Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide
Speaker 1: to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, and now your
Speaker 1: host Tony Peterson. Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wire to
Speaker 1: Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today I plan to
Speaker 1: break down how we can figure out our personal impact
Speaker 1: on the deer and how to mitigate the negative effects
Speaker 1: of the pressure that we put on them. Now, I
Speaker 1: know this might seem like kind of a weird offseason topic,
Speaker 1: but it's not. It's actually kind of a play on
Speaker 1: last week's show about learning the land. Right now, we
Speaker 1: have a free window of time at least till the
Speaker 1: ticks come out, where we can learn a bunch about
Speaker 1: our local white tails. No matter how many we spook
Speaker 1: or how many miles we walk on our hunting grounds,
Speaker 1: the passage of time will erase any negative effects associated
Speaker 1: with it. And it's just a really good thing that
Speaker 1: truly understand how to cut down on the amount of
Speaker 1: negative juju we bring to the woods that those pesky
Speaker 1: bucks and does might just pick up on. When your
Speaker 1: job involves talking for hundreds of hours and then thousands
Speaker 1: of people listen to your ramblings, you find out all
Speaker 1: kinds of interesting things. Honestly, the same goes for writing
Speaker 1: articles or creating videos posting on social media. What you
Speaker 1: learn is that most people don't care that much one
Speaker 1: way or the other what you say or do, as
Speaker 1: long as it fits roughly into the role they believe
Speaker 1: you fill. If you don't stray too far out of
Speaker 1: your lane, they pretty much let it slide and don't
Speaker 1: get a red ass about it. You also find a
Speaker 1: smaller subset of the audience that is just your ride
Speaker 1: or die crowd. They decide, for whatever reason, that you're
Speaker 1: a pretty swell guy, and they'll defend that to the
Speaker 1: bitter end. Obviously, having a few of those people on
Speaker 1: your side is pretty nice. But there's another subset. Those
Speaker 1: are the folks who seem to be looking to get offended.
Speaker 1: They suck and I wish they would go do something
Speaker 1: challenging in their lives every day, so they had learned
Speaker 1: that the reason they seek drama is because they aren't
Speaker 1: getting what they need out of life. We see examples
Speaker 1: of these folks all the time, but I think there
Speaker 1: are a much smaller segment of society than it seems
Speaker 1: they just happen to be real vocal and really into
Speaker 1: getting attention. They are the folks who will try to
Speaker 1: get you to self censor or worse. A lot of
Speaker 1: this behavior seems to come from main character syndrome that
Speaker 1: seems to make them real sensitive, and they take things personal,
Speaker 1: even if the things they are mad about couldn't possibly
Speaker 1: be personal, because well, the person they are mad at
Speaker 1: doesn't know them or care about them. One of the
Speaker 1: first times I really encountered this was when I wrote
Speaker 1: the white Tail column for Outdoor News, now my weekly column.
