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Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.
00:00:20
Speaker 2: Hey everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by first Light.
00:00:24
Speaker 3: I’m your host, Tony Peterson.
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Speaker 2: In today’s episode is all about our impact on the woods and why when you start to be mindful of it, you become a way, way better deer hunter. All right, everyone, I have an assignment for you.
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Speaker 3: Trust me on this.
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Speaker 2: If you go do what I say, then you come back and listen to this episode. You will think about your hunting in a different light. And I promise you it will help you kill more big bucks. And I don’t ever really promise that, but I am.
00:00:51
Speaker 3: Now.
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Speaker 2: Go listen to the Mediater podcast episode number eight thirty eight called how to Translate Animal Language with George. Listen to every word he says, and then come back and listen to this episode because I’m going to take his lessons and apply them to the world of deer hunting. Now believe me when I say this, that episode might have more real, actionable hunting advice in it than anything I’ve ever produced, or at the very least, anything I’ve encountered in a piece of content in a long, long long time. Do that, and then come back here and finish this episode.
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Speaker 3: For real.
00:01:29
Speaker 2: Let me describe a common whitetail scenario for you that I kind of want to use as the basis for this podcast, or at least as a jumping off point.
00:01:38
Speaker 3: You follow all of the best.
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Speaker 2: Advice in the white tail space as it applies to your type of hunting.
00:01:43
Speaker 3: You winter scout as you should.
00:01:45
Speaker 2: You get out and burn some boot leather to find antlers as you should. As midsummer hits, you spray on some bug spray, buy some double A batteries, and you head out into the woods to drop some cameras off. Some go on field edges, some in the woods on travel roads, likely on some kind of funnel or pinch point. The summer ends, fall progresses, and your field edge cameras show plenty of action, while your pinch point cameras show some Now you hunt those early field edges you know, and it just doesn’t happen. The field edges start to go a little dead, except for at night. But occasionally you get that delicious dopamine hit of an image or a video showing up on your in the woods cameras. Now, as October slips away, one of your cameras just starts going off. The bucks are feeling it, and not just any bucks, but it seems like bucks of all age classes. As the end of October looms closer, you make your first attempt to hunt where that hot camera is. You slip into a pre hung stand. The wind is perfect, the seasonal timing is getting real good, and then you blink, or maybe you have a Dona font come through, maybe a four ky. You reason it’s just not quite time yet. You need a few more days, So you wait a few days. Your camera starts to get active again, and the season is just getting better. You repeat the process and have the same results. Now, since the camera shows plenty of action, you just assume it’s bad luck that the bucks haven’t shown up. You have a choice to make now, keep trusting the camera and the spot, or hunt somewhere else. A lot of folks will just go right out back to that field edge with their rattling antlers, and a whole heart full of hopes and dreams. Some will ride it out on that pinch point, some will kill, most won’t. But what went wrong for those who didn’t? By anyone who has gone through this is probably has a pretty good answer, and they probably aren’t wrong. There is always anxiety and excitement rolled up into going into a spot where you have an active camera because the wild card is always us being there, and why wouldn’t it be. We are the apex predator out there, and don’t kid yourself that you’re not viewed that way. In my neck of the woods, wolves are the big bad oh wolves. But the truth is are impact is super negative on the woods as well. Sure, wild canines don’t follow game laws and will kill a deer at midnight just as much as they will during legal shooting hours, But when we take to the woods, we have an outsized impact on the animals in the woods. Are scent, our movements, our presence, It’s felt, and that would be enough to keep a lot of deer from going where we need them to go. But if you followed my advice from the intro to this podcast and went back and listened to the mediater podcast with George Buhman called How to Translate Animal Language. You know there is probably more to it. In fact, I think most of us intuitively know there is more to our presence than.
00:04:39
Speaker 3: Just us and the deer.
