Ep. 646: Foundations - Uncovering Deer Secrets During Spring Turkey Hunts

Today I'm talking about turkey hunting and how often something happens during turkey season that can increase your dear knowledge. You don't really have to listen to too many of these podcast episodes before you learn that I'm I don't know, sort of like an equal opportunity woodsman. I love small game hunting, Western hunting, upland hunting, duck hunting, and of

course turkey hunting. In addition to the dear thing. Being in the fields and in the woods and hell, even on the water is always worth it and every activity seems to feed the other activities. Now I've talked about this a few times over the course of this podcast, but today I really want to break down turkey hunting

and the deer sightings that go with us. And like I know, I've touched on this before, but I'm gonna take a deep dive here because I think the deer that you watch and even spoot when you're turkey hunting can tell you a lot about what the deer will do in the fall and give you an advantage when you go from April or May out to September, October,

and November. Two years ago, my buddy Adam and I sat next to a giant oak tree, overlooking a clover plot on a property he had just bought in southwestern Wisconsin. He faced one way, I faced another, and together we listened to some distant gobbles. It really wasn't an ideal May morning for but it wasn't bad. We took turns calling and scratching away in the leaf litter until I looked up and not twenty yards away stood a deer. Through the budding foliage. I could see a doe staring

straight at me. This happens a lot during turkey season, and it almost always sucks. I don't know what deer have against decoys or leafy suited hunters sitting statues still next to a tree, but they don't like it. In fact, they hate it so much so that they almost always give you a couple of two steps stomps before snorting their stupid faces off and running away. Other deer key

in on this, but so do the turkeys. And nothing will pull a gobbler out of strut faster than a deer that is turning inside out over a perceived threat. It's kind of just game over when that happens, at least for an hour or two. And that's what I was thinking about as this dough stared holes in me, and then I noticed the deer behind her. They rarely travel alone in the spring, so this didn't surprise me at all. My dominant thought then was please just go

away quietly, Please just go away quietly. I was like the person hiding in a closet in a horror movie while the killer roam the hallway. Well, you know, not that dramatic, but you get my drift. She didn't go away quietly, though. She took off down the trail, ran straight across the food plot, and entered the woods on the far side with five other doughs and falls on her tail. I didn't think a thing of that encounter other than it probably messed up our turkey hunting, which

wasn't actually true. We found up pretty soon after because it wasn't long, and we called in a trio of Jake's two of which made a huge mistake by stopping in front of me at like twenty yards. But fast forward six months and I was sitting in that same food plot, but in a ground blind on a different wood edge. I had a cameraman next to me, and it was the fifth day of a seven day shoot

for our first season of one week in November. Not only did I have a solid eight pointer come out right next to the blind and play a perfect game of stopping twice where we couldn't get him on camera, and when he finally did give me a shot, my brain had melted into a puddle of primordial ooze, which was totally incapable of complex calculations and tasks like oh, I don't know, holding a little green sight pin on the body of a nice eight pointer and then hitting

the release like I've done four million times in my life. Anyway, after that whiff, we settled in to watch the only deer that didn't leave the plot, a little button buck who was too dumb for his own good. As camera light faded and I was told we were no longer able to film. Several dos charged out of the woods on the exact trail. I had watched the doz walk during Turkey season, and do you know who followed them out one of the biggest bucks I've ever seen while

hunting on the exact same trail. He even got to thirty eight yards imposed broadside. And let me tell you what. If I didn't have a job to do that required footage of deer, there would have been arrows flying out of that blind in his general direction because there was still legal shooting light and it was wide open between me and him. But instead I watched him chase dose

right out of my life. Now, last season, my buddy was set up on that food plot and he watched even more deer walk that trail across the plot from both directions. Now I know you're thinking, okay, so if you guys had scouted that trail, you would have known it was a deer highway. But the thing is, in that area southwest Wisconsin, there are deer highways everywhere. That specific trail doesn't look any more worn down than the hundreds of other trails on his property. They all look good.

And when they all look good, they all kind of carry equal weight as far as scouting is concerned, at least till you get some cameras on them. Now, I've had several experiences in multiple states. Take the goat of deer hunting opportunities. Iowa. I'm slightly obsessed with some public land and a part of the state I'm not going to talk about on this podcast, but suffice it to say it's just good deer in Turkey Ground, and even though there is a decent amount of hunting pressure there,

I just love it. The first time I hunted it, I was in high school and it was a random trip down there. I was a one off Turkey hunt with a buddy of mine and I didn't return until like twenty nineteen again to Turkey hunt. What I saw brought back a lot of memories and it made my decision up that I was going to apply for a deer tag there as soon as I thought I could draw.

