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Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide

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Speaker 1: to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light,

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Speaker 1: creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind.

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Speaker 1: First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host

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Speaker 1: Tony Peterson.

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Speaker 2: Hey everyone, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast,

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Speaker 2: which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host,

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Speaker 2: Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about what you

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Speaker 2: hear in the White Tail Woods and why paying attention

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Speaker 2: to sounds can make you a better hunter. This is

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Speaker 2: the time of year that I probably love the most.

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Speaker 2: I mean, I really love September hunting, probably more than

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Speaker 2: a lot of folks, and in some ways more than

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Speaker 2: even November hunting, which might sound crazy, but it's when

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Speaker 2: it gets into October, especially mid October, where things just

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Speaker 2: change in the woods. Now, I'm not talking about the

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Speaker 2: lull and hunting scrapes, or the pre rut and all

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Speaker 2: the anticipation that brings, talking about how different it is

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Speaker 2: to sit in the woods and listen and all the

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Speaker 2: little dopamine dumps you can get just by being there

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Speaker 2: and paying attention. Waves are weird now, I'm not talking

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Speaker 2: about ocean waves here, although I guess in a way

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Speaker 2: I kind of am. Physicists and scientists in general have

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Speaker 2: figured out quite a bit about how much in the

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Speaker 2: universe exists in some kind of wave form. Now, light

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Speaker 2: is an easy one. Well, I guess it's easy because

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Speaker 2: we kind of all know that light exists in waves,

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Speaker 2: because we've all been taught that at some point or another.

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Speaker 2: This was first hypothesized in sixteen seventy eight and later

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Speaker 2: proven to be right. Now, that makes me wonder if

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Speaker 2: society truly collapsed and we lost all of our previous

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Speaker 2: knowledge and had to start from scratch, how long would

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Speaker 2: it be before we figured that out again? How did

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Speaker 2: anyone figure out that to begin with? Now, I've read

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Speaker 2: about it quite a bit, and I don't really understand

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Speaker 2: it at all. But light does exist in waves, and

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Speaker 2: we can measure those waves with the right tools and

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Speaker 2: figure out how long ago that light started its journey.

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Speaker 2: We can also use that to confirm that everything in

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Speaker 2: the universe is moving away from our local cluster of

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Speaker 2: galaxies real fast in literally every direction we look, which

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Speaker 2: indicates we are in the middle of a long explosion.

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Speaker 2: Gravity gives off waves too, which is a way harder

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Speaker 2: thing for my smooth brain to grasp than waves of light.

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Speaker 2: Sound moves, obviously, but unlike light and gravity, sound can't

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Speaker 2: travel through a vacuum. Sound needs a medium through which

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Speaker 2: to propagate itself. This was something I had to explain

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Speaker 2: to my daughters recently when we watched the nineteen ninety

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Speaker 2: campy horror flick called Tremors, which stars Kevin Bacon and

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Speaker 2: someone who I hate as an actress, Reba McIntyre. Now

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Speaker 2: I don't hate Reba's music. I don't really like it,

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Speaker 2: but I don't hate it. And maybe this is kind

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Speaker 2: of a weird take, but my wife and kids are

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Speaker 2: into sitcoms from like twenty twenty five years ago, and

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Speaker 2: one of the shows they watch a lot is Riba,

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Speaker 2: and it is so terrible that it makes me want

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Speaker 2: to jump in front of a city bus. It's so

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Speaker 2: cheesy it makes Full House seem like a guy a

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Speaker 2: Ritchie film. Anyway, the premise of Tremors is that there

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Speaker 2: is a tiny town in Nevada called Perfection, and that's

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Speaker 2: about as bleak as it gets, with just fourteen full

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Speaker 2: time residents and not a whole lot of opportunity to

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Speaker 2: go around. What makes it worse is that somehow four

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Speaker 2: giant sandworm creatures who really like eating sheep horses and surprise, surprise,

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Speaker 2: people starts hunting the residents, as well as a smoking

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Speaker 2: hot transplant who just happens to be a seismologist and

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Speaker 2: who also, as was the fashion at the time with

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Speaker 2: women in these kind of films, managed to get into

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Speaker 2: a situation where she had to take her pants off

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Speaker 2: to avoid getting caught by one of the bad worm guys. Now,

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Speaker 2: I don't want to spoil this for you, but it

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Speaker 2: has been out for thirty four years, so I don't

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Speaker 2: know what to say about that. I think the status

