April 24, 2025 • 18 mins
This week, Tony breaks down the ways in which general human behavior hinders hunting efforts, and how as individuals we can break the mold to kill more bucks.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide
to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light,
creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind.
First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host
Tony Peterson.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Foundation's podcast, which is brought
to you by first Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson,
and today's episode is all about human behavior and why
you should study it to be a better deer hunter.
A couple of weeks ago and now, I spent some
time in Nebraska trying to call in a turkey on
public land, and what I learned on that hunt just
(00:41):
drove home something I believe about deer hunting is that
if you don't understand people, you won't understand how to
deer hunt in most places. Now, this might sound like
a topic that applies mostly to the public land or
pressure ground deer hunter, but that's not true. Human behavior
matters in the deer woods no matter where you hunt,
(01:02):
which is what I'm going to talk about right now.
I pulled up into the ditch off of a drainage
on a walk in ranch in central Nebraska, with a
turkey tag in my pocket and all of the fixings
for a bowhunt ready to go. And while I had
poured over on X to try to find likely looking
(01:25):
gobbler hotspots, you really don't know what you're getting into
on a new place until you show up, especially if
that place is a piece of public land six hundred
miles from your house. Now, what I saw the instant
I pulled into the ditch was five jakes beating their
way along a flat toward a cedar covered hillside. Now,
if that isn't a good sign, I don't know what is.
(01:48):
What was even better was that as soon as I
stepped out of the truck, I heard a tom gobble.
Now he lit up about five times while I scrambled
to get my gear in order and head in between
him and the jakes. I figured, you know, it would
be an hour long hunt and i'd be on the
road to Kansas to try to fill another tag. Except
that as soon as I crossed the fence into the
best looking spot to climb the hill, I realized that
(02:11):
the cover was awful sparse and awful steep. And when
I crested the ridge, aside from admiring a set of
giant gobbler tracks on the tiny ridge trail that wound
its way from Cedar Patch to Cedar Patch. I realized
that I was hemmed in by roads. I don't like
hunting any animals on public that might be visible from
the road, but I thought maybe since it was the
(02:32):
early archery season, you know, the pressure would be low
and I could make something happen. I wandered around for
a little bit and realized that the ideal setup wasn't
going to happen, and honestly, neither was a shitty one.
I don't know how many times I found a spot
I wanted to hunt but couldn't make it work. But
if you added up how often that's happened while deer
in Turkey hunting, it might be like a billion. Dejected,
(02:56):
I walked back past my truck to set up where
I had originally planned to go. Now, aside from one
double bearded tom that acted as if he had lost
every fight he had ever got anywhere near it was
super dead for me. So I went looking, and not
only did I find the gobbler from the first day,
I found about ten other legal birds scattered throughout the
same valley. Now that might make it sound like I
(03:19):
have some sort of secret, but the truth is they
were all visible from the road, which means any idiot
with a driver's license could find those birds, and besides
this idiot, a lot of other idiots did. I shouldn't
say that about other hunters I've never met, but I
can say about myself, because I spent the whole next
day trying to call in those birds. What happened was
(03:40):
that I had long, in depth conversations with various toms
and hens who decided I was better off left alone,
and all I had to keep me company were some
songbirds and about fifty thousand ticks. It was a long,
long day in the blind. The plus side was that
one of my last days of that short hunt coincided
(04:01):
with when the shotgun season would be open, and I knew,
after watching truck after truck and one Subaru that made
a lot of laps while looking for birds, that I
needed to get in somewhere where the turkeys weren't visible
and where I could get away from the road, because well, duh,
of course the visible birds are going to get messed with.
(04:22):
And you know what, I wandered around and sat through
a couple of dead calling sequences before finding some real
turkey sign later in the day, which led me deeper
into a huge chunk of walk in land. Now, eventually
I spotted a windmill in there, and since I'm a
smart guy and I was very thirsty, I thought maybe
(04:43):
there would be some turkey activity around the only water
source on maybe two thousand acres of patched or ground.
