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: Hi, everyone, welcome to the Wired 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 just you
Speaker 2: know how cool the white tail really is and why
Speaker 2: they are America's favorite game animals. This episode is a
Speaker 2: fun one. It's just mostly an honor of white Tail
Speaker 2: Week here at Meat Eater. Now, while it might seem
Speaker 2: like some of our crew values Western game animals more
Speaker 2: deep down in their hearts, they know who the king
Speaker 2: really is. They also know that the reason they hunt
Speaker 2: those Western critters is because they are generally a heck
Speaker 2: of a lot easier to kill that are pressured white tail,
Speaker 2: although it probably would be a little bit tough to
Speaker 2: get them to admit at that. But before I get
Speaker 2: into this, I got to do one last plug for
Speaker 2: the white Tail Weeks sale. Now I'm gonna be done
Speaker 2: with it, trust me, This thing ends the night of
Speaker 2: October fifth, so you're running out of time to do
Speaker 2: some shopping. This sale is different than anything we've done
Speaker 2: before because if you spend two hundred bucks, you get
Speaker 2: fifty bucks taken right off the top. Spend four hundred,
Speaker 2: you save one hundred bucks. Keep on going to eight
Speaker 2: hundred dollars plus and you can save up to two
Speaker 2: hundred bucks off your order. That's on everything new, everything old, whatever.
Speaker 2: Go to first light dot com and check it out. Now,
Speaker 2: let's get out of this episode. A couple of weeks ago,
Speaker 2: I pulled it to the driveway of a property near
Speaker 2: my house. The owner was outside by his garage getting
Speaker 2: his hunting gear ready, and it was pushing eighty degrees
Speaker 2: out super sunny. We had already hung a couple of
Speaker 2: stands and set a few blinds out his twenty five acres,
Speaker 2: so he was off to sit a stand that his
Speaker 2: positioned just perfectly to shoot any deer that walks into
Speaker 2: an oversized apple tree to see if there's any goodies
Speaker 2: on the ground, a habit that we've seen quite a
Speaker 2: few little Bucks take on almost like with clockwork regularity,
Speaker 2: which is, you know, the kind of deer he was
Speaker 2: looking for because he's never arrowed one before, so those
Speaker 2: predictable a little year and a half holds are definitely
Speaker 2: on his menu. I was headed into a small pond
Speaker 2: with a stand on my back. Now earlier this summer,
Speaker 2: when we were doing some setup work, I had put
Speaker 2: sticks in a life line up, but the stand I
Speaker 2: brought just wouldn't work for the tree, so I had
Speaker 2: to finish that one before I could sit. But I
Speaker 2: was excited because it was hot. The deer had only
Speaker 2: been hunted one time by the landowner, and our standards
Speaker 2: were pretty low. And as we walked in and we're
Speaker 2: just about to split up to go our separate ways,
Speaker 2: we saw a deer go bounding off through the underbrush.
Speaker 2: It was bedded, I don't know, probably not fifteen yards
Speaker 2: from my stand tree. Now. My buddy thought that was
Speaker 2: a bad sign, but I didn't. I figured if I
Speaker 2: could get my stand up quickly and quietly enough, i'd
Speaker 2: see that deer come ghosting back through eventually. That's not
Speaker 2: how I used to feel about bumping deer, and it
Speaker 2: doesn't always work that way, but it happens often enough
Speaker 2: to me now where I don't get super frustrated by
Speaker 2: spooking one. As long as I do it while i'm
Speaker 2: walking in, it's a different story. Getting winded from stand
Speaker 2: or having one spot you while you're trying to draw
Speaker 2: on your stand A totally different deal there. So I
Speaker 2: got that stand, hung as quietly as I could, and
Speaker 2: I settled in. An hour later, I caught movement through
Speaker 2: the brush and realized there was a deer awful close
Speaker 2: to me. It was a lone dove on and after
Speaker 2: a few minutes of looking for acorns, she walked a
Speaker 2: little bit closer to my stand and bedded down. She
Speaker 2: couldn't have been much more than about ten yards away,
Speaker 2: but there were some grape vines in one pine tree
Speaker 2: between us. For a while, the sun was hitting the
Speaker 2: forest floor where she was just right, so I could
Speaker 2: see her ears flicking occasionally. But the second that the
Speaker 2: sun dipped low enough to no longer shine on her spot,
Speaker 2: it was like she disappeared completely. It's always amazing not
Speaker 2: only how good their camouflage is for a variety of
