Ep. 957: How the Experts Kill Mature Bucks in October

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your guide to the whitetail woods, 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, Mark Kenyon.

00:00:19
Speaker 2: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. This week, on the show, I am conducting a comprehensive review of the many different tactics for killing mature bucks in October that have been shared with me over the course of Wired to Hunt’s seventeen year history. Really all right, welcome back to the Wired to Hunt podcast, brought to you by First Life. Today in the show, we are kicking off the month of October with a little bit of a different kind of episode. Today, we are going to be reviewing the entire month. We’re going to be discussing ideas and tactics and strategies that you can use from October first, which if you’re listening to this right now when I’m releasing it, that would have been yesterday. But you can you can use these tactics from early October all the way through to Halloween. And these are going to be ideas that are not coming from me. They’re not coming from just one expert guest. As we’ve done on many different episodes, this is going to be a set of ideas that is going to pull from hundreds of guests and at least, you know, a handful of core people who have significantly influenced myself and many of you, because I have been running this thing Wired to Hunt or somewhere around seventeen or eighteen years now, and I’ve talked to hundreds and hundreds of different die hard, incredibly serious and successful whitetail hunters from all across the country, and over the course of that, I’ve gotten this very unique, high level, kind of thirty thousand foot overview of the many different ways to do this thing we call deer hunting. Maybe if there’s been any one takeaway for me over the last almost twenty years, it’s been that there are many different ways to skin this cat. There’s not just one approach to killing deer, or one approach to successfully tagging big bucks, or one single way you have to go about things if you want to kill mature bucks. There’s a lot of different ideas out there and many different of these processes and approaches that can work. So I was recently struck by this realization that I’ve had the very unique and fortunate opportunity to have talked to so many of these different people, not just here on the podcast, but also in real life. I’ve gotten to read dozens of different books from these people. I’ve gotten to consume hundreds and hundreds of different articles from these people. And because of my job, I’ve had this unique chance to just absorb so much of this, and I’ve tried to share a lot of that over the years in the podcast. But you know, in any one of our episodes is we’re usually just hearing from one person, and that one person has their one unique set of ideas, but it’s it’s kind of narrow. We’re getting these little narrow slices of how to do this. We’re getting a small window, as if you’re looking through a straw at what’s really a very very big picture. So I got to thinking, what if we could zoom out on occasion, on specific issues, or on certain times of the year and get that bigger picture, not just from one person’s perspective, but get a bunch of people’s perspectives, get that high level overview. There’s there’s a process. I guess there’s an example of this outside of the hunting world, but in like the science world, and they call us a meta analysis, which is which is a fancy term for basically taking a bunch of different studies and combining the results and looking at all of these different studies together to come to conclusions. So rather than just one single scientific study telling us, well, you know, the world is X, they instead will go, let’s go look at every single study on this topic. Let’s look at a hundred different studies on this topic, and then use that aggregate to come to hopefully a better conclusion or a more diverse set of options to help us understand this topic. That’s kind of what a meta analysis is. There’s also something called a literature review that’s kind of similar to this, where like in the academic world, they’ll take in twenty thirty forty different published studies on an issue or a topic, study all those and then publish kind of the high level takeaways from that literature review of everything. That’s kind of what we’re doing today. What I want to do is talk about the month of October, how to kill mature box in the month of October, And I’m going to pull from all of these hundreds and hundreds of conversations I’ve had with these different experts, the hundreds of different articles I’ve read with these experts, the dozens of different books you can see behind me. I’ve got a lot of books. I’ve read a lot of different perspectives on hunting deer. And then pulling also from these podcast conversations, these videos, all the different content that I’ve been fortunate enough to either create with these people or consume from these people. So I want to walk through the month of October. I want to share with you what I’ve learned from these people, cite some specific examples from these people. We’re even going to look at very specific quotes and excerpts from books, from podcasts, from videos, hearing from these different folks who are consistently having success killing deer in October. How they do it, when they do it, why they do it the way they do. That’s what we’re covering here today, and I’m going to try to synthesize all of that into an hour hour and a half of highly concentrated, highly relevant and useful information so you can listen to this today and be armed with a set of tools to help you throughout this next month of hunting that are not provided just by you know, John Aberhart, not just from Adam Hayes, not just from Dan Enfalt or Andre Toquisto or whoever it might be, but from all these folks. That’s the goal with today’s podcast, and that’s what we’re going to do. So it’s you and me talking, but we’re pulling from this wide array of different ideas about how to kill deer in October. Now, very quickly, before we get into that, I want to give you one quick housekeeping item. If you are listening to this the week it dropped, this is dropping on October second, twenty twenty five. If you are listening right now, it is Whitetail week over at met eat. That means there’s tons of new content and sales at the mediator’s store. First Light phelps Fachef across the whole suite of brands. A couple very quick things that are probably most relevant to you. Number one, the main First Light outerwear systems for the white tail hunter. The first Light produces the phase, the core, and the thermic. All of those are thirty percent off until October fifth. That’s a big one. Number Two, the wired hunt hat here the Wired to Hunt t shirts that have just recently launched. All those are twenty five percent off this week. And then finally with Phelps, we have launched the Wired to Hunt buck Grunt. This is something that I’m very excited about. This is a pretty darn cool product that I got to be involved in years ago to begin with, when we helped Phelps design their Beta Pro grunt tube. And then within the last year they came back to me and said, hey, how do we take this to the next level? How do we make this really core to you and the wired hunt community? What else? What other changes would you like to be made? How do we make this even better? How do we make this more unique to our community, into our interest, into our look and feel and all that. So that’s what led to the Wired Hunt buck Grunt. This is similar to the Beta Pro, but it is customized in several ways. A couple core things. Number One, it’s got this wooden body. Now it’s got the Wired Hunt name and logo right there on the front, a blaze orange lanyard, so you’re never gonna lose this thing. A core thing though, for me, is the tone and the sound in this wood This is a teak wood, and this is a custom chosen black rubber bellow tube. This is gonna get you a customizable sound, so you can squeeze this, bend this, do whatever you want with that tube. That gets you the kind of sound you want. This body gets you a mellow, buttery, smooth, deep sound that I really like sounds like this. You know, there’s many different iterations, but check it out. It is not a cheap grunt tube. I didn’t have any say on the pricing of this one, but in conversations with the team there, it is a highly customized call. You know, designed in the US. A lot of these parts put together in the US, so it’s something that’s a premium piece. This, you know, it’s hopefully something’s gonna last a very long time. You can pass it down to your kids. Super stoked on this. I hope that for those of you who want to invest in a premium call, it’s everything you’ve ever wanted. That’s the end of that kind of product discussion for me. Thanks for dealing with that today. The meta analysis, the literature review, the deep dive, the full month comprehensive everything I’ve ever heard about Killing mature bux in October begins now, So there are I would say three brackets, three phases of the month of October that many of us kind of break this month into. The first being the early part of the year, the second being you know, kind of the lull. We’ll talk about that, but folks kind of discuss the mid October as this October low. And then finally there’s that last phase of the month, which which many people describe as the pre rut. This is like that pre rut portion of October, at least if you live, you know, on the upper two thirds of the nation, that’s going to be the case for you. So I’m going to kind of organize this discussion around this three part framework. Early seasons is the beginning the early October months. You know, for some people, if your season open to September, this is no longer early season for you. So some of this will be a little bit different for those of you who open October first, as I do in Michigan, versus if you opened in September first, as might be the case in Nebraska or the Dakotas or these other states that open either in early or mid September. All that said, when it comes to the early part of October on average. Right, if we look at what most deer are doing across the country, these deer are still on a pretty steady bed to feed pattern. So what that means is they have a handful of places they are bedding, and they have a handful of key food sources in early October, and their life basically revolves around those two things, going to feed in the evenings and overnight, and then going back to a safe place to bed during the day. It’s relatively consistent. It is relatively small in scope of space and scale of space. Right, most deer have a relatively small home range at this time of year. You know, for bucks, it’s you know, likely going to be less than a square mile six hundred and forty acres less. Probably that core that the highest percentage, since like eighty percent of the time they’re probably spending in less than two hundred acres. Many studies have shown give or take somewhere in that ballpark. So in the early season, you have a situation where you can, if you do the work, if you have the scouting in the intel, if you understand the area or your local deer herd, you can go into a hunt having a pretty good idea of where these deer might be and where they might be headed, at least a handful of ideas that are that are pretty sound. So because of that, there’s a unique opportunity. There’s two things going for it. Number One, what I just describe, these deer are relatively patternable because of that bed to feed, bed to feed, bed to feed pattern that has been going on all through the summer through most of September. Things start to shift in September because of velvet peeling as food sources and habitat starts changing, but usually for that first portion of October, we’re still in that phase as long as you know, things haven’t been thrown totally out of whack by hunting pressure, which if you open September that could be the case. But if you’re in Michigan or New York, or Iowa or Illinois, are any of these states that open in October, or you know, late late September, you should still have some of that early season magic where these deer have not been yet significantly pressured and are still on a bed defeed pattern. That is a big thing in your favor. Number Two, you have the fact that they are doing that same thing over and over again. So consistency of behavior with lack of hunting pressure means that you have daylight activity that’s somewhat consistent, so you can take advantage of it. That’s why I look at the early days of October is one of your best chances to have success throughout the whole season. Now, if you were opening in September, those first couple of days of September were probably the case. All that said, I look at this first phase of October over as a chance for a big swing, as a chance for you know, a couple hunts that might be extra special. I’m willing to go to better locations if the conditions are right, if the timing is right. I’m willing to take a trip out of state somewhere that I think could be pretty good for those first couple days of their season. Because again, this is a special opportunity. And I’m not unique in saying that there’s a lot of people to look at this early October time periods as a real slam dunk. You know, folks like Adam Hayes looks at early October is one of your best chances. The druries talk about this time period late September or early October, as deer start changing into green food sources. They love this time of year. John Eberhart here in Michigan has always looked at the first couple days of this season as a slam dunk opportunity. There are just you know, it’s pretty darn consistent. If you open in the beginning of October, those first couple days are a high odds great chance. So if you’re listening to this on Thursday, October second, this Friday, or Saturday or Sunday, you know, the third, or fourth or fifth, you might still have some of that. Being the first weekend days of the hunting season, you might still have some deer that are on their bed defeed patterns and have not yet been blown out of there or impacted by hunting pressure. Keep that in mind in these coming days. Now. There are also some major habitat changes underway which are going to be something you can take advantage of. Or if you aren’t you in the right places, or don’t have the right food sources, or aren’t aware of these changes, it might be a reason why you’re not going to have success. So deer, as we discussed their lives revolve around their stomach right now, bed to food, bed to food. So understanding what the key food sources in early October and really almost all the way through this month is very important, maybe the most important thing to understand as this month goes along, at least until we get to that rut phase at the end of the month. In early October, you’ve got a few things going on an egg country, at least, crops are changing. The green soybeans have defoliated, They’ve dried down throughout the month of September, in many parts of the country at least, so you probably have deer that have moved off those bean fields. You maybe even in some parts of the country are having those bean fields being harvested already, especially in a year like this where it’s been very dry, across the large parts of the country, beans are already being harvested. I’ve already seen, like right outside my window there’s a harvested bean field. It’s not even October yet. That’s happening all across the country. So that’s changing things. Corn is drying down. You have corn in your area, That drying of the corn is going to make that more and more attractive deer as well. Finally, you also have mass hidden ground. Depends again on the part of the country you live in, but in many parts many states, you know, acorns are dropping through parts of September and definitely throughout October. That might be peaking in some places very soon. So having a sound understanding of what your acorn crop looks like. Understanding all those things very key time of year. Finally, soft mast is often starting to drop now or already has been dropping for a little bit. Apple trees, per simmons, crab, apples, pears, whatever that might be in your neck of the woods. If you have soft mast, if you have fruit, understanding when those are dropping and taking advantage of that window very key. So I want to share with you two different perspectives on food sources in early October. One is going to be from Mark and Terry Drury with Drewy Outdoors. We’ve had some very good conversations with them over the years. My first podcast ever with Mark, Episode sixty three of the podcast has a great review of really each phase of October and each phase of the year. Highly suggest going back to listen to that or my masterclass with him about patterning deer. That was a really good one lots to review there. Let me play for you a very brief excerpt from one of their explanations about this early October timeframe they call this green Pastures, is like their kind of title for this phase of the season. For them, it runs from late September through early October. But I think this will be very relevant for many folks when they’re considering how to hunt and what deer might be doing in agg country for that first maybe ten or so days of the month of October. Play list for here real quick.

