August 5, 2025 • 17 mins
This week, Tony explains how to make your summer scouting sessions more productive by understanding buck home and core ranges, and what that might mean for your hit list.
Connect with Tony Peterson and MeatEater
Tony Peterson on Instagram and Facebook
MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips
MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube
Shop MeatEater Merch
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
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
house Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about the
bucks that are around right now and if they'll still
be there in another.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Month or two. Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Now, we think we know a lot about big bucks,
but quite a bit of our knowledge was handed to
us by someone else. That's secondary source type of stuff.
And I talk about it all the time on here,
and I'm going to talk about it more here. But really,
what this episode is really about are the big seasonal
movements and excursions that all deer take from their home ranges.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Why that matters to you right now?
Speaker 2 (00:55):
The hit list you build in August might be full
of ghosts, or it might be full of bucks that
will be in play all season. To figure out what
you're dealing with, you have to understand where, when, how far,
and how often Big bucks just up and leave your neighborhood.
That's what I'm going to cover right now. When I
(01:16):
think about what I don't know about deer behavior, it
makes me almost want to quit hunting. I think a
good way to frame this up is to consider one
of my favorite topics dogs. I recently did an episode
of Houndations over on the cal of the Wild feed
called The Dark Side of Domestic Dogs, and in it
I talked about the ways in which we think about
our furry besties and the ways in which they can
(01:38):
surprise us by well being actual canines. Now, I know
they are domestic, but that doesn't mean they are just
couch potatoes and lap dogs. When a house dog like
a lab does something odd of character like rip a
new born fawn in half at the edge of your yard,
like exactly what happened to a woman I know the spring,
it can shake up your worldview. We think we know
(01:59):
our dog. We do, and we don't. We spend every
day with them, or at least a hell of a
lot of days every year with them. We witness their behaviors,
we shape their behaviors through training and conditioning well hopefully anyway,
and we have them all dialed in our heads, but
we don't. And all it takes is one encounter with
a wobbly legged Bambie, or maybe one chance interaction with
(02:22):
a dog or a person they really don't like for
some reason, and bam, another side of your dog becomes
visible to you. When you consider that, it's a little
easier to understand why big Bucks and often deer in
general leave us a little perplexed or gobsmacked and well.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
Just a little confused.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
But consider this also, We rarely spend time with them,
and when we do, it's largely in the fall, when
we are trying to kill them. You know, we get
pictures of them in the summer, but that is a tiny,
infinitesimal glimpse into their lives. We don't know them, and
the folks who actually do know them don't really know
them either, And by that I mean biologists and researchers.
(03:00):
But I should also say at least a lot of
them are actually trying to figure out deer and deer behavior,
and a lot of what they try to figure out
is where do they live?
Speaker 3 (03:10):
Where do they go?
Speaker 2 (03:11):
When certain conditions come together to start to make sense
of their findings. It's a good idea to brush up
on a few definitions. Let's start with home range. We
talk a lot about home range, and it's generally accepted
that a deer will have a home range of about
a square mile. I've talked about this a lot on here,
but that is highly variable by several hundred acres depending
(03:33):
on individual deer and where those deer happen to live
in just what's available to them. You know, a buck
who has nice food plots and thick bedding cover and
lots of does and plenty of brows and masks and
low predator numbers to deal with, he just might not
need to move a whole lot from one section to
the next.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
So he won't.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
A deer that doesn't will And there are a whole
lot of variables beyond that. Any Huski biologists consider a
deer's home range to be where it spends ninety five
percent of its time over the course of an entire year.
That other five percent will come into place soon enough,
but for now, that's the working definition, and it just
(04:12):
kind of makes sense. But then you have core range,
which is what we are all looking for when it
comes to big bucks. Core range is generally considered to
be where a deer spends fifty percent of his time.
