August 22, 2023 • 17 mins
On this week's show, Tony breaks down something that a lot of hunters never think about - what deer really do in any given 24-hour cycle. He explains that hunters often fill in the blanks when it comes to deer activity and that this is a mistake when you could try to learn more about what whitetails actually do with themselves throughout the day.
Connect with Tony Peterson and MeatEater
Tony Peterson on Instagram and Facebook
MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and 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 Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast,
which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about thinking about
deer and what they actually do throughout the entire day wildlife.
(00:43):
If you don't live out there in the wild with
all the critters, it's sort of an abstract concept. I mean,
in some ways, we often only think of them in
terms of what they could do for us, or, in
the case of deer another big game, how we can
cross paths with them during a certain part of the year,
during certain parts of certain days. But the truth is
they're out there every day and what they do we
(01:06):
often have no clue about. That's what this episode is
really meant to focus on, which is thinking about the
animals we love to hunt as a permanent fixture on
the landscape and not something that just exists when it's
time for us to go climb into a tree and
try to deflate their lungs. As a society, we have
(01:31):
a weird fascination with serial killers. Criminals in general, actually,
but serial killers specifically. Go turn on Netflix or Hulu
or whatever seventeen different streaming services you pay for now
that you don't pay for cable, and you can feast
on the murder mysteries until you're full up. You can
find documentaries on all the serial killers out there, gay Cy, Dahmer, BTK,
(01:55):
on and on. You can watch dramas and series on
serial killers like Dexter. You can learn about the women
who love serial killers and who send them letters and
even agree to marry them. This says something about how
dumb we are with celebrities and fame, probably or just
how batshit crazy some people are. And I'm not talking
(02:16):
about the dudes who racked up a crazy BodyCount while
pretending to be normal members of society. It's wild. And
what's weird is if you pay attention to serial killers
at all, they nearly all got caught because they made
a mistake. After following some kind of pattern for a
long time, they became predictable. They also found a lot
of their victims through either random opportunity or the patterns
(02:40):
that were you guessed it predictable. I thought about this
recently after appearing as a guest on The Nine Finger Chronicles,
a podcast hosted by Dan Johnson, who might just be
my long lost twin brother. While his show is a
hunting podcast, we mostly talk about things that aren't related
to hunting, which is what we were doing recently. He
(03:00):
and I were having a good old bitch session about
our wives and kids when I casually mentioned how often
my family members, who aren't two feet tall and black
and super into retrieving pheasants, often leave stuff right at
the top of the stairs. Now this might not sound
like a big deal, but we live in a normal
split level house, so when you walk through our front door,
(03:21):
you either go upstairs right away or downstairs. Since most
of the living we do is upstairs, the area right
at the top of my stairs is without doubt the
most high traffic spot in our house. It's also where
my family likes to leave pretty much anything and everything
that they could carry into the house. Essentially, it's an
(03:41):
obstacle course twenty four to seven, and it doesn't have
to be, and it drives me absolutely freaking crazy. It's
also a location where if you plan to hunt my family,
you'd want to set up as an ambush spot. This
is what I've said to Dan, and I've thought about
it a lot since, because while it's more been kind
of weird, it's just true. If you were to scout
(04:05):
us out and try to fill a tag on one
of the Peterson's, you could do far worse than setting
up shop right where we are all funneled into the
second floor. This led me to think about how often
we ride bikes or walk through a park somewhere in
our neighborhood, and how often I think about hunting deer
in some of those places. I'm sure you do this too,
but I spent a lot of time looking at trees
(04:25):
and thinking about how I'd set up along the mode
trails and edges that are all over the wooded parks.
That inevitably leads me to think about how many of
these clueless suburbanites would walk right by without looking up.
I bet most of them would have no idea that
someone was saddled up about twenty feet over their heads.
Of course, that line of thinking leads you to go
down the rabbit hole of what if you had to
(04:46):
hunt people for some reason, maybe during a full on
invasion of our country, which is deep in weird fantasyland.
I get it, But you guys have those thoughts right right?
What habits of the enemy would you have to learn?
