May 6, 2025 • 17 mins
This week, Tony explains why understanding plant life a little better will give you a leg up on the deer during all of your non-rut hunting time this fall.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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 Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast,
which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about understanding plant
life and how it affects almost all of our non
rut deer hunting strategies. I mean, what a better time
to talk about a super pooring ass subject than right now.
After all, you know, while our southern brothers and sisters
(00:41):
are probably well past the green up stage in the
woods where they live, even those of us Near Canadians
can look outside and see a world vastly change from
a month or two ago. The bloom of plant life
as the top half of the earth tips closer to
the sun is truly incredible, and all of that greenery
out there is relevant to us as hunters, especially if
we learn how to use it to our advantage, which
(01:03):
is what I'm going to talk about right now. A
lot of people believe that summer is hot because the
Earth is closer to the Sun then, and winter is
cold because well, it's farther away. But that's not how
it works. Although the Earth's orbit around the Sun isn't
a perfect circle, it's actually a bit lopsided. The reason
(01:26):
seasons vary in temperature is due to the tilt of
the Earth, or the old wobble of it all. So
why does the Earth do this? Because when our planet
was newly formed and things were a bit more chaotic
in space, we got hit by a smaller planet. It
knocked Earth off of its axis by about twenty three degrees,
and that wobble puts the top half of the Earth
(01:47):
closer to the Sun at certain points, and then the
bottom half at certain points, but the whole Earth doesn't
get closer farther away. Now, fun fact as well, that
collision is what caused a whole bunch of planetary material
to shoot off into and some of that coalesced into
our Moon as it was caught up in Earth's gravity. Now,
why does all of this matter at all to deer hunting?
(02:09):
We'll get there, buddy. That wobble which creates the seasons
also allows plant life to grow lush as hell when
either the northern or the southern hemisphere is pointed more
towards the sun. Now, the equatorial regions experience a much
more muted version of this. This essentially allows the whole
earth to take a big breath every year. When the
(02:32):
plant life is flourishing in the northern hemisphere, a lot
of carbon dioxide is converted to oxygen, which is good
for us, since without it, we'd all be as dead
as the next jake will be when he wanders into
my decoys. Now, when the northern hemisphere starts to tip
away and the southern starts to tip closer, the balance
starts to shift with who is doing the heavy lifting
(02:55):
as far as keeping plenty of oxygen in the atmosphere
for us to breathe in. Stuff, And what we are
learning about plants lately is even wilder. Take bamboo for example,
you know, the favorite food source of those lovable idiot
panda bears. This plant is the fastest growing plant we
know of. It can grow thirty five inches a day.
(03:16):
It's kind of like the deer antlers and their ability
to generate bone at a rate that is just the
usane bolt of uh bone growing. That feels wrong somehow. Anyway,
Archaeologists have found evidence of grape cultivation, specifically for wine making,
as far back as eight thousand years ago. In the
(03:36):
sixteen hundreds, tulips were so valuable in Holland that their
bulbs were worth more than gold. If you want a
crazy lesson in how to invest in stocks, do some
due diligence on the tulip mania craze. There are many,
many valuable financial lessons wrapped up in that one. Sulfuric
(03:56):
compounds are the reason we teer up when we cut onions,
except for Mark, who cries when he cuts most vegetables
and fruits for reasons known only to him and hopefully
his therapist. Now, some plants are medicine, some are for
fun and watching South Park while eating potato chips and
fruit roll ups, and some are essential to the well
(04:17):
being of herbivores, like deer. You see what I did there?
I most lost you, but then bam, it reeled you
back in. The thing about deer hunting in general is
that we are on a constant quest to take the
guesswork out of the whole process. This is no more
evident than by looking at the food block craze. You
want to kill a mature buck without having you know,
(04:39):
too many big brain moments, then clear out an acre,
give the soil some TLC, plant some clover, and wait,
we know deer eat clover or brassicas or whatever. So
the whole thing gets pretty simple. And we like simple
when it comes to hunting, because well, it's better than complicated,
I guess. But not everyone has the means to plant
(05:00):
a food plot, or the desire to sit in the
same spot and stare at the same view until along
comes the right book. There's a world of white tails
beyond that style, and anyone who is engaged in it
would do well to try to understand plants better. I've
talked about the number of plants deer known to eat
in the past, and if I remember correctly, it's something
like six hundred different kinds. That's just what we know of.