Speaker 2: different environments, but how easily they can just disappear simply
Speaker 2: by not moving. Now, when she got up, she wandered
Speaker 2: off straight away from me, and I realized that even
Speaker 2: if I had wanted to shoot her, I never had
Speaker 2: a single opportunity, even though she was top pin close
Speaker 2: for over two hours. It was a good reminder of
Speaker 2: how often we say, well, I could have killed that deer,
Speaker 2: but you never really know, and they actually have to draw,
Speaker 2: aim and execute a shot on it. It was also a
Speaker 2: good reminder of how their primary means of staying not
Speaker 2: eaten by stuff is to sit real still and let
Speaker 2: the danger pass. We think of them mostly as runners
Speaker 2: when they get close to a threat, or when a
Speaker 2: threat gets close to them, I guess, but the default
Speaker 2: setting to survive is to sit tight and observe. This
Speaker 2: is prey behavior one oh one type of stuff, and
Speaker 2: for the white tail almost undoubtedly stems from their long
Speaker 2: history as one of the primary food sources for a
Speaker 2: litany of predators. And while we think about how you
Speaker 2: know a big threat wolves are these days, or maybe
Speaker 2: coyotes and certainly bears when it comes to fawns, we
Speaker 2: don't really understand how good they are at not getting eaten.
Speaker 2: It's common to hear hunters say, you know, the wolves
Speaker 2: killed all the deer where I hunt, but just because
Speaker 2: you don't see them doesn't mean they aren't there. Now.
Speaker 2: Do wolves kill deer, You bet, you're happy ass they do.
Speaker 2: They're good at it. But it's also pretty easy to
Speaker 2: understand that the prevalence of wolves will drastically change deer behavior,
Speaker 2: and it's not likely to make them walk around a
Speaker 2: lot more. It's also important to acknowledge that white tails
Speaker 2: have been avoiding predators for at least a couple of
Speaker 2: million years, or at least the white tail ancestors were,
Speaker 2: which is kind of saying the same thing. I mean,
Speaker 2: without them, there is no modern deer, and they've been
Speaker 2: on the landscape a long time. Some of the fossils
Speaker 2: that we found tell us this. They have been found
Speaker 2: in places like Florida, and they date back to at
Speaker 2: least two million years. Now, imagine what Florida look like
Speaker 2: two million years ago. You probably can't. In fact, that's
Speaker 2: one of the problems we have with ourselves is that
Speaker 2: we live in a world of recency bias. Because how
Speaker 2: our brains are wired. We can't fathom the white tail
Speaker 2: five hundred years ago, much less back when they literally
Speaker 2: had to dodge saber toothed cats or a version of
Speaker 2: jaguars that are long gone, or the American cheetah that
Speaker 2: is also long gone, or a couple of lion and
Speaker 2: bear species that would have dwarfed the biggest specimens we
Speaker 2: have today. Imagine that for a second, a bear so
Speaker 2: big that it would be able to kind of just
Speaker 2: swat a grizzly out of the way like you would
Speaker 2: show away a mosquito if you're paying attention. That means
Speaker 2: that all of those apex predators, they had their moment
Speaker 2: in the spotlight, and then like ninety nine percent of
Speaker 2: the species of life to ever exist on Earth, eventually
Speaker 2: dwindled down to an unsustainable number, and with that decline
Speaker 2: collapsed into extinction. The only record of them preserved in
Speaker 2: the Earth and in the epigenetic behavior traits of game
Speaker 2: animals that made it through the extinction gauntlet to this point.
Speaker 2: The white tail lives in much of the US and
Speaker 2: much of Canada, and the little desert dwellers that don't
Speaker 2: weigh much more than a Michigan fawn in October. They
Speaker 2: inhabit the southwest deserts all the way down into Old Mexico.
Speaker 2: The white tails kind of like the coyote in that
Speaker 2: where it started as interesting but not nearly as interesting
Speaker 2: as where it has gone as a species and where
Speaker 2: it might be going. You can find white tails in Cuba, Finland, Peru,
Speaker 2: and even in New Zealand, where there is a decent
Speaker 2: population in a couple of places. Thanks to Teddy Roosevelt,
Speaker 2: who at one point loaded up a boat with almost
Speaker 2: two dozen and shipped them some twelve thousand miles, most
Speaker 2: of those deers survived, and today they can be found
Speaker 2: in pretty good numbers there, not to mention that they
Speaker 2: run in the spring and give birth in the fall.
