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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: Hi, everyone, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I’m arouse Tony Peterson, and today’s episode is all about finding bachelor groups, watching them, learning about them, and eventually hunting them. It’s the time of year when a lot of us are starting to get very excited and very nervous about whether the bucks we’ve been paying attention to are going to stick to their patterns throughout the fall. Some do, some don’t, and it’s always a crapshoot whether that opening night sit will be awesome or a letdown. But it’s not totally up to chance. And that’s what I really want to talk about right now, So buckle up and listen real good if you want to have your best chance possible of tagging a big one in the early season. I have a buddy who got divorced a couple of years ago, and he did what a lot of guys would do in his situation, which was hit the dating apps and play the field. Think of that what you will, But he told me some stories while we were elk hunting that were pretty interesting. He said that pretty much every woman he matched with mentioned that their favorite photo of his on his dating profile was of him packing out a bull elk. He then went on to explain that pretty much every woman he ended up going on a date with said that the dating pool was full of dudes who don’t really work out in the game a lot, and they don’t really do well manly stuff. Their words, not mine, guys, But it’s interesting given the research coming out lately on testosterone levels in young men, Several large studies show results that in recent decades, lower testosterone levels are very common throughout the US, Europe, and parts of Asia. Now there is enough variance in the test results and the testing methods to question the research some, but it points to a trend that science is working to prove more conclusively. There is also the reality that feeling sluggish or not you know, very energetic or basically not too keen to grab life by the coin person squeeze real hard can be attributed to a lot of things that aren’t low tea. Obesity, poor sleep, lack of physical activity, shitty diets, medications and substance abuse and stress can all induce low tea like symptoms. It’s somewhat of a mystery yet, but the lab coats are working on it. And if there is one thing that lower testosterone does, it’s that it pumps the brakes on a lot of what makes men do manned stuff. I don’t mean shoot elk here, but really more like rage at having to fix something that someone in their family broke because they never listen, and for some reason you never have the right tools, so you have to go to the hardware store when all you really wanted to do today was maybe catch a few large mouth and relax a little since, you know, work this week’s been a total biz natcho, You know what I mean. Testosterone is a blessing and a curse, and in the dear world, it plays a big role in what’s going on with the bucks right now, which is well summertime mode, summertime survival. I guess the bucks are out there. They’re all bachelored up, and research into bachelor groups has turned up somewhat of an interesting finding that they are relatively stable out there. Their boy groups are stable consist of individuals who get along pretty well, you know, until eventually they won’t, which we’ll talk about later. Bachelor groups are an adaptive strategy that provides several survival benefits. The easiest one to understand is that the more eyes, ears, and noses in a group, the less likely a predator is to slip in and chomp someone. Bucks live solitary lives much of the fall, and that means they have to devote more energy to staying alive. Summer. Bucks don’t have to do that quite as aggressively because there’s a built in safety net when there are four or five more deer around you at all times. That might not sound like a huge benefit, but consider how many calories professional chess players burn just by thinking. Our brains do a lot of work, and so do bucks brains, and they don’t have to worry about quite as much right now through basically predator detection, so they are able to stock up energy more efficiently. And that’s not nothing, but there are more benefits. One of the theories about this involves younger Bucks getting to hang with older bucks now deer don’t consciously teach each other anything, just like old bird dogs don’t teach puppies anything intentionally. But you can’t argue, at least very well that there isn’t a benefit to a young dog spending time in the field with a seasoned veteran. The same rules apply to bucks. There is also the reality that in the summer food is more available than any other time of the year. In the fall, a buck that gets too close to another buck and a cornfield might very well get challenged to a fight. Guarding resources as natural as hierarchies are, and when the food is abundant, the risk of someone taking too many calories from you is just gone. That means the survival benefit of grouping up can exist without the risk of paying for it later by having not packed on enough pounds. Of course, bucks and their priorities shift over time, and what life does is figure out how to best leave some extra life in its wake via its bloodline. Having four of your buddies around when you’re looking at the hottest dough in the herd is the opposite of that, and so when the velvet goes, so does the brotherly love for the most part. But until then you can count on the bucks hanging with their buddies, and you can count on them doing something that they just don’t do throughout much of the fall, which is be very predictable. If you challenge me to kill one forty anywhere and told me I could either scout them in the summer and hunt them