Ep. 697: Foundations - The August-Tober Lull

some resolute opinions on the topic. If you take Mark Kenyan, for example, he's all in on the idea of the October lull. This is probably because he doesn't have very much experience hunting white tails and therefore just doesn't really understand what's going on out there. Other hunters, such as myself, don't buy it. I don't think the lull is universal across deer populations, and I don't think we should treat

it as such. And now I'm going to tell you why people who visit my house and who aren't real familiar with the suburbs or what the suburbs can be, are often surprised at what they see. We have a hell of a lot more woods around than they expect, and there are a lot more critters that come with it.

There are hobby farms and real farms around too. You know, not every neighborhood is cookie cutter McMansions with postage stamp yards and houses that could hold multi generational families with ease instead of the typical four person and a dog type family. I went through this very same thing the first time I went to New York, the state, not the city. In my uneducated mind, I didn't really know what to expect. But what I didn't expect was a lot of woods and a ton of deer running around

in people's yards. Anyway, one of the smaller hobby farms that is in our neighborhood is kind of one of those places that embraces the farm culture around a bunch of people who mostly couldn't tell the difference between a dairy cow and a donkey. At that little farm, they sell pumpkins around Halloween, hay and strall summer long, and I can't prove this, but it looks like they're setting

up some kind of petting zoo. They also have a dog that is the most farm dog looking dog I've ever seen, complete with the floppiest ears in the business. And they also have several pens for various animals that butt up nearly to the road. The huge and not so huge pigs, you know, one random cow, and the goats that are there would be interesting enough for my daughters to want to ride their bikes by and take a look. But the real draw there is an adorable

little lady my girl's named Marshmallow. Now. I don't know if you've ever seen a baby goat in person, but if you have, you know why two eleven year old girls would ask their dad almost every night to ride bikes over in Marshmallow's direction so we can all ooh and ouder. And if I'm being honest, I kind of love goats, and I don't really know why. I think I like unpredictability in animals, so maybe that's it. Goats aren't really into parkore and will happily jump up on

other animals. They'll kick and spin and generally celebrate this behavior too, which for some reason I really appreciate. They also often have a hell of a lot of confidence. They'll headbut someone who isn't looking just for the sheer thrill and knocking the mass over apple cart. What's not to love about that free spirits those goats are. In fact, they might be my spirit animal, while Kenyan is I don't know, definitely like a sloth or a three legged cat,

maybe a flipperless seal. Perhaps. When we pedal our happy asses on over to look at Marshmallow with the hope in our hearts that she'll do something adorable, I tend to look for a few things. The first is that the route takes us past some apple trees in people's yards. I kind of just naturally check the daily progress and how many are still in the trees and how many are littered around on the ground. Then I look under

some oak trees. This isn't really hard to do, since many of them are often real big in our neighborhood, and they hang over the road in some spots. The amount of acorns crushed on the road gives me a good idea what's going on in the woods. And do you know what I saw throughout much of August and into early September thousands and thousands of pounds of acorns. And that's not an exaggeration either. Oak trees, of which there are almost ninety species in this country alone, engage

in a strategy called predator satiation. With their seed drop they reckon. If trees can reckon, I guess that the squirrels and turkeys and and chipmunks and assorted songbirds and deer are going to eat most of their potential offspring. That means they need a lot of nuts to hit the ground, so that even if a few escape the gullets of various woodland creatures, those few might just turn

into seedlings and eventually saplings. If those saplings make the cut for a few decades, they might litter acorns down on some other suburb dwellers who are looking at a different baby goat in the future. This strategy of dropping tons of nuts is not really any different from frogs producing hundreds of tadpoles or large mouthed bass producing hundreds of fry. The goal is the same. Most are gonna get eaten, but a few won't. It's a quantity over

quality thing. It's also, at least when it comes to oak trees, a great time for the deer to stop doing their usual stuff and to focus almost solely on a high value here today, gone tomorrow food source. When those acorns near my house were raining down, they were also doing so in southeastern Minnesota, where I hunt. They were also doing it in north central Wisconsin where I hunt. And you know what, all of my cameras went real

cold then, and so did my long range scouting. It was as if the deer were sucked off the landscape by UFOs and not returned for a few weeks. There was a very clear, very definitive lull in the back half of August and many of the places I hunt. But you know what, I didn't care, not really anyway, for a couple of reasons. The first is that the whole thing happened before I could hunt them, so it was mostly just an observation on my part and just a touch of a let down when I checked my cameras.