Speaker 1: At one point I wrote about a Wisconsin buck I shot,
Speaker 1: like I don't know seven or eight years ago. All
Speaker 1: that buck came in and I hit him in the
Speaker 1: shoulder on opening night, and when he ran away, it
Speaker 1: looked like the penetration was good enough, even if my
Speaker 1: shot placement wasn't so great. Now, with a forecast in
Speaker 1: the low thirties overnight, I left him for the morning,
Speaker 1: not wanting to risk pushing him if I was dealing
Speaker 1: with a one long hit or something else that wasn't
Speaker 1: going to be immediately fatal. So when a buddy and
Speaker 1: I returned at first light, we ended up finding a
Speaker 1: pretty sparse blood trail, but it was good enough that
Speaker 1: we eventually found that buck after I think dont an
Speaker 1: hour and a half two hours. He was nice and
Speaker 1: cool and dead and ready to be field dressed and
Speaker 1: wrestled back to the truck. Now, so I wrote about that, dear,
Speaker 1: because I had to write about deer every week. And
Speaker 1: the week after that column published, they ran a letter
Speaker 1: to the editor about how irresponsible I was to leave
Speaker 1: a buck overnight. The letter writer made it clear there
Speaker 1: was never a good reason to leave a deer in
Speaker 1: the woods overnight, and he also not so subtly made
Speaker 1: it known that the meat could not have possibly been
Speaker 1: worth saving. Honestly, it was bizarre. So I sent my
Speaker 1: editor an email and I said, uh, what's up with
Speaker 1: this dude? And he called me up and he said,
Speaker 1: the guy who sent that letter in sends a letter
Speaker 1: in every week, literally fifty two times a year. That
Speaker 1: seems that this old farmer from northwestern Minnesota goes through
Speaker 1: that paper when he gets it until he finds something
Speaker 1: to be offended about, and then he fires off a
Speaker 1: nastygram or an old fashioned letter. I'm sure someone with
Speaker 1: a degree in psychology could weigh in on that with
Speaker 1: some interesting insights with regard to that fellow. Now here's
Speaker 1: the thing. In my position, I can get mad at
Speaker 1: that dude, which I usually do, or I could let
Speaker 1: it go. I can self answer to not have to
Speaker 1: deal with people like him. I can do a lot
Speaker 1: of things. But the truth is, it wouldn't matter if
Speaker 1: I cleaned up my act and try to make any
Speaker 1: one individual happy. There would be someone else who was
Speaker 1: just ready to try to cancel me or force my
Speaker 1: speech in a certain way. Because that's the nature of
Speaker 1: this whole thing. Now, why do I tell you this
Speaker 1: Because so many of the things we do impact others
Speaker 1: in ways we probably can't imagine. If you think this
Speaker 1: isn't true, go work customer service or retail for a
Speaker 1: day or two. Maybe try out being a waiter or
Speaker 1: a waitress for a week, Go do a right along
Speaker 1: with a local police officer. Maybe talk to a nurse
Speaker 1: or an E M T about their work. My point
Speaker 1: is we make decisions every day that we think might
Speaker 1: benefit us or make us feel a little superior, and
Speaker 1: we often don't see how far those ripples spread in
Speaker 1: the old pond of life. We might not see who
Speaker 1: is affected by them, and we might not care, but
Speaker 1: I think we should just like it's not the waitress's
Speaker 1: fault you don't like your burger, or maybe she has
Speaker 1: twice as many tables to handle on a given night
Speaker 1: because they're stoner coal worker called in sick again. It's
Speaker 1: also a reality that when we go into the woods,
Speaker 1: we make a lot of decisions for ourselves. We think
Speaker 1: they'll benefit us or make us feel better because they'll
Speaker 1: hopefully get us closer to putting an arrow through the
Speaker 1: lungs of a buck. But those same decisions, when we
Speaker 1: often think are pretty benign, can be working against us
Speaker 1: in ways we can't really imagine, and we'll probably never
Speaker 1: fully understand. Those are the worst, I bet, because they
Speaker 1: are the ones that your target buck is paying attention
Speaker 1: to and might be the ones that make him decide
Speaker 1: he's had enough a daylight movement for a couple of weeks,
Speaker 1: or that even though he'd rather take a specific trail
Speaker 1: through the woods to get to his betting area, he's
Speaker 1: going to travel a different one that leads through a
Speaker 1: much thicker habitat and around the stand that you've sat
Speaker 1: three times in a row. You see, we often think
Speaker 1: about how other hunters or coyotes or whatever affect the
Speaker 1: deer movement. We give I think a little too much
Speaker 1: weight to those things sometimes because it's easier than acknowledging
Speaker 1: that we are the ones putting the deer down. We
Speaker 1: are the ones burning our spots or leaving a cent
Speaker 1: trail through an area a hunter hasn't set foot in
Speaker 1: for a month. What we do impacts the deer we
Speaker 1: are hunting, maybe more than anything else, and at least
Speaker 1: a lot of different situations. I believe that to be true.