the first week of the season, or scout them throughout the fall and hunt them during the rut, I’d pick the early season every single time. There would be no question in my mind. Honestly. Look, I love the rut and all it entails, but there is nothing about deer hunting I love more than scouting a bachelor group and trying to put a plan together to kill one of its members on opening night, or at least in the first few days of the season. I really believe that’s the best opportunity for awful lot of hunters, and the reason that they don’t take it is because the rut gets so much love and the early season, with its hot weather and bugs, just isn’t as appealing to a lot of hunters. I get that, but I like when a plan comes together and I get to shoot big deer. But here’s the deal. It’s easier than a lot of things in deer hunting, but far from easy. Most of us at this point of the year have cameras out and we have some bucks located. This is the easy part. Maybe you’ve been out glassing too, and if you have, you get bonus points because you’re doing better than most hunters these days. Finding that bachelor group is one thing, but putting a pattern on it is something else. They can be very consistent, for sure, but the most consistent bachelor groups will still do inconsistent things, and that will only increase as the season gets closer. Now you might have the only bean field in the section and so that might not happen, or you might haunt a pivot alfalfa field out west, and the deer literally have no better options, but for most folks they do. I have a camera up on a private piece of ground in northern Wisconsin right now that has an alfalfa field on it. It’s the only alfalfa field for a couple of miles. Predictably, there’s a bachelor group on it. The leader of the group is a really really nice eight pointer and he has several buddies. They’re solid deer for that area. They were like clockwork at one point in July for days and days. Then we got really really hot weather and they became like, well whatever. The opposite the clockwork is they have water everywhere, so I don’t think that’s it. I don’t know where they went. I just know that my cameras went dead and they didn’t stop feeding, because deer don’t really do that for a week at a time. This reality points to something that I think a lot of folks miss when putting a pattern on a bachelor group. You’re hedging your bets, but you need backup plans. Cold fronts, warmfronts, wonky unexpected wind directions, and a host of other factors can throw deer off of a pattern real fast. In fact, the bucks that are on my buddy’s place are most likely to get thrown off by him in the days leading up to the opener. One of his sons has a bear tag over there, which opens up before the deer season, so that property will go from no humans messing around to a lot of humans messing around and four wheelers driving around in the presence of people in the woods where the deer might be betting, and well, just enough stuff to get those bucks off of their pattern. This is my number one concern when I try to pattern bachelor groups on public land, because I know without question the amount of people in the woods will increase as the season opener gets closer. You might think, well, I hunt private, and I’m the only one with a key to the gate, so I’m really not worried about that. You might be right in that confidence, but those bucks might also bet on the neighbors or feed a couple of nights a week somewhere else, and the presence of hunters and those other spots might affect your place. It might help you where it might hurt you. But I know that in my experience, when more people are in the woods with me, it rarely does mean a lot of favors. But that’s a later problem. Right now, you have to find those bucks and figure out what they’re doing. This is a big one. And while it’s pretty easy to get confirmation that a bachelor group is using a spot, it’s not enough to know that they are just sometimes using a field corner. You need more info than that bucks off and enter fields from different trails based on the wind direction. That’s pretty good information to have when you’re setting up to actually hunt them. If it’s going to be a million degrees, they’ll often enter on the shady side first. That’s good information to have if you’re setting up for them and it’s going to be hot, which is real common in the early season. Bucks often hit the field and then go back into the woods to browse, and then hit the field again. What they are doing in the woods is really important to know, and that’s a great job for trail cameras to figure out. Bucks also often follow pretty specific routes through fields. They often have, you know, destinations in mind, and they sort of all flow the same direction. Knowing this gives you more ambush options, which is really important. Instead of pinning your hopes on you know, putting a tree stand in one corner of the field and then looking at the forecast for opening day only to realize the wind sucks for your stand, you have options. And speaking of options, the times when I’ve killed early season bucks that I have patterned, it’s almost always been because I found a couple of spots they frequented, not just one point where they walked out into a field. In fact, I think the most underrated thing you can do for an early season hunt is figure out how to kill those same bucks in the morning, at least try it. Some foods say situations aren’t conducive to evening hunting without a really high blowout factor, but slipping in to catch those bucks coming back through in the morning can be a different story. The basic strategy is to find an evening spot they like to feed in and then set up there. But if that doesn’t work, you’re out of luck, and we’ll keep pushing it. Learning more