But before that, I turkey hunted, and during those Turkey hunts a couple of sits in particular, I saw deer, I saw spring deer cross a meadow to go bed, and when I drew a deer tag, I hunted that meadow and shot and unfortunately lost the biggest of my life on public land. Where I ended up actually killing a deer was several miles down the road on a different chunk, but not on an unfamiliar parcel. I had turkey hunted that too, and had watched deer walk along

a very specific part of a river bottom. Spring deer movement often equals fall deer movement, my friends, hell probably equal summer and winter movement as well, at least in many places. When you're sitting out there at first light and listening for some gobbles, don't just passively take note of deer that you see. Watch them, watch them through your binos. Watch exactly what trails they take, Watch exactly where they go over, through or under barbed wire fences,

Watch how they leave the neighbor's field. This goes for land that you actually deer hunt and land that you don't. Now it's obviously more valuable if you're watching a chef bucket his buddies walk across the corn stubble to enter a wood lot that you absolutely can a deer hunt, but seeing deer in general is worthwhile. Accumulated hours of watching wild deer interact with their environment is one of

the best ways to level up your skills in general. Specifically, it's even better to watch a deer do something on a property that you'll be summer scouting and eventually hunting during the fall. This goes for private ground as well as public and even public ground, you might not want a deer hunt because you have access to something better or you think is better. This is one of the things that has really surprised me over the years, and was honestly one of the things that convinced me to

start hunting deer on public land pretty hard. I have no hang ups at all about hunting public land turkeys, just like hunting upland birds on public land. I've been to enough states, walked enough properties to believe that there are so many good opportunities out there for gobblers or pheasants or grouse and hell even quail. And even when I was younger and thought that public land was always second to private, no questions about it, thank you very much.

I still hunted other critters on public land, and I found shed antlers, and I found rubs and scrapes, and I watched deer from Missouri to Minnesota to Wisconsin to the Dakotas, to Nebraska, down to Oklahoma and quite a few other states. Over and over, I'd chased turkeys and

I'd find more deer than I expected. That was a benefit personally, because those experiences rewired my brain at least a little bit to think about deer hunting differently, especially deer hunting on pressured ground, of which it could be public or it could be private. I had a lot of hang ups, but they didn't come from action will experience of being out there. They came from hearing and believing a lot of the bullshit I still hear to this day about hunting opportunities and how so many of

them aren't worth it for whatever reason. The thing is, this is stuff you can go verify for yourself, and it's pretty easy to do that on a low pressure run and gun turkey hunt. You have to look for the deer sign and the deer, of course, but the bigger thing is just to pay attention to what the white tails are showing you. Seeing a lot of them it's just a good confidence booster, but so as seeing only a handful, but a handful of them doing something valuable.

This goes for anywhere you hunt and isn't limited to watching white tails that are totally unaware of your presence and are making their way across the landscape totally unbothered. Spring also offers an advantage that we rarely get during other parts of this season, the opportunity to see deer actually lay down in bed or jump from their beds

at super close range and take off. Both of these things have happened to me during the last few years of turkey hunting, and both have provided some pretty valuable intel. I've watched more open country dear bed farther west while working Miriam's turkeys, and it's always fascinating, you know. And while there are bed hunting specialists out there and plenty of disciples following their teachings, the truth is it's pretty uncommon to actually observe a deer in its bed. Now

we find beds. We make a lot of assumptions about betting areas and the behavior connected to betting, but rarely do we actually get to witness them while they are betted. I look at this kind of like listening to deer actually makes some kind of vocalization or I don't know, watching two bucks spar or fight. We know these behaviors happen all the time, but how often do you actually get to see them in person? For most of us,

it's not very often. But I'll tell you what. If you're into calling deer with a grunt tube or a set of rattling antlers, watching deer actually grunt, or witnessing two bucks really go at, it is an absolute learning experience. It's a game changer for becoming a better hunter watching their behavior when they bed and then I don't get up to reposition and bet again, and then get up to munch and brows and then bet again, and then get up to stare down in the drainage for fifteen

minutes without moving. It's a game changer. Two Or sneaking up a bluff side while trying not to scare any turkeys and then looking up ahead to see a buck stand up out of his bed that is situated oh so perfectly on a knob halfway down a ridge. That's another game changer. When that happens, you need to ask yourself, what's the wind doing right here? What was his advance nage in this spot at this moment? Because you know what,

he'll do that again and again all year long. If the conditions favor his survival, he'll do it in the fall when you can hunt him. And if you know a specific knob that is covered in prickly ash and perfect for betting during a south or west wind, then you know an awful lot about what a buck could do during certain conditions that you might face when you're hunting in the fall. All of that can be gleaned from a twenty second throwaway encounter during a turkey hunt.

