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 is all about weather, white tails, and how we often think about them wrong. I know this might seem like a weird time of year for this type of podcast, but it’s not, or at least I don’t think it is. White tails and thoughts about weather go hand in hand, but we often use whether as a reason to either hunt or not. I don’t think it’s that simple, though. I think it goes a little deeper than that. And the truth is that if you want to kill big whitetails, you need to understand not only what specific weather might do to the deer, but what they do to us is hunters, which might be the most important part. A couple of weeks ago, I spent a lot of time looking at the ten day forecast for two reasons The first one was that if I could find a window of time to bring my daughter to Wisconsin for a few days, I was going to try to scrounge up a late season four key for her. The second was that I was headed into the Superior National Forest in northern Minnesota to hunt grouse for a few days by sled dog, where my home base would be a tent. Now, for my listeners who don’t know what northern Minnesota is like in the December, I’ll give you a quick rundown just in case you get invited to go camping there this time of year. Don’t just kidding. If you like sled dogs, which I now do since I’m an official musher kind of, and you like being very far away from nearly all of the people, which I do since I’m old enough and jaded enough on life now to know really really like not having to do with people. The tax you’ll pay is that you might wake up, you know, for multiple days in a row, in the middle of the night, with a small black lab in your sleeping bag and ice on just about everything in your tent, including hearts of your body. Plus if it’s super cold, the grouse hunting will be absolutely terrible, So don’t do it or do I don’t care, But that hunt and the fact that we got snowed out of Wisconsin’s Forky Mission reminded me something about white tails. The weather’s just omnipresent. It’s kind of like when people talk about going on a diet, but your diet is really just what you eat all the time. It’s with you every day, and it shapes an awful lot about your life, including all your shape. I don’t know what the actual number is, but I feel like the weather messes up my hunting plans at least fifty percent of the time. Sometimes it feels a lot higher than that. And it’s not because I live in Canada South, which feels really really stupid this time of year, because everywhere you go people bitch about the weather. You know, it’s unpredictable and generally shitty, probably because the places with truly beautiful, consistent weather are full of people who can afford to live there and who do not generally spend a lot of time trying to shoot sharp sticks through Bambi’s dad. Let me give you a good exam from my fall on this very topic. The week before I left for North Dakota to try to find some good bucks on public land. The area I hunt got hit with a bonker’s rainstorm. Now this is a place where you can find genuine although pretty small cactus growing in the same spots the meal deer and sharp tails hangout, and where my buddy Eric once sat on one a cactus I mean, not amelia or a sharpie. The river out there, which I usually crossed daily when I’m hunting there, went from a foot and a half to five feet, which is a hell of a spring surge, let alone a mid October surge. I followed the river flow data out there by the day, and while it came back down to the three foot range, it was a no go for the deer to cross, except for one good buck that forwarded that river and showed me everything I needed to know about how I was not going to cross it. If a critter with four legs can barely make it, a critter with two in the dark is going for a swim. The entire plan I had built around that hunt chained twenty four hour period of freakish weather the week before, which leads me to the point I really want to make with this podcast, which is this. The messaging you’ve been fed about weather is to just wait out very specific conditions and then go hunting. That messaging comes from people who have made millions off of hunters and who have hunting that you couldn’t even dream of. There is no net loss for them to not go hunting, and the easiest way for them to kill big bucks and properties that literally no one else will hunt is to wait for the seasonal timing to meet up with a cold front, which all of the a sudden just coalesces into one big deer movement festival for them. That like the idea that everyone can just age deer by looking at them as if deer all have the same body structure and shape, has maybe been the most damaging thing to the general deer hunting population.
00:04:51
Speaker 3: And here’s why.
00:04:52
Speaker 2: Because that cold front won’t negate the fact that you’ve overhunted your spot, or won’t allow you to hunt a question win just because the deer should be moving given the weather.
00:05:03
Speaker 3: It doesn’t work that way.
00:05:05
Speaker 2: The people who feed us that message can walk in on carefully groomed access trails to sit airtight box blinds or stands with perfect winds, and they have enough options where they don’t need to burn anything out. Do you have that, Because if you don’t, learning to hunt with the weather you’re given is a huge advantage. Think about it this way, who are the people you really look up to who kill good deer on public land? For this conversation, forget about people who kill big ones on private and instead just think about some of the public land killers. Now filter them down a little further and forget about the people who are public land killers but generally only in their home state. Take someone who usually gets it done on the road on public land, you know, the kind of land, as the locals will often say, it can’t be done on the Andy Mays of the world, the zach Fahrenbau’s of the world. Those kind of guys. Do you think they’ve become successful at this stuff by city out hunting until the right cold front hit and then going in spoiler alert, They didn’t. They have gone on many, many trips, often short ones, to parts unknown and not only had to figure out the deer and the whole hunting pressure thing, but work with whatever weather they were handed at the time. Now, if you do that enough, you start to realize that what you consider bad deer weather is just weather, and the deer are still out there doing their thing, and your job is to figure out how to make that work for you. It’s simple and principle, but very hard for most hunters to even attempt. And here’s why. We don’t like to be miserable, and we don’t like to hunt when we have low confidence.