Speaker 1: I learned this early on in my dear hunting career,
Speaker 1: although I probably didn't really understand it fully until I
Speaker 1: had been at this stuff for a long time. When
Speaker 1: I was just starting out, it seemed like the guys
Speaker 1: my dad and I hunted with, and hell, my dad
Speaker 1: either killed bucks right away in the season or often
Speaker 1: not at all. I bet you can guess why, but
Speaker 1: if not, I'll tell you. Those scrapper bucks they mostly
Speaker 1: shot around the mid September opener here in Minnesota hadn't
Speaker 1: been messed with four nine months. I know that's a letdown,
Speaker 1: but it's true. The reality was that back then we
Speaker 1: didn't have trail cameras we didn't have food plots. We
Speaker 1: had our feet and our eyeballs, and we saw deer
Speaker 1: in fields at last light, or we looked at tracks
Speaker 1: on the trails and we set stands for those deer.
Speaker 1: We did this in midsummer and then just got the
Speaker 1: hell out of the woods. In the first couple of
Speaker 1: times we hunted, or those guys hunted anyway, someone would
Speaker 1: occasionally shoot a buck that just hadn't had time to
Speaker 1: catch up to the program. That was it. After opening weekend,
Speaker 1: all bets were off and things got a lot harder.
Speaker 1: You can see this on a much larger scale when
Speaker 1: you look at the breakdown of when deer are shot
Speaker 1: during a general gun season. The bulk of them will
Speaker 1: die on opening day or opening weekend, and then the
Speaker 1: harvest numbers fall right off the old cliff. Now it's
Speaker 1: not as simple as the deer going holy crappy Oli.
Speaker 1: There are thousands of predators in the woods right now.
Speaker 1: It's also a matter of hunter effort, with a majority
Speaker 1: of hunter spending opening weekend in the woods and then
Speaker 1: not hunting again. So I guess if you're gonna have
Speaker 1: five hunters in the woods one day versus a hundred
Speaker 1: thousand the next day, five hundreds gonna kill more deer
Speaker 1: A fe've hunted guns season after the opener. You know
Speaker 1: that even though the woods are much more empty of
Speaker 1: hunters on I don't know, Wednesday than they were on Saturday,
Speaker 1: the deer movement can be real disappointing. That's grand scale
Speaker 1: stuff and pretty easy to understand. But what about your
Speaker 1: own hunting on your own spots. Remember in the intro
Speaker 1: to this podcast where I mentioned the window we have
Speaker 1: right now to scout without negative hunting repercussions. So true
Speaker 1: time is your friend, because it works to convince the
Speaker 1: deer they're safer by the day. Your presence, whether observed
Speaker 1: directly or felt strongly after you're gone, kind of resets
Speaker 1: the old clock. Enough presence and you create the dear
Speaker 1: version of the kind of lunatic who writes a nasty
Speaker 1: letter to a newspaper every week about something that really
Speaker 1: doesn't matter at all. You don't want your whole audience
Speaker 1: full of those guys, if you get my drift. So
Speaker 1: why does it matter now? Because it pays to think
Speaker 1: about how you'll impact the deer when you do hunt
Speaker 1: them in like seven or eight months. It pays to
Speaker 1: understand the weight of the decisions you make around pressure
Speaker 1: and your presence, and how you'll mitigate the whole thing
Speaker 1: to keep the deer from being overly sensitive to your presence.
Speaker 1: This is not as easy as it sounds. You know why.
Speaker 1: There are several reasons. The first is that we look
Speaker 1: at white tails like they just aren't going anywhere. They
Speaker 1: do have relatively small home ranges, and we often get
Speaker 1: lulled into too much false confidence that the bucks aren't
Speaker 1: going to leave our ground. If we spook them in
Speaker 1: late September, they'll still be around a chase dose during
Speaker 1: the rut. That may be true, But why I spook
Speaker 1: them at all? If you don't have to or think
Speaker 1: about it a different way. Most of the places you
Speaker 1: and I hunt probably don't encompass a deer's whole home range.
Speaker 1: Maybe you're hunting forty acres and too much sloppy presents
Speaker 1: on it will push the deer to the neighbor's ground.
Speaker 1: After all, the deer lived there too. I don't know.
