Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide
Speaker 1: to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light,
Speaker 1: creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind.
Speaker 1: First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host
Speaker 1: Tony Peterson.
Speaker 2: Hey everyone, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast,
Speaker 2: which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host,
Speaker 2: Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about what you
Speaker 2: hear in the White Tail Woods and why paying attention
Speaker 2: to sounds can make you a better hunter. This is
Speaker 2: the time of year that I probably love the most.
Speaker 2: I mean, I really love September hunting, probably more than
Speaker 2: a lot of folks, and in some ways more than
Speaker 2: even November hunting, which might sound crazy, but it's when
Speaker 2: it gets into October, especially mid October, where things just
Speaker 2: change in the woods. Now, I'm not talking about the
Speaker 2: lull and hunting scrapes, or the pre rut and all
Speaker 2: the anticipation that brings, talking about how different it is
Speaker 2: to sit in the woods and listen and all the
Speaker 2: little dopamine dumps you can get just by being there
Speaker 2: and paying attention. Waves are weird now, I'm not talking
Speaker 2: about ocean waves here, although I guess in a way
Speaker 2: I kind of am. Physicists and scientists in general have
Speaker 2: figured out quite a bit about how much in the
Speaker 2: universe exists in some kind of wave form. Now, light
Speaker 2: is an easy one. Well, I guess it's easy because
Speaker 2: we kind of all know that light exists in waves,
Speaker 2: because we've all been taught that at some point or another.
Speaker 2: This was first hypothesized in sixteen seventy eight and later
Speaker 2: proven to be right. Now, that makes me wonder if
Speaker 2: society truly collapsed and we lost all of our previous
Speaker 2: knowledge and had to start from scratch, how long would
Speaker 2: it be before we figured that out again? How did
Speaker 2: anyone figure out that to begin with? Now, I've read
Speaker 2: about it quite a bit, and I don't really understand
Speaker 2: it at all. But light does exist in waves, and
Speaker 2: we can measure those waves with the right tools and
Speaker 2: figure out how long ago that light started its journey.
Speaker 2: We can also use that to confirm that everything in
Speaker 2: the universe is moving away from our local cluster of
Speaker 2: galaxies real fast in literally every direction we look, which
Speaker 2: indicates we are in the middle of a long explosion.
Speaker 2: Gravity gives off waves too, which is a way harder
Speaker 2: thing for my smooth brain to grasp than waves of light.
Speaker 2: Sound moves, obviously, but unlike light and gravity, sound can't
Speaker 2: travel through a vacuum. Sound needs a medium through which
Speaker 2: to propagate itself. This was something I had to explain
Speaker 2: to my daughters recently when we watched the nineteen ninety
Speaker 2: campy horror flick called Tremors, which stars Kevin Bacon and
Speaker 2: someone who I hate as an actress, Reba McIntyre. Now
Speaker 2: I don't hate Reba's music. I don't really like it,
Speaker 2: but I don't hate it. And maybe this is kind
Speaker 2: of a weird take, but my wife and kids are
Speaker 2: into sitcoms from like twenty twenty five years ago, and
Speaker 2: one of the shows they watch a lot is Riba,
Speaker 2: and it is so terrible that it makes me want
Speaker 2: to jump in front of a city bus. It's so
Speaker 2: cheesy it makes Full House seem like a guy a
Speaker 2: Ritchie film. Anyway, the premise of Tremors is that there
Speaker 2: is a tiny town in Nevada called Perfection, and that's
Speaker 2: about as bleak as it gets, with just fourteen full
Speaker 2: time residents and not a whole lot of opportunity to
Speaker 2: go around. What makes it worse is that somehow four
Speaker 2: giant sandworm creatures who really like eating sheep horses and surprise, surprise,
Speaker 2: people starts hunting the residents, as well as a smoking
Speaker 2: hot transplant who just happens to be a seismologist and
Speaker 2: who also, as was the fashion at the time with
Speaker 2: women in these kind of films, managed to get into
Speaker 2: a situation where she had to take her pants off
Speaker 2: to avoid getting caught by one of the bad worm guys. Now,
Speaker 2: I don't want to spoil this for you, but it
Speaker 2: has been out for thirty four years, so I don't
Speaker 2: know what to say about that. I think the status
Speaker 2: limitations is out on spoiler alerts for the movie Tremors,
Speaker 2: But if you suddenly think you want to watch it
Speaker 2: for the first time, I'll maybe fast forward here for
Speaker 2: a minute or so. Now. After finding a dude dead
Speaker 2: of exposure on a tower, and another dude dead in
Speaker 2: the sheep pen, and another two dudes dead who are
Speaker 2: working on some road construction in a very not realistic scene,
Speaker 2: the two main characters of Tremors start to piece together
Speaker 2: that something is wrong. Then they meet up with a
Speaker 2: seismologist and figure out the worms haunt by vibrations in
Speaker 2: the soil. After quite a few minor characters end up
Speaker 2: getting chomped on, they eventually use this hunting technique to
Speaker 2: their advantage. It may be wonder if one of the
Speaker 2: writers of the film was maybe a woodcock hunter, since
Speaker 2: those little migrators have evolved a specialized beak that they
Speaker 2: poke into the ground to find worms through the worms vibrations.