Speaker 2: A lot of species of plants, insects, and animals have
Speaker 2: names that are derivative of some feature they have. Take
Speaker 2: the housefly, for example, it's an insect that likes to
Speaker 2: come into your house and fly around. Didn't take much
Speaker 2: to name that one, I guess. Or take the butterfly,
Speaker 2: which is an insect that Mark Kenyon thinks about us
Speaker 2: he's going to sleep. You know, it's also one that
Speaker 2: flies around. But where did the butter part come from? Well,
Speaker 2: maybe from a Dutch word I can't pronounce that means
Speaker 2: butter shit because butterflies have colorful extrement. Or it could
Speaker 2: be because some of those crazy Germans back in the
Speaker 2: day thought butterflies stole milk and butter so who really knows.
Speaker 2: The white tail gets its name in a similar fashion,
Speaker 2: where the interdigital glands on their back hoofs have a
Speaker 2: small white groove on them that is visible only in
Speaker 2: the infrared. Just kidding, it's because their tails are white, duh.
Speaker 2: Their tails are bigger than the tails on a lot
Speaker 2: of the deer species, and this is because they are
Speaker 2: signaling device. The white tail likes to live in thick habitat,
Speaker 2: and it's a somewhat social critter. A deer fleeing in
Speaker 2: one direction can signal to other deer that you better
Speaker 2: get your asses in gear and head this way. But
Speaker 2: they also use their tails to caution others if they
Speaker 2: suspect some ch connery as a foot. This is kind
Speaker 2: of like if you were sneaking through an abandoned insane
Speaker 2: asylum with your friends, and you round it a corner
Speaker 2: in a dark and dusty hallway, and at the far
Speaker 2: end you saw someone cloaked in black just standing there.
Speaker 2: You might put your hand up in such a way
Speaker 2: that says, we better stop for a second and evaluate
Speaker 2: this development. This would most likely be followed by a
Speaker 2: Scooby Doo and Shaggy moment where you get the hell
Speaker 2: out of there, and get the hell out of there
Speaker 2: deer can. They can clock in at thirty miles per
Speaker 2: hour for short periods of time, which is all the
Speaker 2: time you really need if you can run that fast.
Speaker 2: And they can and jump too. The dough one of
Speaker 2: my daughters shot in September cleared a hedgerow with ease
Speaker 2: right after the shot. And that's a hedgerow that I
Speaker 2: can't see over, and I stand six feet two inches tall.
Speaker 2: They've been known to clear fences much taller than that,
Speaker 2: which is pretty incredible. The white tail as a communication
Speaker 2: machine too, and this goes way beyond their oversized bright
Speaker 2: white tail lights. They can secrete sense from a pile
Speaker 2: of different glands in their bodies, and the amount of
Speaker 2: information that they can disseminate and absorb from those scents
Speaker 2: would probably blow our minds. It's probably not unlike a
Speaker 2: fairly extensive vocabulary that a lot of humans have, where
Speaker 2: we can stream together words in a litany of ways
Speaker 2: to convey pretty much anything we want to convey. They
Speaker 2: do that, and just like us, they mix in some
Speaker 2: vocal communication while we generally think of deer as mostly quiet,
Speaker 2: because if you can communicate with body language and scent,
Speaker 2: you don't really need to make much noise and draw
Speaker 2: some predators attention. But they do make some noise, and
Speaker 2: it's cool as hell to hear a dough bleat to
Speaker 2: her fawn, or a buck grunt with every step in November,
Speaker 2: or if you're really lucky, hear a hyped up bucks
Speaker 2: Norway's at a rival. White tails live in so many
Speaker 2: different environments that is pretty amazing when you think about it.
Speaker 2: They are big woods dwellers who don't need an ounce
Speaker 2: of agriculture babysitting to survive just fine, although they do
Speaker 2: thrive where egg is heavy, as we all know. They
Speaker 2: can live in the suburbs while dodging cars and coyotes,
Speaker 2: or they can live whereas about as remote as it gets.