00:17:20
Speaker 3: I love that phase. I also love the phase that follows it, which is Greener Pasture September twenty fifth through October to twelve. To me, greener pastors is one of the best phases to kill a mature buck because there’s a defoliation that goes on during this phase throughout the Midwest. And I’m only talking in terms of the hunting that I’ve observed here in Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, and Kansas. Well, those beans that were planted back in May and June eventually turned from green to brown and defoliate. There is a major switch within the herd to go to the next green food source and if you’ve got that green food source close to where you’ve seen the tur buck all summer, you’re going to go through what I call green and green transfer. There’s a good chance he’s going to transfer from that green beans field into your green plot. That phase to me is want to the best, not the whole year.

00:18:07
Speaker 2: Okay, before we go too much further with that, the key thing there being they’re shifting from green to green. They’re shifting off those green beans, They’re shifting off whatever the crops are to supplemental food sources. So if you have a food plot, or if there are other green fields in your area, like maybe there’s a cover crop, or maybe there’s an alfalfa field that still is is green and hasn’t been harvested, maybe there are clover pastures in your area, if you can find that green that these deer are shifting to, huge opportunity, great thing to be keying in on. I’m fortunate that I have a couple green food plots on a number of properties that I hunt. That’s something I’ll certainly be keying on as well. But even more attractive in some cases than green food plots and green food sources at this time of year, are acorns. It’s really hard to beat the massed crop, especially acorns or something very like a candy crop like apples. Somebody who has talked a lot of about this, who spends a lot of time planning for that is John Eberhart. John Eberhart, of course, is a diehard deer hunter for Michigan, an author, a frequent guest on this podcast and many others, and one of his key approaches to early October is to rotate through a series of food related tree stand locations that are back in the cover. So this is a key point if you are hunting or mature buck in early October in a place with heavy hunting pressure, the key thing is to find that attractive food source back and cover back in a place where these deer are feeling safe moving in daylight. The dreary situation is they discussed it, you know, going onto these big green food plots that works in the area of ad country where you have sanctuaries like they have, where you have managed locations that are not getting pounded by other people, or maybe even in Michigan the first day or two of the season before it gets pounded. But once you get beyond that or if you’re on public land or something along those lines, you need to find this food because they still want that food, but they want to also feel safe, so they want to be away from the road, they want to be away from other hunters, they want to be in security cover. So I’ll read to you what John describes as the key things he is considering for food sources at this time of year. He says in his book The Ultimate Guide to diy Bucks, Volume one, he says, much of our spring scouting is focused on finding early season mass and fruit tree locations in hopes that they’ll offer food in the fall. What he does to confirm that is he scouts in the spring to find these food source locations, and then he does a speed scout just before the hunting season to check those spots out and confirm is that white oak tree producing acorns, is that old apple tree producing apples, et cetera. Then he’ll know exactly where these places are. He needs a long list of food source sites like this. Then he will rotate through them, so he might have ten or fIF fifteen different massed tree options. And then based on the wind and based on as long as they have not been hit by other people and if they have food that is producing this year, then he will rotate through those stands throughout early October he goes on to set. Depending on the area of the country, the most preferred mast and fruit trees are oaks for simon, chestnut, hickory, beechnut, choke, cherry, apple, crab, apple, and pear. These natural foods are available for only a short period of time and in instances where a few trees are dropping food. Where only a few trees are dropping food, deer will compete for their food on a first come, first served basis from day to day, adding a higher daytime value to them as hunting locations. Mast and fruit trees dropping food are best hunted in the evenings because if hunting them in the morning, you would likely spook deer beating at them. With a prior to daybreak entry. The tree is in an isolated, secure area. There’s always the chance of spooking a fawn or a dough with fawns eating there in the early afternoon, but the odds of that are much lower than the odds of spooking a mature buck with a morning entry, and it’s all about hunting the highest percentage situations when pursuing mature bucks. He also goes on to discuss how deer have varying preference for types of acorns, like the case the obvious comparison being white oaks versus red oaks. White oaks seem to be preferable, more preferable than red oaks. Red Oaks are a little bit more acidic, higher tanning content in those acorns. So, all things being equal, if you have a white oak tree and a red oak tree both producing acorns, the deer will prefer to eat the whites. But what he points out in his book is that if there is a difference in security cover, they will prefer whichever one is safer. So if the red oak is back in cover, but the white oak is out in the open in kind of a place that feels dangerous to deer, they’re probably going to eat those red oaks during daylight more often than the white So consider that same thing goes for an apple tree or a pear tree, or whatever it might be. Big considerations throughout the month of October is that overlap. Imagine this Venn diagram of safe places and food sources. Whenever you can get that to overlap that place in the middle where you have the safe and the food that’s palatable and attractive right now. That is really going to be key for your early October hunts right on through much of the month. So those are a couple of things to be thinking about for the first part of this month. Scouting in early October can look like many different things. Of course, running trail cameras this time of year is an obvious tool to be determining where deer are, what they’re doing, what bucks are in the area. Probably the best foods or excuse me, the best locations or cameras in early October are similar to what they’ll be through much of this month, which is going to be scrapes in and around the edges of bedding years and or the edges of quality foods. So same thing what we just talked about. These deer want to be near the attractive food source. They’re living by their stomachs right now, and they want to feel safe if you can put a cell camera somewhere like that, And for me, I really like no matter what it is, if it’s next to a food plot, if it’s inside corner of a cornfield, if it’s a creek, crossing leading into a cornfield or a you know, any kind of food source. I always like to have a licking branch in front of that camera because that is just a little sweetener that will stop a deer right in front of your camera, or that maybe will attract that deer the five yards that you know they need to come off of their normal path to get to where your camera is. So if there’s not already a scrape in a place I want to be, ninety nine percent of the time, I will build a mock scrape to have that in front of the camera. So if this is like in a field, I’ll cut down a tree and put a tree in the field and make a fake scrape tree. If this is in the woods, I’ll you know, break a branch down if I need to, or use a piece of rope to pull down a branch, whatever it needs to be to get a licking branch at deer eye height and then kick out the dirt underneath it to make that mock scrape. I’ll pee in that scrape to kind of give it that urinecent that will kickstart use of it. If you use any kind of send product like preorbital gland scent. Put that in the licking branch. That can work too, But again this is just too sweeten the deal in front of your cameras to give you a better idea of what’s in that zone. Because something to really think about throughout the entire month of October when you’re scouting for deer with cameras is that cameras show a narrow slice of what’s actually happening. You have a very small view of the terrain around you, and there’s you know, almost always much more happening around your cameras than they actually show. So do not fall for, you know, the cameras being everything. Do not assume they’re telling you the full story. They’re just giving you a small glimpse. So cameras are part of the scouting strategy. If you live in a place where you can get eyes on your hunting area from afar, if you can sit at the road with binoculars, or get up on a hill with binoculars, or hunt a tree, stand in a fence row that’s far away from the core of your property that still gives you a view to core places. Having long distance glassing opportunities is huge, because again, deer are still on patterns at this time of year. So the name of the game is identifying the pattern, identifying the key food, identifying the bed, identifying the travel between the two. If you can identify that, they’re one of these ways we’ve talked about, scouting with cameras, scouting with your binoculars, or maybe just being there on the ground and scouting sign you can uncover that kind of line in the sand. If you can uncover that those clues, you all of a sudden have an opportunity to go in and enter. That is the name of the game for hunting October first through the early twenties at least, that’s it. That’s what we’re trying to do in a nutshell, So don’t forget that sometimes scouting is more important than hunting. This is something that I’ve heard from so many different people. Andy May is a perfect example of this. He’s a guy who on his lunch break before work, after work, any spare moment of time he gets, he’s out there walking the edge of a cornfield looking for tracks, or sitting in his truck and glassing a field from afar to see where the deer are coming out into an opening, or moving a camera somewhere else. He is a scouting fiend, as are many of the other best deer hunters we’ve talked to over the years. Scout scout, scout. You know, sometimes more days of scouting in less actual days. Hunting is a recipe for success, because you know, one well planned, well informed hunt is worth much more than three or four or willy nilly hunts where you’re just sitting somewhere to sit. That’s something that has been, you know, brought up time after time after time, whether it be someone on managed properties like Mark Drury and Terry Drury, or whether it’s someone who’s doing DIY public land hunting, or you know, buy permission stuff like Andy may or John Eberhart, or the guys from the hunting public. You know, they’re they’re either figuring this stuff out in the moment and puzzling those pieces together, or they are spending weeks and weeks and weeks ahead of time to figure out what is going on in October, so then when they show up to hunt, they know where to be and they can do it quickly and effectively without educating. Deer calling in early October is something I want to touch on very briefly. This is not a major focus, I think for most people for the first ten month or first ten days of the month, but you can have some success. There are people that have called in deer in October in early October. Excuse me. There’s a few