December 16, 2025 • 17 mins
This week, Tony explains how weather messes with our hunt plans, but can also teach us to be far better deer hunters if we can get past what we want to believe about certain conditions.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide
to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light,
creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind.
First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host
Tony Peterson.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast,
which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and today is all about weather, white tails,
and how we often think about them wrong. I know
this might seem like a weird time of year for
this type of podcast, but it's not, or at least
I don't think it is. White tails and thoughts about
(00:41):
weather go hand in hand, but we often use whether
as a reason to either hunt or not. I don't
think it's that simple, though. I think it goes a
little deeper than that. And the truth is that if
you want to kill big whitetails, you need to understand
not only what specific weather might do to the deer,
but what they do to us is hunters, which might
be the most important part. A couple of weeks ago,
(01:04):
I spent a lot of time looking at the ten
day forecast for two reasons The first one was that
if I could find a window of time to bring
my daughter to Wisconsin for a few days, I was
going to try to scrounge up a late season four
key for her. The second was that I was headed
into the Superior National Forest in northern Minnesota to hunt
grouse for a few days by sled dog, where my
home base would be a tent. Now, for my listeners
(01:25):
who don't know what northern Minnesota is like in the December,
I'll give you a quick rundown just in case you
get invited to go camping there this time of year.
Don't just kidding. If you like sled dogs, which I
now do since I'm an official musher kind of, and
you like being very far away from nearly all of
the people, which I do since I'm old enough and
jaded enough on life now to know really really like
(01:48):
not having to do with people. The tax you'll pay
is that you might wake up, you know, for multiple
days in a row, in the middle of the night,
with a small black lab in your sleeping bag and
ice on just about everything in your tent, including hearts
of your body. Plus if it's super cold, the grouse
hunting will be absolutely terrible, So don't do it or
do I don't care, But that hunt and the fact
(02:10):
that we got snowed out of Wisconsin's Forky Mission reminded
me something about white tails. The weather's just omnipresent. It's
kind of like when people talk about going on a diet,
but your diet is really just what you eat all
the time. It's with you every day, and it shapes
an awful lot about your life, including all your shape.
I don't know what the actual number is, but I
(02:31):
feel like the weather messes up my hunting plans at
least fifty percent of the time. Sometimes it feels a
lot higher than that. And it's not because I live
in Canada South, which feels really really stupid this time
of year, because everywhere you go people bitch about the weather.
You know, it's unpredictable and generally shitty, probably because the
places with truly beautiful, consistent weather are full of people
(02:52):
who can afford to live there and who do not
generally spend a lot of time trying to shoot sharp
sticks through Bambi's dad. Let me give you a good
exam from my fall on this very topic. The week
before I left for North Dakota to try to find
some good bucks on public land. The area I hunt
got hit with a bonker's rainstorm. Now this is a
(03:12):
place where you can find genuine although pretty small cactus
growing in the same spots the meal deer and sharp
tails hangout, and where my buddy Eric once sat on
one a cactus I mean, not amelia or a sharpie.
The river out there, which I usually crossed daily when
I'm hunting there, went from a foot and a half
to five feet, which is a hell of a spring surge,
(03:33):
let alone a mid October surge. I followed the river
flow data out there by the day, and while it
came back down to the three foot range, it was
a no go for the deer to cross, except for
one good buck that forwarded that river and showed me
everything I needed to know about how I was not
going to cross it. If a critter with four legs
can barely make it, a critter with two in the
(03:54):
dark is going for a swim. The entire plan I
had built around that hunt chained twenty four hour period
of freakish weather the week before, which leads me to
the point I really want to make with this podcast,
which is this. The messaging you've been fed about weather
is to just wait out very specific conditions and then
(04:15):
go hunting. That messaging comes from people who have made
millions off of hunters and who have hunting that you
couldn't even dream of. There is no net loss for
them to not go hunting, and the easiest way for
them to kill big bucks and properties that literally no
one else will hunt is to wait for the seasonal
timing to meet up with a cold front, which all
(04:35):
of the a sudden just coalesces into one big deer
movement festival for them. That like the idea that everyone
can just age deer by looking at them as if
deer all have the same body structure and shape, has
maybe been the most damaging thing to the general deer
hunting population.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
And here's why.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Because that cold front won't negate the fact that you've
overhunted your spot, or won't allow you to hunt a
question win just because the deer should be moving given
the weather.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
It doesn't work that way.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
The people who feed us that message can walk in
on carefully groomed access trails to sit airtight box blinds
or stands with perfect winds, and they have enough options
where they don't need to burn anything out. Do you
have that, Because if you don't, learning to hunt with
the weather you're given is a huge advantage. Think about
it this way, who are the people you really look
(05:26):
up to who kill good deer on public land? For
this conversation, forget about people who kill big ones on
private and instead just think about some of the public
land killers. Now filter them down a little further and
forget about the people who are public land killers but
generally only in their home state. Take someone who usually
gets it done on the road on public land, you know,
(05:49):
the kind of land, as the locals will often say,
it can't be done on the Andy Mays of the world,
the zach Fahrenbau's of the world. Those kind of guys.