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Speaker 2: limitations is out on spoiler alerts for the movie Tremors,

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Speaker 2: But if you suddenly think you want to watch it

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Speaker 2: for the first time, I'll maybe fast forward here for

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Speaker 2: a minute or so. Now. After finding a dude dead

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Speaker 2: of exposure on a tower, and another dude dead in

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Speaker 2: the sheep pen, and another two dudes dead who are

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Speaker 2: working on some road construction in a very not realistic scene,

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Speaker 2: the two main characters of Tremors start to piece together

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Speaker 2: that something is wrong. Then they meet up with a

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Speaker 2: seismologist and figure out the worms haunt by vibrations in

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Speaker 2: the soil. After quite a few minor characters end up

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Speaker 2: getting chomped on, they eventually use this hunting technique to

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Speaker 2: their advantage. It may be wonder if one of the

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Speaker 2: writers of the film was maybe a woodcock hunter, since

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Speaker 2: those little migrators have evolved a specialized beak that they

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Speaker 2: poke into the ground to find worms through the worms vibrations.

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Speaker 2: As if maybe some woodcock hunter was like, hmm, what

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Speaker 2: if the worms started hunting the timberdoodles and then bam,

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Speaker 2: a script is born and Kevin Bacon's agent is on

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Speaker 2: the phone or something like that. Sound moves pretty fast,

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Speaker 2: about seven hundred and forty one miles per hour, and

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Speaker 2: if you go faster than that with a bullet or

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Speaker 2: a fighter jet, you can make your own sonic boom.

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Speaker 2: In the case of planes, this is created when the

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Speaker 2: aircraft pushes pressure waves in front of it until the

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Speaker 2: speed of the aircraft increases enough to compress the sound

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Speaker 2: waves to the point where they can't get out of

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Speaker 2: each other's way, and they merge into one single shock wave,

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Speaker 2: which moves at the speed of sound and is very

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Speaker 2: very loud. I think we take sound for granted as

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Speaker 2: people in general, but also as hunters. Sure we love

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Speaker 2: music and the sounds of our kids' voices, and not

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Speaker 2: so much our wife's snoring, which she said she doesn't do,

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Speaker 2: but you actually sometimes record it on your phone so

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Speaker 2: she can't deny it, and yet she still does anyway,

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Speaker 2: And you're like, are you serious with this right now? Sound,

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Speaker 2: as whitetail hunters is something we understand and something we don't.

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Speaker 2: We think of the sounds we make, you know, walking

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Speaker 2: in setting our stands and accidentally banging a climbing stick

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Speaker 2: on a metal carabiner, you know, stepping on a dry

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Speaker 2: stick and making the cracking sound that only indicates there

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Speaker 2: is a big animal on the move. We think about

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Speaker 2: how to make a grunt or tickle the rattle bag

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Speaker 2: a little. We think about the sound of a buck

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Speaker 2: walking through the october leaves, which might be the best

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Speaker 2: sound of all. But there is a soundscape to the

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Speaker 2: whole thing that we should pay attention to and enjoy.

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Speaker 2: There was a somewhat controversial book published in nineteen sixty

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Speaker 2: two by Rachel Carson called Silent Spring. In it, she

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Speaker 2: makes the case that our indiscriminate use of DDT as

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Speaker 2: a pesticide, then was going to kill off the songbirds

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Speaker 2: and frogs and other creatures we definitely don't want to

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Speaker 2: kill off. To highlight what this would be like, she

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Speaker 2: named her book what she did, and it helped usher

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Speaker 2: in a better era for the environment. The idea of

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Speaker 2: a silent spring is wildly abstract, but subtly terrifying. I'm

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Speaker 2: old enough to remember the scare around form frogs, which

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Speaker 2: was a big concern when I was in high school. Frogs,

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Speaker 2: like they're cooler and harder to find little cousins. Salamanders

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Speaker 2: are keynote species to pay attention to for the first

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Speaker 2: signs that an ecosystem might be collapsing. They are also

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Speaker 2: such a part of the soundscape through the spring and

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Speaker 2: the fall that it would be hard to imagine life

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Speaker 2: without that auditory gift. One of my buddies listens for

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Speaker 2: frogs when he scouts the mountains because they will betray

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Speaker 2: a small water hole or an elk wallow in a

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Speaker 2: way that nothing else will. Ever since he told me

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Speaker 2: that trick, I think about it when I'm spring or

