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Speaker 1: gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts,
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Speaker 1: dot com. That's f I R S T L I
Speaker 1: T E dot com for people. Oh no, the show
Speaker 1: is starting right now with this ring. Can it start
Speaker 1: with this ring?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Sounds good dyland Mark Canyon. If he doesn't pick up
Speaker 1: where we keep it, you think, I see? Oh, Mark,
Speaker 1: you know who I'm sitting here with. I have no
Speaker 1: idea you're on you're on the You're not on the air,
Speaker 1: but you know what I mean, you're being recorded. Okay,
Speaker 1: Uh it's me Mark.
Speaker 3: I'm here with doctor Bronson Strickland.
Speaker 1: Hm hm, great guy. And I'm about ready to start
Speaker 1: telling him about the last thing you told me about
Speaker 1: deer in the moon and I and I'm gonna like
Speaker 1: kind of make you look bad. Then I thought that
Speaker 1: that it was a very interesting point I was telling
Speaker 1: you about how you know you and I have argued
Speaker 1: about whether deer are impacted by lunar phases. Yep, you're
Speaker 1: very I mean you're you're very aware of this debate.
Speaker 4: Very aware of it.
Speaker 1: I'm position is, well, I'll tell you what you said
Speaker 1: the last time we talked, Mark, and it was a
Speaker 1: long time ago, and it's stuck in my head, it's
Speaker 1: stuck in my craw you were you were kind of
Speaker 1: hinting at that science can't detect the subtle difference. Is
Speaker 1: that could the subtle, subtle things that could make a
Speaker 1: difference between your success and your failure where you're like,
Speaker 1: if that buck steps out of the woods a minute earlier,
Speaker 1: that could be the difference and science can't find that. Yes,
Speaker 1: So when I say about how you think that, you
Speaker 1: still think that, well, that has been not my position,
Speaker 1: but my.
Speaker 3: No, you didn't put it to me like a question.
Speaker 5: So I've always said that that is the question that
Speaker 5: I feel like science has yet was like, there's all
Speaker 5: these studies that show that cold fronts don't impact movement
Speaker 5: in a statistically significant way, or the moon in many
Speaker 5: different ways has not shown yet to make a statistics
Speaker 5: that's a difference. So I've always been curious though, because
Speaker 5: on when we see that in all the studies. On
Speaker 5: the other hand, you have all these other hunters with
Speaker 5: anecdotal evidence that you.
Speaker 2: Know that says that's not the case.
Speaker 5: And so my question has always been, maybe maybe we're
Speaker 5: just not measuring in the same way or in quite
Speaker 5: the right way to us these tiny.
Speaker 3: Little possible edges that you could get.
Speaker 5: So I'm still like very much on the fence. So
Speaker 5: Steel like, I'm just curious. I'm Moon curious.
Speaker 1: That's how I've always described myself.
Speaker 3: We already talked about you being Moon curious.
Speaker 1: I'm Mark.
Speaker 3: I'm Mark curious.
Speaker 1: Ye know.
Speaker 5: And Bronson has done a really good job of a
Speaker 5: lot of this stuff. So I'm glad you're talking to
Speaker 5: him because he's someone who I listened to a lot
Speaker 5: and uh, and he certainly knows better than I.
Speaker 2: I'm simply a guy with questions.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Remember how I said you're on the air, Mark, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Well you know what I found all was interested ther
Speaker 1: day after the after learning at the other day where
Speaker 1: the FCC start like threatening people for say and stuff
Speaker 1: they didn't like. Yeah, I was like, the FCC has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with podcasts. But then I was like,
Speaker 1: do they the FCC has nothing to do with podcasts?
Speaker 1: Is that a question of statement.
Speaker 3: No, I'm telling you it's true because you're not on
Speaker 3: the air.
Speaker 1: You're not on the air, you're not we're not using
Speaker 1: the air, so we can say like things and the
Speaker 1: FCC won't threaten us and take the show off the air.
Speaker 1: So if they get mad about this lunar phase stuff,
Speaker 1: there's nothing to do about it.
Speaker 5: Saying a lot of crazy stuff about the moon over
Speaker 5: all these years, I would hate to be brought to
Speaker 5: court almose past.
Speaker 1: You can do this the hardware of the easy way mark.
Speaker 1: That's what they say. All right, man, we'll talk to
Speaker 1: you later. Thank you. When the episode comes out, why
Speaker 1: don't you listen and we'll try to find out if
Speaker 1: what you're saying is a thing or not.
Speaker 2: I'm looking forward to.
Speaker 1: As we just said, day goodbye to him. Oh, I
Speaker 1: don't really do that.
Speaker 6: Never, No, not even if it's your wife.
Speaker 1: Definitely not.
Speaker 2: No, that is a of Steve's is it's a it's
Speaker 2: in the name of efficiency that please, thank you, hello, goodbye.
Speaker 2: Once you achieve a certain intimacy with Steve follow in
Speaker 2: this category as well. That those pleasant trees are out
Speaker 2: the window.
Speaker 6: I think, I think that happens to me too, But
Speaker 6: and then I watch it happen to someone else.
Speaker 4: If you really want to.
Speaker 1: If you really want to dig it, I'll take a
Speaker 1: quick break to take this for you. I like there's
Speaker 1: people I talk to. I like the main people in
Speaker 1: my life. I like I talked to him. I like
Speaker 1: to talk to him a lot, so that anytime we
Speaker 1: talk it's only about what we have to talk about.
Speaker 1: The minute I go too long and I haven't talked
Speaker 1: to somebody, then I dread talking to him because we've
Speaker 1: got to do all the parts of talking that I don't.
Speaker 3: Want to do.
Speaker 6: You know what I mean, how's the family?
Speaker 1: So if I keep up like a cadence, like if
Speaker 1: I call it Yanni, I don't need to get into like,
Speaker 1: oh geez, how you been? Is the householding up? Ye know?
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, and like wind up in something
Speaker 1: like that. Yeah.
Speaker 6: I come to expect no small talk.
Speaker 1: So I just like if I call you on and
Speaker 1: like hey blank blank, and he's like blank blank, and
Speaker 1: then we just hang up because we like kept up
Speaker 1: on it and we don't have to do like whatever
Speaker 1: did happen? To your cousin you know I mean or whatever?
Speaker 1: You know what I mean? Like, it's just better that way.
Speaker 1: So I just like to. But I tell my wife
Speaker 1: I love her, and I can always tell how I
Speaker 1: stand with her because I'll do it because I'm just
Speaker 1: trying to find out if she's mad at me about
Speaker 1: something so big I love you and she says I
Speaker 1: love you, then we're cool. If I go I love
Speaker 1: you and she just hangs up the I'm like, oh
Speaker 1: my god, now what now? Okay, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: So that's how I find out if I got it, like,
Speaker 1: if I'm That's how I find out if I'm like
Speaker 1: cool or not. When I go home.
Speaker 3: The longer I've been gone, the less likely I am
Speaker 3: to get the return.
Speaker 1: You know, things get frosty at home. Join Today by
Speaker 1: Doctor Brownson Strickland of University of Mississippi.
Speaker 4: Mississippi State University.
Speaker 1: Is that a big mistake?
Speaker 4: That's a pretty yeah.
Speaker 6: It's not on to make up for say, hot Toddy,
Speaker 6: it's right.
Speaker 3: Where do I see it on?
Speaker 7: Here?
Speaker 6: The bigger?
Speaker 1: Doctor Brownson is the Saint John Family Professor of Wildlife
Speaker 1: Management and the Extension Wildlife Specialist for Mississippi State University.
Speaker 1: And what do you say when you.
Speaker 6: Say that that that's that's another mess up. You've offended
Speaker 6: more Mississippi State folks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what does it mean? Hot?
Speaker 3: Hot like Christmas drinks?
Speaker 6: I do think hatty toddy means anything. It's a different school.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's old. Miss we booze it up.
Speaker 1: Mississippi State University. Did his did his BS degree in
Speaker 1: forest resources in the University of Georgia. Did a master's
Speaker 1: degree Texas A and m Kingsville PhD from Mississippi State University.
Speaker 1: Bronson is the co director of the ms Here's where
Speaker 1: things get interesting. He's a co director of the MSU
Speaker 1: Deer Lab, a certified wild wildlife biologist, and professional member
Speaker 1: of the Boone and Crockett Club. We're this is We're
Speaker 1: here to make this is the most important podcast ever
Speaker 1: ever done. I would say, because this is going to
Speaker 1: be the final answer. This is gonna be we hope. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Dudes out there that are like are they argue about
Speaker 1: like the moon phase? And if I'm talking to Jay Scott,
Speaker 1: We're going to go down to Mexico for Ko's Deer
Speaker 1: And he's talking about what dates to go and he's
Speaker 1: talking about what the moon's doing on those dates. Is
Speaker 1: all of that true or not true? Every old man,
Speaker 1: young man, not even old man, every hunter has an
Speaker 1: opinion about what is the moon doing and how does
Speaker 1: it effect dear movements.
Speaker 6: Jay Scott is one of those guys.
Speaker 3: I don't know where he stands now. Everybody changes.
Speaker 1: I used to just believe it too, because I like, well,
Speaker 1: I used to believe that squirrels, that red squirrels bit
Speaker 1: the nuts off gray squirrels. That's what I was told.
Speaker 2: He will definitely push us one way or another in
Speaker 2: January according to what the Moon's going to be doing.
Speaker 1: When you know, so, I have a lot of I
Speaker 1: have a lot of friends that are lunar guys, moon guys,
Speaker 1: and like, here's the deal. And when we started playing
Speaker 1: It's out, I had a conversation with Krint about it,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, it's not ridiculous, Okay, I mean, what's
Speaker 1: not ridiculous about is look at all the wildlife that
Speaker 1: that absolutely one hundred percent is driven by moonface. Okay,
Speaker 1: Like turtle nesting, like when turtles hatch turtles, like like
Speaker 1: shore nesting turtles that lay eggs, their eggs hatch on
Speaker 1: a new moon. Some species hatch where it's real dark. Okay,
Speaker 1: what are the kind of examples we have? I mean
Speaker 1: there's tons of things, man, fish, tides and fish. Yeah,
Speaker 1: think about it's huge. Well, here here's another one for you.
Speaker 1: I remember they You ever hear the writer Barbara King Salver.
Speaker 1: She had a book called High Tide and Tucson, and
Speaker 1: it was a book of like science writing. Was it
Speaker 1: King Salver? Was it? They took these mollufs and brought
Speaker 1: them to Tucson to a university what what universities in Tucson?
Speaker 1: Camera They took these clams whatever the hell it is asu.
Speaker 1: I believe it was clams. I'm sure it was clams.
Speaker 1: They had these clams in an aquarium and Tucson, and
Speaker 1: they didn't need the ocean to tell them what the
Speaker 1: tide was doing. Their whole groove became tied to their
Speaker 1: whole feeding groove became tied to the moon. And it's
Speaker 1: not even enough, like it's an imperceptible Like the effect
Speaker 1: on an aquarium is like imperceptible, right, But those suckers
Speaker 1: tuned in and stayed on a lunar. They stayed on
Speaker 1: a lunar cycle without even being where there's a giant
Speaker 1: tide swing. Right, they just knew. So it stands the
Speaker 1: reason with all these different creatures migratory birds, right, it
Speaker 1: stands the reason, Like, yeah, the moon impacts stuff. So
Speaker 1: for someone to say that the moon impacts how bucks move,
Speaker 1: it's not crazy.
Speaker 4: It's not like dumb, it's not so Yeah, there is
Speaker 4: a lot of evidence for some species. And I think
Speaker 4: the species you mentioned that does make sense. The gravitational
Speaker 4: pull affecting the tide or moonlight affecting visibility, all that stuff,
Speaker 4: to me makes perfect sense. And I think there's a
Speaker 4: lot of examples in the literature for that and it
Speaker 4: being useful. But what I come back to is, but
Speaker 4: what made it that way? How did the story begin
Speaker 4: for white tail deer? Where has there ever been evidence
Speaker 4: that its influencing whitetail deer except for Paul Paul the
Speaker 4: stories that are passed down from grandfather today, you know,
Speaker 4: and it just becomes part of the story, and it
Speaker 4: makes it fun and it makes it interesting. And humans
Speaker 4: are always looking for patterns, and we're really good at
Speaker 4: looking for patterns even when they don't exist, and so
Speaker 4: it adds I think this element to making it more
Speaker 4: interesting when the bottom line is, in my opinion, I
Speaker 4: think the evidence is very strong they're not influenced by
Speaker 4: the moon whatsoever. And then you think about the natural
Speaker 4: history of deer and you start asking your question, why
Speaker 4: would they be.
Speaker 3: Uh, something to do with visibility.
Speaker 1: Well, like in reading like historic texts, you'll often find
Speaker 1: people pre flashlight and stuff, people traveling by horse. You
Speaker 1: read historic text you'll often find people planning trips to
Speaker 1: have their trip coincide with a full moon for better
Speaker 1: nighttime travel.
Speaker 3: So I used to think I'm the deer thing.
Speaker 1: I'm like, maybe just historically, when it's a full moon
Speaker 1: and you're out at night, because there's more light, you
Speaker 1: become aware of deer around you, so you can see
Speaker 1: you can see them, and so you think in your head,
Speaker 1: maybe you wind up thinking. Maybe people wind up thinking
Speaker 1: when there's a full moon, the deer out.
Speaker 4: They're always out just because you seeing them.
Speaker 1: And so you're like, I'm out because I'm out traveling
Speaker 1: at night because it's a full moon, I can see
Speaker 1: I see deer because it's a full moon, and therefore
Speaker 1: I don't know. People land on on that idea that
Speaker 1: that's a wild I'm like, I'm grasping at straws big,
Speaker 1: where did that come from? But but I like, like
Speaker 1: probably the other guys in the room you can like,
Speaker 1: I'd love to hear Yanni and Spencer like, how if
Speaker 1: you can remember where it come from, where your idea
Speaker 1: about this came from? And then and then and then
Speaker 1: doctor Stricklan, I'd love to hear when you guys did
Speaker 1: the survey, if you could talk about how eighty three
Speaker 1: eighty three percent of hunter of surveyed hunters, eighty three
Speaker 1: percent agree it affects moon, the moon affects deer movement.
Speaker 1: What they don't agree on is why and how right right,
Speaker 1: They don't agree on like what it does, how it
Speaker 1: does it, but they believe it does something. But do
Speaker 1: you remember, Yanni?
Speaker 2: Sure, I would say for me it didn't really come
Speaker 2: down generationally it wasn't because basically for me growing up
Speaker 2: before I came out West and started hunting professional, really
Speaker 2: it was maybe five to ten days of archery in Michigan,
Speaker 2: two or three days of shotgun, and then I'd get
Speaker 2: three days of rifle in Wisconsin. That was like my
Speaker 2: entire big game hunting year. So we're gonna be hunting
Speaker 2: no matter what. Those days you know.
Speaker 1: You never got I'll take an opening day off this year.
Speaker 1: I'm not hunting the opener because the looter phase just
Speaker 1: no way, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. And my dad just never got into it
Speaker 2: to that level either, which is where I would have
Speaker 2: got it. So I just started learning about it once
Speaker 2: I started reading hunting magazines.
Speaker 1: And doing research on my own, and you would encounter it,
Speaker 1: yeah as fat Yeah, I would say that.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 2: Where I felt like it actually played a part in
Speaker 2: my hunting was that when I was an elkhunting guy
Speaker 2: in Colorado, usually the second rifle season would coincide with
Speaker 2: the pretty big moon. It would also coincide a lot
Speaker 2: of times with some warmer weather, extreme amount of hunting pressure,
Speaker 2: and it was always our hardest week of hunting. Would
Speaker 2: still kill some olt, but man, it was always our
Speaker 2: hardest week. So a lot a lot of factors that
Speaker 2: play there, but it always would seem like that week
Speaker 2: would also have a big moon, And in my mind
Speaker 2: it was like, of course, they're just up all night
Speaker 2: feeding and by the time we get to the meadow
Speaker 2: half an hour before daylight, they're long gone.
Speaker 1: They're you know in bed. That's the version I was
Speaker 1: raised on. Yeah, I was raised on, but again I
Speaker 1: was raised on a full moon. They feed all night,
Speaker 1: so they don't need to feed in the daylight hours.