Do you think they've become successful at this stuff by
city out hunting until the right cold front hit and
then going in spoiler alert, They didn't. They have gone
on many, many trips, often short ones, to parts unknown
(06:12):
and not only had to figure out the deer and
the whole hunting pressure thing, but work with whatever weather
they were handed at the time. Now, if you do
that enough, you start to realize that what you consider
bad deer weather is just weather, and the deer are
still out there doing their thing, and your job is
to figure out how to make that work for you.
It's simple and principle, but very hard for most hunters
(06:34):
to even attempt. And here's why. We don't like to
be miserable, and we don't like to hunt when we
have low confidence.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
Trust me, I get it.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
I just spent several nights in a tent twenty five
miles from the Canadian border, where I found far more
wolf tracks than grouse tracks. Being uncomfortable sucks, and I
think that factors into our hunting decisions more than what
we actually believe the deer will be doing. I'll give
you an easy one here. I've talked about this a lot.
People don't like deer hunting when it's hot out early season,
(07:05):
mid season, during the rut, whenever. The general consensus is
that the deer won't be moving, but that's dumb. It's
also commonly stated that the meat is far more likely
to spoil if you hunt when it's hot, but that's
dumb too. Take good shots, give it your best recovery efforts.
You'll be just fine. But what's really happening is that
people don't want to hunt when it's hot, so they
(07:27):
find reasons not to.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
That's fine, you do, you boo.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
But if you want to kill more and bigger deer,
you might want to figure out how to hunt during
whether that you are certain to get every single season.
I killed a decent eight pointer in my home state
of Minnesota this year. They came into a pond here
in the suburbs when it was eighty seven degrees in September.
Now was it comfortable, No, But I knew for a
(07:52):
fact that deer were going to come to that stand
to get a drink, and I was pretty sure a
decent buck would do it. And he did, and he
gave me a twenty two yard shot. And it really
was that simple. Most of my hot weather hunts are
far more productive than my rough hunts because they.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
Are so predictable.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Plus a lot of hunters won't go when they perceive
it to be too hot, which gives me another advantage
over the deer movement, because they're going to move more
when there's fewer people out there. It's simple, and I
know I've used that example many times. You don't hear
this as much as you used to, but here's another one.
From time to time I'll hear someone say that it's
too windy to hunt because the deer won't be moving.
(08:32):
We've seen a lot of deer research that refutes that,
and it's also just common sense for an animal that
lives off of its nose the world around them, feeding
them lots of data from a safe distance will override
the negatives of not being able to hear as well
or the visual aspect of it of things moving all
the time in the woods from the wind. Now, wind
(09:02):
also happens to walk in lockstep with fronts, which sure
seem to get the deer moving. Now, A lot of
folks will hunt pre or post frontal conditions, and we
all know why it cou'd be great. But when weather
moves through, it often moves through for a day or two.
What if you're on that Andy May style trip to
somewhere for a long weekend and your timing sucks and
(09:24):
you catch it right in the middle of a front
blowing through. Do you sit it out or try to
figure out where the deer should be going when the
whole thing is blowing through. I honestly think the biggest
thing that my public land hunts taught me is that
if you have a chance to hunt, you should go
because a lot of times when the deer aren't supposed
to be moving, they are moving and they are killable.
(09:47):
And if you go enough when you're not supposed to,
you start to figure out what motivates them to move.