00:06:42
Speaker 3: Trust me, I get it.
00:06:44
Speaker 2: I just spent several nights in a tent twenty five miles from the Canadian border, where I found far more wolf tracks than grouse tracks. Being uncomfortable sucks, and I think that factors into our hunting decisions more than what we actually believe the deer will be doing. I’ll give you an easy one here. I’ve talked about this a lot. People don’t like deer hunting when it’s hot out early season, mid season, during the rut, whenever. The general consensus is that the deer won’t be moving, but that’s dumb. It’s also commonly stated that the meat is far more likely to spoil if you hunt when it’s hot, but that’s dumb too. Take good shots, give it your best recovery efforts. You’ll be just fine. But what’s really happening is that people don’t want to hunt when it’s hot, so they find reasons not to.
00:07:29
Speaker 3: That’s fine, you do, you boo.
00:07:31
Speaker 2: But if you want to kill more and bigger deer, you might want to figure out how to hunt during whether that you are certain to get every single season. I killed a decent eight pointer in my home state of Minnesota this year. They came into a pond here in the suburbs when it was eighty seven degrees in September. Now was it comfortable, No, But I knew for a fact that deer were going to come to that stand to get a drink, and I was pretty sure a decent buck would do it. And he did, and he gave me a twenty two yard shot. And it really was that simple. Most of my hot weather hunts are far more productive than my rough hunts because they.
00:08:08
Speaker 3: Are so predictable.
00:08:11
Speaker 2: Plus a lot of hunters won’t go when they perceive it to be too hot, which gives me another advantage over the deer movement, because they’re going to move more when there’s fewer people out there. It’s simple, and I know I’ve used that example many times. You don’t hear this as much as you used to, but here’s another one. From time to time I’ll hear someone say that it’s too windy to hunt because the deer won’t be moving. We’ve seen a lot of deer research that refutes that, and it’s also just common sense for an animal that lives off of its nose the world around them, feeding them lots of data from a safe distance will override the negatives of not being able to hear as well or the visual aspect of it of things moving all the time in the woods from the wind. Now, wind also happens to walk in lockstep with fronts, which sure seem to get the deer moving. Now, A lot of folks will hunt pre or post frontal conditions, and we all know why it cou’d be great. But when weather moves through, it often moves through for a day or two. What if you’re on that Andy May style trip to somewhere for a long weekend and your timing sucks and you catch it right in the middle of a front blowing through. Do you sit it out or try to figure out where the deer should be going when the whole thing is blowing through. I honestly think the biggest thing that my public land hunts taught me is that if you have a chance to hunt, you should go because a lot of times when the deer aren’t supposed to be moving, they are moving and they are killable. And if you go enough when you’re not supposed to, you start to figure out what motivates them to move. The hot weather water connection is the Kindergarten version of this because it makes total sense. Frontal weather is a little bit trickier to figure out, but there will be general movement even when things are going from bonkers weather to super calm weather. You also get precipitation with those fronts, and I have yet to meet a really good deer hunter who doesn’t perk up a little when it’s supposed to rain. Some my absolute favorite conditions from the season opener until the rut dies down involve light rain. Always now, heavy downpour type of rain is a different story, but steady or light rain is just a gift that keeps on giving. And if you do get that downpour, it usually doesn’t last super long. And when that thing slows down a little bit, lightens up a little bit, you better get your ass than that stand. We know this stuff, and in some conditions people are far more likely to hunt than in others. But I guess my whole point of this is that the best way to learn about what the deer actually do, not what we want them to do, because enough people have repeated certain things, is to go out there and get some proof. You might think, can I just do that, you know, while being super analytical about my trail camera data, I’d say probably not. Trail cameras are great, but going out and trying to solve for specific conditions and then seeing what you see is a whole different thing. Think about it this way. How often have you hunted and observed something deer wise that you just didn’t expect, something that caught you off guard. This happens to me all the time, and I’ve learned to listen to what the deer tell me instead of listening to the voice in my head that seems to know everything but actually doesn’t. Think about jumping a buck walking out in the morning after you’ve tried to shoot a dough in early October, or think about that deer that crossed the road in front of you if you drove out after an evening hunt that just seemed to emerge from a little patch of cover that just doesn’t make sense to you. The deer show us a lot, and if you’re out there when most folks think it’s not worth it, what the deer show you will make you a far better hunter than the rest of the folks who know better than to hunt them. I had an encounter like ten years ago here in the Cities and a little property during early October, with a really good buck, like one thirties, and where he came from, how he skirted my stand, and just the fact that he was the biggest deer I ever saw in several years of hunting that property all season long taught me a lot. I think about that buck every single year, multiple times, but especially when it’s