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 host, Tony Peterson, and today’s episode is all about this time of the year when white tails go hard antlered and everything seems to get a little mixed up out there in the woods. The thing I like about white tails is that it’s a year round game that involves a hell of a lot of inexact science. Now you might declare that deer always do this thing or never do that, but you’d be wrong about that, just on the sheer fact that predicting the behavior of wild animals is at best and educated guests. This holds true for a lot of deer behavior and has some implications for the time period we are in right now, where bucks go from velvet to hard antlered and the whole shift to fall kicks in. It’s one of the best times of the year and I’m going to talk about it right freaking now. Years ago, when I was in college, I had a canoe. I know that some people love to fish out of canoes, and I have to assume those people are also a little off kilter in their brains where canoes are a necessity and the best option for access right on. But if you can get a real boat in there and use that, it’s always a better choice in my opinion. Well, I had to hand me down canoe from my grandpa at the time, who had a major chest grabber at fifty six and left my mom’s family without a patriarch. It was a fine canoe, but I wanted a real boat, so I found a fourteen foot lon with a twenty five horse outboard on it. I went to my bank and took out a personal loan. I recently found the paperwork for that loan, and the interest rate was almost ten percent. I don’t know why I felt the need to tell you that, any huski. I spent a lot of time in that boat on Pool six of the Mississippi River, and a ton of time I’m on small backwater lakes around there. I hauled it to northern Minnesota more than a few times, and generally caught a pile of fish out of it. One of the places I went to a lot was a small lake outside of Winona, Minnesota that was private but opened up to the public wale. I happened to be in school down there, and also happened to live not very far away from it. Now. The original landing was a sand ramp, and that really sucked. But that old lawn had a trailer that pivoted in the center, and I could launch that boat in almost no water. I fished the living shit out of that lake, and it was full of fish. Dumbfish too, because they hadn’t got hardly a pressure. I actually thought I had a bead on the state record smallmouth in there, and even had her on twice. That fish was one of the reasons why it took me five years to get a four year degree, if I’m being totally honest. One thing that I learned about bass and other predatory fish on that little lake was that during the summer I caught them on deep weed lines around timber. No shock her there. But as the nights grew longer and the water temps started to cool, the big bass in northern shifted. They’d moved to one of the few narrow points in the lake that led to bays full of weeds and just enough depth to host wintering panfish and other baitfish. Imagine it like this, a mountain lion posting up on a rocky outcropping while overlooking a hog’s back ridge in the mountains between two basins that just pinches down migratory mule deer movement when the bad weather kicks in in the high Country. It had never occurred to me that fish would swim from one end of the lake the other to post up in a killer ambush spot while the seasons fed them an unlimited food source, right before the lake locked up in ice and everyone started to fin a little slower throughout the winter months. I don’t remember this happening, although I’m sure it did. But I’m sure I went out and casted the same stuff that had produced all summer and didn’t catch much. I’m sure I figured it was just an off bite due to weather or something else, while not realizing that a fall migration had kicked in underwater and that I was just not clued into it. That sort of thing kind of is happening right now with white tails. I dropped an episode of this podcast a couple weeks ago about home ranges and core ranges and what collared bucks out there have shown researchers on the topic, So I’m not going to get into that here. Instead, I want to talk about personal experiences with a shift from velvet to hard antlered and what that might mean to you. For starters, if you’ve ever haunted a truly early season for white tails, like one that starts right on the first of September and gives you a chance to shoot a velvet buck, you know that what a Bucker bachelor group does today, you know might not be the case tomorrow, but certainly could be. I want to give you two examples to try to illustrate this point. Back in twenty twelve, I had a couple of very young babies at home and a North Dakota white tail tag in my pocket. I got a five day leave of absence from the chief of my household and I drove out there.
00:04:50
Speaker 1: Now.
00:04:50
Speaker 2: While glassing the day before the season opened, I saw a whole bunch of bucks, including a pair of velvet racked kind of basket eight pointers. My standards were pretty oh given my timeframe, and I hope those bucks would stick around because they were in play along with some other ones were bigger. Now I ended up hunting pretty hard, coming up short and just going for a hail Mary on those bucks the last evening of the hunt. Now, the day before I had seen both of them and they were both in velvet, so I figured I had a shot, and with fifteen minutes of shooting light left, one of the bucks showed up on a direct path toward my stand. He was alone and hard antlered. At some point overnight or throughout the day, he’d shed his velvet and his buddy. It was one of the most satisfying conclusions to and over the road hunt I’ve ever had, and it’s one of my favorite memories.
00:05:37
Speaker 1: Now.
