00:00:01
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. I’m your house Tony Peterson, and today’s episode is all about the bucks that are around right now and if they’ll still be there in another.
00:00:30
Speaker 3: Month or two. Absolutely.
00:00:34
Speaker 2: Now, we think we know a lot about big bucks, but quite a bit of our knowledge was handed to us by someone else. That’s secondary source type of stuff. And I talk about it all the time on here, and I’m going to talk about it more here. But really, what this episode is really about are the big seasonal movements and excursions that all deer take from their home ranges.
00:00:52
Speaker 3: Why that matters to you right now?
00:00:55
Speaker 2: The hit list you build in August might be full of ghosts, or it might be full of bucks that will be in play all season. To figure out what you’re dealing with, you have to understand where, when, how far, and how often Big bucks just up and leave your neighborhood. That’s what I’m going to cover right now. When I think about what I don’t know about deer behavior, it makes me almost want to quit hunting. I think a good way to frame this up is to consider one of my favorite topics dogs. I recently did an episode of Houndations over on the cal of the Wild feed called The Dark Side of Domestic Dogs, and in it I talked about the ways in which we think about our furry besties and the ways in which they can surprise us by well being actual canines. Now, I know they are domestic, but that doesn’t mean they are just couch potatoes and lap dogs. When a house dog like a lab does something odd of character like rip a new born fawn in half at the edge of your yard, like exactly what happened to a woman I know the spring, it can shake up your worldview. We think we know our dog. We do, and we don’t. We spend every day with them, or at least a hell of a lot of days every year with them. We witness their behaviors, we shape their behaviors through training and conditioning well hopefully anyway, and we have them all dialed in our heads, but we don’t. And all it takes is one encounter with a wobbly legged Bambie, or maybe one chance interaction with a dog or a person they really don’t like for some reason, and bam, another side of your dog becomes visible to you. When you consider that, it’s a little easier to understand why big Bucks and often deer in general leave us a little perplexed or gobsmacked and well.
00:02:39
Speaker 3: Just a little confused.
00:02:40
Speaker 2: But consider this also, We rarely spend time with them, and when we do, it’s largely in the fall, when we are trying to kill them. You know, we get pictures of them in the summer, but that is a tiny, infinitesimal glimpse into their lives. We don’t know them, and the folks who actually do know them don’t really know them either, And by that I mean biologists and researchers. But I should also say at least a lot of them are actually trying to figure out deer and deer behavior, and a lot of what they try to figure out is where do they live?
00:03:10
Speaker 3: Where do they go?
00:03:11
Speaker 2: When certain conditions come together to start to make sense of their findings. It’s a good idea to brush up on a few definitions. Let’s start with home range. We talk a lot about home range, and it’s generally accepted that a deer will have a home range of about a square mile. I’ve talked about this a lot on here, but that is highly variable by several hundred acres depending on individual deer and where those deer happen to live in just what’s available to them. You know, a buck who has nice food plots and thick bedding cover and lots of does and plenty of brows and masks and low predator numbers to deal with, he just might not need to move a whole lot from one section to the next.
00:03:50
Speaker 3: So he won’t.
00:03:52
Speaker 2: A deer that doesn’t will And there are a whole lot of variables beyond that. Any Huski biologists consider a deer’s home range to be where it spends ninety five percent of its time over the course of an entire year. That other five percent will come into place soon enough, but for now, that’s the working definition, and it just kind of makes sense. But then you have core range, which is what we are all looking for when it comes to big bucks. Core range is generally considered to be where a deer spends fifty percent of his time. Think preferred betting areas or some top notch feeding areas here. Now, the interesting thing about this stuff are the excursions we hear about what we think are outlier excursions when some collar buck takes off and walks across the land and ends up twenty miles away for a few days. But what we often don’t factor in is that an awful lot of deer take excursions, just not the twenty mile kind, and why they take those excursions might surprise you. The primary drivers research suggests, anyway, our habitat availability food and water, not hunting pressure, which is important to note. It’s also important to note while hunting pressure doesn’t seem to convince bucks to head to the next county, it does convince them that walking around a lot during daylight is a generally bad idea. Research into this topic has yielded some interesting findings too. It’s not totally uncommon to hear someone say that a buck has a certain territory, which is the wrong word. Territory is something that is defended and contested to some extent. Now maybe I’m wrong here, but wolf packs in their stopping grounds are probably a decent example, but what this means for whitetail bucks is interesting, and a study out of South Carolina showed that bucks can share core areas, and often do. They share core areas that have significant overlap, even during a hunting season when they shouldn’t be very tolerant of one another. They are tolerant of each other, and if you understand hierarchies and the reality of limited quality habitat and food sources, you kind of understand why they have to just find some peace. The bucks figure out who is the top dog, and then they figure out how to not get in each other spaces all the times. It’s like a middle school out there in some ways. This also flies in the face of conventional thinking when it comes to the end of August in the beginning of September, when the velvet finally gets shed and the bucks theoretically should be getting a little ornery. When we don’t see the bachelor groups lazily feeding in the alfalfa anymore, we assume they split up and dispersed.
