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 Wired Hunt Foundations podcast, which
Speaker 2: is brought to you by First Light. I'm your host,
Speaker 2: Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about early September
Speaker 2: and why you should scout hard right now. There are
Speaker 2: different ways to look at scouting deer. Winter scouting is
Speaker 2: all about pinning down a rut spot for the following season.
Speaker 2: Summer scouting is all about finding a target buck and
Speaker 2: then watching him like some kind of camo clad creep
Speaker 2: until you know his whole routine, or at least his
Speaker 2: evening feeding routine. In season scouting is all about finding
Speaker 2: the hot sign right now. But this week, right now,
Speaker 2: this week, whether your season is open or not, is
Speaker 2: the week that matters a lot. This is when deer
Speaker 2: shuffle the deck, so to speak, and those summertime patterns
Speaker 2: can blow up. The food sources often change, and the
Speaker 2: white tailed world is just in sort of a state
Speaker 2: of flux. It might not seem like a big deal
Speaker 2: to get out and figure things out, but it is,
Speaker 2: which is what I'm going to talk about right now.
Speaker 2: I know you fine listeners are well aware that I
Speaker 2: have twin daughters, since I talk about them all the time.
Speaker 2: They are my little girls and they always will be.
Speaker 2: But they are also twelve and will be teenagers in
Speaker 2: a few months now. I always figured I was meant
Speaker 2: to raise boys, since I'm a pretty manly fella and
Speaker 2: quite honestly, mostly like a little boy myself. In fact,
Speaker 2: I recently filmed some fishing content that required me to
Speaker 2: go catch some frogs, some crayfish, some minnows, and as
Speaker 2: a bonus, a painted turtle and a garter snake. Like
Speaker 2: all of us, there are a lot of times where
Speaker 2: I'm not super excited to do my job, especially if
Speaker 2: he involves spending a lot of time with Mark Kenyan.
Speaker 2: But sometimes, like when I'm tasked with catching some frogs
Speaker 2: so we can film them hopping across lily pads, I
Speaker 2: realize how lucky I am. As an added bonus, one
Speaker 2: of my daughters tagged along to supervise the critter catching
Speaker 2: mission and pitch in where she could. It was the
Speaker 2: best three hours of my working career, and about a
Speaker 2: thousand times better than just a few hours earlier when
Speaker 2: I watched my camera man butterfinger a go pro so
Speaker 2: that it fell from his grasp and sunk to the
Speaker 2: bottom of a lake, and it had a whole bunch
Speaker 2: of hours of much needed footage on it. Anyway, my
Speaker 2: little girls aren't so little anymore. And the thing that
Speaker 2: sucks about raising girls is how everyone tells you stuff like, oh,
Speaker 2: just wait till they are teenagers, you'll really be in
Speaker 2: for it. That's kind of like if someone has a
Speaker 2: puppy and you're like, man, that's a cute little dog.
