Ep. 703: Foundations - Dumbed Down Deer Hunting

habitat for swamp bunnies. Now, they might try to make it seem like more than it is, you know, when the same goes for bird hunters, although duck hunters might be the exception there. This probably happens because duck hunt and can actually be kind of complicated and hardcore duck hunters are like a different species of human, but the same ghosts for whitetail hunters, and the same rules apply you. Deer hunting can be complicated, but it really shouldn't be.

This is the lesson of the day. My friends, and I think you can develop a way of thinking that dumbs down deer behavior, and I think that'll make you better off every season. In a past life, I flirted with becoming a lawyer. I actually got three years down the higher education rabbit hole on that quest. Before being brutally honest with myself about my abilities in college and my future in that role. I switched gears to be a writer, which turned out pretty well, even though it

felt like almost as much of a gamble. The money would have been nice, but a lot of the other parts of that career path might not have been so much fun. One that would have bothered me a lot would have been having to communicate with legal lees. As a writer by trade, my job is to become more precise and direct with each sentence, and not to be like intentionally obtuse legal ease. As it's called. It's kind

of ridiculous. It's like a weird form of gatekeeping where those in the law club can decipher the gibberish while

the common folks can't come close to comprehending it. It's unnecessarily complicated and results in sentences like in the event that the appellate signs the waiver pursuance any claims against the third party, the co signer shall not heed the exemplary consequences without the proper damages being attributed to the defendant, who to this point has been unnamed, as a countermeasure to the incidental yet punitive sorcery related to the actions

heretoforece renamed in the deposition labeled Exhibit F after the injunction filed briefly for emotion. I ran into this recently while researching an article about how states can absolutely stick it to non residents even if they are hunting federal land, and it made me think, why not. Why do we stick it to non residence Because the answer is because

we can, and they are mostly powerless. If the state with a capital s wants to abuse you for their monetary game and not reap any real repercussions, the state will do that. No. The why I asked myself was about the wording and the language of legalese. What's the point of making it overly complicated except to make people feel like they are dumb or not a part of the conversation Is it to make those in the legal

profession feel smarter? Is it actually the best way to draw up contracts and work through the morass that is the legal system, and actually therefore necessary. I don't know. I know that it's a bend that a lot of us have, and it has even invaded our space as whitetail hunters. There are a few reasons why, but I think it is so we can make ourselves sound better

at hunting. I mean, it's not that cool to tell a story where you're like, well, I killed this buck on the edge of the bean field because I know like to eat beans, and so that's where I sat, and that's where he walked in. It's better to say, you know something, like I knew this buck was betting halfway down a ridge after all the winter scouting I did with my trail camera intel in my midsummer glassing sessions,

I identified his core destination food source. I knew that the pressure would be intense, so I set up a stand for a south or a west wind, with the idea that this old buck would give me one shot before he went nocturnal. And on and on and on and on. This thing happens in fishing. It happens in dog training when someone catches a giant bass or has a three musky day. It's never simple. It's always about a specific pattern and a specific presentation that the average

fishermen would have never identified. With dogs, the behavior is always challenging, and this situation is always unique, Like I don't know this lab really prefers to be stubborn during morning training sessions, so I always work into our double blind retrees by setting up wagon wheel drills first, and then I switch it up just to as the wind start switching directions, so he has to quarter the opposite way and will need my help in telling him where

the bumpers are. In reality, it's not that complicated most of the time. And even if we tell our stories like we are pretty gifted at this outdoor thing, it's better to keep things simple. It's better to look at this stuff for what it is, which is largely cut and dry. Let me give you an example that's easy to understand. A few years ago, I killed a good buck on public land in North Dakota. This was a pre rut right into the beginnings of the real rut

kind of hunt. I knew it was going to be a low deer affair, so my best bet was to do all day sits in a place that funnel deer movement. Simple, right, It really was. I parked my happy ass in a spot for four days and I averaged maybe a couple of deer sightings a day. The spot was just a strip of river bottom on public land that attaches private woods on both sides. The rest of the land, at least the public land was open ground covered in cattle.