You'd probably try to figure out where they slept, where
they walked, where they ate, how they got supplies, and
where they were most vulnerable. You'd think about their twenty
(05:09):
four hour cycle of life and really try to understand
as many parts as possible. It wouldn't matter if it
was November or March or July or whenever. You'd want
as much information as you could get. Do you see
where I'm going with this? Deer are mostly a mystery
to us. And what's worse, we all think we know
what they do. We all think we know where they
(05:31):
bed and feed and travel to do their thing, and
we do at least maybe about seven percent of the time.
Those daily movements are predictable. We know they'll feed on
the soybeans because well duh, but why not on opening night?
And when you're hunting them, we all know they'll water
here and walk there in bed on that bench and
(05:54):
whatever else. But we are mostly wrong about that at
any given point when we try to hunt them them
in those locations. Part of that is because we tip
our hand to them too much, and they just know
we are there. That's a given and it's never not
going to be a part of hunting. But a bigger
part of it is that we just don't understand deer
(06:14):
in their daily lives a whole lot. We try to
understand sign and what it means, but we narrow our
focus down so much that we are often only paying
attention to certain kinds of sign at certain times of
the season. We try to understand food sources, but really
we often focus on the big picture buffets that are
easy to figure out. We often don't take too deep
(06:35):
of a dive into brows in many cases, and we
mostly react to seasonal foods like masts, often after they
aren't that relevant and the deer have mostly moved on
to something else. We rarely rarely spend enough time figuring
out a deer's whole life to find that sweet spot
at the top of the stairs. While the bucks and
the does go through multiple times a day, and the does,
(06:57):
even the dough fawns leave all their gimba and shoes
and laundry baskets and books and random detritus laying right
there where the dominant buck has to walk, and sometimes
he trips, and sometimes he stubs his toe on something
like a case of bottled water, and when he does,
he invents new curse words that the neighboring deer can
hear him screaming after he bends his pinky toenail right
over on itself. The thing is, we can't know a
(07:32):
buck's whole life unless we put up a ten foot
fence around him and then radio color him. Even then
we probably wouldn't learn some of the subtle movements and
patterns about his day. I'll think about this with wild deer,
and there are a whole lot more gaps in our knowledge.
We fill these in because it's comforting. Humans do this
(07:52):
a lot. What we don't have answers for we often
make up, and then over time we just start to
believe them. We do this to the point where even
when we are shown that we are wrong, we don't
believe it. This has never been a great feature of mankind,
and it applies to so many aspects of our life.
Take one of my favorite topics, for example space. Go
(08:16):
back about twenty four hundred years ago and you have
a fellow named Aristotle who said a lot of profound
things and a lot of dumb things, but he was
a voice of authority and reason and intellect. So when
he said that the stars in the sky don't change,
people believed it than the Church, and that's with the
(08:37):
Capital C believed it too. They were the authority at
the time. So we had a whole bunch of people
in Europe, specifically during several hundred years who believed that
the stars in the sky were an unmoving fixture, like
the light hanging over your kitchen table kind of. Now,
(08:58):
go back about seven thousand years earlier than Aristotle's time,
and you have a star that was ten times the
size of our sun in the Taurus constellation that went
super nova, which means that it spent several billion years
with an internal fight going on where gravity finally won.
You see, stars are kind of just like giant nuclear
(09:20):
reactors which get extremely hot. No shit, right. Stars are
essentially big balls of fuel. They have an insane amount
of mass, which means they have an insane amount of gravity.
That gravity is trying hard to pull everything toward the center.
But the nuclear fusion that happens at levels we can't
fathom on the inside of it creates heat, which generates
(09:41):
outward pressure, which balances the effect of gravity until the
fuel starts to burn out. Then the stars cool just
enough where gravity gets a definitive edge and the stars collapse.
This happens so fast that something that is a million
times the size of Earth can collapse in a matter
of life like fifteen seconds, which, as you can imagine,
(10:03):
is quite the event. Now, the light from this explosion
travels at one hundred and eighty six thousand miles a
second in all directions. When this happened to that star
in the Tourist constellation I mentioned earlier, the light spent
seven thousand years shooting across the cosmos until it was
visible on Earth. Chinese astronomers wrote about this celestial event.
