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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.
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Speaker 2: Hey everyone, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which has brought to you by first Light. I’m your host, Tony Peterson, and today’s episode is all about understanding not only what bucks eat this time of year, but why it’s all sort of tied to what those bucks will be doing in November when it’s time to shoot them in the lungs. You’ve probably noticed that the latest wave in health conscious eating for people involves protein. Walk the aisles of your local grocery store and you’ll see protein packed foods advertised loud and proud. If you work out, you probably have also heard all about peptides and how expensive they are, how good they work, and on and on. You can’t help ourselves when it comes to health trends, but that’s because we need to be told what to eat and what not to eat. These days, we’ve drifted from simple eating and the kind of eating that follows instincts based off of what our bodies need to kind of comfort eating. That’s not great, but at least the deer don’t do that. They know what they need. They seek out those nutritional sources and it’s honestly one of the primary drivers in a buck’s life. It’s far more important to him than almost anything else, and understanding that is often the key to meeting up with him during deer season. This is what I’m going to talk about right now. Let’s say you have a busy life, so you haven’t been working out, and now you have to throw on a speedo like doctor Randall used to wear while guiding fly fishing clients, and you realize you’re not quite as cut as you want to beat. So he decided to lose a few pounds, and the easiest way to do that is to eat right, So you lean into prioritizing fiber and lean protein. The one two punch that slows down digestion and reduce us is the munchies. The eggs and venison and chicken and whatever else are a good start, but you also need to mix in something that tastes good, so you eat some fruit, maybe some fresh vegetables. Now you have low calorie, high energy foods keep you going. You feel like you’re making some progress. So you ditch the refined carbs like you find in white bread and you go for something nutrient dense and fiber rich, like whole wheat bread. This is all a great start, but you also need to give up the soda, the ice cream, the sour gummy worms, nerd clusters, and whatever else to stay in a calorie deficit. But you do these things, and guess what your body changes, and so does your mind. Now let’s say you’re already lean, but you want to be jacked. You want to bulk up with muscle and not just gain a bunch of visceral fat. Well, you need to take in some extra calories, say around three hundred to five hundred a day, somewhere around one gram per pound of body weight per day. And you need fuel to keep picking up heavy stuff and putting it down, you know, and that comes from the right carbs. And amongst all that, you need those healthy fats that are found in avocados and olive oil and some nuts. To lose weight. You kind of eat what you eat to gain the right weight. But the path is quite a bit different. Now. If you were a buck or hell really animal in the wild, you wouldn’t even consider eating to lose weight. Nature doesn’t much go in that direction very often, but instead is generally looking for ways to get as many calories as needed without the risk of becoming someone else’s lunch. Bucks are wired for this, of course, but they are also eating to bulk up for the rut. This isn’t likely a conscious decision, but honestly, who knows. I don’t really think bucks are out there in their bachelor groups thinking, man, I need to eat some more soybean leaves tonight because in four months it is on and those doves that always bed in the waterway down by the pond are looking real good this year. But maybe they do think that way, or maybe they think I’m going to eat a bunch of elfalf right now because in three weeks I’m going to kick that wonky nine pointers ass. Probably not. But what does happen right now and up to the rut is that bucks eat to be the best physical specimens they can be. We don’t really consider that because if you broke down the diet of a buck on any given day in July, it would probably consist of dozens of different plants. We like simple, we like straightforward, like the way food plots give us something to sit over. That deer generally will eat at some point with all the background noise of everything else he might eat in any given day. To start with, you need to think about it this way. That buck out there, he’s an athlete getting ready for the amorous Olympics, and he needs protein, lots of it. But if you know anything about protein, it’s not that easy to get by just eating a leafy salad without any topics. Lucky for him, he understands this and knows where to look for the best sources out there. He will, if he has access to it, seek out soybean fields. Anyone who hunts white tails an egg country at all knows that summer bucks and soybeans go together like mark and butterfly tramp stamps. Lush green soybean leaves contain twenty five to thirty five percent crude protein. They’re highly digestible, offer two to four percent fat, and also contain calcium and phosphorus. In other words, if you don’t hunt soybeans in the early season, but you could or you don’t really understand why you should consider that. It might literally be the best food source for them at that time. In September, if they can get to the green leaves, they will. Every day in October, if they can get to the green leaves, they will. I’ve mentioned this many times, but one of the easiest ways to kill a good buck in the early season is to focus on the patches of soybean fields you know that are in low or shady