(05:22):
There's probably a lot more, but that's a lot, and
most of it doesn't matter at all to any one
of us on any given season. What matters instead is
to understand your local region to some extent, and to
focus on what the deer should be eating and when
they should be eating that plant. I look at this
process in two different ways, kind of specific and then general.
(05:45):
On the specific side, it's knowing exactly what type of
plant the deer eat, or I guess part of a
plant the deer eat. In my world, an easy example
of this is nettles. I don't really know how they
do it, but I know that they do eat them.
You know, those dark green broad leaf plants that suck
a lot to walk through when you're hanging stands or
(06:06):
hunting in September often show signs of heavy brows, especially
at the tops. Now in my world, that might last
until early October, and then that pattern will be dead.
There are some things I know about nettles which helped
me absolutely kill deer on them. They grow in places
with moist soil, like river bottoms, which is a huge
(06:27):
plus because I like river bottoms very much. They often
stay green longer than vegetation that's nearby but not in
the same little micro habitat. This helped me kill a
buck last year in Iowa. It was literally the reason
I sat where I did and deer after deer showed
me they preferred the dark green, moist broad leaf plants
(06:48):
there over the mostly dry brows in the rest of
the woods. These kind of plants are also easy to
read when they are being browsed, which can show you
right where to hunt, or areas the deer are definitely
passing through at any given moment. All of that is
a huge benefit, and it comes from understanding one type
of plant. That's it. Now, what if you don't want
(07:11):
to dig deep and identify a bunch of different plants
to hunt specifically, then you can play that generalist game
that Iowa buck from last year. He and a bunch
of other deer were hanging out on the river bottom
because the cover was better than everywhere else, and in
that cover was a whole bunch of good brows. You
wouldn't have needed to know how to identify any one
(07:33):
type of plant. You just would have had to recognize
that most of the woods on the bluffs were dry
and devoid of greenery, while the river valley just contained
more moisture, which means more nutritious and palatable plants during
drought years. Or look at it another way. A few
weeks back, I walked a bunch of public land in
northern Wisconsin that all kind of looks the same until
(07:56):
you start paying closer attention. There are some hill there,
which means higher drier ground, and then there's lower wetter ground,
which influences plant growth. But there is also a timber
industry there that creates vastly different plant growth opportunities. Those
(08:23):
soft edges in the timber that guys like me are
always spouting off about, well, they're not just places where
bucks travel because they are often a bit thicker than
the surrounding areas. They also happen to be where two
types of habitat meet but neither dominates. This allows for
fringe species to thrive, the ones that need a certain
mix of shade and sunlight that the old growth and
(08:46):
the clearcuts just don't offer. What that means is it
concentrates certain plants in a kind of tight ish line,
which is part of the reason deer and other animals
love soft edges so much. Since they are generally concentrated,
you can do a browse check pretty quickly on soft
edges to see what's going on there, and you can
(09:07):
double check your work by looking for droppings and tracks
other sign That kind of thing is what separates the
tadpoles from the frogs my friends, and it's a lesson
I keep learning the more I keep hunting everything Helen
Turkey season. This year, I hunted a property I've hunted
a lot, and I kept seeing birds come out of
a specific spot that just didn't make much sense to me.
(09:29):
So I went in and I looked at it, and
I found two things. One was a whole bunch of
red oak acorns that hadn't been gobbled up throughout the winter.
The other was just a couple of grassy hillside spots
that were scratched to shit. I never figured out exactly
what they were scratching up there, but it didn't matter.