(10:25):
Middle Eastern astronomers wrote about it. Native Americans down there
in the southwest corner of the United States made rock
engravings about it. Europe collectively look the other way, and
it was kind of all crickets from them, which is
some serious denial considering the supernova was so bright that
for a while it was visible in broad daylight. The
(10:46):
people there during that time of our history believe that
the stars don't move and they don't change, and therefore
they just didn't accept what they were seeing. Humans do
this with so many things, like you guessed it, golf
and hunting. How many of you find listeners believe that
(11:07):
deer mostly don't move during the hottest part of the day,
that they mostly lay up in the shade and wait
out the long late summer hours until the cooler part
of the day shows up. How many of you walked
out to hang stands like I did a couple of
weeks ago and saw several deer out feeding in a
bean field in the blazing sunlight when the mercury was
touched in the mid nineties. Or how often have you
(11:30):
gotten random pictures on your trail camera of a buck
walking along a trail at noon in the end of August,
or maybe feeding in the alfalfa field at ten in
the morning on October first? Do you look the other
way when this stuff happens? You shouldn't, even though I
know that is easier said than done. Think about this
another way. How often have you glassed during the summer
(11:54):
or sat on a field edge during the season and
watched deer go back and forth between the cover and
the groceries instead of just walking into the field and
feeding NonStop. You know, they spend ten minutes in the
food source and then they head into the woods for
a while. Then they bounce back out on a different trail.
What are they doing? Well, they're probably like you when
(12:14):
you're at a summer cookout. Grab a burger to put
on your plate, maybe some fruit, scoop of coleslaw, whatever.
When you finish that, you think I could eat a
little more, so you go back for round two, and
then someone puts out dessert. You think, deer don't think
like that during the summer and the early season, when
food sources are most variable and abundant, they do. Now
(12:38):
does it matter? Maybe maybe you can't hunt the main
food source because you don't have permission. Now you have
to hunt in the woods. Now, how does that back
and forth pattern play out? Maybe you assume that bucks
are nocturnal and they mostly bed all day long and
don't move during the hours when you can legally shoot them.
(12:58):
Do your cameras in the woods all summer long support
that notion? Does your early to mid season hunting support
that notion. Do you really think that a buck is
so cautious that he's going to lay down in a
secluded bed and not get up one time to take
a dump or stretch his legs or nibble on some
brows or snarf up some acorns. Probably not, But he
(13:21):
might not travel half of a mile to do those things.
His movements might only take him one hundred or two
hundred yards from his bed, maybe no more. But he's
gonna get up and he's gonna move. He's going to
do these things every single day, even if we don't
believe it or don't expect it. Now, there is a
component to recognizing this and trying to learn more about
(13:43):
their daily lives that is so important. And it's not
just about always being in the game. It's not just
about finding the exact right tree to play some high
level pattern of deer hunting with to kill a buck
when most folks think it's not quite possible. It's much
more simple than that. It's confidence in yourself to try
(14:03):
new things and hunt when you previously thought it wasn't
worth it. That's so huge, my friends, and it's something
we don't face very often because it's easier to fill
in the blanks and just pat ourselves on the back
for not hunting at certain times in certain conditions, while
thinking all along that we are being good hunters by
playing it safe. Instead, you want to learn about their
(14:24):
daily lives. Spend some more time watching them, run your
cameras closer together to see how often they use one
trail and not another. That'll blow your minds over time,
I promise you. Instead of looking to confirm what you
think you know, look to see what you're missing in
their daily lives. Try to understand what they do why
(14:45):
they do it, instead of buying into the idea that
we have them all figured out and there are huge
sections of the day where they just aren't killable, or
where there are sizeable sections of any given season where
they just aren't killable. Personally, don't believe any of that stuff,
mostly because there is evidence all over that it's pure bunk.
