September 16, 2025 • 17 mins
This week, Tony breaks down how to take advantage of the early season by keeping bucks unaware of your presence, all while utilizing your in-field time efficiently.
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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 Foundations podcast,
which is brought to you by first Sight. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about the early
season and the mistakes that a lot of us are
going to make and we don't have to, and how
those are going to cost us deer and how we
can avoid them. It's on, and if it's not, it's
(00:43):
staying close. Some lucky folks have already hunted, or if
you're a diehard like Mark, have you know fly fished
for five days while pretending you were hunting. The early
season is on. It's fun, and it's a time that
is often full of mistakes, and it's one hell of
a good opportunity for a lot of to slide right
back into our old habits that will stick with us
(01:03):
all dear season. So let's make a pack not to
do that and to help us get that right. I'm
going to explain some of these big mistakes, how we
make them, and how we can avoid them. The other night,
I took one of my daughters to the high school
to play in a three on three basketball league. It's
basically like a throwaway Sunday night league that is mostly
(01:24):
a way for the girls to get ready for their
actual traveling leagues and their school teams. For my fellow
math challenge people, that's three basketball teams that will be
running concurrently at different points for one eighth grader who
has a very very low chance of making it into
the WNBA. Any honkers, all stupid suburb life stuff aside.
(01:45):
She's pretty good down low, but she lacks confidence, and
the minute she does something wrong, like missing an easy layup,
is the minute she suddenly retreats and will try to
hide from the ball. It's maddening as a parent because
I know, after years of making giant mistakes in my life,
that everyone is basically a walk in and talking screw
up machine. We all are, And I know that missing
(02:05):
one layup in a three on three league with other
eighth grade girls who also miss a lot of shots
isn't going to be all that important. Overall, So on
the drive home, I told her that she can't play
in fear of making mistakes, and I punctuated my point
by saying that Michael Jordan missed something like nine thousand
shots in his career, to which she responded, I don't
really know who that is, So anyway, I guess I
(02:27):
might want to look into nursing homes, because I'm probably
headed there any day now because I'm getting so old. Anyway,
I switched gears and I said, do you know how
many deer I've missed in my life, to which she
answered without hesitation, a lot, which stung a little but
also wasn't really wrong. I said yes, And I said
that we don't stop shooting at them just because we
(02:48):
whif once in a while you just knock another arrow
and wait for another opportunity, even if you do it
on film, and a whole bunch of super excellent hunters
who clearly never miss reach out to tell you how
you don't belong in the same woods with them because
of how skilled they are and how unskilled you are. Now,
by the end of our conversation, I felt like I
might have had a better chance getting my lab pop
(03:08):
to understand quantum physics, but at least I tried, and
I'm going to try to shoot some deer this week,
and mostly I'm going to fail. Hunting white tails, at
least for most of us, on a daily basis, is
a sure way to make mistakes and not get everything right.
The complexity of what we do and the variables that
conspire against us just make it so. But then there
(03:31):
is the US specter, where we do things that definitely
hurt our cause these mistakes are often disguised as good
hunting decisions, but they aren't. Now, I'm not going to
dive into this because I've covered it a whole bunch,
but the idea, the general idea of not ever hunting
mornings in the early season is just a prime example
(03:51):
of one of them. Just think about the idea that
someone from Iowa who has four thousand acres of least
ground telling some hunter from Georgia who hunts public land
that it's never a good idea to hunt mornings until
the preret kicks in. Now, if you think you're making
a good decision by not hunting a whole bunch when
you could be, I'd say right away that not hunting
(04:12):
when you could be is probably not a good decision.