Speaker 1: But it had zero It was just an observation. It
Speaker 1: was an observation, but it did not dictate your dictate
Speaker 1: your habits. Right. It was like you had a two
Speaker 1: week gun season, you were gonna hunt, you know whatever.
Speaker 1: We weren't like going out or not going out based
Speaker 1: on it, But it was just like you'd be like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's too bad that there's a full moon on the opener.
Speaker 1: They'll be out.
Speaker 6: Less because they convenient excuse, or if you're successful, you
Speaker 6: did it in spite of a full moon, Like damn?
Speaker 1: Was that your awareness of what the moon was doing.
Speaker 6: I think when I was a kid, there was a
Speaker 6: communal anti full moon take from like the deer hunters
Speaker 6: in my area, and it was just a very rudimentary
Speaker 6: understanding of like what moon, what moon phase would do
Speaker 6: to deer movement. And it was like today and I
Speaker 6: feel like in the last twenty years, there will be
Speaker 6: very like hyper specific moments of the moon that are
Speaker 6: good or bad for deer movement. It's like if a
Speaker 6: new moon is rising under in the morning, Like that's
Speaker 6: a thing people will say when I was a kid
Speaker 6: that it was just like full moon bad, and it was.
Speaker 6: It was not that they were up feeding all night.
Speaker 6: It was that they were chasing tail all night. So
Speaker 6: they were tired. They were like exhausted come first light.
Speaker 6: And so now you're actually going to get some movements
Speaker 6: like late morning, early afternoon, and so that is like
Speaker 6: a stronger time to be in the woods, or it's
Speaker 6: now as good as the morning or the evening. That's
Speaker 6: like a take.
Speaker 1: Can you hit me that again?
Speaker 6: If if it's a full.
Speaker 1: Moon, since he's been chasing does all chasing does.
Speaker 6: All night, he can see things so well, it's like
Speaker 6: it's not that no one even turned the lights off tonight,
Speaker 6: you know they can. They can chase them all through
Speaker 6: the hardwoods, all out in the cornfields. So now they're
Speaker 6: tired come sunrise at seven thirty am, so they're just
Speaker 6: bedded down somewhere already got it. But now they're getting
Speaker 6: a little restless come like eleven am, and so they're
Speaker 6: gonna be on their feet a little more from that
Speaker 6: eleven am to one pm. Period kind of unorthodox. It's
Speaker 6: been so long, yes, yep, and then you know, now
Speaker 6: it's really thrown off his schedule, and that that like movement,
Speaker 6: it's probably not going to be as good for like
Speaker 6: that last you know, thirty minutes of shooting light either,
Speaker 6: because his whole schedule's just off at this point.
Speaker 2: You know, what's coming coming to my mind is like that.
Speaker 2: We always think about how the full moon would be
Speaker 2: beneficial to these animals, right, like they can chase mortel
Speaker 2: or they can feed better all night long. Right, but
Speaker 2: they're prey animals, so like really the wolves can see
Speaker 2: them better, the coyotes can see them better.
Speaker 1: Let's hear from the experts. Okay, let's start out. Tell
Speaker 1: us about your survey. We just we just gave you
Speaker 1: three really read Yeah, we just gave you two of
Speaker 1: the things that are floating around out there. But tell
Speaker 1: tell us about the survey he did.
Speaker 4: Okay, So before I get tops, so we did a
Speaker 4: a buck movement project for a complete dealy different reason.
Speaker 4: And so seven or eight years ago, I thought, uh, well,
Speaker 4: this is going to be a great opportunity. We have
Speaker 4: all these daily movement rates, and so I'm going to
Speaker 4: tinker with this, real simple analyses. I'm gonna take these
Speaker 4: daily movement rates averaged for the population day by day
Speaker 4: by day and daytime movements nighttime movements, and it was
Speaker 4: very apparent that when you plotted that from September all
Speaker 4: the way to six weeks, two months or a month
Speaker 4: plus post rut, all the variation in movement was apparent.
Speaker 4: Is the rut, there is the right difference in daytime
Speaker 4: movement nighttime movement. So so here we go. I'm gonna
Speaker 4: put this on Facebook. So on top of that movement graph,
Speaker 4: I plotted the oscillation of full moon, new moon, full
Speaker 4: moon new and had those superimposed on each other. And
Speaker 4: so you can see that from from the phase of
Speaker 4: the moon from new to full in that period there's
Speaker 4: a little there's no variation in deer movement whatsoever. And
Speaker 4: so I put it out there on Facebook. Appears to me,
Speaker 4: you know, the biology and and the science is very
Speaker 4: clear that that there's nothing going on with the moon phase.
Speaker 4: What state Mississippi?
Speaker 3: Yeah, come on.
Speaker 2: This is the thing, people, this is a.
Speaker 6: Thing you will yeah, okay, they will to be like,
Speaker 6: well you didn't study the deer in Wisconsin.
Speaker 1: Well, what the typical things you can't win. You can't win.
Speaker 4: They won't even say in my state it will be
Speaker 4: but my deer, yes.
Speaker 1: And so the fact I got I got it because
Speaker 1: one thing that you got I never encountered it before.
Speaker 1: So when you're talking about that, you're graphic movement. Can
Speaker 1: you is this the yards per hour? Which great? M okay,
Speaker 1: keep explaining that to people, like when you say, like
Speaker 1: you're measuring movement, like, what what does that mean?
Speaker 4: What's the metric? Yeah, yeah, we typically do yards per
Speaker 4: day or yards per hour. That that's the measurement, and
Speaker 4: that's from the sequential GPS locations, So we're getting a
Speaker 4: location from them every fifteen minutes and so it's just
Speaker 4: the sum of that over whatever period of time and
Speaker 4: you come up with a rate of movement from that.
Speaker 4: So put that out there and a couple of people
Speaker 4: where yeah, I knew nothing was going on with this.
Speaker 4: What's but the overwhelming response was this guy's an idiot?
Speaker 1: Me this guy sure?
Speaker 4: And that has nothing to do with the moon phase.
Speaker 4: That's what Grandpa talked about. What was moon phase. It's
Speaker 4: moon position. It's the so lunar aspect of it. That
Speaker 4: that's what's driving it. So it's what time of the
Speaker 4: day is the moon overhead underfoot? Setting things like that,
Speaker 4: where is the moon on the horizon, and the supposed
Speaker 4: gravitational pull and how that might be impacting. That is
Speaker 4: what got people interested in that. So that was all
Speaker 4: the deal. And I didn't have any data at that
Speaker 4: point to refute it, so I just tucked that away
Speaker 4: like this just.
Speaker 1: Another eggheaded college guy about the mood.
Speaker 4: Yeah, a lot worse than that, but yeah. And so
Speaker 4: that data set sat there and we you know, I
Speaker 4: was holding that we got to do this, We've got
Speaker 4: to do something more sophisticated. And I was very lucky
Speaker 4: to have a coworker, a research analyst at POSTOCU named
Speaker 4: Natasha Ellison. She has a PhD in mathematics, so undergraduate
Speaker 4: masters PhD and mathematics with the application to biology and
Speaker 4: movement ecology, and she actually tinkered with quantum mechanics for
Speaker 4: her master's degree. One of her famous statements is the
Speaker 4: math really wasn't that challenging for physics and quantum mechanics
Speaker 4: with their master's degree. So she's at the tip of
Speaker 4: the spear and understanding how to disentangle all this and uh,
Speaker 4: I'm sure she chuckled and rolled her eyes when I
Speaker 4: told her, it's like, Natasha.
Speaker 3: We got a problem with Bucks.
Speaker 4: We gotta we gotta do. We've got an opportunity and
Speaker 4: this is going to be something No other academic is
Speaker 4: going to spend this amount of time and emotion going
Speaker 4: into this life. But we've got a real opportunity to do,
Speaker 4: hopefully to do something special. And so she analyzed it
Speaker 4: at a way a level of detail that had never
Speaker 4: been done before. And so, but when we were digging
Speaker 4: into that, and when we were trying to figure out
Speaker 4: what we're gonna do, how we're gonna do it, et cetera,
Speaker 4: we thought, you know, what, we need to do a survey.
Speaker 4: We need to we need to figure out what what
Speaker 4: people think and what are their expectations from If there
Speaker 4: is a moon effect, how big is it? And so
Speaker 4: we use the term in science called effect size, and
Speaker 4: so is something statistically significant or not? That's what people
Speaker 4: hear all the time. So it's really not as important
Speaker 4: as effect size. Effect size just means the difference between
Speaker 4: the treatment and the control. You get a one percent increase,
Speaker 4: fifty percent increase, one hundred percent increase. That is what's
Speaker 4: the most important people. So we did survey and got
Speaker 4: to say this, this was not a sociology sanctioned, sophisticated
Speaker 4: survey and that department. This was the MSU dear lab
Speaker 4: us doing social media survey and just saying, hey, all
Speaker 4: you people out there, what do you think about this?
Speaker 4: So what came back was yet eighty three percent eighty
Speaker 4: three percent of the people that responded thought the moon
Speaker 4: is affecting deer movement in some way. And then a
Speaker 4: subset of that, which was always more than half. You say, okay,
Speaker 4: if it is affecting deer movement by how much and
Speaker 4: the effect size they reported or the differences they reported
Speaker 4: for something like betting, the difference in bedding was at
Speaker 4: a minimum, they're on their feet thirty minutes earlier, or
Speaker 4: they're on their feet up to two hours earlier. The
Speaker 4: moon is stimulating them to get up out of their
Speaker 4: bed two hours earlier. The distance that they were moving
Speaker 4: in terms of velocity was always at least fifty yards
Speaker 4: per hour, two greater than two hundred yards per hour.
Speaker 4: So these people that are believing the moon is stimulating movement,
Speaker 4: they're all in God, Yeah, they're different animals under a
Speaker 4: specified moon condition.
Speaker 2: Ronson Were those respondents were they all from that general
Speaker 2: area in Mississippi or were they nationwide?
Speaker 4: Nationwide?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Nationwide?
Speaker 1: Certainly.
Speaker 7: Was there a specific concentration among you know, was twenty
Speaker 7: five percent although nationwide twenty five percent respondents from like
Speaker 7: Texas or.
Speaker 4: So difficult for us to tell because that was I
Speaker 4: can't remember it was Facebook or Instagram and you might
Speaker 4: be able to disentangle that. I can't.
Speaker 1: When they did the survey and you had eighty three
Speaker 1: percent say that it did something, was it did you
Speaker 1: find that there was a lot of that they had
Speaker 1: contradictory opinions, meaning some people thought they moved earlier, people
Speaker 1: thought they moved later, or did you find like was
Speaker 1: let me put it a different way instead of exploring
Speaker 1: all the exceptions, what if you had to synthesize it
Speaker 1: and make it that like the general impression was what
Speaker 1: among survey people?
Speaker 4: So during the day they betted less, meaning they're on
Speaker 4: their feet more. They are on their feet if you're
Speaker 4: thinking about an afternoon movement, about they're on their feet earlier,
Speaker 4: and when they are moving they are moving at a
Speaker 4: greater rate of speed. All of that which would result
Speaker 4: in greater observability.
Speaker 3: When there's what happening with the moon.
Speaker 4: Name it.
Speaker 1: Oh, okay, so it's an idea that there's more movement,
Speaker 1: but there's But like the general conception is, the general
Speaker 1: perception is that what depending on what the moon is doing,
Speaker 1: it drives more movement. But there's not a lot of
Speaker 1: a there's not a lot of agreement about what the
Speaker 1: moon needs to be doing to drive more movement. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not like a it's not like a full.
Speaker 3: Moon gives more dear movement.
Speaker 1: People might disagree about the detail, but something happens and
Speaker 1: there's more movement based on the moon. I'm not doing
Speaker 1: a very good job of articulate.
Speaker 4: There is a moon situation for every person and their
Speaker 4: pet hypothesis for when I want to go hunt. Okay,
Speaker 4: it's either I'm going to go with the moon overhead
Speaker 4: or the moon underfoot, or the moon is setting or rising,
Speaker 4: or it's a full moon, or we're in the perigy
Speaker 4: or apogee because of the gravitation, it's closer or it's
Speaker 4: further away. Every single day you can pull out a
Speaker 4: scenario of what the moon is doing.
Speaker 1: Got it?
Speaker 3: And but whatever that is, it's driving movement. No, it's
Speaker 3: not you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: No, No, in their mind, yeah, and they're sold and
Speaker 1: then and then in their mind yeah, in the mind
Speaker 1: of a And I'm not trying to dog on them
Speaker 1: like in the mind of because, like I said, I
Speaker 1: used to I used to think there was something to it.
Speaker 1: Is it fair to say that that people that believe
Speaker 1: it also believe that there's like the opposite effect. Meaning
Speaker 1: let's say you're a full moon or like you're a
Speaker 1: full moon guy, You're a full moon guy, Like I
Speaker 1: see more deer movement at a full moon? Do they do?
Speaker 3: They usually then believe.
Speaker 1: That there is a opposite effect, So a new moon
Speaker 1: equals yes, an extreme on the other example, like much
Speaker 1: less movement.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's the reason the deer weren't moving today.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because of the opposite gotcha. So it's not just
Speaker 1: it creates a spike, but it's sort of this like
Speaker 1: trend that moves in and out.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it has a top and bottom. Ya, a
Speaker 4: spike and then a suppression. Yeah, God during daylight hours.
Speaker 4: And that's what we focused on. What hunters are going
Speaker 4: to see?
Speaker 6: What did your study find that did impact deer movement
Speaker 6: just the rut.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so crepuscular periods. So nothing supersedes this, Nothing comes
Speaker 4: even close to superseding sun up and sundown and the rut.
Speaker 4: There is a subtle, subtle effect of temperature, and that
Speaker 4: is what Natasha, It's really complicated in this multivariate all
Speaker 4: these variables are interacting, but there is a subtle effect
Speaker 4: of temperature. Meaning in our neck of the woods it
Speaker 4: would be different up Nora, uh huh, and our neck
Speaker 4: of the woods, when you start getting sub forty degrees,
Speaker 4: we will see a little bit more higher of a
Speaker 4: movement rate during daylight hours.
Speaker 6: I feel like you're saying that is like the hottest
Speaker 6: take a dear biologist has ever had on deer temperature movement.
Speaker 6: And yeah, yeah, deer movement based on tempera.
Speaker 4: Well, this is the guy right here that said for
Speaker 4: more than a decade, it had nothing to do. We
Speaker 4: do not see any signature whatsoever of temperature. But it
Speaker 4: took more data, and it took the right type of
Speaker 4: person analytically to tease apart very very subtle differences, a
Speaker 4: skill set that I didn't have.
Speaker 1: Yeah, can you lay out you do the survey, and
Speaker 1: then you got to start pulling data, like the surveys
Speaker 1: just kind of a.
Speaker 3: Side project to see where you're at.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so to go get a definitive picture of this.
Speaker 1: What are you doing? Like how many deer are you monitoring?
Speaker 1: How do you monitor the deer? Like what is the
Speaker 1: sort of scale of the project?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so, yeah, this is one thing we wanted to
Speaker 4: do different and probably one of the issues in the past,
Speaker 4: including the stuff I did in the past, is treating
Speaker 4: the population as the population and not looking at individuals.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of individual variation and buck movements. Some
Speaker 4: of them are homebodies, some of them have very disjointed
Speaker 4: home ranges that we call a mobile buck personality home range.
Speaker 4: Some of them move a whole bunch, some of them
Speaker 4: don't move a lot. So we don't want to just
Speaker 4: put all of that together and come up with an average.
Speaker 4: We want to be able to look at every single
Speaker 4: buck and what is his movement profile, and then look
Speaker 4: at when you evaluate all these different moon conditions, is
Speaker 4: the buck's behavior movement behavior deviating from the norm that buck.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're looking at I see like what is he?
Speaker 1: What is it buck a or buck.
Speaker 3: One twenty one?
Speaker 1: What is buck one? Twenty one's normal groove. That's right,
Speaker 1: and then how does Buck one twenty one's groove switch
Speaker 1: at the moon?
Speaker 4: That's right?
