July 1, 2025 • 18 mins
This week, Tony explains how we come to believe unwritten rules about deer behavior and hunting strategies, and why we should sometimes break them even when we don't want to.
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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 Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast,
which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson. In today's episode is all about the rules
we think exists for white tails and why we should
be careful about sticking too tightly to them. This one's
kind of a fun one for me because I'm largely
a contrarian at heart. I also have a deer hunting
(00:41):
background that started with a question everything type of attitude.
You know what, Actually, that's not entirely true. It was
just that my dad and I weren't very good at it,
so we kind of just did things the way we wanted.
And he's the kind of guy who would just try
something crazy hunting wise, just to see and while it
really worked out, sometimes it did. And I'm the same
way and this has shaped almost everything I've thought about
(01:03):
when it comes to deer hunting. So Buckle up because
it's time to break some of the hard and fast
deer behavior and hunting strategy rules and kill some bucks. Anyway,
as I said, this is a fun one for me.
But let me make this clear right from the start,
what I mean by white tail rules throughout this podcast
(01:25):
are not the laws and regulations you should obey those.
I'm not giving you the green light to go shoot
a bunch of velvet bucks over a bait pile in August,
well before the actual season opens up. But instead, I
just want to talk about how we make up our
minds that things are a certain way when they often aren't.
Let's start with a non deer hunting situation here that
(01:46):
I've talked about a few times but I think really
encapsulates this whole idea. Last year, when I was baiting
bears for my daughter in Wisconsin, we had exactly two
bears to work with. One was a monster boy with
a belly hanging on the ground. And while everyone says this,
I promise you in this case it's true. He was
well over three hundred pounds. The other was much more
(02:09):
of your typical yogi, you know, like the one hundred
and fifty pound type bear. Now that big bruin. He
was a nighttime visitor. He knew the game and he
was good at it. The younger one wasn't, so that
became our target bear. Now, if you know anything about bears,
they get hunted a lot. They do a pretty good
job of leaning into the nocturnal game. Now, if you
(02:30):
don't know anything about the general rules for bear hunting,
you also know that afternoons are when ninety nine point
seven percent of all bear hunters sit. Of course, i'm
talking about baited bear hunts here. Those hunters, they'll tell
you with very much confidence that there is no reason
to hunt mornings or in most cases even the lunch shift.
(02:50):
It's afternoons and evenings. Now, while you would never confuse
me for an expert bear hunter, I've always just followed
that line of thinking. After all, how the whole culture
around that type of bear hunting have it wrong. The
trouble is, if you have a limited amount of licorice
trail mix out and you have two bears competing for
(03:10):
those calories, they'll just generally sort themselves out into some
level of avoidance through their visits. Or, more specifically, if
a bear is double the size of another, bear, the
smaller one will do a hell of a good job
of avoiding the big one. And if that big one
is nocturnal, the smaller one is going to be a
daylight visitor. That's it. And because the fall is the
(03:33):
time when bears like to eat just like pigs, you know,
and to bulk up for hibernation, those daylight visits might
happen multiple times during those daylight hours. That's what my
daughter's bear was doing. So, in a weird move to
maximize one of the three days we had to hunt,
we went in at sunrise and she shot that bear
at noon. It was one of my top ten coolest
(03:54):
hunting experiences ever, and it was made possible simply by
breaking the general rule of when we should hunt. You're
probably listening to this going, well, dumb man, you have
pictures of a yogi come in in at all hours
of the day to feed, You go in, you cover
those hours of the day. But this is where I'll
kindly steer you to the deer world and ask if
(04:16):
it's so easy for you to go against the grain
and try something that is genuinely thought of as a
no go proposition. Now, what do I mean by that?
Let me count the waves. How About here's a simple one,
hunting mornings in the early season. How About snort wheezing
two one hundred and three inch two and a half
year old on Halloween. He's probably not the dominant buck,
(04:37):
is he. How About snort wheezing to that deer in September?