00:06:21
Speaker 3: They do, but they don’t.
00:06:22
Speaker 2: The change from summer to early fall coincides with different nutritional needs, which coincides often with the availability of different food sources, deer often go from a protein heavy dyet to something that is more car bloated, which means the alfalfa can’t quite compete with the per simmons or acorns. Right about the time when the last vestiges of summer fade and the fall weather hits. So when did the deer go on excursions?
00:06:45
Speaker 3: Then? I’m glad you asked.
00:06:47
Speaker 2: One study out of the University of Tennessee shows that the pre rut, peak rut, and post rut are where it’s at excursion wise. They coller ten bucks and ten dos to monitor their movements and figure this out. In that st seven bucks took lengthy excursions from their home ranges, but so did six dos, which might seem a little surprising. What is more surprising is that with the doze, the most active time period for excursions was during the pre rut. This study seems to lend a lot of credence to the idea that if a deer, buck or dough is going to light out for a little while, it’ll be in the interest of making baby deer, but deer engage in excursions all year. A study out of Pennsylvania where They called thirteen bucks and monitored them from April to June. Showed that nine of them made excursions, which averaged two point five miles, but one buck doubled that distance when he took off not to muddy the water’s further considered the findings of another study out of Pennsylvania that monitored home range and core range sizes throughout the seasons. This one is interesting because it followed nineteen mature bucks. Their home ranges varied in size from an average of nine hundred acres in the fall to less than half of that in the summer. Just followed a similar trajectory, going from about one hundred and fifteen acres down to just sixty during the summer. Now, if you’re not spinning your wheels quite yet, let me throw one more wrench into the gears. A study out of Louisiana concluded that some bucks have two home.
00:08:14
Speaker 3: Ranges during the rut.
00:08:15
Speaker 2: They spend some time in one, then bail and go to another one where they spend some time, then they come back. So the buck that you get picks of during the pre rut, who you’re sure is going to run through your best pinch point spot and give you a shot might be chasing dose two miles away all week and long, and while you think he didn’t show because of some sort of randomness to the rut, it might not be a random at all. It might be a very specific breeding strategy when your timing was just off from his. Well, there are several studies out there that show something that might really mess with your head, which is what I mentioned earlier about hunting pressure and buck travel. Some bucks do leave an area that is under heavy pressure, but most don’t seem to do that. They just don’t move as much, and when they do, they tend to concentrate their movements in dense, thick, nasty areas. Intuitivity that makes sense for a prey animal. I mean, think about it. Take your pick of states. Let’s say Wisconsin, where there are like six hundred thousand gun hunters. That’s a lot of people in the woods trying to shoot deer. If bucks took off because of hunting pressure during that time, instead of holding up, they’d put themselves at risk in a major way. Running away from that type of danger when the woods are saturated with that type of danger means they’re just gonna get shot at sitting tight and waiting for the pressure to fade away as a much better survival technique, and they use it well. They do this even when we assume that all of the other hunters walking around and putting on their drives will get them moving. They mostly don’t because most hunters aren’t going to wade through the swamp or step on every edge of the cattails, or do what they need to do in order to get deer to move out of the spots they use to hide from us. What is the takeaway from all this, especially in consideration of this time of year. Well, maybe this is confirmation biased because I believed it for a long time, but I think it speaks to something important in our current deer hunting culture. Hitless and target bucks are a real thing, and there are a lot of properties out there where you might find a giant today and he’ll still be there in the fall. But it’s also a good idea to acknowledge that the hitless target buck saying works best on properties that offer really good food and habitat and some water and just the right mix of cover. This whole hunting style came from people who have access to those types of spots, they can identify individual bucks and follow them somewhat closely, and they can facilitate the ground that those bucks just won’t want to leave from. Then they control the hunting pressure so that those bucks are prone to walking around in daylight more during the hunting season.
00:10:56
Speaker 3: Case closed sort of.