The hot weather water connection is the Kindergarten version of
this because it makes total sense. Frontal weather is a
little bit trickier to figure out, but there will be
general movement even when things are going from bonkers weather
to super calm weather. You also get precipitation with those fronts,
(10:10):
and I have yet to meet a really good deer
hunter who doesn't perk up a little when it's supposed
to rain. Some my absolute favorite conditions from the season
opener until the rut dies down involve light rain. Always now,
heavy downpour type of rain is a different story, but
steady or light rain is just a gift that keeps
on giving. And if you do get that downpour, it
(10:31):
usually doesn't last super long. And when that thing slows
down a little bit, lightens up a little bit, you
better get your ass than that stand. We know this stuff,
and in some conditions people are far more likely to
hunt than in others. But I guess my whole point
of this is that the best way to learn about
what the deer actually do, not what we want them
to do, because enough people have repeated certain things, is
(10:53):
to go out there and get some proof. You might think,
can I just do that, you know, while being super
analytical about my trail camera data, I'd say probably not.
Trail cameras are great, but going out and trying to
solve for specific conditions and then seeing what you see
is a whole different thing. Think about it this way.
How often have you hunted and observed something deer wise
(11:17):
that you just didn't expect, something that caught you off guard.
This happens to me all the time, and I've learned
to listen to what the deer tell me instead of
listening to the voice in my head that seems to
know everything but actually doesn't. Think about jumping a buck
walking out in the morning after you've tried to shoot
a dough in early October, or think about that deer
that crossed the road in front of you if you
(11:39):
drove out after an evening hunt that just seemed to
emerge from a little patch of cover that just doesn't
make sense to you. The deer show us a lot,
and if you're out there when most folks think it's
not worth it, what the deer show you will make
you a far better hunter than the rest of the
folks who know better than to hunt them. I had
an encounter like ten years ago here in the Cities
and a little property during early October, with a really
(12:02):
good buck, like one thirties, and where he came from,
how he skirted my stand, and just the fact that
he was the biggest deer I ever saw in several
years of hunting that property all season long taught me
a lot. I think about that buck every single year,
multiple times, but especially when it's early October and my
hopes aren't all that high. One of the many reasons
(12:25):
we like the ruts so much is because we don't
have to think about things too hard. We don't really
have to fret over the weather and how the deer
will or won't move, even though we definitely pay attention
to the weather during November. But we like simple. We
want most of the riddle to be solved for us
by that insane breeding desire, so we don't have to
work around a bunch of other bs, But the whole
(12:47):
season is dominated by weather and what that brings to
the woods in the form of wind and precipitation and
temperature and barometric pressure. It all affects deer, but the
deer don't have a choice. They live in it and
they have to do their thing. And quite honestly, I
don't think movement in general is impacted by a lot
of the weather as much as we are now. Maybe
(13:10):
you believe me, or maybe you think, wait a minute.
The folks telling me to hunt when the conditions are
perfect consistently tag one eighties and this rando moron doesn't,
So maybe they are right. Maybe they are, But I
can tell you a couple things. Those one hundred and
eighty inch buck killers wouldn't kill those bucks where you
hunt running that same program. There is a huge difference
(13:30):
between doing what you have to in order to kill
giants in a really good spot versus trying to get
better at deer hunting in general when you don't have
access to the best white tail ground in the country
for you and I, the level up game happens by
doing things differently from most people and then trying to
really learn from the deer if the ten day forecast
(13:53):
isn't appealing to you because of whatever weather reason, so
you mostly sit it out. What you'll learn is that
you didn't kill anything because you didn't. Now, maybe your
cameras will be slower then or maybe not, but that
doesn't matter. It's a self fulfilling prophecy and it helps
a lot of us sleep at night. But I look
at this just like the value in hunting egg country
in the Midwest and then heading down south for a
(14:14):
big wood swamp hunt, or I don't know, spending your
time sitting over a feeder in the Southeast and then
making a long ass drive to hunt western white tails
where you can't bait and there aren't very many trees
and everything is a thousand times more visible than back home.
You suddenly have to solve for all kinds of new problems,
and that is the key to becoming a better deer hunter.
The main strategy we see these days is to create
(14:36):
a spot that is so appealing to the deer that
they will go there eventually, and then hunt that spot
when things get right. Look, it's a great way to
kill big deer. But if you don't have that or
you don't want that. A good strategy is to challenge
your worldview on white tails that you know, the deer
that you do have access to, and then do some
things differently. The cameraman I had on that ill fated
(14:58):
North Country grouse hunt is fellow named Dylan Lenz, who
I've interviewed on the Wire to Hunt podcast and he's
filmed a lot of whitetail hunts with me, and he's
a really, really good deer hunter. We were talking in
the tent one night about our early years as deer hunters,
and he simply said, I don't know. It's like you
go out and you make mistake after a mistake, and
you keep trying new things until something clicks and you
(15:19):
get a little better at making decisions, and then you
do it again and again. Simple, but he's right. The
more we try, the more we color outside the lines,
the more we learn to find the deer where they
want to be and then go there to hopefully shoot one.