00:04:42
Speaker 2: If you’ve ever been reprimanded by a squirrel in the woods, you know there is more to it. Or maybe you flush a covey of quail while sneaking into your stand out west doc and meal deer, elk and sometimes antelope. You bump cattle grazing away on public land, and you might as well lit off a Roman candle and started firing it into criminately into the sky. When you sneak into that spot with that hot camera, you’re not really fooling a hell of a lot of the critters out there that we don’t pay any mind to. Sure, a squirrel barking at a sucks, but squirrels bark at lots of stuff. But you know what, everything is scared of us, especially when we are hiding and signaling that we are in predator mode. The crazy thing about that is most of what we aren’t hunting is very, very afraid of us. I think about this when I walk into my backyard in the late spring, as the evening sets in the amount of frogs we have here with our pond, which is really just a swamp that they couldn’t build a dollar general in is bananas. If I step outside to shoot a few rounds of arrows, the calling of amphibians is pretty unreal until I walk up to my targets, which are right on the edge of the pond. Then it’s like someone flips a series of switches as all of the frogs shut up in waves across the pond. I’m not hunting them, In fact, I love frogs, but they don’t know that. And you know what, I notice that a lot when I hunt ponds in the early season. When I walk in, things go silent, and I can promise you a buck bedded within earshot notices that too. Since they are frogs, they don’t wait forever to start up again. But there is a time period where the silence spreads a credible rumor through the animal kingdom that something scary is there, and the animals listen to that stuff. I’m convinced this is a reason we are gravitating toward blinds more and more in the white tail space. Now I know what it seems like on the surface, you don’t seem simple. Get in there and you can move around and not get spotted by the deer. This goes for pop up blinds and box blinds, and you have the added benefit of a little noise suppression and some sense suppression, but you also have the benefit of not having nearly as big of an impact on all of the songbirds and squirrels and turk and whoever else might be going through that isn’t on your hit list. Think about it this way. The dominant style of hunting for most people who have been filming for a long time is to get into a box blind on a food plot. This is no accident. It’s the easiest way to keep your felt presence down to a bare minimum, which makes hunting easier.
00:07:23
Speaker 3: Now.
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Speaker 2: Anyone who has filmed a hang and bang public land hunt with a cameraman knows exactly why a lot of TV shows are filmed out of box blinds. This style has added benefits when it comes to comfort and spot burnout, of course, but there’s no denying that if you walk out to your elevated redneck blind in the middle of an acre of clover, you’re definitely keeping your negative presence out of the areas where all of the forest critters might subtly announce your presence to anyone listening, and trust me, everyone’s listening.
00:07:55
Speaker 3: Think about it this way.
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Speaker 2: If you were in Africa sitting on a bank above a muddy river, and you watched a herd of blue wildebeest walk down to the edge of the river to grab a drink, and one of them ended up with its nose in between the teeth of a crocodile, you wouldn’t just walk down there to splash around and cool off under the rationale that you’re not a wildebeest, so you’re probably not on the menu. The things that eat deer eat rabbits and squirrels and songbirds and whatever they can get their teeth on. There is a risk reward metric for prey animals who ignore the warning calls of other prey animals, and I’d guess that the ones that pass on their jeans with some regularity are the ones who heed that call relatively equally. When I listen to that Meat Eater podcast, I realized that a lot of my hunting style has been in a response to this reality. Even though I didn’t fully understand it. Over the last several seasons, I’ve started sitting way later in the mornings and going out way earlier in the evenings, and then sitting all day whenever I can. I figured it was just good business to be out there for more hours, and in fact I still believe that. But I also think there’s way more to it. I think that subconsciously, I knew that I was making a big impact on the places I wanted to hunt, especially when I was sitting over a little water hole or hunting a patch of small cover somewhere. For as long as I’ve been consuming hunting content, which started as magazines when I was a kid, people have been talking about letting the woods settle down, that you have to give it time to return to normal, and they aren’t wrong. We view that as a deer centric thing, but it’s not. It’s a nature thing. The worst thing to happen to most of those animals just walked into their world and climbed into a tree or put his back to a tree, or got.
00:09:56
Speaker 3: Into a blind.
00:09:58
Speaker 2: That’s no small thing, and something, some songbird, some insects, some roadent, something is going to express its displeasure at that big, bad man’s presence. Now, if you lived out there and were hunted daily or at least often enough to realize that you’re definitely in danger, you’d listen to those alarms and react accordingly. Now you might be thinking, well, sometimes I walk in and shoot a buck two minutes after I get there. Right, me too, But mostly no. This is one of the big reasons we love the rut, because the deer we want to kill the most are likely to ignore danger that they normally wouldn’t. Mostly we should pay attention to this stuff because given the amount of time we have to hunt and how little of that actually is, the rut means this is pretty important stuff. I think it goes deeper than this too. I was texting back and forth with the CEO of Tethered recently, and he was showing me a really good buck that he was after last season. He mentioned that he tried to call him in but the buck just wasn’t having it. I asked him if he snort weezed, and he said he did, but that he didn’t think that buck was much of a fighter, by the way he responded, Now, I thought about that, and he might be right, But I’m not so sure.
00:11:12
Speaker 3: I think that all the deer fight.
00:11:14
Speaker 2: Because they all live in a hierarchy, and I just don’t think the snort wheeze call always ends up in a fight, because a lot of nature is just posturing for dominance, since an actual fight is a high stakes action. But then it occurred to me that I’ve had dozens and dozens of deer and turkeys that I’ve called to react negatively or neutrally, and quite a few of them that have responded positively have done so until they suddenly didn’t.
