar troops and you
get a bunch, You're hitting them real good. Then at
one minute you throw on a pumpkin colored jig and
you're fishing for a couple of seconds, you don't get
a hit. You put shar truce back on lo and

(59:00):
behold throughout the day you keep catching fish. They were
coming on hartreuse. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And like there's something
to that, because you know, ain't shartruths. It ain't no use.
But I'm saying like you do have a way of
you know, like if you were going to go design
a study about what color small mouth bass are hitting
on in some given day, it wouldn't be like that,

(59:21):
you know. Yeah. So I think that you find part
of the fun. You find patterns and things, and and
you know that works for me. Therefore that's what that's
dictated by.

Speaker 4 (59:34):
Nature, right, Yeah, Well that's a that's a deeper question.
I mean, that would be a psychologist to get into
all the logical fallacies and how the brain works with that.
But I guess the way I think about it, is
we're we're really good as human beings. We want to
find patterns, so we're trying to find the shortcut. We're
really good that that's helped us, that's helped human beings

(59:57):
to be able to link those things together, and that's
the path. Let's capitalize on it. But the problem that
we have is we become enamored with this linkage that
we have made between these two things. A leads to B,
B leads to C, and we will start ignoring contrary evidence.

(01:00:18):
So it's like we become bought in and emotionally invested
in our and hey, in science, it's it's called the
pet hypothesis. That's why we have to get outside peer review.
That's why you got to talk to a buddy, help me,
help me think about this. I'm really locked in confirmation
bias could be bothering me here. But but I think

(01:00:40):
that is always going on. Is we we never remember
the times we were unsuccessful. We disproportionately remember the times
that we were mm hm.

Speaker 2 (01:00:53):
And I think if we if you are a moon believer,
you only go hunt in those conditions where you mostly
hunt those conditions that you think are you know, positively
affect your deer hunting. You're not hunting the other days,
and so you only have a data set from those days. Yeah,
and it could be exactly the same from the days

(01:01:14):
that the moon is doing something completely different.

Speaker 4 (01:01:16):
Yeah. And you may be a good enough hunter, and
you may be hunting in a enough of a target
rich environment where every day you go, you were going
to see deer if that's your metric for success, but
you're only going to go on those special days, and
then that just keeps reinforcing that this moon condition or
weather condition or whatever was the reason for my success.

(01:01:39):
When the way to do it would be, and nobody's
gonna do this. I'm going to get a random number generator,
and I'm going to get a calendar, and I'm going
to pick out these particular days and I'm gonna go hunt.

Speaker 6 (01:01:51):
That's a fun study.

Speaker 4 (01:01:52):
And or look at camera data. Yeah, that'd be another way.
Just record camera data all the time and go back
and look at it.

Speaker 1 (01:02:03):
This is about the moon.

Speaker 6 (01:02:04):
It's it's sort of Bloomberg had an article that bigfoot
sightings have decreased in the last decade. They peaked around
like two thousand and four or so, and they've been
going down ever since. If deer hunters were like very
conscious of what their trail cameras are telling them. Now
that trail cameras are so effective and so cheap and

(01:02:26):
sell cams are very available, I feel like the same
thing would happen that if you pulled deer hunters in
twenty years from now, it wouldn't be eighty three percent anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:02:36):
Yeah, it would be.

Speaker 6 (01:02:37):
Lower because they if they were trying to like really
pay attention, they would maybe notice it. Oh yeah, the
moon isn't saying that that the deer movement is different
based on what the moon is doing.

Speaker 4 (01:02:48):
Yeah, I agree. I just think it's gonna take a
long time because it's really difficult to let go right
with that belief, especially if within your little group, you're
you're the older, wiser, you're the influencer. The single most
difficult thing for a human being to say publicly, I

(01:03:10):
was wrong.

Speaker 1 (01:03:11):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 4 (01:03:12):
I mean, that's that's real. That's very powerful. It's so
difficult to stand up and go forgive me, I was wrong.
I made a big mistake. People are very reluctant.

Speaker 1 (01:03:20):
To do that. I'm going to hit you with a
real I want to bring something up, but I don't
want to dwell on it. What's your take on? How
do I even ask this man? I'm trying to figure out.

Speaker 2 (01:03:34):
He's just saying he wants a real concise ance.

Speaker 1 (01:03:35):
I don't want to get into it. I'm just curious
because you're a big deer guy. Do your hunter deer researcher,
give me, give me your basic like one sentence, what's
your basic take on CWD?

Speaker 4 (01:03:46):
It's it's real, it's it's the single biggest challenge I
believe to deer management and the application of science ants
while simultaneously keeping hunters engaged and believing in science. That

(01:04:08):
wasn't very concise, but that's that's the way. It's the
challenge of our time.

Speaker 3 (01:04:13):
You think it's you believe it's a legitimate threat at.

Speaker 1 (01:04:16):
A herd level.

Speaker 4 (01:04:17):
Yes, yes, yes I do.

Speaker 3 (01:04:21):
Earlier you mentioned different buck personalities?

Speaker 1 (01:04:26):
Are there? Is it? Is it possible to give like
a handful of buck personality types?

Speaker 4 (01:04:33):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:04:35):
And have you heard of a shirker buck?

Speaker 4 (01:04:38):
I have not.

Speaker 1 (01:04:39):
Okay, go on, okay, different.

Speaker 2 (01:04:41):
Buck we'll come back to We'll come back to that.

Speaker 4 (01:04:46):
You never heard of a shirker I'm not recalling val geist, Oh,
val Geist I have heard of that word, but man,
I'm drawing a blank on.

Speaker 3 (01:04:58):
We'll come around to it.

Speaker 1 (01:05:00):
Do give me some buck personality types.

Speaker 4 (01:05:02):
Buck personalities, Well, it's just two from what we categorize.
This is just relative. We call it buck movement behavior.

Speaker 3 (01:05:11):
Yeah, that's what I'm getting at.

Speaker 1 (01:05:12):
Yeah, I don't mean like what they're thinking about. I
mean what they're like personality types in a way that
would impact the hunter's experience.

Speaker 4 (01:05:19):
Yeah, so that we call it a sedentary type that's
gonna be your introvert, and then your mobile personality type
that's gonna be your extrovert. Uh. The what people thought
for the longest time, until we had the type of
instrumentation to be able to see this, was that after
yearling buck dispersal, a buck is going to go set

(01:05:40):
up and have his home range, and that is where
it's going to be. Now, the size of that home
range can vary by resources. He may be a five
hundred acre home range guy, he may be a fifteen
hundred acre home range guy. But that is where he
is essentially going to live and die is in that
that fixed home range. What we found is that about

(01:06:03):
thirty percent of our bucks have completely disconnected and disjointed
home ranges, and so they will spend six, seven, eight
months and one location, and then they will get up
and move to a completely different location.

Speaker 3 (01:06:21):
Just forget about the old spot.

Speaker 4 (01:06:23):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (01:06:24):
That's right.

Speaker 4 (01:06:25):
The most sensational example, just to show you that intrinsically
in some deer, this is in them that they are
going to do it. We call her a buck. In
Mississippi fall winter, and we started noticing really strange long
distance behavior about February so in Mississippi, so we're on

(01:06:47):
the east side of the Mississippi River. He goes all
the way to the Mississippi River miles and miles of miles,
and then paces up and down the river for a
few days, and then crosses the river and then sets
up camp in Louisiana for essentially all summer. August rolls around.

(01:07:07):
He does the same thing. On the Louisiana side. He
goes stages by the river a day or two, getting
up his nerve, maybe swims the river, comes back to
Mississippi to that exact same home range he was the
year before. Did that two years in a row, so
we had four instances of him taking that long distance

(01:07:28):
movement and crossing the Mississippi River. So that's an extreme
example of a mobile personality. And just the way the
crow flies distance it was just shy twenty miles wow,
so his route was a lot more than that.

Speaker 1 (01:07:44):
Yeah, And it's like you could see him doing it once, right,
and then he has a good experience or doesn't have
a good experience, but the fact that he he goes
back to Mississippi. Then a while later he wants to
you know what I mean, yeah, like repeat it where yeah,
just felt or we wind up thinking that it's a
bigger deal, that that swim is a bigger deal than

(01:08:07):
he regards it as. Right, I was reading this thing
like these guys were looking at it. There used to
be this thing that links. They used to think that
links didn't like cross big rivers, and they thought these
big rivers were boxed in links home ranges. So they
had these links with collars were swimming the tan and
awe swimming the Yukon, you know, mm hmm. And people
always saw it just they had just figured that that's

(01:08:28):
a border to a lynx's habitat. That's some bit just yeah,
right across it, shoot across. You don't even think about it,
and in the human mind, you're like, oh, that would
be a he can't get across that. He wouldn't want
to cross that a cat, you know.