(15:06):
But just like those Dark Age early Europeans who saw
a bright star appear in the sky even during the daytime,
we just like to stick to what we know. This
might save more deer and elk and antelope and turkeys
every year than all of the shifting winds and rush
shots and sloppy setups, ever will and it all starts
(15:27):
with the idea that we don't know what we don't know,
but we sure as hell can learn some stuff we
don't know. This, like going on a fad diet or
starting a workout regimen, is easy to embrace in a
big way, but is better adopted in small, manageable chunks.
I like to do this by thinking about where Buck's
(15:48):
going to feed tonight and how he'll leave the food
in the morning. Where is he likely headed? Is he
going to go munch on some brows or soft mass
like grapes? Where's the water is to be thirsty? Probably?
Where are the betting options? Is he more likely to
tuck into a shaded bench on a wooded hillside or
go layout in a grassy waterway in a field where
(16:10):
the wind keeps him cool and keeps some of the
bugs off his nose and his ears? How often does
he leave the property your scouting and hunting? Why would
he leave? What would make him come back and spend
more time there? How about the ladies in the scrapper bucks?
If you laser focus your potential deer knowledge solely on
(16:30):
mature bucks and what they like to do in a day.
You are missing a huge window of opportunity. The other
deer in the herd can teach us plenty if we're
willing to pay attention to them. In fact, that's what
I'm going to talk about next week. I've been scouting
quite a bit the last few weeks, and it has
just become so much more obvious to me how important
(16:50):
it is to pay attention to Doze as well as
the big Bucks, not only what they do in their
daily lives, but how they react to situations where they
travel at any given moment, and a whole host to
other factors. There's much to learn, my friends, and we're
just getting started. So think about those bucks, think about
what you think you know, get out there and prove
(17:12):
yourself wrong, and then listen in next week because I'm
going to cover that topic that gets no love but
will make you a better hunter. That's it for this week,
my friends. I'm Tony Peterson and this is the Wire
to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by
First Light. As always, thank you so much for listening
in for your support all of us at meat Eater
here we really really appreciate it. If you'll want some
(17:35):
more white tail content or out content, fishing content, whatever
you name it, head on over to the meadeater dot
com and you will see all kinds of how to videos,
all kinds of our series articles, podcasts, everything you need
to scratch that itch.
Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide
to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light,
creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind.
First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host
Tony Peterson.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hey everyone, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast,
which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about thinking about
deer and what they actually do throughout the entire day wildlife.
(00:43):
If you don't live out there in the wild with
all the critters, it's sort of an abstract concept. I mean,
in some ways, we often only think of them in
terms of what they could do for us, or, in
the case of deer another big game, how we can
cross paths with them during a certain part of the year,
during certain parts of certain days. But the truth is
they're out there every day and what they do we
(01:06):
often have no clue about. That's what this episode is
really meant to focus on, which is thinking about the
animals we love to hunt as a permanent fixture on
the landscape and not something that just exists when it's
time for us to go climb into a tree and
try to deflate their lungs. As a society, we have
(01:31):
a weird fascination with serial killers. Criminals in general, actually,
but serial killers specifically. Go turn on Netflix or Hulu
or whatever seventeen different streaming services you pay for now
that you don't pay for cable, and you can feast
on the murder mysteries until you're full up. You can
find documentaries on all the serial killers out there, gay Cy, Dahmer, BTK,
(01:55):
on and on. You can watch dramas and series on
serial killers like Dexter. You can learn about the women
who love serial killers and who send them letters and
even agree to marry them. This says something about how
dumb we are with celebrities and fame, probably or just
how batshit crazy some people are. And I'm not talking
(02:16):
about the dudes who racked up a crazy BodyCount while
pretending to be normal members of society. It's wild. And
what's weird is if you pay attention to serial killers
at all, they nearly all got caught because they made
a mistake. After following some kind of pattern for a
long time, they became predictable. They also found a lot
of their victims through either random opportunity or the patterns
(02:40):
