Ep. 540: Foundations - How (and Why) to Take Summer Deer Inventory

is a little mushy. Well maybe foggy is a better word. Anyway, I'm going to struggle through this one a little bit, and if I say something down, you gotta forgive me. I'm sorry. With that out of the way, my friends, While we are a little early here for really nailing down the inventory of bucks on your hunting rounds, it's worth thinking about maybe making a little plan and taking inventory. Seems pretty simple, and it can be, but it's also

something that kind of gets misrepresented. Is only valuable to private landowners who are managing deer, or for folks who only hunt after they've established a hit list and decided what bucks are shooters of which ones aren't. There's a lot more to this stage or there can be anyway, and this is a strategy that can be valuable to anyone who dear hunts. So in this episode, that's what

I'm gonna make the case for. I'm gonna break this inventory thing down way beyond what we usually see when it comes to getting pictures of bucks in the summer not I don't want to brag, but I was taking dear inventory before it became the cool thing to do. I'm joking, of course, because even before it had a label white till hunters were out. He's trying to figure out who was living where they could hunt, and the

bigger the deer, the more we focused on them. We just, you know, at least for the first several decades of modern deer hunting, never had tools like trail cameras, and they really are the lynchpin to this whole thing, but they are also limited in their ability to help us. Does that sound super clear and concise, like it came right from the mouth of a professional writer? Guy? Sorry, I know it's not. So let's start with the very basics before we move on to the nuances of summer inventory.

Buck inventory, you know, or summer inventory or whatever. It's a simple act of trying to tally up who lives where you can hunt them, and just to see how many of them there are. For hunters and deer dense states, this might just include top end bucks as well as some of the up and comers who are off limits. For others living in lower deer density areas or just hunting tougher ground, it might just be an attempt to figure out how many deer of all shapes and sizes

are around. This helps informed decisions on whether to fill antlerless tags or not, and whether to hold out for a certain sized buck or just let one fly. Whenever you get antlers up close. Inventory is useful for the hunter who has been on the same farm since Carter lost the Oval office to Reagan, or for the hunter who is just starting to mess around on a new

piece of ground. It's valuable to the private land hunter, and it's valuable to the public land hunter, although as you can probably guess, this is tied to a pile of local and situational variables. Now, with that out of the way, I want to start with an easy spot. The easiest spot probably to take inventory private land in a state with no restrictions on feeding or minerals. If you're lucky enough to have a spot like that in a state that hasn't put the damper on how you

can concentrate, dear, your task is pretty easy. Just go buy yourself a salt block or a mineral block and then head on into the woods, put it on the ground about eight ft from a tree, and then put your camera on a tree. Done and done, Easy peasy. Now all you have to do is let that sucker soak until I don't know August. Then you go in count up the monster velvet box you've got on camera, you know, making sure to divide them into neat piles of deer you'd kill and deer you wouldn't. And that's

about it. You've got your inventory. As you can imagine. Doing that doesn't give you much insight on how to hunt those deer or anything else, but it does establish a baseline for the season. That's better than nothing. But what if you can't run mineral sites or salt blocks or dump a pile of apples out every week, Well, then you have to think about the deer a little more.

And I think that's a good thing. This issue with chronic wasting disease in white tails is not going to go away likely ever, so rules against concentrating deer with attractants are probably here to stay as well. You can think of that what you will, but it is the law of the land in many, many places. And it's also worth noting that some states outlaw all types of attractants, while others have specifics in place and what kind of attractans can be used and when they can be used.

This means you might be able to have a salt block out until the day before the bow opener, but then it has to be removed. In some states there can't be any evidence even in the soil of that salt block or mineral station. This has gotten more than a few people in trouble over the years, especially when they shoot a monster buck and the jealousy thing comes out and people call them in for a suspected violation of violation they might not even have known they committed.

You also have some states where mineral blocks are just fine, but anything that can be construed as bait isn't. To put another way, if an attractant has some type of food in it, you can't use it. There are a lot of attractives on the markets with names like I don't know, a super big buck mineral magnet or giant toad buck cocaine that promises your deer will be hooked

on it and party like it's in Miami. What you need to be aware of with those products is that they often have some food component or ingredient in them, even if they really aren't advertised that way. A little bit of corn mixed in, or some kind of ground up apples or whatever food sources in there, and now you're on the wrong side of the law when you thought it was just maybe some kind of a mineral thing.