ways to do that that keep on coming time and time again from other people, and that I’ve found in my own experience as well. Number One, if I’m doing a grunt call of any kind, it’s a contact grunt. It’s a very lit here. I’ve got one right here. It’s a very simple light just bop like this. You don’t need to be aggressive, you don’t need to be overly repetitive, you don’t need to go overboard with it. You’re simply saying to another deer, hey, I’m here. That’s it. At this time of the year, deer are curious, deer are social. They’re beginning the bucks are beginning to start sorting out the hierarchy of the herd in the area. So when they know, oh, there’s another buck over there, just behind those trees, sometimes they might be curious enough just to come and check it out. Who’s here, what are they doing, what’s going on over there? A contact grunt like that can work. Similarly, very light rattling can work. It just posted something on my Instagram account about the fact that I have seen a ton of pictures and videos on my trial cameras over the last handful of days of bucks just lightly sparring. I mean, like lots, like many, many, many examples on different properties, different places of bucks, just clacking the antlers together, lightly tickling the times, kind of pushing each other back and forth. They’re not fighting in any kind of way. It’s not aggressive. It’s just kind of like just kind of feeling feeling things out. That’s something you can take advantage of with some light tickling of the times or just lightly bumping together your rattling bag whatever is you’re using. That is something that again could trigger a little bit of curiosity that could get a deer to come, you know, fifty yards out of the brush to come peek into the field, or peek into the opening, or come check out this little scrape area you’re hunting. That is an option to consider at this time of year as well. Finally, if you’re trying to fill an antler list, tag a great option anytime of October, but especially now if you’re trying to kill a dough is a fawn in distress bleat. That’s like a high pitched kind of whining sound that a fawn might make kind of sounds like I don’t know, i’ll describe it, but something like that can bring a dough in closer to see what’s going on. If you need to get a shot in antlerless deer in early October. Those are some calling things to consider. The final thing I will note is if you’re looking at like how aggressive you want to be with your hunts in early October. This is kind of a phase where, like the first couple of days of the season, if you’re opening in October, as we discussed at the beginning, that is a high odds chance to catch deer unaware. So I’m willing to be a little bit more aggressive for the first couple of hunts. If we’re going to rank my aggressiveness on like a one to ten scale, maybe a ten would be something I would do during the peak of the rut when stuff’s crazy, I’m going to go right into the core of a property for the first couple days of October. I think the general consensus for most people I’ve talked over the years is that the first couple of days of any season could be worth a relative high risk spot because those odds are especially high because of them being unaware no hunting pressure up to this point. So that might be worth like a seven or eight on the aggressiveness scale. But then quickly after that most people pull back a little bit. And in that case, this might be different if you’re on a traveling hunt, but if you’re hunting a place that you’re going to hunt throughout the rest of the year, now you need to think about how your hunts are going to impact the rest of the month of October, the rest of your hunting season throughout the fall. So i might hunt the first day or two in a seven or eight ten aggressiveness stand and then I’m going to pull back and be slightly more conservative to make sure that I’m not blowing up this property before the next wave of increased dear activity comes along. That’s going to bring us into the middle of October. The middle of October is when many people pull back completely and become uber conservative, and this is because of the much ballyhooed, much discussed October lull. Now there’s two sides to this coin. We need to discuss. I’ll keep it kind of brief because this has been discussed ad nausm over the years in the podcast and many other places, but I do want to present them in case you’re not you know fully in the know on this. So the October lull is this idea that come mid October, bucks kind of go nocturnal and don’t move as much and activity is slower, and so because of that, you should pull back in the middle of October, be very conservative, maybe don’t hunt at all, and wait till the pre rut gets deer moving in daylight again, especially mature bucks moving in daylight again, and that rutting activity starts getting things going, and that’s when it’s worth hunting, because in the middle of October they’re just not going to be in places you can get a shot of them, So you’re ruining your hunting spots while not having a good chance of success. Anyways, that is the kind of the frame of mind or the overview of like the October lull approach. On the flip side, the science, all of the studies that have collared deer and observed how they move and where they move and when they move, they have all shown that buck activity actually does not go down through the month of October. There’s no lull in the middle of October. When it comes to deer movement, there’s actually a slow, steady progression. There’s an increase in deer movement and buck movement too throughout this month, So there’s no October lull. But what I do think there is, in which many people have talked about, is that there is an October shift. There is a change going on that does change where bucks spend time, where bucks feed, and travel, how much they travel all that. So if you are hunting the same place as you hunted on October first, on October fifteenth, you probably will experience a lull because the deer changed and you haven’t. So what hunting the middle of October requires is that you would just alongside that shift. So because of that, there are two I would say camps of hunting the middle of October. You’re going to have the generally conservative let’s wait for the right moments crowd. I would put people like Marc and Terry Drury. I would put Bobby Kendall, I would put Jeff Sturgis. I would probably put John Eberhart in this camp. Folks like that would be in the camp of let’s kind of look at our timing and time our hunts carefully in the middle of October and not blow up things too much at this time because we’re still waiting for it to get better. And then you’ve got another camp, which we’ll look at the middle of October, in all of October as like, hey, it’s getting better and better every day. Let’s keep punching in their punching, and they’re punching in there, and they simply will adjust to that October shift. So they shift with the bucks, go to where the bucks are now, and if that requires being really aggressive, they will do that. Many of these folks I’m talking to, people like Dan Infult. I’m talking about the guys at the hunting public. You know, I think the Daquistos have done some of this. I think some of the Daquisto disciples do some of this. Justin Hollinsworth. Folks within that world are going to be aggressively getting in after deer closer to their betting years as the month of October progresses, because that’s that’s a big thing here. I mentioned there’s some changes happening. Number One, hunting pressure is changing throughout the month of October. Right, Let’s say you hunt in Iowa or Michigan or Ohio. The season has just opened, either the last couple of days of September or early October. Within a couple days of hunts, there are a lot of people in the woods, there’s a lot of human scent in the woods, and pretty quickly the deer herd realizes that. So by October fifth, they’re sixth, they’re seventh. These deer realize they’re being hunted. They’re being they’re realizing the places that used to be safe no longer seem so safe. So all of a sudden movement they were doing out in the edge of the field in daylight maybe is now going to happen after dark. They are still moving though, they are still there, but they’re going to be doing much more of that back in that security cover. John Eberhart hammers us over and over and over again. If you hunt in a place with heavy hunting pressure, you constantly need to be thinking about security cover. Where do these deer feel safe during daylight? And for most folks, that’s deep in the cover, that’s close to the betting areas. You know where I live in southern Michigan. This is near swampy, thick nasty cover, tall grass, water, tons of cedars or cat tails, just anything that makes it hard for you to move through there. That’s where these deer feels safe because people don’t want to move through there. If you’re in hill country, this might be really thick nasty stuff or clearcuts or down you know, tornado blowdown stuff like that. But it might also just simply be topography that will make deer feel safe because of the advantages that topography can give them. Many times in hill country, these bucks will like to bed down off of a ridge, let’s say about a third of the way down the ridge, where they can, you know, have thermals coming up to them. They can have wind coming from behind them and rolling over. They can catch these swirling winds. They can see down the valley around them, they can smell behind them, they can hear everything around them. They’re going to have these different topographic features in their favor so that they feel safe. That is how mature buck gets mature. It’s because he did things. He placed himself in an area where he could stay safe and out of range of hunters for most of the daylight hours. So if you are going to shift with bucks in October, it’s going to require you get back in security cover most of the time. If you’re trying to kill mature buck at this time of the year, it’s going to require you get closer to those bedding areas. And in many cases there’s the two ways that people go about doing this. There would be let’s say the dan Infalt Way, which would be scouting all winter in early spring to find all these betting years. He spends a lot of time in swampy spots where you know you’re gonna find a little bit of high ground out in that cattail swamp and you’re gonna find a big bed there and some hair in it and some rubs around it, and you can say, okay, this is where a buck has been bedded. They’ll mark that in the map, and he knows he can come back there in the fall for a hunter or two and have a decent chance that there could be a buck in that zone. He’ll try to hunt around it, get closer to it, and make a move. The other approach would be if you were hunting in new place where you’ve not been able to do that kind of scouting. And this is something that you know, Zach and Aaron and Jake and Ted and the rest of the hunting Public crew do a lot. They show up to an area in public land, they look at maps, and they think about where they think the betting is going to be. But then they’re going to hunt their way into those spots. They’re gonna work their way in. They’re gonna go in thinking, Okay, I think there’s betting here, so let’s push our way in there. Let’s get into that cover. But then they’re going to let the sign on the ground or let the deer they see tell them when they need to stop. And so I just talked to Ted a couple of weeks ago about this and he described, you know, going into an oak ridge that he thought, man, they’re probably betting off of these points. I bet you there’s acorns dropping off of this ridge. Let’s work our way in there. Once they started bumping does out of their betting ere, they decide, Okay, yep, we’ve got to this layer of dough