about what they really like to do beyond to eat some beans in the early season is a good idea. There’s no substitute for glassing actual bachelor groups, which I know I’ve talked about a lot, but I really believe is the key. Trail cameras are great to confirm your suspicions and lead you down new paths of discovery on the bucks, but the glassing is what tells you where to set up, who does what when they get into the open, and where they come from and where they go you know how you can actually move in and kill them. It’s the way to get the highest odds of success possible, and it works, but you have to put in the work without getting busted, and you have to understand that you all always need to think about what you’re going to do if the bachelor group just decides enough is enough and they break up before or during your first chances to hunt them. How I look at this is basically like this. If I have done my homework on some Bucks and they start to break up, I know the clock is ticking, but that I can still hunt them pretty much like I would if they were still together. The biggest Bucks will often stick to the pattern for a little while because they’re going to command the best spots at the dinner table, the places they’ve usually been choosing to feed in the summer. If you get my drift, you might only get a cracker two at them, but if you put in the preseason work, that might be all you need. And it’s also true that if you take your best swing and it doesn’t result in a blood trail, it’s very likely to result in a sighting. Bring your binos, of course, and pay real close attention. The bucks all individually might still be using that food source or getting a drink at the same pond in the woods before they go to bed, but they don’t maybe use them so brazenly in daylight. You might only catch a glimpse of the biggest dude in the bachelor group coming out in the far corner of the field at dark. That sucks, but it’s also good motivation to get your happy ass over there the next night and set up for him. Or maybe your bachelor group blows up on you. But you see some doze and fawns feeding on the first of the acorn drop on the edge of the field, and now you think maybe your bachelor group just shifted its feeding patterns to take advantage of that back in the woods food source before they head out into the open to feed after dark. Hunting whitetails has just take constant quest to make educated guesses upon educated guesses until something hits an awful lot of the bigger deer I’ve killed in the first week of the season in North Dakota or South Dakota or Wisconsin or Minnesota or Nebraska or wherever have been not on my first sit but my second. I often think I have them dialed, only to see them doing something a little bit different on the first day that forces me to change my plan for the second day. I’m often only off by a little bit when you’re bow hunting, that’s enough. The key is to be open to that possibility and have a whole bunch of data from the preseason to help guide you through the new situation. The worst thing you can do is hunt the same stand twice and then call it a lost cause and then pat yourself on the back for getting out of the woods for several weeks until it’s almost Halloween. Think about what the bucks are doing beyond what you can absolutely know about where they feed, Like where are they betting in the woods or in a grassy swale in the middle of the field. Is that likely to change as the season gets closer? And if it does, how will you relocate them? Where do they get some water? This is a big one, and it’s real important if you don’t hunt where there are awesome summertime in early fall food sources. I’d much much rather have a bachelor group visiting a water hole in the cover a couple times a week over a bachelor group hitting a field edge almost every night. If I’m being honest, that water pattern just isn’t likely to delaminate the way a field edge pattern can. Think about that about the trails those bucks are likely to take to get to the neighbors, or what exact fence crossing they’ll probably take in the morning when they come back from wherever, and think about safely glassing for them as much as you possibly can as the season looms ever closer. When they shed their velvet and that testosterone starts to ramp up, they might not follow the summertime pattern anymore, but they won’t become total ghosts. They’ll still eat and drink and travel. And while it’s nice to glass for a full month in July, that might not give you as much actionable intel as glassing the three nights before the opener. Just make damn sure you don’t spook them, because that might be the end of all that hard work and put those deer on a path that doesn’t lead by your highest odds. Stand think about that, Think about coming back next week, because I’m going to drop some more deer knowledge as we get ever closer to that most wonderful time of the year when we can all stop talking about this stuff and actually get out there and hunt some deer. That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peter and this has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast. As always, thank you so much for your support. If you need some more hunting content, whether you want to watch a film, maybe you want to listen to some podcasts, Maybe I want to read how to article about how to catch the trout or shoot a fish, not shoot a fish, well, maybe shoot a fish or catch some fish, or maybe you just want some conservation news. Whatever the medeater dot com has you covered. We drop new content literally every single day of the year. I say that, I don’t know if that’s true, but we drop a lot almost every day of the year. Go check it out and thank you for all your support.
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