Ep. 598: Foundations - Expert Level Hide and Seek

a quick sales pitch. Meat Eater is running a massive Black Friday sale. Now, I know, I know you're sick of hearing about the sales, but probably not as sick of them as I am. They are still a hell of a good chance to pick up some sweet First Light or f h F Gear, Phelps or meat Eater or some of our partner gear. You'll find a bunch of killer products at off Just head on over to the meat eater dot com and check it out. And

here's the better part. If you don't want me to get fired, because I'm literally as low on the totem pole as you can get here at meat Eater and likely the first one on the chopping block. You can visit the Meat Eater store under the old shop tab and look for the crew picks pages. Way at the end you'll see a picture of yours truly sitting in a tree stand waiting on a big buck. If you

click on it, you'll see some of my gear picks. Now, this is the stuff I use, and if enough of you visit that page, I might get to keep producing this podcast and make some I don't know, really cool public land hunting films next year instead of getting fired and having to go back to the freelance world. Thank

you in advance, and enough of that stuff. We are at the stage of the rut where the roller coaster is almost finished, the fun is mostly over, the grind is almost upon us, and well that kind of sucks. But not all hope is lost. There's still a chance to catch a cruiser, still a chance to out hunt the Blaze Orange Masses, and still a chance to have one hell of a good time hunting. You just need to learn how to play hide and seek at a high level, with a heavy emphasis on the seek part.

Way back in and Astronomer came up with a crazy idea. He said that he thought the universe started as a single point and has expanded ever since. I'm sure a lot of people then thought he was an idiot, just as a lot of people now probably think he's an idiot. But a couple of years later, a different astronomer named Edwin Hubbell noticed that other galaxies were moving away from us. He also noticed that the farther galaxies were moving away

from us faster, and the closer ones. Since then, a hell of a lot of science has gone into trying to disprove the Big Bang theory, but it has done the opposite. Using the known laws of physics, scientists and astronomers have worked back the origins of the universe to nearly fourteen billion years ago, but have also discovered quite a bit of evidence to support the theory that all of this came to be from one really, really big and powerful explosion. But this is where things get real wonky.

This isn't an explosion of matter into the universe, but an explosion of the universe itself. All of space is expanding, and it's taking the stuff inside of it with it. It's expanding pretty fast. Too. By studying the brightness of known stars through the observable universe, scientists now say that the rate is forty five point five miles per second per mega parsak, which is a unit of measurement equal to three point two six million light years. Keep in

mind a light year is six trillion miles. So put another way, in the next nine point eight billion years, at the current expansion rate of the universe, the distance between cosmic objects will double. That might not sound like a lot, but it is actually unreal. The question is what is the universe expanding into does it ever stop? One theory that addresses these questions is the Big Crunch.

This theory says that eventually the universe will stop expanding and the force of gravity will start to cause it to reverse course. Eventually, over cosmological scales of tens of billions of years, all that super spread out matter will come back together into one big singularity. And once it does, guess what, there could be a giant explosion from all that energy that pushes things back out again. In other words, we might just be living in an unfathomably huge accordion.

Well that's not exactly it, and the big accordion theory which I just invented, probably isn't going to gain a lot of traction in the scientific community. The folks at NASA are so stuck up they never actually listened to squirrel hunting writers. Anyway, What does this have to do with white tails. Well, we went through the big bang of the rut, and guess what, the big crunch it's on us now. There's still some chasing and some breeding going on, but a lot of it is slowing down.

Part of this is just timing, but part of it is due to the pressure of so many hunters in the woods. There is no more popular time to hunt than the rut, and there are many many states where the gun season opens up at some point in November. Hell, probably almost all of the states that have white tails have a white tailed gun season in November, except for a few of the premier trophy states. I wonder if

there's a connection there. Anyway, if the thought of the big white tail crunch makes you sad, think about it this way. Now is the time to understand how white tails survive and how you can use that to beat the odds before the whole thing collapses in on itself

and we get stuck in the dreaded late season. The way to do this is to understand how dear move, not how they put one hoof in front of the other, but how they get from point A to point B without getting shot in their lungs or harassed by road hunters. They do this by being masters of hide and seek. They do this by understanding everywhere they can travel that offers them an advantage. Now, I know I've talked about this a lot, but I think it's worth a lot

of talking. I think it's worth a lot of thought for most of us because this is how white tails survive, and we honestly make it pretty easy for them to do so. This lesson is just driven home to me every year in ways that make me believe it might be the most important thing for white tail hunters to understand survive. Eval instinct is no joke, and it's the primary driver behind so much of a deer's daily movements.