Speaker 2: As if maybe some woodcock hunter was like, hmm, what
Speaker 2: if the worms started hunting the timberdoodles and then bam,
Speaker 2: a script is born and Kevin Bacon's agent is on
Speaker 2: the phone or something like that. Sound moves pretty fast,
Speaker 2: about seven hundred and forty one miles per hour, and
Speaker 2: if you go faster than that with a bullet or
Speaker 2: a fighter jet, you can make your own sonic boom.
Speaker 2: In the case of planes, this is created when the
Speaker 2: aircraft pushes pressure waves in front of it until the
Speaker 2: speed of the aircraft increases enough to compress the sound
Speaker 2: waves to the point where they can't get out of
Speaker 2: each other's way, and they merge into one single shock wave,
Speaker 2: which moves at the speed of sound and is very
Speaker 2: very loud. I think we take sound for granted as
Speaker 2: people in general, but also as hunters. Sure we love
Speaker 2: music and the sounds of our kids' voices, and not
Speaker 2: so much our wife's snoring, which she said she doesn't do,
Speaker 2: but you actually sometimes record it on your phone so
Speaker 2: she can't deny it, and yet she still does anyway,
Speaker 2: And you're like, are you serious with this right now? Sound,
Speaker 2: as whitetail hunters is something we understand and something we don't.
Speaker 2: We think of the sounds we make, you know, walking
Speaker 2: in setting our stands and accidentally banging a climbing stick
Speaker 2: on a metal carabiner, you know, stepping on a dry
Speaker 2: stick and making the cracking sound that only indicates there
Speaker 2: is a big animal on the move. We think about
Speaker 2: how to make a grunt or tickle the rattle bag
Speaker 2: a little. We think about the sound of a buck
Speaker 2: walking through the october leaves, which might be the best
Speaker 2: sound of all. But there is a soundscape to the
Speaker 2: whole thing that we should pay attention to and enjoy.
Speaker 2: There was a somewhat controversial book published in nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: two by Rachel Carson called Silent Spring. In it, she
Speaker 2: makes the case that our indiscriminate use of DDT as
Speaker 2: a pesticide, then was going to kill off the songbirds
Speaker 2: and frogs and other creatures we definitely don't want to
Speaker 2: kill off. To highlight what this would be like, she
Speaker 2: named her book what she did, and it helped usher
Speaker 2: in a better era for the environment. The idea of
Speaker 2: a silent spring is wildly abstract, but subtly terrifying. I'm
Speaker 2: old enough to remember the scare around form frogs, which
Speaker 2: was a big concern when I was in high school. Frogs,
Speaker 2: like they're cooler and harder to find little cousins. Salamanders
Speaker 2: are keynote species to pay attention to for the first
Speaker 2: signs that an ecosystem might be collapsing. They are also
Speaker 2: such a part of the soundscape through the spring and
Speaker 2: the fall that it would be hard to imagine life
Speaker 2: without that auditory gift. One of my buddies listens for
Speaker 2: frogs when he scouts the mountains because they will betray
Speaker 2: a small water hole or an elk wallow in a
Speaker 2: way that nothing else will. Ever since he told me
Speaker 2: that trick, I think about it when I'm spring or
Speaker 2: summer scouting too. The frogs in the deer woods can
Speaker 2: tell you a lot about where an october buck might
Speaker 2: get a drink. There's also the reality of songbirds out
Speaker 2: there and squirrels. I sat a spot recently here in
Speaker 2: Minnesota that was squirrel central, and what made it just
Speaker 2: a bit worse but also a hell of a lot
Speaker 2: more exciting, was that a late summer storm up here
Speaker 2: knocked a bunch of trees over. Its killed some trees
Speaker 2: that are still kind of standing, and from the pond
Speaker 2: at the stand I was on is one of those
Speaker 2: dying trees with dried leaves on it. For whatever reason,
Speaker 2: the squirrels in the blue jays love that tree, and
Speaker 2: they sound an awful lot like a deer shuffling around
Speaker 2: for acorns when they're screwing around in there. The problem
Speaker 2: is that they make that sound all day long in
Speaker 2: that tree, and after a while it's sort of a
Speaker 2: boy who Cried buck scenario where you just ignore it.
