August 29, 2023 • 18 mins
On today's episode, Tony explains how valuable doe sightings can be to most whitetail hunters throughout the season, and during pre-season scouting missions. He also discusses how we don't give pressured, mature does enough credit for helping us become better hunters.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide
to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light,
creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind.
First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host
Tony Peterson.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hey everyone, welcome to the wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast,
which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about why learning
what does do helps you kill bucks. They get no
(00:42):
love and it drives me nuts. I honestly think that
if those were as rare as mature bucks, they'd be
harder to kill the mature bucks. I know people will
laugh at that because it's situational like olive hunting. In
some places, killing does is as easy as picking an
evening to go sit on the food and then shooting one.
But in some places, killing a good buck is like
(01:02):
that too. In others lots of others, killing a dough
is as tough as any deer hunting challenge out there
are pretty damn clothes, But it's more than that. The
ladies of the deer herd can teach us a lot.
If we were willing to pay attention to them. And
that's what I'm really going to dive into this week.
(01:29):
I know you guys and gals think I'm super clever
at coming up with all this stuff on my own,
but sometimes someone around me will say something and that's
all I need to come up with an article or
a podcast. My kids do this to me fairly often.
I'll give you a couple examples. When my girls were
maybe six, I was cleaning out a wood duck house
in our backyard that hangs over our little pond. This
(01:52):
task involves getting up on a ladder, sweeping out the
old wood shavings, and refilling the box sometime in the
early spring. Often there's evidence of other critters using the
nesting box. At some point, a pair of gray squirrels
had had some babies in the duck apartment, but it
was clear that they had moved out. They had also
abandoned one of their youngsters, who was really dead and
(02:14):
really fascinating to my daughter. So we talked about squirrels,
all kinds of them, including pine squirrels and gray squirrels
and fox squirrels and even flying squirrels, which really caught
her attention. Later long after I had forgotten about the conversation,
I heard my daughter excitedly telling my wife about her conversation,
and at some point she said, there were flying dead
(02:34):
squirrels in there. Now, flying dead squirrels will be the
name of the parenting book I'll eventually write. My other daughter,
the one who casually blurted out that she could actually
smell the blood inside of me when we were driving
one time, said something else that I'll make into some
kind of content. At some point, she, along with her
sister and cousins, had been working hard on a ford
(02:56):
up at the lake. They scrounged up a couple of tarps,
some old chair cushions, and other sorted crap that just
seems to slowly accumulate in life. They're pretty into this
whole fort building thing, so into it that they talked
to my sister in law to taking them shopping for
supplies recently. And when I asked my daughter what they bought,
she quickly replied, hmmm, just fort snacks and fly traps.
(03:19):
Fort snacks and fly traps will be the inspiration for
something eventually, probably a podcast or an article, or maybe
I don't know, I'll start a punk band who knows
the thing is when you do what I do. Inspiration
is everywhere if you learn to look for it. Mark
hasn't really figured that out yet, but he's young and
we'll probably get there eventually as his slightly older and
(03:42):
much much wiser mentor I've learned to keep my ears
open for any such utterance that might light a spark
of an idea. This is what happened earlier this month
when I was packing up my spotting scope and my
camera gear on the edge of a beanfield in southeastern Minnesota.
My hunting partner Eric and I had posted up on
(04:02):
the edge to see if we could turn up a
bachelor group of big bucks. What we saw instead was
a few scrappers and a lot of does and fawns, which,
to our sadness, is what our cameras on that property
had been consistently showing us. As we walked out, we
pondered where the big boys might be, and Eric casually
said they definitely aren't hanging with a bachelorette group. There
(04:27):
you have it, a podcast is born. While he was
making a joke, he was also making a true observation, which,
if you really think about it, is the cornerstone of
so many good jokes, kind of like one of my
favorite lines in The Crossing, which is a book by
Cormack McCarthy that you should read because it's well pretty incredible. Anyway,
(04:49):
one of the characters in the book says something like
it would take one hell of a wife to beat
no wife at all, which, while it's one of my
favorite jokes, my wife actually doesn't think is very funny.