I don't mean that in the realm of getting enough calories in their belly to see another day, or enough water or whatever. I mean it in terms of predator avoidance, of which we are the biggest threat. Now, allow me to go off on a tangent here about this topic, because I think it deserves a deeper look years ago, in a past life as an associate editor for Peterson's Bow Hung magazine, I had a conversation with one of our columnists who is a big name in the dear world.

He casually said, I don't know what it is, but the bucks on my place seemed to get dumber once they hit five and a half years old. They just move more in daylight, and they get easier to kill. My first reaction was, what the hell are you talking about? How could that even be true? But it is true, and the reason for it is those deer have dull survival instincts. They've been conditioned to accept risky behavior because it hasn't been risky to them at all for all

of their lives. This is kind of like if you took a trust fund kid and you just nerfed up the world for them. You deliver to them the best food, the best houses on the best beaches all over the world. You hire security teams to watch over their every move and keep them safe, and they live their entire life this way, let's say, until they are seventy years old. But then you pull the old switcher rou on them.

You cut off their bank accounts, you change the locks on all those mansions you sell the private jets, and you say, you know what, buddy, you're on your own. Now. Do you think that person would function pretty well in the real world. Probably not. Now, maybe this is a poor comparison, But take a buck on a thousand acres of private land in southern Iowa. Sure he has coyotes to worry about, but those song dogs have a smorgasvord

of critters to eat that buck. He's born there. He eats on food plots every day, or knobs down on some supplemental feed in the winter. He's healthy and relatively free to do as he pleases. Every year he grows a bigger set of antlers, and sure he's gonna smell humans. Hell, he probably sees hunters in the trees, but even when he does, they don't shoot at him. They leave him alone. He chases does, he beds where he wants to, and

he enjoys his nerve up dear world. He grows old in that place, learning every year that he's safer and safer, so finally he's had no negative consequences for going to his favorite food source two hours before dark, or chasing does wherever the scent of the ladies take him, but he's also six point five years old, sports about antlers on his head, and suddenly his once benign human benefactor says, I'm done babysitting you. You're on a hit list. That

dear survival ice is at an enormous disadvantage. He's been conditioned to believe there isn't much in the way of danger out there, kind of like these dipshit Yellowstone visitors who try to get a selfie with a bison and end up riding its horns for a while, all the while becoming not only a viral video star, but also sometimes paralyzed or dead. That's the name of the game for the one percentage of the white to a world, And good for them the deer part, not the bison part.

If they want to arrow a babysat deer every year, so be it. I'm happy for them, but that's probably not you, is it. Deer hunting deer that live with constant threats on their lives, or, if not constant, at least pretty damn consistent throughout much of the fall those threats. They likely reached a fever pitch in the last few weeks so that the rut that was supposed to deliver unto you a dumbass LUs craze buck also delivered onto the deer the highest concentration of two legged predators in

the woods. Do you think that doesn't affect them? It does. I promise you that this is one of the darkest secrets about the deer hunting industry. It's that we don't know the truth, or we do, and we don't want to tell it to you because we have ways of getting around the difficulties that most hunters face. But reality is reality. And while the rut can be great, nature and deer hunting in life has a way of finding

a level set. So the good things the rut can do for you are often offset by the increase in hunting pressure. What should be easier almost never is acknowledge that and think about what it means. In mid November, the big crunches coming, but not before the bucks do their best to pass on their genes a few more times. The wildest days are likely over, but all the good

days aren't. They're just going to happen to people who figure out what November survival means to dear, and it means cover maybe tighter cruising loops, it often means concentrated deer movement away from where most hunters want to hunt. This is something that mirrors public land elk hunts, and it's a powerful motivator to keep looking. When you do find a little sanctuary, you can have a pretty damn good hunting, even in November when the peak of the

run is passed. It's also worth while to think about the average life of does in your woods right now. They are sensitive to that hunting pressure too, probably more sensitive than your average buck. I would guess. They have that pretty big inconvenience visited upon them. But they also have the harassment from all the boys. And while there are social animals, they also seem to appreciate being mostly left alone. Where those does and fawns go, so too

will go your bucks. This, at least on paper, probably cuts down on the need to cruise all over the countryside with their noses to the ground and a little extra leading their pencils. If you get my drift, what's the secret to figuring them this out? Well, look at the positives. Maybe, and obviously this varies wildly by staton, by individual properties. Maybe some of the initial fervor over