Learn to solve the problems like how to find a
good early season morning set up, instead of making the
mistake of just deciding that it can't be done so
it won't be worth it. Now, another big mistake that
a lot of hunters make is not appreciating the blank
slate reality of a new season. The cumulative effects of
hunters entering the woods now does a generally good job
(04:35):
of letting the deer know that another season is on
and that they had better be careful. Even if you're
on public land and know a lot of other hunters
are out there, you still can control your impact on
the woods to some extent. Sometimes I go down weird
rabbit holes on different topics, and I recently went pretty
deep on reading about fighter jets. I honestly don't remember
(04:58):
what even spurred it, but I guess that doesn't matter
what I found. What was pretty interesting in reading about
the aircraft that the US has that might take to
the skies if some country or terrorist group kicks the
old hornet nest of freedom a little too hard was
the radar signatures of certain fighter jets. So imagine standing
on a runway. Looking at a parked F twenty two,
(05:20):
for example, it definitely would look small, and it definitely
would look badass. You wouldn't think that it would be
all that hard to see, because well, you're literally looking
at it right now. Now, you got to remember it's
not flying at MOK two, which is about fifteen hundred
miles per hour, a speed that an F twenty two
can reach. The crazy part is that the actual design
(05:42):
of the jet is meant to fool radar, which means
that the actual radar signature of them is like point
zero zero zero one square meters, or to put it in
another way, about the size of a single marble. Why
am I telling you this is I always think about
what a white tail can detect and how they do it.
(06:03):
The easy way for them to detect us is to
bed just inside the wood edge and watch us drive
down the field road, get out of our trucks, sued up,
spray down like good little hunters, and then walk past
them to get to our field edge stands. The easiest
way for us to avoid getting detected that way is
to plan entrance and exit routes that keep us generally
hidden in a visual sense. A lot of hunters don't
(06:26):
really think about this, and it costs them. If you
can walk through a standing cornfield or walk along an
open two track, think long and hard about why you
would choose one over the other. Just like if you
can walk in through a dry creek bed that's six
feet below the surrounding ground, or walk on that higher ground,
think about it. Your radar signature there is big, and
(06:50):
it's going to get you caught. Little things make a
big difference there in getting sighted when you're going in.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Now.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
One final note on this is that while we tend
to think about our entrance as high priority stealth missions,
we might not value our exits the same way. Sneaking
into a beanfield edge staying to sit opening night is
going to give you an advantage that night, But if
when you leave you walk right through the field, then
you're going to hurt every chance you have at that
(07:16):
stand for at least a couple of weeks. The way
out matters, my friends, so be careful with that too.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Now.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
While conditions vary a lot on this front, another way
to think about detection is how noisy you might be.
The early season has a lot of vegetation to soak
up sound. It isn't full of dry leaves and sticks
usually on the ground, and can be one of the
easiest times of the year to be quiet on your
way in and your way out. The easiest way to
generally be quiet in the woods is to go slow,
(07:45):
and that means you have to give yourself time. A
huge mistake a lot of hunters make is not building
in a decent cushion of time to go low and
slow into an out of their setups. Then you have
(08:06):
the scent aspect, which is where I think we do
ourselves the most harm. I like to think about it
this way. While I definitely don't want to get winded
while sitting on stand or in a blind, that's only
part of keeping your scent signature down. What we touch
on the way in, while we are there and when
we walk out all exists to tattle on us after
(08:28):
we get back to the truck. Deer are curious, and
you don't have to run trail cameras very long before
you'll see them come up to your cams and give
them a good sniff. They are interested in out of
place items that smell like deadly predators. They are also
just very interested in the comings and goings of those
same predators. This is a tough one, but it's also
(08:50):
just reality that the more that you try to reduce
your scent any way possible in the woods, the longer
you'll preserve that early season relaxed nature of deer. Just
the difference between wearing leather boots and knee high rubber
boots during your early season hunts can buy you a
little leeway on this front, especially if you spray down
your knee highs. Think about your overall radar signature, if
(09:13):
you will, and try to consciously keep it down. I
don't know if it's possible to keep the deer totally
unaware of your presence, but you can reduce how much
of an impact you have on any excursion into the woods,
and that always helps. Another early season mistake that is
really easy to make is the not paying attention thing.
(09:33):
It's actually pretty scary how widespread our phone addictions are,
and it certainly feels like things are only going to
get worse. I also know that early season sits are
often pretty boring until right before dark, and I'm definitely
not immune to doom scrolling to kill time. But one
thing I learn every single year during the early season
is that my hunting senses just aren't as sharp. When
(09:55):
I go out and I hear something three hours before
I expect the deer to show up, I often miss
it pretty quickly as a squirrel or something else. Sometimes
I'm right and sometimes I'm wrong. And when I am wrong,
it's usually not super fun to try to have to
grab my bow when there's a deer right by me,
or get caught facing the wrong way and I can't move.