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Speaker 2: summer scouting too. The frogs in the deer woods can

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Speaker 2: tell you a lot about where an october buck might

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Speaker 2: get a drink. There's also the reality of songbirds out

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Speaker 2: there and squirrels. I sat a spot recently here in

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Speaker 2: Minnesota that was squirrel central, and what made it just

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Speaker 2: a bit worse but also a hell of a lot

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Speaker 2: more exciting, was that a late summer storm up here

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Speaker 2: knocked a bunch of trees over. Its killed some trees

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Speaker 2: that are still kind of standing, and from the pond

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Speaker 2: at the stand I was on is one of those

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Speaker 2: dying trees with dried leaves on it. For whatever reason,

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Speaker 2: the squirrels in the blue jays love that tree, and

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Speaker 2: they sound an awful lot like a deer shuffling around

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Speaker 2: for acorns when they're screwing around in there. The problem

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Speaker 2: is that they make that sound all day long in

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Speaker 2: that tree, and after a while it's sort of a

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Speaker 2: boy who Cried buck scenario where you just ignore it.

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Speaker 2: That's what I did, and it nearly cost me a

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Speaker 2: dough one night. We are good at blocking out noise,

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Speaker 2: and if you don't believe that, go get yourself married

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Speaker 2: and have some kids. Children make noise to make noise,

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Speaker 2: and somehow it conditions us to eventually just tune some

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Speaker 2: stuff out. It's not that we don't want to listen,

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Speaker 2: it's that if we do, we will never have a

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Speaker 2: coherent thought again and could possibly go postal after a while.

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Speaker 2: There's also nothing quite like you know when you're in

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Speaker 2: the woods. It just starts to get late and the

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Speaker 2: animals start moving. Hearing the chickadees start to fly through,

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Speaker 2: or a rough grouse start to drum away in the distance.

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Speaker 2: You know, the squirrels and the chipmunks playing grab ass

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Speaker 2: as they scuffle around for breakfast. Hearing woodpeckers, especially the

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Speaker 2: gangly oversized pilliated woodpeckers with their sweet red mohawks that

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Speaker 2: my daughters loved to see when we're in Wisconsin. We

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Speaker 2: call them pecilated pilliwookers, a habit that I picked up

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Speaker 2: from my dad when I was their age, and for

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Speaker 2: some reason it just stuck. I also can't see one

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Speaker 2: or hear one without thinking about. A woman in a

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Speaker 2: kayak I had a previous conversation with maybe twenty five

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Speaker 2: years ago, while I was flipping some flooded trees for

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Speaker 2: large mouth as she paddled by. When I asked her

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Speaker 2: how it was going, she explained to me all of

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Speaker 2: the birds she had seen, and she punctuated it by

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Speaker 2: saying she had seen a pilated woodpecker. And she seemed

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Speaker 2: much more educated than me. So I remember thinking, have

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Speaker 2: we been saying it wrong all this time? Am I

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Speaker 2: still saying it wrong? The sounds of the woods aren't

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Speaker 2: nice just because they provide an auditory landscape in the

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Speaker 2: places we love to be. They can tell us when

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Speaker 2: a deer is coming. Now by this, I don't just

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Speaker 2: mean the hoofs and the leaves either, that stick snap

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Speaker 2: that we hate making. Is there a better sound to

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Speaker 2: hear when you're settled in and it's twenty minutes before dark?

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Speaker 2: What about the sounds other animals make when they encounter

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Speaker 2: a deer. It doesn't happen too often in my experience,

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Speaker 2: but every once in a while, a deer will just

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Speaker 2: piss off a squirrel with its presence. Maybe this is

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Speaker 2: surprised the bushy tails a little bit, and then they

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Speaker 2: get scolded. I don't know, but there are so many

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Speaker 2: times when squirrels and deers seem to live in a

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Speaker 2: totally harmonious way, but once in a while they get

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Speaker 2: sideways with each other, and a squirrel will bark rapidly

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Speaker 2: out of nowhere, just telling you that a deer is

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Speaker 2: on its way, and it's not just a red tailed

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Speaker 2: hawk up in a tree or a coyote or something

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Speaker 2: that got their alarm. Deer sound different than most animals,

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Speaker 2: but most animals also can sound like a deer. If

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Speaker 2: you haven't had a skunk or a possum or a

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Speaker 2: porcupine or some other critter trick you into grabbing your

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Speaker 2: bow and attaching your release to your d loop, you

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Speaker 2: haven't hunted very long. The Venn diagram of deer noises

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Speaker 2: and other animal noises overlaps, maybe only by like twenty percent,

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Speaker 2: but that twenty percent makes hunting way more fun. If

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Speaker 2: you hear something coming and you believe it's a deer

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Speaker 2: and it is, you get a huge surprise to the upside.

