Ep. 522: Foundations- Gobbler Hunting Sessions and Deer Hunting Lessons

long beards across the countryside. Last week, I tried to make a good case for anyone who is interested in traveling for deer to first head out on a turkey hunting trip. This week, I want to talk about something I never hear anyone in my position, talk about how hunting one thing like turkeys can make you much better at hunting something else. You know what I mean, of course, But maybe you don't really unerstand what I'm talking about. Hell sometimes I don't, and neither does Mark because he

lets me know when he's confused. Anyway, get ready, because I'm gonna help you level up as a white tail hunter in a pretty unconventional way. In a past life, when I was an associate editor for a big game bow hunting magazine, one of the writers and I got into a conversation about turkey hunting. This guy, who has a more prominent name in the white tail space than almost anyone, he casually mentioned that he doesn't turkey hunt

because there's no money in it. The deer where the dollar signs are, he said, and honestly, he wasn't totally wrong. If you want to be an outdoor writer or hell I know these days, a content creator and your soul focus is turkey hunting, I hope you really like eating ramen noodles and living with your parents. Now, I know that's not much of a concern for the listeners of this podcast, and so his answer should be interpreted a

different way. Not hunting an open season in the spring for a bird that can be a ton of fun to hunt, it's kind of strange and can be defeating if you want to level up your woodsmanship game and become a better deer hunter. Now, I do understand that not everyone likes turkey hunting. Oftentimes, I find it's the people who tried it once and either had a really difficult hunt or more often a really easy hunt, who just aren't big fans. The folks who see turkeys at

their bird feed are all winter long. There's there are the kind of people who seem to devalue the opportunity to hunt them as well, and I get it. But fortunately there are a ton of different ways to hunt turkeys, in a ton of different states, in a ton of different types of habitat, And honestly, one of the biggest things I love about turkeys is that they are easier to kill on public land than about any animal I've

ever pursued. This makes a compelling case hunting them on public land, which leads to a lot of dear discoveries which you don't have to just hunt them on public land. And I'm going to get to that, but first let's backtrack a little to the folks who don't like to turkey hunt. If you're in this category, I wonder do you really know how to call? Because if not, you're missing out on the best part about the whole thing, the interaction. It's what makes elk hunting so damn special too, aside.

I don't know, of course, from like the locations in which we tend to pursue elk, and I don't know how much pure deliciousness they contain. If you're lucky enough to kill one, maybe you've never really used quality turkey decoys, which changes the whole thing as well. If you don't think it's fun to watch a couple of Tim's run into your spread and start fighting with your fake Jake,

I'm not sure you and I would be friends. I say that, but I have to remind myself that there are people out there who love country music and the taste of coke, Nutter Green peppers, reality television. All of those things are very unappealing to me, but they boiled down to personal taste. So it's okay if you don't like turkey hunting. It's okay if you hate it, in fact, but do me a favor. Listen in until the end, because maybe there's something about turkeys you haven't thought about

that will make you a better deer hunter. This something, for me, is at least partially just time in the woods. We often preach a big white tail game as something that can be conducted with surgical precision, sort of like a drone strike. We just sit back, we look at screens to see satellite imagery, then we look at weather data. Bam. We head into the woods at the most likely time to kill a buck, and we do just that, except we mostly don't. This works for a few, but not

for the many. For most of us, offseason time in the woods is more important than any other aspect of white tail hunting, aside from actually white tail hunting. The problem here is that most of us don't possess whatever gene it is that guys like Andy may have that make them want to scout constantly. Most of us just won't do that, and we think something like trail cameras

will bridge that gap, but they won't. The reality is that the more time you spend in the woods with a purpose memori, you'll start to understand how dear you use the landscape. It's that simple, even if it's not easy. Now, keep in mind that I consider myself to be genetically gifted in one way, and that is that I must possess some type of coding deep in my cells or somehow possess an ancestral calling to hunt a bunch of different critters. I just want to Basically, if I can

eat it, I really want to hunt it. I don't have to convince myself to go hunt anything from squirrels on up to elk. I love upland game, waterfall, small game, big game. I'll love them all, and like I said last week, I love turkeys, and turkeys are what we can hunt in the spring, So that's what I'm in a hunt, and that's what you should hunt. But here's

the thing. Whether you bow hunt for turkeys from a pop up blind or you run and gun while putting your back to any random oak tree that tickles your fancy, you can learn a lot about deer from these hunts. So I want to start here with the turkey bow hunt first. There are a few hunts that are more mentally taxing than a dark to dark turkey bow hunt from a blind. This is a style of hunting that can border on pure torture, particularly for anyone with a