Speaker 2: They love river bottoms, but will spend time in the
Speaker 2: foothills of the mountains in certain spots. There is no
Speaker 2: shortage of them in the swamps some of the deserts,
Speaker 2: and there also seems to be no holding them back.
Speaker 2: But we did hold them back to the point where
Speaker 2: about the time we were trying a failed experiment called prohibition,
Speaker 2: the deer population had sunk to around thirty thousand animals.
Speaker 2: Through a lot of effort and game management, we have
Speaker 2: a lot more deer than that today. In fact, I
Speaker 2: was thinking about this while hunting with my daughters recently.
Speaker 2: You know, we were in north central Wisconsin. In the
Speaker 2: course of three days, we saw three deer, two of
Speaker 2: which are now in our freezer thanks to a pair
Speaker 2: of good shots from a couple of twelve year old girls.
Speaker 2: I told my daughters that when I started hunting, it
Speaker 2: was a big goal of mine and my dad's to
Speaker 2: just get one deer a season, just one in the
Speaker 2: whole season. And there were a hell of a lot
Speaker 2: of seasons where we didn't do that. I didn't start
Speaker 2: hunting when, you know, seeing a deer was a newsworthy
Speaker 2: event like it was back in the sixties. But I
Speaker 2: did start when there weren't nearly as many deer to
Speaker 2: see as there are now. It's amazing how available white
Speaker 2: tails are to this day. They can live a long
Speaker 2: time too. While we tend to cap our thoughts on
Speaker 2: white tail age right around that maybe I don't know,
Speaker 2: six and a half to eight and a half year
Speaker 2: old timeframe. They can live a hell of a lot
Speaker 2: longer than that. In fact, I think a lot of
Speaker 2: them do. We just don't know it. The oldest deer
Speaker 2: a doe who made it to an age where she
Speaker 2: could illegally drink in the US, although just barely reach
Speaker 2: twenty two years, imagine the survival instincts it takes to
Speaker 2: be a wild deer with over two decades under your belt.
Speaker 2: Part of the reason they can get this old is
Speaker 2: that they are, unlike one of my daughters who drives
Speaker 2: me absolutely crazy, not picky eaters. There is no version
Speaker 2: of deer that only eats plain spaghetti and chicken tenders
Speaker 2: for ninety percent of its meals. It is often reported
Speaker 2: that whitetails willingly numb on at least six hundred different plants,
Speaker 2: and they also eat fruit, mushrooms, and if you could
Speaker 2: actually figure out the truth, probably a hell of a
Speaker 2: lot more stuff than we give them credit for. They
Speaker 2: have a four chambered stomach, which allows them to have
Speaker 2: such a diverse diet. It also allows them to eat
Speaker 2: a lot pretty quickly and then lay down in safety
Speaker 2: to hork up their meal and chew on it again. Sometimes,
Speaker 2: like in the case of that fond that betted by
Speaker 2: me in September, you can hear them coughing, and while
Speaker 2: that might just be from getting a little bit of
Speaker 2: dandelion fuzz caught in their throats, sometimes it's them working
Speaker 2: on their next stage of digestion. While we think of
Speaker 2: them as cute herbivores that live solely off of plants,
Speaker 2: that's just not entirely the case. There are videos out
Speaker 2: there of deer walking down baby birds and gnomming on them,
Speaker 2: and videos of them eating eggs right out of a
Speaker 2: bird's nest. In twenty seventeen, a white tail was observed
Speaker 2: eating a human corpse on a Texas body farm, which
Speaker 2: is a sentence you don't think you'll get to write
Speaker 2: or say, ever, but here we are. Their coats change
Speaker 2: with the seasons. This is one of the reasons deer
Speaker 2: looks so mangy and disheveled when you see them in
Speaker 2: the spring. They are going from heavy winter coats to
Speaker 2: light summer coats. In late August and early September throughout
Speaker 2: much of their range, they put away the light windbreaker
Speaker 2: and they don their heavy park is again. Now, while
Speaker 2: it seems simple enough, the reason their winter coats are
Speaker 2: heavier is not solely because longer hair is warmer. It
Speaker 2: also allows more air to be trapped next to the skin,
Speaker 2: which creates an insulating layer, kind of like how when
Speaker 2: you're duck hunting and you get water in your waiters.