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Speaker 2: If you hear something coming and you believe it might

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Speaker 2: be a deer but it's not a deer and it

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Speaker 2: turns out to be a trash bandit or whatever, you

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Speaker 2: still got the anticipation of thinking a deer might be coming,

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Speaker 2: and you got to watch a raccoon chirp his way

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Speaker 2: through the woods while checking stuff out bandit style. The

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Speaker 2: sounds we actually hear in the woods are often different

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Speaker 2: from the sounds we imagine. I think about this with

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Speaker 2: buck fights a lot. I've only seen a handful of good,

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Speaker 2: real buckfights, and I can say that every one of

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Speaker 2: them was way louder than I expected. You know, not

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Speaker 2: from the perspective of antlers smashing and crashing together because

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Speaker 2: they aren't big horned sheep, but from the perspective of

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Speaker 2: two big animals pushing each other around and essentially trying

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Speaker 2: to kill each other. There is a whole soundtrack to

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Speaker 2: a buck fight that we almost never actually make when

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Speaker 2: we rattle. I honestly think this is why rattling is

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Speaker 2: such a low odds deal for most of us. Even

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Speaker 2: if a buck isn't smart enough to say that the

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Speaker 2: buck fight he's hearing doesn't have enough other sounds to

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Speaker 2: go with it, so you know he's not going to

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Speaker 2: check it out. Intuitively, they seem to know what sounds

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Speaker 2: natural and what doesn't. The first buck I ever witnessed

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Speaker 2: involved two two year olds going at it in mid

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Speaker 2: October and southeastern Minnesota. They met up in a valley

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Speaker 2: below me, and they settled a feisty dispute. They made

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Speaker 2: so much noise that I watched seven other deer approach

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Speaker 2: from different directions. Some of them ran in to watch

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Speaker 2: it all go down. That was one of those lessons

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Speaker 2: that the deer taught me that no amount of magazine

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Speaker 2: articles or hunting shows could Another time, I watched two

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Speaker 2: bucks fight in the Little Missouri River out in North Dakota,

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Speaker 2: and the amount of splashing and river rocks crashing against

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Speaker 2: one another was wild. It was like twenty times louder

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Speaker 2: than I've ever rattled in my life. But that was

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Speaker 2: the real thing. And when I do it, it's not

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Speaker 2: I like to sit water a lot. And you know

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Speaker 2: what else betrays approaching deer. You know, pretty often morning

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Speaker 2: doves in the mornings. In the evenings, doves are big

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Speaker 2: fans and landing on the edges of ponds and rivers

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Speaker 2: where they like to hang out right at water level,

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Speaker 2: where almost always anything that approaches the pond or the

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Speaker 2: river will be above them. And they are skittish. And

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Speaker 2: there's a difference between one or two doves flying off

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Speaker 2: on their own volition, or however many doves are there,

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Speaker 2: all spooking at one time from a perceived threat. The

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Speaker 2: difference in those two sounds is probably very minimal, But

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Speaker 2: if you spend a lot of time sitting over water holes,

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Speaker 2: you learn real quickly to pay attention when you hear

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Speaker 2: one and not the other. There are other sounds that

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Speaker 2: can make a whole season or deflate you in an

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Speaker 2: instant on a sit. In the latter category, an old

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Speaker 2: dough snorting away will do it pretty handily, especially if

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Speaker 2: you didn't know she was there. I mean, is there

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Speaker 2: anything worse than stretching in your stand or reaching into

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Speaker 2: your pack and hearing the thump of hoofs and then

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Speaker 2: ten seconds later a dough snorting her head off. Now,

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Speaker 2: the opposite sound of that is a buck grunt. When

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Speaker 2: you're sitting quietly on stand and not much is happening

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Speaker 2: and you hear a grunt, it's an adrenaline rush that

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Speaker 2: just can't quite be explained. The only thing that tops

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Speaker 2: it is a buck roar, which I've only heard once,

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Speaker 2: but it was incredible and it got my attention the

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Speaker 2: way very few sounds in the woods ever have. I

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Speaker 2: cannot look at that deer's rack on my wall and

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Speaker 2: not think about hearing that roar crash through the woods

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Speaker 2: before I caught sight of him, and he did it again.