(10:16):
Try to remember that you might be a little dull
from like nine months of off season, and that stick
that snaps when it's three pm and not a half
hour before dark could be a thirsty buck headed to
the water, or an old dough making her way to
the alfalf a nice and early to munch on some greenery.
When you don't have the luxury of open woods in
the ground covered with dry dead leaves, you have a
(10:39):
situation in which they can move pretty quietly and get
up on you in a surprising way. Pay attention to
the sounds of the woods, Try to be diligent on
taking a look around more often, you know, and maybe
glassing when you can to pick up some movement before
that movement is right beneath your stand. Now, another big
mistake that is really really easy to make in the
(10:59):
early season is trusting your trail cameras too much. This morning,
before I dropped the girls off at school, I checked
my Moultrie app to see who showed up last night.
The answer was almost no one, which is always a
little disappointing. But then when we got into my truck
and we started driving to school, I realized how foggy
it was out, which is a condition we get a
(11:19):
lot up here in September. Now. Two things happen when
it's foggy out. The first is that cameras don't seem
to function very well. Neither do rangehinders, by the way,
And the second is that the deer don't seem overly
inspired to cover tons of ground, which only makes sense.
Last night didn't tell me anything about deer other than
if it's foggy when I go hunting, I might not
(11:41):
be overrun with action. But it's also almost a guarantee
that more deer walked by my cameras than the pictures
would suggest. This isn't just a foggy condition thing either.
With the abundance of soft and hard mass out there,
and the fact that this is the high water mark
for foliage in the woods, which means they have a
lot of easy places to hide and lots of security
(12:01):
cover to work with. They aren't necessarily going to follow
the best trails all the time. A few years ago
I filmed a show in northern Wisconsin with one of
my daughters, and since I knew we wouldn't see tons
of deer or bears while we were actually hunting, I
set up several cameras on my property to capture video footage.
What blew my mind was how often one of my cameras,
which was set up on a trail I cut that
(12:23):
leads into a little kill plot of mine, showed deer
not going down the trail, but cutting it crosswise where
there's just no defined trail. Trust me on that, because
I checked about six times. They were just browsing and
feeding their way through in a way that didn't create
a concentration of sign but they were pretty consistent, and
that lesson has stuck with me now. While cameras in
(12:45):
certain spots, like really good train traps will tell you
a lot about who passes through on a daily basis,
they're not going to show you everything. Again, just like
the advice to not hunt mornings, if you aren't going
out to sit right now because your cameras are slow,
could be making a big mistake. The deer aren't all
that likely to be nocturnal right now, but they do
(13:07):
have a lot of food options, and in some places,
a lot of water options, and in almost all places,
the most betting options they'll have for the entire season.
You might not have the camera intel that gets you
stoked to go out, but sitting in spots where the
food is good enough, or the water is good enough,
or they might sneak back through to bed in the
morning can be a hell of a lot better than
(13:28):
staying out of the woods because your hit lister hasn't
walked by one of your three cameras in the last
two weeks. I think on that last point, which was
also kind of my first point in this, I want
to say something else to try to drive this home.
It's easy to be hyped up and feel like you're
on the verge of shooting a giant this season and
you have your mission set and all of that, but
(13:49):
be careful about going into the season that way. This
stuff is supposed to be fun and a nice escape
from the bullshit that has infested our lives and made
our lives a lot less enjoyable by the day. This
idea kind of walks hand in hand with the false
reed we often give ourselves in the early season that
we can play it safe because we have tons of time.
(14:09):
Most of us actually don't, and if you factor in
how many sits you actually get in a season, you
might realize that skipping a day in September when you
could hunt might be the equivalent of giving up three
or five or even ten percent of your actual hunting
time for the rut. That's a big gamble, and it's
one of the reasons I preached the message of trying
to find a reason to hunt. One of the things
(14:30):
that really helped me on this front a long time
ago was when I bought into the lull idea. I
thought you wouldn't shoot a big buck in earlier mid October,
But I really wanted to hunt, because being in the
woods in October is better than being literally anywhere else.