Pretty dumb right. How About taking a swing at your
number one hit lister in your number one stand site
well before he starts daylighting on your cameras. How About
hunting hard during the middle of October when you know
damn well that none of the bucks are moving because
they are all mandated by deer latigo nocturnal during the lull.
(05:00):
Do you know why all of those rules have kind
of entered to zeitgeist and stuck right on our slightly
smooth brains, Because we have to vicariously learn some of
this stuff, and to do that we follow people who
seem to be a hell of a lot better than
us at killing deer. But their rules are not good
for you. And I promise you that even though they
(05:20):
kill two hundred inch deer frequently and you don't. The
reason for this is because the deer behavior varies so
much by state and county and property in region and whatever.
Are there general behaviors that transcend locality. Absolutely, there's also
the depths of nuance to any situation that creates scenarios
here but not there, and there but not here. Let
(05:43):
me give you an example. I have permission to hunt
a large dairy farm in southeastern Minnesota that I talk
about sometimes. That property borders another property that one of
my buddies' leases, and it also borders a small property
that is generally treated as a deer sanctuary. Now, my
property is the opposite of what you'd call a deer sanctuary.
(06:04):
A lot of people hunt it, and the landowner would
like it if lots of deer were shot out of there,
and he does his best to facilitate that every year,
and the deer know it. So a lot of the
deer that I end up with on my property at
some point of the season often move to those other
two properties, and as the season progresses, the differential in
(06:26):
pressure has a major effect on a lot of things,
including the dispersal of big bucks. Now, when the pre
rut kicks in, my buddy hunts his lease and is
generally covered in good deer chasing and doing their thing,
and it's literally right across the fence, literally in a
place where I can see from some of my stands,
(06:47):
and yet on my property I struggle to see good
bucks and sometimes any bucks. It's not even close to
the same experience, even though the properties are very close.
So what does that mean? Well, for starters, the rules
he should follow wouldn't make much sense for me, would they.
I'm dealing with just a vastly different scenario. And what's worse,
(07:07):
if I didn't know any better and he were to
tell me what he was doing to get on deer,
and then I were to try those things, they probably
wouldn't work for me. Now, imagine someone who owns a
thousand acres in southern Iowa telling the masses that the
deer rules are this and not that according to his experience.
Do you think that makes a whole lot of sense
for the hunter in Georgia who has to fight the
(07:29):
crowds on public land. Academically, it just doesn't work. Yet
we all kind of fall into this trap often. And
do you know why? At least this is my thought anyway,
I think the rules we think deer follow scare us,
And really, why wouldn't they rules are meant to encourage
specific behavior, and without consequences for not doing those behaviors,
(07:52):
then they don't matter. So we believe if we don't
follow the rules, we will not kill deer, and worse,
we will actually make it harder on ourselves in the future.
Most of these rules come from the line of thinking
that you'll do more harm than good. So don't hunt,
don't scout, don't go in and blow those bucks up
before they get carryless and start to move a lot
(08:13):
during daylight. It's a calculation, you know, that makes sense
for maybe five percent of the deer hunters out there.
The further you are from a really good property that
is well managed, the less likely those general deer rules
are worth following. Part of this is simply because you
can predict the behavior of your fellow hunters, because they
(08:33):
are going to more or less follow the general rules.
The big one, of course, is you know when to hunt.
Most hunters won't hunt the lull. Most hunters will hunt
the rut. Simple right now, Imagine what the deer do
in response to that. Most hunters won't hunt when it's
super hot, but they will when a cold front hits.
What do you think deer do in response to that?
(08:55):
And how many hunters are we talking about in your
neck of the woods, because that's what really matters. Now,
think about this another way. Some of the general deer
rules are probably pretty good ones to follow, but we
(09:17):
often don't take the all day sits during the rut.
