Ep. 688: Foundations - Go Fly a Kite!

get as much love as I don't know. Three hot new tactics for hunting the rud or how to east scout whatever. Well. Wind is one of those elements of any hunt. And let me tell you this, if you don't understand how moving air affects your hunts, you're gonna have a lot of bad hunts. You are out of luck, partner. This goes for a lot of different pursuits, but it's so important to deer hunting, elk hunting, bear hunting, probably

some other kinds of hunting I'm forgetting. When I was in high school, a buddy and I drove six hours north to the edge of the Boundary waters to stay with my aunt and uncle while we fished our hearts out. Those Ely area lakes were like heaven to us, partially because the undeveloped shorelines and unpressured fish, and partially because the folks who did spend a lot of time on

the water up there always fished hungry. They targeted walleyes and mostly crappies throughout the summer, and would often spear northerns in the winter. The pressure was on the good eating fish, so the smallies in the large mouth up there were largely ignored by the locals, which made it

so much fun. Well, my buddy, who will call Hawk because that's what we call him, he and I drove up there to fish for a few days, and like we did in that time of our life and for way too many years afterwards, we brought a bottle of vodka with us. Right before my aunt and uncle went to sleep. My aunt casually said that we should go outside and check out the northern lights, being from a place where you don't see them often hardly. Ever, we did just that with screwdrivers in our cup. That's vodka

and orange juice and not some weird tool fetish. Hawk and I went outside and craned our next toward the heavens. It was unbelievable. If you've ever seen real northern lights, you know what I mean. We were in awe and as we chipped away at that bottle of vodka, we just stared at the shimmering green lights in the sky.

The next morning, as we bounced across the waves of Bear Island Lake, Hawk turned awful pale, and then lost his breakfast in the drink, and then very urgently asked me to bring him to shore so he wouldn't shit his pants. Now, I've seen a few people hop urgently out of a boat when nature called, but that one was the most urgent, the most athletic, and the most shameless, considering the boat was maybe three feet away when he

dropped trow and cut loose. While I can't explain really how dumb we were, then I can now explain kind of how northern lights work. You see, the Sun is an enormous ball of fuel that is really, really hot. You guys probably knew that part, but did you know that the Sun is in a constant state of throwing off solar wind, which carries charge particles at nearly five hundred miles per second, not miles per hour per second.

That wind and all the charge particles it's made of, shoot across the cosmos, and if you're unlucky enough to be on the wrong planet, it'll strip away the atmosphere completely. This is something that happened on Mars. What keeps it from happening to us is the magnetic field that surrounds the Earth. Thanks to all of that molten iron rolling around in the core of our planet. When solar winds hit that invisible shield, they bounce and scatter around it.

If you're in an area with low light pollution and clear skies, you'll see that as northern lights pretty wild huh, well far below where that's happening. We hunt deer in areas with wind that doesn't blow quite as fast as solar winds, but still influences us in many many ways. As hunters. We know this intuitively, but it helps to understand what wind is before we get into why. It's important to understand as hunters, So for starters, wind is

the result of different temperatures of air meeting. This is most easily understood with thermals, but in my experience a lot of hunters don't really understand thermals. Wind is just the replacement of one temperature of molecules with another. Teen p butture molecules. How fast are they moving? Generally, as air gets warmer, it gets less dense than it rises. This creates a space for cooler air to move in,

and well, there you have it. This is why with thermals the scent moves uphill in the morning and downhill in the evening, or why when you're elk hunting, which basically involves thermals on steroids, the wind at times will absolutely rush uphill or downhill, depending on whether you're there in the morning or the evening, or whether the sun is out or not, whether it's early September or late November, or often unfortunately, whether you have an elk coming in

or not. You might think, well, I hunt the big woods and as flat as a pancake and harder to hunt than those dumb deer that just walk into every cornfield, and so I don't deal with thermals, and the wind just blows straight across the landscape every day. Hold on there, partner, you might be missing something. There's another kind of thermal that you might want to consider. Although to be honest, I don't know if it's actually called a thermal or not.