It was also a reminder that there will be another lull when the other acorns start dropping and the leaves start really falling, and the other hunters start looking a little deeper into the cover. This happens every year in many, many different parts of the country. You know what doesn't happen though, all the bucks suddenly going nocturnal and not

moving at all. It doesn't happen. Stop believing it. I don't care if your trail cameras go dead or if you can't buy a deer sighting on your favorite stand that overlooks the beanfield. The deer are out there, and if they stopped going somewhere or doing something, they are going somewhere else while doing something else. Acorns or other hard masts soft masts for that matter, can change deer

patterns literally overnight. So can the right cold front that is coupled with some wind, which has the tendency to really usher the changing leaves to the ground and leave the woods far more open than they just were. This is something that we as hunters inherently understand, but we often ignore. We say things like I have a destination food source here and a betting area there, and well that's the whole puzzle. But it's not a destination food

source unless food is severely limited in your region. Isn't going to be the same draw every day of the season. That's obvious, but we don't really think of it that way. There are so many reasons for them to not just blindly walk into the alfalfa or a corn a cruise the edge of a fresh clear cut. Our job as good whitetail hunters isn't to adopt beliefs that allow us to stop thinking, or worse, think that we know all

the answers. Our job is to ask questions about the here and now and maybe next week, and then try to answer them. Anything that you hear that allows you to close the book on deer behavior in an absolute way is not your friend. It's your sworn enemy, and you must vanquish him and then drink a celebratory libation from his skull. You don't have to go that far, but you should be careful and rethink your early October strategy.

Instead of assuming it's a lost cause, ask yourself what's going on that could cause the deer to shift their patterns. I'll give you an example that should be relatable. Have you ever hung a stand in July or August that you thought was just going to be perfect? For the rut. You know, you get up there in that August heat, sweaty, and you look around and you think, oh man, they're going to cruise that trail or cut up the hill right there or whatever, and they are never ever going

to see me until it's too late. And then you fast forward a couple of months and you finally decide the timing is right and the conditions are awful favorable for you to shoot a solid one sixty five or so in there, so you slip in and climb into that setup. Then you look around and it feels kind of like that hacky sitcom type scenario of being naked in front of your coworkers. All it takes is the leaves to fall down to change your game as a

hunter in a major, major way. Now the stand you thought that was rock solid is more of a liability, but you hunt it anyway. And guess what if your deer aren't raised on mama's milk and lead paint chips, they probably spot you, or some of them do. Anyway, you're just easier to see then than you were in August. The same goes for the deer. They are prey animals, and I have to imagine the dominant thought in their minds pretty much every day is don't get eaten by something,

don't get caught by something. That's it. The way they do this is by hiding well and trusting their senses and running fast when they need to. The hiding well part is their best defense in much of their life. And if you think they aren't aware that the woods are suddenly a hell of a lot more open than they were just a couple of weeks ago, then I have bad news for you. So they shift their patterns.

They adopt a new strategy for survival that involves mostly spending the daylight hours where the cover still gives them a solid advantage. They don't stop moving when the sun is out, they just do it in more places that make them feel safe. Now, what if you don't have any cameras in spots? What if your cameras are all out on the destination food sources. What if you don't hunt deep in the cover but instead post up on the edge of the woods where the views are so great, Well,

you're going to be all in on the lull. After all, the deer obviously aren't moving, and it's probably a good time to go golfing instead of wasting time in your best spots, which could ruin your rut chances. A good hunter, you think, gets the hell out of the woods now and comes back when it's closer to Halloween. So you and just about every other person out there does the exact same thing. The deer realize this and they move more.