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Speaker 2: If Bucks had a bigger tendency to do that, we'd

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Speaker 2: pay non resident ELK prices for deer all day long.

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Speaker 2: Most of us would lose our private spots to hunt

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Speaker 2: if we didn't own them. Those deer would be in

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Speaker 2: such high demand or higher demand, I should say, which

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Speaker 2: is really saying something. There's the sound of a deer

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Speaker 2: crashing after you shoot it kind of like the death

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Speaker 2: moon from a bear. You know what happened, and you

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Speaker 2: believe what happened, but until you walk up on it,

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Speaker 2: you just don't know. You know, there's the reality that

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Speaker 2: it always sounds like whoever you're hunting with walks much

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Speaker 2: louder than you, You know, with all the grace of

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Speaker 2: a drunken elephant and a potato chip factory. They don't.

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Speaker 2: But hunting partners are kind of like spouses. It can

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Speaker 2: get real easy to spot the flaws, even if they

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Speaker 2: are a minor and exactly the same flaws we have.

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Speaker 2: I think about sound a lot, because I think about

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Speaker 2: being addicted to my phone a lot. And while it's

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Speaker 2: easy to sit and stare at a screen until a

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Speaker 2: deer shows up, I sometimes find myself realizing that I

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Speaker 2: don't hear what's going on when I'm looking at another

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Speaker 2: one of Mark's fly fishing posts, or going down a

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Speaker 2: rabbit hole on Reddit about UFO disclosure, or something you

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Speaker 2: can be in the moment in the environment you're in,

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Speaker 2: or pay attention to the NonStop boredom fighter machines we

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Speaker 2: carry around. But it's hard to do both. But to

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Speaker 2: be a good hunter, generally, it's to be an astute listener.

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Speaker 2: And that's not some bullshit a terrible poet might say.

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Speaker 2: It's true, and it's something you should think about when

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Speaker 2: you're out there. Listen to the woods, not just for

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Speaker 2: the sound of a deer walking in, but for what

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Speaker 2: the woods sound like when the deer aren't walking in too.

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Speaker 2: If you pay attention, you'll notice that there are critters

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Speaker 2: that can tell you what's going on and what's coming

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Speaker 2: down the trail, and when it's just time for everybody

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Speaker 2: to get a snack before the lights go out and

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Speaker 2: the day shift gives way to night shift and a

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Speaker 2: whole different soundscape emerges. It's honestly one of the best

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Speaker 2: parts about being a hunter, because there is something you'll hear,

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Speaker 2: or a lot of things you'll hear that most folks

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Speaker 2: just won't, and it's something that humans have been listening

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Speaker 2: to for a long long time, and for all we know,

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Speaker 2: might be something we absolutely need to hear here, even

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Speaker 2: if the reasons for that are abstract and impossible to

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Speaker 2: put in words. Now, do you know what else you

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Speaker 2: should try to listen to this podcast next week? Because

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Speaker 2: I'm going to talk about how to hunt the pre

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Speaker 2: rut and why it might be the best time for

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Speaker 2: you to kill a buck, even though most folks will

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Speaker 2: say that it's definitely not. That's it for the show.

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Speaker 2: I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt

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Speaker 2: Foundations podcast. We know you're in the heart of deer

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Speaker 2: season here, you're driving all over, you're you know, putting

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Speaker 2: in a little time in the office when you can,

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Speaker 2: and you're probably consuming some hunting content. If you want

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00:17:35,560 --> 00:17:37,639
Speaker 2: to consume hunting content, you want to see more of it.

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Speaker 2: Read some articles, find some recipes, maybe watch some you know,

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Speaker 2: some films to get you pumped up. Whatever the meat

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Speaker 2: eater dot Com has you covered. We have so much content,

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Speaker 2: not only whitetail stuff, but fishing, hunting, Western big game,

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Speaker 2: upland stuff, caliber battles, whatever you name it. You can

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Speaker 2: go find it there, and you can kill a lot

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Speaker 2: of time on your boss's dime doing that. As always,

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Speaker 2: thank you so much for listening and for all your

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Speaker 2: support here. Truly appreciate it. We would be nothing without

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Speaker 2: the audience, so thank you so much for checking in

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Speaker 2: and being loyal to us and giving us your support.

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Speaker 2: We appreciate it so much