So I went out and hunted, mostly for doz. I
like to shoot deer, I like to eat deer, and
I don't like not hunting deer when I can, so
(14:50):
it just made sense. I'm sure you know where this
is going. But it wasn't just the dose that showed
up to eat acorns. When I started doing that, I
had inadvertently taken most to the pressure off of myself
to kill a buck, and it just gone out more
relaxed to hang and hunt on fresh sign, which was
often tied to mast or some other mid season food source,
(15:10):
and I ended up finding a hell of a lot
of bucks that way. In fact, it was one of
the biggest revelations I had as a public land bow hunter,
because it not only gave me a reason to go,
I figured out that most other hunters weren't going, and
because of that, the bucks seemed far more likely to move.
So that was two times or two conditions where they
shouldn't move, and they were moving more. In so many
(15:31):
cases to this day, I'd rather hunt public on October
tenth than on November seventh, which probably sounds nuts, but
it really isn't a joke. So let's tie a bow
on this thing. It's Christmas morning for us whitetail junkies,
and it's time to finally hunt again. The thing we've
waited for for about nine months is here, and the
deer as dumb as they are going to be all season.
Try your best to keep them that way, and try
(15:53):
your best to find a good reason to go as
much as you can, because it won't be that long,
and the rut will come and go, and the late
season will show up with all of its challenges, and
then suddenly we will all be sadly mourning the loss
of another deer season. Don't let this get away from you,
at least without a fight, which starts right now. So
good luck, and don't forget to come back next week
because I'm going to talk about Judgment Light and how
(16:15):
we should just watch our own bobbers this dear season
and we will all be much happier. That's it for
this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired
to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by
First Light. I just want to say thank you so
much for your support. You guys show up for us
in a major way. We really really appreciate it, all
of us on the med Eater crew, everybody here at
Meat Eater. We'd be nothing without the audience. That's you. Guys,
(16:38):
so thank you so much for that. I know you're
consuming podcasts because you're listening to this. You know where
to find our podcast We have a whole bunch of
them at the medeater dot com. But when you're there,
you might also see that there's a bunch of articles
by a whole bunch of really good hunters and a
whole bunch of really good outdoor journalists, a lot of
really good news stories going up on the site right now,
(17:00):
interesting stuff. There's also a ton of videos. Essentially, if
you like content content, and I know you do, go
to the medeater dot com and 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 Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast,
which is brought to you by first Sight. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about the early
season and the mistakes that a lot of us are
going to make and we don't have to, and how
those are going to cost us deer and how we
can avoid them. It's on, and if it's not, it's
(00:43):
staying close. Some lucky folks have already hunted, or if
you're a diehard like Mark, have you know fly fished
for five days while pretending you were hunting. The early
season is on. It's fun, and it's a time that
is often full of mistakes, and it's one hell of
a good opportunity for a lot of to slide right
back into our old habits that will stick with us
(01:03):
all dear season. So let's make a pack not to
do that and to help us get that right. I'm
going to explain some of these big mistakes, how we
make them, and how we can avoid them. The other night,
I took one of my daughters to the high school
to play in a three on three basketball league. It's
basically like a throwaway Sunday night league that is mostly
(01:24):
a way for the girls to get ready for their
actual traveling leagues and their school teams. For my fellow
math challenge people, that's three basketball teams that will be
running concurrently at different points for one eighth grader who
has a very very low chance of making it into
the WNBA. Any honkers, all stupid suburb life stuff aside.
(01:45):
She's pretty good down low, but she lacks confidence, and
the minute she does something wrong, like missing an easy layup,
is the minute she suddenly retreats and will try to
hide from the ball. It's maddening as a parent because
I know, after years of making giant mistakes in my life,
that everyone is basically a walk in and talking screw
up machine. We all are, And I know that missing
(02:05):
one layup in a three on three league with other
eighth grade girls who also miss a lot of shots
isn't going to be all that important. Overall, So on
the drive home, I told her that she can't play
in fear of making mistakes, and I punctuated my point
by saying that Michael Jordan missed something like nine thousand
shots in his career, to which she responded, I don't
really know who that is, So anyway, I guess I
(02:27):
might want to look into nursing homes, because I'm probably
headed there any day now because I'm getting so old. Anyway,
I switched gears and I said, do you know how
many deer I've missed in my life, to which she
answered without hesitation, a lot, which stung a little but
also wasn't really wrong. I said yes, And I said
that we don't stop shooting at them just because we
(02:48):
whif once in a while you just knock another arrow
and wait for another opportunity, even if you do it
on film, and a whole bunch of super excellent hunters
who clearly never miss reach out to tell you how
you don't belong in the same woods with them because
of how skilled they are and how unskilled you are. Now,
by the end of our conversation, I felt like I
might have had a better chance getting my lab pop
(03:08):
to understand quantum physics, but at least I tried, and
I'm going to try to shoot some deer this week,
and mostly I'm going to fail. Hunting white tails, at
least for most of us, on a daily basis, is
a sure way to make mistakes and not get everything right.