Speaker 1: If you had one room in your house that was
Speaker 1: infested with scorpions or black mambas, you'd probably spend more
Speaker 1: time in a room that wasn't infected with scorpions, and
Speaker 1: black Mamba's right. The danger of believing the bucks really
Speaker 1: aren't going anywhere because of their genetic hardwearing that tells
Speaker 1: them six or seven acres is plenty is that we
Speaker 1: often don't think of how much ground that actually is.
Speaker 1: What's worse is that these rules only apply when the
Speaker 1: sun is shining, but our trail cameras work at night,
Speaker 1: when all bets are off. So the buck that might
Speaker 1: be as good as gone because he's onto you in
Speaker 1: the daylight could eat easily walk by your camera at
Speaker 1: midnight and make you think that he's still in play.
Speaker 1: This is kind of a white tail specific thing. It
Speaker 1: would probably really be driven home if you were lucky
Speaker 1: enough to hunt out west for big meal deer with
Speaker 1: an absolute killer like Randy Armer or Nate Simmons over
Speaker 1: at Western Hunter. Those guys find a big deer and
Speaker 1: their whole goal is to not let them know they're
Speaker 1: being hunted, because those mountain bucks that are so visible
Speaker 1: in a specific basin now will bust the hell on
Speaker 1: out of there when they figure out that they're being
Speaker 1: stalked or even watched. Sometimes could badass hunters like those
Speaker 1: guys find them again three basins over sure, but they
Speaker 1: don't want to have to try because it's not a
Speaker 1: guarantee and the whole thing is going to get a
Speaker 1: lot harder than next go round. So where does all
Speaker 1: this rambling intersect with you, a white tail hunter and
Speaker 1: the offseason conditions we are facing now? Because it's never
Speaker 1: too early to figure out how you'll go about your
Speaker 1: year as a white tail hunter with a keen I
Speaker 1: towards your impact on the deer. I think about it
Speaker 1: all in reference to timing. Right now, I can blow
Speaker 1: mll the deer out of there all I want and
Speaker 1: it won't affect me in September. What can I learn
Speaker 1: about the land, which is what last week's episode was
Speaker 1: all about. It's just damn near like a positive. Anything
Speaker 1: I learned is good. The downsides are so low they
Speaker 1: might not even really register. That's why so many of
Speaker 1: the best deer hunters spent so much time winter scouting.
Speaker 1: I know you've heard me say that a lot, but
Speaker 1: I'm gonna keep saying it. You know you might, but
Speaker 1: what if you only hunt a small property and it
Speaker 1: doesn't really require a bunch of winter scouting? Okay, how
Speaker 1: many stand sites do you have? How many access points?
Speaker 1: How do they allow you to play potential conditions throughout
Speaker 1: the various months of the hunting season, and how can
Speaker 1: you lay out your options to keep your impact as
Speaker 1: light as possible. Can you go out and trim a
Speaker 1: few entrance trail now? Okay? Do that The trails you
Speaker 1: cut now will grow in some during the summer, but
Speaker 1: to give you a real advantage for going in and
Speaker 1: out undetected, and they won't have any effect right now.
Speaker 1: If you go in, it's free time. It's a free hit,
Speaker 1: free play or whatever. That's a good start. Or do
Speaker 1: you have a favorite stand site that starts out really
Speaker 1: good but fizzles out after a few hunts? Is there
Speaker 1: a better way to get there? Or is it your
Speaker 1: favorite because it's easy to get to and hunt and
Speaker 1: you don't really give yourself too many other options. Should
Speaker 1: you be looking at other parts of your property that
Speaker 1: might be better suited for a few ground blinds? What
Speaker 1: kind of an ambush plan can you put together? Now?
Speaker 1: While you've got tons of time. Now, even if you
Speaker 1: don't hang stands, you had to put out some blinds.