But you guys can probably also tell that my wife
never listens to any of my podcasts. The thing about
the Bachelorette group comment is this, the doze and bucks
(05:12):
often don't hang together much. This is true in the
world of white tails, it's true in the world of
elk antalope, meal deer, and you see it all the
time with turkeys. I wonder if it happens with fish. Now.
I know that all the critters will mix at some point,
otherwise we wouldn't have new little critters running around. But
nature often segregates itself in such a way, and there's
(05:35):
a lot to learn from that.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Hell.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Take dose, for example. I've already mentioned this, but I
believe it. If you can go kill pressure doze, mature
pressure dose, I should say, with I don't know, some
level of consistency, you can kill mature pressure bucks. I
know that doesn't seem true, but it is. If you're
good enough to learn the ladies and their habits and
(05:59):
of their detection at most times of the season, you
can do the same with their elderly boyfriends. The only
difference is that the elderly boyfriends aren't very common. It's
kind of like this. A lot of hunters with some
Western experience and a lot of hunters with no Western
experience would rank elk as the toughest critter to get
(06:20):
an arrow in on public land now in Colorado or
Idaho and an over the countertype unit. You can make
a pretty strong case for that. But what about on
a twelve thousand dollars landowner tag in New Mexico that
you're using on public land? Different story there. The variables
are endless, so generalizing is often a good way to
be wrong. But I'll say this in my somewhat not
(06:42):
so limited experience, if you're good enough to crawl across
the prairie and arrow an analope of any size somewhat consistently,
you can kill just about anything that might make its
way into the Super Slam list. It's just to test
of good hunting skills. Arrowing elk is too, or spotting
and stocking meal deer, and so is being able to
figure out white till doze on a regular basis, at
(07:04):
least if you're in a place where they get hunted
fairly hard. But those ladies and these early season groups
of them also do something else for us as hunters.
They tell us where the bucks often aren't. You see,
nature does a wonderful job of creating hierarchies. The biggest
and toughest in any group tends to own the spots
with the best advantages security, cover, water, food sources, you
(07:27):
name it. The entire deer herd on your property is
organized this way, kind of like that org chart at
work that shows who works under who and what department.
It's also not a perfect pyramid shape either, because some
does are dominant over other doughs, while some bucks are
dominant over other bucks. In general, what you see as
(07:48):
you scout the last days of velvet living in the
first couple weeks of hard antlered life is that the
deer tend to split up into groups divided by gender.
The dose will be in the beanfield of multiple spots,
but the bucks, at least the bigger deer will usually
be in very specific locations. They'll be in the back
corner that is invisible from the road and is close
(08:08):
to the trout stream where they can drink some delicious
cold water any damn well time they please. When they
are feeding together, you often won't see groups of dozen
fawns get too close to the bucks or mix it
up with them. When you watch groups of dozen fawns
feeding in a spot, they often won't mix it up
with other dozen fawns either, and if they do, you
(08:29):
often see ears, pin back and hoof's flying. They do
this even when they have two hundred acres of the
same food source right at their disposal. It's the proximity
to one another that matters most, and they often aren't
that tolerant. So what does this mean? Well for starters,
what if you're getting a whole bunch of pictures of
dozen fawns but not a whole bunch of pictures of
(08:50):
one hundred and fifty inch bucks. Well, either the bucks
aren't around, or your camera is on a spot that
is great for the ladies but not so great for
the dominant bucks. You might think, well, I do get
some buck pictures, so they are around, and aren't I
supposed to be around does for my rut hunts. Sure, buddy,
that's all true, but the run is a long ways
(09:12):
off and a lot is going to change between then
and now. Don't you want to fill your deer tag
earlier in the season so you can go to another
state and have some more deer fun. Here's the thing.
The does are often not exactly where the bucks are.
That matters for your scouting, for your camera placement, for
your stand sites, for all of it. It's not a
(09:33):
hard and fast rule, of course, but it is something
to consider when you're trying to make a hunting plan
that results in you getting a big buck, which is
what we're talking about here. So the ladies teach us
(09:55):
a lot of things. They teach us where the secondary
feeding areas probably are, which is what that bachelorette group
that Eric so aptly named showed us. But we didn't
learn their full message until we pulled a camera in
one spot on that giant beanfield that has just tucked
away sort of no man's land and close to a
water source. That camera had more big buck pictures on
(10:17):
it than the other four or five on the field combined.