They were using the area big time, and that's sometimes
(09:50):
all we can ask for. Now when it comes to deer,
there are different ways to look at this and how
it might play into a hunting strategy. Think about a
field edge, for example. We love to sit field edges
for many reasons, but where to sit on what field
edge matters a lot too. Exposure to sunlight will be
a factor in whether the early season bucks will come
(10:12):
out two hours before dark or at last light. Now
that west dish facing edge that gets soaked and burning
sunlight for the back half of the day isn't going
to be as good as the shadier sides in hot weather,
but it also might not offer up as much lush
brows as the field edges with a little better mix
of sunlight and shadows. That stuff matters, And if you
(10:34):
spend any amount of time looking through a spot or
in the summer, you know how often deer pop out
and then dive back into the cover, or how some
of them will mostly feed in the field for a
while but mix things up by standing on the edge
and browsing away. If I'm hunting the early season, I
want that main food source working for me, but I
(10:54):
also want that secondary brows working for me, Just like
I'd rather sit on on the edge of the bean
where white oaks are dropping their acorns versus not or
post up on the alfalfa near a couple apple trees
versus sitting on the alfalfa not near any granny smiths
drop into the ground. I look at understanding brows and
(11:15):
really masked as well as the micro part of the
whole thing, The macro part which a lot of us
don't move past, is that the deer walk into the
field and they eat, they set up there see deer
and sometimes kill them. But the micro part matters because
it's just more specific and being able to predict where
a buck will likely walk, like exactly where he'll walk,
(11:38):
that's pretty dang valuable. Another way to think about botany,
which kind of goes back to that Iowa buck example,
is this deer want the best bang for their bucks,
so to speak, when it comes to spending time eating something.
Maybe this isn't the same thing, but think about this scenario.
You wake up and don't have time for breakfast because
your dog puked on the floor and the kids have
(12:00):
to get to school, and for whatever reason, you don't eat,
and you're used to eating, what are you going to
be like at lunch? Ravenous and when you're super hungry,
what are you going to look for something quick in
calorie dnse. That's actually evolution at work, and in modern society,
it works against us because we have access to a
(12:20):
lot of easy, calorie dense food that is mostly very
very bad for us. But it's an undeniable poll that
if you don't prepare for it and you find yourself
suddenly very very hungry, you know what you're going to
do now with deer. They probably aren't skipping breakfast and
sitting in stupid deer Google meets all morning listening to
their deer. Coworkers try to justify their jobs by saying
(12:43):
dumb shit that didn't need to be said. But they
do get hungry, and they do have different dietary needs
depending on the time of year. A big one for
bucks is the lead up to the rut, where they
need to pack on the pounds like folks do when
they go on that survival show called Alone. Because when
the dose start going wild and the bucks are after them,
those bucks aren't going to eat a lot. They need
(13:05):
good calories and nutrients, and they are very, very familiar
with their home ground. So if some plant is still
green and lush and full of the good stuff that
it pulled from the soil, they are going to know
about that food source and they are going to find
it and use it. I think about this stuff a lot,
and I play this pattern a lot when I'm hunting
(13:26):
Western critters where there are either stock tanks or just
cattle ponds. A stock tank that overflows as almost like
a bait pile, where the ground is generally very dry,
that little swath of irrigated ground will have lush grasses
and other vegetation, and it'll concentrate deer or turkeys or
elk or whatever. Now there is the bonus of water,
(13:50):
of course, but even when it's cool and the rut
isn't on and the deer aren't dying of thirst at
any given point in the day, they will want to
eat that lush greenery because it's better for their bodies.
Maybe that's the last point to talk about here when
it comes to understanding plant life better in your region
and why it matters to you as a hunter. We
(14:11):
like to dumb this stuff down to make the decision
making process much easier. So take a cut cornfield as
an example. Without question, if there are a deer around somewhere,
they're going to end up in that cut cornfield, especially
if it wasn't chisel plowed. That's easy, and you can
kill a hell of a lot of deer without knowing
much more than that. But is that cut cornfield the
(14:33):
same drawn October as it is in December? What about
if it's eighty degrees during the rut versus thirty. What
about the fact that a big cut cornfield is generally
a promise to the deer that a certain type of
carbs or calories is kind of static in their lives.