betting. There’s probably buck betting beyond it. Let’s hold up here, hunt here, observe, and then either stick with this or pushing deeper based on what we saw. So you could kind of think of this as like a layer by layer approach where you use sign on the ground or previous scout and to tell you, okay, this should get me into the general zone and then see what happens on your hunt and then make the next move based on that. Again, October is very much trying to identify the betting and the feeding and the travel between the two. So sometimes that’s from long tosay since glassing from the road. Sometimes that’s from actually hunting, seeing that you’re not quite on the X and then adjusting to it. That’s something that can work very well during the month of October. I will say this, if you are going to take this aggressive approach where you are pushing in hunting, in security cover, trying to get something killed in the middle of October, it’s kind of a you know, swing for the fences or strikeout kind of deal. It is going to make an impact. You can do it a time or two and it very well could pan out. You could kill a deer on the flip side, you might not kill any deer, and you might blow up the whole place. You might blow up this whole betting area and make these deer feel much less safe in that zone for future hunts. So, if you’re on a traveling hunt and you’re just hunting for a week and a piece, this is a great approach. Make the most of your time. If you are hunting public land and you have a lot of different public land locations, you can hunt here, there, you know, anywhere within a two hour radius, and you have a bunch of different places you’ve scouted or the earth that you want to hunt, this is a great approach. This is what Dan Infholt does. This is what the hunting public does. These are people who have a bunch of options. They might totally blow up a swamp, but that’s okay because they have another swamp and another swamp, and another ridge and another spot. If you only have one place that you’re trying to hunt, you’ve got a small twenty acre property or a seventy acre property that your gramm and grampa’s farm, whatever it is. If you are stuck hunting one spot, you want to be much more careful because if you go go in and blow things up on October thirteenth, by doing this, it could really hurt your chances come October twenty fifth or twenty ninth or November second. So this is something that you need to really think about what your circumstances are compared to the people you watch on TV or the people you hear on this podcast. And remember that each of these different approaches is appropriate for a different set of circumstances. So if you are in the have a small property to hunt, or I have a care fully managed farm that I’ve been trying to make really good over the years, you might want to take a different approach. And the different approach is more of the juries. It’s more of the Jeff Sturgis approach, it’s more of the Bobby Kendall approach. I would say Don Higgins has a little bit more of this kind of approach where you have a carefully protected sanctuary of some sort. You have your property or a portion of your property, or a food plot on your property, or a betting area in your property, someplace that you know deer like to spend daylight hours, and you keep that feeling safe for those deer if you have control over it with a lease or permission for just yourself or you own it, whatever it is. Throughout the month of October, you absolutely can kill mature bucks in places like that. You certainly can kill them later in the month. The big question is what are the days where it makes sense to go into that sanctuary or to the edge of that sanctuary, or to that good spot. What are the days that give you the highest odds for success versus the and the lowest odds of risk Because every time you hunt, there is risk of deer smelling you, seeing you, hearing you. So every single one of your hunts throughout the month of October, you have to constantly weigh this risk. We talked about this with doctor Grant Woods the other day. You need to think about, Okay, how high are my odds of killing a deer here versus how high are the odds of me educating deer? And every day is going to be a little bit different. There’s gonna be some days, like let’s say, the first day of October, as we discussed, where your odds for success are a little bit higher because they haven’t been hunted yet. And so even if you go to somewhere where there’s a little bit of risk, it might be worth it because those odds for success are extra high today. But now let’s fast forward to October fifteenth. Let’s say, and let’s say it’s a hot, muggy day. It’s still your area has been hunted heavily, and you don’t really know where these deer are. You haven’t figured out how they’ve shifted. Well, it sounds like my odds for success on that day are pretty low. If I want to go deep into a betting year now, my risk is very high. So I’m hunting a high risk location when the conditions and my information intel is telling me, well, not a great chance for success anyways. So you’re just blowing somewhere up for very little reason. Those are the kinds of hunts you want to avoid in this situation. You want the reverse. You want a place where things are looking really good and you have low risk. That’s the ideal. So for many people throughout the month of October, especially mid October, they are being conservative on most days, maybe hunting you know, the periphery of a property, or hunting some public land that they’re not depending on fully, or they’re trying to kill does on a part of a property that won’t impact where they think their main you know, buck betting is, or where their target buckets or whatever it might be. And then on certain key days, when conditions or intel tell them, hey, it’s a special day, then they are going to one of these killing stands and taking advantage of it. There’s a few different things that could be indicative of a killing day. One of these special days in mid October, one would be the weather. Cold fronts, especially, I think, are something that a lot of us, a lot of hunters put a lot of weight on. An important thing to note about cold fronts, about the moon, about barometric pressure, about any outside factor impacting deer movement. Key thing to take note here is that no study, no science, no research has yet to back this up. So none of the GPS color studies have shown a statistically significant impact for precipitation, or temperatures, or moon phase, timing pressure, anything like that changing how much bucks move or when they move. All that said, there’s a bunch of hunters who feel otherwise. So I want to share with you a few different exits and examples of these different perspectives. The first one is going to be the impact of cold fronts. I’m going to read to you from Jeff Sturgis’s book Mature Buck Success by design. All right, So Jeff discussing cold fronts, he spends a lot of time analyzing the weather waiting for these key cold fronts to move through, and when they do in mid October or really all through the month, that is when he will dive into his best locations. So here in the book he says, in simple terms, if the weather is unseasonably hot, mild, or boring, it pays to seek other activities. On the other hand, if the weather is unseasonably cool, make sure to hit the woods. By focusing on high quality days both inside and outside of the rut, you can discover a season full of exceptional days for you to take advantage of. In fact, you may find that some of the days outside of the rut, which might be triggered by wind snow, rain, or temperatures, will rival or even beat some of the best days that the rut has to offer. Best of all, if you will allow the fluctuation of weather patterns to define your hunting opportunities, your land will not become burned out by hunting too many days in a row. Now, there’s three parts to a cold front. According to Jeff Sturgis, there is the setup. There’s the drop, and then there’s the calm afterwards. So a quick extra here discussing the setup for a cold front. Without the actual setup for the best days to be in the woods, there would not actually be any high value days to predict. The extremity of the front plays a major role in the quality of the CITs that follow. The higher the winds and the more unstable the front, including rain, ice, or snow, the more attractive the calm and cold days are that follow. Warm weather, stormy weather, and any set of consistently poor conditions all serve to set up an incredible date to be in the woods afterwards. So what he’s saying here is that, you know, the impact of a cold front is all relative to how bad things were beforehand. So stuff was really bad beforehand, Maybe that was like a long stretch of very kind of hot temperature, you know, a lot of stability. If you have a long stretch of the same undesirable condition, then when that cold front finally comes, that’s going to make it a dramatic change. Or if you had a very long stretch of like super severe wind and rain and nastiness something else, that would put deer down a little bit when it finally cools down and calms down after that. Again, it’s a significant change that, in Jeff’s purview, will get you a little bit better of a bump in activity. Now when he talks about the drop, here we go, folks. It doesn’t matter if it’s September, October, or November. If you see a ten degree temperature drop or more, make sure you head to the woods. Although I really start to take notice of at least a five degree temp drop, I prefer at least eight to ten degrees of change in the forecast. The more extreme the conditions during the front, along with the larger the temperature change, the higher the value of the potential sits to come afterwards when conditions calm. So kind of the same thing we discussed there a second ago. Finally, the calm the first high pressure, cool and clear day that you can recognize following that front, make sure to hit the woods. Keep in mind that predicting a high value sit goes well beyond focusing merely on high pressure conditions. Well out of quality set up and drop. A good high pressure day is just another day in the woods. So to review, Jeff wants a long stable setup, so this might be a long period of hot days or a long period of just like the same old, same old, over and over over again. Then he wants a big drop, he wants a ten degree temperature drop or more, and then he wants those days immediately following that being you know, the days where it gets cold and the days where the high pressure comes in and then things calm down. Those, you know, one, two, three days afterwards can be particularly good days in October. When you have something like that happened on October twelfth, or October sixteenth, or October twenty second, or whatever it might be, Many many folks key in on that those can be some of the best days of the month of October. That is one perspective on conditions and it can impact deer. Someone who has a relatively similar perspective but slightly different particulars is Bobby Kendall. Bobby Kendall from the White Tail Group. He’s been some great episodes. I should have mentioned. Jeff Sturgis has been on a number of great episodes with us where he’s talked in detail about how he predicts deer movement, about how he sets up his hunts. I highly recommend checking out those as well. As some more recent episodes we’ve done with Bobby Kendall, who I think as a really interesting perspective on this. He calls the best days a magic X day, and I want to play you an excerpt here from a podcast chat we had where he discusses exactly what he calls a magic X day, how he tracks these, and how that helps him pick the right days in October, especially mid October, late October, to go in and hunt his best spot. Here’s what Bobby says about that.