Speaker 2: Just wait until you love it for twelve years and
Speaker 2: then you have to put it down. That will absolutely
Speaker 2: destroy you as a person, and you'll cry like a
Speaker 2: little baby. Ha ha. Sometimes some things just don't need
Speaker 2: to be said, because we all know what's coming. With
Speaker 2: my daughters. I knew the preteen and soon to be
Speaker 2: teen behavior was coming. I didn't need to be told
Speaker 2: over and over again. It still surprised me when suddenly
Speaker 2: one day they went from wearing pink puppy love shirts
Speaker 2: to suddenly being obsessed with fashion and wearing shirts that,
Speaker 2: in my opinion, are way way too short for the
Speaker 2: average twelve year old. What's worse is when I bring
Speaker 2: up the clothing choices to my wife, she thinks it's
Speaker 2: hilarious that I'm in full on old dad mode. Now,
Speaker 2: the old blonde buzzkill isn't exactly known for her risk
Speaker 2: gay clothing choices, so it surprised me that she was
Speaker 2: okay with our little, tiny baby girls wearing shirts that
Speaker 2: show off their belly buttons. Now. To her credit, she
Speaker 2: told me, we can clamp down on it now and
Speaker 2: fight a much bigger battle later, or we can give
Speaker 2: them some autonomy with their fashion and do our best
Speaker 2: to guide them to be smart about life. You fellas
Speaker 2: out there raising young dog might think that's bananas. But
Speaker 2: I was raised in a household where my parents, mostly
Speaker 2: my mom, talked about alcohol like it was about one
Speaker 2: hundred times worse than pure heroin. We never had an
Speaker 2: ounce of it in the house, and I was rarely
Speaker 2: around anyone who drank it all, so naturally, by the
Speaker 2: time I had my learners permit, I was well on
Speaker 2: my way to being a functioning alcoholic, which only got
Speaker 2: worse and worse for about twenty years or so. Such
Speaker 2: is the way with kids and parents and navigating the
Speaker 2: differences between the two. I don't think any of us
Speaker 2: really knows what we're doing. The girls are just in
Speaker 2: a big transition in their life, and that's going to
Speaker 2: lead to a new reality. Do you know what else
Speaker 2: is in a big transition right now? That's right, the
Speaker 2: game of golf. I'm so sorry, guys, imagine what it's
Speaker 2: like to be married to me. The deer in transition,
Speaker 2: and I think doing your best to keep tabs on
Speaker 2: them right now is a huge benefit to early season hunting,
Speaker 2: and quite frankly, you're hunting over the whole season, or
Speaker 2: at least up until about the rut or pre rut time. Anyway.
Speaker 2: The thing is, there are multiple reasons why the deer
Speaker 2: are going to start doing things differently now. You know,
Speaker 2: in the next ten days, the biggie that we all
Speaker 2: know about is all the bucks are going to go
Speaker 2: from velvet antler to heart antlered. This is the week
Speaker 2: where that happens for I don't know most of them,
Speaker 2: maybe like eighty five percent of the deer out there. Now.
Speaker 2: If you get the chance to watch a bachelor group,
Speaker 2: not just get trail camera picks of them, but really
Speaker 2: glass them. You can usually over a few days see
Speaker 2: the dynamics change when they start going hard antlered. There's
Speaker 2: nothing saying their patterns will totally die or shift to
Speaker 2: something that might seem more familiar in October, but they
Speaker 2: definitely are prone to changing. This is due to several reasons.
Speaker 2: Most likely, for one, it's time to fight or at
Speaker 2: least spar. You do, you know, sometimes see late August
Speaker 2: or early September, deer square up and kind of spar
Speaker 2: even when they're in velvet, but it's not super common.
Speaker 2: But once they shed their velvet it does become super common.
Speaker 2: They can also now all of a sudden make rubs,
Speaker 2: and let me tell you something, pay attention to those
Speaker 2: September rubs. They are the ticket to killing bucks in
Speaker 2: my experience. Think about it this way. Deer sign like rubs,
Speaker 2: starts out at zero for the season. Now, while you
Speaker 2: might find scrapes getting used all year long, you won't
Speaker 2: find that with rubs. They are not there in the summer,
Speaker 2: and they start to show in just kind of a
Speaker 2: trickle in the early fall. Now, as the season progresses,
Speaker 2: more bucks of all sizes just make more rubs. This
Speaker 2: means that any individual rub, or even a cluster of rubs,
Speaker 2: becomes less important on its own as September gives way
Speaker 2: to October and then November comes roaring in. The first
Speaker 2: rubs of the season matter, and they matter even more
Speaker 2: where you have low deer densities. But even if you
Speaker 2: have tons of deer around, pay attention to them. Where
Speaker 2: bucks make early season rubs, especially rubs in the cover,
Speaker 2: is where you want to hunt right now, and beyond rubs,
Speaker 2: you just have a reshuffling of the deer herd. Young
Speaker 2: bucks head out to go stake their claims somewhere, and
Speaker 2: if you're in the market for young bucks, that's good
Speaker 2: news for you. Not all of us are in a
Speaker 2: situation where we can name bucks and pass them up
Speaker 2: at four and a half years old every season so
Speaker 2: that we have a fresh crop of five year olds
Speaker 2: to hunt. So sometimes you got to go for what
Speaker 2: you can get, and if that's a young buck, you're
Speaker 2: in luck. I'm convinced this is one of the reasons
Speaker 2: why some deer seems so stupid in September. Now, sure
Speaker 2: they haven't been hunted for nine months or so, but
Speaker 2: Some of them have just left their homes that they've
Speaker 2: known their whole lives and struck out to find a
Speaker 2: new place to live. They settle where the living is good,
Speaker 2: which is often some food plot tucked into the woods
Speaker 2: where they think they haven't made I killed a buck
Speaker 2: like this a long long time ago. He's an eight
Speaker 2: pointer that might score about eight eighty inches, but at
Speaker 2: the time he was a really good one to me.