early October and my hopes aren’t all that high. One of the many reasons we like the ruts so much is because we don’t have to think about things too hard. We don’t really have to fret over the weather and how the deer will or won’t move, even though we definitely pay attention to the weather during November. But we like simple. We want most of the riddle to be solved for us by that insane breeding desire, so we don’t have to work around a bunch of other bs, But the whole season is dominated by weather and what that brings to the woods in the form of wind and precipitation and temperature and barometric pressure. It all affects deer, but the deer don’t have a choice. They live in it and they have to do their thing. And quite honestly, I don’t think movement in general is impacted by a lot of the weather as much as we are now. Maybe you believe me, or maybe you think, wait a minute. The folks telling me to hunt when the conditions are perfect consistently tag one eighties and this rando moron doesn’t, So maybe they are right. Maybe they are, But I can tell you a couple things. Those one hundred and eighty inch buck killers wouldn’t kill those bucks where you hunt running that same program. There is a huge difference between doing what you have to in order to kill giants in a really good spot versus trying to get better at deer hunting in general when you don’t have access to the best white tail ground in the country for you and I, the level up game happens by doing things differently from most people and then trying to really learn from the deer if the ten day forecast isn’t appealing to you because of whatever weather reason, so you mostly sit it out. What you’ll learn is that you didn’t kill anything because you didn’t. Now, maybe your cameras will be slower then or maybe not, but that doesn’t matter. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy and it helps a lot of us sleep at night. But I look at this just like the value in hunting egg country in the Midwest and then heading down south for a big wood swamp hunt, or I don’t know, spending your time sitting over a feeder in the Southeast and then making a long ass drive to hunt western white tails where you can’t bait and there aren’t very many trees and everything is a thousand times more visible than back home. You suddenly have to solve for all kinds of new problems, and that is the key to becoming a better deer hunter. The main strategy we see these days is to create a spot that is so appealing to the deer that they will go there eventually, and then hunt that spot when things get right. Look, it’s a great way to kill big deer. But if you don’t have that or you don’t want that. A good strategy is to challenge your worldview on white tails that you know, the deer that you do have access to, and then do some things differently. The cameraman I had on that ill fated North Country grouse hunt is fellow named Dylan Lenz, who I’ve interviewed on the Wire to Hunt podcast and he’s filmed a lot of whitetail hunts with me, and he’s a really, really good deer hunter. We were talking in the tent one night about our early years as deer hunters, and he simply said, I don’t know. It’s like you go out and you make mistake after a mistake, and you keep trying new things until something clicks and you get a little better at making decisions, and then you do it again and again. Simple, but he’s right. The more we try, the more we color outside the lines, the more we learn to find the deer where they want to be and then go there to hopefully shoot one. That development doesn’t happen when we wait for the best weather, because even the best weather won’t override so many factors that influence deer movement, not the least of which is hunting pressure. I think a good way to view this or for all of us, is, you know, just to challenge ourselves, especially since not everyone has the means or time or willingness to travel to new whiteail spots, is to look at hunting like my black lab looks at If I say, Sadie, do you want to go hunt some roosters? She isn’t like, hmm, but wait, isn’t it too hot or too windy for pheasant hunting?
00:16:09
Speaker 3: She’s like, you have no idea? How good of an idea? That is?
00:16:14
Speaker 2: Rain, snow, forty mile per hour, winds, hot, cold, whatever She’s going every time. And honestly, I think that little lab pup is onto something because I know the more I hunt deer in weather that I really don’t want to hunt them in, the more deer I see and kill, and that makes me want to hunt more regardless of the forecast. It might be too late in the season for this to matter too much to most of us now, but you should think about it for next year, the next ten years.
00:16:39
Speaker 3: At least.
00:16:41
Speaker 2: The worst it’ll happen is that you’ll get to hunt more, and even if you don’t kill any more big bucks right away, you’ll still well get to hunt more, and I promise you you’re going to learn a thing or two about the deer that will help you eventually. That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson and this has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation’s podcast. As always, thank you so much for all your support. I can’t tell you what it means to us. Just trust me on this. We love you, guys, We appreciate it. If you need some more white tail content, maybe if you just need a podcast to listen to when you’re driving somewhere for the holidays, want to watch some films since it gets dark at five o’clock at night and that really sucks. We drop new content on the medeater dot com every single day, so you want to watch people hunting all over, listen to some good stuff, maybe read some articles, maybe find a recipe on the site to cook up something for Christmas dinner.
00:17:30
Speaker 3: Whatever We’ve got you covered.
00:17:31
Speaker 2: Go check it out at the medeater dot com
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