00:52:02
Speaker 4: So, yeah, in October, so magic X day. So I use the Weather Underground. I’ll show you here real quick, maybe on the phone so people can understand.

00:52:16
Speaker 2: It a little bit better.

00:52:17
Speaker 4: But I use the Weather Underground, not the app, but I use the the website on the phone, and then I anchor it to my homepage and I’m trying to pull it up here. But it just shows a really big display and any app that shows the pressure line will work, but it just shows it really really nice and big and clear.

00:52:41
Speaker 2: But essentially what the magic X is.

00:52:45
Speaker 4: And it’s more pronounced that time of year than it is in the summer. But when you have a high pressure front come in, you’ll see the black line on that app particularly, but that’s the that’s the high pressure, and it’ll look like that. And then at the same time you have temperatures dropping, so the temperature line is dropping, you know, humidity is usually dropping, cloud covers dropping, so it literally kind of makes an X on the graph and you can see it instantly. And those days in October they trump everything. I mean, you know, if you have a big deer on camera, and it’s not just late October, it becomes more powerful in late October. But whenever it whenever it happens.

00:53:31
Speaker 2: Is really good. Like I think two years ago it was a really good.

00:53:34
Speaker 4: Stretch like October sixteenth to the nineteenth, and then within the last couple of years there was a really good stretch like the sixth to the tenth or something like that.

00:53:43
Speaker 2: It doesn’t really matter.

00:53:45
Speaker 4: But you know, there’s all these different things that affect deer movement, and when you line them all up, like their mindset in the end of October, they’re just so much more rambunctious and rammy. So if you get a magic X day in the end of October, yeah.

00:53:57
Speaker 2: It’s better, all right. So that is Bobby Kendall’s take on how he times his hunt in October looking for those magic X days that that rising barometric pressure, the declining cloud cover and temperatures dropping. The third perspective or theory I want to share with you is around the moon. This is a big one. A lot of people believe that the moon can impact your movement in one way or another. This is one that again, the science has not backed up. The research has not backed up, but folks like Mark and terror Jury, like Adam Hayes, like dan Ienfhalt, like Andre Dequisto, countless others have pointed to there being something there. I’ve described myself as moon curious. I don’t really do anything like I don’t plan any of my hunts around the moon. I don’t have it. You have too much of a bearing on my approach to things. But I’m curious about it. I observe it. I keep on waiting and wanting for something to pop up. This show correlation. But there are some people that live and die by it, and one of those people is Adam Hayes. Adam Hayes is a bowhunter from Ohio. He’s had success all over the country. He’s killed multiple two hundred inch plus bucks, many many many other matured deer. He’s fully ascribed to the red Moon theory. He also sells a product related to it. But he seems to really truly believe in it and has a lot of success with it. So I want to play for you an excerpt from episode two ninety nine of this podcast, where Adam described his take on the red moon theory, what that means, how he uses that to plan his hunts during this month. Just for those that aren’t familiar.