They know they can go there at any point in
the night and they can scrounge around for enough kernels
to fill their bellies. That's great, but corn is only
(14:57):
going to give them a part of what they need
to be healthy enough to fade predators and pass on
their janes when the time comes. Depending on the region,
that part might be a big part, but it still
won't be the whole thing. Those cornfield deer are going
to find other sources of food to eat because their
bodies literally need them, and some of those food sources
(15:17):
will be short window heavy draw plants. This is one
of the reasons I love observation stands so much. When
I'm hunting new ground, watching a buck walk across a
creek in a certain spot huge advantage. But watching that
same buck spend an hour on the riverbank browsing away
is even better. Now I have that crossing to work with,
(15:39):
but also a browse pattern that will definitely be appealing
to more than just that deer. Hell, the reality of
that is that every deer you see browsing, whether it's
doze with a couple of fawnds or a booner is
giving you a gift because it's not accidental what they
are doing. It's intentional because they needed to serve. And
(16:00):
that's something we miss with a lot of the talk
about certain food sources, but especially masked you don't think
about persimmons. For example, a right per simon is a
sugar retreat, and we know that deer like them very much,
But why purely for the flavor? I doubt that while
we are inundated with sugar in so many different foods
to the point most of us consume way way too
(16:22):
much of it, the deer don't. They aren't rolling up
to the seven eleven to buy a slushian of Snickers.
The sugar content is different for them, just like the
moisture content of some broad leaf brassica type plant growing
in the creek bottom gives them something more beneficial than
nipping along on the dry brows at the top of
the ridge. They can eat both, but they choose one
(16:42):
for a very specific reason. Now. I know this is
kind of daunting to a lot of folks who just
want to know what deer call to use and when,
But the truth is that you can't escape good old
woodsmanship and understanding plant life and the importance of brows
is way up there on the list of ways you
can do diferentiate yourself from most other hunters. It might
(17:04):
not be an exciting topic, but becoming an amateur botanist
can help you kill more big bucks. So consider it
and consider coming back next week because I'm going to
talk about finding a little mystery in the deer woods.
That's it. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired
to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by
First Light. Thank you so much for listening and for
(17:24):
all your support. We truly appreciate it here at meat Eater.
If you want to watch some turkey hunting films, maybe
mark up in Alaska looking for a white tail and
maybe stumbling across a black tail. Maybe check out Brent
Reeves This country Life. Go over to the meeteater dot com.
Give it a listen, give it a watch, check out
the articles. Tons of content dropping every week, so much
(17:46):
good stuff. As always, thanks again, have a great week.
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 Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast,
which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about understanding plant
life and how it affects almost all of our non
rut deer hunting strategies. I mean, what a better time
to talk about a super pooring ass subject than right now.
After all, you know, while our southern brothers and sisters
(00:41):
are probably well past the green up stage in the
woods where they live, even those of us Near Canadians
can look outside and see a world vastly change from
a month or two ago. The bloom of plant life
as the top half of the earth tips closer to
the sun is truly incredible, and all of that greenery
out there is relevant to us as hunters, especially if
we learn how to use it to our advantage, which
(01:03):
is what I'm going to talk about right now. A
lot of people believe that summer is hot because the
Earth is closer to the Sun then, and winter is
cold because well, it's farther away. But that's not how
it works. Although the Earth's orbit around the Sun isn't
a perfect circle, it's actually a bit lopsided. The reason
(01:26):
seasons vary in temperature is due to the tilt of
the Earth, or the old wobble of it all. So
why does the Earth do this? Because when our planet
was newly formed and things were a bit more chaotic
in space, we got hit by a smaller planet. It
knocked Earth off of its axis by about twenty three degrees,
and that wobble puts the top half of the Earth
(01:47):
closer to the Sun at certain points, and then the
bottom half at certain points, but the whole Earth doesn't
get closer farther away. Now, fun fact as well, that
collision is what caused a whole bunch of planetary material
to shoot off into and some of that coalesced into
our Moon as it was caught up in Earth's gravity. Now,
why does all of this matter at all to deer hunting?
(02:09):
We'll get there, buddy. That wobble which creates the seasons
also allows plant life to grow lush as hell when
either the northern or the southern hemisphere is pointed more
towards the sun. Now, the equatorial regions experience a much
more muted version of this. This essentially allows the whole
earth to take a big breath every year. When the
(02:32):
plant life is flourishing in the northern hemisphere, a lot
of carbon dioxide is converted to oxygen, which is good
for us, since without it, we'd all be as dead
as the next jake will be when he wanders into
my decoys. Now, when the northern hemisphere starts to tip
away and the southern starts to tip closer, the balance
starts to shift with who is doing the heavy lifting
(02:55):
as far as keeping plenty of oxygen in the atmosphere
for us to breathe in. Stuff, And what we are
learning about plants lately is even wilder. Take bamboo for example,
you know, the favorite food source of those lovable idiot
panda bears. This plant is the fastest growing plant we
know of. It can grow thirty five inches a day.