You might also answer questions you've always asked yourself about. Dear, take a private land situation where you have five stands. Every season, you know roughly where and when to hunt. You say that's good enough. You kind of follow the same strategy from season to season, and some years it works, some years it doesn't. But you have questions like why

isn't a certain stand any good after mid October? Or why do you always catch a glimpse of deer at last light coming out of the swamp at a certain spot, or crossing the river on a deeper crossing when there are several shallow water crossings that would be easier. Time on stand leads to questions, just like trail camera usage,

leads to questions and sometimes answers. But we are creatures of habit and we don't often go out of our way to address what we think our anomalies in dear behavior, because then we'd have to question what we think we know, and that's scary country there, So it's easier just to be dismissive about observations that don't fit into our expectations.

When you turkey hunt far far away from the actual deer season, you might put your back to a tree in the heart of your best deer bedding area, a place you wouldn't dream of setting foot in until November fifth, during the actual deer season. What do you see, dear do then when you're in there? Or maybe you'll work your way along a sparse tree line, hoping to call in a long beard who decided to go roaming for the lunch shift, or who decided to show his stuff

in its drunting zone in a high visibility spot. What if while you're sitting there staring at your decoys, you see some dear ghosts their way through forty yards behind you. You might never deer hunt the spot because there aren't any stand trees there and the cover is thin, and because you know that, you're not going to really scout it, either you don't go in there and look for sheds or look for a concentration of rubs. It might signal you're missing something. Yet in April you see deer doing

what you don't think they should do. What's the best reaction here? If you think it's to write that off as inconsequential randomness, I have bad news for you. That's what we like to do with information that doesn't reinforce our biases. But the truth is it's not a random They're there for a reason. And if you think that reason is tied to something important in the spring that won't be important in the fall, you may be right. Maybe some food source popped up and it means nothing

to a fall hunt. Or maybe you just had your blinders on during deer season and now they've shown you something that you should probably believe instead of doubt. This kind of thing happens to me a lot when I'm turkey hunting, and not all of my encounters lead to filling deer tags in the fall, But have really started to believe what the deer in April and may tell

me their moments are truthful if that makes sense. If they cross a field a certain way or travel a soft edge in the big woods in a specific direction, there aren't any lies there, and there probably is no randomness to it. It's most likely an answer to a question you haven't even thought to ask. That's the beauty of being in the woods and taking a long look around.

Whether you're the running gun type who has to chase every gobble and can't sit still for more than ten minutes, or you'd rather open a good book with your bow leaned up against the wall you're blind and ride out a monotonous twelve hours sit in a pre scouted spot. The deer during turkey season they just might give you something real to work with, no matter how your turkey hunt.

So again, while you're out there yelping your happy ass off in the hopes of earning another set of spurs to hang from your rearview mirror or a whole plate full of turkey nuggets, keep your eyes open for the deer, and when you do see them, watch them. Get those binos up to your eyes and pay attention to what they do, whether they spook or walk casually through the woods to bed down. And view or twenty of them all leave a cut cornfield single file that head down

to the river bottom for the morning. Take note, and really really take note if those deer happen to be bucks, which will be pretty obvious through your optics, and should be traveling in a little bachelor group, because what bucks do during the spring indicates travel and behavior that they feel safe engaging in. They'll do some of that behavior again in the fall if they feel those safety advantages

are still there. This is sort of the opposite of deer scouting with a mission kind of thing that I just talked about, but it can be even almost more valuable. Kind of like when you're fishing for bass at noon on a sunny day and you happen to catch a twenty seven inch walleye and five feet of water on a swimming jig. Could be a total fluke, but probably isn't. There's probably a here today, gone to moral food source there that is drawing in all kinds of big toothy predators,

and it'll probably happen again tomorrow or next year. It's just like that with deer. Right now, That's all I have for you this week. Good luck with the gobblers. Be sure to tune in next week when I plan to talk about the most underrated aspect of deer knowledge, which is brows. I know it sounds boring, but I'm gonna try to make it not boring. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which has brought to

you by First Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and as I always, thank you so much for listening, we really appreciate it. Here at meat Eater, if you want more deer hunting advice, head on over to the meat eater dot com slash wired and you can check out a ton of hunting articles by Mark Kenyon, Alex Skills, Strom Beomartonic, Andy May Myself, Dylan Tramp, whole bunch of white tail killers. Head on over there check it out.