Speaker 4 (01:08:40):
And yet we had some bucks that, uh in this
one in the Mississippi River. We're talking about a normal river,
so think think a river that's fifty yards across or something.
We had some bucks that would go across that every
single day. Was not an impediment to them whatsoever. We
had some bucks that would never cross that river. When
you look at their home range and all of their points,

(01:09:03):
it is directly adjacent to that river. They would not
do it. Really, So there's just so much variation in
their personality and what they're willing to accept.

Speaker 1 (01:09:13):
You can't I guess you probably can't say this is
one of those strategies better for longevity. Like do you
find that like super tight stay at home box, super
small home ranges, they have a greater survival rate or
is it that not or is that not fair to say.

Speaker 4 (01:09:31):
Yeah, we didn't have enough of a sample size to
tease that apart, because again, only a third of them
were had this mobile personality. But that makes sense to me.
I think that's reasonable. I also think of it. This
may be a bad analogy here, but I think it's
just like embedded within some species and some individuals. There's explorers,

(01:09:55):
there's colonizers, there's individuals that are willing to take a
rip and go somewhere else. And you know, I think
when you just go way way way back in time,
you know, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and you
think about the landscape and that deer. We're always having
to colonize different areas based on buffalo going through, based

(01:10:19):
on wildfire, and so I just want to think any
way that that tendency is embedded within some individuals that
I'm going to go look, I'm going to go explore
and I'm going to capitalize on some resources unbeknownst to me.

Speaker 1 (01:10:34):
Yeah right here. Oh yeah, because if not you because
as as environments and landscapes change, if everybody was a
super home body, you'd have awesome pieces of habitat open
up and like we're never found. Word doesn't get out. Yeah,
with the with the idea that like I've heard this

(01:10:56):
express two ways, maybe it's not this clean that during
the rut bucks move more. Okay.

Speaker 3 (01:11:04):
I remember someone pointing.

Speaker 1 (01:11:05):
Out, like they move more but they don't move to
new places more. They just move more in the places
that they already move.

Speaker 3 (01:11:15):
Anyways, is that fair.

Speaker 4 (01:11:18):
That's not think that's fair.

Speaker 1 (01:11:19):
That's not fair. Yeah, okay, So what.

Speaker 4 (01:11:22):
We were able to do is, of course we did
all the annual home range stuff, but we also looked
at two week home ranges, daily home ranges, and a
term called net distance or net displacement. And the bottom
line is you will see the greatest home range if

(01:11:43):
you look at it in two week periods during the
peak of the rut and during the late rut or
immediately after the peak of the rut. But the amount
of area that a buck is spending each day, it
did not matter if it was pre rut, no rut,
after the rut. Two hundred acres per day independent okay,

(01:12:06):
on a daily scale, independent on the time of year,
rut phase or not peak of the rut, post rut,
pre rut, et cetera. Did not matter. Even though there
they're daily ground they were covering could be greater. During
the rut, the amount of area that they were covered

(01:12:29):
was two hundred acres per day, But when you look
at the very next day where they're at, it will
be further apart, meaning a buck is spending covering ground
about two hundred acres of ground per day, but during
the peak of the rut in late rut, those daily
areas or places are further apart. Really, maybe you make.

Speaker 2 (01:12:57):
A single move and then do the two hundred yard
circuit and then makes a single move into another two
hundred yard circuit. Is that what you're saying?

Speaker 4 (01:13:05):
Yeah, so maybe think of it like this. When you
get into a non rut and early pre rut, every
single day there is a great deal of overlap in
the area of buckets covering. He might have an overlap
of eighty percent of the area he covered the day before,
he's in this area. But when you get to later

(01:13:28):
in the rut, because now they're seeking, they're chasing, they're looking.
Now we're spending two hundred acres away over here, fifteen
hundred yards away, he's in a completely different area. He's
covering the same amount of area in a twenty four
hour time frame, but the distance away from the dates
he's exploring new spots.

Speaker 1 (01:13:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:13:49):
Really, so do you really as a hunter then are
we trying to capitalize on that move between the two spots?

Speaker 4 (01:13:58):
If you can. I mean, if if you can find out.

Speaker 2 (01:14:02):
I rut funnel, it would be a good place to sit, right, Okay.

Speaker 4 (01:14:07):
I think you got to frame it like this. If
if you've got a lot of intel on a buck,
I mean, I know from camera data observation, I know
kind of where he's going to be. The best chance
for that is pre rut. But if you want to
go out, I'm going to go to the woods and
what are my greatest odds of seeing a buck? A

(01:14:29):
good buck? Then because of that movement behavior that is
absolutely so.

Speaker 1 (01:14:34):
The one that hides out of old Lady Thompson's might
be off on your spot.

Speaker 4 (01:14:39):
That's right, that's right, he's gonna shift, he's gonna move.

Speaker 1 (01:14:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:14:45):
Really mm hmm. I can show you the show the data.

Speaker 1 (01:14:49):
Yeah, oh, let me, I'll hit you know, and then
these guys can hit you with whatever they want.

Speaker 3 (01:14:53):
Do you this might not be something you can tell
from your data.

Speaker 1 (01:14:56):
Do you think it's true that bucks play the wind
and cruise for does by coming on the down wind
side of betting cover?

Speaker 4 (01:15:09):
I think probably fifty percent of the time they do.

Speaker 1 (01:15:12):
Okay, so they're not visually looking for them. They do,
but they in addition to visually looking, they're cruising to
smell them.

Speaker 4 (01:15:23):
Yeah, what we generally think of right now, and this
could have a lot to do with those two hundred
acre daily areas being so far apart and disjointed. What
we think is that bucks are cruising to find what
are called dough focal areas. So think about the social

(01:15:44):
behavior of your dough population, those matrilineal groups. And so
here's a group of dose here, here's a group of
dose over here. We think of it as a circuit.
And so a buck is going to go into this area.
He knows who all's there, you know, via signposts sent
so forth. He's gonna check it. Since check it, who's

(01:16:06):
good or bad? Anybody close coming into heat? Maybe she's
already into heat but occupied. He's gonna go to another area,
part of that circuit and look for adoin estris there.

Speaker 1 (01:16:18):
Okay, I light, I got one more question than he's
Guys can hit some.

Speaker 3 (01:16:23):
I asked this earlier, but I kind of screwed it up.

Speaker 1 (01:16:27):
During peak rut? Is there like a high Is there
a strong likelihood or however you want to put it,
Is there a strong likelihood that a buck will go
somewhere during peak rut that he has never before been
in his life, or is he usually at some point
in his life been to all the places he's gonna go.

(01:16:47):
So he's visiting places he knows about, or is he
legit like going spots he's never seen before.

Speaker 4 (01:16:55):
I think the answer is yes, But I don't think
that is just during the rut. So the way we
would define that would be called an excursion, and so
that would be different from a mobile personality like we
talked about earlier, because that is where you set up
a new home range and you have affinity for that area,
and excursion is I'm in my existing home range and

(01:17:17):
I'm gonna take a trip yep, a two to three
day I'm will cut a loop and go here and
go here. We see those start to occur during the
pre rut, and it really escalates during the rut. But
with our data during our study, we saw the greatest
amount of excursions in the in the post rut, so
after the rut.

Speaker 1 (01:17:37):
But excursions being that he again like he's going to
it might be hard to do it because you can't
track him his whole life. He's going to places he's
never been. I can't answer that because you don't know
where he's because you can't you don't know his whole life.
I don't have his whole life history, got it.

Speaker 4 (01:17:56):
Yeah, Yeah, but we we definitely saw the the bucks
going to novel areas within the limited time frame we
had them studied.

Speaker 1 (01:18:05):
We did.