That development doesn't happen when we wait for the best weather,
because even the best weather won't override so many factors
(15:42):
that influence deer movement, not the least of which is
hunting pressure. I think a good way to view this
or for all of us, is, you know, just to
challenge ourselves, especially since not everyone has the means or
time or willingness to travel to new whiteail spots, is
to look at hunting like my black lab looks at
If I say, Sadie, do you want to go hunt
(16:03):
some roosters? She isn't like, hmm, but wait, isn't it
too hot or too windy for pheasant hunting?
Speaker 3 (16:09):
She's like, you have no idea? How good of an idea?
That is?
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Rain, snow, forty mile per hour, winds, hot, cold, whatever
She's going every time. And honestly, I think that little
lab pup is onto something because I know the more
I hunt deer in weather that I really don't want
to hunt them in, the more deer I see and kill,
and that makes me want to hunt more regardless of
the forecast. It might be too late in the season
for this to matter too much to most of us now,
(16:36):
but you should think about it for next year, the
next ten years.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
At least.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
The worst it'll happen is that you'll get to hunt more,
and even if you don't kill any more big bucks
right away, you'll still well get to hunt more, and
I promise you you're going to learn a thing or
two about the deer that will help you eventually. That's
it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson and this has
been the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast. As always, thank
you so much for all your support. I can't tell
(17:02):
you what it means to us. Just trust me on this.
We love you, guys, We appreciate it. If you need
some more white tail content, maybe if you just need
a podcast to listen to when you're driving somewhere for
the holidays, want to watch some films since it gets
dark at five o'clock at night and that really sucks.
We drop new content on the medeater dot com every
single day, so you want to watch people hunting all over,
(17:24):
listen to some good stuff, maybe read some articles, maybe
find a recipe on the site to cook up something
for Christmas dinner.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
Whatever We've got you covered.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Go check it out at the medeater dot com
Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide
to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light,
creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind.
First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host
Tony Peterson.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast,
which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and today is all about weather, white tails,
and how we often think about them wrong. I know
this might seem like a weird time of year for
this type of podcast, but it's not, or at least
I don't think it is. White tails and thoughts about
(00:41):
weather go hand in hand, but we often use whether
as a reason to either hunt or not. I don't
think it's that simple, though. I think it goes a
little deeper than that. And the truth is that if
you want to kill big whitetails, you need to understand
not only what specific weather might do to the deer,
but what they do to us is hunters, which might
be the most important part. A couple of weeks ago,
(01:04):
I spent a lot of time looking at the ten
day forecast for two reasons The first one was that
if I could find a window of time to bring
my daughter to Wisconsin for a few days, I was
going to try to scrounge up a late season four
key for her. The second was that I was headed
into the Superior National Forest in northern Minnesota to hunt
grouse for a few days by sled dog, where my
home base would be a tent. Now, for my listeners
(01:25):
who don't know what northern Minnesota is like in the December,
I'll give you a quick rundown just in case you
get invited to go camping there this time of year.
Don't just kidding. If you like sled dogs, which I
now do since I'm an official musher kind of, and
you like being very far away from nearly all of
the people, which I do since I'm old enough and
jaded enough on life now to know really really like
(01:48):
not having to do with people. The tax you'll pay
is that you might wake up, you know, for multiple
days in a row, in the middle of the night,
with a small black lab in your sleeping bag and
ice on just about everything in your tent, including hearts
of your body. Plus if it's super cold, the grouse
hunting will be absolutely terrible, So don't do it or
do I don't care, But that hunt and the fact
(02:10):
that we got snowed out of Wisconsin's Forky Mission reminded
me something about white tails. The weather's just omnipresent. It's
kind of like when people talk about going on a diet,
but your diet is really just what you eat all
the time. It's with you every day, and it shapes
an awful lot about your life, including all your shape.
I don't know what the actual number is, but I
(02:31):
feel like the weather messes up my hunting plans at
least fifty percent of the time. Sometimes it feels a
lot higher than that. And it's not because I live
in Canada South, which feels really really stupid this time
of year, because everywhere you go people bitch about the weather.