Speaker 2: This year ended up setting up shop right next to
Speaker 2: a stand that my dad and I hunted a lot,
Speaker 2: and the first time I saw him was during a
Speaker 2: morning on September where after I walked in in the dark,
Speaker 2: I heard a deer approaching in the moonlight. I could
Speaker 2: see him walk right up to my stand, and I
Speaker 2: could hear him sniffing my screw in steps. He was
Speaker 2: gone before first light, but I remember thinking that he
Speaker 2: might be the kind of deer a guy with my
Speaker 2: skill set could actually kill. And I had never killed
Speaker 2: anything with more than six points, so an eight pointer
Speaker 2: was a real dream come true. I did what any
Speaker 2: not very smart why tail hunter would do, and I
Speaker 2: went in there the next morning with a set of
Speaker 2: rattling antlers. I don't even really remember what my justification
Speaker 2: for that move was, but I do remember the feeling
Speaker 2: of seeing that buck walking right toward my tree after
Speaker 2: I had done my best to convince him a couple
Speaker 2: of buddies were having a shoving match in his new
Speaker 2: living room. He walked in close enough that even I
Speaker 2: didn't miss him, which wasn't always the case. When I
Speaker 2: started out deer running, another deer a little bigger than
Speaker 2: that one, but equally as dumb and seemingly lost, walked
Speaker 2: out during extremely windy and somewhat wet evening in northern Wisconsin.
Speaker 2: A few years after I killed that other eight pointer.
Speaker 2: My buddy had had an encounter with the deer and
Speaker 2: it didn't break his way. But when I saw him
Speaker 2: walk out, I not only knew it was the same deer,
Speaker 2: but that he wasn't on his a game survival wise.
Speaker 2: I'll tell you what, when I walked up on that
Speaker 2: buck dead in the swamp, it didn't bother me in
Speaker 2: the least that Mother Nature had reshuffled the deer deck
Speaker 2: and put that buck in my lap. While most of
Speaker 2: the white tail talk involves mature bucks and figuring out
Speaker 2: their home ranges, if the bar isn't set quite so
Speaker 2: high for you. Scouting right now can put you on
Speaker 2: an interloper deer that is just trying to figure out
Speaker 2: his new way of life in a new neighborhood, and
Speaker 2: those deer can be an absolute gift, which is not
Speaker 2: something that the deer gods deliver on a regular basis
Speaker 2: for most of us. Now you also have the food
Speaker 2: aspect out there. The thing about scouting deer is that
Speaker 2: you're not only scouting the deer, but the environment in
Speaker 2: which those deer live. This is what trail cameras won't
Speaker 2: do for you, and that matters. While you might suddenly
Speaker 2: stop getting picks of deer here or there, or suddenly
Speaker 2: start getting picks on a somewhat dead camera, you're going
Speaker 2: to have to fill in the blanks for why those
Speaker 2: changes occurred. But when you go into the woods to
Speaker 2: look around, or you sit back on a spotting scope
Speaker 2: and you try to keep tabs on your favorite beanfield buffet,
Speaker 2: you're also exposing yourself to the world of the deer
Speaker 2: in a way that often delivers answers instead of just
Speaker 2: more questions. I dealt with this last week. I took
Speaker 2: the girls over to Wisconsin to bate some bears and
Speaker 2: set some deer blinds, and just generally get a little
Speaker 2: more ready for the upcoming season. What I was particularly
Speaker 2: curious about was why my cameras had gone so dead
Speaker 2: in the last week or so. I went from at
Speaker 2: least some buck activity to literally no buck activity and
Speaker 2: just had a few doze and some random natural movement bears.