The complexity of what we do and the variables that
conspire against us just make it so. But then there
(03:31):
is the US specter, where we do things that definitely
hurt our cause these mistakes are often disguised as good
hunting decisions, but they aren't. Now, I'm not going to
dive into this because I've covered it a whole bunch,
but the idea, the general idea of not ever hunting
mornings in the early season is just a prime example
(03:51):
of one of them. Just think about the idea that
someone from Iowa who has four thousand acres of least
ground telling some hunter from Georgia who hunts public land
that it's never a good idea to hunt mornings until
the preret kicks in. Now, if you think you're making
a good decision by not hunting a whole bunch when
you could be, I'd say right away that not hunting
(04:12):
when you could be is probably not a good decision.
Learn to solve the problems like how to find a
good early season morning set up, instead of making the
mistake of just deciding that it can't be done so
it won't be worth it. Now, another big mistake that
a lot of hunters make is not appreciating the blank
slate reality of a new season. The cumulative effects of
hunters entering the woods now does a generally good job
(04:35):
of letting the deer know that another season is on
and that they had better be careful. Even if you're
on public land and know a lot of other hunters
are out there, you still can control your impact on
the woods to some extent. Sometimes I go down weird
rabbit holes on different topics, and I recently went pretty
deep on reading about fighter jets. I honestly don't remember
(04:58):
what even spurred it, but I guess that doesn't matter
what I found. What was pretty interesting in reading about
the aircraft that the US has that might take to
the skies if some country or terrorist group kicks the
old hornet nest of freedom a little too hard was
the radar signatures of certain fighter jets. So imagine standing
on a runway. Looking at a parked F twenty two,
(05:20):
for example, it definitely would look small, and it definitely
would look badass. You wouldn't think that it would be
all that hard to see, because well, you're literally looking
at it right now. Now, you got to remember it's
not flying at MOK two, which is about fifteen hundred
miles per hour, a speed that an F twenty two
can reach. The crazy part is that the actual design
(05:42):
of the jet is meant to fool radar, which means
that the actual radar signature of them is like point
zero zero zero one square meters, or to put it in
another way, about the size of a single marble. Why
am I telling you this is I always think about
what a white tail can detect and how they do it.
(06:03):
The easy way for them to detect us is to
bed just inside the wood edge and watch us drive
down the field road, get out of our trucks, sued up,
spray down like good little hunters, and then walk past
them to get to our field edge stands. The easiest
way for us to avoid getting detected that way is
to plan entrance and exit routes that keep us generally
hidden in a visual sense. A lot of hunters don't
(06:26):
really think about this, and it costs them. If you
can walk through a standing cornfield or walk along an
open two track, think long and hard about why you
would choose one over the other. Just like if you
can walk in through a dry creek bed that's six
feet below the surrounding ground, or walk on that higher ground,
think about it. Your radar signature there is big, and
(06:50):
it's going to get you caught. Little things make a
big difference there in getting sighted when you're going in.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Now.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
One final note on this is that while we tend
to think about our entrance as high priority stealth missions,
we might not value our exits the same way. Sneaking
into a beanfield edge staying to sit opening night is
going to give you an advantage that night, But if
when you leave you walk right through the field, then
you're going to hurt every chance you have at that
(07:16):
stand for at least a couple of weeks. The way
out matters, my friends, so be careful with that too.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Now.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
While conditions vary a lot on this front, another way
to think about detection is how noisy you might be.