Speaker 1: And then Buck one twenty eight, same thing. And one
Speaker 1: of those bucks might be like a dude who likes
Speaker 1: to cruise, and one of those bucks might be a
Speaker 1: dude who likes to stay home.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So the guy that cruises, does he cruise more?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 3: There is a stay of home guy cruse more?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah.
Speaker 4: And so Natasha went through and so for every single buck,
Speaker 4: she created a fourteen day window. So this is a
Speaker 4: moving window. And so for every fourteen days, she looked
Speaker 4: at the seven days prior seven days and it uh
Speaker 4: behind and calculated for every single hour of the day.
Speaker 4: So for this buck at ten am, she has a
Speaker 4: movement profile of what the average response for that buck
Speaker 4: will be at ten am, calibrated for the prior seven
Speaker 4: days and the future seven days. And so when we
Speaker 4: have some moon alignment or phase or whatever, we then
Speaker 4: look at does that buck's ten am movement pattern deviate
Speaker 4: because of the moon. And so then you do the
Speaker 4: sum of those deviations for every single buck that is
Speaker 4: in the population to come up with a mean response
Speaker 4: and that's how we are able to work through A
Speaker 4: Saturday occurred, big hunting day, a Saturday, the rut occurred.
Speaker 4: It was a really warm period, we had a really
Speaker 4: a cold front. By doing that and having a moving
Speaker 4: average for every single buck, you account for all the
Speaker 4: extraneous noise. Sure that can be going on.
Speaker 1: Huh okay, off the moon because now just you brought
Speaker 1: it up a Saturday, a lot of guys hunting. You
Speaker 1: mentioned it crepuscular period. So sunrise, sunset impacts, the rot impacts,
Speaker 1: temperature impacts.
Speaker 3: Pressure's got to make them not move, right, sure?
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, so that's true.
Speaker 4: I think it's less about it's not that they're not moving,
Speaker 4: it is where they choose to move based on hunting pressure.
Speaker 4: And so in another study that we did conducted in Oklahoma,
Speaker 4: we and that was set up differently. So that was
Speaker 4: a treatment area where there was hunting pressure and treatment
Speaker 4: area too heavy hunting pressure, and a control area. And
Speaker 4: in those places the deer were collared, the hunters were
Speaker 4: collared carrying a GPSHW and so could we could monitor
Speaker 4: where they were going on the landscape and so forth.
Speaker 4: Then we're watching the bucks be able to move around them,
Speaker 4: and it literally took three to four days, and three
Speaker 4: to four days of there are hunters on the landscape,
Speaker 4: it changed. Something is different. Their the bucks movement behavior changed,
Speaker 4: not as much as total distance moved during the day,
Speaker 4: but where they went on the landscape. And the academic
Speaker 4: term is called their tortuosity, meaning the complexity of their
Speaker 4: movement path changed. That we think was because they had
Speaker 4: to avoid all these different places on the landscape that
Speaker 4: they had three to four days of info was going
Speaker 4: to be associated with hunting in danger.
Speaker 1: Oh but his yards per hour, his his yards per
Speaker 1: stay up, stay consistent.
Speaker 4: In that experiment. Yeah. Yeah, their movement behavior really didn't
Speaker 4: change other than the tortuosity and where they went. So quote,
Speaker 4: they did not go nocturnal. They were still on their
Speaker 4: feet because they got eat They're on their feet, they're forging.
Speaker 4: They're just going to areas where they determine there's not
Speaker 4: going to be hunting pressure, no evidence, no memory of
Speaker 4: human activity.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Old Lady Thompson's house, you know, doesn't let anybody hunt.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I was just telling my buddy Seth. We
Speaker 2: came out of the woods after we killed the bull.
Speaker 2: I was telling you about earlier. The next night dead,
Speaker 2: not that it was on fire the night before. I've
Speaker 2: only heard like four or five bugles before that bull died.
Speaker 2: But the next evening we hear like a bugle. It's
Speaker 2: just just dead, still quiet. And I'm remarking to my
Speaker 2: buddy's seth. I'm like, yeah, it was kind of hot,
Speaker 2: no wind. You know, it's just like, you know, they
Speaker 2: don't want to run when they got that big winter codeon.
Speaker 2: He goes, well, where I was at yesterday, We're the
Speaker 2: lasting a big herd out in a private hayfield and
Speaker 2: at four thirty they are ripping. Yeah, you know.
Speaker 1: So it's like, yeah, they found a good place to
Speaker 1: go exactly. Yeah, they're going to do their thing. Huh.
Speaker 1: So the going nocturnal from pressure, they just go do
Speaker 1: what they.
Speaker 3: Want to do somewhere else.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, they just changed their behavior on where they
Speaker 4: spend time. Now, I will say this, there have been
Speaker 4: cases at the deer conference we go to, you know
Speaker 4: every year, there have act there have been some cases
Speaker 4: with GPS or VHF collared bucks where in heavily heavily
Speaker 4: hunted places, a buckbedded all day long. But I literally, Steve,
Speaker 4: I remember that one time. In the thirty years i've
Speaker 4: been going and learning about deer and thinking, I've heard
Speaker 4: of one instance where objectively a buck had a mark,
Speaker 4: a radio caller on it or a GPS collar, and
Speaker 4: it did not move during daylight hours because hunting pressure
Speaker 4: was all around God and all these other instances. They're
Speaker 4: up on their feet and moving. Now they may not be.
Speaker 4: You have to look at what's called the step length,
Speaker 4: the movement path. So step length is a surrogate for velocity.
Speaker 4: So if you're getting a ping from that collar every
Speaker 4: fifteen minutes, if he's got a really high rate of speed,
Speaker 4: you're going to cover more distance in fifteen minutes. And
Speaker 4: so what you will see is that their yards per
Speaker 4: hour can slow down, but they're still on their feet
Speaker 4: and they're foraging and moving.
Speaker 3: The other day, we were watching a bull moose.
Speaker 1: Doing his like rut wander, and he was going through
Speaker 1: this big alpine area and we watched them, I mean,
Speaker 1: we watched him go a couple miles fast, and we're
Speaker 1: waiting for him to stop. He was so far away
Speaker 1: where like, well, when he stops, we'll try to call
Speaker 1: and see if he registers the noise at all. We
Speaker 1: watched him go a couple of miles and never stopped once,
Speaker 1: just moving, just cruising, and you're like, where what you know,
Speaker 1: what is his concept of where he's going? But just
Speaker 1: moving and yeah, he's not afraid of anything. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: not afraid of anything.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Whitetail hunters have this time period between October ten
Speaker 6: October twenty they refer to as the October Law. And
Speaker 6: if you were to if you lived in a state
Speaker 6: where the deer season is September one to December thirty,
Speaker 6: first they would tell you that is the hardest ten
Speaker 6: day stretch to kill a buck because they're nocturnal. What
Speaker 6: are your movement studies say about that?
Speaker 4: There is no lull that that does does not exist.
Speaker 6: Not in any form. Like they're not only are they
Speaker 6: not nocturnal during that period, but they're also like they're
Speaker 6: moving more in that period than they were October one
Speaker 6: to October Tenen.
Speaker 4: I can't say they're moving more, but they're moving. And
Speaker 4: this is just sit in the Mississippi State data here.
Speaker 4: This is over and over again that there is no law.
Speaker 4: But what can be going on at that time is
Speaker 4: you have got a shuffling, so to speak. It's a
Speaker 4: little bit late in October. So think about bachelor groups
Speaker 4: during the summer box low testosterone velvet, and then we
Speaker 4: get into September October, testosterone is surging through their body again.
Speaker 4: They start getting into hard antler and then they start
Speaker 4: shifting and moving around and setting up their fall winter
Speaker 4: rut home ranges. So I think what's going on a
Speaker 4: lot there is you've had a couple months or a
Speaker 4: couple weeks of seeing the deer that you're normally seeing,
Speaker 4: and then you get into that period in October where
Speaker 4: a shuffle is coming and so they're moving in different
Speaker 4: areas or they have left your area where your trail
Speaker 4: camera is at, but they're still moving.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I think like if I was speaking to hunters in
Speaker 6: eastern South Dakota where I grew up, I bet they
Speaker 6: are seeing less movement in that period. But it's because
Speaker 6: now there's combines in the fields. It's because there are
Speaker 6: acorns on the ground. It's because pheasant season just opened
Speaker 6: and that's kicked deer out of some beds. In CRP
Speaker 6: like that, there is a lull happening that's very specific
Speaker 6: to them, but it's not because the buck is now nocturnal.
Speaker 6: It's because he's just moving in a different way in
Speaker 6: a different place.
Speaker 3: You're in a strategic.
Speaker 1: Low, yes, where like all summer, these five bucks come
Speaker 1: into that beanfield and all of a sudden they're not
Speaker 1: there anymore.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And I think it can be true that that's
Speaker 6: like maybe the hardest ten day window to kill a
Speaker 6: mature buck. But it's not because he's unkillable.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he's just in a different place. Yeah, you got
Speaker 4: to go look for him. Now Here's us really interesting
Speaker 4: to me is we we looked at So we had
Speaker 4: to have deer where we had to have two years
Speaker 4: of them being collared. So we had a lot of
Speaker 4: deer come and go, you know, why is.
Speaker 3: That that you had Why two years? What's the significance.
Speaker 4: Because the question, like Spencer was alluding to, is do
Speaker 4: they have fidelity for a site the following year? So
Speaker 4: if you see it in a particular place this October,
Speaker 4: what are the odds you're going to see it next year?
Speaker 4: So we had to limit our data just to bucks
Speaker 4: that so it's a subset of that that we had
Speaker 4: two years of data and it was really amazing. Is
Speaker 4: that on the average when you got to after that
Speaker 4: October kind of break up and shuffling, and when they
Speaker 4: went back and started settling into that area, the average
Speaker 4: distance on a daily scale. And so what we did is,
Speaker 4: where is this buck at five pm October ninth, twenty
Speaker 4: twenty four. Where is it at October ninth, five pm,
Speaker 4: twenty twenty five? About a thousand yards apart?
Speaker 1: Is that right?
Speaker 4: About a thousand yards apart?
Speaker 1: See, if you're hunting ten ac or parcels, that's a lot.
Speaker 4: And that could absolutely be off property and you may
Speaker 4: never see it again. But he's in the neighborhood. If
Speaker 4: he's alive, he's in the neighborhood.
Speaker 1: Yeah. God.
Speaker 6: I used to work with a lot of fish biologists,
Speaker 6: and I found that there were equal number of fish
Speaker 6: biologists who were hardcore anglers as there were guys who
Speaker 6: never fished a day a year, like they just literally
Speaker 6: never wed a line. And I found that they would
Speaker 6: ask very different questions when it came to what they
Speaker 6: were studying. What do you notice for what percentage of
Speaker 6: dear biologists are hardcore hunters? These guys who just like
Speaker 6: never fill a tag?
Speaker 1: Good question, are.
Speaker 6: You a big hunter?
Speaker 4: I am? I am?
Speaker 6: Which do you think that's normal.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I do. I guess hardcore is a scale,
Speaker 4: you know, I would say probably seventy five percent. There
Speaker 4: are absolutely some that love deer and just ungulates, you know,
Speaker 4: and study that type of stuff, that aren't big hunters.
Speaker 4: But I would say on the white tail side, at
Speaker 4: least the ones I'm thinking about off the top of
Speaker 4: my head, they all hunt.
Speaker 6: Until like that twenty five percent. You don't think those
Speaker 6: folks hunt at all?
Speaker 4: Probably not, okay. I think they're enamored with the deer
Speaker 4: and ecology of it. The system really excites them. Yeah,
Speaker 4: But then picking up our bow or rifle just in
Speaker 4: their things.
Speaker 6: And do you notice anything different with like those biologies? Yeah,
Speaker 6: the questions okay.
Speaker 4: The questions I asked typically that type of part and
Speaker 4: this isn't good or bad, it's just different.
Speaker 6: But I think it needs both, like the field needs
Speaker 6: both of those.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, right. I would say they're more the theory
Speaker 4: type of stuff, which is really important ecological grounding in theory.
Speaker 4: And then people like me is more about the application,
Speaker 4: and you know, my roles extension. So then what's the application?
Speaker 4: How do I tell people about it? What does it
Speaker 4: mean to you for hunting? Your land or managing your land.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to hit you with a bunch of
Speaker 1: once we cover off on them. We sold this pretty
Speaker 1: heavy on the moon thing. But let's let's put the
Speaker 1: moon thing to bed. So I want to get into
Speaker 1: other things that drive I want to get into other
Speaker 1: things that drive changes of movement and other things about
Speaker 1: Like you mentioned that different deer have different personalities. I'd
Speaker 1: love to hear more about that. Let's close out on
Speaker 1: this moon thing for a little bit out put some
Speaker 1: numbers to us, or put some way of expressing the
Speaker 1: how much which you can rule out and how much
Speaker 1: could still be up for grabs. Meaning Mark thing is like, hey, listen,
Speaker 1: if a buck comes out. If I'm watching a buck
Speaker 1: and I can't catch him out in the daylight and
Speaker 1: he comes out five minutes early because of the moonface,
Speaker 1: that's a big deal to me.
Speaker 3: Are they catching that in the research?
Speaker 1: You know? That was his question, right, like, when they're
Speaker 1: looking at these general things, like they generally don't change
Speaker 1: their behavior. But he says, but let's say it's just
Speaker 1: five minutes, right, That to me matters, Like when you
Speaker 1: look at it, how like what degree of certainty are
Speaker 1: you comfortable putting on that there is there isn't any
Speaker 1: impact because you're always going to have guys that are like,
Speaker 1: he doesn't know what he's talking about, yeah, yeah, or
Speaker 1: he's not detecting what I'm seeing because I'm seeing things
Speaker 1: at a micro scale and he's looking to macro.
Speaker 4: And I don't ever think we can produce anything that's
Speaker 4: going to affect that person. So when you get in
Speaker 4: got feedback from people, and this was part when we
Speaker 4: when we reached out initially doing this survey. We had
Speaker 4: and I would call them the saddle bow hunter. I
Speaker 4: mean they are just locked in. They they're trying to
Speaker 4: hunt close to cover. And so if if that buck
Speaker 4: is walking out thirty seconds earlier and five more steps,
Speaker 4: I got a shot.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 4: So what we looked at is, of course, like we
Speaker 4: explained earlier deviation from normal. We did eighty five different analyzes,
Speaker 4: so we we made eighty five different comparisons of all
Speaker 4: the different moon stuff you can put together. And the
Speaker 4: the average response for bedding time deviations were less than
Speaker 4: a minute. A couple of them were two or three minutes.
Speaker 4: But and not to get too deep in the stats here,
Speaker 4: when you run that many analyzes you're gonna you're gonna
Speaker 4: hear your results are gonna follow a bell shaped curve.
Speaker 4: You're gonna get some results that were positive. You're gonna
Speaker 4: get some results that were negative. And so when you
Speaker 4: look at the body of everything that we did, we
Speaker 4: had a couple instances where the deer were on their
Speaker 4: feet a few seconds earlier, maybe a minute earlier. We
Speaker 4: had some results where they stayed in their bed a
Speaker 4: few seconds or a minute longer. We had some results
Speaker 4: where the yard per hour and so think about that.
Speaker 4: Put that in your terms. My pace, one of my steps.
Speaker 1: Is a yard.
Speaker 4: And so when you talk about, yeah, we found a
Speaker 4: big result on such and such a moon condition, they
Speaker 4: were moving three yards per hour more. That's three steps
Speaker 4: and one hour three steps. Now, if that motivates you,
Speaker 4: and that does get back when I'm given this as
Speaker 4: a seminar and people are ready to throw beer cans
Speaker 4: and rotten tomatoes and all that stuff at me. If
Speaker 4: it makes you feel good, man, if this is your
Speaker 4: placebo effect, yeah, roll with it. If it instills more
Speaker 4: confidence in you, that's such and such moon condition, and
Speaker 4: I'm gonna be more alert and I'm gonna get to
Speaker 4: the stand thirty minutes earlier, because this is a red
Speaker 4: moon day. You know, then, by God, keep doing it
Speaker 4: if it makes you happy, but the evidence does not
Speaker 4: support it.