For example, here, you want to kill more big bucks,
that's one of your answers. You won't shoot one at
noon every year, But if you're in the habit of
all day sits, you'll get a few really good midday
opportunities every decade of your deer hunting life. Now, maybe
that means only one or two more mounts on your wall,
(09:39):
but that's enough to get a guy like minis it
all day. The best way to look at this might
simply be to ask yourself, how do I know this
rule is a good one? Did I hear it over
and over from people who seem to have a real
handle on deer hunting? Okay? But have I witnessed it firsthand?
Have I tried this thing or not? Take the snort
(10:02):
wheeze deal that I talk about all the time. Last
year I snort weezed in a really good North Dakota
buck on public land and missed him, which you can
watch over at the mediater dot com. My cameraman for
that hunt is a really good deer hunter, but since
our timing was outside the rut, he thought it was
nuts that I was snort wheezing at that buck. After
the whole encounter, he told me that flat out, he
(10:24):
thought there was no way that was going to work.
But it took like four storm wheezes and that buck
came right in. Now, my camera guy, he's a really
good deer hunter, really good. But in his head, he
had a rule about snort wheezing, and you only do
it during the rut and only on really big deer.
When you believe that, Will you ever snort wheeze at
a deer outside of the rut? Probably not. Well, you
(10:47):
ever snort weeze at a small buck? Probably not? So
what does that mean? It means that you'll follow that
rule even if you don't actually know it's a good one.
Let's think about something else. On that dairy farm I
mentioned earlier, there is one hundred acre field on one
part of it. Now that field is split by a
waterway and it's a crapshoot on any of given year.
(11:09):
What'll be planted in there? Sometimes, like this year, the
whole thing is corn, sometimes half of its corn and
half of its alfalfa, sometimes half as beans. You get
my drift. Now, On some years, I can access the
woods that that field borders via standing corn, and I
can kill decent bucks in the morning in September as
they work their way back to bed. Sometimes I can't
(11:32):
get anywhere near that field in the mornings, or I'll
blow the whole thing out because of what's planted in there.
So on some years on that farm, the rule about
not hunting early season mornings is pretty solid. On other years,
following that rule would cost me real opportunities at good bucks.
The only thing that changes those rules is the crop
(11:55):
rotation and my willingness to hunt when the rules seem wrong.
For the scenario where I'm going with all of this
is that we find comfort in guardrails. If you believe
you shouldn't hunt early season mornings and you don't hunt them,
you're going to feel like you are being a good hunter.
But what might have been a good decision last year
(12:18):
could be a dumb one this year. Or what might
be a good one on that property that you used
to hunt might not be a good one on the
least that you have this year. Another example, if you
believe you can't hunt bottoms of valleys because the wind
will swirl and you'll get busted, for sure, you're not
going to try to hunt bottoms of valleys, and I
promise you there are conditions where you can get away
(12:39):
with it, and if you do, you're probably going to
be on deer. The danger to all of this is
that you have to try things that you've been conditioned
to believe just won't work. That sucks, but it's also
why I love heading out on the road to hunt
public land in random states. My willingness to be cavalier
and try riskier strategies goes way up when I'm a
(13:00):
strict timeline and have little to know history with a property.
When you do that, it sort of crumbles the foundation
ever so slightly that we've built on our home ground
where we just know we can do this, but not that.
I also believe that the rules we like to follow
keep us from figuring out how to hunt as if
(13:20):
they don't exist. Let me give you an example about
seven or eight years ago, I killed one hundred and
forty six inch ten pointer on public land in South Dakota.
The buck, along with his little buddy, came through in
the morning in late September, when you're not supposed to
hunt mornings. But I'd watched some deer use that spot,
and I knew they were passing through there in the mornings.
I just didn't have a great idea how to approach
(13:41):
the whole thing. So I stuck a blind into a
bunch of dead cedars, and I went in way early
and parked down the road in a place that meant
I had to walk in from the opposite direction the
deer were likely to approach from, and it worked. If
that had been a home ground situation, I doubt I
would have tried. That would have been too risky. It's
honestly as simple as that. Though now I have to
(14:04):
say this because if I didn't, I wouldn't feel great
about myself. A lot of the things that I try
to make work, which might be outside of general deer
hunting rules that people like to follow, they just don't work.