Speaker 2: I knew from some of the local scouting that the
Speaker 2: acorns were hitting the ground, but at least in my
Speaker 2: world this year, it seems like the hard mass crop
Speaker 2: is way down from last year. Now that might be
Speaker 2: solely a regional thing, but that's all it really matters
Speaker 2: to me. It doesn't do me any good to focus
Speaker 2: hard on how many white oaks are dropping, and, say
Speaker 2: central Missouri, for example, now here the acorn situation feels light,
Speaker 2: which is generally good for my hunting because I don't
Speaker 2: have enough situations where I can get out an acorn
Speaker 2: pattern quickly and ride it out to a short blood trail.
Speaker 2: So that made me happy, but it didn't answer why
Speaker 2: the bucks had all disappeared off of my cameras. My
Speaker 2: suspicion is that there are some bait piles out there
Speaker 2: on the names. Even though that option was made illegal
Speaker 2: in our area last year when a game farm deer
Speaker 2: pop positive for CWD. Now I don't know what the
Speaker 2: compliance rate is when baiting has been legal for a
Speaker 2: couple of decades and then suddenly it's not, but I'm
Speaker 2: guessing it's not one hundred percent. Hell, just perusing the
Speaker 2: land listings on a dream of picking up another hunting
Speaker 2: property has shown me that there's a lot of illegal
Speaker 2: baiting going on in such a way that it's like,
Speaker 2: literally so prevalent that the photo evidence is often used
Speaker 2: to try to sell hunting land any husky. When the
Speaker 2: girls and I got into the woods, we realized that
Speaker 2: the apple trees in our neighborhood were absolutely weighed down
Speaker 2: with the good stuff. We also saw some deer munching
Speaker 2: on Granny Smith's in the middle of the day while
Speaker 2: we were driving to a brook trout stream to see
Speaker 2: if we could find a few fish to mess with.
Speaker 2: When there is a heat advisory, because the air feels
Speaker 2: like Florida in August and not northern Wisconsin, and yet
Speaker 2: there are deer on their feet munching away at one
Speaker 2: o'clock in the afternoon, you know there is a powerful
Speaker 2: food draw there. That's what we saw. And while I
Speaker 2: don't know if apples are the sole reason for the
Speaker 2: sudden lack of bucks of my cameras, I know that
Speaker 2: it's certainly a possibility. I also know that being in
Speaker 2: the woods right now and actually scouting put us on
Speaker 2: a couple of trees that look like they might draw
Speaker 2: a deer in for a couple more weeks, especially if
Speaker 2: we can hunt around them right after pounding rain or
Speaker 2: some frontal wind, both of which tend to take soft
Speaker 2: masts from the trees and put it on the ground,
Speaker 2: and the deer that eat it know that is for
Speaker 2: sure the case. Scouting right now can help you dial
Speaker 2: into another reality that is unavoidable as well, the fact
Speaker 2: that there are more people in the woods than there
Speaker 2: were a month or two ago. The weeks leading up
Speaker 2: to the boat opener witness a steady increase in people
Speaker 2: poking around in the woods and checking cameras and messing
Speaker 2: with stands and generally just tipping off the deer that
Speaker 2: a mass invasion of their worst predator is building up.