And there was. And it didn't take a whole lot
of yelping and purring and clucking before six redheads popped
up and wandered close to my decoys. Now, I know
some hunters brown on shooting jakes, but I've also noticed
that most of those guys aren't hunting cage public land birds,
(05:06):
and even if they are, I don't care. I'm not
about to start trophy hunting turkeys. And I can say
with the utmost sincerity that I was pretty excited to
see a lot of jakes rolling into my decoys, and
very excited to see one of them split from the
group and poke his head up in the air at
twenty yards. Now, after I sent him to the happy
strutting grounds in the sky, I realized I had only
(05:28):
actually laid eyes on one turkey while hunting in about
four days at least until that gang of Jake's wandered
in because I had hunted like everyone else. I don't
know why it's so hard for us to break away
from what everyone else does to what we should do
while we're hunting, but it just is. I also know
(05:50):
that people are going to listen to this and think
that the hunting they have is different from me or
anyone else, and maybe assume these rules don't apply. I'm
telling you they probably do. And I want to frame
this up with an easy one. You know, those shitty
out of state hunters who only road hunt and just
don't want to burn a calorie to kill a deer
(06:10):
or a turkey. They exist everywhere, and if you think
the residents in your state don't do that, you're being
intentionally glib. I see it everywhere I hunt, and honestly
probably see it the most out West, where everyone is
supposed to be snorting lines of mountain oops off of
their ninety pound packs and engaging in almost superhero level
(06:30):
feats of strength that would make the average whitetail hunter
ball like an abandoned newborn. This isn't because Western hunters
are lazier than whitetail hunters. It's because they live where
road hunting can be productive because of the visibility and
the sheer scope of land they have to work with.
There are plenty of whitetail hunters who try to spot
deer from their vehicles too. It just doesn't, you know,
(06:53):
probably work as well in quite a few places where
big concentrations of deer and hunters mix, the less if
I can tease one out of the morass. Here is this.
If something is visible from the road and it's not
on a highly managed property, then it's probably not worth hunting. Now,
(07:13):
you can check an awful lot of spots like that
and find sign, because deer will leave sign at night.
But for the most part, that should be left to
the people who aren't in too much danger of going
over their bag limits on deer in any given season.
Human behavior is predictable like that, and you should think
about it. You should use it to your advantage. Let
(07:34):
me give you another example. Think about how often you
call to deer that don't come in. Now, think about
that same deer living in a square mile and how
many hunters he's encountered who operate just like you. Maybe
you can grun him in or snort we's him in,
But the odds are pretty good that unless the mood
(07:55):
is just right, it's not gonna happen. We often think
that they won't commit just because they didn't want to,
but I think it's often because they get called to
a lot, and that creates kind of an association between
frantic grunting or rattling with danger up in a tree.
I think they get conditioned. Now you might think, wasn't
(08:16):
that sort of a no harm, no foul type of situation.
So I grunt out a buck and he doesn't commit,
Who cares? What if he spooks? What if he comes
in and you didn't think about it, But it's only
a matter of him swinging around just a little bit
so he can check the wind upon which you're sending
plenty of old factory warning signs. Or what if you
spook him out right? That happens a fair amount to
(08:38):
deer I call to. That doesn't stop me from calling
all the time, but it stops me from calling every
time I get the urge. If I see a deer
do something today and he's not giving me great calling vibes,
I'd rather watch him do his thing, and then move
closer tomorrow or the next time I can hunt. This
is a thing that's hard to resist, but it can
be a good idea, beecially, if you hunt on pressure ground. Now,
(09:12):
let's look at another way that human behavior is predictable
and detrimental to our success in the deer woods, the
good looking spot conundrum. We are conditioned to look for
food sources and generally openings, oftentimes openings in the cover.
We like to be able to see. We like to
hunt where the deer could come in and grab a
(09:33):
bite to eat. We see dozens and dozens of giant
bucks every fall that are posed up in cornfields and
food plots after they get shot. All those trophy photos.
Now we might not know where they bed or stage,
but we can figure out where they might feed easily enough.
And again, there might also be plenty of sign in
(09:55):
the food. The trouble is, even the dullest white tail
hunter out there knows that foods sources are good spots
to hunt. If you hunt public land at all, where
there's some sort of agg on it, you'll find blinds
and stands. Cameras too. Probably you'll find evidence of hunting pressure,
you'll find the same spot that everyone else can find
(10:16):
because everyone else, uh can find it. The spot that
looks like it would be amazing on private ground is
often a lost cause on public land or pressure ground.