I don't know how many times I've tried to access
the spot that I thought i'd get away with sneaking
in and not letting the bucks know I was there,
and it just didn't happen. This happens a lot. What
(14:26):
it does for me is helped me set up my
own rules for certain properties in certain times of the year.
Take this little chunk of land I own in Wisconsin.
It's three hundred yards from my east to west boundary,
and if I park anywhere but the farthest southwest corner,
my daughters and I generally won't see deer when we sit,
at least if we hunt in the evenings. Anyway. Now,
(14:49):
I learned this because I thought I needed to park
on the other side due to where I figured the
deer would be betted. But they knew when we went in,
no matter how careful I was. Now we park as
close so as you could to where they bed, just
because it also puts us close to two neighbors we
have on that property, and our noise sort of blends
into the general noise of those other two people, or
(15:10):
the other two households, I should say, they hear human
noise there in that corner all the time. On the
other side of the property, there's no houses or driveways,
and a truck crunching along the gravel and stopping there
seems to be just enough to keep them from doing
what they need to do. The lesson there is that
I had a rule in my head when I started
(15:31):
hunting that property, but the deer showed me it was
a bad one. Then I had to go through some
trial and error to figure out that specific property and
how to make it work. That rule about where to
park and how to access it is literally property specific.
I wouldn't park as close as I could to a
known bedding area anywhere else. In almost any situation, I
(15:53):
go the opposite way, and you know what, I might
be totally right in doing that, even if on my
land that's the wrong move. Here's the thing that makes
all of this even tougher. That might not be the
case this season or in five seasons from now. Maybe
they won't bed there as much in the future, and
my access will have to change. I don't know. What
(16:15):
I do know is that I have a rule for
where I park now and how I get into that piece,
and it's a good one. If we stop seeing deer,
it'll be time to rewrite the rules and figure out
what to do to get things working in my direction again.
So what does all of this mean for you? For starters,
I'll give you a simple one which plays off that
summer scouting episode I did last week. One of the
(16:38):
summertime rules a lot of us follow is to run
cameras and mostly stay out of the woods. How about
don't do that. Run cameras and go into the woods.
Take a good look around. Try to envision what you
should do now to kill one the first week of
the season. Go check some of your rut funnels for
tracks now, walk field edges and fence rows. Go into
(16:59):
the woods. Pay attention to the heat and the bugs
and how bad they are while you're standing up on
top of the hill looking at your on X and
how bad they are when you drop into the bottom
of the valley to look around. Pay attention to the
water sources and the browsing evidence. The more we learn
about the deer we are hunting, the more we realize
that the general rules don't matter much. It's far more
(17:20):
important to figure out exactly what's going on in your spot,
not what someone else is doing seven states away on
a property that is nothing like yours. So don't break
the laws and the regulations, but think about the general
deer hunting rules that you follow. Do they seem to
be working out for you? Or do you still struggle
(17:41):
to fill tags even though you're diligent about them. If
the latter is true, go figure out how to do
things differently, break some of those rules and forget about
what you're supposed to do and try to learn what
you should do. I want you to do that. I
want you to come back next week because I'm going
to talk about some more summertime, your concerns and get
into some strategies that I have right now to set
(18:04):
myself up for hunts all fall, including rut hunts, even
though it's hot, miserable out and I'm not really that
excited to do it. That's it for this week. I'm
Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast,
which is brought to you by First Light. As always,
thank you so much for listening. We really appreciate it.
(18:25):
Here at Meat Eater, I firmly believe we have the
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check in all the time. It's just great. Your support
means the world to us. If you need more, Dear
Hunting content, Maybe you need some good storytelling on a podcast.
Maybe you want to watch a film or three. The
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(18:47):
and fishing content every single day at that site. Go
check it out.