Speaker 2: That's what I did, and it nearly cost me a
Speaker 2: dough one night. We are good at blocking out noise,
Speaker 2: and if you don't believe that, go get yourself married
Speaker 2: and have some kids. Children make noise to make noise,
Speaker 2: and somehow it conditions us to eventually just tune some
Speaker 2: stuff out. It's not that we don't want to listen,
Speaker 2: it's that if we do, we will never have a
Speaker 2: coherent thought again and could possibly go postal after a while.
Speaker 2: There's also nothing quite like you know when you're in
Speaker 2: the woods. It just starts to get late and the
Speaker 2: animals start moving. Hearing the chickadees start to fly through,
Speaker 2: or a rough grouse start to drum away in the distance.
Speaker 2: You know, the squirrels and the chipmunks playing grab ass
Speaker 2: as they scuffle around for breakfast. Hearing woodpeckers, especially the
Speaker 2: gangly oversized pilliated woodpeckers with their sweet red mohawks that
Speaker 2: my daughters loved to see when we're in Wisconsin. We
Speaker 2: call them pecilated pilliwookers, a habit that I picked up
Speaker 2: from my dad when I was their age, and for
Speaker 2: some reason it just stuck. I also can't see one
Speaker 2: or hear one without thinking about. A woman in a
Speaker 2: kayak I had a previous conversation with maybe twenty five
Speaker 2: years ago, while I was flipping some flooded trees for
Speaker 2: large mouth as she paddled by. When I asked her
Speaker 2: how it was going, she explained to me all of
Speaker 2: the birds she had seen, and she punctuated it by
Speaker 2: saying she had seen a pilated woodpecker. And she seemed
Speaker 2: much more educated than me. So I remember thinking, have
Speaker 2: we been saying it wrong all this time? Am I
Speaker 2: still saying it wrong? The sounds of the woods aren't
Speaker 2: nice just because they provide an auditory landscape in the
Speaker 2: places we love to be. They can tell us when
Speaker 2: a deer is coming. Now by this, I don't just
Speaker 2: mean the hoofs and the leaves either, that stick snap
Speaker 2: that we hate making. Is there a better sound to
Speaker 2: hear when you're settled in and it's twenty minutes before dark?
Speaker 2: What about the sounds other animals make when they encounter
Speaker 2: a deer. It doesn't happen too often in my experience,
Speaker 2: but every once in a while, a deer will just
Speaker 2: piss off a squirrel with its presence. Maybe this is
Speaker 2: surprised the bushy tails a little bit, and then they
Speaker 2: get scolded. I don't know, but there are so many
Speaker 2: times when squirrels and deers seem to live in a
Speaker 2: totally harmonious way, but once in a while they get
Speaker 2: sideways with each other, and a squirrel will bark rapidly
Speaker 2: out of nowhere, just telling you that a deer is
Speaker 2: on its way, and it's not just a red tailed
Speaker 2: hawk up in a tree or a coyote or something
Speaker 2: that got their alarm. Deer sound different than most animals,
Speaker 2: but most animals also can sound like a deer. If
Speaker 2: you haven't had a skunk or a possum or a
Speaker 2: porcupine or some other critter trick you into grabbing your
Speaker 2: bow and attaching your release to your d loop, you
Speaker 2: haven't hunted very long. The Venn diagram of deer noises
Speaker 2: and other animal noises overlaps, maybe only by like twenty percent,
Speaker 2: but that twenty percent makes hunting way more fun. If
Speaker 2: you hear something coming and you believe it's a deer
Speaker 2: and it is, you get a huge surprise to the upside.