I'm going to call it that because it makes sense to me and it's my podcast. If you're that big woods hunter, ask yourself, do you hunt around swamps or reservoirs, rivers, ponds, some kind of standing water, some kind of body water? Because the air above land tends to heat up faster than the air above water. You know what that means. Yep, the air is going to move and create wind. But wait, there's more. The air above the water not only heats up slower in the morning, but it cools off faster

than the air over the land in the evening. So you once again have a situation where your scent might be getting pulled somewhere by the ever present temperature differential in the air around you. Here's what I know about this stuff, at least when it comes to thermals. The bigger,

the temperature difference, the faster the thermals will move. We often talk about thermals as if they are a constant in bluff country in the mountains, and while they probably are to some extent in elk Habitat for white tails, they aren't exactly a sure thing. If it's twenty seven degrees before first light and supposed to reach seventy at noon, you're going to see a rapid change in temperature that

is going to create thermals. If it's twenty seven degrees before first light, it's only in the claw its way up to thirty one, you won't see much for thermals. This is worth understanding because it's also the driving force and why so many people won't hunt in valleys or in bottoms they reckon wrongly. I might add that the wind will always be swirling in the odds of not

getting busted or zero, so it's not worth hunting. But calm conditions exist, Reliable winds exist even in broken, weird terrain. Experience in these spots is the key to understanding when to hunt and when to stay out. Staying out without hunting and the experience what the wind actually does is a shortcut and not a smart one. Wind is unreliable sometimes, but understanding how it works is important. It flows over the land kind of like water. It takes easy routes

when it can. The best wind, in my experience, is wind that is blowing a decent amount, say ten to fifteen miles an hour, but sticking to a very predictable direction. That's the easiest wind to play for your setups, but also the easiest wind to predict deer movement around. This is the other part of wind that we don't really give a lot of love to how it influences deer movement,

since they trust their noses more than anything. A deer are heavily motivated to travel certain directions and at certain times in relation to how strong the wind is blowing and in what direction it's blowing. They enter fields on specific trails just because of how the wind is blowing. They bet according to the wind direction and will reposition

if the wind changes direction. They mostly, and I say that with an asterisk, walk into the wind or crosswise with it if it's possible, although that's far from written in stone. They often approach decoys and calling sequences according to wind direction. If they see something they don't like, or here's something they don't like, they'll head down wind to verify their suspicions. Bears do this a lot, too, and if you think you can fool a bear's nose, well,

you have more confidence in yourself than you should. Ditto with elk. Most of their movements are influenced by wind, even during the rut, when they have other reasons for going from one would lot to the next. I also believe, through lots of personal observation, that pressure deer rely more heavily on their noses and the wind than unpressured deer. Now I know that's not revelatory, but let me explain.

I've hunted Texas deer that were so dumb and so oblivious that they wouldn't run away when they winded me. They just didn't care. Most of us don't deal with those deer. We deal with deer that are far less forgiving. I've seen deer in other places get a whiff of me that left but didn't totally turn inside out. And I've seen deer that snorted five thousand times at the

mere hint of a whiff of a human. Where I hunt in northern Wisconsin, I see the wind play a major role in deer movement and how they position themselves to feed. Since the hunter numbers are high and the predator numbers are really high over there, the deer are just kind of neurotic. They don't take a lot of risks. That makes them really challenging and really frustrating to hunt.

The times I've had a chance to hunt them on a meadow or a hay field over there, I've watched how they leave the cover and either go out into the middle where they have a good field of view in every direction, or often they'll position themselves out far enough into the field where they can still check the cover while watching the rest of the field with their eyes. The harder the wind blows, the cagier they get, but also the more predictable it is. When they do come out.

They trust their noses to tell them what is in the woods that they can't see, and they give themselves an advantage by being far enough out there to get away as soon as they smell something fishy. How they travel out of the cover is related to wind oftentimes, but how they travel in cover is almost always influenced by the wind. This is why a really good funnel or pinch point is so beneficial to find. It forces them to give up their noses a lot of times,

which is something they will do. Elk will too, so will bears, but it has to be a very specific situation. For white tails, you can find these spots where they're just going to walk even though the wind isn't going to give them an edge and will actually take away their best predator detecting sense. The folks who figure out how to identify these spots and then the conditions when they should hunt these spots to reap the real wind benefits are the hunters who kill more big bucks than

the rest of us. Trust me on that. So how do you figure out how they use the wind in certain spots, and then how you can use use that wind to hide your presence and position big bucks so you can shoot them. Well, you can look at the terrain first. Ridge tops are great for this because you have built in locations to hang stands where your scent will blow out over a big valley of nothingness. But