It's the prevalence of sign and the type of sign
that really matters. On that turkey hunt I just went on,
I didn't find hardly any droppings or roos, trees or
(10:37):
flipped over cow pois or random feathers in almost every
spot I looked at. But I still wasted my first
day and a half hunting a good looking spot that
really wasn't worth a shit. It wasn't until I started
finding some fresh turkey sign, and then a whole bunch
of fresh turkey sign on the two track leading to
the water tank that I felt like I was actually
(10:59):
in a spot that the birds were using. Currently. Deer
hunting is like that, but the waters get a little
muddier there because deer leave a lot of sign. A
spot that looks good, that's great, but without the fresh
droppings and the tracks and hopefully rubs and scrapes, you
might be looking at a spot that is just kind
of cooled off considerably, or a spot that is only
(11:21):
hot at night, which is often the case with pressured
food sources, and those spots, because they look so dang tasty,
will soak up a lot of the hunting pressure because
human behavior makes it so. Human behavior is generally kind
of lazy, and understanding that is huge for figuring out
(11:41):
where deer go to avoid us. This applies to something
that I think matters a lot to being a good hunter,
which is just figuring out a different way to get
into spots. If you only ever park in the parking
areas of a WMA, you're only ever going in the
way most hunters go in. If you only ever park
one hundred yards into the field road on your lease
(12:03):
because it's easiest, you're conditioning the deer to your behavior,
and that can be just as damaging as someone else's
predictable behavior. This is really a simple lesson to understand,
but a hard one to put into practice. That jakester
I shot Nebraska. Him and his buddies came in at
three in the afternoon. It was at least eighty degrees
(12:24):
with the sun beating down. You know who was the
only one stupid enough to be out there trying to
call a bird in during those conditions yours truly, at
least it seemed to be in that spot, and it
was a big, big spot. I had a lot of
land in myself, and I found a place that had
a big time draw in it, which was the water.
I promised you that most folks would have said that
(12:46):
the birds weren't going to be overly active or callable
in those conditions, and in a lot of places that
would have been true. But when you go where the
turkeys want to be, they get a hell of a
lot more callable because they are not only more concentrated,
but I believe this anyway, they're just more likely to
respond positively when they hear birds where they expect to
hear birds, kind of like how I believe that calling
(13:09):
deer gets a hell of a lot easier when you
find them in the thick cover where they feel safe
and probably wouldn't be surprised to bump into a few
other deer. We think we have this stuff figured out
because there is a template for good hunting on good
ground that has leaked through to all of us, but
that template doesn't really apply to most of us. I
(13:31):
see this in one big way that I think holds
a lot of folks back, and that's our behavior around
trail cameras. Now, look, I love trail cameras, but I
don't let them tell me when bucks are daylighting, because
if I did, I'd haunt a lot less than I should.
This idea that we can single out our target buck
and then wait for him to start slipping during daylight
(13:52):
is great if you have the right setup. We believe
that is the move because it makes sense, and for
some folks it works. But even if you are on
good private ground, you have to ask yourself, what are
the odds that the buck you want only moves in
daylight past your cameras showing you that he is in
(14:13):
fact moving in daylight. He takes one other trail, or
shows up in the food plot at the opposite end,
or whatever, and your cameras will show you that he
is definitely not moving in daylight. But that's not true
and is mostly not true for most bucks on any
given day. I believe that in my heart, just as
(14:33):
I believe that a lot of hunters follow that program,
and not necessarily with individual deer, but deer in general
or bucks in general anyway, and it keeps them from
hunting that's predictable human behavior that we do to ourselves
in a way, and it's a great way to often
not fill your buck tag under the idea that you're
actually being a really smart, calculated deer hunter. Now, if
(14:57):
you have the right spot, sure, but if you don't,
then you're only setting yourself up for failure with that behavior.
But we can't help ourselves. We look for the answers
to our dear problems and others, and we should probably
look mostly inward. Now, there's another type of human behavior
that we should try to understand too, one that isn't
(15:17):
just general hunter behavior, and one that isn't our own
set of behaviors. It's the behavior of anyone who hunts
on or near where we hunt. I have a farm.
I've hunted in southern Minnesota for a long long time,
and I've gotten to know what some of the other
hunters will do out there. Some of them hunt field
(15:38):
edges in the mornings, which means certain fields will mostly
be a lost cause after the first week of the season.
Some or at least one who I wish would move
far far away, only stalks around while trying to shoot one,
which is very hard for good hunters let alone. This
particular fella, where he goes to do that is where
(16:00):
I mostly won't go to hunt much, especially on the
weekends when he's most likely to be out. Is what
he's doing is walking around and spooking a lot of
deer while killing very very few of them. Now, what
can you learn about the other hunters on the ground
you're hunting? Well? Where they park, where they hunt, how
(16:21):
long they sit when they're likely to be out there,
all of the above. All of that matters and can
inform some of your decisions. Now, what about your neighbors.
