Ep. 616: Foundations - Tread Lightly, Sooooo Lightly

Hopefully you had a good one. Maybe have a full freezer, and I don't know what taxidermy bill If you don't, or you're just out there trying to fill one last tag, I feel for you. I'm in the same boat. While I love late season hunting, sometimes I mostly kind of hate it for one reason. I have to be so damn careful. You probably do too, and if not, you probably either have an amazing spot or never kill anything.

This episode is kind of just all about that reality, you know, the reality of treading real lightly, and honestly, it's a pretty good lesson for any part of the season, although it's most noticeable during the last gasps of a dying season. Many of you find folks are probably a little bit too young to be married yet, so you probably think life is going to be pretty sweet for a long time, and that I don't know, you'll be

the master of your domain. Now, I'm sure the older already married and maybe unmarried crowd is laughing at you as I am. All of us beaten down wise old married folks. We're having a good hearty chuckle at your expense, our best ah, Count Dracula laugh perhaps, Now, why do we do this, this mocking laugh of ours, you might ask, Well,

because we know better. We've been in the trenches dodging sniper fire and looking for grenades that were lobbed in our direction, and I don't know, just trying to keep our heads down and weather the old firefight. Now, some of you might argue that I'm being a bit too dramatic, and you'd probably be right, but I don't care. The thing about being married is that sometimes your spouse will get a little spicy, and not in a good way either.

They'll decide that today when you should be able to lay around and watch football, or maybe tinker with some of your old fish and tackle, or take a goddamn nap, because you're forty two and you're tired, and you should be able to partake in an afternoon siesta if you so desire. They'll decide that today you have some chores

to do. You'll be volunteered for cleanup of the gutters or some other crappy homeowner task you should have already done, but you spent too much time in a tree standard maybe following the labs around while trying to shoot a limited roosters. In this situation, you are done for. The crosshairs have not only settled on your forehead, but the sniper has slowed her breathing down and started squeezing the old trigger puff right into your stupid head. Goes another

honeydew list bullet. That's a bummer. But there's an almost scarier time in marriage. That's when the spiciness sounds like it's coming on, but it isn't quite there. Kind of like when you're standing on a beach of a I don't know, some island somewhere and all the water sucks away and you go, I think I've heard about this before, and you realize there's potentially a tsunami coming. It's that time where you know one wrong move and suddenly you're getting the ladder out of the garage to go scoop

leaf slop out of the gutters. This is tiptoe through the old living room tulips time, my friends, and if you have kids, they'll also learn pretty quickly to recognize this danger zone. The key here is discretion, subtlety, subterfuge, submarines. If you can find one to take you on an underwater escape, you have to choose every move wisely. You have to look busy and look productive without actually being either.

You get bonus points and often overlooked. If that business involves putting your little allies to pretend work too, everyone must be careful not to tip their hand. It's not a dance as old as time, but I'll bet we've been doing some version of it ever since we left one too many clubs out in the corner of our cave, and our hairy but lovely Neanderthal wives grunted and grunted at us until we organized them in the corner. Do you know what this has to do with late season

deer hunting? A lot? Take the moment when your lovely spouse is at peak spiciness. I mean, I don't like ghost pep per level spiciness. It's too late for you. You have to accept your fate and get to work.

That's like ignoring how crunchy the snow is, or that the wind is blowing right into the main bedding area and walking into hanging hunt without thinking for one second about how much noise you'll make, or how visible you are, or how you keep clanking every piece of metal you can on different pieces of metal until it sounds like a high school shop class out there in the woods. Instead of going bowl in the china shop here, you

should consider it red zone time. How are you going to sneak in and seal the deal when you know the deer are prone to peak spiciness at any hint that some camel clad asshole is out there trying to kill them subtly sneakiness ninja moves. You have to keep your presence to an absolute minimum when you're dealing with late season deer. How do you do that for starters? I actually think the late season might be the best time to run trail cameras aside from the early season.