Speaker 6: In college, I would get the field in Stream magazine
Speaker 6: and they would always predict the rut, the best days
Speaker 6: of the rut. And I think it was maybe a
Speaker 6: sophomore and I had saw that, like, the best day
Speaker 6: of the rut this year was on a Saturday. I
Speaker 6: was available, So I did what you're talking about. I
Speaker 6: sat in my best stand that day that I had
Speaker 6: saved for a week leading up to it because I
Speaker 6: knew it was the best day of the rut. I
Speaker 6: got there earlier, I packed lunch to be there all day.
Speaker 6: I was more alert because I was like, it's going
Speaker 6: to happen. And then a buck showed up and the
Speaker 6: killed him, and so I was just more confidence and
Speaker 6: I was a better hunter. That day was going to
Speaker 6: optimistic and so that that I think that that can
Speaker 6: work for people.
Speaker 4: That can be a thing, and keep doing it. If
Speaker 4: it keeps working for you, keep doing it, keep taking
Speaker 4: the placebo. Placebo effect is really really powerful. There's some
Speaker 4: cool science behind that as well. Sure, but yeah, you
Speaker 4: took the words out of my mouth. But I wonder
Speaker 4: if you had gone five additional times under those exact
Speaker 4: same conditions and you didn't have a good day.
Speaker 6: Totally, if you remember the good ones, then I was like,
Speaker 6: it was because this was the best day of the rut,
Speaker 6: as Field and Stream had deemed it. You know, looking
Speaker 6: back now and since I've like formed my own white
Speaker 6: tail opinions, I recognized I was just very confident that day.
Speaker 4: And Field and that was throughout the range of the
Speaker 4: white tailed deer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but this was going to be the day.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yep, yeah, so that should totally. I got one
Speaker 6: more moon question before we move on. Charles Allsheimer he
Speaker 6: had developed like the rutting moon theory in the nineties
Speaker 6: that caught on with a lot of guys, and the
Speaker 6: running moon theory is that the second full moon after
Speaker 6: the autumn equinox is what triggers the white tail rut.
Speaker 6: That's like, this is the beginning of it. And in
Speaker 6: his theory he had determined there are three types of
Speaker 6: white tail ruts. You could have it a given year
Speaker 6: based on when that second.
Speaker 1: Moon fo Okay, bag, I want to make sure I'm
Speaker 1: tracking autumn equin second full.
Speaker 6: Moon, right, not the first one, the second one.
Speaker 1: When I got that part, but then you said another
Speaker 1: thing that threw me off.
Speaker 6: So that that second full moon could land in late October,
Speaker 6: it could land in mid November, okay, based on when
Speaker 6: that would fall. You could have one of three ruts.
Speaker 6: You could have a synchronized rut, which is if it's
Speaker 6: between like October thirty one and November five. You could
Speaker 6: have a classic rut, which is like November six to thirteen,
Speaker 6: or you could have a trickle rut, which is November
Speaker 6: thirteen on.
Speaker 1: Huh.
Speaker 6: And it's it's basically saying that like some years, if
Speaker 6: you have a trickle rut, for example, maybe that Bell
Speaker 6: curve you're talking about is flat at the top and
Speaker 6: it's just wider, Whereas if you have a synchronized rut
Speaker 6: where you get that full moon on November third, now
Speaker 6: the Bell curve has a really tall peak in it,
Speaker 6: and it's skinnier. Is that anything you've ever seen that
Speaker 6: some years the rut was longer or shorter.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, never even outside of the moon, like
Speaker 1: never mind the moon.
Speaker 4: Yeah, not from from year to year in a place.
Speaker 4: And so when you talk about a you know, a
Speaker 4: protracted rut or a trickle rut. All that stuff is
Speaker 4: related to sex ratio of the population, so we can
Speaker 4: manipulate that with management. Here it has nothing to do
Speaker 4: with the moon. It is about the availability of dozen
Speaker 4: estres and enough box to serve them when they are
Speaker 4: in standing heat. If your sex ratio becomes so biased
Speaker 4: that the dozen estres there is not a buck to
Speaker 4: copulate twenty eight later days later, she's going to cycle
Speaker 4: and come into heat again, and there is your trickle
Speaker 4: or your extended rut. Or if you have dough fawns,
Speaker 4: dough fawnts will typically the proportion of them that do
Speaker 4: come into estres are going to come in a little
Speaker 4: bit later.
Speaker 1: So adult adult that has a faun with her and
Speaker 1: she's trying to get rid of it in the fall,
Speaker 1: she'll come into estris later than adult that did that
Speaker 1: didn't was not carrying a faun.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, I misspoke, though, uh not everywhere. This varies
Speaker 4: depending on where you're at in the US. In Mississippi,
Speaker 4: for example, ten to fifteen percent of dough faunds or
Speaker 4: do funds will reach sufficient body size and condition to
Speaker 4: come into heat. They're never going to come in at
Speaker 4: the peak of the rut, it'll be two three weeks
Speaker 4: a month later by the time they've reached physiological condition
Speaker 4: where they can come into estras.
Speaker 1: Got it, so that we'll be part of it, and
Speaker 1: that can drive a little late rut action.
Speaker 4: That's your trickle.
Speaker 6: If you do believe in the rutting moon. This year
Speaker 6: twenty twenty five, it is November fifth, so you're you're
Speaker 6: like straddling a synchronized rut and a classic rut, meaning
Speaker 6: that like November five to ten.
Speaker 2: Period.
Speaker 4: Wow, it's gonna be November five to ten. All right,
Speaker 4: let's back it up like those.
Speaker 6: To be clear, I don't believe in this either. I
Speaker 6: just love that, but I throw out this thing because
Speaker 6: some people do.
Speaker 1: But then he and then he, he says that's not right,
Speaker 1: and then you alert everybody what day.
Speaker 6: To be Because because I love that people do believe it.
Speaker 6: I really appreciate that those folks have taken the time
Speaker 6: to develop a theory and to spread that theory around.
Speaker 2: Reason you have bigfoot experts on radio the other day.
Speaker 7: Exactly, we need a new believer hat it's not just
Speaker 7: the black bucket of moon.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, that's great idea.
Speaker 3: Oh, core full moon buck, That says believer.
Speaker 4: What's the purpose of the timing of the ruts when
Speaker 4: the fawns will hit the ground in spring? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 4: Why would mother nature? Why would evolution have that affected
Speaker 4: by some moon. So the most reliable clock, of course,
Speaker 4: is photo period. They can be calibrated so well, and
Speaker 4: so it's so important over time of when the dough
Speaker 4: needs to be bred seven months later, when that fawn
Speaker 4: is going.
Speaker 2: To be dropped.
Speaker 4: Why would evolution fold in any of the moon stuff
Speaker 4: to tinker with that at all, I mean, biologically or ecologically.
Speaker 4: That just doesn't make sense. However, we did test this,
Speaker 4: and so we did it two ways. We did it
Speaker 4: at an individual scale and we did it at a
Speaker 4: population scale, individual scale with our captive deer herd. We
Speaker 4: looked at records of estrus and copulation for all of
Speaker 4: our does so population of doze over many, many, many years,
Speaker 4: and so we know when they were coming into heat,
Speaker 4: and we knew when they were bred. So we have
Speaker 4: those records. We then line that up with this rutting moon.
Speaker 4: And so every year you know that rutting moon is
Speaker 4: moving back and forth a week or fifteen days or whatever.
Speaker 4: And so we should have seen if it was influencing
Speaker 4: when they are coming into estrus, we should have seen
Speaker 4: them moving towards that or moving back.
Speaker 6: Zero.
Speaker 4: We then go to let's go to wild populations, and
Speaker 4: we looked at wildlife management areas and our state Wildlife
Speaker 4: Agency is very good at doing what is called spring
Speaker 4: health checks. What that does is they harvest doze post
Speaker 4: deer season, typically March, and they will look at the
Speaker 4: condition of dose and then also look at the number
Speaker 4: of fetuses that they are carrying. So along with all
Speaker 4: the general hunter harvest data, that is a way for
Speaker 4: them to look at what's the condition of this population statewide,
Speaker 4: so forth. So we know where the rut is in
Speaker 4: all these places, we know where the peak of the
Speaker 4: rut is, and so we then line that up with
Speaker 4: the rutting moon zero no effect whatsoever. So individually population
Speaker 4: wise logic, Yeah, doesn't make sense to.
Speaker 6: Me because of the Mississippi deer.
Speaker 4: That's why maybe it's just those Mississippi deer.
Speaker 2: Would it be worth just taking five minutes to tabrons
Speaker 2: and explain what confirmation bias is and how that shows
Speaker 2: up in hunters?
Speaker 1: Sure?
Speaker 2: I think so?
Speaker 1: Yeah. My favorite analogy about this is you go, I
Speaker 1: don't know, surprise analogy, Like you go out and you
Speaker 1: fishing small mouths and you're throwing shar troops and you
Speaker 1: get a bunch, You're hitting them real good. Then at
Speaker 1: one minute you throw on a pumpkin colored jig and
Speaker 1: you're fishing for a couple of seconds, you don't get
Speaker 1: a hit. You put shar truce back on lo and
Speaker 1: behold throughout the day you keep catching fish. They were
Speaker 1: coming on hartreuse. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And like there's something
Speaker 1: to that, because you know, ain't shartruths. It ain't no use.
Speaker 1: But I'm saying like you do have a way of
Speaker 1: you know, like if you were going to go design
Speaker 1: a study about what color small mouth bass are hitting
Speaker 1: on in some given day, it wouldn't be like that,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah. So I think that you find part
Speaker 1: of the fun. You find patterns and things, and and
Speaker 1: you know that works for me. Therefore that's what that's
Speaker 1: dictated by.
Speaker 4: Nature, right, Yeah, Well that's a that's a deeper question.
Speaker 4: I mean, that would be a psychologist to get into
Speaker 4: all the logical fallacies and how the brain works with that.
Speaker 4: But I guess the way I think about it, is
Speaker 4: we're we're really good as human beings. We want to
Speaker 4: find patterns, so we're trying to find the shortcut. We're
Speaker 4: really good that that's helped us, that's helped human beings
Speaker 4: to be able to link those things together, and that's
Speaker 4: the path. Let's capitalize on it. But the problem that
Speaker 4: we have is we become enamored with this linkage that
Speaker 4: we have made between these two things. A leads to B,
Speaker 4: B leads to C, and we will start ignoring contrary evidence.
Speaker 4: So it's like we become bought in and emotionally invested
Speaker 4: in our and hey, in science, it's it's called the
Speaker 4: pet hypothesis. That's why we have to get outside peer review.
Speaker 4: That's why you got to talk to a buddy, help me,
Speaker 4: help me think about this. I'm really locked in confirmation
Speaker 4: bias could be bothering me here. But but I think
Speaker 4: that is always going on. Is we we never remember
Speaker 4: the times we were unsuccessful. We disproportionately remember the times
Speaker 4: that we were mm hm.
Speaker 2: And I think if we if you are a moon believer,
Speaker 2: you only go hunt in those conditions where you mostly
Speaker 2: hunt those conditions that you think are you know, positively
Speaker 2: affect your deer hunting. You're not hunting the other days,
Speaker 2: and so you only have a data set from those days. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and it could be exactly the same from the days
Speaker 2: that the moon is doing something completely different.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And you may be a good enough hunter, and
Speaker 4: you may be hunting in a enough of a target
Speaker 4: rich environment where every day you go, you were going
Speaker 4: to see deer if that's your metric for success, but
Speaker 4: you're only going to go on those special days, and
Speaker 4: then that just keeps reinforcing that this moon condition or
Speaker 4: weather condition or whatever was the reason for my success.
Speaker 4: When the way to do it would be, and nobody's
Speaker 4: gonna do this. I'm going to get a random number generator,
Speaker 4: and I'm going to get a calendar, and I'm going
Speaker 4: to pick out these particular days and I'm gonna go hunt.
Speaker 6: That's a fun study.
Speaker 4: And or look at camera data. Yeah, that'd be another way.
Speaker 4: Just record camera data all the time and go back
Speaker 4: and look at it.
Speaker 1: This is about the moon.
Speaker 6: It's it's sort of Bloomberg had an article that bigfoot
Speaker 6: sightings have decreased in the last decade. They peaked around
Speaker 6: like two thousand and four or so, and they've been
Speaker 6: going down ever since. If deer hunters were like very
Speaker 6: conscious of what their trail cameras are telling them. Now
Speaker 6: that trail cameras are so effective and so cheap and
Speaker 6: sell cams are very available, I feel like the same
Speaker 6: thing would happen that if you pulled deer hunters in
Speaker 6: twenty years from now, it wouldn't be eighty three percent anymore.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it would be.
Speaker 6: Lower because they if they were trying to like really
Speaker 6: pay attention, they would maybe notice it. Oh yeah, the
Speaker 6: moon isn't saying that that the deer movement is different
Speaker 6: based on what the moon is doing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I agree. I just think it's gonna take a
Speaker 4: long time because it's really difficult to let go right
Speaker 4: with that belief, especially if within your little group, you're
Speaker 4: you're the older, wiser, you're the influencer. The single most
Speaker 4: difficult thing for a human being to say publicly, I
Speaker 4: was wrong.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm.
Speaker 4: I mean, that's that's real. That's very powerful. It's so
Speaker 4: difficult to stand up and go forgive me, I was wrong.
Speaker 4: I made a big mistake. People are very reluctant.
Speaker 1: To do that. I'm going to hit you with a
Speaker 1: real I want to bring something up, but I don't
Speaker 1: want to dwell on it. What's your take on? How
Speaker 1: do I even ask this man? I'm trying to figure out.
Speaker 2: He's just saying he wants a real concise ance.
Speaker 1: I don't want to get into it. I'm just curious
Speaker 1: because you're a big deer guy. Do your hunter deer researcher,
Speaker 1: give me, give me your basic like one sentence, what's
Speaker 1: your basic take on CWD?
Speaker 4: It's it's real, it's it's the single biggest challenge I
Speaker 4: believe to deer management and the application of science ants
Speaker 4: while simultaneously keeping hunters engaged and believing in science. That
Speaker 4: wasn't very concise, but that's that's the way. It's the
Speaker 4: challenge of our time.
Speaker 3: You think it's you believe it's a legitimate threat at.
Speaker 1: A herd level.
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, yes I do.
Speaker 3: Earlier you mentioned different buck personalities?
Speaker 1: Are there? Is it? Is it possible to give like
Speaker 1: a handful of buck personality types?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 1: And have you heard of a shirker buck?
Speaker 4: I have not.
Speaker 1: Okay, go on, okay, different.
Speaker 2: Buck we'll come back to We'll come back to that.
Speaker 4: You never heard of a shirker I'm not recalling val geist, Oh,
Speaker 4: val Geist I have heard of that word, but man,
Speaker 4: I'm drawing a blank on.
Speaker 3: We'll come around to it.
Speaker 1: Do give me some buck personality types.
Speaker 4: Buck personalities, Well, it's just two from what we categorize.
Speaker 4: This is just relative. We call it buck movement behavior.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's what I'm getting at.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't mean like what they're thinking about. I
Speaker 1: mean what they're like personality types in a way that
Speaker 1: would impact the hunter's experience.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so that we call it a sedentary type that's
Speaker 4: gonna be your introvert, and then your mobile personality type
Speaker 4: that's gonna be your extrovert. Uh. The what people thought
Speaker 4: for the longest time, until we had the type of
Speaker 4: instrumentation to be able to see this, was that after
Speaker 4: yearling buck dispersal, a buck is going to go set
Speaker 4: up and have his home range, and that is where
Speaker 4: it's going to be. Now, the size of that home
Speaker 4: range can vary by resources. He may be a five
Speaker 4: hundred acre home range guy, he may be a fifteen
Speaker 4: hundred acre home range guy. But that is where he
Speaker 4: is essentially going to live and die is in that
Speaker 4: that fixed home range. What we found is that about
Speaker 4: thirty percent of our bucks have completely disconnected and disjointed
Speaker 4: home ranges, and so they will spend six, seven, eight
Speaker 4: months and one location, and then they will get up
Speaker 4: and move to a completely different location.
Speaker 3: Just forget about the old spot.