Speaker 4 (01:18:05):
In other words, we didn't see the exact same excursion
loop every time they would go different areas. Yeah, and
so yeah, we think they are looking prospecting, whether it
be those food resources whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:18:16):
That's when you get like really vulnerable. Man, Like you
get really vulnerable to something bad happen to you when
you're in places you've never been, Like you're on some
do you know what I mean? You have no idea
what's going on? And like that to me feels like
a that to me feels like a buck would get light. Dude,
I'm not doing that. Yeah, do you know what I mean? Like,
I'm not like, I've never been there, I have no

(01:18:38):
idea what's happening. It seems like they'd feel so vulnerable.

Speaker 4 (01:18:41):
And from a deer management perspective, I mean, if you
do the kind of stuff we were gone with, you
know your you're managing for antlers and older bucks and
so forth. That is where even with a large area,
so you may have a five to ten thousand acre
tract and you were primarily controlling the harvest within that
population except for the excursion, and so that is where

(01:19:02):
you will see some of those target bucks are gonna
go off and man, they get hammered.

Speaker 1 (01:19:07):
Yeah. Yeah, you go over to the place where the
you know, brown it's down property.

Speaker 4 (01:19:11):
I get shot. And that is so frustrating because you've
done everything all year long for years and years and years,
and you have that weekend where he decides to take
a trip.

Speaker 3 (01:19:22):
Do What's funny is uh?

Speaker 1 (01:19:24):
I know these guys and they have a big no
fence operation in Texas, but they wound up doing one fence.
They fenced one property line because they have some brown
it's down neighbors and so they just tried to like
control it a little bit by blocking that spot right
you know, the other three sides or do whatever they want. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:19:47):
I got a couple of places like that too. It's
that pinch point, that corridor of where they're going to
go on to that other property and we're gonna block.

Speaker 3 (01:19:55):
That up, and these dudes stands.

Speaker 1 (01:19:56):
It's so funny is these dudes stands are all we're
all that property life. Oh yeah, oh just waiting, you know, Yeah,
all right, I'm done.

Speaker 6 (01:20:08):
The October Boogeyman is the October law for hunters. The
November version of that is lockdown, where there's an idea
that there is a phase of the rut for like
two to four days where a buck gets a hot
dough around like November sixteenth, and they bed down and
they breed and they just become less visible and they

(01:20:29):
just become very dedicated to that spot and like running
with each other.

Speaker 3 (01:20:35):
I don't care what he says, this is true?

Speaker 1 (01:20:37):
Is that a thing?

Speaker 6 (01:20:38):
Do the deer movement studies show thing.

Speaker 1 (01:20:41):
Yeah, they just stand there like the does are feeding,
and he just stands there. He doesn't lay down, he
doesn't eat, he just stands there.

Speaker 4 (01:20:48):
Yeah, that's legit.

Speaker 1 (01:20:49):
Oh it is okay, Yeah, because everything else you're like, no,
that's not true. That's legit.

Speaker 4 (01:20:55):
So you get like in the peak of the rut,
this is going to occur all all the time. When
there is a dough an estras it becomes a population
a level of fact, or it becomes noticeable when a
greater proportion of the does are in standing heat and
bucks are tending them. So you're gonna have less bucks

(01:21:17):
available roaming the landscape because they're locked in.

Speaker 6 (01:21:19):
If there are too many dos, that happens.

Speaker 4 (01:21:24):
You're saying no, I'm saying that if you had an
appropriate number of doughs.

Speaker 1 (01:21:28):
Okay, that's kind of like some magical world every dough,
like you have some thing where it lists every dough
in a population all came into heat on November seventh.
It would be reasonable to assume that on November seventh,
no bucks are running around doing crazy stuff, right because
they're standing there with all these doughs.

Speaker 4 (01:21:47):
That are exactly And then twenty eight days later you're
gonna have the leftovers because the sex ratio, there's always
more doughs than bucks, and so some of them may
not get bred, and so then that would follow again
twenty eight days later.

Speaker 6 (01:22:03):
How impactful, though, do you think lockdown is? Is it
a thing where like hunters are going to have a
worse experience in the woods.

Speaker 4 (01:22:11):
I would still go because it's it's the rut. I
would look at it as the frequency of just seeing
more bucks during that time frame is gonna be less
because some of them are locked in with does, but
you also have the odd man out or the odd
buck out, and he's gonna be going around looking for
another dough and estress, so that there's still gonna be

(01:22:34):
general buck movement. You're just gonna have a greater number
of them that is occupying a dough.

Speaker 6 (01:22:39):
And there's no crater though in the bell curve. When
that happens, don't see it, Okay, Yeah, man, I wonder.

Speaker 2 (01:22:46):
If you do, you could tell me what days not
to hunt.

Speaker 1 (01:22:50):
What I'm thinking is this man picture you got like
some kind of weird deal where you can it's illegal,
like you put out some kind of a birth control
thing or something where none of the dos ever come in.

Speaker 6 (01:23:04):
Oh, Bucks, just crazy everywhere.

Speaker 1 (01:23:08):
It's a short term play. Yeah, it's not a good lie.

Speaker 4 (01:23:11):
That'd be some some evil science there.

Speaker 1 (01:23:14):
It's a bad long term play. You're going to see
a plumbing deer population.

Speaker 2 (01:23:19):
We're in Wisconsin. Uh you know, cwd's big there, big deer.
Heard a lot of our neighbors have started shooting more does.
Since they've started doing that, they claim to have a
better rut because less does mean more bucks moving around,
more bucks reacting to calls does that make sense.

Speaker 4 (01:23:40):
It makes perfect sense. I do not know of a
study that has specifically evaluated that, but I think that
is entirely logical because you've increased competition. You know, they're
less does per male and so they have to compete more,
look more, search more, et cetera.

Speaker 1 (01:24:01):
It's my turn.

Speaker 2 (01:24:02):
We're just going said you were done.

Speaker 1 (01:24:04):
I was for my turn when this turn, This turn
is gonna be one question turned.

Speaker 4 (01:24:10):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:24:11):
We have a buddy who has a really great property
in Texas whereabouts Way South Texas, Brownsville, Way South Texas.
Like when you're cruising around, you see I mean, you
see way more Bucks and does anyhow, we go down
there a couple times. We've gone down to Rattle Bucks,

(01:24:32):
which is the funnest thing in the world because it's
very effective there. I developed this little theory that the
most effective time to rattle them is during the middle
of the day. In my thinking, the dolls are all
laying down on their board and they're just more inclined
to wonder what's up when the doors are up on
their feet. They're like, yeah, yeah, I hear it, but

(01:24:53):
I'm like following my dough around. Then midday he gets bored.
He hears the rattle, He's got nothing else going on,
and so he runs over. Yeah, what do you think
about that?

Speaker 4 (01:25:03):
There's a merit to that, Steve, but it's wrong. We
did a study on that. Now I was a tech,
I was a participant as a buddy of mine. So
again my master's degree was in South Texas, so I
spent a lot of time down there, and so we

(01:25:23):
did a rattling experiment. To my knowledge, it is the
only peer reviewed experiment ever done on rattling antlers and
and dough response. And what we found, very generally was
we we varied the how loud the rattling was, the
duration of rattling, the time of day of rattling, and

(01:25:49):
then the time of year relative to the rut for
the rattling. And so the clear winner for time of
day was crepuscular. No, here's why, because the real winner
on the rattling technique. And remember back then, so this
would have been this has been mid nineties, and so

(01:26:10):
this is your You're reading the magazine and how do
you set up your rattling sequence? And so you got
to get there, and you gotta get crouch and you
got to scrape the brush and you gotta kick and
you gotta rattle, and you got to remember that, remember
all that.

Speaker 3 (01:26:28):
But anyways, gone, okay, Well.

Speaker 4 (01:26:30):
It was a thing back in the day.

Speaker 1 (01:26:32):
And what we found, you're you're painting the whole picture,
like the deer. You're kind of like you're you're sort
of creating the entire encounter.

Speaker 4 (01:26:40):
You're trying to mimic reality. Yeah, where they're bumping into
the brush and all that, sort of making it more realistic.
But the bottom it was just very very clear, how
loud you are. Number One, the louder you make it,
you increase the probability that more bucks will hear it.
More bucks will hear it when more bucks are circulating

(01:27:02):
during the crepuscular period, more bucks are going to be
up and about circulating during the pre rut. So make
it as loud as you can. And the sequence that
we were doing, we had a we had four different sequences,
but the one that always worked the best was called
long and Loud. I still remember it. It's still etched

(01:27:26):
in here. Long and Loud was you got to go
for three minutes. Three minutes. That doesn't sound like a
lot with those things. As hard as you can possibly go.
Your arms will be tired, they're spaghetti. Yeah, I mean
you're you're just done by that. But that was the
clear winter, and so just the obvious thing is they

(01:27:46):
could hear it better. And so I and I even
had chances where a sweat somebody on the ground.