Speaker 2: If you hear something coming and you believe it might
Speaker 2: be a deer but it's not a deer and it
Speaker 2: turns out to be a trash bandit or whatever, you
Speaker 2: still got the anticipation of thinking a deer might be coming,
Speaker 2: and you got to watch a raccoon chirp his way
Speaker 2: through the woods while checking stuff out bandit style. The
Speaker 2: sounds we actually hear in the woods are often different
Speaker 2: from the sounds we imagine. I think about this with
Speaker 2: buck fights a lot. I've only seen a handful of good,
Speaker 2: real buckfights, and I can say that every one of
Speaker 2: them was way louder than I expected. You know, not
Speaker 2: from the perspective of antlers smashing and crashing together because
Speaker 2: they aren't big horned sheep, but from the perspective of
Speaker 2: two big animals pushing each other around and essentially trying
Speaker 2: to kill each other. There is a whole soundtrack to
Speaker 2: a buck fight that we almost never actually make when
Speaker 2: we rattle. I honestly think this is why rattling is
Speaker 2: such a low odds deal for most of us. Even
Speaker 2: if a buck isn't smart enough to say that the
Speaker 2: buck fight he's hearing doesn't have enough other sounds to
Speaker 2: go with it, so you know he's not going to
Speaker 2: check it out. Intuitively, they seem to know what sounds
Speaker 2: natural and what doesn't. The first buck I ever witnessed
Speaker 2: involved two two year olds going at it in mid
Speaker 2: October and southeastern Minnesota. They met up in a valley
Speaker 2: below me, and they settled a feisty dispute. They made
Speaker 2: so much noise that I watched seven other deer approach
Speaker 2: from different directions. Some of them ran in to watch
Speaker 2: it all go down. That was one of those lessons
Speaker 2: that the deer taught me that no amount of magazine
Speaker 2: articles or hunting shows could Another time, I watched two
Speaker 2: bucks fight in the Little Missouri River out in North Dakota,
Speaker 2: and the amount of splashing and river rocks crashing against
Speaker 2: one another was wild. It was like twenty times louder
Speaker 2: than I've ever rattled in my life. But that was
Speaker 2: the real thing. And when I do it, it's not
Speaker 2: I like to sit water a lot. And you know
Speaker 2: what else betrays approaching deer. You know, pretty often morning
Speaker 2: doves in the mornings. In the evenings, doves are big
Speaker 2: fans and landing on the edges of ponds and rivers
Speaker 2: where they like to hang out right at water level,
Speaker 2: where almost always anything that approaches the pond or the
Speaker 2: river will be above them. And they are skittish. And
Speaker 2: there's a difference between one or two doves flying off
Speaker 2: on their own volition, or however many doves are there,
Speaker 2: all spooking at one time from a perceived threat. The
Speaker 2: difference in those two sounds is probably very minimal, But
Speaker 2: if you spend a lot of time sitting over water holes,
Speaker 2: you learn real quickly to pay attention when you hear
Speaker 2: one and not the other. There are other sounds that
Speaker 2: can make a whole season or deflate you in an
Speaker 2: instant on a sit. In the latter category, an old
Speaker 2: dough snorting away will do it pretty handily, especially if
Speaker 2: you didn't know she was there. I mean, is there
Speaker 2: anything worse than stretching in your stand or reaching into
Speaker 2: your pack and hearing the thump of hoofs and then
Speaker 2: ten seconds later a dough snorting her head off. Now,
Speaker 2: the opposite sound of that is a buck grunt. When
Speaker 2: you're sitting quietly on stand and not much is happening
Speaker 2: and you hear a grunt, it's an adrenaline rush that
Speaker 2: just can't quite be explained. The only thing that tops
Speaker 2: it is a buck roar, which I've only heard once,
Speaker 2: but it was incredible and it got my attention the
Speaker 2: way very few sounds in the woods ever have. I
Speaker 2: cannot look at that deer's rack on my wall and
Speaker 2: not think about hearing that roar crash through the woods
Speaker 2: before I caught sight of him, and he did it again.