Think preferred betting areas or some top notch feeding areas here. Now,
the interesting thing about this stuff are the excursions we
(04:32):
hear about what we think are outlier excursions when some
collar buck takes off and walks across the land and
ends up twenty miles away for a few days. But
what we often don't factor in is that an awful
lot of deer take excursions, just not the twenty mile kind,
and why they take those excursions might surprise you. The
primary drivers research suggests, anyway, our habitat availability food and water,
(04:56):
not hunting pressure, which is important to note. It's also
important to note while hunting pressure doesn't seem to convince
bucks to head to the next county, it does convince
them that walking around a lot during daylight is a
generally bad idea. Research into this topic has yielded some
interesting findings too. It's not totally uncommon to hear someone
(05:17):
say that a buck has a certain territory, which is
the wrong word. Territory is something that is defended and
contested to some extent. Now maybe I'm wrong here, but
wolf packs in their stopping grounds are probably a decent example,
but what this means for whitetail bucks is interesting, and
a study out of South Carolina showed that bucks can
share core areas, and often do. They share core areas
(05:40):
that have significant overlap, even during a hunting season when
they shouldn't be very tolerant of one another. They are
tolerant of each other, and if you understand hierarchies and
the reality of limited quality habitat and food sources, you
kind of understand why they have to just find some peace.
The bucks figure out who is the top dog, and
then they figure out how to not get in each
other spaces all the times. It's like a middle school
(06:02):
out there in some ways. This also flies in the
face of conventional thinking when it comes to the end
of August in the beginning of September, when the velvet
finally gets shed and the bucks theoretically should be getting
a little ornery. When we don't see the bachelor groups
lazily feeding in the alfalfa anymore, we assume they split
up and dispersed.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
They do, but they don't.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
The change from summer to early fall coincides with different
nutritional needs, which coincides often with the availability of different
food sources, deer often go from a protein heavy dyet
to something that is more car bloated, which means the
alfalfa can't quite compete with the per simmons or acorns.
Right about the time when the last vestiges of summer
fade and the fall weather hits. So when did the
(06:44):
deer go on excursions?
Speaker 3 (06:45):
Then? I'm glad you asked.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
One study out of the University of Tennessee shows that
the pre rut, peak rut, and post rut are where
it's at excursion wise. They coller ten bucks and ten
dos to monitor their movements and figure this out. In
that st seven bucks took lengthy excursions from their home ranges,
but so did six dos, which might seem a little surprising.
(07:08):
What is more surprising is that with the doze, the
most active time period for excursions was during the pre rut.
This study seems to lend a lot of credence to
the idea that if a deer, buck or dough is
going to light out for a little while, it'll be
in the interest of making baby deer, but deer engage
in excursions all year. A study out of Pennsylvania where
They called thirteen bucks and monitored them from April to June.
(07:31):
Showed that nine of them made excursions, which averaged two
point five miles, but one buck doubled that distance when
he took off not to muddy the water's further considered
the findings of another study out of Pennsylvania that monitored
home range and core range sizes throughout the seasons. This
one is interesting because it followed nineteen mature bucks. Their
(07:52):
home ranges varied in size from an average of nine
hundred acres in the fall to less than half of
that in the summer. Just followed a similar trajectory, going
from about one hundred and fifteen acres down to just
sixty during the summer. Now, if you're not spinning your
wheels quite yet, let me throw one more wrench into
the gears. A study out of Louisiana concluded that some
(08:13):
bucks have two home.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Ranges during the rut.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
They spend some time in one, then bail and go
to another one where they spend some time, then they
come back. So the buck that you get picks of
during the pre rut, who you're sure is going to
run through your best pinch point spot and give you
a shot might be chasing dose two miles away all
week and long, and while you think he didn't show
because of some sort of randomness to the rut, it
(08:37):
might not be a random at all. It might be
a very specific breeding strategy when your timing was just
off from his. Well, there are several studies out there
that show something that might really mess with your head,
(09:00):
which is what I mentioned earlier about hunting pressure and
buck travel. Some bucks do leave an area that is
under heavy pressure, but most don't seem to do that.