After all, the two legged predator level has gone from bananas to tolerable, which gives them more confidence to move, although they mostly will do it in the cover, at least in my experience. So my question is this, do you ever make a real note of the times when you're scouting in the off season and just don't turn up much. I mean with your cameras and your in

person observation, not just walking around looking for sign. I'll bet if you paid more attention this past summer you would have noticed there were stretches of a couple weeks here or there where the card polls just didn't produce much, and the long range glassing was mostly an exercise and futility. Did you assume then that all the deer were nocturnal? Maybe, but you're probably wrong. Then it was probably tied far more closely to some type of food source that had

the deer all bunched up and using the same spots. Now, if you're the kind of hunter who doesn't adapt well to changing conditions, you might think that those situations are just a good time to get out and wait for easier hunting. But think of it this way. If you knew there was something out there concentrating deer activity and you could find it, wouldn't you want to know the what, where,

and why the whole thing. Wouldn't you want to take a perceived disadvantage, one that is almost universally believed by the hunting masses, and turn it into your personal advantage. I would I use the lull as a time to try to shoot a few doughs, which keeps me in the woods. I use it as a chance to start going really mobile and looking for fresh sign and doing

a lot observation sets. I know that on my private farms, and definitely on my public land hunts, that my competition isn't going to be as serious about hunting as they will be in a few weeks. That's a huge advantage to anyone willing to stay out there and hunt. And I mean that it's a huge, huge, advantage. I also know that, over the course of my hunting career, I've found deer on a hot acorn pattern randomly, and it has almost always produced some of my most exciting hunts.

There's something so fun about posting up near a white oak that is dropping ten in free goodness into the leaf litter, when you know eventually you'll hear the sound of deer approaching. It's also fun knowing that if you get into that situation, you might have visitors all hours of the day, or you might have a crazy hunt right after a strong wind knocks down a ton or so of groceries. The key to all this, and to really master the times when the deer seem to have vanished,

is to end season scout and to observe. There isn't a time during any season where I adopted an observation strategy more religiously than during the first two weeks of October. Because I might not know what tree is the tree, but I can set up on a ridge or an oak flat and figure it out pretty quickly. This is not the time to move a bunch of cameras around and cross your fingers, because by the time you get enough intel to work with the whole thing's going to

be over. You have to treat this time of year as something that can produce amazing hunts. But there is a shelf life to that. You might get a few days, you might get a few weeks, but where you find your best hunts in early to mid October isn't likely to last. So now, before I wrap this up, I want to drive this point home. I'm going to swing you back to August for a second. When my cameras went mostly dry and my glassing session started to get real boring, I didn't think there was an August lull.

I just thought, well, something's going on. There has to be a reason why the deer aren't where they were, and that reason was simple enough to understand. Those same rules apply to October. If the deer stop doing what you expect them to do, it's not because there's a switch that gets flipped and all the deer suddenly decide to go fully nocturnal for three weeks. It doesn't work that way, and I don't care how many white tail

experts say it. The deer is still going to bed somewhere and eat somewhere, and walk somewhere and they'll do stuff during shooting hours that will give you a chance to arrow them. You just need to understand that the woods are in a state of constant change, with early October being an especially transitional time frame. It just is there's a lot going on out there, and that means your early season program that you work so hard to set up might just be dead as the old dinosaurs.

Instead of accepting that as a good reason to wait for the pre rut, ask yourself where the deer likely went, what they are likely doing. Pay attention to your surroundings, and maybe you'll notice a ton of acorns smashed on the road, acorns that you don't remember being there just last week. Maybe you'll notice something else, like a high prevalence of combines in the field while you're commuting to work. Who knows. The truth is there and there's reasons for

these changes. It's out there. It's better to view this time of year as an opportunity to figure something out than an excuse to stay out of the woods. Go find them, go hunt them and do what so many hunters think you can't, and come back next week because I'm going to talk just all about white tails and their evolution and how cool they really are. It's just going to be a sciencey little breakdown of our favorite game animal. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson.

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