You know, it's unpredictable and generally shitty, probably because the
places with truly beautiful, consistent weather are full of people
(02:52):
who can afford to live there and who do not
generally spend a lot of time trying to shoot sharp
sticks through Bambi's dad. Let me give you a good
exam from my fall on this very topic. The week
before I left for North Dakota to try to find
some good bucks on public land. The area I hunt
got hit with a bonker's rainstorm. Now this is a
(03:12):
place where you can find genuine although pretty small cactus
growing in the same spots the meal deer and sharp
tails hangout, and where my buddy Eric once sat on
one a cactus I mean, not amelia or a sharpie.
The river out there, which I usually crossed daily when
I'm hunting there, went from a foot and a half
to five feet, which is a hell of a spring surge,
(03:33):
let alone a mid October surge. I followed the river
flow data out there by the day, and while it
came back down to the three foot range, it was
a no go for the deer to cross, except for
one good buck that forwarded that river and showed me
everything I needed to know about how I was not
going to cross it. If a critter with four legs
can barely make it, a critter with two in the
(03:54):
dark is going for a swim. The entire plan I
had built around that hunt chained twenty four hour period
of freakish weather the week before, which leads me to
the point I really want to make with this podcast,
which is this. The messaging you've been fed about weather
is to just wait out very specific conditions and then
(04:15):
go hunting. That messaging comes from people who have made
millions off of hunters and who have hunting that you
couldn't even dream of. There is no net loss for
them to not go hunting, and the easiest way for
them to kill big bucks and properties that literally no
one else will hunt is to wait for the seasonal
timing to meet up with a cold front, which all
(04:35):
of the a sudden just coalesces into one big deer
movement festival for them. That like the idea that everyone
can just age deer by looking at them as if
deer all have the same body structure and shape, has
maybe been the most damaging thing to the general deer
hunting population.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
And here's why.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Because that cold front won't negate the fact that you've
overhunted your spot, or won't allow you to hunt a
question win just because the deer should be moving given
the weather.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
It doesn't work that way.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
The people who feed us that message can walk in
on carefully groomed access trails to sit airtight box blinds
or stands with perfect winds, and they have enough options
where they don't need to burn anything out. Do you
have that, Because if you don't, learning to hunt with
the weather you're given is a huge advantage. Think about
it this way, who are the people you really look
(05:26):
up to who kill good deer on public land? For
this conversation, forget about people who kill big ones on
private and instead just think about some of the public
land killers. Now filter them down a little further and
forget about the people who are public land killers but
generally only in their home state. Take someone who usually
gets it done on the road on public land, you know,
(05:49):
the kind of land, as the locals will often say,
it can't be done on the Andy Mays of the world,
the zach Fahrenbau's of the world. Those kind of guys.
Do you think they've become successful at this stuff by
city out hunting until the right cold front hit and
then going in spoiler alert, They didn't. They have gone
on many, many trips, often short ones, to parts unknown
(06:12):
and not only had to figure out the deer and
the whole hunting pressure thing, but work with whatever weather
they were handed at the time. Now, if you do
that enough, you start to realize that what you consider
bad deer weather is just weather, and the deer are
still out there doing their thing, and your job is
to figure out how to make that work for you.
It's simple and principle, but very hard for most hunters
(06:34):
to even attempt. And here's why. We don't like to
be miserable, and we don't like to hunt when we
have low confidence.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
Trust me, I get it.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
I just spent several nights in a tent twenty five
miles from the Canadian border, where I found far more
wolf tracks than grouse tracks. Being uncomfortable sucks, and I
think that factors into our hunting decisions more than what
we actually believe the deer will be doing. I'll give
you an easy one here. I've talked about this a lot.
People don't like deer hunting when it's hot out early season,
(07:05):
mid season, during the rut, whenever. The general consensus is
that the deer won't be moving, but that's dumb. It's
also commonly stated that the meat is far more likely
to spoil if you hunt when it's hot, but that's
dumb too. Take good shots, give it your best recovery efforts.
You'll be just fine. But what's really happening is that
people don't want to hunt when it's hot, so they
(07:27):
find reasons not to.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
That's fine, you do, you boo.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
But if you want to kill more and bigger deer,
you might want to figure out how to hunt during
whether that you are certain to get every single season.