00:55:44
Speaker 5: Yeah, so I’ve been using the moon guy for twenty years and it’s just really about it has nothing to do with the phases of the moon. It’s about the position of the moon in the sky and the gravitational pool and how that affects maturitier to move because you only have a handful of the each month. When that moon is peaking at prime time in the evenings, you know, and it’s just another thing added to the wind and the weather to push that deer to get up and move during daylight when he’s normally not going to do that. So those are the evenings I focus on. And like I said, anytime you have multiple factors like the wind in the moon, the weather in the moon, or all three. You know, it’s about stacking the deck in your favor. It’s you know, putting everything in your favor that you can do. And you know, after using the moon guy for twenty years, I’ve just seen it happen and have killed too many big deer that just normally don’t move during daylight. But you killed them right when that moon peaked in the evening.

00:56:45
Speaker 3: You know, it’s it’s not a dick.

00:56:46
Speaker 5: I mean, it’s Mother Nature. I didn’t invent the moon. The moon the moon and the gravitational pull is strong enough to move the oceans, the biggest mass on this planet. You cannot tell me that that does not affect animals and fish to feed.

00:57:06
Speaker 2: So obviously he has a strong opinion on this. But to paraphrase this a little bit and to make sure that folks understand, he’s using a tool called the Moon Guide. That’s the product that he now sells. But what it shows you is the times when the moon is either directly overhead or directly underfoot, when that coincides with the kind of typical primetime hours of daylight or sorry of deer movement, which are the you know, the beginning of the day and the end of the day, when that moon is directly overhead or underfoot during those typical peak windows, the belief is that you have an especially good chance for deer activity. The druries believe that it’s a little bit different. They they are looking at like the moon on the edges. So when the moon is rising during one of those peak morning or evening hours, or if the moon is still out in setting during that early morning or late evening hours, that’s what they believe is a particularly good time. So again, there’s a lot of different angles to this. There’s a lot of different perspectives. I think the key thing all these different people might disagree on what’s the very most important factor. Is it temperature, is it wind speed, is it bearometric pressure, is it the moon? Or maybe you’re one of those people who think that you know, none of it really matters because the science hasn’t backed it up. The key thing for most of October, but especially the middle of October, is that you do not want to just mindlessly pound your best hunting places. Goes back to what we talked about earlier. Every time you hunt, you were educating deer. You are making your next chance, your next hunt harder. You are going to make these deer smarter every time you go in there unless you are really really careful about how you do so. So the two things you want to do are number one, be very very careful about how you hunt to reduce your impact, to reduce your chain instead of educating deer. And then number two, don’t hunt too much or in too aggressive of a manner, or in too many times in the same single place. So one way to do that is to time your hunts, to be selective about the days that you choose to call in sick or the nights that you choose to you know, use the good ad jail free card with your spouse and say, hey, I got I gotta bounce away from this family thing and instead go hunting tonight because it’s one of these special days. That’s what these folks are talking about. That’s when the fronts the pressure, the magic X day, is the red mode, anything like that, that might be the indicator that these could be special days. Of course, scouting intel can also be that. So if you have found, you know, through trail camera pictures, maybe that you have multiple days of daily activity from a buck, that might be the sign like, hey, it’s time to go, or maybe you were out glassing on an evening and you were able to see a buck doing that kind of thing right now in the spot you can hunt. Well, then there’s the sign you need to go in there and hunt. Another important piece of scouting information that a lot of people put a lot of weight behind folks we’ve talked about already, folks like Don Haiggens, folks like Bobby, folks like Mark Drury. This would be historical patterns, annual patterns. If I didn’t mention Don Higgins. Don Haggens was one of the guys that really I think brought a lot of attention to this early on, this idea that mature bucks especially seemed to do something similar year after year. If they kind of shift to their fall range at the end of September as a two year old, is a pretty good chance that they’ll do kind of the same thing as a three year old, and as a four year old and as a five year old. You know, these things are always different, but it’s weird. It’s eerie with mature bucks, especially how often they do things kind of on a cyclical nature. I had a buck, for whatever reason, three different years in a row would disappear at the beginning of November, and he seemed to rut somewhere else for almost the entire month of November. And then every year early December he showed back up. He did that three years in a row, and the third year he was five and a half. I kind of knew this was a thing he had done. I’d noticed this pattern from previous years, and I said, I wonder if he’s going to do the same darn thing this year. And so I was keeping an eye on things. And then early December, the first good condition day I had in early December, I was going in there after him and I did, and lo and behold, I saw him for the first time in five weeks. I think, and kill them. This is something that time and time again, these guys are pointing out, these guys are taking advantage of. So it’s not just what your most recent scouting intel tells you, but it’s also what years in the past have told you. So try to identify trends like that. Try to take note of when your target deer or when amature buck or whatever dear it is that you’re targeting this year, What do they do last year? If you hunted there in the past, if you have pictures, if you have notes, what have the general trends on this property been from previous years, and then plan for that this year so that you are hunting there and waiting for them and they are at the right time when they show back up or when that peak of activity arrives, whatever it might be. That’s another important thing to be thinking about throughout this month of October as we go throughout it. I want to share one other opinion here on how to approach this month, and this is from Steve Bartilla, another great hunter writer. In his book Big Buck Secrets, he discusses having a hunt plan for the month of October and how you can shift that throughout the month. So he says here, I’m going to read an excerpt. When a hunter believes they can safely pull off multiple sits, they’re most often best served by following the pattern of trying to get it done by nipping at the edges of cover and slowly moving deeper on an as needed basis. At the same time, their stand choices should come from a pool the best fits what mister big That’s like a buck, what the buck is driven by during each particular phase of the season. For example, it doesn’t make much sense to be sitting at your best rut funnel or on the downwind side of a dough betting year during the first week of October. Save those rut stands for during the rut. Instead, look at all the food and water related stands you have. Hopefully you have the scouting information that determines which one to sit. If not, begin with your lowest impact stand that works best for the wind, then slowly climb the rankings of impact with each new day. Doing so will keep your property fresh for the longest time. If you’ll be hunting the property all season, it may be best to save your highest impact food related stands until the rut, or until mister Big tells you to hunt them.

01:03:31
Speaker 3: There.