(03:16):
It's kind of like the deer antlers and their ability
to generate bone at a rate that is just the
usane bolt of uh bone growing. That feels wrong somehow. Anyway,
Archaeologists have found evidence of grape cultivation, specifically for wine making,
as far back as eight thousand years ago. In the
(03:36):
sixteen hundreds, tulips were so valuable in Holland that their
bulbs were worth more than gold. If you want a
crazy lesson in how to invest in stocks, do some
due diligence on the tulip mania craze. There are many,
many valuable financial lessons wrapped up in that one. Sulfuric
(03:56):
compounds are the reason we teer up when we cut onions,
except for Mark, who cries when he cuts most vegetables
and fruits for reasons known only to him and hopefully
his therapist. Now, some plants are medicine, some are for
fun and watching South Park while eating potato chips and
fruit roll ups, and some are essential to the well
(04:17):
being of herbivores, like deer. You see what I did there?
I most lost you, but then bam, it reeled you
back in. The thing about deer hunting in general is
that we are on a constant quest to take the
guesswork out of the whole process. This is no more
evident than by looking at the food block craze. You
want to kill a mature buck without having you know,
(04:39):
too many big brain moments, then clear out an acre,
give the soil some TLC, plant some clover, and wait,
we know deer eat clover or brassicas or whatever. So
the whole thing gets pretty simple. And we like simple
when it comes to hunting, because well, it's better than complicated,
I guess. But not everyone has the means to plant
(05:00):
a food plot, or the desire to sit in the
same spot and stare at the same view until along
comes the right book. There's a world of white tails
beyond that style, and anyone who is engaged in it
would do well to try to understand plants better. I've
talked about the number of plants deer known to eat
in the past, and if I remember correctly, it's something
like six hundred different kinds. That's just what we know of.
(05:22):
There's probably a lot more, but that's a lot, and
most of it doesn't matter at all to any one
of us on any given season. What matters instead is
to understand your local region to some extent, and to
focus on what the deer should be eating and when
they should be eating that plant. I look at this
process in two different ways, kind of specific and then general.
(05:45):
On the specific side, it's knowing exactly what type of
plant the deer eat, or I guess part of a
plant the deer eat. In my world, an easy example
of this is nettles. I don't really know how they
do it, but I know that they do eat them.
You know, those dark green broad leaf plants that suck
a lot to walk through when you're hanging stands or
(06:06):
hunting in September often show signs of heavy brows, especially
at the tops. Now in my world, that might last
until early October, and then that pattern will be dead.
There are some things I know about nettles which helped
me absolutely kill deer on them. They grow in places
with moist soil, like river bottoms, which is a huge
(06:27):
plus because I like river bottoms very much. They often
stay green longer than vegetation that's nearby but not in
the same little micro habitat. This helped me kill a
buck last year in Iowa. It was literally the reason
I sat where I did and deer after deer showed
me they preferred the dark green, moist broad leaf plants
(06:48):
there over the mostly dry brows in the rest of
the woods. These kind of plants are also easy to
read when they are being browsed, which can show you
right where to hunt, or areas the deer are definitely
passing through at any given moment. All of that is
a huge benefit, and it comes from understanding one type
of plant. That's it. Now, what if you don't want
(07:11):
to dig deep and identify a bunch of different plants
to hunt specifically, then you can play that generalist game
that Iowa buck from last year. He and a bunch
of other deer were hanging out on the river bottom
because the cover was better than everywhere else, and in
that cover was a whole bunch of good brows. You
wouldn't have needed to know how to identify any one
(07:33):
type of plant. You just would have had to recognize
that most of the woods on the bluffs were dry
and devoid of greenery, while the river valley just contained
more moisture, which means more nutritious and palatable plants during
drought years. Or look at it another way. A few
weeks back, I walked a bunch of public land in
northern Wisconsin that all kind of looks the same until
(07:56):
you start paying closer attention. There are some hill there,
which means higher drier ground, and then there's lower wetter ground,
which influences plant growth. But there is also a timber
industry there that creates vastly different plant growth opportunities. Those
(08:23):
soft edges in the timber that guys like me are
always spouting off about, well, they're not just places where
bucks travel because they are often a bit thicker than
the surrounding areas. They also happen to be where two
types of habitat meet but neither dominates. This allows for
fringe species to thrive, the ones that need a certain
mix of shade and sunlight that the old growth and
(08:46):
the clearcuts just don't offer. What that means is it
concentrates certain plants in a kind of tight ish line,
which is part of the reason deer and other animals
love soft edges so much. Since they are generally concentrated,
you can do a browse check pretty quickly on soft
edges to see what's going on there, and you can
(09:07):
double check your work by looking for droppings and tracks
other sign That kind of thing is what separates the
tadpoles from the frogs my friends, and it's a lesson
I keep learning the more I keep hunting everything Helen
Turkey season. This year, I hunted a property I've hunted
a lot, and I kept seeing birds come out of
a specific spot that just didn't make much sense to me.