It also has a really interesting stand set up on
it now that you'll probably get to see next year
on the media or YouTube channel. At some point, I'm
guessing the other cameras we have on that field, the
spotting scope work we've done on that field, it all
came together to show us where a lot of dough
(10:38):
family groups were, and you know, where a couple of
year and a half old bucks were. Two it also
showed us where the bachelor group of older bucks wasn't
And they weren't nocturnal, they weren't on somebody else's property.
They just weren't in the spots we monitored. This happens
a lot. It happens when you're scouting and running cameras.
(11:00):
That happens when you're hunting. Now, I know I'm contradicting
myself here on some level, because I do believe trying
to get in close proximity to all kinds of deer
is good for your hunting overall. But for early season
hunts where your target is a decent buck, sometimes you
want to get away from most of the rest of
the deer. You also don't want to write does off
(11:22):
as interesting things to watch while you're waiting for another
chance to rack up a taxidermy bill. This is because
the dough groups, when they do overlap with good buck movement,
often show up first. I see this in the evenings
a lot, and almost always in the mornings. I don't
know why this is, but when I hunt early season mornings,
you know, when every white tail expert out there says
(11:43):
that you shouldn't, I often see does and youngsters come
through first. Then, like eight thirty or nine in the morning,
when I start thinking about pancakes and a midday nap
or maybe going to troutfish for a few hours, the
bigger deer will cruise through. If I get busted by
the does first, the big guy is going to show up.
If you're on a field edge in the evening and
that dough with two fawns decides she doesn't like the
(12:06):
first light specter covered blob in the tree filming her
with an iPhone ten or worse taking selfies for the
gram good luck, She's going to send out the bat
signal and the bucks aren't going to show, or if
they do, it's going to be real late. The point
I'm trying to make here is this, There is no
(12:26):
just hunting big bucks. You might focus solely on that
as your goal, but you're never gonna do that without
dealing with other deer in the herd. They're always a consideration.
It's kind of like throwing frogs for large mouth in
the lily pads. When you're in the north country, your
goal might be an amphibian's chomping five pounder that is
(12:46):
living in two feet of water and just waiting to
smash something slimy on the surface. But along the way
you'll also do with northern pike biting you off and
ripping holes in your twelve dollars spro frogs so often
that you might need to take out a heelock just
to pay for your next shields order. They are just
a part of the whole thing, just like the groups
of doze out there. I know this one has been
(13:07):
kind of all over the place, so let me try
to stick this landing here without breaking in an ankle.
Pay attention to the doze on your cameras, the doze
you see while glassing, and the doze you see while hunting.
What they do bucks will do the trails they walk.
Bucks will eventually walk the way they drop down to
(13:28):
the pond for a little drink, so too will some
bucks at some point. But they'll also show you, particularly
in the early season, where the bucks often aren't that
beautiful open woods you like to sit in because there
are a bunch of white oaks in there, that's great.
But if it's just dough after dough during daylight, it's
(13:49):
not because the bucks are nocturnal. It's because they either
have a better spot to feed where you aren't, or
they're just taking their sweet ass time moving in better
cover until you leave and the lights go out. If
your camera on your kill plot shows tons of daylight
activity from does but not much daylight activity from good bucks,
pay attention. Are they in there after dark? Then you
(14:12):
might have to hunt them a little ways off of
the groceries, all while avoiding detection from the ladies as
they pass through. First, I think you have to learn
how to hunt the does before you can learn how
to hunt the big dudes. But you also have to
work with them throughout the season because they are going
to be a part of the whole thing, whether you
(14:32):
like it or not. They sometimes show you exactly where
you should hunt, like if they are using a river
crossing or traveling along a soft edge while browsing in
the big woods. But they also sometimes show you where
you shouldn't hunt if you want a big buck. That is,
if the part of the field you love to watch
is dominated by does. Take note if your favorite stand
(14:55):
that is easy to get to and sits over a
power line with nice views in two directions is always
full of ladies and youngsters, take note. The bucks are
likely around, but they are using some part of the
terrain that offers them something better. This lesson is often
most easily understood by betting. You see this with Western
critters a lot, too, because they often show themselves in
(15:18):
their beds, so you can see exactly where they are
and make a good guess as to why white tails
aren't as generous that way. But you can fill in
the blanks pretty well with when and where you jump
deer and when and where you see them on your hunts.