areas where the leaves will stay green longer when the rest of the field starts to yellow. Now, instead of focusing on a fifty acre field, you might have three acres in total where the deer really want to be, which means you can predict with a high level of accuracy where they’ll go feed. And on top of that, those spots are often the places they want to be anyway, because they’re not that visible. Now. Alfalfa is another brainer for early season and summertime bucks. You know it has eighteen to twenty five percent crude protein, high digestibility, a fat percentage similar to soybean leaves, and a tendency to be real high in calcium. Right there with alfalfa are a couple of different kinds of clover and peas now where egg isn’t everywhere. Bucks will munch on young forbes like ragweed and pokeweed, which can offer fifteen to thirty percent protein. And they’ll even eat BlackBerry leaves. I watched a dough a few years ago eating actual raspberries in August. I don’t know why I’m telling you that, but maybe someday somewhere someone will shoot a deer on a berry pattern. I don’t know. All of this is pretty simple and well known stuff, and most hunters don’t seem to care a whole lot because it seems like their summer pattern for those deer is pretty disconnected from the fall pattern they’ll be on. But it’s not. And honestly, I think most people who are struggling to kill mature bucks would do a hell of a lot better forgetting about the rut for a minute and trying to action patterned summer bucks and then kill them in the first week or two of the season. That used to be such a popular method of hunting, and it was talked about a lot, but now it seems like it’s just not as popular. I can’t help but wonder if that’s partially due to the fact that it’s easier to sell rut hunters a lot of gear than it is to sell an early season hunter a lot of gear. I don’t want to be that cynical, but I’ve seen how the sausage is made, and I’m not so sure that isn’t true to some extent. Now, the key to this strategy and just learning what bucks need to eat to do what they need to do throughout the year, is that it introduces a level of predictability to their behavior. We think that the rut will do this, and it does, but not in the same way. You can predict that a buck will move more in daylight during the rut, because he generally will. You can try to predict where that movement is likely to happen, and with the right funnel or pinch point and enough time and patience, you can be right on you know, often enough to rely on it. What a rut plan is just ripe for something to blow up. Higher than expected temperatures, east winds, you know, the most hunting pressure of the season. One hot dough on the neighbors. You name it. Promise of the rut in all of its awesomeness also glosses over the sheer unpredictability of the whole thing. When a buck is thinking with his not his stomach, he’s difficult to pin down. When he’s thinking about food, you have the chance to almost know where he’s going to be on any given day. Now, it’s not that simple, of course, but it is an advantage we often overlook, and that’s a mistake. So think about it this way. You can absolutely know what foods are most beneficial to him. On the day of the bowseason opens up in your neck of the woods. You can hopefully glass those foods. Is to develop some kind of pattern on him, or use cameras or both. If you have access to the right food source, he will at the very least show you an awful lot about how he uses it. That intel is real valuable. I’d place a higher value on a buck showing up on the edge of an alfalfa field three out of seven nights during shooting hours in September, way above that same buck showing up on a camera and shooting light three out of seven days in the first week of November. This is simply because the factors that could throw him off that early season pattern aren’t as numerous as those that could keep him from crossing through that funnel in the next week. And when you think about it, what we do as hunters is just kind of gamble on this stuff. We take in the data we can, we decide what to do with it, and then place our bets on hunting this stand or that blind or not hunting today to hunt next week. Whatever the best friend a gambler can have is predictability, and nothing in a buck’s life is more predictable than where he is likely to feed before the rut kicks in. Now, I’m not trying to talk you out to hunting the rut. The beauty of all of this is that you can actually hunt the early season, the mid season, and the rut even a late season. But if you want to kill big bucks, and I know you do, and you’re not actively trying to figure out the early season game, you’re not giving yourself the best shot you can to kill big bucks. It’s kind of that simple. But what happens if your deer go from you know, the summer tissue building phase of eating to the building fuel reserves phase. These are very different things, and the window before they turn over is one in which you can kill big bucks with consistency. But the turnover might happen the first week of September in some places and not you know, at least until deep into October and others. But it will happen, and when it does, you’ll know because that field edge camera that has been pretty consistent will suddenly show more sporadic movement, and a lot of your daylight visitors will start to show up at midnight. This is the time when a lot of hunters say, say, well, the lull is on and it’s time to rake some leaves and bank up the brownie points at home because the bucks aren’t moving in daylight. That’s just wrong. Though. I believe hunting pressure has a big influence on this shift, but that is just what it is, and is so highly variable amongst different hunters in their different hunting situations. It’s a wild card. You just have to evaluate for yourself. But