Do they take it pretty easy until you season and
then go hard in the paint with a bunch of kids.
That's valuable intel. Do they sit fence lines or walk
out early because they're scared of the dark. Do they
(16:42):
cruise around on four wheelers at peak hours during daylight hours?
I don't think most dear think about coyotes or wolves
or anything else that might kill them quite as much
as they think about us. We are the threat on
a large scale, and what we do is convince them
to engage in certain behaviors to avoid us. That's not
the whole game, but is a huge part of it.
(17:06):
Our behavior directly influences their behavior, and that's why hunting
public land is more difficult than hunting primo lease in
Iowa with only one name on it. It's simple, but
isn't It is worth thinking about, though, because you have
to ask yourself how others will influence the deer you're
hunting and just what you can do about that. And
(17:27):
then you have to ask yourself what behaviors you engage
in that seem to work and the ones we believe
should work but mostly don't. There are so many lessons
in that last point, but self awareness kind of sucks.
It is important for a lot of things in life,
including being a better deer hunter, but it just isn't
much fun. Getting better at deer hunting is, though, and
(17:49):
so is shooting a nice buck in his big old lungs.
So think about that and think about coming back next
week because I'm going to talk about botany, which is
a boring ass topic, but I plan to make it
exciting and promise you that it might help you kill
more giant bucks or at least some fourkies. That's it
for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the
(18:11):
Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you
by First Flight. As always, thank you so much for listening.
Your support means the world to us. You guys show
up every week, every month.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Huge.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
Without you, guys, we are nothing, so thank you for that. Now,
if you want to listen to some other podcasts, maybe
you want to hear some good storytelling and head over
to Clay's Bear Grease or Brent's This Country Life. Check
those podcasts out at the mediator dot com. While you're there,
you can read all kinds of articles. I'm putting out
a bunch of dog training articles right now. Maybe you
need a recipe for that bird you're going to kill
(18:43):
here this week. Whatever, go check it out at the
mediator dot com and thank you for all of your support.
Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide
to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light,
creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind.
First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host
Tony Peterson.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Foundation's podcast, which is brought
to you by first Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson,
and today's episode is all about human behavior and why
you should study it to be a better deer hunter.
A couple of weeks ago and now, I spent some
time in Nebraska trying to call in a turkey on
public land, and what I learned on that hunt just
(00:41):
drove home something I believe about deer hunting is that
if you don't understand people, you won't understand how to
deer hunt in most places. Now, this might sound like
a topic that applies mostly to the public land or
pressure ground deer hunter, but that's not true. Human behavior
matters in the deer woods no matter where you hunt,
(01:02):
which is what I'm going to talk about right now.
I pulled up into the ditch off of a drainage
on a walk in ranch in central Nebraska, with a
turkey tag in my pocket and all of the fixings
for a bowhunt ready to go. And while I had
poured over on X to try to find likely looking
(01:25):
gobbler hotspots, you really don't know what you're getting into
on a new place until you show up, especially if
that place is a piece of public land six hundred
miles from your house. Now, what I saw the instant
I pulled into the ditch was five jakes beating their
way along a flat toward a cedar covered hillside. Now,
if that isn't a good sign, I don't know what is.
(01:48):
What was even better was that as soon as I
stepped out of the truck, I heard a tom gobble.
Now he lit up about five times while I scrambled
to get my gear in order and head in between
him and the jakes. I figured, you know, it would
be an hour long hunt and i'd be on the
road to Kansas to try to fill another tag. Except
that as soon as I crossed the fence into the
best looking spot to climb the hill, I realized that
(02:11):
the cover was awful sparse and awful steep. And when
I crested the ridge, aside from admiring a set of
giant gobbler tracks on the tiny ridge trail that wound
its way from Cedar Patch to Cedar Patch. I realized
that I was hemmed in by roads. I don't like
hunting any animals on public that might be visible from
the road, but I thought maybe since it was the
(02:32):
early archery season, you know, the pressure would be low
and I could make something happen. I wandered around for
a little bit and realized that the ideal setup wasn't
going to happen, and honestly, neither was a shitty one.