Speaker 1: You can start to decide where you'll do it and
Speaker 1: maybe trim some shooting lanes or whatever. Right now, maybe
Speaker 1: you can stack up some dead falls on the edge
Speaker 1: of a meadow so that in August you can slip
Speaker 1: in and really brush in the ground line. This is
Speaker 1: like at certain times when the yellow penalty flag goes
Speaker 1: fly in an NFL game and the quarterback knows he
Speaker 1: essentially has a free play to work with, so he
Speaker 1: takes a shot deep. As you're thinking about this and
Speaker 1: how you can cut down on your felt presence in
Speaker 1: September by doing stuff, now, think about your trail camera
Speaker 1: strategy too. Can you buy some lithium batteries to keep
Speaker 1: your cameras running for months while you stay the hell
Speaker 1: out of the woods. Remember, your presence in the woods
Speaker 1: is a negative no matter what, even if it's just
Speaker 1: a seemingly innocuous little camera check. Three weeks before the
Speaker 1: season opens, do you have an idea where you might
Speaker 1: sit around the opener? But also, three weeks into the season,
Speaker 1: how about a little rut funnel that you can leave alone.
Speaker 1: Now you might be thinking, sure, but there are other
Speaker 1: people hunting my ground, and who knows what those idiots
Speaker 1: will do? No one, probably not even those idiots. Really no.
Speaker 1: But you can't control them, so you just have to
Speaker 1: decide on how to set yourself up for success. And
Speaker 1: a big part of that he's understanding how to lessen
Speaker 1: your impact and play the timing game. This all goes
Speaker 1: back to what I talked about last week about learning
Speaker 1: the land and learning the habitat and how dear use
Speaker 1: specific parts of the terrain and when they should use it.
Speaker 1: I mean, think about this in terms of the lead
Speaker 1: up to the season. You just have this amazing window there,
Speaker 1: but throughout the season, when you hunt and where you
Speaker 1: hunt should also be filtered through how much of an
Speaker 1: impact you've had on the deer recently and how much
Speaker 1: you'll impact them with each hunt. If you have set
Speaker 1: ups for various winds and have worked on some access
Speaker 1: in the off season, you're probably already ahead of the competition.
Speaker 1: This allows you to keep the deer from getting overly
Speaker 1: sensitive to your presence and allows you to create a
Speaker 1: situation where, even on smallish properties you know you're gonna
Speaker 1: have some options, they'll tend to hunt a little bigger.
Speaker 1: If you really think it through now, all of this
Speaker 1: might seem so far off and not really that urgent
Speaker 1: right now, but now is when you should start war
Speaker 1: working on that plan. This is like the corner stone
Speaker 1: of winter scouting. You get a freebee and you get
Speaker 1: to do this work now that's going to pay off.
Speaker 1: Every little bite of work you take now can add
Speaker 1: up to a pretty damn satisfying meal come deer season,
Speaker 1: and if you actively try to keep the deer from
Speaker 1: knowing you're after them to the best of your abilities,
Speaker 1: the dessert will be something sweet and delicious and hopefully
Speaker 1: worthy of a gripping grin. So think about the land,
Speaker 1: think about how the deer use it, Think about your
Speaker 1: individual spot, and then think about timing. Plan for the
Speaker 1: best options to rest spots, to mitigate your felt presence,
Speaker 1: and to keep the deer moving during daylight hours in
Speaker 1: areas where you can have close encounters. Start that right
Speaker 1: now and keep it going all summer long, and you
Speaker 1: have the recipe for one hell of a good season.
Speaker 1: And tune in next week when I plan to talk
Speaker 1: about how to get creative in finding new places to hunt,
Speaker 1: because it's never a add thing to be trying to
Speaker 1: suss out some places they are going to give you permission,
Speaker 1: or maybe some new public land or whatever that's it
Speaker 1: for this week, my friends, I'm Tony Peterson has been
Speaker 1: the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to
Speaker 1: you by First Light. As I always thank you so
Speaker 1: much for listening and for supporting us here at meat Eater,
Speaker 1: we really appreciate it. If you want more white tail content,
Speaker 1: head on over to our wire to Hunt YouTube channel
Speaker 1: or to the meat eater dot com slash wired and
Speaker 1: you'll get everything you need to be the baddest ask
Speaker 1: deer hunter you could possibly imagine. Maybe