At least if you're hunting in the cover, the does
will often be betted in the most obvious spots, and
(15:41):
the bucks won't. They will show you this by either
actually showing themselves or not. How is that confusing. Look
at it this way. If you walk into the woods
and you see some does running away at say noon,
you know they were probably betted there. You might find
proof of that by well finding their beds. But if
(16:01):
you hike up a bluff onto a nice little bench
where the view is solid and the wind is just right,
you probably won't see any deer. You might find a
great big loan bed and think, dang, at some point,
he's here. But the truth is he's always going to
be gone when you get there, because he knows you're coming.
Because his bed is positioned in such a way you're
(16:23):
just not going to sneak up on him. His spot
is better than where those does bed up on the
ridge or in the open valley below. The deer all
have something to teach us, just like every elk encounter
is a lesson in elk behavior, just like every turkey
that feeds through the meadow is giving you a first
hand lesson on turkey behavior. These things matter, and they
(16:46):
are the secret sauce that takes average hunters to the
next level. So my friends, don't write off the ladies.
Use their presence, use your pictures of them, your sightings
to inform your decisions on how to hunt whatever deer
trips your trigger, and come back next week because I'm
going to break down one of our biggest allies in
one of our biggest enemies as hunters, an unseen force
(17:08):
that influences our hunting decisions more than just about anything else.
It's an invisible element of each and every second we
spend in the outdoors that can make or break your
experience in a matter of seconds, and there ain't a
damn thing we can do about it. You guessed it.
I'm going to talk about squirrels. Just kidding. It's wind.
(17:28):
That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has
been the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought
to you by First Light. As always, thank you so
much for listening and for all your support. Every one
of us here at meat Eater truly appreciates it. We
can't thank you enough. If you want some more hunting content,
and I'm talking other podcasts, videos, articles, whatever, you want
(17:51):
to do a little shop and head on over to
the medeater dot com and you'll see all of that
more
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 why learning
what does do helps you kill bucks. They get no
(00:42):
love and it drives me nuts. I honestly think that
if those were as rare as mature bucks, they'd be
harder to kill the mature bucks. I know people will
laugh at that because it's situational like olive hunting. In
some places, killing does is as easy as picking an
evening to go sit on the food and then shooting one.
But in some places, killing a good buck is like
(01:02):
that too. In others lots of others, killing a dough
is as tough as any deer hunting challenge out there
are pretty damn clothes, But it's more than that. The
ladies of the deer herd can teach us a lot.
If we were willing to pay attention to them. And
that's what I'm really going to dive into this week.
(01:29):
I know you guys and gals think I'm super clever
at coming up with all this stuff on my own,
but sometimes someone around me will say something and that's
all I need to come up with an article or
a podcast. My kids do this to me fairly often.
I'll give you a couple examples. When my girls were
maybe six, I was cleaning out a wood duck house
in our backyard that hangs over our little pond. This
(01:52):
task involves getting up on a ladder, sweeping out the
old wood shavings, and refilling the box sometime in the
early spring. Often there's evidence of other critters using the
nesting box. At some point, a pair of gray squirrels
had had some babies in the duck apartment, but it
was clear that they had moved out. They had also
abandoned one of their youngsters, who was really dead and
(02:14):
really fascinating to my daughter. So we talked about squirrels,
all kinds of them, including pine squirrels and gray squirrels
and fox squirrels and even flying squirrels, which really caught
her attention. Later long after I had forgotten about the conversation,
I heard my daughter excitedly telling my wife about her conversation,
and at some point she said, there were flying dead
(02:34):
squirrels in there. Now, flying dead squirrels will be the
name of the parenting book I'll eventually write. My other daughter,
the one who casually blurted out that she could actually
smell the blood inside of me when we were driving
one time, said something else that I'll make into some
kind of content. At some point, she, along with her
sister and cousins, had been working hard on a ford
(02:56):
up at the lake. They scrounged up a couple of tarps,
some old chair cushions, and other sorted crap that just
seems to slowly accumulate in life. They're pretty into this
whole fort building thing, so into it that they talked
to my sister in law to taking them shopping for
supplies recently. And when I asked my daughter what they bought,
she quickly replied, hmmm, just fort snacks and fly traps.