I killed a decent eight pointer in my home state
of Minnesota this year. They came into a pond here
in the suburbs when it was eighty seven degrees in September.
Now was it comfortable, No, But I knew for a
(07:52):
fact that deer were going to come to that stand
to get a drink, and I was pretty sure a
decent buck would do it. And he did, and he
gave me a twenty two yard shot. And it really
was that simple. Most of my hot weather hunts are
far more productive than my rough hunts because they.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
Are so predictable.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Plus a lot of hunters won't go when they perceive
it to be too hot, which gives me another advantage
over the deer movement, because they're going to move more
when there's fewer people out there. It's simple, and I
know I've used that example many times. You don't hear
this as much as you used to, but here's another one.
From time to time I'll hear someone say that it's
too windy to hunt because the deer won't be moving.
(08:32):
We've seen a lot of deer research that refutes that,
and it's also just common sense for an animal that
lives off of its nose the world around them, feeding
them lots of data from a safe distance will override
the negatives of not being able to hear as well
or the visual aspect of it of things moving all
the time in the woods from the wind. Now, wind
(09:02):
also happens to walk in lockstep with fronts, which sure
seem to get the deer moving. Now, A lot of
folks will hunt pre or post frontal conditions, and we
all know why it cou'd be great. But when weather
moves through, it often moves through for a day or two.
What if you're on that Andy May style trip to
somewhere for a long weekend and your timing sucks and
(09:24):
you catch it right in the middle of a front
blowing through. Do you sit it out or try to
figure out where the deer should be going when the
whole thing is blowing through. I honestly think the biggest
thing that my public land hunts taught me is that
if you have a chance to hunt, you should go
because a lot of times when the deer aren't supposed
to be moving, they are moving and they are killable.
(09:47):
And if you go enough when you're not supposed to,
you start to figure out what motivates them to move.
The hot weather water connection is the Kindergarten version of
this because it makes total sense. Frontal weather is a
little bit trickier to figure out, but there will be
general movement even when things are going from bonkers weather
to super calm weather. You also get precipitation with those fronts,
(10:10):
and I have yet to meet a really good deer
hunter who doesn't perk up a little when it's supposed
to rain. Some my absolute favorite conditions from the season
opener until the rut dies down involve light rain. Always now,
heavy downpour type of rain is a different story, but
steady or light rain is just a gift that keeps
on giving. And if you do get that downpour, it
(10:31):
usually doesn't last super long. And when that thing slows
down a little bit, lightens up a little bit, you
better get your ass than that stand. We know this stuff,
and in some conditions people are far more likely to
hunt than in others. But I guess my whole point
of this is that the best way to learn about
what the deer actually do, not what we want them
to do, because enough people have repeated certain things, is
(10:53):
to go out there and get some proof. You might think,
can I just do that, you know, while being super
analytical about my trail camera data, I'd say probably not.
Trail cameras are great, but going out and trying to
solve for specific conditions and then seeing what you see
is a whole different thing. Think about it this way.
How often have you hunted and observed something deer wise
(11:17):
that you just didn't expect, something that caught you off guard.
This happens to me all the time, and I've learned
to listen to what the deer tell me instead of
listening to the voice in my head that seems to
know everything but actually doesn't. Think about jumping a buck
walking out in the morning after you've tried to shoot
a dough in early October, or think about that deer
that crossed the road in front of you if you
(11:39):
drove out after an evening hunt that just seemed to
emerge from a little patch of cover that just doesn't
make sense to you. The deer show us a lot,
and if you're out there when most folks think it's
not worth it, what the deer show you will make
you a far better hunter than the rest of the
folks who know better than to hunt them. I had
an encounter like ten years ago here in the Cities
and a little property during early October, with a really
(12:02):
good buck, like one thirties, and where he came from,
how he skirted my stand, and just the fact that
he was the biggest deer I ever saw in several
years of hunting that property all season long taught me
a lot. I think about that buck every single year,
multiple times, but especially when it's early October and my
hopes aren't all that high. One of the many reasons
(12:25):
we like the ruts so much is because we don't
have to think about things too hard. We don't really
have to fret over the weather and how the deer
will or won't move, even though we definitely pay attention
to the weather during November. But we like simple. We
want most of the riddle to be solved for us
by that insane breeding desire, so we don't have to
work around a bunch of other bs, But the whole
(12:47):
season is dominated by weather and what that brings to
the woods in the form of wind and precipitation and
temperature and barometric pressure. It all affects deer, but the
deer don't have a choice. They live in it and
they have to do their thing. And quite honestly, I
don't think movement in general is impacted by a lot
of the weather as much as we are now. Maybe
(13:10):
you believe me, or maybe you think, wait a minute.