the rut has died off. Maybe some of your competition is at home getting their ice shacks ready instead of going full pumpkin and sitting in their favorite ladder stands for another dear list set. Maybe there are still some big deer left looking for ladies, and maybe they're getting a little desperate as they dribble around at mid court watching the shot clock wind down. They might not be visible in as many places on your property, but they

might be awful vulnerable in a couple. This is, in my experience, the most important time to put your faith in the rut. It's still happening out there, and that's a good thing. You just need to go find it. And I'm going to tell you something that might not make you feel better. Trail cameras probably aren't the ticket here. Now. I'm not saying don't run them. I really don't care if you do or don't. But if you're running a traditional camera only checking it once a week, you're a

week behind. If you're running cell cameras, they're showing you a percentage of the deer. That's it, and it's probably not a great percentage. If you decide a November twenty all days it is worthless because your cell camps aren't showing chasing. Every day you're missing the point. You are literally not hunting for reasons that make no sense. Instead, it's time to treat this part of the rut differently. Gone, or at least going, are the days we're just planting

your button. A seat over a promising funnel is good enough. Now, if the trails are still pounded and the action seems okay, by all means, keep at it, but pay attention, especially if you're out there gun hunting. If your favorite funnel or pinch point doesn't deliver in an all days sit, you gotta go somewhere else instead of settling for the old excuse that the bucks are all nocturnal, or the lockdown is in total effect, or the rut is over.

Go find it. It's still happening somewhere. It won't be in that beautiful deciduous forest look that looks like it's straight out of a painting. It will be in some place tight, like it usually is on pressured ground. Now what I like to do this time of year? Let's just get a little curious. I asked myself, where am I not seeing them? Kind of again, like when I'm el hunting. If they aren't in the meadows and don't seem to be using those postcard worthy aspen veins, they

must be in the dark timber. If the bucks I'm after aren't hitting the cut corn and daylight and they aren't using the open woods, does that mean they aren't running? Does it mean that they aren't looking for love? And what about the does have your sightings of the ladies fallen off the cliff too? If so, go looking. Fresh tracks are huge here because fresh scrapes and rubs might

not be a really good option. You want to at trails, fence crossings, river crossings, anywhere where there might be an opportunity to read fresh deer movement in the dirt of the sand. You get bonus points, super super bonus points if those spots happen to be around thicker cover. Now, this doesn't mean that it needs to be so thick that you couldn't push a cotton tail out of it, even if you owned a dozen beagles. It just needs

to be thicker than the other habitat that's available. This is an important point, and I'm going to cover it next week quite a bit in a rut Reflections episode. But for now, I think thicker than average and get in there to watch. Also, think about the fact that you're looking for a real concentration of deer now. It doesn't matter if what you think you find is just some dozen fonts, because the bucks will find them too.

You want to find out where they're hold up and make a plan and not bump them in into a different sanctuary. This is harder than it sounds, because if you go from zero to something to work with, it's easy to push it with access or wind or your setups or any other thing that might be trade or present. These deer you're hunting now, they don't suffer fools. They're looking for an excuse to big crunch into a smaller and smaller presence in the woods, and you could be

that catalyst. But if you play it safe and smart, that relocated concentration of deer can give you a few magical days. This strategy works on another level too, because they'll have you hunting like others. Don't think about the average gun hunter. Is he going to saddle up and try observation sits and tight creep bottoms and I don't know, abandon homesteads now. I'm sure if you do, but I

bet most don't. They go the opposite direction. Or think about your average bow hunter now, as the hunting gets harder, is he likely to dig in and go mobile while actively trying to find a deer concentration to hunt right this moment? Or is he more likely to phone it in, hunt the easy stuff and make excuses for not finding deer. Those hunters in both categories, they've done you a weird favor by hunting the way that they do. They've pushed the deer into specific spots, deepen the cover, and they

have concentrated them. That's a silver lining on what is really not an easy time to kill a buck. It's just not one wrong approach where your wind blows out one of these spots and it's back to square one. But if that doesn't happen and you spend some time seeking out these mid November sanctuaries, you can still have good hunting. You can salvage your season, and this is the truth, have the chance to bump into your biggest

buck ever. I don't know what it is about the dwindling days of the rut, but it seems to get the mature bucks on their feet and moving, so use that as motivation. Get out there with your gun or bow or spear or whatever to your chosen weapon is find those hotspots and then listen in next week as we reflect a little on this past rut. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired Hunt Foundations podcast, which has brought to you by

First Light. As I always thank you so much for listening and all of your support, I truly truly appreciate it. If you want to check out some more of our whitetail content, head on over to the meatia dot com slash wired and you'll see a bunch of articles by me, Mark Alex Gilstrom in a whole bunch of white tail Killers