(03:19):
Fort snacks and fly traps will be the inspiration for
something eventually, probably a podcast or an article, or maybe
I don't know, I'll start a punk band who knows
the thing is when you do what I do. Inspiration
is everywhere if you learn to look for it. Mark
hasn't really figured that out yet, but he's young and
we'll probably get there eventually as his slightly older and
(03:42):
much much wiser mentor I've learned to keep my ears
open for any such utterance that might light a spark
of an idea. This is what happened earlier this month
when I was packing up my spotting scope and my
camera gear on the edge of a beanfield in southeastern Minnesota.
My hunting partner Eric and I had posted up on
(04:02):
the edge to see if we could turn up a
bachelor group of big bucks. What we saw instead was
a few scrappers and a lot of does and fawns, which,
to our sadness, is what our cameras on that property
had been consistently showing us. As we walked out, we
pondered where the big boys might be, and Eric casually
said they definitely aren't hanging with a bachelorette group. There
(04:27):
you have it, a podcast is born. While he was
making a joke, he was also making a true observation, which,
if you really think about it, is the cornerstone of
so many good jokes, kind of like one of my
favorite lines in The Crossing, which is a book by
Cormack McCarthy that you should read because it's well pretty incredible. Anyway,
(04:49):
one of the characters in the book says something like
it would take one hell of a wife to beat
no wife at all, which, while it's one of my
favorite jokes, my wife actually doesn't think is very funny.
But you guys can probably also tell that my wife
never listens to any of my podcasts. The thing about
the Bachelorette group comment is this, the doze and bucks
(05:12):
often don't hang together much. This is true in the
world of white tails, it's true in the world of
elk antalope, meal deer, and you see it all the
time with turkeys. I wonder if it happens with fish. Now.
I know that all the critters will mix at some point,
otherwise we wouldn't have new little critters running around. But
nature often segregates itself in such a way, and there's
(05:35):
a lot to learn from that.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Hell.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Take dose, for example. I've already mentioned this, but I
believe it. If you can go kill pressure doze, mature
pressure dose, I should say, with I don't know, some
level of consistency, you can kill mature pressure bucks. I
know that doesn't seem true, but it is. If you're
good enough to learn the ladies and their habits and
(05:59):
of their detection at most times of the season, you
can do the same with their elderly boyfriends. The only
difference is that the elderly boyfriends aren't very common. It's
kind of like this. A lot of hunters with some
Western experience and a lot of hunters with no Western
experience would rank elk as the toughest critter to get
(06:20):
an arrow in on public land now in Colorado or
Idaho and an over the countertype unit. You can make
a pretty strong case for that. But what about on
a twelve thousand dollars landowner tag in New Mexico that
you're using on public land? Different story there. The variables
are endless, so generalizing is often a good way to
be wrong. But I'll say this in my somewhat not
(06:42):
so limited experience, if you're good enough to crawl across
the prairie and arrow an analope of any size somewhat consistently,
you can kill just about anything that might make its
way into the Super Slam list. It's just to test
of good hunting skills. Arrowing elk is too, or spotting
and stocking meal deer, and so is being able to
figure out white till doze on a regular basis, at
(07:04):
least if you're in a place where they get hunted
fairly hard. But those ladies and these early season groups
of them also do something else for us as hunters.
They tell us where the bucks often aren't. You see,
nature does a wonderful job of creating hierarchies. The biggest
and toughest in any group tends to own the spots
with the best advantages security, cover, water, food sources, you
(07:27):
name it. The entire deer herd on your property is
organized this way, kind of like that org chart at
work that shows who works under who and what department.
It's also not a perfect pyramid shape either, because some
does are dominant over other doughs, while some bucks are
dominant over other bucks. In general, what you see as
(07:48):
you scout the last days of velvet living in the
first couple weeks of hard antlered life is that the
deer tend to split up into groups divided by gender.