that were you guessed it predictable. I thought about this
recently after appearing as a guest on The Nine Finger Chronicles,
a podcast hosted by Dan Johnson, who might just be
my long lost twin brother. While his show is a
hunting podcast, we mostly talk about things that aren't related
to hunting, which is what we were doing recently. He
(03:00):
and I were having a good old bitch session about
our wives and kids when I casually mentioned how often
my family members, who aren't two feet tall and black
and super into retrieving pheasants, often leave stuff right at
the top of the stairs. Now this might not sound
like a big deal, but we live in a normal
split level house, so when you walk through our front door,
(03:21):
you either go upstairs right away or downstairs. Since most
of the living we do is upstairs, the area right
at the top of my stairs is without doubt the
most high traffic spot in our house. It's also where
my family likes to leave pretty much anything and everything
that they could carry into the house. Essentially, it's an
(03:41):
obstacle course twenty four to seven, and it doesn't have
to be, and it drives me absolutely freaking crazy. It's
also a location where if you plan to hunt my family,
you'd want to set up as an ambush spot. This
is what I've said to Dan, and I've thought about
it a lot since, because while it's more been kind
of weird, it's just true. If you were to scout
(04:05):
us out and try to fill a tag on one
of the Peterson's, you could do far worse than setting
up shop right where we are all funneled into the
second floor. This led me to think about how often
we ride bikes or walk through a park somewhere in
our neighborhood, and how often I think about hunting deer
in some of those places. I'm sure you do this too,
but I spent a lot of time looking at trees
(04:25):
and thinking about how I'd set up along the mode
trails and edges that are all over the wooded parks.
That inevitably leads me to think about how many of
these clueless suburbanites would walk right by without looking up.
I bet most of them would have no idea that
someone was saddled up about twenty feet over their heads.
Of course, that line of thinking leads you to go
down the rabbit hole of what if you had to
(04:46):
hunt people for some reason, maybe during a full on
invasion of our country, which is deep in weird fantasyland.
I get it, But you guys have those thoughts right right?
What habits of the enemy would you have to learn?
You'd probably try to figure out where they slept, where
they walked, where they ate, how they got supplies, and
where they were most vulnerable. You'd think about their twenty
(05:09):
four hour cycle of life and really try to understand
as many parts as possible. It wouldn't matter if it
was November or March or July or whenever. You'd want
as much information as you could get. Do you see
where I'm going with this? Deer are mostly a mystery
to us. And what's worse, we all think we know
what they do. We all think we know where they
(05:31):
bed and feed and travel to do their thing, and
we do at least maybe about seven percent of the time.
Those daily movements are predictable. We know they'll feed on
the soybeans because well duh, but why not on opening night?
And when you're hunting them, we all know they'll water
here and walk there in bed on that bench and
(05:54):
whatever else. But we are mostly wrong about that at
any given point when we try to hunt them them
in those locations. Part of that is because we tip
our hand to them too much, and they just know
we are there. That's a given and it's never not
going to be a part of hunting. But a bigger
part of it is that we just don't understand deer
(06:14):
in their daily lives a whole lot. We try to
understand sign and what it means, but we narrow our
focus down so much that we are often only paying
attention to certain kinds of sign at certain times of
the season. We try to understand food sources, but really
we often focus on the big picture buffets that are
easy to figure out. We often don't take too deep
(06:35):
of a dive into brows in many cases, and we
mostly react to seasonal foods like masts, often after they
aren't that relevant and the deer have mostly moved on
to something else. We rarely rarely spend enough time figuring
out a deer's whole life to find that sweet spot
at the top of the stairs. While the bucks and
the does go through multiple times a day, and the does,
(06:57):
even the dough fawns leave all their gimba and shoes
and laundry baskets and books and random detritus laying right
there where the dominant buck has to walk, and sometimes
he trips, and sometimes he stubs his toe on something
like a case of bottled water, and when he does,
he invents new curse words that the neighboring deer can
hear him screaming after he bends his pinky toenail right
over on itself. The thing is, we can't know a
(07:32):
buck's whole life unless we put up a ten foot
fence around him and then radio color him. Even then
we probably wouldn't learn some of the subtle movements and
patterns about his day. I'll think about this with wild deer,
and there are a whole lot more gaps in our knowledge.