01:03:32
Speaker 2: Many hunters choose to wait until the rut to begin hunting, but I enjoy chasing deer way too much to do that and have no desire to waste early season opportunities. However, I often won’t hunt the high impact food related stands, and by avoiding them and nipping at the edges and low impact stands, the property stays fresh as if you’d waited until the rut, only you’ve been able to enjoy some hunting time and had the potential to tag in early season buck. So this again comes back to I think what we’ve spent the last fifteen minutes discussing, which is weighing risk and reward and knowing that it’s a long season and just looking at the month of October, it’s a long month. So knowing when to be aggressive, when to hunt high impact stand versus knowing when to lay back and hunt those low impact stands, that is that’s absolutely critical for the month of October. So taking your big swings when the conditions are right, when you get the cold front, the magic acts, the moon, whatever it is you like, whichever belief you ascribe to, or when the wind is just right, or when you’re intel and scouting tells you it’s just right, otherwise being a little bit more conservative and waiting, or take the infault and hunting public approach, which is like pound pound pound, But you are going to all these different places, so making a high impact doesn’t matter because you’re just going to go to a new property the next day or the next weekend. Those are two different schools of thought for mid October. Really the whole month of October, but especially in the middle. As we move towards late October, we’re going to move here into the final phase of the month, things again start shifting. And what’s shifting here more than anything is dear behavior. We get the first big curveball in dear behavior because we are shifting away from the bed defeed pattern and we’re moving into a rut pattern. But this is like that intermingling, Zoe. This is like talking about ven diagrams. This is where those two things intermingle. We’re getting the beginnings of the rut mixing with the bed defeed pattern. And so because of that, this is another extra special window of the season. I look at the first couple days of the season as one of these extra specials, and then I look at the end of October as another one of these extra special moments. And again many many folks echo this. I know Ben Rising puts a huge priority on late October. Adam Hayes, I think he’s killed many of his biggest bucks during what he calls Red October. Like the last ten days or so of October. This is this time period where you still have bucks living relatively along the same lines of their uneral bed defeed pattern that hopefully you’ve been learning about over the last few weeks. They’re still betting in the same general handful of places. Probably they’re still feeding in the same general handful of places. Now. Of course, food sources are evolving, so you have to constantly be monitoring that. You know, are my deer on corn now or are they mostly on acorns? Is that apple tree still dropping fruit or is it all eating up? This is something that throughout the month we need to keep watching. John Aberhart talks about doing this. He’s constantly rotating through these different food sources and figuring out what’s actually working, what’s not, what’s actually here, what’s not. In an adjusting course based on that one. When we get to this time period, you are getting deer still on that kind of betting sorry feeding rotation. But now bucks are feeling extra excited because they are having these rising testosterone levels that have been rising all throughout the month, but they’re nearing their peak now towards the end of October. They are ready to breed. They are just dying for those first females to come into heat and to be ready to breed. So the bucks are rammy as Bobby Kendall describes it. But the does, most of them are not quite yet ready. So you have bucks that are still doing something that hopefully you understand. You know some of their patterns, you know some of their behaviors and hotspots, but they’re doing it more often, and they’re doing it in daylight more often. So this is where you get some bucks making mistakes. This is where if you have a specific buck you’ve been after, this might be your very best time to kill that deer because they’re moving more in daylight. They’re taking a few more risks, but they’re doing it in places that you understand. When you get into November, some of that gets thrown out the window. Some of this starts getting kind of subsumed by chaos when you get bucks chasing does all over the place and bucks making big trips to new areas seeking out doors or following doughs into new areas, and it just gets a little bit crazy. We have this special window, you know, it might be seven days, it might be ten days, give or take, where you have this ven diagram that really lines up well for hunters who know their area. Again, this might not be the very best time to just see a ton of deer or a bunch of bucks. That might be in November. But if you know a spot, if you know a buck and you’ve been trying to figure him out, this is probably your best opportunity to do that. I want to read you, speaking of Adam Hayes, I want to read you a little segment here from a book called Real World White Tail Icons, and Adam contributed to this. Don Higgins edited it, but Adam contributed a bit here. I’m going to read this and kind of echoes some of the things I just said, but from the perspective of somebody who has done this consistently with a lot of success. So he says, when I’m after a specific buck, I want to know he’s a homebody doing the same basic thing every day. A mature buck is going to be the most predictable and the most patentable before the rot influences him, and that’s in October. There’s a short window of opportunity in the early season. He discussed the following weeks, which are referred to as the October Law, can be a difficult time to hunt. The weather can be warm, acorns are falling, YadA, YadA, YadA, YadA. But then he says, towards the end of October, things begin to change, especially a buck’s attitude. He’s established his dominance and won’t tolerate subordinate bucks in this area. Along with this testosterone levels, something else is changing inside him, his urge to breed. The problem for him, though, is that there are not yet any does in heat, and that’s where our opportunity lies. During these last ten days of October, our adversary has all this frustration building inside of him, but nowhere to go with it. He’s primed, but he’s still doing the same thing every day. He’s not chasing does in the next county, as he’s still on a predictable pattern and very vulnerable. This is when our mature buck is most likely to make a mistake by responding to calling or getting up before dark to head for food. If you’ve done your homework and you know where this buck will most likely be during this time frame, this is a very deadly window of opportunity. I’ve managed to put three two hundred inch white tails on the ground during the last ten days of October. So red October, as he describes, it, is an absolute dynamite time of year. To pull this out. As I mentioned, these bucks that are still basically doing the same thing. They’re still going bedding to feeding. So hopefully the knowledge you’ve accrued to this point of where these bucks are spending most of their daylight hours those bedding years, that’s still going to be, you know, core to where you want to be. The food source still core to where you want to be. The only change might be that there’s going to be some of bucks not heading to food sources to feed only in the evenings, but also to check for does. So thinking about where the absolute most does are right now, that’s going to start getting more and more important as we get later into October. Thinking about how buck might scent check a food source at this time of year. He might not just walk right into feed he did on October first. He might want to kind of circle the downwind edge and scent check the trails or scent check the field before because he’s hoping one of those dos is coming into heat. That’s a consideration at this time of year. As Adam eluded in his expert there in the book, calling becomes more effective of this time of year. I would say as the month of October progresses more and more people are picking up the calls more often, and they’re going to be more aggressive with them. So, you know, in the first couple of days of the season, I’m doing just a contact grunt. As we get into later October, this is when I’m going to be a little bit more aggressive. This is when you’re going to hear, you know, your diehard deer hunter start using their grunt tubes a whole lot more. They might do something that’s more of like a buck roar. They might do a snort, wheeze. And I look at calling, and this is my approach, but it’s pretty much echoed by most others. You should look at your calling as being like a ladder, and you slowly work your way up that ladder, getting more aggressive as needed. You don’t want to start typically at the top of that ladder. You kind of want to work your way there and then read a buck’s body language and how he reacts to your call to determine whether or not you should take a step up the next rung. So, if I see a buck, you know, out of shooting range it’s October twenty fifth, I’m first going to see if I can get his attention with a simple contact grunt as I showed you earlier, just right. If that does not catch his attention, or if he hears that looks my way, but just you know, keeps doing this thing like slowly walking along or working a scrape or whatever, then I might just give him a louder contact grunt or move into something that it might be described as like a buck roar or a growl. That’s going to be deeper, louder, just more of like, hey, look at me, something like this, So again just ramping up my volume a little more punched to it. And then finally, you know, you can get really loud with that. If you are seeing that this buck is interested but still not committing, maybe he’s ripping up a scrape now or something, but he’s not coming to you, then you might take the final step up the ladder, which is a snort wheeze, which is basically equivalent to like pushing another guy at the bar. This is trying to pick a fight, and this is something you can just make with your mouth. It sounds like this you make that that is, you know, say they’re going to really piss off a buck and he’s going to come into you or he’s gonna make nope, I don’t want to fight, and he’s gonna get out of there, so you can step up that ladder. If the buck is not committing to you but still showing like, you know, vague interest or disinterest. If a buck is showing the opposite, which is getting nervous or scared, then just stop going up the ladder. Just give up at that point, because you’re only gonna make things worse if you do that. Let’s say you do the buck roar and that buck tucks his tail and starts walking away. Don’t keep sending him calls. Don’t start ripping out, snort wheezes at him. He’s telling you, hey, I’m not interested in this. If you do that contact run and he jumps a few steps away and then starts walking away, just stop. You know, whatever it is, read that language. If he shows aggression, if he puffs up, if his ears pin back, if he starts ripping up a rubber or a scrape or slowly you know, kind of hanging in your zone, take those steps. If he starts coming to you, like on a bee line, that’s another reason to stop. Don’t keep calling. If he’s already doing the thing you want him to do. So that I would say is that is a pretty good synthesis of calling advice as October moves forward, and as a kind of encounter on wines rattling, same kind of thing in early October, as we discussed, you know that a little bit of time tickling can be okay. John Eberhart has been talking about this more recently that early and mid October. You know, light rattling has been very successful for him. When you get too late October, this is when you can start getting more aggressive because bucks aren’t just like kind of tickling times and pushing each other. Now as we get to the last days of October, we’re getting to real fights. We’re getting to really trying to aablished dominance. You know, there might be a hot dough, the first hot dough, or very close to being ready to breed where bucks are all out really wanting to get after it. In that case, you can have real rut rattling sequences. You can really smash these things together, simulate that in pulling some deer, you know, to check out what’s going on. My experience, and I think this has been echoed by many others, is that those kinds of aggressive, especially rattling sequences, tend to work better in areas where there’s lower hunting pressure and higher mature buck presence. So if you have a really good aide structure, rattling seems to work better if you’re in a place where there’s not many mature bucks and there’s not that serious knockdown, drag out fight going on very often, and whenever there is rattling, it’s