Speaker 1 (01:27:52):
This was that.

Speaker 4 (01:27:52):
Do youn't know where the Welder Wildlife Refuge is?

Speaker 7 (01:27:55):
Aid?

Speaker 4 (01:27:55):
Did you go past it? Going south? Unhunted population tens
of thousands of They have all these observation towers. So
we got an observers up top fifteen twenty foot above
the brush, and somebody down below, and you could literally
even see I saw this to where the guy below
starts rattling. He's doing a long and loud or something

(01:28:16):
like that, and the buck is four hundred yards away,
and he hears it and he starts coming, coming, coming,
He's not running, but he's coming. He's obviously moving that way,
stopped rattling. He was back to browsing around. And then
it was over a thirty minute period, and so then
we had an elapsed time and you do another rattle,

(01:28:36):
and then another rattle, and do you rattle bring him in,
keep coming, stop rattling. He stopped rattled him again, finally
closed the distance and brought him in the volume and
increasing the probability that a buck is within distance of
hearing you. That was the secret sauce.

Speaker 6 (01:28:58):
I like your strategy, though, Steve, because as if I'm
thinking about rattling, if it's donn or dusk, in my head,
deer movement is already like a nine out of ten.
I don't need to help the deer movement anymore right now.
At midday, though, maybe it's like a four out of ten,
and so I could rattle and bring it up to
a seven out of ten. And so I'm just like
I'm raising the floor of my hunt at that point.

Speaker 1 (01:29:20):
Yeah, we were not viewing it as making We were
not viewing it as hey, there's nothing else to do.
We're viewing it as going out in the morning. There's
like deer round and you do a few rattle sessions,
nothing happened, gets to be eleven am, and all of
a sudden, buck buck buck. So I had this whole boredom.
There you go, hypothesis, But it could be other factors

(01:29:42):
in there. Well.

Speaker 6 (01:29:43):
Ask a question, what do your movement studies say about age?
I assume it's just real simple that like a one
and a half year old moves more and he's more
reckless than a five and a half year old. Is
that Is that what you've seen?

Speaker 4 (01:29:54):
Yeah, it's very subtle. You know. There's a lot of
people will say, and maybe we didn't not have enough
really really old bucks. We had several five and six
year olds, but we saw a general decline, a general
contraction in home range. But it was not overwhelming. Okay,

(01:30:14):
but yes it did. You know after the yearling dispersal event,
they're typically going to have a larger one and then
it's like they keep figuring out, you know, year after
year it gets a little bit small.

Speaker 6 (01:30:25):
Huh, I feel like hard oh Whitetail hunters will also
say that you talked about how there's more movement after
the peak of the rut, and usually those are the
mature bucks. They're the wise ones who know that not
every dough has been bred yet, so they're playing the
long game. That's when they're going to get up and
be a little more reckless. Is if you think the

(01:30:46):
peak of the rut is like November fourteen, those old
mature bucks, five six year olds, they are really participating
in the rut more in that like fifteenth to twenty
fifth time period than a two and a half year old?
Is that? Is that like putting too much stock in
those ideas.

Speaker 4 (01:31:05):
I think a buck is gonna participate whenever he can, huh,
and whenever he detects there is a dough an estress,
he's gonna participate. Okay, if that answers your question.

Speaker 6 (01:31:17):
Yeah, Like I said, a white tail hunter would say,
that is the time period of the rut for the
old bucks. That's like when they are vulnerable.

Speaker 4 (01:31:24):
Well, yeah, they would be exposed more during that time,
but not more than a two and a half year old,
is I wouldn't think?

Speaker 1 (01:31:31):
So? Okay, Yeah, I'm gonna go out of order and
ask my next question. Then Yanni, and then Spencer.

Speaker 2 (01:31:37):
We have a couple left time.

Speaker 1 (01:31:40):
Why ask your question?

Speaker 3 (01:31:41):
I was afraid I don't forget you.

Speaker 2 (01:31:43):
No, go ahead, I won't forget mine because it's sitting
right in front of me.

Speaker 1 (01:31:45):
How far away you think? How far away you think
a buck can smell it a dough? That's an astress?

Speaker 4 (01:31:57):
Great question, I would say, Uh, I haven't said it
depends yet, but I think it's going to depend so
much on wind condition, you know, and.

Speaker 1 (01:32:06):
So wild ass like, like perfect conditions.

Speaker 4 (01:32:10):
Hundreds of yards?

Speaker 2 (01:32:12):
Are you asking about the doe herself or just the
scent that maybe she left behind?

Speaker 1 (01:32:18):
Just detect the presence of a doe that's in heat. Yeah,
in perfect conditions, it wouldn't be it wouldn't be crazy
to say hundreds of yards.

Speaker 4 (01:32:28):
I don't think so, not at all.

Speaker 1 (01:32:30):
Yeah, their sense of smells that good.

Speaker 4 (01:32:34):
Yeah, yeah, I think so. I don't know if it's
five hundred yards to me, I think about diffusion, and so,
you know, the further and further you're getting away, the
more those molecules are, you know, being distributed within the air,
and can they pick up enough of a concentration to
cause a response. But certainly hundreds.

Speaker 1 (01:32:53):
Of yards.

Speaker 2 (01:32:56):
Bronson, why did you bring that antler all the way
from here?

Speaker 4 (01:33:01):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:33:03):
And if you're just listening, you're just later gonna have
to go to YouTube and watch to see what we're
gonna tell you.

Speaker 1 (01:33:08):
He's got a big old he's got a big old
buck antler. It's a Michigan tan with the browtie and
saw it off's got one. He's got an a luinum contraption.
He's got an a lunum contraption glued to the end
of it.

Speaker 6 (01:33:21):
Squirrels have been chewing on the times.

Speaker 4 (01:33:24):
That was actually damage during velvet.

Speaker 1 (01:33:27):
Oh, I just thought.

Speaker 4 (01:33:31):
This is a this is an example from or this
is a specimen from an experiment we did about ten
years ago now. And the question was, let me, let
me back up. We always at Mississippi State with the
Deer Lab, we tried to do every single thing we
do has a purpose for the end user. It's gonna

(01:33:52):
affect hunting, it's going to affect management, help you manage
your property. Except this. This has nothing to do at
all with man. This is straight up deer biology. Me
and Steve Demris, the other co director of the Deer Lab,
we have this debate going on for years and years
about female choice. Do female white tailed deer can they

(01:34:14):
do they have any type of choice whatsoever? Now? Behaviorally,
we don't know if she does, because when she comes
into standing heat, she's she's going to breed, you know,
if there is a If she's in standing heat and
a buck is behind her, she's gonna breed.

Speaker 3 (01:34:30):
Doesn't matter if it's a spiky or no big old
rope dragger.

Speaker 4 (01:34:35):
So I think she has to assume whom I guess
that's the right word, assume that that's going to sort
itself out, that that hopefully, through a dominance hierarchy, she's
getting the better buck. But during the peak of the rut,
that may not always be the case because the quote
dominant older buck, he may be occupied on a you know,

(01:34:56):
way over here with another though, you know, And we
see multi paternity, and so in twenty five percent of doze,
the twin faunds, twenty five percent of those will have
two different fathers, got it, So it's going on multiple
bucks of breeding. So I had just always thought that

(01:35:18):
she has to care. She has to care. Now whether
she can do anything about it or not, it's a
different question, but she has to care that if what
is behind me and about to breed me, is it
a year old spike or would it be a three,
four or five year old with larger antlers and a
big body who has clearly demonstrated I'm a survivor. I

(01:35:39):
can make it. You know, she's got all the investment,
she's going to have the gestation for seven months, is
all her resources. She ought to care who's behind hers? Like, well,
how do we do this? So we ended up we
had another project going on and we had a way
we could set this up. So we took all of
our bucks and we standardized them. We came up with
p We paired them by age. We paired them by

(01:36:03):
body size, so a doe looking at a buck couldn't say, well,
that buck is clearly four year four years old, that
one is clearly a yearling and choose one of them.

Speaker 1 (01:36:14):
Yep.