The early season has a lot of vegetation to soak
up sound. It isn't full of dry leaves and sticks
usually on the ground, and can be one of the
easiest times of the year to be quiet on your
way in and your way out. The easiest way to
generally be quiet in the woods is to go slow,
(07:45):
and that means you have to give yourself time. A
huge mistake a lot of hunters make is not building
in a decent cushion of time to go low and
slow into an out of their setups. Then you have
(08:06):
the scent aspect, which is where I think we do
ourselves the most harm. I like to think about it
this way. While I definitely don't want to get winded
while sitting on stand or in a blind, that's only
part of keeping your scent signature down. What we touch
on the way in, while we are there and when
we walk out all exists to tattle on us after
(08:28):
we get back to the truck. Deer are curious, and
you don't have to run trail cameras very long before
you'll see them come up to your cams and give
them a good sniff. They are interested in out of
place items that smell like deadly predators. They are also
just very interested in the comings and goings of those
same predators. This is a tough one, but it's also
(08:50):
just reality that the more that you try to reduce
your scent any way possible in the woods, the longer
you'll preserve that early season relaxed nature of deer. Just
the difference between wearing leather boots and knee high rubber
boots during your early season hunts can buy you a
little leeway on this front, especially if you spray down
your knee highs. Think about your overall radar signature, if
(09:13):
you will, and try to consciously keep it down. I
don't know if it's possible to keep the deer totally
unaware of your presence, but you can reduce how much
of an impact you have on any excursion into the woods,
and that always helps. Another early season mistake that is
really easy to make is the not paying attention thing.
(09:33):
It's actually pretty scary how widespread our phone addictions are,
and it certainly feels like things are only going to
get worse. I also know that early season sits are
often pretty boring until right before dark, and I'm definitely
not immune to doom scrolling to kill time. But one
thing I learn every single year during the early season
is that my hunting senses just aren't as sharp. When
(09:55):
I go out and I hear something three hours before
I expect the deer to show up, I often miss
it pretty quickly as a squirrel or something else. Sometimes
I'm right and sometimes I'm wrong. And when I am wrong,
it's usually not super fun to try to have to
grab my bow when there's a deer right by me,
or get caught facing the wrong way and I can't move.
(10:16):
Try to remember that you might be a little dull
from like nine months of off season, and that stick
that snaps when it's three pm and not a half
hour before dark could be a thirsty buck headed to
the water, or an old dough making her way to
the alfalf a nice and early to munch on some greenery.
When you don't have the luxury of open woods in
the ground covered with dry dead leaves, you have a
(10:39):
situation in which they can move pretty quietly and get
up on you in a surprising way. Pay attention to
the sounds of the woods, Try to be diligent on
taking a look around more often, you know, and maybe
glassing when you can to pick up some movement before
that movement is right beneath your stand. Now, another big
mistake that is really really easy to make in the
(10:59):
early season is trusting your trail cameras too much. This morning,
before I dropped the girls off at school, I checked
my Moultrie app to see who showed up last night.
The answer was almost no one, which is always a
little disappointing. But then when we got into my truck
and we started driving to school, I realized how foggy
it was out, which is a condition we get a
(11:19):
lot up here in September. Now. Two things happen when
it's foggy out. The first is that cameras don't seem
to function very well. Neither do rangehinders, by the way,
And the second is that the deer don't seem overly
inspired to cover tons of ground, which only makes sense.
Last night didn't tell me anything about deer other than
if it's foggy when I go hunting, I might not
(11:41):
be overrun with action. But it's also almost a guarantee
that more deer walked by my cameras than the pictures
would suggest. This isn't just a foggy condition thing either.
With the abundance of soft and hard mass out there,
and the fact that this is the high water mark
for foliage in the woods, which means they have a
lot of easy places to hide and lots of security
(12:01):
cover to work with. They aren't necessarily going to follow
the best trails all the time. A few years ago
I filmed a show in northern Wisconsin with one of
my daughters, and since I knew we wouldn't see tons
of deer or bears while we were actually hunting, I
set up several cameras on my property to capture video footage.