(09:29):
So I went in and I looked at it, and
I found two things. One was a whole bunch of
red oak acorns that hadn't been gobbled up throughout the winter.
The other was just a couple of grassy hillside spots
that were scratched to shit. I never figured out exactly
what they were scratching up there, but it didn't matter.
They were using the area big time, and that's sometimes
(09:50):
all we can ask for. Now when it comes to deer,
there are different ways to look at this and how
it might play into a hunting strategy. Think about a
field edge, for example. We love to sit field edges
for many reasons, but where to sit on what field
edge matters a lot too. Exposure to sunlight will be
a factor in whether the early season bucks will come
(10:12):
out two hours before dark or at last light. Now
that west dish facing edge that gets soaked and burning
sunlight for the back half of the day isn't going
to be as good as the shadier sides in hot weather,
but it also might not offer up as much lush
brows as the field edges with a little better mix
of sunlight and shadows. That stuff matters, And if you
(10:34):
spend any amount of time looking through a spot or
in the summer, you know how often deer pop out
and then dive back into the cover, or how some
of them will mostly feed in the field for a
while but mix things up by standing on the edge
and browsing away. If I'm hunting the early season, I
want that main food source working for me, but I
(10:54):
also want that secondary brows working for me, Just like
I'd rather sit on on the edge of the bean
where white oaks are dropping their acorns versus not or
post up on the alfalfa near a couple apple trees
versus sitting on the alfalfa not near any granny smiths
drop into the ground. I look at understanding brows and
(11:15):
really masked as well as the micro part of the
whole thing, The macro part which a lot of us
don't move past, is that the deer walk into the
field and they eat, they set up there see deer
and sometimes kill them. But the micro part matters because
it's just more specific and being able to predict where
a buck will likely walk, like exactly where he'll walk,
(11:38):
that's pretty dang valuable. Another way to think about botany,
which kind of goes back to that Iowa buck example,
is this deer want the best bang for their bucks,
so to speak, when it comes to spending time eating something.
Maybe this isn't the same thing, but think about this scenario.
You wake up and don't have time for breakfast because
your dog puked on the floor and the kids have
(12:00):
to get to school, and for whatever reason, you don't eat,
and you're used to eating, what are you going to
be like at lunch? Ravenous and when you're super hungry,
what are you going to look for something quick in
calorie dnse. That's actually evolution at work, and in modern society,
it works against us because we have access to a
(12:20):
lot of easy, calorie dense food that is mostly very
very bad for us. But it's an undeniable poll that
if you don't prepare for it and you find yourself
suddenly very very hungry, you know what you're going to
do now with deer. They probably aren't skipping breakfast and
sitting in stupid deer Google meets all morning listening to
their deer. Coworkers try to justify their jobs by saying
(12:43):
dumb shit that didn't need to be said. But they
do get hungry, and they do have different dietary needs
depending on the time of year. A big one for
bucks is the lead up to the rut, where they
need to pack on the pounds like folks do when
they go on that survival show called Alone. Because when
the dose start going wild and the bucks are after them,
those bucks aren't going to eat a lot. They need
(13:05):
good calories and nutrients, and they are very, very familiar
with their home ground. So if some plant is still
green and lush and full of the good stuff that
it pulled from the soil, they are going to know
about that food source and they are going to find
it and use it. I think about this stuff a lot,
and I play this pattern a lot when I'm hunting
(13:26):
Western critters where there are either stock tanks or just
cattle ponds. A stock tank that overflows as almost like
a bait pile, where the ground is generally very dry,
that little swath of irrigated ground will have lush grasses
and other vegetation, and it'll concentrate deer or turkeys or
elk or whatever. Now there is the bonus of water,
(13:50):
of course, but even when it's cool and the rut
isn't on and the deer aren't dying of thirst at
any given point in the day, they will want to
eat that lush greenery because it's better for their bodies.