If you want to know who is walking by without having to be there to see them the it's kind of your moment. I'd also say don't be afraid to hide your cameras this time of year. I hunt some places where deer never ever, ever, ever look at cameras, and other places where they not only almost always look at them, but often obviously spook from them. To keep your felt presence, even lower cell crammers are a pretty

sweet option for this time of year. Now. You can hide your cameras by blending them in with some sticks or maybe a few pine boughs or red oak limbs, or you can hang them high and point them down. That's my go to strategy, but I also think this keeps some of the deer from getting photographed. Keep this in mind if you go this route, because it's likely that your cameras are missing some deer, especially if you're

mounting them high. Now, the next step in this whole subtle late season hunter thing is to accept that you can only control your pressure. Maybe you have a spot to yourself, then great things are gonna be pretty easy for you. A few hunt public land or permission based ground that you have to share, You're gonna have to forget what the other people might be doing and focus on your own hunting. Now, this is tough, but it is what it is. Now. It does require surgical timing

for your hunts and an eye towards resting spots. I know this. It's really tough because for most of us, we just have to hunt when we can. I also know that I've bitched a lot about the advice of resting spots because it mostly comes from people who have primo ground and kind of a special hunting situation. I mean, how often have you watched some unfortunate hundred and seventy in or walk into a food plot on the Outdoor Channel after the host said or whispered into the camera

that they have it on this plot all season. You don't have that, but you also have the chance to be a better hunter for it. Those folks won't get any better despite having a wall full of booners, So I don't know, take some solace in that, I guess us anyway, As much as I hate to be a hypocrite, the idea of resting spots and only hunting them when the conditions line up is something I hate for every part of the season, but the last couple of weeks

that's when I stop hating it. Now. I've said this a lot because I've seen in action my whole life. But white tails now in most places are as intolerant of our mistakes as they will be at any point. Now. I know we say stuff like that all the time, especially when it comes to mature bucks, but I don't actually believe that mature bucks are that special compared to

the rest of the deer. Right now, I don't think that mature bucks are nearly as cagy as we like to say, and I don't think they behave like a different species, which is something I've heard from a lot of outdoor communicators. This often comes from people who have a knack and the opportunity to keep bucks dumb all

through their lives until they choose to kill them. But who wants to say I hacked nature and made what could be a crafty animal into the equivalent of a lobotomized moron type of deer, so I can kill it easily and show the world how skilled by them. In a way, those high fence without defence deer prove my point. If you leave them alone, they'll get easier to kill. This goes for five years of their life and five

days in the late season. Now, even though even those bucks you know that aren't on primo ground, I just think they're mostly rare and they live a selfish life where they look out for numero uno. So we tend to think of them as cagier than everyone else. But that's a mind trick we play on ourselves instead of factoring in their general rarity. I think those deer have mostly witnessed how the general hunting public tends on them,

and they've altered their lives to avoid our patterns. I think it's pretty simple example, a prey animal, you know, just reacting over and over to a specific type of predatory behavior until beneficial habits become ensconce in their being. And then I think when you take that in a deer that's of a caliber that there might only be one or two in a section, or one or two on the property, and it can seem like they are

pretty special at avoiding us. I also think that when it comes to all dear in the herd, they just tend to be less tolerant of our presence the later it goes into the season. But this is an ebb and flow thing which can work to your advantage. If you can leave them alone for a few days or a week in a specific spot, they're more likely to give you a chance than if you hunt them every day, because the more they hear, see, and smell us, the more they react. The less they hear, see and smell us,

the less they react. So your job is to keep the times when they see here smell you to a minimum. But here's the thing. These rules don't apply to just mature bucks. I'll give you a real world example. I have permission to hunt late season doughs on a farm by my house that is a sad example of urban sprawl. What was four thirty acres a few years ago is now just over a hundred. The rest of the land is full of mc mansion's that will cost you seven fifty k just for a big house on a tiny lot.

This property still holds dear the remaining part of the property anyway, But the landowner and his family and his buddies big time shotgun hunters. Someone hunts that farm every day of the shotgun season, and often lots of people hunted. And that season here where I live is almost the entire month of November this year, when they wrapped up. It was my turn to go out there with a muzzleloader. Do you know how nice it felt to pick up a scoped gun after like eight years of only bow hunting.

I honestly felt like I was going grocery shopping. I felt bad that it was going to be so easy. Well, deer hunt likes to remind us that we often don't understand reality until it's kicking us right in our asses. With fresh snow and a weapon that I can really reach out and touch them, I headed out to sit on a beautiful, icy cold afternoon after resting that property for I guess about six days, since the gun season

had ended that night. I mostly watched turkeys, which will be real trouble this spring, but we're not the reason I was out there now. I also saw a few deer, but nothing anywhere near the best cover. The cover you know, with all the box blinds and ladder stands in it that have witnessed a revolving cast, a blaze, orange clad characters over the last four weeks throughout all parts of