Speaker 4 (01:36:15):
So we standardized by body size and age. And then
we got with our egg engineering people and we developed
a contraption to where we could manipulate antlers.

Speaker 1 (01:36:26):
Could make him look like a toad even when he wasn't.

Speaker 4 (01:36:28):
That's exactly right. So we challenged these does with.

Speaker 2 (01:36:32):
Well, hold on, you gotta explain how you did that.

Speaker 1 (01:36:35):
Take a little spike and put that antler on his ass.

Speaker 2 (01:36:39):
Yeah he's alive.

Speaker 4 (01:36:41):
Yeah, Well we sedate him. Yeah we sedatum.

Speaker 1 (01:36:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:36:44):
Looking so they all had the base part somehow attached
to their.

Speaker 4 (01:36:51):
Pedical Yeah yeah, So all the all the bucks that
are they're in the study. They're going to be sedated
and then we're gonna cut their antlers off. We're gonna
fix that part, the coupling, a fix to the antler
and then the pedicle. They're going to get a receiver
coupling there, and so this is incredible, and so then

(01:37:13):
we will challenge a dough. So then we had someone
from that school reproductive physiologist. They can induce estress, you know,
with the progesterone treatment or something. So now we know
where that dough is coming into heat. And so now
she's behaviorally, she's demonstrating that she's an estress. So we
send her down an alleyway and she's got a pen,

(01:37:33):
and then to her left and her to her right
are too equally aged or equally body sized bucks. One
of them is carrying a one sixty, one of them
is carrying a ninety, and then we monitored her behavior
to see which one she would prefer. Now, we could
not allow them to breed just the way it was

(01:37:54):
set up the logistics, but then we looked at all
the behavioral signs of if we pull the fence up,
which which one would she go to? And it was
over eighty percent of the time she always went for
the antlers. Wow, even a younger official.

Speaker 1 (01:38:12):
Dude, good for her, superficial man, hey man, But there's
that twenty interest in personality, it's like totally suficial.

Speaker 4 (01:38:21):
But it wasn't one hundred percent. It was you know,
twenty percent didn't fall for the for the big antlers.

Speaker 1 (01:38:27):
So there's some selection going on. Well, but but like
you're saying whether or not it, I get what you're saying,
Like in that environment, there's selection going on. But however
that's occurring in the real world scenario, it.

Speaker 4 (01:38:38):
Is hard to determine exactly right, Yeah, can that even happen?
You know? The only the only thing we can say
in the wild of does she have any choice at all?
Is when she since the sensing she's coming into estras,
might she go to an area where she knows this
knows this guy occupies and just make herself available. Yeah,

(01:38:59):
but yeah, she can't be very proactive in this thing.
But when you standardize all that and controlled for it,
that's what she preferred. So it does follow the ecological
theory about antlers or an honest signal of quality.

Speaker 3 (01:39:14):
Yeah, yeah, I think I've wondered.

Speaker 1 (01:39:18):
I'm especially thinking about this as you're explaining this is
when you're watching a buck work a group of does
and you see like he's particularly interested, like he sort
of singled out a dough. He's very interested in his dough.
He's singled out. But you see her every time he approaches.
She runs.

Speaker 3 (01:39:33):
Every time he approaches, she runs, And you.

Speaker 1 (01:39:35):
Wonder, like, well, if it was a different buck, would
she run every time? Like? Is she running because she's
just not ready? Or is she running because she doesn't?
Like she doesn't want that buck buyer? Because from whatever
in his perspective, there's something very particular.

Speaker 3 (01:39:49):
About that dough.

Speaker 1 (01:39:50):
He's like hounding that dough, so he knows something's going on.

Speaker 3 (01:39:55):
But she's not receptive.

Speaker 4 (01:39:58):
I just don't think she's ready. She's just not She's close.

Speaker 1 (01:40:02):
Yeah, he knows she's close, but she's not that ready yet, right, yeh,
got it? So she might not be making like a
not you not you wait, I'm waiting for Dave or whatever.

Speaker 4 (01:40:11):
Yeah, I think she's just waiting to be receptive. Physiologically, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:40:18):
Uh.

Speaker 6 (01:40:18):
There's a theory among whitetail hunters that if you have
an old dominant buck, like a six and a half
year old, when he gets killed, you've now created a
vacuum where there's an opportunity for another big, mature buck
to come in and take that home range and own
that food source, own that betting area, own those doughs.
Do you ever see that with your movement studies, that

(01:40:40):
a big buck disappears until a new big buck moves in.

Speaker 4 (01:40:44):
No, I'm really interested in that. I do think that
has a lot of logic and appeal, and I want
that to happen because I think that's something as managers
we can manipulate doing that, removing particular bucks and creating
space for others to move in. Uh, we did not
have enough data. Well, first of all, we didn't want

(01:41:06):
to shoot all of our mature bucks. But to my knowledge,
there's been no good experiment to demonstrate that. But but
I would love to try it if we could. I
do think it's logical.

Speaker 3 (01:41:20):
Yeah, some little bucks like now's my time to shine?

Speaker 6 (01:41:22):
Yeah? Yeah, Yeah, that's the best cornfield in the neighborhood.
Does all beding here?

Speaker 3 (01:41:30):
Have you ever heard that bucks avoid certain kinds of
cover when they're in velvet and they're more comfortable going
into that cover once their antlers are hard?

Speaker 4 (01:41:38):
No?

Speaker 1 (01:41:40):
You you never heard that with elk and stuff like
that too.

Speaker 4 (01:41:43):
Well, I don't think a lot about elk, but I'm
biased with my time in South Texas and so man
thorny up in that helicopter. I say, a lot of
bucks and velvet going through. Yeah, the pair and the
mesquite and got it.

Speaker 3 (01:41:59):
That's really a good testing ground.

Speaker 1 (01:42:01):
Yeah. Yeah, there's a price to pay for going through
that mesquite.

Speaker 4 (01:42:04):
And the awareness that they have, you know, when you're
you're pushing them with the helicopter and and there's a
big mesquite branch coming up, and they know how to
tilt their head just enough to get their antlers under it.
And it's a thing of beauty to watch moose question.
I mean, you can ask.

Speaker 1 (01:42:21):
If you're maybe there's a deer parallel. You're calling. You're
calling to a moose. You're making cow calls to a moose.
And then he comes from a mile away and he
gets up, he comes just b line stops, his head's
pointing towards you.

Speaker 3 (01:42:39):
You call, he comes, you call, he comes.

Speaker 1 (01:42:41):
He gets five hundred yards away and lays down, lays
down for an hour, gets up, walks the other direction.

Speaker 6 (01:42:48):
Dawn's in his head.

Speaker 2 (01:42:50):
You were supposed to come to him.

Speaker 1 (01:42:54):
You think so?

Speaker 3 (01:42:55):
Was there.

Speaker 1 (01:42:57):
Was the wind in his face? No, there's no wind.
Isn't a human thing it wasn't a human thing. Wind's
totally wrong. He hadn't seen nothing. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:43:08):
My My only guess was there was no there was
no visual queue to stimulate him coming any further.

Speaker 1 (01:43:16):
That would make sense because he's like, I'm looking at
the whole hill, dude, there's nothing there. I'll cow standing there.
Yeah you know that. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:43:26):
He's like at some points, like at some point I
need to see.

Speaker 4 (01:43:28):
The cow, so you need a cow decoy.

Speaker 1 (01:43:32):
I've seen this sap two times in the same place,
comes all that way, and it's lays down staring and
gets up and leaves.

Speaker 2 (01:43:39):
Sounds like you've gotta be able to shoot at five
hundred yards next time.

Speaker 1 (01:43:42):
We did one time got him, but it's it's thick
and yeah, it's hard.

Speaker 2 (01:43:50):
If we have time, I could lay out the shirt
or buck, but I know.

Speaker 1 (01:43:52):
We're a shirt. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:43:55):
He's big believer in us.

Speaker 2 (01:43:56):
That's not true. But I did re Valgeist a couple
of his books, and he observed watching mule deer he
felt he observed, yeah, that there were bucks that he
would watch that would shirk the responsibility of breeding for

(01:44:19):
many seasons in a row, and then all of a
sudden year five year six come in there and because
they had reserved all those resources for that many years
and built up an extra whatever amount of body weight,
bigger antlers or whatever, then they could come in.

Speaker 1 (01:44:36):
And rule the roost, just lay waste.