Speaker 4: That's right.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 4: The most sensational example, just to show you that intrinsically
Speaker 4: in some deer, this is in them that they are
Speaker 4: going to do it. We call her a buck. In
Speaker 4: Mississippi fall winter, and we started noticing really strange long
Speaker 4: distance behavior about February so in Mississippi, so we're on
Speaker 4: the east side of the Mississippi River. He goes all
Speaker 4: the way to the Mississippi River miles and miles of miles,
Speaker 4: and then paces up and down the river for a
Speaker 4: few days, and then crosses the river and then sets
Speaker 4: up camp in Louisiana for essentially all summer. August rolls around.
Speaker 4: He does the same thing. On the Louisiana side. He
Speaker 4: goes stages by the river a day or two, getting
Speaker 4: up his nerve, maybe swims the river, comes back to
Speaker 4: Mississippi to that exact same home range he was the
Speaker 4: year before. Did that two years in a row, so
Speaker 4: we had four instances of him taking that long distance
Speaker 4: movement and crossing the Mississippi River. So that's an extreme
Speaker 4: example of a mobile personality. And just the way the
Speaker 4: crow flies distance it was just shy twenty miles wow,
Speaker 4: so his route was a lot more than that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's like you could see him doing it once, right,
Speaker 1: and then he has a good experience or doesn't have
Speaker 1: a good experience, but the fact that he he goes
Speaker 1: back to Mississippi. Then a while later he wants to
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, yeah, like repeat it where yeah,
Speaker 1: just felt or we wind up thinking that it's a
Speaker 1: bigger deal, that that swim is a bigger deal than
Speaker 1: he regards it as. Right, I was reading this thing
Speaker 1: like these guys were looking at it. There used to
Speaker 1: be this thing that links. They used to think that
Speaker 1: links didn't like cross big rivers, and they thought these
Speaker 1: big rivers were boxed in links home ranges. So they
Speaker 1: had these links with collars were swimming the tan and
Speaker 1: awe swimming the Yukon, you know, mm hmm. And people
Speaker 1: always saw it just they had just figured that that's
Speaker 1: a border to a lynx's habitat. That's some bit just yeah,
Speaker 1: right across it, shoot across. You don't even think about it,
Speaker 1: and in the human mind, you're like, oh, that would
Speaker 1: be a he can't get across that. He wouldn't want
Speaker 1: to cross that a cat, you know.
Speaker 4: And yet we had some bucks that, uh in this
Speaker 4: one in the Mississippi River. We're talking about a normal river,
Speaker 4: so think think a river that's fifty yards across or something.
Speaker 4: We had some bucks that would go across that every
Speaker 4: single day. Was not an impediment to them whatsoever. We
Speaker 4: had some bucks that would never cross that river. When
Speaker 4: you look at their home range and all of their points,
Speaker 4: it is directly adjacent to that river. They would not
Speaker 4: do it. Really, So there's just so much variation in
Speaker 4: their personality and what they're willing to accept.
Speaker 1: You can't I guess you probably can't say this is
Speaker 1: one of those strategies better for longevity. Like do you
Speaker 1: find that like super tight stay at home box, super
Speaker 1: small home ranges, they have a greater survival rate or
Speaker 1: is it that not or is that not fair to say.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we didn't have enough of a sample size to
Speaker 4: tease that apart, because again, only a third of them
Speaker 4: were had this mobile personality. But that makes sense to me.
Speaker 4: I think that's reasonable. I also think of it. This
Speaker 4: may be a bad analogy here, but I think it's
Speaker 4: just like embedded within some species and some individuals. There's explorers,
Speaker 4: there's colonizers, there's individuals that are willing to take a
Speaker 4: rip and go somewhere else. And you know, I think
Speaker 4: when you just go way way way back in time,
Speaker 4: you know, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and you
Speaker 4: think about the landscape and that deer. We're always having
Speaker 4: to colonize different areas based on buffalo going through, based
Speaker 4: on wildfire, and so I just want to think any
Speaker 4: way that that tendency is embedded within some individuals that
Speaker 4: I'm going to go look, I'm going to go explore
Speaker 4: and I'm going to capitalize on some resources unbeknownst to me.
Speaker 1: Yeah right here. Oh yeah, because if not you because
Speaker 1: as as environments and landscapes change, if everybody was a
Speaker 1: super home body, you'd have awesome pieces of habitat open
Speaker 1: up and like we're never found. Word doesn't get out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: with the with the idea that like I've heard this
Speaker 1: express two ways, maybe it's not this clean that during
Speaker 1: the rut bucks move more. Okay.
Speaker 3: I remember someone pointing.
Speaker 1: Out, like they move more but they don't move to
Speaker 1: new places more. They just move more in the places
Speaker 1: that they already move.
Speaker 3: Anyways, is that fair.
Speaker 4: That's not think that's fair.
Speaker 1: That's not fair. Yeah, okay, So what.
Speaker 4: We were able to do is, of course we did
Speaker 4: all the annual home range stuff, but we also looked
Speaker 4: at two week home ranges, daily home ranges, and a
Speaker 4: term called net distance or net displacement. And the bottom
Speaker 4: line is you will see the greatest home range if
Speaker 4: you look at it in two week periods during the
Speaker 4: peak of the rut and during the late rut or
Speaker 4: immediately after the peak of the rut. But the amount
Speaker 4: of area that a buck is spending each day, it
Speaker 4: did not matter if it was pre rut, no rut,
Speaker 4: after the rut. Two hundred acres per day independent okay,
Speaker 4: on a daily scale, independent on the time of year,
Speaker 4: rut phase or not peak of the rut, post rut,
Speaker 4: pre rut, et cetera. Did not matter. Even though there
Speaker 4: they're daily ground they were covering could be greater. During
Speaker 4: the rut, the amount of area that they were covered
Speaker 4: was two hundred acres per day, But when you look
Speaker 4: at the very next day where they're at, it will
Speaker 4: be further apart, meaning a buck is spending covering ground
Speaker 4: about two hundred acres of ground per day, but during
Speaker 4: the peak of the rut in late rut, those daily
Speaker 4: areas or places are further apart. Really, maybe you make.
Speaker 2: A single move and then do the two hundred yard
Speaker 2: circuit and then makes a single move into another two
Speaker 2: hundred yard circuit. Is that what you're saying?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so maybe think of it like this. When you
Speaker 4: get into a non rut and early pre rut, every
Speaker 4: single day there is a great deal of overlap in
Speaker 4: the area of buckets covering. He might have an overlap
Speaker 4: of eighty percent of the area he covered the day before,
Speaker 4: he's in this area. But when you get to later
Speaker 4: in the rut, because now they're seeking, they're chasing, they're looking.
Speaker 4: Now we're spending two hundred acres away over here, fifteen
Speaker 4: hundred yards away, he's in a completely different area. He's
Speaker 4: covering the same amount of area in a twenty four
Speaker 4: hour time frame, but the distance away from the dates
Speaker 4: he's exploring new spots.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Really, so do you really as a hunter then are
Speaker 2: we trying to capitalize on that move between the two spots?
Speaker 4: If you can. I mean, if if you can find out.
Speaker 2: I rut funnel, it would be a good place to sit, right, Okay.
Speaker 4: I think you got to frame it like this. If
Speaker 4: if you've got a lot of intel on a buck,
Speaker 4: I mean, I know from camera data observation, I know
Speaker 4: kind of where he's going to be. The best chance
Speaker 4: for that is pre rut. But if you want to
Speaker 4: go out, I'm going to go to the woods and
Speaker 4: what are my greatest odds of seeing a buck? A
Speaker 4: good buck? Then because of that movement behavior that is
Speaker 4: absolutely so.
Speaker 1: The one that hides out of old Lady Thompson's might
Speaker 1: be off on your spot.
Speaker 4: That's right, that's right, he's gonna shift, he's gonna move.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Really mm hmm. I can show you the show the data.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh, let me, I'll hit you know, and then
Speaker 1: these guys can hit you with whatever they want.
Speaker 3: Do you this might not be something you can tell
Speaker 3: from your data.
Speaker 1: Do you think it's true that bucks play the wind
Speaker 1: and cruise for does by coming on the down wind
Speaker 1: side of betting cover?
Speaker 4: I think probably fifty percent of the time they do.
Speaker 1: Okay, so they're not visually looking for them. They do,
Speaker 1: but they in addition to visually looking, they're cruising to
Speaker 1: smell them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, what we generally think of right now, and this
Speaker 4: could have a lot to do with those two hundred
Speaker 4: acre daily areas being so far apart and disjointed. What
Speaker 4: we think is that bucks are cruising to find what
Speaker 4: are called dough focal areas. So think about the social
Speaker 4: behavior of your dough population, those matrilineal groups. And so
Speaker 4: here's a group of dose here, here's a group of
Speaker 4: dose over here. We think of it as a circuit.
Speaker 4: And so a buck is going to go into this area.
Speaker 4: He knows who all's there, you know, via signposts sent
Speaker 4: so forth. He's gonna check it. Since check it, who's
Speaker 4: good or bad? Anybody close coming into heat? Maybe she's
Speaker 4: already into heat but occupied. He's gonna go to another area,
Speaker 4: part of that circuit and look for adoin estris there.
Speaker 1: Okay, I light, I got one more question than he's
Speaker 1: Guys can hit some.
Speaker 3: I asked this earlier, but I kind of screwed it up.
Speaker 1: During peak rut? Is there like a high Is there
Speaker 1: a strong likelihood or however you want to put it,
Speaker 1: Is there a strong likelihood that a buck will go
Speaker 1: somewhere during peak rut that he has never before been
Speaker 1: in his life, or is he usually at some point
Speaker 1: in his life been to all the places he's gonna go.
Speaker 1: So he's visiting places he knows about, or is he
Speaker 1: legit like going spots he's never seen before.
Speaker 4: I think the answer is yes, But I don't think
Speaker 4: that is just during the rut. So the way we
Speaker 4: would define that would be called an excursion, and so
Speaker 4: that would be different from a mobile personality like we
Speaker 4: talked about earlier, because that is where you set up
Speaker 4: a new home range and you have affinity for that area,
Speaker 4: and excursion is I'm in my existing home range and
Speaker 4: I'm gonna take a trip yep, a two to three
Speaker 4: day I'm will cut a loop and go here and
Speaker 4: go here. We see those start to occur during the
Speaker 4: pre rut, and it really escalates during the rut. But
Speaker 4: with our data during our study, we saw the greatest
Speaker 4: amount of excursions in the in the post rut, so
Speaker 4: after the rut.
Speaker 1: But excursions being that he again like he's going to
Speaker 1: it might be hard to do it because you can't
Speaker 1: track him his whole life. He's going to places he's
Speaker 1: never been. I can't answer that because you don't know
Speaker 1: where he's because you can't you don't know his whole life.
Speaker 1: I don't have his whole life history, got it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Yeah, but we we definitely saw the the bucks
Speaker 4: going to novel areas within the limited time frame we
Speaker 4: had them studied.
Speaker 1: We did.
Speaker 4: In other words, we didn't see the exact same excursion
Speaker 4: loop every time they would go different areas. Yeah, and
Speaker 4: so yeah, we think they are looking prospecting, whether it
Speaker 4: be those food resources whatever.
Speaker 1: That's when you get like really vulnerable. Man, Like you
Speaker 1: get really vulnerable to something bad happen to you when
Speaker 1: you're in places you've never been, Like you're on some
Speaker 1: do you know what I mean? You have no idea
Speaker 1: what's going on? And like that to me feels like
Speaker 1: a that to me feels like a buck would get light. Dude,
Speaker 1: I'm not doing that. Yeah, do you know what I mean? Like,
Speaker 1: I'm not like, I've never been there, I have no
Speaker 1: idea what's happening. It seems like they'd feel so vulnerable.
Speaker 4: And from a deer management perspective, I mean, if you
Speaker 4: do the kind of stuff we were gone with, you
Speaker 4: know your you're managing for antlers and older bucks and
Speaker 4: so forth. That is where even with a large area,
Speaker 4: so you may have a five to ten thousand acre
Speaker 4: tract and you were primarily controlling the harvest within that
Speaker 4: population except for the excursion, and so that is where
Speaker 4: you will see some of those target bucks are gonna
Speaker 4: go off and man, they get hammered.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, you go over to the place where the
Speaker 1: you know, brown it's down property.
Speaker 4: I get shot. And that is so frustrating because you've
Speaker 4: done everything all year long for years and years and years,
Speaker 4: and you have that weekend where he decides to take
Speaker 4: a trip.
Speaker 3: Do What's funny is uh?
Speaker 1: I know these guys and they have a big no
Speaker 1: fence operation in Texas, but they wound up doing one fence.
Speaker 1: They fenced one property line because they have some brown
Speaker 1: it's down neighbors and so they just tried to like
Speaker 1: control it a little bit by blocking that spot right
Speaker 1: you know, the other three sides or do whatever they want. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I got a couple of places like that too. It's
Speaker 4: that pinch point, that corridor of where they're going to
Speaker 4: go on to that other property and we're gonna block.
Speaker 3: That up, and these dudes stands.
Speaker 1: It's so funny is these dudes stands are all we're
Speaker 1: all that property life. Oh yeah, oh just waiting, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, I'm done.
Speaker 6: The October Boogeyman is the October law for hunters. The
Speaker 6: November version of that is lockdown, where there's an idea
Speaker 6: that there is a phase of the rut for like
Speaker 6: two to four days where a buck gets a hot
Speaker 6: dough around like November sixteenth, and they bed down and
Speaker 6: they breed and they just become less visible and they
Speaker 6: just become very dedicated to that spot and like running
Speaker 6: with each other.
Speaker 3: I don't care what he says, this is true?
Speaker 1: Is that a thing?
Speaker 6: Do the deer movement studies show thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they just stand there like the does are feeding,
Speaker 1: and he just stands there. He doesn't lay down, he
Speaker 1: doesn't eat, he just stands there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's legit.
Speaker 1: Oh it is okay, Yeah, because everything else you're like, no,
Speaker 1: that's not true. That's legit.
Speaker 4: So you get like in the peak of the rut,
Speaker 4: this is going to occur all all the time. When
Speaker 4: there is a dough an estras it becomes a population
Speaker 4: a level of fact, or it becomes noticeable when a
Speaker 4: greater proportion of the does are in standing heat and
Speaker 4: bucks are tending them. So you're gonna have less bucks
Speaker 4: available roaming the landscape because they're locked in.
Speaker 6: If there are too many dos, that happens.
Speaker 4: You're saying no, I'm saying that if you had an
Speaker 4: appropriate number of doughs.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's kind of like some magical world every dough,
Speaker 1: like you have some thing where it lists every dough
Speaker 1: in a population all came into heat on November seventh.
Speaker 1: It would be reasonable to assume that on November seventh,
Speaker 1: no bucks are running around doing crazy stuff, right because
Speaker 1: they're standing there with all these doughs.
Speaker 4: That are exactly And then twenty eight days later you're
Speaker 4: gonna have the leftovers because the sex ratio, there's always
Speaker 4: more doughs than bucks, and so some of them may
Speaker 4: not get bred, and so then that would follow again
Speaker 4: twenty eight days later.
Speaker 6: How impactful, though, do you think lockdown is? Is it
Speaker 6: a thing where like hunters are going to have a
Speaker 6: worse experience in the woods.
Speaker 4: I would still go because it's it's the rut. I
Speaker 4: would look at it as the frequency of just seeing
Speaker 4: more bucks during that time frame is gonna be less
Speaker 4: because some of them are locked in with does, but
Speaker 4: you also have the odd man out or the odd
Speaker 4: buck out, and he's gonna be going around looking for
Speaker 4: another dough and estress, so that there's still gonna be
Speaker 4: general buck movement. You're just gonna have a greater number
Speaker 4: of them that is occupying a dough.
Speaker 6: And there's no crater though in the bell curve. When
Speaker 6: that happens, don't see it, Okay, Yeah, man, I wonder.
Speaker 2: If you do, you could tell me what days not
Speaker 2: to hunt.
Speaker 1: What I'm thinking is this man picture you got like
Speaker 1: some kind of weird deal where you can it's illegal,
Speaker 1: like you put out some kind of a birth control
Speaker 1: thing or something where none of the dos ever come in.
Speaker 6: Oh, Bucks, just crazy everywhere.
Speaker 1: It's a short term play. Yeah, it's not a good lie.
Speaker 4: That'd be some some evil science there.
Speaker 1: It's a bad long term play. You're going to see
Speaker 1: a plumbing deer population.