If the deer wanted to go from one woodlot to the other and they wanted to stay in the cover, their options were real limited. That's it. The whole setup was just a pinch point during a time when the bucks should have been cruising and they were. There really wasn't anything high level about it, and it resulted in a great public land deer that most private land hunters

would have been thrilled to shoot. I guess I could add in a bunch of details about the spot that made it better, but the truth was, it's not the kind of thing that needs to be complicated, because it wasn't. Most of deer hunting is like that. Hell, most of any type of hunting is like that. Elk hunting is like that, and the biggest hurdle there is just getting

around them. After that, they aren't that difficult to hunt most of the time until they figure out you're there, or the whims of the mountain dwellers take them to two drainages over for some reason. Take another example that's near and deer. No pun intended to my heart water holes. The entire reason I love hunting water is because it's so damn simple. Deer get thirsty, they go to drink. That's it. The hotter it is, the easier it is

to run this program. There isn't anything super technical about it, at least as a hunting style or strategy. The little details like how to approach a water hole and where to set up will involve some mental horsepower because every situation is a little different, you know, in the variables of wind and weather can alter plans in a hurry. But again, a lot of that is pretty simple. If it's ninety degrees and there's a south wind blowing, you have a perfect tree to set up in for just

that wind. I don't know, man, it's pretty simple. If it's forty degrees with a variable wind, now it's a different story, But that's not when you'd really want to be on water anyway, and instead should maybe hunt some travel quarters. Now, there is a difference in simplicity when it comes to hunting deer versus hunting individual bucks. When you're hunting just deer, which is what everyone should do for some years before they are to hunt specific bucks,

the rules are simple. Where do they probably bed? How about travel feed? What trails connect those spots? How can you get into those areas while causing the least amount of disturbance? These questions are about all you need to answer correctly to really be in the game. If you're hunting pressure, dear, you can add in the idea that the easy stuff will get hunted and the hard stuff

maybe won't. This is actually really simple, too, but we make it way more complicated because even when we know it to be true, we have a hard time not hunting spots we want to hunt. We like familiarity a lot, we don't like change. As hunters, both of these predispositions can make us bad at the task. In this way, we actually keep it too simple so that we don't have to think about things, and that makes hunting seem

hard and complicated. I know that's a word salad made mostly with kale, which is hard to handle, but it's true. Deer are simple creatures, but so are we. What makes things more complicated is mostly between our ears, and that's the danger we all face. This is no more true than when we are struggling, which is what I'm going to talk about in next week's podcast. Think of it this way, when are you most likely to believe this

is all really complex? When are you most likely to believe the ways of deer are complicated and beyond the understanding of our sad, smooth brains when things go wrong, or at least when things don't go really right. Take a hunt I shared with one of my daughters in the end of September as an example. It was pretty cut and dry. She wanted a deer, so we hunted

a few blinds that should have produced encounters. Since it was pouring rain for our first sit and the wind was blowing from the southeast, which sucks mostly, we went to a backup spot to preserve a better spot. The wind was good for that backup spot, but the question was if we'd bumped deer on the way in, since they sometimes bed there. Well, I don't know what happened, because we blanked. We then blanked on three sits after that, while looking at a lush little kill plot tucked into

the big woods of Wisconsin. I was flustered. It made me think a lot of things. Now. I talk a lot of shit about people who buy into moon phase as a primary driver of deer movement, but let me tell you this. I was staring at that full moon during that trip like it had just kicked my dog and made a pass at my wife. I was like, you rotten chunk of rock and regolith just spinning out. There's two hundred and sixty thousand miles away from me,

with your dumb tides and your werewolf connections. I also blame the weather, since it was either pouring or stupid hot. I blamed a lot of things for the turd sandwich that was that hunt. But I think the truth is far more simple. When I hunt that property and keep things really safe, I almost always have a few days where the dos are scrapper bucks. They cooperate pretty well. But I took a gamble on our first sit of

that weekend, and I think it cost us. I think the deer knew we came in there, and they don't like those intrusions. Usually, when I go in there and get busted, you know, or I'm grouse hunting or whatever, the will disappear for at least a few days. I didn't think that first hunt in that betting area would produce those results, but those results happened, and I think that's why, so Lesson learned. Maybe the moon did affect our hunt, maybe it was the weather, but I know

I did something I never do. And the following hunts were highlighted by rabbit and squirrel sightings and one fat raccoon moving way too late in the morning. From now on, with a bad wind, I'll hunt somewhere other than that property. Now Here's where the main Lesson probably comes in. I'm an outdoor communicator, and my natural reaction is to break that hunt down in a way that makes the deer sound like they are super smart while also making me

sound pretty damn crafty. But the deer we were hunting aren't super smart. We were literally targeting four key's and does not seven and a half year old public land bruisers. The gravity I feel to make things sound more complicated and thus less accessible to some of my audience is real. This is endemic in the outdoor world, and it's most often noticeable on someone who has a specific style of hunting.