Speaker 2: If Bucks had a bigger tendency to do that, we'd
Speaker 2: pay non resident ELK prices for deer all day long.
Speaker 2: Most of us would lose our private spots to hunt
Speaker 2: if we didn't own them. Those deer would be in
Speaker 2: such high demand or higher demand, I should say, which
Speaker 2: is really saying something. There's the sound of a deer
Speaker 2: crashing after you shoot it kind of like the death
Speaker 2: moon from a bear. You know what happened, and you
Speaker 2: believe what happened, but until you walk up on it,
Speaker 2: you just don't know. You know, there's the reality that
Speaker 2: it always sounds like whoever you're hunting with walks much
Speaker 2: louder than you, You know, with all the grace of
Speaker 2: a drunken elephant and a potato chip factory. They don't.
Speaker 2: But hunting partners are kind of like spouses. It can
Speaker 2: get real easy to spot the flaws, even if they
Speaker 2: are a minor and exactly the same flaws we have.
Speaker 2: I think about sound a lot, because I think about
Speaker 2: being addicted to my phone a lot. And while it's
Speaker 2: easy to sit and stare at a screen until a
Speaker 2: deer shows up, I sometimes find myself realizing that I
Speaker 2: don't hear what's going on when I'm looking at another
Speaker 2: one of Mark's fly fishing posts, or going down a
Speaker 2: rabbit hole on Reddit about UFO disclosure, or something you
Speaker 2: can be in the moment in the environment you're in,
Speaker 2: or pay attention to the NonStop boredom fighter machines we
Speaker 2: carry around. But it's hard to do both. But to
Speaker 2: be a good hunter, generally, it's to be an astute listener.
Speaker 2: And that's not some bullshit a terrible poet might say.
Speaker 2: It's true, and it's something you should think about when
Speaker 2: you're out there. Listen to the woods, not just for
Speaker 2: the sound of a deer walking in, but for what
Speaker 2: the woods sound like when the deer aren't walking in too.
Speaker 2: If you pay attention, you'll notice that there are critters
Speaker 2: that can tell you what's going on and what's coming
Speaker 2: down the trail, and when it's just time for everybody
Speaker 2: to get a snack before the lights go out and
Speaker 2: the day shift gives way to night shift and a
Speaker 2: whole different soundscape emerges. It's honestly one of the best
Speaker 2: parts about being a hunter, because there is something you'll hear,
Speaker 2: or a lot of things you'll hear that most folks
Speaker 2: just won't, and it's something that humans have been listening
Speaker 2: to for a long long time, and for all we know,
Speaker 2: might be something we absolutely need to hear here, even
Speaker 2: if the reasons for that are abstract and impossible to
Speaker 2: put in words. Now, do you know what else you
Speaker 2: should try to listen to this podcast next week? Because
Speaker 2: I'm going to talk about how to hunt the pre
Speaker 2: rut and why it might be the best time for
Speaker 2: you to kill a buck, even though most folks will
Speaker 2: say that it's definitely not. That's it for the show.
Speaker 2: I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt
Speaker 2: Foundations podcast. We know you're in the heart of deer
Speaker 2: season here, you're driving all over, you're you know, putting
Speaker 2: in a little time in the office when you can,
Speaker 2: and you're probably consuming some hunting content. If you want
Speaker 2: to consume hunting content, you want to see more of it.
Speaker 2: Read some articles, find some recipes, maybe watch some you know,
Speaker 2: some films to get you pumped up. Whatever the meat
Speaker 2: eater dot Com has you covered. We have so much content,
Speaker 2: not only whitetail stuff, but fishing, hunting, Western big game,
Speaker 2: upland stuff, caliber battles, whatever you name it. You can
Speaker 2: go find it there, and you can kill a lot
Speaker 2: of time on your boss's dime doing that. As always,
Speaker 2: thank you so much for listening and for all your
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