Speaker 2: We're in Wisconsin. Uh you know, cwd's big there, big deer.
Speaker 2: Heard a lot of our neighbors have started shooting more does.
Speaker 2: Since they've started doing that, they claim to have a
Speaker 2: better rut because less does mean more bucks moving around,
Speaker 2: more bucks reacting to calls does that make sense.
Speaker 4: It makes perfect sense. I do not know of a
Speaker 4: study that has specifically evaluated that, but I think that
Speaker 4: is entirely logical because you've increased competition. You know, they're
Speaker 4: less does per male and so they have to compete more,
Speaker 4: look more, search more, et cetera.
Speaker 1: It's my turn.
Speaker 2: We're just going said you were done.
Speaker 1: I was for my turn when this turn, This turn
Speaker 1: is gonna be one question turned.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 1: We have a buddy who has a really great property
Speaker 1: in Texas whereabouts Way South Texas, Brownsville, Way South Texas.
Speaker 1: Like when you're cruising around, you see I mean, you
Speaker 1: see way more Bucks and does anyhow, we go down
Speaker 1: there a couple times. We've gone down to Rattle Bucks,
Speaker 1: which is the funnest thing in the world because it's
Speaker 1: very effective there. I developed this little theory that the
Speaker 1: most effective time to rattle them is during the middle
Speaker 1: of the day. In my thinking, the dolls are all
Speaker 1: laying down on their board and they're just more inclined
Speaker 1: to wonder what's up when the doors are up on
Speaker 1: their feet. They're like, yeah, yeah, I hear it, but
Speaker 1: I'm like following my dough around. Then midday he gets bored.
Speaker 1: He hears the rattle, He's got nothing else going on,
Speaker 1: and so he runs over. Yeah, what do you think
Speaker 1: about that?
Speaker 4: There's a merit to that, Steve, but it's wrong. We
Speaker 4: did a study on that. Now I was a tech,
Speaker 4: I was a participant as a buddy of mine. So
Speaker 4: again my master's degree was in South Texas, so I
Speaker 4: spent a lot of time down there, and so we
Speaker 4: did a rattling experiment. To my knowledge, it is the
Speaker 4: only peer reviewed experiment ever done on rattling antlers and
Speaker 4: and dough response. And what we found, very generally was
Speaker 4: we we varied the how loud the rattling was, the
Speaker 4: duration of rattling, the time of day of rattling, and
Speaker 4: then the time of year relative to the rut for
Speaker 4: the rattling. And so the clear winner for time of
Speaker 4: day was crepuscular. No, here's why, because the real winner
Speaker 4: on the rattling technique. And remember back then, so this
Speaker 4: would have been this has been mid nineties, and so
Speaker 4: this is your You're reading the magazine and how do
Speaker 4: you set up your rattling sequence? And so you got
Speaker 4: to get there, and you gotta get crouch and you
Speaker 4: got to scrape the brush and you gotta kick and
Speaker 4: you gotta rattle, and you got to remember that, remember
Speaker 4: all that.
Speaker 3: But anyways, gone, okay, Well.
Speaker 4: It was a thing back in the day.
Speaker 1: And what we found, you're you're painting the whole picture,
Speaker 1: like the deer. You're kind of like you're you're sort
Speaker 1: of creating the entire encounter.
Speaker 4: You're trying to mimic reality. Yeah, where they're bumping into
Speaker 4: the brush and all that, sort of making it more realistic.
Speaker 4: But the bottom it was just very very clear, how
Speaker 4: loud you are. Number One, the louder you make it,
Speaker 4: you increase the probability that more bucks will hear it.
Speaker 4: More bucks will hear it when more bucks are circulating
Speaker 4: during the crepuscular period, more bucks are going to be
Speaker 4: up and about circulating during the pre rut. So make
Speaker 4: it as loud as you can. And the sequence that
Speaker 4: we were doing, we had a we had four different sequences,
Speaker 4: but the one that always worked the best was called
Speaker 4: long and Loud. I still remember it. It's still etched
Speaker 4: in here. Long and Loud was you got to go
Speaker 4: for three minutes. Three minutes. That doesn't sound like a
Speaker 4: lot with those things. As hard as you can possibly go.
Speaker 4: Your arms will be tired, they're spaghetti. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 4: you're you're just done by that. But that was the
Speaker 4: clear winter, and so just the obvious thing is they
Speaker 4: could hear it better. And so I and I even
Speaker 4: had chances where a sweat somebody on the ground.
Speaker 1: This was that.
Speaker 4: Do youn't know where the Welder Wildlife Refuge is?
Speaker 7: Aid?
Speaker 4: Did you go past it? Going south? Unhunted population tens
Speaker 4: of thousands of They have all these observation towers. So
Speaker 4: we got an observers up top fifteen twenty foot above
Speaker 4: the brush, and somebody down below, and you could literally
Speaker 4: even see I saw this to where the guy below
Speaker 4: starts rattling. He's doing a long and loud or something
Speaker 4: like that, and the buck is four hundred yards away,
Speaker 4: and he hears it and he starts coming, coming, coming,
Speaker 4: He's not running, but he's coming. He's obviously moving that way,
Speaker 4: stopped rattling. He was back to browsing around. And then
Speaker 4: it was over a thirty minute period, and so then
Speaker 4: we had an elapsed time and you do another rattle,
Speaker 4: and then another rattle, and do you rattle bring him in,
Speaker 4: keep coming, stop rattling. He stopped rattled him again, finally
Speaker 4: closed the distance and brought him in the volume and
Speaker 4: increasing the probability that a buck is within distance of
Speaker 4: hearing you. That was the secret sauce.
Speaker 6: I like your strategy, though, Steve, because as if I'm
Speaker 6: thinking about rattling, if it's donn or dusk, in my head,
Speaker 6: deer movement is already like a nine out of ten.
Speaker 6: I don't need to help the deer movement anymore right now.
Speaker 6: At midday, though, maybe it's like a four out of ten,
Speaker 6: and so I could rattle and bring it up to
Speaker 6: a seven out of ten. And so I'm just like
Speaker 6: I'm raising the floor of my hunt at that point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we were not viewing it as making We were
Speaker 1: not viewing it as hey, there's nothing else to do.
Speaker 1: We're viewing it as going out in the morning. There's
Speaker 1: like deer round and you do a few rattle sessions,
Speaker 1: nothing happened, gets to be eleven am, and all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, buck buck buck. So I had this whole boredom.
Speaker 1: There you go, hypothesis, But it could be other factors
Speaker 1: in there. Well.
Speaker 6: Ask a question, what do your movement studies say about age?
Speaker 6: I assume it's just real simple that like a one
Speaker 6: and a half year old moves more and he's more
Speaker 6: reckless than a five and a half year old. Is
Speaker 6: that Is that what you've seen?
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's very subtle. You know. There's a lot of
Speaker 4: people will say, and maybe we didn't not have enough
Speaker 4: really really old bucks. We had several five and six
Speaker 4: year olds, but we saw a general decline, a general
Speaker 4: contraction in home range. But it was not overwhelming. Okay,
Speaker 4: but yes it did. You know after the yearling dispersal event,
Speaker 4: they're typically going to have a larger one and then
Speaker 4: it's like they keep figuring out, you know, year after
Speaker 4: year it gets a little bit small.
Speaker 6: Huh, I feel like hard oh Whitetail hunters will also
Speaker 6: say that you talked about how there's more movement after
Speaker 6: the peak of the rut, and usually those are the
Speaker 6: mature bucks. They're the wise ones who know that not
Speaker 6: every dough has been bred yet, so they're playing the
Speaker 6: long game. That's when they're going to get up and
Speaker 6: be a little more reckless. Is if you think the
Speaker 6: peak of the rut is like November fourteen, those old
Speaker 6: mature bucks, five six year olds, they are really participating
Speaker 6: in the rut more in that like fifteenth to twenty
Speaker 6: fifth time period than a two and a half year old?
Speaker 6: Is that? Is that like putting too much stock in
Speaker 6: those ideas.
Speaker 4: I think a buck is gonna participate whenever he can, huh,
Speaker 4: and whenever he detects there is a dough an estress,
Speaker 4: he's gonna participate. Okay, if that answers your question.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Like I said, a white tail hunter would say,
Speaker 6: that is the time period of the rut for the
Speaker 6: old bucks. That's like when they are vulnerable.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, they would be exposed more during that time,
Speaker 4: but not more than a two and a half year old,
Speaker 4: is I wouldn't think?
Speaker 1: So? Okay, Yeah, I'm gonna go out of order and
Speaker 1: ask my next question. Then Yanni, and then Spencer.
Speaker 2: We have a couple left time.
Speaker 1: Why ask your question?
Speaker 3: I was afraid I don't forget you.
Speaker 2: No, go ahead, I won't forget mine because it's sitting
Speaker 2: right in front of me.
Speaker 1: How far away you think? How far away you think
Speaker 1: a buck can smell it a dough? That's an astress?
Speaker 4: Great question, I would say, Uh, I haven't said it
Speaker 4: depends yet, but I think it's going to depend so
Speaker 4: much on wind condition, you know, and.
Speaker 1: So wild ass like, like perfect conditions.
Speaker 4: Hundreds of yards?
Speaker 2: Are you asking about the doe herself or just the
Speaker 2: scent that maybe she left behind?
Speaker 1: Just detect the presence of a doe that's in heat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in perfect conditions, it wouldn't be it wouldn't be crazy
Speaker 1: to say hundreds of yards.
Speaker 4: I don't think so, not at all.
Speaker 1: Yeah, their sense of smells that good.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I think so. I don't know if it's
Speaker 4: five hundred yards to me, I think about diffusion, and so,
Speaker 4: you know, the further and further you're getting away, the
Speaker 4: more those molecules are, you know, being distributed within the air,
Speaker 4: and can they pick up enough of a concentration to
Speaker 4: cause a response. But certainly hundreds.
Speaker 1: Of yards.
Speaker 2: Bronson, why did you bring that antler all the way
Speaker 2: from here?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: And if you're just listening, you're just later gonna have
Speaker 2: to go to YouTube and watch to see what we're
Speaker 2: gonna tell you.
Speaker 1: He's got a big old he's got a big old
Speaker 1: buck antler. It's a Michigan tan with the browtie and
Speaker 1: saw it off's got one. He's got an a luinum contraption.
Speaker 1: He's got an a lunum contraption glued to the end
Speaker 1: of it.
Speaker 6: Squirrels have been chewing on the times.
Speaker 4: That was actually damage during velvet.
Speaker 1: Oh, I just thought.
Speaker 4: This is a this is an example from or this
Speaker 4: is a specimen from an experiment we did about ten
Speaker 4: years ago now. And the question was, let me, let
Speaker 4: me back up. We always at Mississippi State with the
Speaker 4: Deer Lab, we tried to do every single thing we
Speaker 4: do has a purpose for the end user. It's gonna
Speaker 4: affect hunting, it's going to affect management, help you manage
Speaker 4: your property. Except this. This has nothing to do at
Speaker 4: all with man. This is straight up deer biology. Me
Speaker 4: and Steve Demris, the other co director of the Deer Lab,
Speaker 4: we have this debate going on for years and years
Speaker 4: about female choice. Do female white tailed deer can they
Speaker 4: do they have any type of choice whatsoever? Now? Behaviorally,
Speaker 4: we don't know if she does, because when she comes
Speaker 4: into standing heat, she's she's going to breed, you know,
Speaker 4: if there is a If she's in standing heat and
Speaker 4: a buck is behind her, she's gonna breed.
Speaker 3: Doesn't matter if it's a spiky or no big old
Speaker 3: rope dragger.
Speaker 4: So I think she has to assume whom I guess
Speaker 4: that's the right word, assume that that's going to sort
Speaker 4: itself out, that that hopefully, through a dominance hierarchy, she's
Speaker 4: getting the better buck. But during the peak of the rut,
Speaker 4: that may not always be the case because the quote
Speaker 4: dominant older buck, he may be occupied on a you know,
Speaker 4: way over here with another though, you know, And we
Speaker 4: see multi paternity, and so in twenty five percent of doze,
Speaker 4: the twin faunds, twenty five percent of those will have
Speaker 4: two different fathers, got it, So it's going on multiple
Speaker 4: bucks of breeding. So I had just always thought that
Speaker 4: she has to care. She has to care. Now whether
Speaker 4: she can do anything about it or not, it's a
Speaker 4: different question, but she has to care that if what
Speaker 4: is behind me and about to breed me, is it
Speaker 4: a year old spike or would it be a three,
Speaker 4: four or five year old with larger antlers and a
Speaker 4: big body who has clearly demonstrated I'm a survivor. I
Speaker 4: can make it. You know, she's got all the investment,
Speaker 4: she's going to have the gestation for seven months, is
Speaker 4: all her resources. She ought to care who's behind hers? Like, well,
Speaker 4: how do we do this? So we ended up we
Speaker 4: had another project going on and we had a way
Speaker 4: we could set this up. So we took all of
Speaker 4: our bucks and we standardized them. We came up with
Speaker 4: p We paired them by age. We paired them by
Speaker 4: body size, so a doe looking at a buck couldn't say, well,
Speaker 4: that buck is clearly four year four years old, that
Speaker 4: one is clearly a yearling and choose one of them.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 4: So we standardized by body size and age. And then
Speaker 4: we got with our egg engineering people and we developed
Speaker 4: a contraption to where we could manipulate antlers.
Speaker 1: Could make him look like a toad even when he wasn't.
Speaker 4: That's exactly right. So we challenged these does with.
Speaker 2: Well, hold on, you gotta explain how you did that.
Speaker 1: Take a little spike and put that antler on his ass.
Speaker 2: Yeah he's alive.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Well we sedate him. Yeah we sedatum.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Looking so they all had the base part somehow attached
Speaker 2: to their.
Speaker 4: Pedical Yeah yeah, So all the all the bucks that
Speaker 4: are they're in the study. They're going to be sedated
Speaker 4: and then we're gonna cut their antlers off. We're gonna
Speaker 4: fix that part, the coupling, a fix to the antler
Speaker 4: and then the pedicle. They're going to get a receiver
Speaker 4: coupling there, and so this is incredible, and so then
Speaker 4: we will challenge a dough. So then we had someone
Speaker 4: from that school reproductive physiologist. They can induce estress, you know,
Speaker 4: with the progesterone treatment or something. So now we know
Speaker 4: where that dough is coming into heat. And so now
Speaker 4: she's behaviorally, she's demonstrating that she's an estress. So we
Speaker 4: send her down an alleyway and she's got a pen,
Speaker 4: and then to her left and her to her right
Speaker 4: are too equally aged or equally body sized bucks. One
Speaker 4: of them is carrying a one sixty, one of them
Speaker 4: is carrying a ninety, and then we monitored her behavior
Speaker 4: to see which one she would prefer. Now, we could
Speaker 4: not allow them to breed just the way it was
Speaker 4: set up the logistics, but then we looked at all
Speaker 4: the behavioral signs of if we pull the fence up,
Speaker 4: which which one would she go to? And it was
Speaker 4: over eighty percent of the time she always went for
Speaker 4: the antlers. Wow, even a younger official.
Speaker 1: Dude, good for her, superficial man, hey man, But there's
Speaker 1: that twenty interest in personality, it's like totally suficial.
Speaker 4: But it wasn't one hundred percent. It was you know,
Speaker 4: twenty percent didn't fall for the for the big antlers.
Speaker 1: So there's some selection going on. Well, but but like
Speaker 1: you're saying whether or not it, I get what you're saying,
Speaker 1: Like in that environment, there's selection going on. But however
Speaker 1: that's occurring in the real world scenario, it.
Speaker 4: Is hard to determine exactly right, Yeah, can that even happen?
Speaker 4: You know? The only the only thing we can say
Speaker 4: in the wild of does she have any choice at all?
Speaker 4: Is when she since the sensing she's coming into estras,
Speaker 4: might she go to an area where she knows this
Speaker 4: knows this guy occupies and just make herself available. Yeah,
Speaker 4: but yeah, she can't be very proactive in this thing.
Speaker 4: But when you standardize all that and controlled for it,
Speaker 4: that's what she preferred. So it does follow the ecological
Speaker 4: theory about antlers or an honest signal of quality.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I think I've wondered.