Pay attention to your local laws scratch. Pay attention to your current local laws because this stuff is always changing. And make sure you don't do something silly like buying a product that is totally illegal and then putting it out there and advertising it to the world when you start posting your summer images on the Graham. Now, before I move on from this, I just want to say

one more thing about it. Even if your local sporting goods store sells something that doesn't mean it's legal to use in your state, I can go to my local Cabella's right before the gun season opens in Minnesota, and see palettes of corn, bags of corn. I can see automatic deer feeders, I can see all kinds of products that are totally illegal to use while hunting in my state. That's a cautionary tale on this stuff. And better yet, I'll say that you don't need any of those products

to take inventory. In fact, I think it's more valuable to gather your intel a more old fashioned way, So you might you might want to think about inventory differently. Instead of contriving a situation to concentrate deer in a three foot circle, you have to take stock in what your ground offers and to decide where are the best places to put your cameras to capture the images of all the deer that live there. This does a couple

of things for you. First off, attracting the local deer to one spot and taking pictures of them tells you very little. It does tell you who is around, which seems like the only goal. And it does tell you, I guess what direction they approached the mineral site from. That's maybe a little bit valuable, but beyond that doesn't really do you much. That's as basic of inventory as you're gonna get and that might be enough for some folks.

That might be okay. But if you can't or don't want to use some kind of attractive then you're in a different spot. You've got to think about how you can strategically capture images of as many deer as possible while building up your hit list in a more natural way. Obvious spots for this include field edges and food plots, but you can also dive a little deeper and post a camera up over a pond or other water source, or maybe focus on a fence crossing or some other

high traffic area you find. I really like this style of taking inventory for two reasons. The first is that while it's not as easy as just using some kind of attractant to concentrate deer, it will still show you a complete roster of the deer on your property. The second is that it combines actual scouting with taking inventory.

That's important. While it's nice to know that there are three bucks using your ground that would all score between say fifty inches, it's better to know that, plus know that the biggest buck loves to water a certain stock tank, and that the two other decent you're always seem to travel together, and they really like to use one certain trail that leads out to the neighbor's bean field. In this way, there's a very thin membrane that divides deer

inventory from good old summer scouting. But there's more. Let's say you're a public land hunter and would never ever ever name a deer in your life. You just like to hunt, and you make your judgment call on who gets shot by who walks down the trail and get your heart pounding. Now, if that's you and you don't listen to too much pop country, we could probably be best friends or pretty good friends anyway. Now, all potential friendships aside, there might be another reason to take inventory.

You know, first off, it's just fun to know who's around. Even if you think the bucks you get on camera will be pushed out long before you have a chance to shoot them, it never hurts the old motivation any to know there are some big bucks around in your neighborhood. You might also want to just know what caliber a buck is mostly of ailable or how many deer are using the woods in total, or at least as much

of that as you can know. So let's say you live in a not so great trophy state, and you just want to have a rough idea what your odds are of shooting a certain kind of buck, and your summer inventory, whether on a salt liquor on natural movement, shows you that the entire crop of bucks all appear to be under three and a half years old. This

is really not uncommon, and it is telling. It tells you that holding out for a hundred and seventy inch is pretty stupid, and in fact that holding out for maybe a d five inch or might be almost equally as stupid. It might show you that a ninety seven inch two year old is a real, actual trophy in

your region. That's good knowledge to have. And besides the bucks, a comprehensive look at all the deer or most of the deer in your woods will tell you you know if you should shoot five does all this season or just let every mamma walk talk. Now, a lot of hunters default to the state biologists or wildlife biologists or whoever is deciding on tag allocations, but I don't. Of course, you can't just overshoot the available tags, because that's poaching

and not good. But there are situations where the recommendation might be for everyone to get three antlerless tags, or some county being a lot at a certain amount of dough tags, which seems like way too much from your perspective. Maybe you just feel like, after a month or two of inventory that it would be best for the herd if you laid off the does, Or maybe you see so many deer on camera that you green light yourself to fill your freezer this fall and fill every antlerless

tag they'll sell you. I realized this is a weird tangent, but in some ways, we all own some level of responsibility with the deer we hunt. Besides the obvious, we know our woods and we know our critters that live in them better most of the time than somebody who's never been there could know. Somebody who might be using population models to predict how many deer living there, and

they've never set foot in the county that you hunt in. Now, even if you think it possibly really can't matter one way or the other whether you personally shoot one or ten deer this season, it's still up to us to police ourselves. To some extent. We are as the stewards of this resource, and I think we should be in tune to it. At the very least. Inventory helps us with that. Sorry, enough of that tangent, because I want to talk about something else with some inventory. The fact

that it's often great a bullshit. Well, not exactly, that's too harsh. But I've interviewed quite a few dear biologists in my life who have done extensive research on summer ranges and home ranges and everything related to where deer live, and all of them have said at one point or another that some bucks are homebodies and some bucks just aren't. Some deer and we really still don't know the reason for this have a bring in summer range and then

a fall and winter range. Those ranges might be miles apart. And while not every deer lives this way, the ones that do seem to be pretty reliable in their migrations. This doesn't seem to be tied to available food or summer cover or anything like we can definitively put our fingers on yet. But I refuse to believe it isn't some evolutionary path that took hold in certain deer and not others. That means it is, or more likely was beneficial to the deer somehow. Now it might be or

it might not be. We don't know, and it really doesn't matter. That's all just kind of purely academic, and it's kind of fun to think about. But the reality is we just need to acknowledge that that exists, and those traits vary from buck to buck, summer homebodies, some aren't.