even if you hunt public land with lots of pressure, you need to remind yourself that the bucks in your neighborhood still have very specific nutritional needs. The easiest food source to identify here is good old corn fall dear love corn and it’s probably not for the taste, or at least not solely for the taste. Corn averages eight to ten percent crude protein and four to five percent fat. It’s low in fiber but high end calorie density, considering it’s about seventy percent starch, which is just a form of carbs, you know, just the kind of thing you want to eat if you’re bulking up and getting ready to run yourself ragged for a few weeks. Corn is obvious, though, and so are acorns. White oak acorns contain about four to six percent protein but forty five to fifty five percent carbs and plenty of fat. They are like little energy balls raining from the trees, and the deer know it. Red oaks are similar in nutritional value, but just loaded with tannins, which a wildlife researcher told me recently is tied to their germination timelines. Red oak acorns apparently need to sit on the ground a lot longer, so they need a defense against getting eaten up, which is cool as hell. Then you have apples per Simon’s grapes, you know, stuff like that that offers a lot of sugar, you know, which is carbs and probably tastes better than soybean leaves or field corn. Now there are other food sources I could get into, but that’s not really the point. The point is to think about not what a buck likes to eat, but what he needs to eat and why he would choose one source over another. A good way to think about this is with the acorn drop, which happens all across the country with various types of trees. When the acorns are dropping, the deer is just generally going to eat them. We know this. We hunt those trees, and when we don’t see deer under a certain tree, or don’t get buck picks on the camera we sat on the oak ridge, we just assume something else is going on. Deer eat a lot of stuff, but when a highly desirable here today, gone tomorrow food source comes on, they focus on it. They just likely know where more of the best trees are than you, and they very likely feed not where the heaviest drop is, but the safest drop is happening. There’s a big difference there, because not only are all mass trees not created equal, they aren’t located in equally safe spots. You have to work off the assumption that bucks are going to hit prime masked food sources and really all prime of the seasoned food sources, but they won’t be so suicidal over per simmons on public land that they feed next to the parking lot all day. Doesn’t work that way, and that is one of the reasons that a lot of people really miss out on the food pattern of deer. This only gets worse for some hunters because they pick something, you know, like an alfalfa field, and they know deer eat alfalfa all season, so that’s just what they hunt over and over. But now you have a food source, you know, with kind of varying levels of appeal depending on the part of the season, but that is also wide open and a hub of hunting activity. I keep coming back to the same line of thought with white tails and how to kill them consistently, and it’s this, not only do you need to learn about bucks and where they like to walk, but you have to learn how to get there to those spots, how to find them. We are primarily comfortable waiting for some feature on the land to bring deer to us, and we volume hunt those spots until the seasonal conditions conspire to put a buck in our laps with enough time. That works a lot, but it often doesn’t because of many reasons. It’s much better to try to go to the deer when you can, and well, you almost always can unless you hunt a very small property. Most people don’t like to go to the deer because they aren’t you confident in that style, and they buy into the advice of not messing with bedding areas and sanctuaries and all that stuff. But most people will never kill a pope and young buck in any given season, let alone a whole bunch of seasons, So how much of that strategy should you adopt. A better bet a lot of times is to look at your whole season from start to finish and try to figure out what is going to get bucks moving in the daylight hours. If it’s super hot, that’s going to be water. If it’s November seventh, it’s going to be the ladies. But pretty much the whole season, though close to it anyway, it’s what he needs to eat to survive. We think about food from the perspective of desirability because most of us aren’t in any danger of starvation. You know, we don’t have to eat buds off trees. For five months in the winter, and I’m sure deer have flavors and food sources that just taste good, but mostly they are eating to accomplish something with their bodies, you know, bulk up for the rut, produce enough milk for triplet fawns, stay warm all night long in December. Whatever they eat to survive and thrive, and that means they have to move to eat and put themselves at risk at some point, often some point every single day of their lives during shooting hours, or at least every single day during the fall when we can hunt them. Think about that and think about coming back next week for more white tail talk. That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for your support. I can’t tell you how much we appreciate it. Just trust me that we do. If you need some more whitetail content, maybe you want to hear about some conservation issues, read about them. Maybe you just want to watch a film and chill out and be entertained. The meat eater dot Com has you covered. We drop new content every single day there’s so much to consume, there’s so much good content. Go check it out and thanks again for your support.
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Speaker 1: He
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