Speaker 2: It's super duper cold at first, but after a while
Speaker 2: it's kind of nice and warm. If you ever see
Speaker 2: a deer in truly cold temperatures and by that I
Speaker 2: mean like twenty below for extended periods of time, you'll
Speaker 2: see something else. They look kind of like puffballs. The
Speaker 2: first time I saw this, I was sitting behind a
Speaker 2: tree in late December in Minnesota, overlooking a drainage that
Speaker 2: was not only covered with scouring rush horsetail, you know,
Speaker 2: a reedy plant that stays green all winter long, but
Speaker 2: also a pile of deer trails. It was a little
Speaker 2: honey hole I found in the late season on some
Speaker 2: public land down by Lanesboro, Minnesota, and I thought I
Speaker 2: was going to get my chance, and then I did.
Speaker 2: The only deer that walked in then was a fawn,
Speaker 2: and she looked like a threatned porcupine. Her coat was
Speaker 2: all puffed out against the cold, and it was cold,
Speaker 2: and it's also with great shame, uh, a little bit
Speaker 2: shame anyway, that I'll admit that teenage Tony whiffed on
Speaker 2: that buzzer beater deer at a distance of really really close.
Speaker 2: That strategy for surviving the cold is rad because we
Speaker 2: have the same thing going on with our goosebumps that
Speaker 2: show up and we get chilly. Although most of us
Speaker 2: aren't covered with a ton of hair these days, except
Speaker 2: for my old college roommate Nolan, who definitely looks like
Speaker 2: he got some strong Neanderthal jens. It's an evolutionary holdover
Speaker 2: from a time when we lived a life closer to
Speaker 2: wild whitetails than modern humans, and you know, back when
Speaker 2: we couldn't just throw on a coat or turn up
Speaker 2: a thermostat. There's a lot to love about the white tail,
Speaker 2: and there's a lot to understand about why when they
Speaker 2: get a little hunting pressure from us, they get real
Speaker 2: hard to kill in a hurry. Perhaps that's the coolest
Speaker 2: thing about them. We have Selkam ground blinds, tower blinds,
Speaker 2: ozonics units on X real time weather information clothing to
Speaker 2: keep us warm and dry in every condition. We can
Speaker 2: leave food out for them in some places and create
Speaker 2: food sources for them and others. We can manipulate the
Speaker 2: land to influence their travel, We can create a water source,
Speaker 2: we can give them a utopia, and we have so
Speaker 2: many advantages it's almost unreal. And yet most of us
Speaker 2: can't kill them. With a high level of consistency. They
Speaker 2: are still beating the best predators in the game, at
Speaker 2: least to the point where their numbers are still pretty
Speaker 2: much going north. That's absolutely unbelievable, especially when you consider
Speaker 2: that they can thrive in the face of not only
Speaker 2: our attempts to put them in the freezer, but EHD
Speaker 2: and CWD and horrible winners and wolf packs and millions
Speaker 2: of cars traveling down roads that bisect their home ranges
Speaker 2: and hit them with enough frequency where it kind of sucks.
Speaker 2: They're just cool as hell, and we are so dang
Speaker 2: lucky to have them to hunt. We truly are, And
Speaker 2: I want every listener to think about that. The whitetail
Speaker 2: is the most available and awesome game animal out there,
Speaker 2: and if we behave ourselves, we can keep it that
Speaker 2: way and make sure our kids and grandkids have a
Speaker 2: chance to hunt them too. So let's do that, and
Speaker 2: let's all come back next week. Because I'm going to
Speaker 2: talk about thermal hubs, weird wins, and how you need
Speaker 2: to learn individual stand sites through experience so you know
Speaker 2: when to hunt them. That's it. I'm Tony Peterson. This
Speaker 2: has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is
Speaker 2: brought to you by first Light. As I mentioned in
Speaker 2: the intro here, the white Tail Week sale is about
Speaker 2: to end in a couple of days here on October fifth,
Speaker 2: the night of October fifth, so go over to first
Speaker 2: Light dot com if you want to get some new
Speaker 2: gear and save a bunch of money. And as always,
Speaker 2: thank you so much for listening. We truly appreciate it
Speaker 2: here at meet eat, or whether you're checking out an
Speaker 2: article at the Mediator dot com, or you're listening to
Speaker 2: Clay's Bear Grease podcast or watching a video, whatever, we
Speaker 2: truly appreciate it. So thank you for that