Speaker 1: I'm especially thinking about this as you're explaining this is
Speaker 1: when you're watching a buck work a group of does
Speaker 1: and you see like he's particularly interested, like he sort
Speaker 1: of singled out a dough. He's very interested in his dough.
Speaker 1: He's singled out. But you see her every time he approaches.
Speaker 1: She runs.
Speaker 3: Every time he approaches, she runs, And you.
Speaker 1: Wonder, like, well, if it was a different buck, would
Speaker 1: she run every time? Like? Is she running because she's
Speaker 1: just not ready? Or is she running because she doesn't?
Speaker 1: Like she doesn't want that buck buyer? Because from whatever
Speaker 1: in his perspective, there's something very particular.
Speaker 3: About that dough.
Speaker 1: He's like hounding that dough, so he knows something's going on.
Speaker 3: But she's not receptive.
Speaker 4: I just don't think she's ready. She's just not She's close.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he knows she's close, but she's not that ready yet, right, yeh,
Speaker 1: got it? So she might not be making like a
Speaker 1: not you not you wait, I'm waiting for Dave or whatever.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think she's just waiting to be receptive. Physiologically, yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 6: There's a theory among whitetail hunters that if you have
Speaker 6: an old dominant buck, like a six and a half
Speaker 6: year old, when he gets killed, you've now created a
Speaker 6: vacuum where there's an opportunity for another big, mature buck
Speaker 6: to come in and take that home range and own
Speaker 6: that food source, own that betting area, own those doughs.
Speaker 6: Do you ever see that with your movement studies, that
Speaker 6: a big buck disappears until a new big buck moves in.
Speaker 4: No, I'm really interested in that. I do think that
Speaker 4: has a lot of logic and appeal, and I want
Speaker 4: that to happen because I think that's something as managers
Speaker 4: we can manipulate doing that, removing particular bucks and creating
Speaker 4: space for others to move in. Uh, we did not
Speaker 4: have enough data. Well, first of all, we didn't want
Speaker 4: to shoot all of our mature bucks. But to my knowledge,
Speaker 4: there's been no good experiment to demonstrate that. But but
Speaker 4: I would love to try it if we could. I
Speaker 4: do think it's logical.
Speaker 3: Yeah, some little bucks like now's my time to shine?
Speaker 6: Yeah? Yeah, Yeah, that's the best cornfield in the neighborhood.
Speaker 6: Does all beding here?
Speaker 3: Have you ever heard that bucks avoid certain kinds of
Speaker 3: cover when they're in velvet and they're more comfortable going
Speaker 3: into that cover once their antlers are hard?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 1: You you never heard that with elk and stuff like
Speaker 1: that too.
Speaker 4: Well, I don't think a lot about elk, but I'm
Speaker 4: biased with my time in South Texas and so man
Speaker 4: thorny up in that helicopter. I say, a lot of
Speaker 4: bucks and velvet going through. Yeah, the pair and the
Speaker 4: mesquite and got it.
Speaker 3: That's really a good testing ground.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, there's a price to pay for going through
Speaker 1: that mesquite.
Speaker 4: And the awareness that they have, you know, when you're
Speaker 4: you're pushing them with the helicopter and and there's a
Speaker 4: big mesquite branch coming up, and they know how to
Speaker 4: tilt their head just enough to get their antlers under it.
Speaker 4: And it's a thing of beauty to watch moose question.
Speaker 4: I mean, you can ask.
Speaker 1: If you're maybe there's a deer parallel. You're calling. You're
Speaker 1: calling to a moose. You're making cow calls to a moose.
Speaker 1: And then he comes from a mile away and he
Speaker 1: gets up, he comes just b line stops, his head's
Speaker 1: pointing towards you.
Speaker 3: You call, he comes, you call, he comes.
Speaker 1: He gets five hundred yards away and lays down, lays
Speaker 1: down for an hour, gets up, walks the other direction.
Speaker 6: Dawn's in his head.
Speaker 2: You were supposed to come to him.
Speaker 1: You think so?
Speaker 3: Was there.
Speaker 1: Was the wind in his face? No, there's no wind.
Speaker 1: Isn't a human thing it wasn't a human thing. Wind's
Speaker 1: totally wrong. He hadn't seen nothing. Yeah.
Speaker 4: My My only guess was there was no there was
Speaker 4: no visual queue to stimulate him coming any further.
Speaker 1: That would make sense because he's like, I'm looking at
Speaker 1: the whole hill, dude, there's nothing there. I'll cow standing there.
Speaker 1: Yeah you know that. Yeah.
Speaker 3: He's like at some points, like at some point I
Speaker 3: need to see.
Speaker 4: The cow, so you need a cow decoy.
Speaker 1: I've seen this sap two times in the same place,
Speaker 1: comes all that way, and it's lays down staring and
Speaker 1: gets up and leaves.
Speaker 2: Sounds like you've gotta be able to shoot at five
Speaker 2: hundred yards next time.
Speaker 1: We did one time got him, but it's it's thick
Speaker 1: and yeah, it's hard.
Speaker 2: If we have time, I could lay out the shirt
Speaker 2: or buck, but I know.
Speaker 1: We're a shirt. Yeah.
Speaker 3: He's big believer in us.
Speaker 2: That's not true. But I did re Valgeist a couple
Speaker 2: of his books, and he observed watching mule deer he
Speaker 2: felt he observed, yeah, that there were bucks that he
Speaker 2: would watch that would shirk the responsibility of breeding for
Speaker 2: many seasons in a row, and then all of a
Speaker 2: sudden year five year six come in there and because
Speaker 2: they had reserved all those resources for that many years
Speaker 2: and built up an extra whatever amount of body weight,
Speaker 2: bigger antlers or whatever, then they could come in.
Speaker 1: And rule the roost, just lay waste.
Speaker 2: That's one way to put it. Yeah, did you ever
Speaker 2: see that in your captive heard where the bucks would shirk.
Speaker 4: Not at that that scale. But so he valarious guys
Speaker 4: is talking about a multi year right, what we would
Speaker 4: see which we attributed to, but we don't know this,
Speaker 4: you know, buck personality in this case hormonally higher testosterone
Speaker 4: levels or something. But there were definitely some bucks that
Speaker 4: at the beginning of the rut they were absolute mad men.
Speaker 4: I mean, they wanted to fight. Everybody hated them. The
Speaker 4: dos hated them, other bucks hated them. They just want
Speaker 4: to fight, fight, fight, And their breeding success was always
Speaker 4: greater the first path and maybe even longer into the
Speaker 4: breeding season. So you know, we were able to enumerate
Speaker 4: how many fawns you know that they sired.
Speaker 1: He's a fighter, he's a fighter, and he does good
Speaker 1: in the beginning of the breeding season.
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah yeah, and then his body condition,
Speaker 4: all of that fighting begins to take its toll on him.
Speaker 4: Now keep in mind too, these are captive deer. They
Speaker 4: got ad lib food, So I mean he's avoiding eating.
Speaker 4: He is so consumed and obsessed with fighting and breeding.
Speaker 4: But when you get a month, six weeks whatever into it,
Speaker 4: his body condition begins to suffer. And now he starts
Speaker 4: getting his butt kicked by the more passive deer who
Speaker 4: now weighed even though they're the same age, even though
Speaker 4: they weigh twenty pounds more. Those guys may be the shirkers.
Speaker 4: Then they have higher breeding success later in the year.
Speaker 4: So we kind of saw that, but compressed within year.
Speaker 1: It's super interesting. But it's different than the idea that well,
Speaker 1: we told this the one deer biologist. I'm sure you're
Speaker 1: familiar with Jim half a finger. Oh yeah, yeah, So
Speaker 1: we told this the one deer biologist, and he felt
Speaker 1: that it was just like he felt, it was a
Speaker 1: very questionable approach from an evolutionary standpoint, to be that, like,
Speaker 1: you're alive now, you're sexually mature now, to put off
Speaker 1: breeding opportunity after breeding opportunity after breeding opportunity in order
Speaker 1: to really kick ass some year down the road just
Speaker 1: didn't make sense. Risky, Yeah, like, you know, it just
Speaker 1: didn't make sense as a way to really to to
Speaker 1: put more progeny on the landscape that your banking that. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna have a hell of a year when I'm five. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I'm taking off two, three and four.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I agree with that.
Speaker 7: Yeah, what are the the guest reasons for this? I mean,
Speaker 7: it's it's not I don't believe it's like a buck
Speaker 7: makes a conscious choice to do this. So, like, what
Speaker 7: would be the biological underpinnings if this were a thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, my well, I don't remember what hilarious geist all
Speaker 4: of his reasoning, But I'm I'm trying to think about
Speaker 4: a mechanism of how that could work.
Speaker 7: And like onset of hormones and things.
Speaker 4: Are happening differing testosterone levels, and whereas the example I
Speaker 4: was giving with our data, I think it's within season,
Speaker 4: different timing in the surging of testosterone. But there's some
Speaker 4: great research out of Auburn University showing that there's a
Speaker 4: lot of variation by age class, and so it could
Speaker 4: be that those younger Bucks, and then there's gonna be
Speaker 4: variation within an age class where some have born, some
Speaker 4: have less, and so some of them, they just don't
Speaker 4: have a lot of testosterone. When they're two or three
Speaker 4: years of age. They're looking at this particular older, dominant, bigger, antlered,
Speaker 4: bigger bodied buck and maybe it's a survival strategy. Man,
Speaker 4: I'm not gonna risk it. But then later in life
Speaker 4: greater surgeon testosterone and they risk it and go for it.
Speaker 3: What do you wind up seeing?
Speaker 1: If you think of an old buck that gets a
Speaker 1: reputation with hunters as being like, he's so stealthy, he's shy,
Speaker 1: he's sly, right.
Speaker 3: That that's got to be real, right, But what is that?
Speaker 1: What is it?
Speaker 3: What do you think he's doing?
Speaker 1: What is he not doing? You know?
Speaker 3: When he gets to be that they just seem like
Speaker 3: they vanish.
Speaker 4: Yeah, right, And and to me that that's a really
Speaker 4: good question of ways you have to think about it.
Speaker 4: So is it that that buck has always been that
Speaker 4: way and the ones that were dumber were killed? So
Speaker 4: selection that's great going on?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Or are they literally learning and modifying their behavior over time?
Speaker 1: Like I love, I love what you're saying. I would
Speaker 1: have when I approached the question. I was approaching that
Speaker 1: he learned it, yeah, not that he's just always been paranoid.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's probably a little bit of both as well,
Speaker 4: would be my guess. Yeah, so what what are they
Speaker 4: doing different? I think it's probably just being more perceptive
Speaker 4: and maybe being more slow in how they process what's
Speaker 4: going on. They're not as much of a risk taker,
Speaker 4: and so they're playing for the long game of like
Speaker 4: I might not breed as many doves within a year,
Speaker 4: but lifetime reproductive success I may win. Yeah, things like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there seems like there's some learn stuff like looking
Speaker 1: up in trees, you know what I mean, like learning
Speaker 1: like in certain areas. He's just like looking up, looking up,
Speaker 1: looking up, like because he's seen before, yeah, trees. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and like the coming out of the box, like a
Speaker 1: year and a half old buck probably hasn't figured out
Speaker 1: yet to like yeah look up. Yeah you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and so does that yearling buck have to live
Speaker 4: through a bad experience and then he's able to he's
Speaker 4: going to be looking from this point forward.
Speaker 1: Yeah, or a yearling bucks that are just so paranoid
Speaker 1: they're looking all around, And.
Speaker 2: It's good they learn it from their five year old mother.
Speaker 4: I think they do.
Speaker 1: Oh that's a good point too. Yeah, she's like the
Speaker 1: big cherry tree at the point, the point that juts
Speaker 1: out between the fields.
Speaker 3: Don't go by that cherry tree.
Speaker 1: You know. The other thing is specific cherry tree I
Speaker 1: grew up by with the deer dude, like the Ranella's
Speaker 1: are always in that tree.
Speaker 2: There's less of those bucks on the landscape too, so
Speaker 2: we just we have this perception that we see them less.
Speaker 2: So there's sneakier though, but it's just like a numbers
Speaker 2: game where you're just gonna see less of those bucks,
Speaker 2: even if they're moving just as much as the two
Speaker 2: year olds, because there's I don't know where percentage is
Speaker 2: in most populations, but yeah, much less.
Speaker 4: Yeah, all depends on punting rate and mortality. But but yeah,
Speaker 4: that's gonna be uh yeah. I mean even in a
Speaker 4: well managed population, less than twenty five percent of the
Speaker 4: bucks are going to be something like that. And that's
Speaker 4: just based on age. And then when you start adding
Speaker 4: in antler size, it's gonna be less than ten percent
Speaker 4: are gonna resemble something like that. So they're very rare.
Speaker 6: In twenty fifteen, I tried very hard to kill a
Speaker 6: cactus buck. And if you're listening, you don't know what
Speaker 6: that is. It's A cactus buck is a buck who
Speaker 6: does not shut his velvet, and sometimes he will grow
Speaker 6: a unique rack as a result of that. It could
Speaker 6: be a testosterone problem that his testicles never dropped. It
Speaker 6: could be that he was crossing a fence and ripped
Speaker 6: his sack open one time. And that cactus buck was
Speaker 6: very hard to kill because it seemed as though he
Speaker 6: didn't participate in the rut. He just like didn't loosen
Speaker 6: up and become reckless like the other bucks would. Have
Speaker 6: you ever looked at the movement of a cactus buck?
Speaker 4: Have not?
Speaker 1: Have not?
Speaker 4: We've never, I guess been lucky enough to have a
Speaker 4: collar on one, but a property that a hunt has one.
Speaker 4: Right now, He just got pictures from a puny buddy
Speaker 4: about a week ago that the cactus buck is back.
Speaker 4: So see there last year, It was there last year.
Speaker 6: What did you notice him due last year?
Speaker 5: He?
Speaker 4: Uh, he hung out with the doze.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, they just like don't participate in the room.
Speaker 4: Nope, not at all.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 1: The deer writer Pat Durkin, he had an observation where
Speaker 1: he when he was the editor Deer and Deer Hunting magazine,
Speaker 1: he profiled a great many big buck killers okay, and
Speaker 1: he had come to this kind of realization after a while.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of amazing big buck killers. They couldn't
Speaker 1: tell you what kind of tree their tree stands hanging in,
Speaker 1: meaning it's just like it's not like a wood's there's
Speaker 1: a point at which it's not like a woodsmanship thing.
Speaker 1: It's like they're just good at killing box. They're not
Speaker 1: generalist woodsmen. You know, do you ever feel like your research,
Speaker 1: like in real on the ground application as a deer hunter,
Speaker 1: does your research guide your activities or is like deer
Speaker 1: hunting is just deer hunting and it doesn't matter what
Speaker 1: you know to be true from all your projects.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yes, it does guides. Yeah, And a lot of
Speaker 4: that is about hunting pressure and thinking about and you know,
Speaker 4: this doesn't work everywhere in the US. In the southeast,
Speaker 4: you know a lot a lot of stand hunting, a
Speaker 4: lot of permanent stand hunting and so forth, and and
Speaker 4: just recognizing that deer know when you're on the property
Speaker 4: and it's and it's not gunshots, it's it's you being there,
Speaker 4: you being on an ATV. It's the smells, the sounds,
Speaker 4: all that they they know when you're there. And one
Speaker 4: thing that has really changed when we try to really
Speaker 4: advise now is when when you hunt, if you're going
Speaker 4: to hunt a particular stand, particular area, only go on
Speaker 4: the days where you're going to minimize the opportunity of
Speaker 4: bumping deer, because we know the research I talked about earlier.
Speaker 4: After a couple days and deer know you're on the property,
Speaker 4: they're going to start behaving differently. So doing whatever you
Speaker 4: can to minimize your footprint, so to speak, on the property.
Speaker 4: That's probably one of the biggest things. And then some
Speaker 4: really boring stuff that people roll their eyes about. But
Speaker 4: in terms of antler quality, herd condition, things like that density,
Speaker 4: deer density, dough harvest, stuff like that. I know how
Speaker 4: critically important that is. And people are trying to figure
Speaker 4: out what the heck's going on with our deer. The
Speaker 4: quality of the deer is down, we're doing all this,
Speaker 4: that and the other. You just got too many deer.