I don't know how many times I found a spot
I wanted to hunt but couldn't make it work. But
if you added up how often that's happened while deer
in Turkey hunting, it might be like a billion. Dejected,
(02:56):
I walked back past my truck to set up where
I had originally planned to go. Now, aside from one
double bearded tom that acted as if he had lost
every fight he had ever got anywhere near it was
super dead for me. So I went looking, and not
only did I find the gobbler from the first day,
I found about ten other legal birds scattered throughout the
same valley. Now that might make it sound like I
(03:19):
have some sort of secret, but the truth is they
were all visible from the road, which means any idiot
with a driver's license could find those birds, and besides
this idiot, a lot of other idiots did. I shouldn't
say that about other hunters I've never met, but I
can say about myself, because I spent the whole next
day trying to call in those birds. What happened was
(03:40):
that I had long, in depth conversations with various toms
and hens who decided I was better off left alone,
and all I had to keep me company were some
songbirds and about fifty thousand ticks. It was a long,
long day in the blind. The plus side was that
one of my last days of that short hunt coincided
(04:01):
with when the shotgun season would be open, and I knew,
after watching truck after truck and one Subaru that made
a lot of laps while looking for birds, that I
needed to get in somewhere where the turkeys weren't visible
and where I could get away from the road, because well, duh,
of course the visible birds are going to get messed with.
(04:22):
And you know what, I wandered around and sat through
a couple of dead calling sequences before finding some real
turkey sign later in the day, which led me deeper
into a huge chunk of walk in land. Now, eventually
I spotted a windmill in there, and since I'm a
smart guy and I was very thirsty, I thought maybe
(04:43):
there would be some turkey activity around the only water
source on maybe two thousand acres of patched or ground.
And there was. And it didn't take a whole lot
of yelping and purring and clucking before six redheads popped
up and wandered close to my decoys. Now, I know
some hunters brown on shooting jakes, but I've also noticed
that most of those guys aren't hunting cage public land birds,
(05:06):
and even if they are, I don't care. I'm not
about to start trophy hunting turkeys. And I can say
with the utmost sincerity that I was pretty excited to
see a lot of jakes rolling into my decoys, and
very excited to see one of them split from the
group and poke his head up in the air at
twenty yards. Now, after I sent him to the happy
strutting grounds in the sky, I realized I had only
(05:28):
actually laid eyes on one turkey while hunting in about
four days at least until that gang of Jake's wandered
in because I had hunted like everyone else. I don't
know why it's so hard for us to break away
from what everyone else does to what we should do
while we're hunting, but it just is. I also know
(05:50):
that people are going to listen to this and think
that the hunting they have is different from me or
anyone else, and maybe assume these rules don't apply. I'm
telling you they probably do. And I want to frame
this up with an easy one. You know, those shitty
out of state hunters who only road hunt and just
don't want to burn a calorie to kill a deer
(06:10):
or a turkey. They exist everywhere, and if you think
the residents in your state don't do that, you're being
intentionally glib. I see it everywhere I hunt, and honestly
probably see it the most out West, where everyone is
supposed to be snorting lines of mountain oops off of
their ninety pound packs and engaging in almost superhero level
(06:30):
feats of strength that would make the average whitetail hunter
ball like an abandoned newborn. This isn't because Western hunters
are lazier than whitetail hunters. It's because they live where
road hunting can be productive because of the visibility and
the sheer scope of land they have to work with.
There are plenty of whitetail hunters who try to spot
deer from their vehicles too. It just doesn't, you know,
(06:53):
probably work as well in quite a few places where
big concentrations of deer and hunters mix, the less if
I can tease one out of the morass. Here is this.
If something is visible from the road and it's not
on a highly managed property, then it's probably not worth hunting. Now,
(07:13):
you can check an awful lot of spots like that
and find sign, because deer will leave sign at night.
But for the most part, that should be left to
the people who aren't in too much danger of going
over their bag limits on deer in any given season.
Human behavior is predictable like that, and you should think
about it. You should use it to your advantage. Let
(07:34):
me give you another example. Think about how often you
call to deer that don't come in. Now, think about
that same deer living in a square mile and how
many hunters he's encountered who operate just like you. Maybe
you can grun him in or snort we's him in,
But the odds are pretty good that unless the mood
(07:55):
is just right, it's not gonna happen. We often think
that they won't commit just because they didn't want to,
but I think it's often because they get called to
a lot, and that creates kind of an association between
frantic grunting or rattling with danger up in a tree.