Speaker 2 (01:44:40):
That's one way to put it. Yeah, did you ever
see that in your captive heard where the bucks would shirk.

Speaker 4 (01:44:48):
Not at that that scale. But so he valarious guys
is talking about a multi year right, what we would
see which we attributed to, but we don't know this,
you know, buck personality in this case hormonally higher testosterone
levels or something. But there were definitely some bucks that

(01:45:10):
at the beginning of the rut they were absolute mad men.
I mean, they wanted to fight. Everybody hated them. The
dos hated them, other bucks hated them. They just want
to fight, fight, fight, And their breeding success was always
greater the first path and maybe even longer into the
breeding season. So you know, we were able to enumerate

(01:45:32):
how many fawns you know that they sired.

Speaker 1 (01:45:35):
He's a fighter, he's a fighter, and he does good
in the beginning of the breeding season.

Speaker 4 (01:45:39):
Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah yeah, and then his body condition,
all of that fighting begins to take its toll on him.
Now keep in mind too, these are captive deer. They
got ad lib food, So I mean he's avoiding eating.
He is so consumed and obsessed with fighting and breeding.
But when you get a month, six weeks whatever into it,

(01:46:01):
his body condition begins to suffer. And now he starts
getting his butt kicked by the more passive deer who
now weighed even though they're the same age, even though
they weigh twenty pounds more. Those guys may be the shirkers.
Then they have higher breeding success later in the year.
So we kind of saw that, but compressed within year.

Speaker 1 (01:46:23):
It's super interesting. But it's different than the idea that well,
we told this the one deer biologist. I'm sure you're
familiar with Jim half a finger. Oh yeah, yeah, So
we told this the one deer biologist, and he felt
that it was just like he felt, it was a
very questionable approach from an evolutionary standpoint, to be that, like,
you're alive now, you're sexually mature now, to put off

(01:46:48):
breeding opportunity after breeding opportunity after breeding opportunity in order
to really kick ass some year down the road just
didn't make sense. Risky, Yeah, like, you know, it just
didn't make sense as a way to really to to
put more progeny on the landscape that your banking that. Well,
I'm gonna have a hell of a year when I'm five. Yeah,

(01:47:09):
and I'm taking off two, three and four.

Speaker 4 (01:47:12):
Yeah, I agree with that.

Speaker 7 (01:47:14):
Yeah, what are the the guest reasons for this? I mean,
it's it's not I don't believe it's like a buck
makes a conscious choice to do this. So, like, what
would be the biological underpinnings if this were a thing.

Speaker 4 (01:47:36):
Yeah, my well, I don't remember what hilarious geist all
of his reasoning, But I'm I'm trying to think about
a mechanism of how that could work.

Speaker 7 (01:47:45):
And like onset of hormones and things.

Speaker 4 (01:47:48):
Are happening differing testosterone levels, and whereas the example I
was giving with our data, I think it's within season,
different timing in the surging of testosterone. But there's some
great research out of Auburn University showing that there's a

(01:48:08):
lot of variation by age class, and so it could
be that those younger Bucks, and then there's gonna be
variation within an age class where some have born, some
have less, and so some of them, they just don't
have a lot of testosterone. When they're two or three
years of age. They're looking at this particular older, dominant, bigger, antlered,
bigger bodied buck and maybe it's a survival strategy. Man,

(01:48:31):
I'm not gonna risk it. But then later in life
greater surgeon testosterone and they risk it and go for it.

Speaker 3 (01:48:40):
What do you wind up seeing?

Speaker 1 (01:48:43):
If you think of an old buck that gets a
reputation with hunters as being like, he's so stealthy, he's shy,
he's sly, right.

Speaker 3 (01:48:55):
That that's got to be real, right, But what is that?

Speaker 1 (01:48:58):
What is it?

Speaker 3 (01:48:58):
What do you think he's doing?

Speaker 1 (01:49:00):
What is he not doing? You know?

Speaker 3 (01:49:03):
When he gets to be that they just seem like
they vanish.

Speaker 4 (01:49:06):
Yeah, right, And and to me that that's a really
good question of ways you have to think about it.
So is it that that buck has always been that
way and the ones that were dumber were killed? So
selection that's great going on?

Speaker 1 (01:49:25):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (01:49:27):
Or are they literally learning and modifying their behavior over time?

Speaker 1 (01:49:32):
Like I love, I love what you're saying. I would
have when I approached the question. I was approaching that
he learned it, yeah, not that he's just always been paranoid.

Speaker 4 (01:49:40):
Yeah, it's probably a little bit of both as well,
would be my guess. Yeah, so what what are they
doing different? I think it's probably just being more perceptive
and maybe being more slow in how they process what's
going on. They're not as much of a risk taker,
and so they're playing for the long game of like

(01:50:03):
I might not breed as many doves within a year,
but lifetime reproductive success I may win. Yeah, things like that.

Speaker 1 (01:50:10):
Yeah, there seems like there's some learn stuff like looking
up in trees, you know what I mean, like learning
like in certain areas. He's just like looking up, looking up,
looking up, like because he's seen before, yeah, trees. Yeah,
and like the coming out of the box, like a
year and a half old buck probably hasn't figured out

(01:50:32):
yet to like yeah look up. Yeah you know.

Speaker 4 (01:50:37):
Yeah, and so does that yearling buck have to live
through a bad experience and then he's able to he's
going to be looking from this point forward.

Speaker 1 (01:50:47):
Yeah, or a yearling bucks that are just so paranoid
they're looking all around, And.

Speaker 2 (01:50:52):
It's good they learn it from their five year old mother.

Speaker 4 (01:50:55):
I think they do.

Speaker 1 (01:50:56):
Oh that's a good point too. Yeah, she's like the
big cherry tree at the point, the point that juts
out between the fields.

Speaker 3 (01:51:05):
Don't go by that cherry tree.

Speaker 1 (01:51:06):
You know. The other thing is specific cherry tree I
grew up by with the deer dude, like the Ranella's
are always in that tree.

Speaker 2 (01:51:15):
There's less of those bucks on the landscape too, so
we just we have this perception that we see them less.
So there's sneakier though, but it's just like a numbers
game where you're just gonna see less of those bucks,
even if they're moving just as much as the two
year olds, because there's I don't know where percentage is
in most populations, but yeah, much less.

Speaker 4 (01:51:37):
Yeah, all depends on punting rate and mortality. But but yeah,
that's gonna be uh yeah. I mean even in a
well managed population, less than twenty five percent of the
bucks are going to be something like that. And that's
just based on age. And then when you start adding
in antler size, it's gonna be less than ten percent

(01:51:58):
are gonna resemble something like that. So they're very rare.

Speaker 6 (01:52:03):
In twenty fifteen, I tried very hard to kill a
cactus buck. And if you're listening, you don't know what
that is. It's A cactus buck is a buck who
does not shut his velvet, and sometimes he will grow
a unique rack as a result of that. It could
be a testosterone problem that his testicles never dropped. It
could be that he was crossing a fence and ripped
his sack open one time. And that cactus buck was

(01:52:24):
very hard to kill because it seemed as though he
didn't participate in the rut. He just like didn't loosen
up and become reckless like the other bucks would. Have
you ever looked at the movement of a cactus buck?

Speaker 4 (01:52:35):
Have not?

Speaker 1 (01:52:36):
Have not?

Speaker 4 (01:52:37):
We've never, I guess been lucky enough to have a
collar on one, but a property that a hunt has one.
Right now, He just got pictures from a puny buddy
about a week ago that the cactus buck is back.
So see there last year, It was there last year.

Speaker 6 (01:52:55):
What did you notice him due last year?

Speaker 5 (01:52:57):
He?

Speaker 4 (01:52:57):
Uh, he hung out with the doze.

Speaker 1 (01:52:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:53:00):
Yeah, they just like don't participate in the room.

Speaker 4 (01:53:02):
Nope, not at all.

Speaker 6 (01:53:05):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:53:07):
The deer writer Pat Durkin, he had an observation where
he when he was the editor Deer and Deer Hunting magazine,
he profiled a great many big buck killers okay, and
he had come to this kind of realization after a while.
There's a lot of amazing big buck killers. They couldn't

(01:53:30):
tell you what kind of tree their tree stands hanging in,
meaning it's just like it's not like a wood's there's
a point at which it's not like a woodsmanship thing.
It's like they're just good at killing box. They're not
generalist woodsmen. You know, do you ever feel like your research,
like in real on the ground application as a deer hunter,

(01:53:53):
does your research guide your activities or is like deer
hunting is just deer hunting and it doesn't matter what
you know to be true from all your projects.