They just don't move as much, and when they do,
they tend to concentrate their movements in dense, thick, nasty areas.
Intuitivity that makes sense for a prey animal. I mean,
think about it. Take your pick of states. Let's say Wisconsin,
(09:22):
where there are like six hundred thousand gun hunters. That's
a lot of people in the woods trying to shoot deer.
If bucks took off because of hunting pressure during that time,
instead of holding up, they'd put themselves at risk in
a major way. Running away from that type of danger
when the woods are saturated with that type of danger
means they're just gonna get shot at sitting tight and
waiting for the pressure to fade away as a much
(09:44):
better survival technique, and they use it well. They do
this even when we assume that all of the other
hunters walking around and putting on their drives will get
them moving. They mostly don't because most hunters aren't going
to wade through the swamp or step on every edge
of the cattails, or do what they need to do
in order to get deer to move out of the
spots they use to hide from us. What is the
(10:05):
takeaway from all this, especially in consideration of this time
of year. Well, maybe this is confirmation biased because I
believed it for a long time, but I think it
speaks to something important in our current deer hunting culture.
Hitless and target bucks are a real thing, and there
are a lot of properties out there where you might
find a giant today and he'll still be there in
the fall. But it's also a good idea to acknowledge
(10:27):
that the hitless target buck saying works best on properties
that offer really good food and habitat and some water
and just the right mix of cover. This whole hunting
style came from people who have access to those types
of spots, they can identify individual bucks and follow them
somewhat closely, and they can facilitate the ground that those
(10:47):
bucks just won't want to leave from. Then they control
the hunting pressure so that those bucks are prone to
walking around in daylight more during the hunting season.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
Case closed sort of.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
A scouting is generally more directly connected to their fall
hunting because they try hard to reduce some of the
variables that might convince bucks to head somewhere else. Most
of us don't have that, even if we think that
we do. So let's look at this. Let's say you
have one hundred and sixty acres to hunt and you
share it with your buddy and your cousin. That's a
sweet setup, and not many people would turn it down.
(11:21):
And you guys put in some food plots, and you
do some hinge cutting, have a couple of no go
bedding areas, and really try to make things work for
the deer. But one hundred and sixty acres is twenty
five percent of a section, which means it might be
twenty five percent of your target bucks home range or
maybe far less. Now, what if that one hundred and
sixty acres is a half fields and forty acres of
it is pastured woods that the turkeys love but the
(11:43):
deer don't. Now, you might still have one hundred and
sixty acres of a few bucks home ranges, but maybe
forty of their core range, or maybe less, maybe none.
You have a bachelor group on one of your fields
all summer long. Hell, maybe you have a mineral block
out to draw them in and get great trick photos.
Those bucks spend every night for two months on your place,
(12:04):
and you are already eyeballing a spot on your wall
for the shoulder amount that you're inevitably going to need.
You know where I'm going with this. You pin your
hopes on the biggest dear in the bachelor group, and
then it just kind of explodes. They go hard, antlered,
the mineral block goes cold, and the whole thing just
kind of falls apart when you're about to start hunting.
Speaker 3 (12:23):
That happens, and it's okay.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
But then we pin our hopes on that buck, and
you know, he might not spend hardly any time on
your property during the entire season, we still hold hope
for him because he was there, and because no matter what,
he's going to sway through during the rut right, maybe,
but maybe not. And where I'm going with this is
that if you're out there right now, running cameras and
(12:47):
glassing and building a case for why a certain buck
is you're one and only this season, consider how quickly
that might go totally wrong. This only becomes more true
for folks hunting smaller properties or properties with more pressure
or properties it just don't have the right cover or browser,
food or water or dough groups or whatever that might
make this seem like a lost cause. And I don't
(13:08):
want that, because it's not. It's just a warning that
instead of going full hit list on specific deer, it
might be a good idea to learn about bucks generally,
those core areas out there where bucks just like to
spend at least fifty percent of their time during the
fall hunting season, they offer something up that is valuable
to all bucks. While we like to try to find
one deer and sauce out as daily habits to build
(13:30):
a pattern, a lot of us would be better off
scouting like fiends to find areas that bucks like to use. Now,
I know that's not like a huge revelation, but think
about it. What would help you become a better hunter,
you know, the kind who consistently kills big bucks. Is
it pinning your hopes on a deer in August that
might not be in the same section as you in October?