I think they get conditioned. Now you might think, wasn't
(08:16):
that sort of a no harm, no foul type of situation.
So I grunt out a buck and he doesn't commit,
Who cares? What if he spooks? What if he comes
in and you didn't think about it, But it's only
a matter of him swinging around just a little bit
so he can check the wind upon which you're sending
plenty of old factory warning signs. Or what if you
spook him out right? That happens a fair amount to
(08:38):
deer I call to. That doesn't stop me from calling
all the time, but it stops me from calling every
time I get the urge. If I see a deer
do something today and he's not giving me great calling vibes,
I'd rather watch him do his thing, and then move
closer tomorrow or the next time I can hunt. This
is a thing that's hard to resist, but it can
be a good idea, beecially, if you hunt on pressure ground. Now,
(09:12):
let's look at another way that human behavior is predictable
and detrimental to our success in the deer woods, the
good looking spot conundrum. We are conditioned to look for
food sources and generally openings, oftentimes openings in the cover.
We like to be able to see. We like to
hunt where the deer could come in and grab a
(09:33):
bite to eat. We see dozens and dozens of giant
bucks every fall that are posed up in cornfields and
food plots after they get shot. All those trophy photos.
Now we might not know where they bed or stage,
but we can figure out where they might feed easily enough.
And again, there might also be plenty of sign in
(09:55):
the food. The trouble is, even the dullest white tail
hunter out there knows that foods sources are good spots
to hunt. If you hunt public land at all, where
there's some sort of agg on it, you'll find blinds
and stands. Cameras too. Probably you'll find evidence of hunting pressure,
you'll find the same spot that everyone else can find
(10:16):
because everyone else, uh can find it. The spot that
looks like it would be amazing on private ground is
often a lost cause on public land or pressure ground.
It's the prevalence of sign and the type of sign
that really matters. On that turkey hunt I just went on,
I didn't find hardly any droppings or roos, trees or
(10:37):
flipped over cow pois or random feathers in almost every
spot I looked at. But I still wasted my first
day and a half hunting a good looking spot that
really wasn't worth a shit. It wasn't until I started
finding some fresh turkey sign, and then a whole bunch
of fresh turkey sign on the two track leading to
the water tank that I felt like I was actually
(10:59):
in a spot that the birds were using. Currently. Deer
hunting is like that, but the waters get a little
muddier there because deer leave a lot of sign. A
spot that looks good, that's great, but without the fresh
droppings and the tracks and hopefully rubs and scrapes, you
might be looking at a spot that is just kind
of cooled off considerably, or a spot that is only
(11:21):
hot at night, which is often the case with pressured
food sources, and those spots, because they look so dang tasty,
will soak up a lot of the hunting pressure because
human behavior makes it so. Human behavior is generally kind
of lazy, and understanding that is huge for figuring out
(11:41):
where deer go to avoid us. This applies to something
that I think matters a lot to being a good hunter,
which is just figuring out a different way to get
into spots. If you only ever park in the parking
areas of a WMA, you're only ever going in the
way most hunters go in. If you only ever park
one hundred yards into the field road on your lease
(12:03):
because it's easiest, you're conditioning the deer to your behavior,
and that can be just as damaging as someone else's
predictable behavior. This is really a simple lesson to understand,
but a hard one to put into practice. That jakester
I shot Nebraska. Him and his buddies came in at
three in the afternoon. It was at least eighty degrees
(12:24):
with the sun beating down. You know who was the
only one stupid enough to be out there trying to
call a bird in during those conditions yours truly, at
least it seemed to be in that spot, and it
was a big, big spot. I had a lot of
land in myself, and I found a place that had
a big time draw in it, which was the water.
I promised you that most folks would have said that
(12:46):
the birds weren't going to be overly active or callable
in those conditions, and in a lot of places that
would have been true. But when you go where the
turkeys want to be, they get a hell of a
lot more callable because they are not only more concentrated,
but I believe this anyway, they're just more likely to
respond positively when they hear birds where they expect to
hear birds, kind of like how I believe that calling
(13:09):
deer gets a hell of a lot easier when you
find them in the thick cover where they feel safe
and probably wouldn't be surprised to bump into a few
other deer. We think we have this stuff figured out
because there is a template for good hunting on good
ground that has leaked through to all of us, but
that template doesn't really apply to most of us. I
(13:31):
see this in one big way that I think holds
a lot of folks back, and that's our behavior around
trail cameras. Now, look, I love trail cameras, but I
don't let them tell me when bucks are daylighting, because
if I did, I'd haunt a lot less than I should.