I don't care what it is, either bed hunting experts, stalking experts, ground hunting experts, early season experts, rod hunting experts, to your calling experts, whatever. If someone is selling you information about hunting, the odds are decent that they might intentionally or unintentionally overcomplicate things. I mean, it's a pretty short sales pitch for your skills. If you're like, I don't know, I like hunting buck beds because that's where bucks go to spend their day. If I set up

close by, I can sometimes shoot them. Because of this, that's not that cool, even though it's kind of true. Making the whole process and strategies sound way more complicated means that the audience has to follow along, and they'll have a lot of questions about why they failed and you didn't. But the truth is you did almost every time.

You just have the luxury of talking about your wins and skipping over the many, many losses, and they are far more aware of their losses because they are trying something out of their comfort zone, and while they hope to succeed, most people expect to fail at this stuff, and when they do. An easy reason why is because the task was so complicated. Oh oh, most folks would have failed. There's comfort and shared misery. If there wasn't,

we wouldn't all be so addicted to social media. So the balance lies in recognizing when things actually are complicated, or where we are making them be so without them actually needing to be so. A good way to find this balance is to spend time watching deer, which is what I've talked about a lot. The more you can see them do their thing, the less crafty they really seem. This goes for in season observation any time of the year when you can watch deer, even dozen fawns and

scrapper bucks. It's also important to break down what should be simple and what might not be. Hunting deer shouldn't be complicated, it's just not. Your job is to figure out where deer like to walk, and that isn't that hard. They leave a lot of sign They are influenced by terrain, and while they're pretty predictable in general, we know a lot about deer. My friends The part where it gets complicated sometimes is when to hunt a spot, how to

hunt a spot. This is where you can get bogged down in the overthinking and the over analysis, and that's trouble. A good hedge against a mental meltdown over this stuff is just to accept the risk of trying something. If you feel like you know where deer like to walk in the evening, but you have a few different options for setups, just try something. Whether it's saddling up in the best tree or building a natural ground blind, whatever, give it a go. Sometimes the deer do what you expect.

A lot of times they don't. When they do, you've learned something, and when they don't, you've learned something. Over time, especially if you' into a mobile hunting strategy, you start to get very comfortable with this process. It teaches you that trying is almost always worth it because sometimes it works out, and even when it doesn't, you're probably like

a little better hunter because of it. You're not sitting in the same tree stand over and over wondering why the jury brothers are killing huge bucks left and right and you can't see a spike to save your life. Instead, you're actively working the deer in a way that takes into account the simple things we know about them, the stuff like where they probably bed and where they definitely sometimes walk, and where they for sure like to fill

their bellies, even if it's at midnight. The basics are all right there, and they aren't out of reach of any hunter. Even big woods hunters who have to play the brows pattern with low deer densities can do this stuff, although that situation can be a little more complicated and

a hell of a lot more frustrating. Still attainable, though, if you keep it simple and understand that a lot of the reason deer hunting seems so complicated is because it's just a different task to begin with, and so much of the advice comes from folks who have a vested interest in making the whole process sound way more

complex than it really is. This is just good stuff to think about, but it might not help you with next week's topic, which is why it's so damn hard for so many of us to keep our shit together. I'm mature, bucks, That's what I'm going to talk about. And even if you're in the I don't know, shoot any deer phase of your hunting journey, you're gonna want to give it a listen. And if you're real interested in big Bucks, you're definitely gonna want to give it

a listen. That's it for this week, my friends. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. Head on over to the Meat Eater dot com and you will see so many articles, so many videos, so many podcasts, so much hunting content. You can also stop at the store there, maybe pick up a new Phelps Call or

some first Light camel whatever. Go check it out if you want to get your fix on not only deer hunting, but fishing stuff of Western big game hunting, small game, but whatever, it's all there. Mm hmm