What blew my mind was how often one of my cameras,
which was set up on a trail I cut that
(12:23):
leads into a little kill plot of mine, showed deer
not going down the trail, but cutting it crosswise where
there's just no defined trail. Trust me on that, because
I checked about six times. They were just browsing and
feeding their way through in a way that didn't create
a concentration of sign but they were pretty consistent, and
that lesson has stuck with me now. While cameras in
(12:45):
certain spots, like really good train traps will tell you
a lot about who passes through on a daily basis,
they're not going to show you everything. Again, just like
the advice to not hunt mornings, if you aren't going
out to sit right now because your cameras are slow,
could be making a big mistake. The deer aren't all
that likely to be nocturnal right now, but they do
(13:07):
have a lot of food options, and in some places,
a lot of water options, and in almost all places,
the most betting options they'll have for the entire season.
You might not have the camera intel that gets you
stoked to go out, but sitting in spots where the
food is good enough, or the water is good enough,
or they might sneak back through to bed in the
morning can be a hell of a lot better than
(13:28):
staying out of the woods because your hit lister hasn't
walked by one of your three cameras in the last
two weeks. I think on that last point, which was
also kind of my first point in this, I want
to say something else to try to drive this home.
It's easy to be hyped up and feel like you're
on the verge of shooting a giant this season and
you have your mission set and all of that, but
(13:49):
be careful about going into the season that way. This
stuff is supposed to be fun and a nice escape
from the bullshit that has infested our lives and made
our lives a lot less enjoyable by the day. This
idea kind of walks hand in hand with the false
reed we often give ourselves in the early season that
we can play it safe because we have tons of time.
(14:09):
Most of us actually don't, and if you factor in
how many sits you actually get in a season, you
might realize that skipping a day in September when you
could hunt might be the equivalent of giving up three
or five or even ten percent of your actual hunting
time for the rut. That's a big gamble, and it's
one of the reasons I preached the message of trying
to find a reason to hunt. One of the things
(14:30):
that really helped me on this front a long time
ago was when I bought into the lull idea. I
thought you wouldn't shoot a big buck in earlier mid October,
But I really wanted to hunt, because being in the
woods in October is better than being literally anywhere else.
So I went out and hunted, mostly for doz. I
like to shoot deer, I like to eat deer, and
I don't like not hunting deer when I can, so
(14:50):
it just made sense. I'm sure you know where this
is going. But it wasn't just the dose that showed
up to eat acorns. When I started doing that, I
had inadvertently taken most to the pressure off of myself
to kill a buck, and it just gone out more
relaxed to hang and hunt on fresh sign, which was
often tied to mast or some other mid season food source,
(15:10):
and I ended up finding a hell of a lot
of bucks that way. In fact, it was one of
the biggest revelations I had as a public land bow hunter,
because it not only gave me a reason to go,
I figured out that most other hunters weren't going, and
because of that, the bucks seemed far more likely to move.
So that was two times or two conditions where they
shouldn't move, and they were moving more. In so many
(15:31):
cases to this day, I'd rather hunt public on October
tenth than on November seventh, which probably sounds nuts, but
it really isn't a joke. So let's tie a bow
on this thing. It's Christmas morning for us whitetail junkies,
and it's time to finally hunt again. The thing we've
waited for for about nine months is here, and the
deer as dumb as they are going to be all season.
Try your best to keep them that way, and try
(15:53):
your best to find a good reason to go as
much as you can, because it won't be that long,
and the rut will come and go, and the late
season will show up with all of its challenges, and
then suddenly we will all be sadly mourning the loss
of another deer season. Don't let this get away from you,
at least without a fight, which starts right now. So
good luck, and don't forget to come back next week
because I'm going to talk about Judgment Light and how
(16:15):
we should just watch our own bobbers this dear season
and we will all be much happier. That's it for
this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired
to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by
First Light. I just want to say thank you so
much for your support. You guys show up for us
in a major way. We really really appreciate it, all
of us on the med Eater crew, everybody here at
Meat Eater. We'd be nothing without the audience. That's you. Guys,
(16:38):
so thank you so much for that. I know you're
consuming podcasts because you're listening to this. You know where
to find our podcast We have a whole bunch of
them at the medeater dot com. But when you're there,
you might also see that there's a bunch of articles
by a whole bunch of really good hunters and a
whole bunch of really good outdoor journalists, a lot of
really good news stories going up on the site right now,
(17:00):
interesting stuff. There's also a ton of videos. Essentially, if
you like content content, and I know you do, go
to the medeater dot com and check it out.
Host
Mark Kenyon
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