We fill these in because it's comforting. Humans do this
(07:52):
a lot. What we don't have answers for we often
make up, and then over time we just start to
believe them. We do this to the point where even
when we are shown that we are wrong, we don't
believe it. This has never been a great feature of mankind,
and it applies to so many aspects of our life.
Take one of my favorite topics, for example space. Go
(08:16):
back about twenty four hundred years ago and you have
a fellow named Aristotle who said a lot of profound
things and a lot of dumb things, but he was
a voice of authority and reason and intellect. So when
he said that the stars in the sky don't change,
people believed it than the Church, and that's with the
(08:37):
Capital C believed it too. They were the authority at
the time. So we had a whole bunch of people
in Europe, specifically during several hundred years who believed that
the stars in the sky were an unmoving fixture, like
the light hanging over your kitchen table kind of. Now,
(08:58):
go back about seven thousand years earlier than Aristotle's time,
and you have a star that was ten times the
size of our sun in the Taurus constellation that went
super nova, which means that it spent several billion years
with an internal fight going on where gravity finally won.
You see, stars are kind of just like giant nuclear
(09:20):
reactors which get extremely hot. No shit, right. Stars are
essentially big balls of fuel. They have an insane amount
of mass, which means they have an insane amount of gravity.
That gravity is trying hard to pull everything toward the center.
But the nuclear fusion that happens at levels we can't
fathom on the inside of it creates heat, which generates
(09:41):
outward pressure, which balances the effect of gravity until the
fuel starts to burn out. Then the stars cool just
enough where gravity gets a definitive edge and the stars collapse.
This happens so fast that something that is a million
times the size of Earth can collapse in a matter
of life like fifteen seconds, which, as you can imagine,
(10:03):
is quite the event. Now, the light from this explosion
travels at one hundred and eighty six thousand miles a
second in all directions. When this happened to that star
in the Tourist constellation I mentioned earlier, the light spent
seven thousand years shooting across the cosmos until it was
visible on Earth. Chinese astronomers wrote about this celestial event.
(10:25):
Middle Eastern astronomers wrote about it. Native Americans down there
in the southwest corner of the United States made rock
engravings about it. Europe collectively look the other way, and
it was kind of all crickets from them, which is
some serious denial considering the supernova was so bright that
for a while it was visible in broad daylight. The
(10:46):
people there during that time of our history believe that
the stars don't move and they don't change, and therefore
they just didn't accept what they were seeing. Humans do
this with so many things, like you guessed it, golf
and hunting. How many of you find listeners believe that
(11:07):
deer mostly don't move during the hottest part of the day,
that they mostly lay up in the shade and wait
out the long late summer hours until the cooler part
of the day shows up. How many of you walked
out to hang stands like I did a couple of
weeks ago and saw several deer out feeding in a
bean field in the blazing sunlight when the mercury was
touched in the mid nineties. Or how often have you
(11:30):
gotten random pictures on your trail camera of a buck
walking along a trail at noon in the end of August,
or maybe feeding in the alfalfa field at ten in
the morning on October first? Do you look the other
way when this stuff happens? You shouldn't, even though I
know that is easier said than done. Think about this
another way. How often have you glassed during the summer
(11:54):
or sat on a field edge during the season and
watched deer go back and forth between the cover and
the groceries instead of just walking into the field and
feeding NonStop. You know, they spend ten minutes in the
food source and then they head into the woods for
a while. Then they bounce back out on a different trail.
What are they doing? Well, they're probably like you when
(12:14):
you're at a summer cookout. Grab a burger to put
on your plate, maybe some fruit, scoop of coleslaw, whatever.
When you finish that, you think I could eat a
little more, so you go back for round two, and
then someone puts out dessert. You think, deer don't think
like that during the summer and the early season, when
food sources are most variable and abundant, they do. Now
(12:38):
does it matter? Maybe maybe you can't hunt the main
food source because you don't have permission. Now you have
to hunt in the woods. Now, how does that back
and forth pattern play out? Maybe you assume that bucks
are nocturnal and they mostly bed all day long and
don't move during the hours when you can legally shoot them.