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 Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast,
which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson. In today's episode is all about the rules
we think exists for white tails and why we should
be careful about sticking too tightly to them. This one's
kind of a fun one for me because I'm largely
a contrarian at heart. I also have a deer hunting
(00:41):
background that started with a question everything type of attitude.
You know what, Actually, that's not entirely true. It was
just that my dad and I weren't very good at it,
so we kind of just did things the way we wanted.
And he's the kind of guy who would just try
something crazy hunting wise, just to see and while it
really worked out, sometimes it did. And I'm the same
way and this has shaped almost everything I've thought about
(01:03):
when it comes to deer hunting. So Buckle up because
it's time to break some of the hard and fast
deer behavior and hunting strategy rules and kill some bucks. Anyway,
as I said, this is a fun one for me.
But let me make this clear right from the start,
what I mean by white tail rules throughout this podcast
(01:25):
are not the laws and regulations you should obey those.
I'm not giving you the green light to go shoot
a bunch of velvet bucks over a bait pile in August,
well before the actual season opens up. But instead, I
just want to talk about how we make up our
minds that things are a certain way when they often aren't.
Let's start with a non deer hunting situation here that
(01:46):
I've talked about a few times but I think really
encapsulates this whole idea. Last year, when I was baiting
bears for my daughter in Wisconsin, we had exactly two
bears to work with. One was a monster boy with
a belly hanging on the ground. And while everyone says this,
I promise you in this case it's true. He was
well over three hundred pounds. The other was much more
(02:09):
of your typical yogi, you know, like the one hundred
and fifty pound type bear. Now that big bruin. He
was a nighttime visitor. He knew the game and he
was good at it. The younger one wasn't, so that
became our target bear. Now, if you know anything about bears,
they get hunted a lot. They do a pretty good
job of leaning into the nocturnal game. Now, if you
(02:30):
don't know anything about the general rules for bear hunting,
you also know that afternoons are when ninety nine point
seven percent of all bear hunters sit. Of course, i'm
talking about baited bear hunts here. Those hunters, they'll tell
you with very much confidence that there is no reason
to hunt mornings or in most cases even the lunch shift.
(02:50):
It's afternoons and evenings. Now, while you would never confuse
me for an expert bear hunter, I've always just followed
that line of thinking. After all, how the whole culture
around that type of bear hunting have it wrong. The
trouble is, if you have a limited amount of licorice
trail mix out and you have two bears competing for
(03:10):
those calories, they'll just generally sort themselves out into some
level of avoidance through their visits. Or, more specifically, if
a bear is double the size of another, bear, the
smaller one will do a hell of a good job
of avoiding the big one. And if that big one
is nocturnal, the smaller one is going to be a
daylight visitor. That's it. And because the fall is the
(03:33):
time when bears like to eat just like pigs, you know,
and to bulk up for hibernation, those daylight visits might
happen multiple times during those daylight hours. That's what my
daughter's bear was doing. So, in a weird move to
maximize one of the three days we had to hunt,
we went in at sunrise and she shot that bear
at noon. It was one of my top ten coolest
(03:54):
hunting experiences ever, and it was made possible simply by
breaking the general rule of when we should hunt. You're
probably listening to this going, well, dumb man, you have
pictures of a yogi come in in at all hours
of the day to feed, You go in, you cover
those hours of the day. But this is where I'll
kindly steer you to the deer world and ask if
(04:16):
it's so easy for you to go against the grain
and try something that is genuinely thought of as a
no go proposition. Now, what do I mean by that?
Let me count the waves. How About here's a simple one,
hunting mornings in the early season. How About snort wheezing
two one hundred and three inch two and a half
year old on Halloween. He's probably not the dominant buck,
(04:37):
is he. How About snort wheezing to that deer in September?
Pretty dumb right. How About taking a swing at your
number one hit lister in your number one stand site
well before he starts daylighting on your cameras. How About
hunting hard during the middle of October when you know
damn well that none of the bucks are moving because
they are all mandated by deer latigo nocturnal during the lull.