00:11:40
Speaker 3: Now, think about this.
00:11:42
Speaker 2: When you’re sitting out there trying not to move too much, and you spot that buck in the woods or that gobbler out in the field, and you decide to make a call, what do you do well? With deer, You usually have to reach for a grunt tube or a set of antlers, and often you stand up to get ready to shoot. That’s big movement stuff. Now, if your back is to a tree and your turkey hunting, you might have to reach on the ground for your box call or a slate call, maybe grab a mouth call and pop it back in quick while getting your shotgun up on your knees. Big movements. You do both in a way that you know that the buck or longbeard can’t see you. But what about the songbirds and the trees with you? What about the stuff you aren’t paying attention to at all because they don’t matter in the moment. I’m not saying this is how it always goes, or that this is the primary reason a calling sequence doesn’t work, But imagine this. You’re a buck and you hear a grunt call. You look and you don’t see anything, but you also hear the alarm call of some songbird I don’t know, say a robin. That’s two strikes. It’s not the same thing as spotting some cameo clad do in a tree and busting him flat out, but it’s something, and it might be just enough to get you to question the intelligence of heading over there when you really don’t need to. Their curiosity just often isn’t enough. Take the long beard think about it. He sees your decoys, he hears your calls, but watches a whole bunch of songbirds sort of listens to a chipmunk freak out or whatever make their alarm calls. And he’s not that curious about anything. Because turkeys just don’t have that. He probably doesn’t even actively acknowledge what is going on, but something trips a tiny little alarm in his brain that says, eh, I’m close enough, I’m going to strut here and see if the hen comes over to me. That might be all it takes. I think that kind of thing happens to us a lot. In fact, there’s a stupid stand on my property in Wisconsin I’ve been talking about for two stupid seasons now where I can’t get a frickin’ deer to walk by it, even though the camera I have there is my most active camera in that whole stupid county. It has really bothered me that out of multiple all day sits over two seasons, I’ve seen exactly one deer, a button buck, and that deer came through within like two minutes of the shooting light. The very first time I sat there, I just didn’t believe that the deer were winding me, and I know they aren’t seeing me because it’s pretty thick. But last year, as I sat there for three dark to dark sits during the rut, I realized that I almost constantly have pine squirrels bitching me out. There are also a lot of blue jays in there for some reason, and they aren’t shy about making alarm calls. I don’t know if this is the reason or not, but it got me wondering. In fact, this year, I’m not going to do anything different other than brush in a blind there in the late summer and let it soak inuntil the rut. I’m going to slip in well before first light to hunt that spot and see if being contained in a blind instead of up in a pine tree with a local squirrel population affects my success there at all. And I kind of believe it will, but I might be wrong either way. I’m going to find out. I’m also convinced that this is something that is a real factor for success when you hunt where the hunting is really tough. Now, if you have a high deer density or you just hunt lightly pressure deer, I don’t think they take their survival as seriously as deer that live you know, where there are very few of them and where they get hunted really hard. I know that might sound crazy, but the best way to kill giant bucks, we’ve found a date is to convince them they aren’t in any danger. For five years of their life by putting no pressure on them. I also know that I’m going to try hard to think about this stuff this fall when I’m out hunting by myself or with my daughters. I don’t know exactly what that means for me, other than I’m going to try my best to keep my presence down, my negative presence not felt as much as possible, and to get out there for as many hours as i can on each sit. I don’t really love the idea of getting into more blinds, so I’m not going to lean too hard into that direction, even though that is an easy move for at least part of the issue. But this isn’t about just being a better big buck killer either. The idea of learning what the birds say to each other, not only when I walk through, but when a coyote or a bobcat is around, or what the crows have to say at the bait site, when my daughters are trying to arrow a bear, or just about any of the sounds nature wants to offer up to teach me a thing or two. They’re just interesting, something worth paying attention to, and that should interest you too, Because woodsmanship actually kills big deer, but developing it is also a cheat code to enjoying time in the woods more, which is something we can all probably use. Think about that and think about coming back next week because it’s time to talk turkeys, calling decoys, blind setups, and a whole bunch of other good gobbler stuff. That’s it for this episode. I am Tony Peterson. This is the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. Thank you so much for your support showing up every week for us.
00:16:58
Speaker 3: We really really appreciateciate it.
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Speaker 2: If you want some more content, and we know you do, we drop new stuff damn near every day at the mediator dot com. New podcasts, new articles, new recipes, new films, all kinds of good stuff. Go check it out at the mediator dot com and thank you once again for all your support.
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