(12:58):
Do your cameras in the woods all summer long support
that notion? Does your early to mid season hunting support
that notion. Do you really think that a buck is
so cautious that he's going to lay down in a
secluded bed and not get up one time to take
a dump or stretch his legs or nibble on some
brows or snarf up some acorns. Probably not, But he
(13:21):
might not travel half of a mile to do those things.
His movements might only take him one hundred or two
hundred yards from his bed, maybe no more. But he's
gonna get up and he's gonna move. He's going to
do these things every single day, even if we don't
believe it or don't expect it. Now, there is a
component to recognizing this and trying to learn more about
(13:43):
their daily lives that is so important. And it's not
just about always being in the game. It's not just
about finding the exact right tree to play some high
level pattern of deer hunting with to kill a buck
when most folks think it's not quite possible. It's much
more simple than that. It's confidence in yourself to try
(14:03):
new things and hunt when you previously thought it wasn't
worth it. That's so huge, my friends, and it's something
we don't face very often because it's easier to fill
in the blanks and just pat ourselves on the back
for not hunting at certain times in certain conditions, while
thinking all along that we are being good hunters by
playing it safe. Instead, you want to learn about their
(14:24):
daily lives. Spend some more time watching them, run your
cameras closer together to see how often they use one
trail and not another. That'll blow your minds over time,
I promise you. Instead of looking to confirm what you
think you know, look to see what you're missing in
their daily lives. Try to understand what they do why
(14:45):
they do it, instead of buying into the idea that
we have them all figured out and there are huge
sections of the day where they just aren't killable, or
where there are sizeable sections of any given season where
they just aren't killable. Personally, don't believe any of that stuff,
mostly because there is evidence all over that it's pure bunk.
(15:06):
But just like those Dark Age early Europeans who saw
a bright star appear in the sky even during the daytime,
we just like to stick to what we know. This
might save more deer and elk and antelope and turkeys
every year than all of the shifting winds and rush
shots and sloppy setups, ever will and it all starts
(15:27):
with the idea that we don't know what we don't know,
but we sure as hell can learn some stuff we
don't know. This, like going on a fad diet or
starting a workout regimen, is easy to embrace in a
big way, but is better adopted in small, manageable chunks.
I like to do this by thinking about where Buck's
(15:48):
going to feed tonight and how he'll leave the food
in the morning. Where is he likely headed? Is he
going to go munch on some brows or soft mass
like grapes? Where's the water is to be thirsty? Probably?
Where are the betting options? Is he more likely to
tuck into a shaded bench on a wooded hillside or
go layout in a grassy waterway in a field where
(16:10):
the wind keeps him cool and keeps some of the
bugs off his nose and his ears? How often does
he leave the property your scouting and hunting? Why would
he leave? What would make him come back and spend
more time there? How about the ladies in the scrapper bucks?
If you laser focus your potential deer knowledge solely on
(16:30):
mature bucks and what they like to do in a day.
You are missing a huge window of opportunity. The other
deer in the herd can teach us plenty if we're
willing to pay attention to them. In fact, that's what
I'm going to talk about next week. I've been scouting
quite a bit the last few weeks, and it has
just become so much more obvious to me how important
(16:50):
it is to pay attention to Doze as well as
the big Bucks, not only what they do in their
daily lives, but how they react to situations where they
travel at any given moment, and a whole host to
other factors. There's much to learn, my friends, and we're
just getting started. So think about those bucks, think about
what you think you know, get out there and prove
(17:12):
yourself wrong, and then listen in next week because I'm
going to cover that topic that gets no love but
will make you a better hunter. That's it for this week,
my friends. I'm Tony Peterson and this is the Wire
to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by
First Light. As always, thank you so much for listening
in for your support all of us at meat Eater
here we really really appreciate it. If you'll want some
(17:35):
more white tail content or out content, fishing content, whatever
you name it, head on over to the meadeater dot
com and you will see all kinds of how to videos,
all kinds of our series articles, podcasts, everything you need
to scratch that itch.
Host
Mark Kenyon
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.