the rut. When I drove out that first night, the bean field on the farm was covered, and I mean covered in dear they were all feeding right next to rush our traffic. It's so I figured i'd cut them off the next night by going in really sneaky like into an area that I figured they just had to be staging to get to where they were when I saw them, But they weren't. As soon as I settled in that next night, I could see six of them across the highway on a property that might as well

have been on the moon. The only deer I saw that night was at eight pointer that stood up out of a little cedar thicket and walked right past me. I even texted the landowner that there was a good one coming to see if maybe he'd feel a little charity towards the guy who guides all of his kids on the farm to turkeys and is the primary supplier of slightly used bows to his family members. But his

response was a hard no, okay. I also realized that night that the deer I was hunting, after one night of my pressure, were I was pretty sneaky, had reverted back to a less quality property across the road, where not coincidentally, no one can hunt them. But with nothing to lose and the muzzle over season coming to a close. I went back out there the next night, deeper into the timber to see if I could pick up a

straggler that wasn't on the main herd program. While out there, the landowner texted me that if a scrapper buck came by, I could shoot it. Now. That might not seem like a big deal in this podcast and too many of you find listeners, but it made me really really happy. I was hunting hungry on a burned out property in

single digit temperatures in Minnesota. And what made me even way happier was that the only deer that came out that night to wind his way through the cat tails was a three pointer that might break twenty inches if I give him a bonus half a foot or so.

That book, a year and a half old, obviously was one of the few deer that didn't get the pressure memo, and he made a bad mistake of walking by the only outdoor writer in the industry who has a soft spot in his heart for shooting sports and a never ending desire to see the white packages with shitty handwriting pile up in his freezer. The takeaway from this story, because I'm probably not making it all that clear, is that even careful pressure can be too much pressure. In

the late season. If you're not paying attention to the details, and I mean all of the details, you have a great opportunity to push the deer out of most of your hunting area or send them back to their old nocturnal ways. Now a good way to look at this is to be honest about the deer you're seeing and what dear you think are around. What what's showing up on your camera when you go hunt. Are you seeing anything or is it totally dead? Is the sign still there?

What's going on right now? Not? What should they be doing? What are they doing now? If you're not seeing them, they know you're there. Most likely they know where you park, they know how you walk in, and they know where you sit. This means you have to get tricky with your presence when you do finally hunt. You know, take a few days off, lull them into a false sense security,

but then do something different. Park in a different spot, if you can walk in from the north instead of the south, if you can take some calculated risks, depite despite what you think you know, because if the deer aren't showing then it doesn't matter your best laid plans are burned. It's time to show them something they haven't seen before, and please pay attention. I mean, really pay attention.

I don't know how many of my late season deer kills have come from seeing something, some glimpse of brown hide in the timber or the swamps, and then sneaking in later at a different time for a closer look. Now, of course, this is also the time when a lot of us should just be hunting deer. I recently accorded a Wired Hunt episode with Alex Gilstrom, and this came up. Actually, it always does when I talked to Alex, for a

simple reason. It's crucial. If you can't find daylight movers of any variety, you sure as hell won't kill a mature uck. Now, a lot of hunters have a problem with this in a late season because they can find daylight movers in the other parts of the season. But this isn't the early season with those barely hunted deer on their soybean field pattern. It's not those stages in October they are looking for acorns in a good place to make a scrape back in the timber. It's not

the rut and all the goodness that that brings. It's the last gasp part of the season with cold weather that amplifies sound, a diminished deer herd due to so much hunting, and that post apocalyptic feel of the whole thing where the four legged survivors duck and move and make decisions based solely on not wanting to be anywhere

near us. The most basic tenant of finding success right now, whether that is measured in a mature dough for the freezer, an unlucky sport who thinks he's got the whole place to himself, or a hundred seventy buck with double drop times, is to not let them know you're in the woods with them. No, this is a good move all season, but an absolute necessity now. Without that veil of secrecy, you're going to have a hell of a time with those buzzer beat or deer. So keep hunting, but tread lightly,

my friends. There's still time, but it's dwindling away right now. And be sure to tune in next week because I'm going to do kind of a seasonal recap and talk about how to analyze your past season and what to do if you're like me and you feel like it was kind of a clunker type of hot garbage season. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has

been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast. As always, thank you so much for listening, and if you want more white tail wisdom, check out the metator dot com slash wired and visit our Wired Hunt YouTube feed to watch how to videos. Until you're sick to death is seeing Mark and I spouting off about how to kill the big ones.