The dose will be in the beanfield of multiple spots,
but the bucks, at least the bigger deer will usually
be in very specific locations. They'll be in the back
corner that is invisible from the road and is close
(08:08):
to the trout stream where they can drink some delicious
cold water any damn well time they please. When they
are feeding together, you often won't see groups of dozen
fawns get too close to the bucks or mix it
up with them. When you watch groups of dozen fawns
feeding in a spot, they often won't mix it up
with other dozen fawns either, and if they do, you
(08:29):
often see ears, pin back and hoof's flying. They do
this even when they have two hundred acres of the
same food source right at their disposal. It's the proximity
to one another that matters most, and they often aren't
that tolerant. So what does this mean? Well for starters,
what if you're getting a whole bunch of pictures of
dozen fawns but not a whole bunch of pictures of
(08:50):
one hundred and fifty inch bucks. Well, either the bucks
aren't around, or your camera is on a spot that
is great for the ladies but not so great for
the dominant bucks. You might think, well, I do get
some buck pictures, so they are around, and aren't I
supposed to be around does for my rut hunts. Sure, buddy,
that's all true, but the run is a long ways
(09:12):
off and a lot is going to change between then
and now. Don't you want to fill your deer tag
earlier in the season so you can go to another
state and have some more deer fun. Here's the thing.
The does are often not exactly where the bucks are.
That matters for your scouting, for your camera placement, for
your stand sites, for all of it. It's not a
(09:33):
hard and fast rule, of course, but it is something
to consider when you're trying to make a hunting plan
that results in you getting a big buck, which is
what we're talking about here. So the ladies teach us
(09:55):
a lot of things. They teach us where the secondary
feeding areas probably are, which is what that bachelorette group
that Eric so aptly named showed us. But we didn't
learn their full message until we pulled a camera in
one spot on that giant beanfield that has just tucked
away sort of no man's land and close to a
water source. That camera had more big buck pictures on
(10:17):
it than the other four or five on the field combined.
It also has a really interesting stand set up on
it now that you'll probably get to see next year
on the media or YouTube channel. At some point, I'm
guessing the other cameras we have on that field, the
spotting scope work we've done on that field, it all
came together to show us where a lot of dough
(10:38):
family groups were, and you know, where a couple of
year and a half old bucks were. Two it also
showed us where the bachelor group of older bucks wasn't
And they weren't nocturnal, they weren't on somebody else's property.
They just weren't in the spots we monitored. This happens
a lot. It happens when you're scouting and running cameras.
(11:00):
That happens when you're hunting. Now, I know I'm contradicting
myself here on some level, because I do believe trying
to get in close proximity to all kinds of deer
is good for your hunting overall. But for early season
hunts where your target is a decent buck, sometimes you
want to get away from most of the rest of
the deer. You also don't want to write does off
(11:22):
as interesting things to watch while you're waiting for another
chance to rack up a taxidermy bill. This is because
the dough groups, when they do overlap with good buck movement,
often show up first. I see this in the evenings
a lot, and almost always in the mornings. I don't
know why this is, but when I hunt early season mornings,
you know, when every white tail expert out there says
(11:43):
that you shouldn't, I often see does and youngsters come
through first. Then, like eight thirty or nine in the morning,
when I start thinking about pancakes and a midday nap
or maybe going to troutfish for a few hours, the
bigger deer will cruise through. If I get busted by
the does first, the big guy is going to show up.
If you're on a field edge in the evening and
that dough with two fawns decides she doesn't like the
(12:06):
first light specter covered blob in the tree filming her
with an iPhone ten or worse taking selfies for the
gram good luck, She's going to send out the bat
signal and the bucks aren't going to show, or if
they do, it's going to be real late. The point
I'm trying to make here is this, There is no
(12:26):
just hunting big bucks. You might focus solely on that
as your goal, but you're never gonna do that without
dealing with other deer in the herd. They're always a consideration.