(13:51):
Or is it learning about the areas that bucks really
really like and then figuring out how to hunt them.
You see, in all those deer studies, one of the
things that up a lot is that the bucks will
go into the thick shit to avoid us. So we
should figure out how to haunt the thick shit, or
at least find the thick shit and then figure out
what to do with it. But instead we often get
(14:11):
a pick of a good one, which is easy to
do these days. Then we try to talk ourselves into
hunting him like we want to haunt him, which means
going out, you know, during the right pre rut and
rut days with the right conditions, and then hoping he
comes through. But it's a better about to really try
to figure out where he or his buddies will likely
go when they get sick of getting stepped on by
us or our friends or our cousins. Or if you
(14:34):
haunt some places like public land just about you know,
anywhere anyone who pulls into the WMA parking lot for
a couple of months could mess up your plan. So
where do those bucks go? And the individual buck thing
is great, but it's really hard to do in an
awful lot of situations. If you hunt small properties, for example,
it's not hopeless, but it can be awful close. If
(14:54):
you hunt generally pressured ground, again, it's not hopeless, but
it can be awful close. I've started to lean into
this style of thinking hard to last few years, and
boy have I killed some bucks and had some encounters
with great deer because of it. I want to find
the area they are happy to use because most of
us won't go in there, and then I want to
figure out how to hunt it for big bucks, but
(15:15):
not necessarily a specific big buck. This line of thinking
is also a great way to take yourself to the
next level of hunting, because it's not just about killing
one fifties, but going from only being able to arrow
a year and a half holds to bumping yourself up
to two and a half year olds or three and
a half year olds. It's a pressure deer strategy but
also just a deer strategy, and it's something that most
(15:38):
of us need to develop. Because most of us are
hunting pressure deer of some level. It's something that might
not seem important now because the bucks are easy to
see and easy to get pictures of, but it'll come
into play for a hell of a lot of us
in the next six to eight weeks or so and
stay with us until the snowflies or at least the
season ends. So think about that as you're naming bucks
and gaining more and more confidence that Skyscraper or a
(16:00):
Goldpost or whatever his name is, he's all but tagged
and hanging in the garage.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
You're ready.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
He's not, but you can try to figure out where
he might end up or somebody like him might end
up during the season, and set up some ambush sites
for them.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
And according to.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
The research, if they don't show up, but you do
your part, someone else's hit list buck might just take
a little excursion to your farm in the end of
October early November, and that'll be a welcome surprise. Think
about that as you're out there scouting right now, and
then come back next week because I'm going to talk
about a few things bow hunters and crossbow hunters and
rifle hunters should do while they are practicing in the
(16:35):
off season, you know, in this preseason time right now
to get ready to make a good shot when it
counts to most.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
That's it for this episode. I'm Tony Peterson.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which
is brought to you by First Light.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
Thank you so much for all of your support.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
If you need more hunting content, maybe you want to
watch some films, maybe you need some podcasts to listen to.
Maybe you want to read a few articles or find
a new recipe for something the media or has you covered.
We drop new content literally every single day over there
at that site, and the amount, the depth of content
is bananas. So go check it out at the mediator
(17:11):
dot com and as always, thanks for everything.