The folks telling me to hunt when the conditions are
perfect consistently tag one eighties and this rando moron doesn't,
So maybe they are right. Maybe they are, But I
can tell you a couple things. Those one hundred and
eighty inch buck killers wouldn't kill those bucks where you
hunt running that same program. There is a huge difference
(13:30):
between doing what you have to in order to kill
giants in a really good spot versus trying to get
better at deer hunting in general when you don't have
access to the best white tail ground in the country
for you and I, the level up game happens by
doing things differently from most people and then trying to
really learn from the deer if the ten day forecast
(13:53):
isn't appealing to you because of whatever weather reason, so
you mostly sit it out. What you'll learn is that
you didn't kill anything because you didn't. Now, maybe your
cameras will be slower then or maybe not, but that
doesn't matter. It's a self fulfilling prophecy and it helps
a lot of us sleep at night. But I look
at this just like the value in hunting egg country
in the Midwest and then heading down south for a
(14:14):
big wood swamp hunt, or I don't know, spending your
time sitting over a feeder in the Southeast and then
making a long ass drive to hunt western white tails
where you can't bait and there aren't very many trees
and everything is a thousand times more visible than back home.
You suddenly have to solve for all kinds of new problems,
and that is the key to becoming a better deer hunter.
The main strategy we see these days is to create
(14:36):
a spot that is so appealing to the deer that
they will go there eventually, and then hunt that spot
when things get right. Look, it's a great way to
kill big deer. But if you don't have that or
you don't want that. A good strategy is to challenge
your worldview on white tails that you know, the deer
that you do have access to, and then do some
things differently. The cameraman I had on that ill fated
(14:58):
North Country grouse hunt is fellow named Dylan Lenz, who
I've interviewed on the Wire to Hunt podcast and he's
filmed a lot of whitetail hunts with me, and he's
a really, really good deer hunter. We were talking in
the tent one night about our early years as deer hunters,
and he simply said, I don't know. It's like you
go out and you make mistake after a mistake, and
you keep trying new things until something clicks and you
(15:19):
get a little better at making decisions, and then you
do it again and again. Simple, but he's right. The
more we try, the more we color outside the lines,
the more we learn to find the deer where they
want to be and then go there to hopefully shoot one.
That development doesn't happen when we wait for the best weather,
because even the best weather won't override so many factors
(15:42):
that influence deer movement, not the least of which is
hunting pressure. I think a good way to view this
or for all of us, is, you know, just to
challenge ourselves, especially since not everyone has the means or
time or willingness to travel to new whiteail spots, is
to look at hunting like my black lab looks at
If I say, Sadie, do you want to go hunt
(16:03):
some roosters? She isn't like, hmm, but wait, isn't it
too hot or too windy for pheasant hunting?
Speaker 3 (16:09):
She's like, you have no idea? How good of an idea?
That is?
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Rain, snow, forty mile per hour, winds, hot, cold, whatever
She's going every time. And honestly, I think that little
lab pup is onto something because I know the more
I hunt deer in weather that I really don't want
to hunt them in, the more deer I see and kill,
and that makes me want to hunt more regardless of
the forecast. It might be too late in the season
for this to matter too much to most of us now,
(16:36):
but you should think about it for next year, the
next ten years.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
At least.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
The worst it'll happen is that you'll get to hunt more,
and even if you don't kill any more big bucks
right away, you'll still well get to hunt more, and
I promise you you're going to learn a thing or
two about the deer that will help you eventually. That's
it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson and this has
been the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast. As always, thank
you so much for all your support. I can't tell
(17:02):
you what it means to us. Just trust me on this.
We love you, guys, We appreciate it. If you need
some more white tail content, maybe if you just need
a podcast to listen to when you're driving somewhere for
the holidays, want to watch some films since it gets
dark at five o'clock at night and that really sucks.
We drop new content on the medeater dot com every
single day, so you want to watch people hunting all over,
(17:24):
listen to some good stuff, maybe read some articles, maybe
find a recipe on the site to cook up something
for Christmas dinner.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
Whatever We've got you covered.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Go check it out at the medeater dot com
Host
Mark Kenyon
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