It's kind of like throwing frogs for large mouth in
the lily pads. When you're in the north country, your
goal might be an amphibian's chomping five pounder that is
(12:46):
living in two feet of water and just waiting to
smash something slimy on the surface. But along the way
you'll also do with northern pike biting you off and
ripping holes in your twelve dollars spro frogs so often
that you might need to take out a heelock just
to pay for your next shields order. They are just
a part of the whole thing, just like the groups
of doze out there. I know this one has been
(13:07):
kind of all over the place, so let me try
to stick this landing here without breaking in an ankle.
Pay attention to the doze on your cameras, the doze
you see while glassing, and the doze you see while hunting.
What they do bucks will do the trails they walk.
Bucks will eventually walk the way they drop down to
(13:28):
the pond for a little drink, so too will some
bucks at some point. But they'll also show you, particularly
in the early season, where the bucks often aren't that
beautiful open woods you like to sit in because there
are a bunch of white oaks in there, that's great.
But if it's just dough after dough during daylight, it's
(13:49):
not because the bucks are nocturnal. It's because they either
have a better spot to feed where you aren't, or
they're just taking their sweet ass time moving in better
cover until you leave and the lights go out. If
your camera on your kill plot shows tons of daylight
activity from does but not much daylight activity from good bucks,
pay attention. Are they in there after dark? Then you
(14:12):
might have to hunt them a little ways off of
the groceries, all while avoiding detection from the ladies as
they pass through. First, I think you have to learn
how to hunt the does before you can learn how
to hunt the big dudes. But you also have to
work with them throughout the season because they are going
to be a part of the whole thing, whether you
(14:32):
like it or not. They sometimes show you exactly where
you should hunt, like if they are using a river
crossing or traveling along a soft edge while browsing in
the big woods. But they also sometimes show you where
you shouldn't hunt if you want a big buck. That is,
if the part of the field you love to watch
is dominated by does. Take note if your favorite stand
(14:55):
that is easy to get to and sits over a
power line with nice views in two directions is always
full of ladies and youngsters, take note. The bucks are
likely around, but they are using some part of the
terrain that offers them something better. This lesson is often
most easily understood by betting. You see this with Western
critters a lot, too, because they often show themselves in
(15:18):
their beds, so you can see exactly where they are
and make a good guess as to why white tails
aren't as generous that way. But you can fill in
the blanks pretty well with when and where you jump
deer and when and where you see them on your hunts.
At least if you're hunting in the cover, the does
will often be betted in the most obvious spots, and
(15:41):
the bucks won't. They will show you this by either
actually showing themselves or not. How is that confusing. Look
at it this way. If you walk into the woods
and you see some does running away at say noon,
you know they were probably betted there. You might find
proof of that by well finding their beds. But if
(16:01):
you hike up a bluff onto a nice little bench
where the view is solid and the wind is just right,
you probably won't see any deer. You might find a
great big loan bed and think, dang, at some point,
he's here. But the truth is he's always going to
be gone when you get there, because he knows you're coming.
Because his bed is positioned in such a way you're
(16:23):
just not going to sneak up on him. His spot
is better than where those does bed up on the
ridge or in the open valley below. The deer all
have something to teach us, just like every elk encounter
is a lesson in elk behavior, just like every turkey
that feeds through the meadow is giving you a first
hand lesson on turkey behavior. These things matter, and they
(16:46):
are the secret sauce that takes average hunters to the
next level. So my friends, don't write off the ladies.
Use their presence, use your pictures of them, your sightings
to inform your decisions on how to hunt whatever deer
trips your trigger, and come back next week because I'm
going to break down one of our biggest allies in
one of our biggest enemies as hunters, an unseen force
(17:08):
that influences our hunting decisions more than just about anything else.
It's an invisible element of each and every second we
spend in the outdoors that can make or break your
experience in a matter of seconds, and there ain't a
damn thing we can do about it. You guessed it.
I'm going to talk about squirrels. Just kidding. It's wind.
(17:28):
That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has
been the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought
to you by First Light. As always, thank you so
much for listening and for all your support. Every one
of us here at meat Eater truly appreciates it. We
can't thank you enough. If you want some more hunting content,
and I'm talking other podcasts, videos, articles, whatever, you want
(17:51):
to do a little shop and head on over to
the medeater dot com and you'll see all of that
more
Host
Mark Kenyon
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