This idea that we can single out our target buck
and then wait for him to start slipping during daylight
(13:52):
is great if you have the right setup. We believe
that is the move because it makes sense, and for
some folks it works. But even if you are on
good private ground, you have to ask yourself, what are
the odds that the buck you want only moves in
daylight past your cameras showing you that he is in
(14:13):
fact moving in daylight. He takes one other trail, or
shows up in the food plot at the opposite end,
or whatever, and your cameras will show you that he
is definitely not moving in daylight. But that's not true
and is mostly not true for most bucks on any
given day. I believe that in my heart, just as
(14:33):
I believe that a lot of hunters follow that program,
and not necessarily with individual deer, but deer in general
or bucks in general anyway, and it keeps them from
hunting that's predictable human behavior that we do to ourselves
in a way, and it's a great way to often
not fill your buck tag under the idea that you're
actually being a really smart, calculated deer hunter. Now, if
(14:57):
you have the right spot, sure, but if you don't,
then you're only setting yourself up for failure with that behavior.
But we can't help ourselves. We look for the answers
to our dear problems and others, and we should probably
look mostly inward. Now, there's another type of human behavior
that we should try to understand too, one that isn't
(15:17):
just general hunter behavior, and one that isn't our own
set of behaviors. It's the behavior of anyone who hunts
on or near where we hunt. I have a farm.
I've hunted in southern Minnesota for a long long time,
and I've gotten to know what some of the other
hunters will do out there. Some of them hunt field
(15:38):
edges in the mornings, which means certain fields will mostly
be a lost cause after the first week of the season.
Some or at least one who I wish would move
far far away, only stalks around while trying to shoot one,
which is very hard for good hunters let alone. This
particular fella, where he goes to do that is where
(16:00):
I mostly won't go to hunt much, especially on the
weekends when he's most likely to be out. Is what
he's doing is walking around and spooking a lot of
deer while killing very very few of them. Now, what
can you learn about the other hunters on the ground
you're hunting? Well? Where they park, where they hunt, how
(16:21):
long they sit when they're likely to be out there,
all of the above. All of that matters and can
inform some of your decisions. Now, what about your neighbors.
Do they take it pretty easy until you season and
then go hard in the paint with a bunch of kids.
That's valuable intel. Do they sit fence lines or walk
out early because they're scared of the dark. Do they
(16:42):
cruise around on four wheelers at peak hours during daylight hours?
I don't think most dear think about coyotes or wolves
or anything else that might kill them quite as much
as they think about us. We are the threat on
a large scale, and what we do is convince them
to engage in certain behaviors to avoid us. That's not
the whole game, but is a huge part of it.
(17:06):
Our behavior directly influences their behavior, and that's why hunting
public land is more difficult than hunting primo lease in
Iowa with only one name on it. It's simple, but
isn't It is worth thinking about, though, because you have
to ask yourself how others will influence the deer you're
hunting and just what you can do about that. And
(17:27):
then you have to ask yourself what behaviors you engage
in that seem to work and the ones we believe
should work but mostly don't. There are so many lessons
in that last point, but self awareness kind of sucks.
It is important for a lot of things in life,
including being a better deer hunter, but it just isn't
much fun. Getting better at deer hunting is, though, and
(17:49):
so is shooting a nice buck in his big old lungs.
So think about that and think about coming back next
week because I'm going to talk about botany, which is
a boring ass topic, but I plan to make it
exciting and promise you that it might help you kill
more giant bucks or at least some fourkies. That's it
for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the
(18:11):
Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you
by First Flight. As always, thank you so much for listening.
Your support means the world to us. You guys show
up every week, every month.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Huge.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
Without you, guys, we are nothing, so thank you for that. Now,
if you want to listen to some other podcasts, maybe
you want to hear some good storytelling and head over
to Clay's Bear Grease or Brent's This Country Life. Check
those podcasts out at the mediator dot com. While you're there,
you can read all kinds of articles. I'm putting out
a bunch of dog training articles right now. Maybe you
need a recipe for that bird you're going to kill
(18:43):
here this week. Whatever, go check it out at the
mediator dot com and thank you for all of your support.
Host
Mark Kenyon
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