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
house Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about the
bucks that are around right now and if they'll still
be there in another.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Month or two. Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Now, we think we know a lot about big bucks,
but quite a bit of our knowledge was handed to
us by someone else. That's secondary source type of stuff.
And I talk about it all the time on here,
and I'm going to talk about it more here. But really,
what this episode is really about are the big seasonal
movements and excursions that all deer take from their home ranges.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Why that matters to you right now?
Speaker 2 (00:55):
The hit list you build in August might be full
of ghosts, or it might be full of bucks that
will be in play all season. To figure out what
you're dealing with, you have to understand where, when, how far,
and how often Big bucks just up and leave your neighborhood.
That's what I'm going to cover right now. When I
(01:16):
think about what I don't know about deer behavior, it
makes me almost want to quit hunting. I think a
good way to frame this up is to consider one
of my favorite topics dogs. I recently did an episode
of Houndations over on the cal of the Wild feed
called The Dark Side of Domestic Dogs, and in it
I talked about the ways in which we think about
our furry besties and the ways in which they can
(01:38):
surprise us by well being actual canines. Now, I know
they are domestic, but that doesn't mean they are just
couch potatoes and lap dogs. When a house dog like
a lab does something odd of character like rip a
new born fawn in half at the edge of your yard,
like exactly what happened to a woman I know the spring,
it can shake up your worldview. We think we know
(01:59):
our dog. We do, and we don't. We spend every
day with them, or at least a hell of a
lot of days every year with them. We witness their behaviors,
we shape their behaviors through training and conditioning well hopefully anyway,
and we have them all dialed in our heads, but
we don't. And all it takes is one encounter with
a wobbly legged Bambie, or maybe one chance interaction with
(02:22):
a dog or a person they really don't like for
some reason, and bam, another side of your dog becomes
visible to you. When you consider that, it's a little
easier to understand why big Bucks and often deer in
general leave us a little perplexed or gobsmacked and well.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
Just a little confused.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
But consider this also, We rarely spend time with them,
and when we do, it's largely in the fall, when
we are trying to kill them. You know, we get
pictures of them in the summer, but that is a tiny,
infinitesimal glimpse into their lives. We don't know them, and
the folks who actually do know them don't really know
them either, And by that I mean biologists and researchers.
(03:00):
But I should also say at least a lot of
them are actually trying to figure out deer and deer behavior,
and a lot of what they try to figure out
is where do they live?
Speaker 3 (03:10):
Where do they go?
Speaker 2 (03:11):
When certain conditions come together to start to make sense
of their findings. It's a good idea to brush up
on a few definitions. Let's start with home range. We
talk a lot about home range, and it's generally accepted
that a deer will have a home range of about
a square mile. I've talked about this a lot on here,
but that is highly variable by several hundred acres depending
(03:33):
on individual deer and where those deer happen to live
in just what's available to them. You know, a buck
who has nice food plots and thick bedding cover and
lots of does and plenty of brows and masks and
low predator numbers to deal with, he just might not
need to move a whole lot from one section to
the next.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
So he won't.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
A deer that doesn't will And there are a whole
lot of variables beyond that. Any Huski biologists consider a
deer's home range to be where it spends ninety five
percent of its time over the course of an entire year.
That other five percent will come into place soon enough,
but for now, that's the working definition, and it just
(04:12):
kind of makes sense. But then you have core range,
which is what we are all looking for when it
comes to big bucks. Core range is generally considered to
be where a deer spends fifty percent of his time.