Speaker 4: You just have too many mouths relative to the amount
Speaker 4: of range that you have in the food supply. So
Speaker 4: pretty mundane. But stuff like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I could definitely picture management information, But just
Speaker 1: like how you go about where you're putting your stand,
Speaker 1: when you're out there what you're doing with the wind,
Speaker 1: But I could see with the stuff, with the research
Speaker 1: you've done around how they handle pressure, you might look
Speaker 1: at a place, look what everybody's up to, and then
Speaker 1: based on what you've seen, be like I think when
Speaker 1: the pressure hits, I think you're going to see more
Speaker 1: of this, You're gonna see less of that, and that
Speaker 1: might guide your movements.
Speaker 4: Yeah, what I do all the time. So, yeah, what
Speaker 4: we talked about approach, try to minimize your disturbance of
Speaker 4: the deer. I think about during the rut, I think
Speaker 4: about where are those dough focal groups on the landscape.
Speaker 4: What are going to be the movement or cover corridors
Speaker 4: that might link those areas up and so it won't
Speaker 4: be hunting on food. It's going to be hunting on
Speaker 4: a corridor. And then finally when you get to the
Speaker 4: post rut, I'm focusing on food. So the evidence is
Speaker 4: really really clear with that. When you get a month
Speaker 4: past the peak of the rut, they got to recover
Speaker 4: that twenty percent of their body weight. They're hungry, and
Speaker 4: food plots in my neck of the woods us a
Speaker 4: great place to haunt.
Speaker 3: M think, well, that spencer Newhart.
Speaker 6: Can I make two study requests?
Speaker 4: Absolutely well, okay one of them.
Speaker 6: I haunt a lot of places in the West where
Speaker 6: whitetail habitat and mule deer habitat overlap, but I never
Speaker 6: see them interact with each other. I'm always like pretty
Speaker 6: shocked that I could. I could, in the same hunt
Speaker 6: see a couple of white tails and a couple of
Speaker 6: mule deers, but they like don't have any social interaction
Speaker 6: anything to do with them. I would be very interested in,
Speaker 6: like if if you took that same study and you
Speaker 6: put a dough down a corral and she got to
Speaker 6: choose between a muley buck and a white tail buck,
Speaker 6: I imagine would be very high highly skewed for the white
Speaker 6: tail buck, like ninety plus percent, just based on what
Speaker 6: I've seen. But I don't know that I'm interested in
Speaker 6: anything like what a white tail buck and a mule
Speaker 6: deer buck would do if they encountered each other.
Speaker 1: That's a great thing. Or if you just took like
Speaker 1: if you just took like older arrays hmm, like order
Speaker 1: from a mild deer dough and estriss and odor from
Speaker 1: a white tail dough and estrus and like put it
Speaker 1: in front of both boxes. He like, oh, that's the
Speaker 1: white tail, you know, Yeah, that's a great.
Speaker 6: And in my observations, they interact as though like an
Speaker 6: elk in a white tail would interact. They just show
Speaker 6: no interest in each other. But I can't imagine it's
Speaker 6: that simple.
Speaker 3: You know, how you get funding for this?
Speaker 1: Remember how a few years ago you couldn't get funding
Speaker 1: for anything if it didn't have to do with climate. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: so pitch it like this. More and more white tails
Speaker 1: moving into more and more mildier country, mild deer are
Speaker 1: in a tough spot. Milder are probably going to be
Speaker 1: in a tougher spot with increased competition from white tails
Speaker 1: increase competition for elk. So go to the Mild Deer
Speaker 1: Foundation and be like, we need to understand more about
Speaker 1: as these as these white tails are colonizing more and
Speaker 1: more mildier country, how do they interact? We did, and
Speaker 1: here's all you're funding. Now there you go, got that problem.
Speaker 4: What do you think on like how they interact with
Speaker 4: each other in the wild. Don't know a lot about
Speaker 4: that because that's out of my that's side of my
Speaker 4: home range over there, But I do think it would
Speaker 4: be interesting to challenge a white tailed dough with a
Speaker 4: fully mature, large antlered mule deer and then a smaller,
Speaker 4: younger whitetail. Really, is it the species straw or the
Speaker 4: the phenotype of this is a good father, a good sire.
Speaker 6: And biology would tell us that she would be making
Speaker 6: a poor decision by going with the Muley right, because
Speaker 6: their offspring really fail with their escape mechanism, like they
Speaker 6: can't start or something like that is viable. I don't
Speaker 6: know if that's is that true?
Speaker 1: I think that I think it's like I think it's
Speaker 1: like a horse.
Speaker 3: And a donkey throwing a mule.
Speaker 6: I thought.
Speaker 1: They're viable. Okay, they're sexually viable.
Speaker 6: We're gonna learn when he does the study.
Speaker 1: You know what I'd throw into that study? Man, if
Speaker 1: you got like time to burn, man, if there's any
Speaker 1: like h if symmetry matters to dose joan, is there
Speaker 1: any like disadvantage to being atypical? It probably gets hard
Speaker 1: after a while to tease out all these little differences, though,
Speaker 1: don't it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but you could manipulate it. It would be obvious. Yeah, yeah, nine, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: you could attach stuff to where it's really.
Speaker 3: He's got a club on one side.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you can do that.
Speaker 6: The other study I'd be interested in is a deer's
Speaker 6: response to yellow soybeans. I've been told all my life,
Speaker 6: and I feel like I've maybe witnessed it some but
Speaker 6: I don't know if I'm witnessing it because I'm supposed
Speaker 6: to witness it. But a deer given the choice in
Speaker 6: a in a big old soybean field, if there's some
Speaker 6: green beans, some yellow beans, and some brown beans, which
Speaker 6: the yellow is the ripening stage going from green to brown,
Speaker 6: they won't pick the yellow ones. They just taste worse,
Speaker 6: taste worse. Is that something you've heard seen?
Speaker 4: No, I haven't, but I think that's logical. So turning
Speaker 4: yellow from the desiccation that they're growing.
Speaker 1: Sounds like yeah, good? Like that. You know. I got
Speaker 1: some friends that are songwriters, and over the years, I've
Speaker 1: learned that they just do not want to hear our
Speaker 1: song ideas. But they don't even when you try to
Speaker 1: do it like a joke and give them a song
Speaker 1: idea but you're serious, but you're trying to act like
Speaker 1: it's a joke, they don't want to hear it.
Speaker 4: I like how you use the word hour. But but
Speaker 4: do they give you the obligatory that's a good.
Speaker 3: Just nothing to it. Do you like hearing study ideas?
Speaker 1: I do. Snow, you got a pile of.
Speaker 4: Some of them. Some of them can be really cuckoo.
Speaker 4: So you're you know, you're given a seminar and you
Speaker 4: always have what you ought to do? Is sure that
Speaker 4: can get old?
Speaker 1: What else? Man?
Speaker 3: I could go on all day.
Speaker 6: They just like to cap it off. If if hunters
Speaker 6: want to take what you've seen in your movement still
Speaker 6: but he's an apply it to the rut this year?
Speaker 6: What does that look like?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 6: Yeah, how can they be more successful?
Speaker 4: So if you again, if you're going after a target buck,
Speaker 4: a particular buck, your greater opportunity for him to demonstrate
Speaker 4: site fidelity. So if you know where he's hanging out,
Speaker 4: you need to do that in the pre rut. If
Speaker 4: on the other hand, you are just gonna there's a
Speaker 4: lot of big bucks in the area. I just want
Speaker 4: to increase my odds for intercepting one that's going to
Speaker 4: be during the peak of the rut, a.
Speaker 6: Pre rut window being like late October.
Speaker 4: Well it depends when you is, say it's like a.
Speaker 6: November fifteen rut, that's the peak rut.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so let's go one month or greater before the
Speaker 4: peak of the rut. Okay, yeah, so like October fifteen
Speaker 4: then in your neck of the woods. Yeah okay, yeah,
Speaker 4: that'd be about right.
Speaker 1: Okay, So just make sure I'm track what you're saying,
Speaker 1: Like when we when you pick the November fifteenth, we
Speaker 1: would agree that peak rut is sort of like the
Speaker 1: day when you have the highest relative number of doughs
Speaker 1: in estres. That's what is that fair to define peak
Speaker 1: rut that way?
Speaker 4: Yeah, but rather than day, we might say over a
Speaker 4: two week, over a two week period, about half of
Speaker 4: the does have been into estres. So yes, that is
Speaker 4: going to be the series of days where the greatest
Speaker 4: number and greatest proportion.
Speaker 1: So there's a there's a two week window, like if
Speaker 1: you take a like just generally with white tail deer,
Speaker 1: there's a two week window in which fifty percent of
Speaker 1: the does come into estres. And we're going to declare
Speaker 1: that two week window peak rut.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, if it's a synchronized rut and so forth.
Speaker 1: Yeah, generally speaking, So that that's kind of funny because
Speaker 1: then when you hear guys killing some giant that no
Speaker 1: one has ever seen, never showed up on their cameras, like,
Speaker 1: that's that, dude, it's cruise, an excursion, he's an excursion book. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he excurreted off your place. Yeah, and excirted on some
Speaker 1: other goal.
Speaker 4: Somebody else and they got him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly right.
Speaker 4: And then if you didn't get them pre rut, if
Speaker 4: you didn't get them during the rut, hunt food in
Speaker 4: the post rut, okay, yeah, and during the rut you
Speaker 4: might want to here's an interesting finding. We actually looked
Speaker 4: at food plot use, two different types of food plot use,
Speaker 4: and so on our study area. By the way, our
Speaker 4: study area was fifty to sixty thousand acres, so pretty big,
Speaker 4: pretty big footprint, and we had every making model of
Speaker 4: food plot you could have. We had quarter acre food
Speaker 4: plots acre all the way up to twenty acre food plots,
Speaker 4: and so we wanted to look at is there any
Speaker 4: food plot size that deer would come to that disproportionately and.
Speaker 2: So the size you weren't varying what you were growing.
Speaker 4: Good, good question. We had so many food plots that
Speaker 4: we had to assume that some of them had wheat
Speaker 4: and clover some of them had brassicas. We had to
Speaker 4: assume all that kind of smoothed, doubt that the actual
Speaker 4: plantings within it. But yes, it was just size and
Speaker 4: what we found. Even though two times the amount of
Speaker 4: like the smaller one acre food plots, the sweet spot
Speaker 4: was three four five acres. Really they disproportionately selected that
Speaker 4: size of plot.
Speaker 1: That feels secure to them.
Speaker 4: So why why would they do that? And so we
Speaker 4: think it's because what do small food plots not provide
Speaker 4: over the course of the hunting season. What happens to them?
Speaker 2: They get eaten out.
Speaker 4: They get over brows, they get overwhelmed. So not only
Speaker 4: because of the size of it and the number of
Speaker 4: deer on it. You don't have as many hours of
Speaker 4: photosynthesis going on because the smaller in the shade all that.
Speaker 4: Then you get to this three four five acre. Now
Speaker 4: you've got a big area. You're now producing more forage
Speaker 4: per acre, and now we've got a social aspect of
Speaker 4: it too, which I'll get to in a second. But
Speaker 4: then after that it was diminishing returns. So we didn't
Speaker 4: see anything greater of a ten acre plot versus a
Speaker 4: three acre plot.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, they didn't prefer five over twenty.
Speaker 4: They did.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry they did.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And so we saw a big drop
Speaker 4: off in relative to their availability on the landscape. Deer
Speaker 4: were disproportionately choosing those plots over the ones smaller and
Speaker 4: the ones larger.
Speaker 1: What's the argument against a bigger plot? Do you think
Speaker 1: in his head?
Speaker 4: I think you reach a particular size and there's just
Speaker 4: only so many deer in the area or are gonna
Speaker 4: use it.
Speaker 6: And I would say they're vulnerable.
Speaker 1: There's it's like a like like why do you feel
Speaker 1: a avoids? Like why is he avoiding a big food plot?
Speaker 4: I see what you mean. Now, yeah, he doesn't want
Speaker 4: to go into the middle of a big, old ten
Speaker 4: or twenty acres. Yeah, because that's security possibly, so yes, exposure.
Speaker 1: It's exposed.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So when you look at during the year, if
Speaker 4: you look at the number of visits per day, you
Speaker 4: will see that they are visiting more during the rut.
Speaker 4: So you think about how we analyze the data, it's
Speaker 4: just ding, did he visit the plot or not? Yes,
Speaker 4: and you tally those up. So they're visiting those food
Speaker 4: plots more during the day. So some of that is food,
Speaker 4: some of it is also socially. I mean they're cruising
Speaker 4: looking for dose. When you get to the end of
Speaker 4: the year, during the post rut, they will have just
Speaker 4: as many or less visits, but their duration is longer.
Speaker 4: So now they are visiting for the purpose of forage
Speaker 4: and not socially looking for a female.
Speaker 1: Yep, cow man. No, it's a lot of great information.
Speaker 1: I got such a good study. I had to say
Speaker 1: so hard to explain.
Speaker 2: I'm like a post book right now, and all I
Speaker 2: can think about is some food. And we got to
Speaker 2: do this trivia in like thirty minutes.
Speaker 3: Dude, thanks for coming on and wrap it up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, I love your the extension, like, tell people
Speaker 1: go how to go find your work and to see exauce.
Speaker 1: I mean, you got you have your academic publications, but
Speaker 1: you're also producing stuff for just guys like us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so tell people how to go, how to go kind
Speaker 1: of find some of your infographics.
Speaker 4: And yeah, a couple places so you can go to
Speaker 4: the Msudar lab dot com. That's our website that has
Speaker 4: all of these publications on there. We also do a
Speaker 4: lot of this on social media, so we're on Facebook, Instagram,
Speaker 4: we have a YouTube channel with a lot of different videos,
Speaker 4: podcasts where we talk about this type of stuff. Podcast
Speaker 4: is Deer University, so MSU Deer Lab, the website, social media,
Speaker 4: uh YouTube. You ought to be able to get us.
Speaker 4: If it's on the private side outside of the university.
Speaker 4: If you're looking for help with land management, go to
Speaker 4: Wildlife Investments dot com and there's a lot of us there.
Speaker 4: A little company consulting work that's for consulting work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's great, man. And on that consulting work you
Speaker 1: kind of you probably do. You go survey the property,
Speaker 1: talk about what's going on, what could be better?
Speaker 4: Right, what strategies, habitat habitat management, deer ducks, turkey, quail,
Speaker 4: whatever you want with wildlife management. All right, we've got
Speaker 4: an expert.
Speaker 1: To help you. Right again, doctor Bronson Strickland from University
Speaker 1: of Mississippi.
Speaker 4: Hale State, Mississippi State.
Speaker 1: University, Mississippi State University. We have that same problem in
Speaker 1: Michigan because we've got U of M and M s
Speaker 1: U well.
Speaker 2: With the M specific with them specifically specifically.
Speaker 1: And then the the extension material is like the extension
Speaker 1: piece I was talking about that shows like that kind
Speaker 1: of puts your study on the lunar stuff. That's that's uh,
Speaker 1: that's a Michigan State University Extension pieced a Mississippi State
Speaker 1: University Extension piece that puts down it's a great graphic
Speaker 1: because it puts down what people think, the idiosyncrasies of
Speaker 1: what people think, what's found, and then it puts it
Speaker 1: into all these like percentages, and then whatever kind of
Speaker 1: guy you are, moon underfoot, moon overhead, full moon rising,
Speaker 1: full moon setting, you can go and track every possible
Speaker 1: variation and find out.
Speaker 3: Yards per hour all that, and you can go put
Speaker 3: your mind at ease about what's going on.
Speaker 1: That's right. I mean, it's very It is a when
Speaker 1: you look through it. I spent thirty minutes staring at
Speaker 1: it today. It is a very convincing portrayal of like
Speaker 1: looking at something quite thoroughly.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a great piece.
Speaker 4: Appreciate that.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 3: In poster form, it would take up a lot of walls.
Speaker 4: It sure would, it sure would.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you might think about a small poster. We will, yeah,
Speaker 1: with the real salient points in it next time.
Speaker 3: Okay, thank you very much for coming on.
Speaker 1: We're all going to be, if not better deer hunters, better,
Speaker 1: Dear observers now, thank
Speaker 2: You, thanks Ronson,