00:10:59
Speaker 2: A scouting is generally more directly connected to their fall hunting because they try hard to reduce some of the variables that might convince bucks to head somewhere else. Most of us don’t have that, even if we think that we do. So let’s look at this. Let’s say you have one hundred and sixty acres to hunt and you share it with your buddy and your cousin. That’s a sweet setup, and not many people would turn it down. And you guys put in some food plots, and you do some hinge cutting, have a couple of no go bedding areas, and really try to make things work for the deer. But one hundred and sixty acres is twenty five percent of a section, which means it might be twenty five percent of your target bucks home range or maybe far less. Now, what if that one hundred and sixty acres is a half fields and forty acres of it is pastured woods that the turkeys love but the deer don’t. Now, you might still have one hundred and sixty acres of a few bucks home ranges, but maybe forty of their core range, or maybe less, maybe none. You have a bachelor group on one of your fields all summer long. Hell, maybe you have a mineral block out to draw them in and get great trick photos. Those bucks spend every night for two months on your place, and you are already eyeballing a spot on your wall for the shoulder amount that you’re inevitably going to need. You know where I’m going with this. You pin your hopes on the biggest dear in the bachelor group, and then it just kind of explodes. They go hard, antlered, the mineral block goes cold, and the whole thing just kind of falls apart when you’re about to start hunting.
00:12:23
Speaker 3: That happens, and it’s okay.
00:12:26
Speaker 2: But then we pin our hopes on that buck, and you know, he might not spend hardly any time on your property during the entire season, we still hold hope for him because he was there, and because no matter what, he’s going to sway through during the rut right, maybe, but maybe not. And where I’m going with this is that if you’re out there right now, running cameras and glassing and building a case for why a certain buck is you’re one and only this season, consider how quickly that might go totally wrong. This only becomes more true for folks hunting smaller properties or properties with more pressure or properties it just don’t have the right cover or browser, food or water or dough groups or whatever that might make this seem like a lost cause. And I don’t want that, because it’s not. It’s just a warning that instead of going full hit list on specific deer, it might be a good idea to learn about bucks generally, those core areas out there where bucks just like to spend at least fifty percent of their time during the fall hunting season, they offer something up that is valuable to all bucks. While we like to try to find one deer and sauce out as daily habits to build a pattern, a lot of us would be better off scouting like fiends to find areas that bucks like to use. Now, I know that’s not like a huge revelation, but think about it. What would help you become a better hunter, you know, the kind who consistently kills big bucks. Is it pinning your hopes on a deer in August that might not be in the same section as you in October? Or is it learning about the areas that bucks really really like and then figuring out how to hunt them. You see, in all those deer studies, one of the things that up a lot is that the bucks will go into the thick shit to avoid us. So we should figure out how to haunt the thick shit, or at least find the thick shit and then figure out what to do with it. But instead we often get a pick of a good one, which is easy to do these days. Then we try to talk ourselves into hunting him like we want to haunt him, which means going out, you know, during the right pre rut and rut days with the right conditions, and then hoping he comes through. But it’s a better about to really try to figure out where he or his buddies will likely go when they get sick of getting stepped on by us or our friends or our cousins. Or if you haunt some places like public land just about you know, anywhere anyone who pulls into the WMA parking lot for a couple of months could mess up your plan. So where do those bucks go? And the individual buck thing is great, but it’s really hard to do in an awful lot of situations. If you hunt small properties, for example, it’s not hopeless, but it can be awful close. If you hunt generally pressured ground, again, it’s not hopeless, but it can be awful close. I’ve started to lean into this style of thinking hard to last few years, and boy have I killed some bucks and had some encounters with great deer because of it. I want to find the area they are happy to use because most of us won’t go in there, and then I want to figure out how to hunt it for big bucks, but not necessarily a specific big buck. This line of thinking is also a great way to take yourself to the next level of hunting, because it’s not just about killing one fifties, but going from only being able to arrow a year and a half holds to bumping yourself up to two and a half year olds or three and a half year olds. It’s a pressure deer strategy but also just a deer strategy, and it’s something that most of us need to develop. Because most of us are hunting pressure deer of some level. It’s something that might not seem important now because the bucks are easy to see and easy to get pictures of, but it’ll come into play for a hell of a lot of us in the next six to eight weeks or so and stay with us until the snowflies or at least the season ends. So think about that as you’re naming bucks and gaining more and more confidence that Skyscraper or a Goldpost or whatever his name is, he’s all but tagged and hanging in the garage.
00:16:04
Speaker 3: You’re ready.
00:16:05
Speaker 2: He’s not, but you can try to figure out where he might end up or somebody like him might end up during the season, and set up some ambush sites for them.
00:16:12
Speaker 3: And according to.
00:16:13
Speaker 2: The research, if they don’t show up, but you do your part, someone else’s hit list buck might just take a little excursion to your farm in the end of October early November, and that’ll be a welcome surprise. Think about that as you’re out there scouting right now, and then come back next week because I’m going to talk about a few things bow hunters and crossbow hunters and rifle hunters should do while they are practicing in the off season, you know, in this preseason time right now to get ready to make a good shot when it counts to most.
00:16:41
Speaker 3: That’s it for this episode. I’m Tony Peterson.
00:16:43
Speaker 2: This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by First Light.
00:16:47
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for all of your support.
00:16:49
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