Think preferred betting areas or some top notch feeding areas here. Now,
the interesting thing about this stuff are the excursions we
(04:32):
hear about what we think are outlier excursions when some
collar buck takes off and walks across the land and
ends up twenty miles away for a few days. But
what we often don't factor in is that an awful
lot of deer take excursions, just not the twenty mile kind,
and why they take those excursions might surprise you. The
primary drivers research suggests, anyway, our habitat availability food and water,
(04:56):
not hunting pressure, which is important to note. It's also
important to note while hunting pressure doesn't seem to convince
bucks to head to the next county, it does convince
them that walking around a lot during daylight is a
generally bad idea. Research into this topic has yielded some
interesting findings too. It's not totally uncommon to hear someone
(05:17):
say that a buck has a certain territory, which is
the wrong word. Territory is something that is defended and
contested to some extent. Now maybe I'm wrong here, but
wolf packs in their stopping grounds are probably a decent example,
but what this means for whitetail bucks is interesting, and
a study out of South Carolina showed that bucks can
share core areas, and often do. They share core areas
(05:40):
that have significant overlap, even during a hunting season when
they shouldn't be very tolerant of one another. They are
tolerant of each other, and if you understand hierarchies and
the reality of limited quality habitat and food sources, you
kind of understand why they have to just find some peace.
The bucks figure out who is the top dog, and
then they figure out how to not get in each
other spaces all the times. It's like a middle school
(06:02):
out there in some ways. This also flies in the
face of conventional thinking when it comes to the end
of August in the beginning of September, when the velvet
finally gets shed and the bucks theoretically should be getting
a little ornery. When we don't see the bachelor groups
lazily feeding in the alfalfa anymore, we assume they split
up and dispersed.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
They do, but they don't.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
The change from summer to early fall coincides with different
nutritional needs, which coincides often with the availability of different
food sources, deer often go from a protein heavy dyet
to something that is more car bloated, which means the
alfalfa can't quite compete with the per simmons or acorns.
Right about the time when the last vestiges of summer
fade and the fall weather hits. So when did the
(06:44):
deer go on excursions?
Speaker 3 (06:45):
Then? I'm glad you asked.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
One study out of the University of Tennessee shows that
the pre rut, peak rut, and post rut are where
it's at excursion wise. They coller ten bucks and ten
dos to monitor their movements and figure this out. In
that st seven bucks took lengthy excursions from their home ranges,
but so did six dos, which might seem a little surprising.
(07:08):
What is more surprising is that with the doze, the
most active time period for excursions was during the pre rut.
This study seems to lend a lot of credence to
the idea that if a deer, buck or dough is
going to light out for a little while, it'll be
in the interest of making baby deer, but deer engage
in excursions all year. A study out of Pennsylvania where
They called thirteen bucks and monitored them from April to June.
(07:31):
Showed that nine of them made excursions, which averaged two
point five miles, but one buck doubled that distance when
he took off not to muddy the water's further considered
the findings of another study out of Pennsylvania that monitored
home range and core range sizes throughout the seasons. This
one is interesting because it followed nineteen mature bucks. Their
(07:52):
home ranges varied in size from an average of nine
hundred acres in the fall to less than half of
that in the summer. Just followed a similar trajectory, going
from about one hundred and fifteen acres down to just
sixty during the summer. Now, if you're not spinning your
wheels quite yet, let me throw one more wrench into
the gears. A study out of Louisiana concluded that some
(08:13):
bucks have two home.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Ranges during the rut.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
They spend some time in one, then bail and go
to another one where they spend some time, then they
come back. So the buck that you get picks of
during the pre rut, who you're sure is going to
run through your best pinch point spot and give you
a shot might be chasing dose two miles away all
week and long, and while you think he didn't show
because of some sort of randomness to the rut, it
(08:37):
might not be a random at all. It might be
a very specific breeding strategy when your timing was just
off from his. Well, there are several studies out there
that show something that might really mess with your head,
(09:00):
which is what I mentioned earlier about hunting pressure and
buck travel. Some bucks do leave an area that is
under heavy pressure, but most don't seem to do that.
They just don't move as much, and when they do,
they tend to concentrate their movements in dense, thick, nasty areas.
Intuitivity that makes sense for a prey animal. I mean,
think about it. Take your pick of states. Let's say Wisconsin,
(09:22):
where there are like six hundred thousand gun hunters. That's
a lot of people in the woods trying to shoot deer.