it's not so simple. If the wind is blowing across the top of a ridge perpendicular to the ridge, we will say then playing it is as simple as getting on the downwind side. But if it's a knife ridge, they might not want to walk up and down it if the wind is blowing across it, because they can't smell what's ahead of them. So you'd need a wind that blows down the ridge lengthwise. But then your scent is also blowing down to where the deer will be

coming from or where they're going. It's quite the dilemma. Now, imagine a little juke in the ridge somewhere, or a bunch of dead falls to concentrate travel on one side. You might be able to set up off of that ridge with your scent blowing straight down it, or real close to straight down it, but not quite. It might be enough of the right direction to get the bucks to walk it and trust their nose, but it's just off by a few degrees, giving them a disadvantage, and

you a slight margin of an advantage. Now he thinks he's safe to walk it, and that is when you kill him. There are situations like this in the woods all over waiting for you to find them. There are situations like this in the mountains too, that you might find if you haunt elk, if you bait bears, You can look for a situation like this where you put water or some kind of wet swamp to your back and set up with a bait just into the higher ground.

Even if the approaching bruins want to get down wind, they might not do it because they don't want to get their feet too wet or go swimming. There are a lot of ways to play the wind that go far beyond simply hunting a spot in such a way that you think the wind won't get you busted. That's part of it, and believe me, it's no small part, but a bigger part is learning how animals bed and feed and travel in relation to the wind. Because when you start thinking about that, start to be able to

see into the future a little bit. You see, you have to think about the wind as a constant in your world as a hunter. Then once you do, you have to think about it as a constant in the deer's life, or an elks or a pheasant for that matter, anything.

It's going to have an effect on them every day because they sure as hell think about the wind and whether it's going to carry sent to them from a wallow in the meadow, or whether it's going to make it impossible to spot hawks and other aerial preudters that might be looking for a rooster snack. It's an ever present element of all hunts, and it goes so far beyond just some invisible thing that carries are sent to

their noses or not. It's the number one way in which some of these critters survive to see another day because it's such an advantage to them. But every advantage is also some sort of weakness, and that is that if you can give them too much confidence in their safety, you can beat them. Recognizing those situations is the key to figuring out season after season spots that will always

produce sightings and encounters. So think about the wind not just as a reason to sit one stand that's set up for the northwest or west or south or whatever, but as something that controls to some extent, you know, oftentimes small, but sometimes larger, the overall movements of the animals you hunt. Once you get it figured out, you not only have more educated guesses on where to sit, but you can figure out where the deer or elk or whatever should be coming from because they will bet

or feed in certain locations based on the wind. This means that the buck that entered soybeans from a specific trail while the wind was out of the northwest today will probably do that very same thing the next time the wind is out of the northwest. Unless some other factors change. That small herd of public land elk you find heading up a certain drainage to bed on September tenth might do the same thing on the twelfth. Is

the wind is in the same direction. How bears approach bait sites, how bucks approach scrapes, how bulls approach what they think is a rival, bogling it head off in a bad ideal of challenge. It all depends on the wind. So think about it and think about what the wind is doing. When you see animals doing something, Which direction was it blowing? When you watch that big woods buck cross the tiny stream and enter the clear cut, how hard was it blowing? Is there a reason to believe

there were some thermals that play where he crossed? Think about this when you see bucks and does and all kinds of animals moving around naturally, All of it, or quite a bit of it anyway, has a little bit to do with the wind. And lastly, think about coming back next week for more hunting wisdom, because I plan to talk about how to figure out dear by accident, but sort of on purpose, whether you hunt the big

woods or the western plains or wherever. Now, I know that doesn't make any sense at all, so just give it a listen and I'll clear the whole thing up. That's it for this week. I'm Old Antonio and this has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for listening for supporting us here at meat Eat. All of us really appreciate it, so

thank you, thank you for that. If you want some more white tail content, you want to listen to Clay's podcast or the Elements podcast, or you want to check out some of our series in our videos some articles, go to the meeteater dot com. You'll find all that stuff. And if you have a hanker and to pick up some new first light gear maybe a Phelps Dear Call or whatever, you can also find that there as well at our met Eater's store. Again, thanks for your support. See you next week.