(05:00):
Do you know why all of those rules have kind
of entered to zeitgeist and stuck right on our slightly
smooth brains, Because we have to vicariously learn some of
this stuff, and to do that we follow people who
seem to be a hell of a lot better than
us at killing deer. But their rules are not good
for you. And I promise you that even though they
(05:20):
kill two hundred inch deer frequently and you don't. The
reason for this is because the deer behavior varies so
much by state and county and property in region and whatever.
Are there general behaviors that transcend locality. Absolutely, there's also
the depths of nuance to any situation that creates scenarios
here but not there, and there but not here. Let
(05:43):
me give you an example. I have permission to hunt
a large dairy farm in southeastern Minnesota that I talk
about sometimes. That property borders another property that one of
my buddies' leases, and it also borders a small property
that is generally treated as a deer sanctuary. Now, my
property is the opposite of what you'd call a deer sanctuary.
(06:04):
A lot of people hunt it, and the landowner would
like it if lots of deer were shot out of there,
and he does his best to facilitate that every year,
and the deer know it. So a lot of the
deer that I end up with on my property at
some point of the season often move to those other
two properties, and as the season progresses, the differential in
(06:26):
pressure has a major effect on a lot of things,
including the dispersal of big bucks. Now, when the pre
rut kicks in, my buddy hunts his lease and is
generally covered in good deer chasing and doing their thing,
and it's literally right across the fence, literally in a
place where I can see from some of my stands,
(06:47):
and yet on my property I struggle to see good
bucks and sometimes any bucks. It's not even close to
the same experience, even though the properties are very close.
So what does that mean? Well, for starters, the rules
he should follow wouldn't make much sense for me, would they.
I'm dealing with just a vastly different scenario. And what's worse,
(07:07):
if I didn't know any better and he were to
tell me what he was doing to get on deer,
and then I were to try those things, they probably
wouldn't work for me. Now, imagine someone who owns a
thousand acres in southern Iowa telling the masses that the
deer rules are this and not that according to his experience.
Do you think that makes a whole lot of sense
for the hunter in Georgia who has to fight the
(07:29):
crowds on public land. Academically, it just doesn't work. Yet
we all kind of fall into this trap often. And
do you know why? At least this is my thought anyway,
I think the rules we think deer follow scare us,
And really, why wouldn't they rules are meant to encourage
specific behavior, and without consequences for not doing those behaviors,
(07:52):
then they don't matter. So we believe if we don't
follow the rules, we will not kill deer, and worse,
we will actually make it harder on ourselves in the future.
Most of these rules come from the line of thinking
that you'll do more harm than good. So don't hunt,
don't scout, don't go in and blow those bucks up
before they get carryless and start to move a lot
(08:13):
during daylight. It's a calculation, you know, that makes sense
for maybe five percent of the deer hunters out there.
The further you are from a really good property that
is well managed, the less likely those general deer rules
are worth following. Part of this is simply because you
can predict the behavior of your fellow hunters, because they
(08:33):
are going to more or less follow the general rules.
The big one, of course, is you know when to hunt.
Most hunters won't hunt the lull. Most hunters will hunt
the rut. Simple right now, Imagine what the deer do
in response to that. Most hunters won't hunt when it's
super hot, but they will when a cold front hits.
What do you think deer do in response to that?
(08:55):
And how many hunters are we talking about in your
neck of the woods, because that's what really matters. Now,
think about this another way. Some of the general deer
rules are probably pretty good ones to follow, but we
(09:17):
often don't take the all day sits during the rut.
For example, here, you want to kill more big bucks,
that's one of your answers. You won't shoot one at
noon every year, But if you're in the habit of
all day sits, you'll get a few really good midday
opportunities every decade of your deer hunting life. Now, maybe
that means only one or two more mounts on your wall,
(09:39):
but that's enough to get a guy like minis it
all day. The best way to look at this might
simply be to ask yourself, how do I know this
rule is a good one? Did I hear it over
and over from people who seem to have a real
handle on deer hunting? Okay? But have I witnessed it firsthand?