Speaker 4 (01:54:04):
Yeah, yes, it does guides. Yeah, And a lot of
that is about hunting pressure and thinking about and you know,
this doesn't work everywhere in the US. In the southeast,
you know a lot a lot of stand hunting, a
lot of permanent stand hunting and so forth, and and
just recognizing that deer know when you're on the property

(01:54:28):
and it's and it's not gunshots, it's it's you being there,
you being on an ATV. It's the smells, the sounds,
all that they they know when you're there. And one
thing that has really changed when we try to really
advise now is when when you hunt, if you're going

(01:54:49):
to hunt a particular stand, particular area, only go on
the days where you're going to minimize the opportunity of
bumping deer, because we know the research I talked about earlier.
After a couple days and deer know you're on the property,
they're going to start behaving differently. So doing whatever you
can to minimize your footprint, so to speak, on the property.

(01:55:12):
That's probably one of the biggest things. And then some
really boring stuff that people roll their eyes about. But
in terms of antler quality, herd condition, things like that density,
deer density, dough harvest, stuff like that. I know how
critically important that is. And people are trying to figure

(01:55:34):
out what the heck's going on with our deer. The
quality of the deer is down, we're doing all this,
that and the other. You just got too many deer.
You just have too many mouths relative to the amount
of range that you have in the food supply. So
pretty mundane. But stuff like that.

Speaker 1 (01:55:51):
Yeah, well, I could definitely picture management information, But just
like how you go about where you're putting your stand,
when you're out there what you're doing with the wind,
But I could see with the stuff, with the research
you've done around how they handle pressure, you might look
at a place, look what everybody's up to, and then
based on what you've seen, be like I think when

(01:56:13):
the pressure hits, I think you're going to see more
of this, You're gonna see less of that, and that
might guide your movements.

Speaker 4 (01:56:18):
Yeah, what I do all the time. So, yeah, what
we talked about approach, try to minimize your disturbance of
the deer. I think about during the rut, I think
about where are those dough focal groups on the landscape.
What are going to be the movement or cover corridors
that might link those areas up and so it won't

(01:56:41):
be hunting on food. It's going to be hunting on
a corridor. And then finally when you get to the
post rut, I'm focusing on food. So the evidence is
really really clear with that. When you get a month
past the peak of the rut, they got to recover
that twenty percent of their body weight. They're hungry, and
food plots in my neck of the woods us a

(01:57:01):
great place to haunt.

Speaker 3 (01:57:03):
M think, well, that spencer Newhart.

Speaker 6 (01:57:08):
Can I make two study requests?

Speaker 4 (01:57:10):
Absolutely well, okay one of them.

Speaker 6 (01:57:13):
I haunt a lot of places in the West where
whitetail habitat and mule deer habitat overlap, but I never
see them interact with each other. I'm always like pretty
shocked that I could. I could, in the same hunt
see a couple of white tails and a couple of
mule deers, but they like don't have any social interaction
anything to do with them. I would be very interested in,

(01:57:34):
like if if you took that same study and you
put a dough down a corral and she got to
choose between a muley buck and a white tail buck,
I imagine would be very high highly skewed for the white
tail buck, like ninety plus percent, just based on what
I've seen. But I don't know that I'm interested in
anything like what a white tail buck and a mule
deer buck would do if they encountered each other.

Speaker 1 (01:57:56):
That's a great thing. Or if you just took like
if you just took like older arrays hmm, like order
from a mild deer dough and estriss and odor from
a white tail dough and estrus and like put it
in front of both boxes. He like, oh, that's the
white tail, you know, Yeah, that's a great.

Speaker 6 (01:58:13):
And in my observations, they interact as though like an
elk in a white tail would interact. They just show
no interest in each other. But I can't imagine it's
that simple.

Speaker 3 (01:58:21):
You know, how you get funding for this?

Speaker 1 (01:58:23):
Remember how a few years ago you couldn't get funding
for anything if it didn't have to do with climate. Yeah, okay,
so pitch it like this. More and more white tails
moving into more and more mildier country, mild deer are
in a tough spot. Milder are probably going to be
in a tougher spot with increased competition from white tails
increase competition for elk. So go to the Mild Deer
Foundation and be like, we need to understand more about

(01:58:46):
as these as these white tails are colonizing more and
more mildier country, how do they interact? We did, and
here's all you're funding. Now there you go, got that problem.

Speaker 4 (01:58:54):
What do you think on like how they interact with
each other in the wild. Don't know a lot about
that because that's out of my that's side of my
home range over there, But I do think it would
be interesting to challenge a white tailed dough with a
fully mature, large antlered mule deer and then a smaller,

(01:59:15):
younger whitetail. Really, is it the species straw or the
the phenotype of this is a good father, a good sire.

Speaker 6 (01:59:25):
And biology would tell us that she would be making
a poor decision by going with the Muley right, because
their offspring really fail with their escape mechanism, like they
can't start or something like that is viable. I don't
know if that's is that true?

Speaker 1 (01:59:40):
I think that I think it's like I think it's
like a horse.

Speaker 3 (01:59:43):
And a donkey throwing a mule.

Speaker 6 (01:59:45):
I thought.

Speaker 1 (01:59:48):
They're viable. Okay, they're sexually viable.

Speaker 6 (01:59:50):
We're gonna learn when he does the study.

Speaker 1 (01:59:52):
You know what I'd throw into that study? Man, if
you got like time to burn, man, if there's any
like h if symmetry matters to dose joan, is there
any like disadvantage to being atypical? It probably gets hard
after a while to tease out all these little differences, though,

(02:00:12):
don't it.

Speaker 4 (02:00:12):
Yeah, but you could manipulate it. It would be obvious. Yeah, yeah, nine, yeah, yeah,
you could attach stuff to where it's really.

Speaker 3 (02:00:22):
He's got a club on one side.

Speaker 1 (02:00:24):
Yeah, yeah, you can do that.

Speaker 6 (02:00:27):
The other study I'd be interested in is a deer's
response to yellow soybeans. I've been told all my life,
and I feel like I've maybe witnessed it some but
I don't know if I'm witnessing it because I'm supposed
to witness it. But a deer given the choice in
a in a big old soybean field, if there's some
green beans, some yellow beans, and some brown beans, which
the yellow is the ripening stage going from green to brown,

(02:00:48):
they won't pick the yellow ones. They just taste worse,
taste worse. Is that something you've heard seen?

Speaker 4 (02:00:56):
No, I haven't, but I think that's logical. So turning
yellow from the desiccation that they're growing.

Speaker 1 (02:01:05):
Sounds like yeah, good? Like that. You know. I got
some friends that are songwriters, and over the years, I've
learned that they just do not want to hear our
song ideas. But they don't even when you try to
do it like a joke and give them a song
idea but you're serious, but you're trying to act like
it's a joke, they don't want to hear it.

Speaker 4 (02:01:21):
I like how you use the word hour. But but
do they give you the obligatory that's a good.

Speaker 3 (02:01:29):
Just nothing to it. Do you like hearing study ideas?

Speaker 1 (02:01:32):
I do. Snow, you got a pile of.

Speaker 4 (02:01:39):
Some of them. Some of them can be really cuckoo.
So you're you know, you're given a seminar and you
always have what you ought to do? Is sure that
can get old?

Speaker 1 (02:01:53):
What else? Man?

Speaker 3 (02:01:54):
I could go on all day.

Speaker 6 (02:01:55):
They just like to cap it off. If if hunters
want to take what you've seen in your movement still
but he's an apply it to the rut this year?
What does that look like?

Speaker 1 (02:02:02):
Yeah?

Speaker 6 (02:02:03):
Yeah, how can they be more successful?

Speaker 4 (02:02:06):
So if you again, if you're going after a target buck,
a particular buck, your greater opportunity for him to demonstrate
site fidelity. So if you know where he's hanging out,
you need to do that in the pre rut. If
on the other hand, you are just gonna there's a
lot of big bucks in the area. I just want

(02:02:28):
to increase my odds for intercepting one that's going to
be during the peak of the rut, a.

Speaker 6 (02:02:33):
Pre rut window being like late October.

Speaker 4 (02:02:36):
Well it depends when you is, say it's like a.