usually other hunters those GISTs. Does not seem to be that effective, So keep that in mind. I’m pretty conservative with rattling in Michigan. I’m much more aggressive if I’m in Iowa or Ohio or something like that. So we’ve talked calling, We’ve talked about, you know, how our hunting setups are going to shift a little bit more towards ruddy stuff. But we’re not yet hunting, you know, funnels and locations like that. What I will say, though, and what is a key difference from early October to late October, is the effectiveness of scrapes within your hunting repertoire. Now, this is something you can look at all year. Kind of going back, I mentioned John quite a few times. John has been very influential on myself and many others, and he’s been a great guest on the podcast. He uses scrapes all throughout the month of October. He’s looking for primary scrape areas, is what he calls him, where you’re back in security cover and have a zone where there are multiple scrapes all kind of clustered in a small area. He likes to key in and on that all throughout the season. Many others prefer to not spend much time on scrapes until late October, but late October is the peak of scraping activity. Multiple studies have shown that you know, somewhere in that like October twenty third of the twenty seventh, give or take, in that window is when studies have shown the absolute peak of checking scrapes occurs. That’s when you have the best chance of daylight activity on scrapes. These bucks are trying to collect important information because as we talked about the testostroones rising, the running excitement is rising to a near frenzy. So bucks are just constantly trying to figure out where are these doughs, when are they gonna be ready to breed? Who else is here, what’s going on? It’s like the tailgate before a football game or something. There’s a lot of excitement, a lot of optimism and anxiety and all those things. They’re continuing to go back to this hot spot checking, checking, smelling, smelling, sniffing, leaving their own sign as well. So scrapes. If you can be in cover near those scrapes, that’s a great place to be. Obviously, a great place for cameras to get an idea of what deer are in your area at this time of the year. And of course, if you can have many of these different things coming together, it’s your best case scenario. So if you can have like an active scrape right you know, on the way to a great late October food source where you know there’s been a lot of doze, and you’re right in between that great food source and a bedding area that you know has been frequented by a target buck. If you can line all that up, then you have a great setup. Combine that with what’s hopefully a good conditioned day, maybe one of those cold fronts or Magic X day or whatever it is, then you have a really terrific hunting opportunity. Those are the kinds of days where magic happens. That’s what we’re dreaming of in the hunting season. When you can, you know, use your information, use your scouting intel, use your week’s worth of learning to take advantage of something you know, making a predictable mistake that you predict put yourself in the right place on the right day, and voila, it finally comes together for you. So that is a high level review of October took you from the early October days to the late October days. I will tell you that I kind of look at it as a as a I guess I don’t know how to describe it. If you imagine like a roller coaster October. First, I’m gonna start hiring that roller coaster with excitement and you know, taking some swings. I’m gonna drop down after that as hunting pressure impacts my property. And then it’s a slow rise throughout the month for me at least and for many other hunters. As you’re slowly getting more aggressive, bucks testosterone slowly rising, and then you’re reaching that next peak as you get to late October. I spend a lot of time that lasts five to seven days of the month aggressively hunting near the core areas of bucks that I’m interested in putting a tag on. I put a lot of priority on those days. Adam Hayes, as we discussed, he does too. Almost everyone on the podcast we’ve talked to over the years, they are keying in on those days as being absolutely peak opportunity. So as you progress through the month of October, don’t forget that the best is probably yet to come. So don’t, you know, push all your chips into the pot unless you have things lining up just right throughout this entire month. I want to go back to this final thought to leave you with is that you’re constantly like, imagine like an old school scale, right, There’s like these two metal trays, and you put stuff on either side of the tray. One side is our risk, one side is our reward, And you’re constantly thinking every day you’re going to hunt, or when you’re choosing a hunting location, you’re constantly thinking, Okay, how are the scales going to going to move on this particular day, with this set of information, with this set of conditions, at this time of year, Knowing that deer behavior is changing through the month, Knowing that deer do seem to at least hunters. We surely have seen anecdotal evidence that certain conditions can change behavior a little bit. Knowing that hunter pressure does impact what these do deer do throughout the month, all of that is going to shift the scales and hopefully will be in your mind as you make your decisions every weekend or every night when you get out to hunt. Whatever it is speaking of this, something I did not mention, but something that is a major topic to consider in October is hunting mornings versus hunting evenings, and this is the exact same set of issues is relevant here. It’s always the scale. There are some people like Don Higgins, who has advocated in the past to not hunt mornings too terribly often because they are harder, and John Eberhart said that in the ex the book I read earlier in this episode, talked about how many parts of October, especially early to mid October, many times mature bucks will be back in their bedding years quite early in the morning. So if you are trying to slip in to hunt at the same time that these bucks are either already in their beds or approaching their beds, there’s a very high chance of you spooking that deer and educating him in the dark before we ever got to hunt him on the side. For an evening hunt, you can get in there while he’s betted down, and you can slip up to whatever location you want to hunt while knowing he’s bedded somewhere, and you can avoid you know, sending your wind there. You can avoid walking so close that’ll hear or see you, and you can get an undetected So it’s easier to have an undetected safe hunt in the evenings, easier sell than it would be for a morning hunt in most situations. So that’s why I would say, on average, for most of October, evening hunts seem to be a safer bet, and many die hard deer hunters prefer to hunt evenings and do not hunt mornings as much. There are, of course, exceptions, if you’re on a short trip, if you are hunting public land, if you are you know, trying to take advantage of a special set of conditions like a big cold front or something. Morning hunts. You know, A, if you’re on a short trip, make the most of your time, get out there and hunt, give it a try. B. If you have that big cold front come through or if you believe in the moon and the moon phase is a little bit better on a certain morning, you give it a shot. The biggest thing here is just recognizing, like what’s the high risk that we’re looking at and how do you work around that. So if we’re worried about spooking deer on the way to hunt in the morning, but you want to hunt the morning, you just really need to think about how do I get to a spot without educating deer. So you need to make sure that you’re hunting a location that’s not going to require you walk through a food source, or that’s not going to require you blow out a bedding area when you leave, or whatever it might be. So access and entry is really really important anytime of year. It’s really important morning or evening, but it’s especially important or entry on morning hunts in early October when those bucks can be going back earlier in the day. That said, as you move through the month of October, I mean get into late October, you’re going to find that bucks do stay on their feet later into the morning. And once you get to that last week or ten days of October, all of a sudden, mornings start getting better, better and better. Until they get like very good and might be the best once you get to that phase. And so at that point you want to shift and you want to make sure you’re hunting those mornings in late October and definitely November. And and you know, some studies are starting to show that there might be a little bit more morning movement in October than we have given deer credit for. We just did a podcast with with a gentleman who’s been doing with Derek Dixon, who’s been doing drone research using a thermal drone. Hopefully you guys heard this episode, but he found when he was actually watching this deer with his drone, watching them all day every day, that they were moving a lot more in the mornings than we give them credit for. Now, it is back in security cover, it’s in hard places to hunt. So can you hunt it without educating them and without spooking them that’s still a question. But they are moving more in those morning hours. Maybe then we have sometimes given them credit for. So ken mornings work in October. Yes, but you need to be very aware of the challenges and have a plan for your entry and exit that accounts for that same thing goes for the whole season. You know, if you’re gonna hunt evenings in October, that’s great, and it’s great getting in for those hunts, but you better have a good way to get out, because if you have to walk through the food plot, or if you have to walk through the cut cornfield, or if you have to walk, you know, past all the apple trees or something after dark, after the hunt, and that’s where all the deer are right now, you are going to educate those deer and you are going to have worst hunts in the coming days because of it. So always thinking about that, always thinking about the scales risk and reward, Always thinking about how your hunts are going to educate deer in the future, and making sure you’re making smart hunting decisions every day of October as the months go on, or as the days go on, because in October, these deer are still survivable machines. They have not quite gotten to the point where they throw caution to the wind and chase ladies without thinking that will happen for most of us, it happens in Novemberber. They still kind of had their head screwed on straight, So you too need to keep your head screwed on straight. Make good decisions. Work your way through the month, take those stabs when the timing is right, when your intel tells you what’s right, when the conditions seem right, or when the time of yours right. At a high level, that is my meta analysis, my literature review, my comprehensive analysis of how to Hunt Mature Bucks in October, based on the perspectives that I have come to from so many, so many different podcasts, so many different conversations with these guys. You’ve heard me mentioned number of folks. I’ve mentioned Adam Hayes, I’ve mentioned Don Higgins, I’ve mentioned Ben Rising, I’ve mentioned Jeff Sturgist, John Eberhart, Mark Drury, Terry Jury, Bobby Kendall, Andre Toquisto, Dan Infalt, the guys from the hunting public. All of these folks we have had very deep, concerted, comprehensive conversation with on these topics, and would highly encourage you to go back search those names and Wired to Hunt find our episodes, listen to those full episodes for more. But I hope that with this kind of overview, giving you insights from a bunch of different people all about this one month, it will be helpful to kind of hear it all in one place and to give you a starting point as we kick off what is one of the very most exciting months of the entire year. So thanks for tuning in, Thanks for being with me for this one. Let me know in the comments. I would love to hear from you, whether it be on social media or YouTube or an email whatever. I’m curious what you think about this format show. Is this helpful? Is this something that I should do for November and December. I’ve considered doing this more topically too, so maybe doing like a comprehensive review about approaches to scrapes, or an episode like this all about trail cameras and getting all these different perspectives on cameras and stuff like that. Let me know if you think this is helpful or if you think this is junk, let me know that too. So thanks for listening, thanks for your feedback, thanks for being a part of this community. And if you are kicking off hunting season as i am, here best a lout, have fun out there. It’s a beautiful time of year. It’s a wonderful time of year. Make sure you are sharing it with your friends and family. Get some meat in the freezer, get some great memories, and be safe doing it. So until next time, thank you, and stay wired to hunt.