Have I tried this thing or not? Take the snort
(10:02):
wheeze deal that I talk about all the time. Last
year I snort weezed in a really good North Dakota
buck on public land and missed him, which you can
watch over at the mediater dot com. My cameraman for
that hunt is a really good deer hunter, but since
our timing was outside the rut, he thought it was
nuts that I was snort wheezing at that buck. After
the whole encounter, he told me that flat out, he
(10:24):
thought there was no way that was going to work.
But it took like four storm wheezes and that buck
came right in. Now, my camera guy, he's a really
good deer hunter, really good. But in his head, he
had a rule about snort wheezing, and you only do
it during the rut and only on really big deer.
When you believe that, Will you ever snort wheeze at
a deer outside of the rut? Probably not. Well, you
(10:47):
ever snort weeze at a small buck? Probably not? So
what does that mean? It means that you'll follow that
rule even if you don't actually know it's a good one.
Let's think about something else. On that dairy farm I
mentioned earlier, there is one hundred acre field on one
part of it. Now that field is split by a
waterway and it's a crapshoot on any of given year.
(11:09):
What'll be planted in there? Sometimes, like this year, the
whole thing is corn, sometimes half of its corn and
half of its alfalfa, sometimes half as beans. You get
my drift. Now, On some years, I can access the
woods that that field borders via standing corn, and I
can kill decent bucks in the morning in September as
they work their way back to bed. Sometimes I can't
(11:32):
get anywhere near that field in the mornings, or I'll
blow the whole thing out because of what's planted in there.
So on some years on that farm, the rule about
not hunting early season mornings is pretty solid. On other years,
following that rule would cost me real opportunities at good bucks.
The only thing that changes those rules is the crop
(11:55):
rotation and my willingness to hunt when the rules seem wrong.
For the scenario where I'm going with all of this
is that we find comfort in guardrails. If you believe
you shouldn't hunt early season mornings and you don't hunt them,
you're going to feel like you are being a good hunter.
But what might have been a good decision last year
(12:18):
could be a dumb one this year. Or what might
be a good one on that property that you used
to hunt might not be a good one on the
least that you have this year. Another example, if you
believe you can't hunt bottoms of valleys because the wind
will swirl and you'll get busted, for sure, you're not
going to try to hunt bottoms of valleys, and I
promise you there are conditions where you can get away
(12:39):
with it, and if you do, you're probably going to
be on deer. The danger to all of this is
that you have to try things that you've been conditioned
to believe just won't work. That sucks, but it's also
why I love heading out on the road to hunt
public land in random states. My willingness to be cavalier
and try riskier strategies goes way up when I'm a
(13:00):
strict timeline and have little to know history with a property.
When you do that, it sort of crumbles the foundation
ever so slightly that we've built on our home ground
where we just know we can do this, but not that.
I also believe that the rules we like to follow
keep us from figuring out how to hunt as if
(13:20):
they don't exist. Let me give you an example about
seven or eight years ago, I killed one hundred and
forty six inch ten pointer on public land in South Dakota.
The buck, along with his little buddy, came through in
the morning in late September, when you're not supposed to
hunt mornings. But I'd watched some deer use that spot,
and I knew they were passing through there in the mornings.
I just didn't have a great idea how to approach
(13:41):
the whole thing. So I stuck a blind into a
bunch of dead cedars, and I went in way early
and parked down the road in a place that meant
I had to walk in from the opposite direction the
deer were likely to approach from, and it worked. If
that had been a home ground situation, I doubt I
would have tried. That would have been too risky. It's
honestly as simple as that. Though now I have to
(14:04):
say this because if I didn't, I wouldn't feel great
about myself. A lot of the things that I try
to make work, which might be outside of general deer
hunting rules that people like to follow, they just don't work.