If bucks took off because of hunting pressure during that time,
instead of holding up, they'd put themselves at risk in
a major way. Running away from that type of danger
when the woods are saturated with that type of danger
means they're just gonna get shot at sitting tight and
waiting for the pressure to fade away as a much
(09:44):
better survival technique, and they use it well. They do
this even when we assume that all of the other
hunters walking around and putting on their drives will get
them moving. They mostly don't because most hunters aren't going
to wade through the swamp or step on every edge
of the cattails, or do what they need to do
in order to get deer to move out of the
spots they use to hide from us. What is the
(10:05):
takeaway from all this, especially in consideration of this time
of year. Well, maybe this is confirmation biased because I
believed it for a long time, but I think it
speaks to something important in our current deer hunting culture.
Hitless and target bucks are a real thing, and there
are a lot of properties out there where you might
find a giant today and he'll still be there in
the fall. But it's also a good idea to acknowledge
(10:27):
that the hitless target buck saying works best on properties
that offer really good food and habitat and some water
and just the right mix of cover. This whole hunting
style came from people who have access to those types
of spots, they can identify individual bucks and follow them
somewhat closely, and they can facilitate the ground that those
(10:47):
bucks just won't want to leave from. Then they control
the hunting pressure so that those bucks are prone to
walking around in daylight more during the hunting season.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
Case closed sort of.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
A scouting is generally more directly connected to their fall
hunting because they try hard to reduce some of the
variables that might convince bucks to head somewhere else. Most
of us don't have that, even if we think that
we do. So let's look at this. Let's say you
have one hundred and sixty acres to hunt and you
share it with your buddy and your cousin. That's a
sweet setup, and not many people would turn it down.
(11:21):
And you guys put in some food plots, and you
do some hinge cutting, have a couple of no go
bedding areas, and really try to make things work for
the deer. But one hundred and sixty acres is twenty
five percent of a section, which means it might be
twenty five percent of your target bucks home range or
maybe far less. Now, what if that one hundred and
sixty acres is a half fields and forty acres of
it is pastured woods that the turkeys love but the
(11:43):
deer don't. Now, you might still have one hundred and
sixty acres of a few bucks home ranges, but maybe
forty of their core range, or maybe less, maybe none.
You have a bachelor group on one of your fields
all summer long. Hell, maybe you have a mineral block
out to draw them in and get great trick photos.
Those bucks spend every night for two months on your place,
(12:04):
and you are already eyeballing a spot on your wall
for the shoulder amount that you're inevitably going to need.
You know where I'm going with this. You pin your
hopes on the biggest dear in the bachelor group, and
then it just kind of explodes. They go hard, antlered,
the mineral block goes cold, and the whole thing just
kind of falls apart when you're about to start hunting.
Speaker 3 (12:23):
That happens, and it's okay.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
But then we pin our hopes on that buck, and
you know, he might not spend hardly any time on
your property during the entire season, we still hold hope
for him because he was there, and because no matter what,
he's going to sway through during the rut right, maybe,
but maybe not. And where I'm going with this is
that if you're out there right now, running cameras and
(12:47):
glassing and building a case for why a certain buck
is you're one and only this season, consider how quickly
that might go totally wrong. This only becomes more true
for folks hunting smaller properties or properties with more pressure
or properties it just don't have the right cover or browser,
food or water or dough groups or whatever that might
make this seem like a lost cause. And I don't
(13:08):
want that, because it's not. It's just a warning that
instead of going full hit list on specific deer, it
might be a good idea to learn about bucks generally,
those core areas out there where bucks just like to
spend at least fifty percent of their time during the
fall hunting season, they offer something up that is valuable
to all bucks. While we like to try to find
one deer and sauce out as daily habits to build
(13:30):
a pattern, a lot of us would be better off
scouting like fiends to find areas that bucks like to use. Now,
I know that's not like a huge revelation, but think
about it. What would help you become a better hunter,
you know, the kind who consistently kills big bucks. Is
it pinning your hopes on a deer in August that
might not be in the same section as you in October?