00:05:37
Speaker 2: Two years later, I drove back out there for another white tail hunt, and I watched a bachelor group of four bucks bed in the brakes way up in Meal Dear country. But when they came out that night, they followed the script and I ended up shooting a velvet eight pointer that was much bigger than the one from two years earlier. But I was targeting a gnarly old seven pointer that was in velvet in the morning and hard antlered in the afternoon. It only took maybe a couple hours for him to get rid of that velvet. Both of them stuck to the travel script, the pattern script, mostly because out west, where the cover and food is often pretty limited, those deer might not veer off their daily patterns by a whole lot. No matter what. They really don’t have a choice but to do what they usually do in places with limited resources. That has not been my experience here in the Midwest, at least not entirely. Now. This is where that whole inexact science thing kicks in. We are fed almost NonStop content from folks who are in a race to create the perfect deer property. And when they have food and water, cover, doze and no pressure to leave, bucks oftentimes just don’t. So we see their summer bucks turn into fall bucks, you know, on social media. But those deer are literally sort of living in an artificial world. I don’t really know how else to say it, but I don’t want it to sound as petty as that does. They are just given every reason to stick around, and nature likes easy, so that’s what they choose. Nature likes security. Two, which might be a better way to put that. Now, you might think that this means that it’s highly likely that your summer Bucks will stick around through September and beyond, and they certainly might, but they also might not, and that’s worth trying to understand. But to do that, you have to acknowledge all of the things that are changing in their world by the day. For starters, the shift from Velvet to hart Antler means many things, but one of them is that it’s time to figure out who is the top dog and really establish their hierarchy. I’ve watched Bucks spar while still in Velvet, and it’s pretty cool to see. In fact, I had a buddy send me a series of trail camera photos in mid August of two Bucks sparring under an apple tree. So as their summer coats start to give away to fall coats and their weapons on their heads finish up becoming real weapons, and their hormones start to really kick in, they figure out who is who in the hurt. This is a side note here and maybe won’t apply to a lot of you find listeners, but I found that Bucks are often highly callable in the early season, whether that’s a contact grunt or a snort. I’ve had some pretty good results talking to bucks in the first couple weeks of the season here in Minnesota, in Wisconsin and out west in earlier seasons. I have my theories on that, and maybe none of them are right. I just know that it has worked for me, and I think they are susceptible to calling because they’ve spent all season bachelored up and they are in the phase where they are sorting things out. Anyway, you kind of have to factor that in. The deer aren’t as likely to hang together as the days progress, although you can still find plenty of bucks paired up and sometimes traveling in groups. Then you have a couple of other things to think about, some of which I consider more impactful to deer for starters. The food sources are likely to change. In the last couple of weeks. In my world, I’ve started noticing a hell of a lot of acorns hitting the dirt. I’ve also spent some time scouting, and the apple tree thing is definitely on or around here. Hard masks and soft mast matter, and after a summer of eating alfalfa and beans, it seems like the deer prime to switch food sources right now. So they do. This might be a more subtle shift down south, but also might not be when you factor in per Simmons or some other high value Here today, gone tomorrow. Food source. Food is a primary driver of deer behavior, and if you’re not in a position to create a food plot for them or curate a property in some other way, this is probably the thing you should pay attention to the most. If they suddenly aren’t popping out into the egg like they were a couple weeks ago, what are they feeding on? Because they are eating something. Now, that’s all pretty elementary stuff, but then you have to factor in the truth about whitetail hunters and the impact they have on deer. While hunters like Kenyon try hard to get their work finished well before the season to give everything a chance to settle down, it’s not so simple for a lot of hunters. Some folks just don’t get out there in the midsummer to sweat and hang stands and cameras and brush in blinds and scout. Some folks just get the itch to get into the woods or go glassing more. Now that it might be cooling off ever so slightly, But most whitetail hunters just don’t put in much effort until the season draws closer. This is something that it was absolutely driven home to me in Minnesota while growing up and hunting a farm that I shared with a lot of bow hunters and a ton of gun hunters. Since our gun season opens up on the first full weekend of November, that means that the weekend before is almost always around Halloween, which is pretty prime time to be on a stand if you ask me and just about anyone who has even a total dullard’s understanding of deer hunting. But that was also the weekend when random dudes would walk through the woods, often with the dog at their side and a heart of hearing buddy who needed to shout through normal conversations. It was maddening but very consistent. So there’s also the weekend one I’d often hear gunshot after gunshot after gunshot as guys check their zeros on their slugguns. In other words, the people impact from that gun opener on my general bow hunting success was real and didn’t do many favors. Now, think about being a public land whitetail bow hunter or someone who shares ground with other people, the highest likelihood for preseason intrusion in general is now until you’re opener. That’s just the reality of most whitetail hunters, and it