natural wanderlust and who is also short on patients. Usually go together, but there are certain situations where your turkey scouting leads you to a high traffic area and maybe you're hunting a really small parcel where you can't get out and cover too much ground. I don't Maybe you don't want to carry a whole flock of full body decoys, a blind, a chair, and all the makings for a

long sit all across the countryside. Maybe you want to plant your happy ass in one spot call the birds to you all day long instead of going to them. I I do this probably about fifteen days every turkey season, and it helps me kill birds with my bow, oftentimes public land birds. It also helps me mentally when fall rolls around, because if you can put in like a fifteen hour shift during May to kill a bird, it's really not so hard to string together a bunch of

dark to dark sits for deer come November. All day turkey bow hunts also allowed me to observe, through every hour of the day what the turkeys are doing and what the deer doing, and that's something that interests me a lot. I'll give you an example of this which started a long and widening road to a dead buck for me. A few years back, a buddy and I drove to Texas to turkey hunt. On the way home, we stopped at a spot in Nebraska where we saw

a bird strutting from the road. We gave him a quick hunt and then decided to look around a little more. What we found was a pretty decent spot to turkey hunt. So the following spring we drove back down there with our camping gear ready to go. There was snow on the ground, The birds were still pretty flocked up and it was ideal weather. But I did manage to set up on top of a spot some jake's really wanted to be, and I did manage to call three of

them in almost immediately an arrow one. I peaked early turkey wise on that trip, but I also put in a full day in that very spot, and the next morning I watched several deer leave the private fields and work their way up into the sand hills. I even watched a doll with two fons bed down on a small bench for quite a few hours. As the sun crept toward the western horizon and my sanity frayed further from my voluntary confinement, I watched some of the same

dear from the morning reverse their course. Then I saw a bachelor group of shed bucks take the same route out of the hills down to the fields. And that's actionable intel, my friends. How dear use the landscape is mostly what I'm interested in about deer, and watching them from a turkey blind can turn up lots of useful nuggets of information. It also often shows you how wrong we are about thinking what dear do when they're betting.

Instead of a buck heading into his best safest bed and laying there until dark, they seem to bed down for a little while and then get up. They look around, they stretch, they take a dump, they reposition themselves. Oftentimes they get up, they go to water, or they browse for an hour before laying it back down. It's really a fascinating glimpse into the world of white tails. We originally only speculate about it, and then we get it

wrong a lot. Turkey hunting can give you a glimpse into that world, and in this case, the deer observations led me to come back for the early September opener, where I killed a great velvet ten pointer the first evening of the season. Part of that dear success was due directly to turkey hunting that spot, I promise you. Another time in South Dakota, I watched a whole herd of deer leave a private alf alpha field to browse

their way through patches of sumac and scrub brush. Once they got to a little thicker cover, a couple of coyotes set up a deer drive for them that damn near worked, except that the object of their push was a little master than they anticipated. It was an amazing show, one that I'd have never seen if I hadn't been posted up in a blind waiting on a gobbler to come in that property, the one where I watched those deer and those coyotes play out their deadly chess game. Well,

I went back there that fall. In fact, I went back there four years in a row, and I killed four bucks there on public land. Some of those bucks ended up wearing my tag because of what I saw during subsequent turkey hunting trips. Not only does springtime observations sometimes translate to good fall deer hunting strategies, but it also gives you a good reason to cover some ground. While I do go on a fair amount of turkey bow hunts, even on those, you'll end up looking at

the places you think public land turkey should frequent. Those are also the places, often the exact same places the public land bucks and does frequent. And if you choose to run and gun with a twelve gauge slung over your shoulder, which is a more popular style of turkey hunting, you'll probably see a lot of ground depending on how much running you do. Here's the thing about this that if you listen to enough of these episodes already, you probably know this about me or my beliefs. But I

don't think there are too many accidents in nature. I don't think there's a ton of randomness out there in a weird way. Nature in the animals that it consists of, are always in survival mode. I guess it's really not that weird. This means they do things on purpose. Whether they can reason that out or not, it doesn't really matter.

They don't take unnecessary risks very often. They don't walk randomly through their world, burning extra calories and exposing themselves to potential death unless they have a reason, a reason that is almost always tied either to survival or the propagation of their species. What does that mean? It means that every observation of a deer tells you something. Every track in the sand tells you something. Every old rub you run across while your turkey hunting tells you something.