Maybe that's the last point to talk about here when
it comes to understanding plant life better in your region
and why it matters to you as a hunter. We
(14:11):
like to dumb this stuff down to make the decision
making process much easier. So take a cut cornfield as
an example. Without question, if there are a deer around somewhere,
they're going to end up in that cut cornfield, especially
if it wasn't chisel plowed. That's easy, and you can
kill a hell of a lot of deer without knowing
much more than that. But is that cut cornfield the
(14:33):
same drawn October as it is in December? What about
if it's eighty degrees during the rut versus thirty. What
about the fact that a big cut cornfield is generally
a promise to the deer that a certain type of
carbs or calories is kind of static in their lives.
They know they can go there at any point in
the night and they can scrounge around for enough kernels
to fill their bellies. That's great, but corn is only
(14:57):
going to give them a part of what they need
to be healthy enough to fade predators and pass on
their janes when the time comes. Depending on the region,
that part might be a big part, but it still
won't be the whole thing. Those cornfield deer are going
to find other sources of food to eat because their
bodies literally need them, and some of those food sources
(15:17):
will be short window heavy draw plants. This is one
of the reasons I love observation stands so much. When
I'm hunting new ground, watching a buck walk across a
creek in a certain spot huge advantage. But watching that
same buck spend an hour on the riverbank browsing away
is even better. Now I have that crossing to work with,
(15:39):
but also a browse pattern that will definitely be appealing
to more than just that deer. Hell, the reality of
that is that every deer you see browsing, whether it's
doze with a couple of fawnds or a booner is
giving you a gift because it's not accidental what they
are doing. It's intentional because they needed to serve. And
(16:00):
that's something we miss with a lot of the talk
about certain food sources, but especially masked you don't think
about persimmons. For example, a right per simon is a
sugar retreat, and we know that deer like them very much,
But why purely for the flavor? I doubt that while
we are inundated with sugar in so many different foods
to the point most of us consume way way too
(16:22):
much of it, the deer don't. They aren't rolling up
to the seven eleven to buy a slushian of Snickers.
The sugar content is different for them, just like the
moisture content of some broad leaf brassica type plant growing
in the creek bottom gives them something more beneficial than
nipping along on the dry brows at the top of
the ridge. They can eat both, but they choose one
(16:42):
for a very specific reason. Now. I know this is
kind of daunting to a lot of folks who just
want to know what deer call to use and when,
But the truth is that you can't escape good old
woodsmanship and understanding plant life and the importance of brows
is way up there on the list of ways you
can do diferentiate yourself from most other hunters. It might
(17:04):
not be an exciting topic, but becoming an amateur botanist
can help you kill more big bucks. So consider it
and consider coming back next week because I'm going to
talk about finding a little mystery in the deer woods.
That's it. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired
to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by
First Light. Thank you so much for listening and for
(17:24):
all your support. We truly appreciate it here at meat Eater.
If you want to watch some turkey hunting films, maybe
mark up in Alaska looking for a white tail and
maybe stumbling across a black tail. Maybe check out Brent
Reeves This country Life. Go over to the meeteater dot com.
Give it a listen, give it a watch, check out
the articles. Tons of content dropping every week, so much
(17:46):
good stuff. As always, thanks again, have a great week.
Host
Mark Kenyon
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