Speaker 6 (02:02:39):
November fifteen rut, that's the peak rut.

Speaker 4 (02:02:41):
Yeah, so let's go one month or greater before the
peak of the rut. Okay, yeah, so like October fifteen
then in your neck of the woods. Yeah okay, yeah,
that'd be about right.

Speaker 1 (02:02:51):
Okay, So just make sure I'm track what you're saying,
Like when we when you pick the November fifteenth, we
would agree that peak rut is sort of like the
day when you have the highest relative number of doughs
in estres. That's what is that fair to define peak
rut that way?

Speaker 4 (02:03:06):
Yeah, but rather than day, we might say over a
two week, over a two week period, about half of
the does have been into estres. So yes, that is
going to be the series of days where the greatest
number and greatest proportion.

Speaker 1 (02:03:21):
So there's a there's a two week window, like if
you take a like just generally with white tail deer,
there's a two week window in which fifty percent of
the does come into estres. And we're going to declare
that two week window peak rut.

Speaker 4 (02:03:34):
Yeah, you know, if it's a synchronized rut and so forth.

Speaker 1 (02:03:38):
Yeah, generally speaking, So that that's kind of funny because
then when you hear guys killing some giant that no
one has ever seen, never showed up on their cameras, like,
that's that, dude, it's cruise, an excursion, he's an excursion book. Yeah,
he excurreted off your place. Yeah, and excirted on some
other goal.

Speaker 4 (02:03:56):
Somebody else and they got him.

Speaker 1 (02:03:57):
Yeah, exactly right.

Speaker 4 (02:04:00):
And then if you didn't get them pre rut, if
you didn't get them during the rut, hunt food in
the post rut, okay, yeah, and during the rut you
might want to here's an interesting finding. We actually looked
at food plot use, two different types of food plot use,

(02:04:21):
and so on our study area. By the way, our
study area was fifty to sixty thousand acres, so pretty big,
pretty big footprint, and we had every making model of
food plot you could have. We had quarter acre food
plots acre all the way up to twenty acre food plots,
and so we wanted to look at is there any
food plot size that deer would come to that disproportionately and.

Speaker 2 (02:04:45):
So the size you weren't varying what you were growing.

Speaker 4 (02:04:50):
Good, good question. We had so many food plots that
we had to assume that some of them had wheat
and clover some of them had brassicas. We had to
assume all that kind of smoothed, doubt that the actual
plantings within it. But yes, it was just size and
what we found. Even though two times the amount of

(02:05:12):
like the smaller one acre food plots, the sweet spot
was three four five acres. Really they disproportionately selected that
size of plot.

Speaker 1 (02:05:26):
That feels secure to them.

Speaker 4 (02:05:27):
So why why would they do that? And so we
think it's because what do small food plots not provide
over the course of the hunting season. What happens to them?

Speaker 2 (02:05:42):
They get eaten out.

Speaker 4 (02:05:43):
They get over brows, they get overwhelmed. So not only
because of the size of it and the number of
deer on it. You don't have as many hours of
photosynthesis going on because the smaller in the shade all that.
Then you get to this three four five acre. Now
you've got a big area. You're now producing more forage
per acre, and now we've got a social aspect of

(02:06:07):
it too, which I'll get to in a second. But
then after that it was diminishing returns. So we didn't
see anything greater of a ten acre plot versus a
three acre plot.

Speaker 1 (02:06:17):
Oh okay, they didn't prefer five over twenty.

Speaker 4 (02:06:22):
They did.

Speaker 1 (02:06:23):
I'm sorry they did.

Speaker 4 (02:06:24):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And so we saw a big drop
off in relative to their availability on the landscape. Deer
were disproportionately choosing those plots over the ones smaller and
the ones larger.

Speaker 1 (02:06:39):
What's the argument against a bigger plot? Do you think
in his head?

Speaker 4 (02:06:43):
I think you reach a particular size and there's just
only so many deer in the area or are gonna
use it.

Speaker 6 (02:06:51):
And I would say they're vulnerable.

Speaker 1 (02:06:53):
There's it's like a like like why do you feel
a avoids? Like why is he avoiding a big food plot?

Speaker 4 (02:07:06):
I see what you mean. Now, yeah, he doesn't want
to go into the middle of a big, old ten
or twenty acres. Yeah, because that's security possibly, so yes, exposure.

Speaker 1 (02:07:15):
It's exposed.

Speaker 4 (02:07:16):
Yeah. So when you look at during the year, if
you look at the number of visits per day, you
will see that they are visiting more during the rut.
So you think about how we analyze the data, it's
just ding, did he visit the plot or not? Yes,
and you tally those up. So they're visiting those food

(02:07:39):
plots more during the day. So some of that is food,
some of it is also socially. I mean they're cruising
looking for dose. When you get to the end of
the year, during the post rut, they will have just
as many or less visits, but their duration is longer.
So now they are visiting for the purpose of forage

(02:08:03):
and not socially looking for a female.

Speaker 1 (02:08:05):
Yep, cow man. No, it's a lot of great information.
I got such a good study. I had to say
so hard to explain.

Speaker 2 (02:08:19):
I'm like a post book right now, and all I
can think about is some food. And we got to
do this trivia in like thirty minutes.

Speaker 3 (02:08:26):
Dude, thanks for coming on and wrap it up.

Speaker 1 (02:08:27):
Yeah, man, I love your the extension, like, tell people
go how to go find your work and to see exauce.
I mean, you got you have your academic publications, but
you're also producing stuff for just guys like us. Yeah,
so tell people how to go, how to go kind
of find some of your infographics.

Speaker 4 (02:08:44):
And yeah, a couple places so you can go to
the Msudar lab dot com. That's our website that has
all of these publications on there. We also do a
lot of this on social media, so we're on Facebook, Instagram,
we have a YouTube channel with a lot of different videos,
podcasts where we talk about this type of stuff. Podcast

(02:09:05):
is Deer University, so MSU Deer Lab, the website, social media,
uh YouTube. You ought to be able to get us.
If it's on the private side outside of the university.
If you're looking for help with land management, go to
Wildlife Investments dot com and there's a lot of us there.
A little company consulting work that's for consulting work.

Speaker 1 (02:09:28):
Yeah, that's great, man. And on that consulting work you
kind of you probably do. You go survey the property,
talk about what's going on, what could be better?

Speaker 4 (02:09:37):
Right, what strategies, habitat habitat management, deer ducks, turkey, quail,
whatever you want with wildlife management. All right, we've got
an expert.

Speaker 1 (02:09:47):
To help you. Right again, doctor Bronson Strickland from University
of Mississippi.

Speaker 4 (02:09:56):
Hale State, Mississippi State.

Speaker 1 (02:09:58):
University, Mississippi State University. We have that same problem in
Michigan because we've got U of M and M s
U well.

Speaker 2 (02:10:08):
With the M specific with them specifically specifically.

Speaker 1 (02:10:13):
And then the the extension material is like the extension
piece I was talking about that shows like that kind
of puts your study on the lunar stuff. That's that's uh,
that's a Michigan State University Extension pieced a Mississippi State
University Extension piece that puts down it's a great graphic

(02:10:36):
because it puts down what people think, the idiosyncrasies of
what people think, what's found, and then it puts it
into all these like percentages, and then whatever kind of
guy you are, moon underfoot, moon overhead, full moon rising,
full moon setting, you can go and track every possible

(02:10:57):
variation and find out.

Speaker 3 (02:11:01):
Yards per hour all that, and you can go put
your mind at ease about what's going on.

Speaker 1 (02:11:06):
That's right. I mean, it's very It is a when
you look through it. I spent thirty minutes staring at
it today. It is a very convincing portrayal of like
looking at something quite thoroughly.

Speaker 6 (02:11:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:11:19):
Yeah, it's a great piece.

Speaker 4 (02:11:21):
Appreciate that.

Speaker 1 (02:11:21):
Thank you.

Speaker 3 (02:11:22):
In poster form, it would take up a lot of walls.

Speaker 4 (02:11:24):
It sure would, it sure would.

Speaker 1 (02:11:27):
Yeah, but you might think about a small poster. We will, yeah,
with the real salient points in it next time.

Speaker 3 (02:11:33):
Okay, thank you very much for coming on.

Speaker 1 (02:11:36):
We're all going to be, if not better deer hunters, better,
Dear observers now, thank

Speaker 2 (02:11:41):
You, thanks Ronson,

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