Every bleached and half chewed up antler you find tells you something. Everything out there, deer wise is giving you little hints. When you're running a mouth call and propping a twelve gage in your lap while putting your back to a tree. Your focus is first on the gobblers, but don't ignore the deer and the deer sign. One of my favorite things to do, which I recently talked about on a different episode, is to run and gun for turkeys on public land that I'm curious about deer hunting.

This is a scouting method that really gets me out there from dark to dark every day. It might mean that I cover miles and miles in search of a bird, but those miles and all of those setups where I have time to sit and watch the woods around me for an hour or two, they put me right where the deer live. And while it could, this doesn't have to happen in a situation where your three states from home, running and gunning with a nonresident turkey tag in your pocket.

You can learn about deer by doing this on your home farm too. In fact, this is sometimes the best way to learn about dear Scratch that it's sometimes the best way to learn about what you think about the deer that isn't actually true, or that your picture of dear usage on the property you've hunted for a while is incomplete. I'll give you an example. Last spring, my buddy bought an amazing property in southwestern Wisconsin. We met up to hunt one of the late seasons in May

and we set up on one of his fields. It was simple stuff. We knew the birds were coming into the picked corn field, and we knew they'd see our decoys. It worked very well, and I was out of tags within an hour. But in that hour and in the hours after when we tried to get my buddy a bird, we saw quite a few deer. Some of them entered that field on a very subtle trail and they crossed it without stopping to leave on a very subtle trail.

At the time, it honestly didn't feel that important. But fast forward to last November and I was sitting in a ground blind with a cameraman next to me, filming an episode of our One Week in November series. My goal was mostly to try to arrow a dough on that field, while I was really trying to just leave a couple other areas alone so that the conditions would break in my favor and I could sneak in and

sit where I really wanted to hunt. Well, I missed a nice eight pointer and a colossal melt down that night. That resulted partly from my own flaws and partly from the Bucks stopping the first time right where he couldn't be filmed. By the time he walked where he was in frame, I'd mostly just lost my mind and I flat out whiffed, which isn't that much fun when you're not on camera, and it's a special kind of not

fun when you are. Later that evening, when the camera light faded and we were thinking about packing up, one of the biggest Bucks I've ever seen, ran into the far end of the plot and started chasing Dose. And the trail that he took to get there. You guessed it. It was the one that the random deer took during Turkey season. Now, recently, my buddy and I walked that trail as far as we could and we found an amazing crossing at the bottom of a ravine, And I

do mean amazing. Next year, I'll have a stand on it for sure, and I'll have a trail tacked straight up the bluff from a highway so I can get into that crossing in the morning without any dear knowing. Now, the point here and all of this rambling is this the initial question of why deer are doing what they are doing. Came to my buddy and I while we were sitting on the ground waiting on some turkeys to

lose their minds and come charging in. We didn't have to be in the woods scouting deer to learn something very valuable about scouting deer, even if the full lesson didn't reveal itself right away. My friends, I believe in this stuff, and I believe that the time you spend in the woods turkey hunting, whether you're running, gunning solo, or maybe you've got a youngster with you, maybe you're junior all day bow hunt, it's all important. It's important for the act in and of itself, but it's also

ancillari lee important as a deer hunter. All of your time in the woods is just as all of your time e scouting is. But what's cool about the spring is that you can have a hell of a lot of fun focusing on turkeys while you're just keeping an eye out for interesting deer clues. Do this, even if you think you know everything about your dear Pay attention to where you see spring deer traveling, because that's how

they'll travel in the fall. A lot of times, pay attention to not only the travel and the sightings and the sign that you fully expect to see, but also the stuff that makes you stop and wonder why those deer and that sign. They help you grow as a deer hunter. That's how you level up, and that's how you kill deer you wouldn't have killed five years ago because you're learning and you're questioning what you know. You're confirming some beliefs and shattering others with every hour you

spend in the woods. That's a beautiful thing. And it only gets better when you're zoned out and thinking about birds and how they're not going to play, and suddenly a butt pucker and close gobble rattles your chest and it's all you can do to slowly get your gun

to your shoulder. So get out there, huntsome birds, learn about the deer, have some fun, and listen in next week because I'm gonna start switching things up a little bit to some episodes that focus on hunting gear and maybe possibly buying a little piece of deer ground for yourself. That's it for this week, my friends. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast.

As I always thank you so much for listening. If you need some more white tailed goodness, head on over to our YouTube channel or visit The Metiator dot com, slash wire