I don't know how many times I've tried to access
the spot that I thought i'd get away with sneaking
in and not letting the bucks know I was there,
and it just didn't happen. This happens a lot. What
(14:26):
it does for me is helped me set up my
own rules for certain properties in certain times of the year.
Take this little chunk of land I own in Wisconsin.
It's three hundred yards from my east to west boundary,
and if I park anywhere but the farthest southwest corner,
my daughters and I generally won't see deer when we sit,
at least if we hunt in the evenings. Anyway. Now,
(14:49):
I learned this because I thought I needed to park
on the other side due to where I figured the
deer would be betted. But they knew when we went in,
no matter how careful I was. Now we park as
close so as you could to where they bed, just
because it also puts us close to two neighbors we
have on that property, and our noise sort of blends
into the general noise of those other two people, or
(15:10):
the other two households, I should say, they hear human
noise there in that corner all the time. On the
other side of the property, there's no houses or driveways,
and a truck crunching along the gravel and stopping there
seems to be just enough to keep them from doing
what they need to do. The lesson there is that
I had a rule in my head when I started
(15:31):
hunting that property, but the deer showed me it was
a bad one. Then I had to go through some
trial and error to figure out that specific property and
how to make it work. That rule about where to
park and how to access it is literally property specific.
I wouldn't park as close as I could to a
known bedding area anywhere else. In almost any situation, I
(15:53):
go the opposite way, and you know what, I might
be totally right in doing that, even if on my
land that's the wrong move. Here's the thing that makes
all of this even tougher. That might not be the
case this season or in five seasons from now. Maybe
they won't bed there as much in the future, and
my access will have to change. I don't know. What
(16:15):
I do know is that I have a rule for
where I park now and how I get into that piece,
and it's a good one. If we stop seeing deer,
it'll be time to rewrite the rules and figure out
what to do to get things working in my direction again.
So what does all of this mean for you? For starters,
I'll give you a simple one which plays off that
summer scouting episode I did last week. One of the
(16:38):
summertime rules a lot of us follow is to run
cameras and mostly stay out of the woods. How about
don't do that. Run cameras and go into the woods.
Take a good look around. Try to envision what you
should do now to kill one the first week of
the season. Go check some of your rut funnels for
tracks now, walk field edges and fence rows. Go into
(16:59):
the woods. Pay attention to the heat and the bugs
and how bad they are while you're standing up on
top of the hill looking at your on X and
how bad they are when you drop into the bottom
of the valley to look around. Pay attention to the
water sources and the browsing evidence. The more we learn
about the deer we are hunting, the more we realize
that the general rules don't matter much. It's far more
(17:20):
important to figure out exactly what's going on in your spot,
not what someone else is doing seven states away on
a property that is nothing like yours. So don't break
the laws and the regulations, but think about the general
deer hunting rules that you follow. Do they seem to
be working out for you? Or do you still struggle
(17:41):
to fill tags even though you're diligent about them. If
the latter is true, go figure out how to do
things differently, break some of those rules and forget about
what you're supposed to do and try to learn what
you should do. I want you to do that. I
want you to come back next week because I'm going
to talk about some more summertime, your concerns and get
into some strategies that I have right now to set
(18:04):
myself up for hunts all fall, including rut hunts, even
though it's hot, miserable out and I'm not really that
excited to do it. That's it for this week. I'm
Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast,
which is brought to you by First Light. As always,
thank you so much for listening. We really appreciate it.
(18:25):
Here at Meat Eater, I firmly believe we have the
best audience out there. You guys are so loyal, you
check in all the time. It's just great. Your support
means the world to us. If you need more, Dear
Hunting content, Maybe you need some good storytelling on a podcast.
Maybe you want to watch a film or three. The
medeater dot com has you covered. We literally drop hunting
(18:47):
and fishing content every single day at that site. Go
check it out.
Host
Mark Kenyon
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