has a big impact on deer or it can. So while we might be looking for a lot of scientific reasons why our summer pattern on known bucks suddenly went to shit, it’s very likely that’s due to the increased presence of hunters in the woods. This is something that happens a lot where elk taggs are easy to get, you know where. Hunters out west show up a week before the season and hike into every meadow and along every trail to find the hot sign and generally do a great job of pushing the elk into the dark timber hell holes right before the season opens. It’s just part of the game, my friends. What it means for us whitetail hunters is that the field edge easy pattern we thought we had might get killed right before we can actually even hunt the deer. And it might be our fault or might be the cumulative effect of other hunters, but either way, the end result is the same. Now the deer don’t necessarily leave, but they might not be so keen to pop out into the open at five point thirty in the afternoon to feed with three of their best friends. So the question is what it always is, which is what does this mean? You should cross your fingers and hope the deer you scouted and had on trail camera this summer will stick to their patterns throughout opening week. They certainly might, or they might seem to shuffle off to parts unknown, leaving you with a couple of four keys and some does to work with. This is what I consider the best option for most of us. If you’re running cameras, try to set a few of them to show you where the deer have gone. I know that’s simple, but a lot of us won’t do it. Where are they most likely to stage or travel when the human presence increases and the food sources change and they just get a little less tolerant of antlered company. That’s an easy one, and it can be so valuable. A lot of the early season deer I kill are just off of the food in the cover, in a situation that I just kind of think is like one layer back. The window for that type of hunt is often a short one, but man, it can be good. The next thing I do is scout. I know we all want to be super careful this time here because we don’t want to spook deer unnecessarily, But when the great shuffle happens, I want to know where the bucks go. I don’t know how to put it any other way. Every rub I can find is huge, Truly. There is nothing I like better than finding September rubs because I know I’m close to September bucks. A fresh scrape in September that’ll get my attention too. But we also often have just the conditions that allow for track checking trails, and that is something I do a lot. A field edge with tracks is fine, but a trail in the cover that is all tracked up with fresh sign yes please two scoops, well, that might not put you on an individual buck, but it’ll put you on deer. And getting on deer is off in the first step to getting something going with a target buck or a buck that is of the caliber that would make you happy, because it’s not just the giants that will respond to all of the changes out there in the woods, and the old doves that are raising the next generation of boooners don’t much like hunters either, but they do like acorns and security and persimmons and apples and water that’s in the woods where they leave tracks in September, So two will bucks leave tracks, and if some of those trails have any actual buck sign, like even very small rubs, pay attention. I’ve watched quite a few big bucks make rubs in the woods throughout quite a few different states, and honestly can’t remember any one of them ever making a thigh size rub. For some reason, it’s always on a sapling and the size of the rub is never really correlated to the size of the buck. Now, I know this sucks because you’ve heard all about building a summer pattern and seeing it through, which is totally doable. But the best white tail hunters out there always have a backup plan because while they hunt with confidence, they expect a certain level of failure. That’s the nature of deer hunting because it’s just pretty damn hard in general. But if you start to think think about where they’ll go when the conditions change, you’ll start to think about what you can do to meet them there, just like the big smallies in Largemouth that somehow realize it’s time to go post up on a channel, leading to a wintering hole. The summer bucks you counted on to be there might just have other plans that keep them less visible and as well fed as they’ve been all summer long. So think about that. If you start to see a change in your trail camera activity, or you just realize that you’re seeing fewer deer and out in the fields on your way to work, whatever things are changing out there, and if you work with those changes to get somewhere the deer want to be, you’ll have a good chance of filling your tag. If you don’t, you’ll be swimming upstream during one of the best times of year to kill a big one. Think about that, my friends, and think about coming back next week, because I’m going to talk about the myth of quote unquote plenty of time and how that has saved more than a few early season bucks. That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson. This has been the Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, I just want to thank you for your support, Mark and I here truly appreciate it. The whole Mediator crew does without you, guys, we don’t have anything, so thank you for that. If you need some more white tail content you can listen to this feed. We’ve got three shows on here now on the Wire to Hunt feed at least for a little while with Jake series. We have a whole bunch more podcasts that can educate you entertain you at the mediator dot com. Maybe you know you want to listen to Clay explore some crazy path and through history on the Bear Grease podcast. Maybe you just want to hear Brent Reeves’s beautiful voice as he does this Country Life, which is a great podcast. Or maybe you need a recipe, maybe you need an article, maybe you just want to watch some hunting films with the family. Whatever, we have it at the mediator dot com. Go check it out.
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