Speaker 2: If you're a public land hunter, this is a big deal.
Speaker 2: If you're not, it might be a big deal, depending
Speaker 2: on the size of the property you hunt and the
Speaker 2: density of hunters in your area. The idea is to
Speaker 2: start to figure out where the deer could be when
Speaker 2: the season actually opens. Now, this goes against the traditional
Speaker 2: summer scouting advice of finding a bachelor group and then
Speaker 2: dialing in their patterns so you can kill them on
Speaker 2: opening week. That works, but sometimes well so you know
Speaker 2: a lot of times actually it doesn't because the deer
Speaker 2: changed their patterns. So what do you do? Well, This
Speaker 2: is why you have one mobile setup, or at least
Speaker 2: keep your options open to that natural ground blind thing
Speaker 2: I talked about last week. The deer might come in
Speaker 2: and march right by the stand you have on the
Speaker 2: alfalfa field or food plot where you've been monitoring their
Speaker 2: activity since turkey season. Or they might pull some move
Speaker 2: where they decide the apples are a better bet, especially
Speaker 2: since they are falling in the overgrown homestead that no
Speaker 2: one goes into until late in the small game season
Speaker 2: when the cottontails are in real danger. It's not enough
Speaker 2: just to scout heavy right now, to keep tabs on
Speaker 2: what is changing on the woods, because if you don't
Speaker 2: have the means to react to it, you're just giving
Speaker 2: yourself depressing information about how your typical setups might not
Speaker 2: cut it. You need to be able to act on
Speaker 2: what you find. I think this is maybe the best
Speaker 2: reason to try to keep scouting right now, instead of
Speaker 2: just admitting that things have changed and probably not for
Speaker 2: the better in relation to your early season plan, you know,
Speaker 2: and just hoping that things will level off later in
Speaker 2: the season and the deer will start doing what you
Speaker 2: want them to. You need to meet the deer where
Speaker 2: they are now. Like a couple of twelve year old
Speaker 2: girls who decide puppy power shirts aren't cool anymore. You
Speaker 2: can try to get the world to bend to your
Speaker 2: whims and wants, but it doesn't really work that way
Speaker 2: with the deer. They go where they can, you know,
Speaker 2: where they can get what they need and avoid danger
Speaker 2: as much as possible. It is that simple, and it's
Speaker 2: something they do all season long. It's also something they
Speaker 2: are doing right now, along with the fact that their
Speaker 2: world is changing in a variety of ways, many of
Speaker 2: which will take them right out of the path you
Speaker 2: have set for the season. Don't let that happen if
Speaker 2: you can help it. Now. Keep those cameras running, but
Speaker 2: get out there too, find those rubs, pay attention to
Speaker 2: the random new bucks that seem to show up. Ask yourself,
Speaker 2: what food is here today that might be more important
Speaker 2: than the food that has been there all summer than
Speaker 2: prepare to react to whatever you figure out. Do that
Speaker 2: and come back next week, because I'm going to talk
Speaker 2: about how you just can't live vicariously through others when
Speaker 2: it comes to making deer hunting decisions. That's it. I'm
Speaker 2: Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast,
Speaker 2: which is brought to you by First Light. As always,
Speaker 2: thank you so much for listening, for checking in, for
Speaker 2: supporting us. We truly appreciate it. If you want to
Speaker 2: get a little bit more of a white tail fix,
Speaker 2: you know, maybe check out the new white Tail Edu
Speaker 2: series that Mark and I put together. Uh, you know,
Speaker 2: how to strategies, styles, hunting tactics in video form. Go
Speaker 2: check that out at the medieater dot com. While you're there,
Speaker 2: you might find a whole bunch of articles or maybe
Speaker 2: some other podcasts to kill the time, some video series,
Speaker 2: tons of hunting content there. Go check it out at
Speaker 2: the medeater dot com.