And what we do know is that you might run a camera on a corn pile all summer long and have every buck named, and suddenly, right around the bow opener, two of your hit listeners are just gone poof, And you think maybe they got hit by a car, or maybe the neighbor poach them, or maybe aliens sucked them up to the mother ship to try venison for their first time. It doesn't matter where they went, because they are gonzo, and that is that now they're gone from you.

But somewhere down the road, some other hunter will be the beneficiary of a few new bucks that just showed up out of nowhere. He's probably sitting there thinking, what the hell where did these bucks come from? Now that sucks if you're the one who loses the bucks, but it's pretty awesome if you're the one who gains a couple of good bucks. And even if you're on the losing end of this deal, the good news is that you might pick up a few fresh recruits from somewhere else.

And if not, oh well, they are just dear. And on that note, I want to talk about one last thing with summer inventory. Don't get married to it, or more specifically, don't fall in love with the bucks that you see and get images of all summer long. Some of them will undoubtedly be around for you in the fall, and some of them will undoubtedly be gone, so deer might live on your place. Others might pass through from

time to time. The buck that you have the most pictures of, who you know is going to bet on a certain knob and always enters the soybeans from a specific trail. The buck who is I don't know all of or thirty inches bigger than anything you've ever shot before,

and he's oh so predictable in his patterns. That buck might just disappear, or we might get shot by your neighbor opening morning, who has the deer hunting skills of a throw pillow and probably drank six bush lattes before climbing into a widowmaker wooden tree stand he built with his grandpa seventy three years ago. Hunting works like that. The point here is that even though you thought that

buck was yours, he wasn't. He never was. They aren't until we wrap our tags around their antlers, and that's how this stuff goes. So inventory is cool. Can be really fun to take stock in the local white tails and get involved in a little census taking. It can prove to be a useful tool for overall decision making throughout the season, and even help you become a better hunter when you're doing it. It can do a lot of things for you, regardless of the type of land

you hunt or the type of hunter you are. But I also can lead to some of the nastiness that just rears its ugly head up and deer hunting quite often because it's never easier to expose yourself to trophy bucks than through summer trail camera usage, and that trophy over everything else. Mentality, hatred for other hunters or neighboring landowners and all that stuff. Honestly can just lead to a weird hatred of the deer. Well, I don't know.

Hatred is probably too strong of a word, but it can lead to a lot of frustration, a lot of frustration actually, which tends to show up when the bucks we count on decide they're going to ghost us faster than a crazy tinder hookup. That's life part of deer hunting the bucks, you know, no matter how familiar we get with them, they'll almost always give us the slip. They'll almost always tease us with their presence and improve to us that they are better at surviving than we

are at killing them. But that's also what keeps us coming back, and if you can learn to live with it, keeps us developing a love for them. And this weird game we play where we try to run sharp sticks through their ribs. It's a wild thing we do here.

This obsession of ours and taking inventory can be this a creative, enjoyable aspect, as long as we don't let it add too much fuel to the crazy antler fire that that is so prone to burning out of control anyway, So take that for what it's worth and come back next week. The next episode is going to be a morale booster, a self confidence booster, a plea to get you to understand how good of a deer hunter you are and how good of a deer hunter you could become.

Because really, after a year of droning on and on and on, which is a line I stole from a wonderful song called black Dogs and Bubbles, I'm going to tell you how freaking awesome you are at this and why that matters. I'm gonna lay it all out because that's what I want to talk about next week, and I want to get into more of that stuff as we enter into the year two of this foundation's podcast, so I hope you stick around with me. That's it

for this week, my white tail obsessed friends. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As I always, thank you so much for listening, for your support, and if you want to get some more white tail content, you can head on over to them eat eater dot com, slash Wired to read all kinds of articles by Mark myself, Beaumartonic Andy May a whole bunch of white tail killers.

Or you can visit our wire to Hunt YouTube channel to see the weekly how to videos that we drop covering a whole wide range of how to white tail science, you name it, strategy whatever. Head on over there, check them up.