(13:51):
Or is it learning about the areas that bucks really
really like and then figuring out how to hunt them.
You see, in all those deer studies, one of the
things that up a lot is that the bucks will
go into the thick shit to avoid us. So we
should figure out how to haunt the thick shit, or
at least find the thick shit and then figure out
what to do with it. But instead we often get
(14:11):
a pick of a good one, which is easy to
do these days. Then we try to talk ourselves into
hunting him like we want to haunt him, which means
going out, you know, during the right pre rut and
rut days with the right conditions, and then hoping he
comes through. But it's a better about to really try
to figure out where he or his buddies will likely
go when they get sick of getting stepped on by
us or our friends or our cousins. Or if you
(14:34):
haunt some places like public land just about you know,
anywhere anyone who pulls into the WMA parking lot for
a couple of months could mess up your plan. So
where do those bucks go? And the individual buck thing
is great, but it's really hard to do in an
awful lot of situations. If you hunt small properties, for example,
it's not hopeless, but it can be awful close. If
(14:54):
you hunt generally pressured ground, again, it's not hopeless, but
it can be awful close. I've started to lean into
this style of thinking hard to last few years, and
boy have I killed some bucks and had some encounters
with great deer because of it. I want to find
the area they are happy to use because most of
us won't go in there, and then I want to
figure out how to hunt it for big bucks, but
(15:15):
not necessarily a specific big buck. This line of thinking
is also a great way to take yourself to the
next level of hunting, because it's not just about killing
one fifties, but going from only being able to arrow
a year and a half holds to bumping yourself up
to two and a half year olds or three and
a half year olds. It's a pressure deer strategy but
also just a deer strategy, and it's something that most
(15:38):
of us need to develop. Because most of us are
hunting pressure deer of some level. It's something that might
not seem important now because the bucks are easy to
see and easy to get pictures of, but it'll come
into play for a hell of a lot of us
in the next six to eight weeks or so and
stay with us until the snowflies or at least the
season ends. So think about that as you're naming bucks
and gaining more and more confidence that Skyscraper or a
(16:00):
Goldpost or whatever his name is, he's all but tagged
and hanging in the garage.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
You're ready.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
He's not, but you can try to figure out where
he might end up or somebody like him might end
up during the season, and set up some ambush sites
for them.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
And according to.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
The research, if they don't show up, but you do
your part, someone else's hit list buck might just take
a little excursion to your farm in the end of
October early November, and that'll be a welcome surprise. Think
about that as you're out there scouting right now, and
then come back next week because I'm going to talk
about a few things bow hunters and crossbow hunters and
rifle hunters should do while they are practicing in the
(16:35):
off season, you know, in this preseason time right now
to get ready to make a good shot when it
counts to most.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
That's it for this episode. I'm Tony Peterson.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which
is brought to you by First Light.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
Thank you so much for all of your support.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
If you need more hunting content, maybe you want to
watch some films, maybe you need some podcasts to listen to.
Maybe you want to read a few articles or find
a new recipe for something the media or has you covered.
We drop new content literally every single day over there
at that site, and the amount, the depth of content
is bananas. So go check it out at the mediator
(17:11):
dot com and as always, thanks for everything.
Host
Mark Kenyon
Popular Podcasts
Fudd Around And Find Out
UConn basketball star Azzi Fudd brings her championship swag to iHeart Women’s Sports with Fudd Around and Find Out, a weekly podcast that takes fans along for the ride as Azzi spends her final year of college trying to reclaim the National Championship and prepare to be a first round WNBA draft pick. Ever wonder what it’s like to be a world-class athlete in the public spotlight while still managing schoolwork, friendships and family time? It’s time to Fudd Around and Find Out!
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.