Ep. 730: Foundations - Lonesome Deer

probably get there, provided you put in the work. Or if you just happen to hunt someplace with low deer numbers, which not coincidentally happens to be in the big woods a lot, you're going to get there. The challenge of hunting a small population of deer is real, and it's a proving ground for your skills. Now, it's not necessary to go seek out someplace like this, but it is a good idea to understand what to do when you're struggling to just find deer or where every encounter is

truly a gift. That's what this episode is all about. And even if you hunt a place with one hundred deer per square mile, you should listen because there's going to be something in here for you too. I've only been to the state of California a handful of times, and each trip was either for a pig hunt or a blacktail hunt. So it wasn't like I spent a lot of time shopping or hanging out at Disneyland or

anything like that. It was, to my surprise, at least the first time I went, kind of in an amazing dichotomy. The bigger cities made me feel like I was allergic to the environment, while the areas we hunted made me feel like I was in Wyoming or Montana or some other western state with very few people and a lot of really cool ground that I wanted to hunt. It was weird, but life is like that when you get a little bit of exposure to things that are outside

of your normal world. Now, if you take a city like San Francisco, for example, you can break this down even a little bit further. The city by the Bay has sort of become a poster child for the stark difference between the haves and the have nots. Tech executives and other C suite high income folks live there in numbers that are way overrepresented from say, I don't know, Omaha, Nebraska. For a totally absurd example, the median rent in San Francisco as of October this year was three three hundred

and seventy six dollars a month. That's a healthy house payment in most of the country and could buy you damn near a mansion in some places. Not just because I was curious, I looked up the median rent in Omaha and it came in at thirteen hundred and fifty dollars, which to me actually seemed pretty high as well. But it's also been a long time since I rented anyway.

As you can imagine buying a house in San Francisco, or even going out to eat or playing around a gulf, it's going to be pretty damn expensive compared to the rest of the country. And you have thousands and thousands of people who can afford to do any of those things, and they are living right next to a pretty substantial homeless population. Roughly eight thousand people live on the streets of San Francisco, but I don't know how accurate that is.

I don't know how they'd count them. Doesn't matter for this podcast. I just point that out to illustrate something. There are Silicon Valley execs and homeless people living in the same block, or within at least a few blocks of one another. They are both technically residents of the same city, I guess, but their individual existence from day

to day life couldn't be further apart. Now. I don't know anyone who would be so dumb as to suggest that just because those two types of people live in the same general place, that they experience the same general lives. That would be stupid and obviously disingenuous. Yet we do this all the time in hunting. We stereotype our fellow hunters or the difficulty of all our deer hunting, based around somewhat arbitrary things like what state we live in or how many gun hunters there are in our county.

We take credit for how tough our personal hunting might be by attaching something to it that might not have any actual effect on how difficult our hunting is. You know, the number of folks who buy a gun tag is just a good example of this. You know, even if you live in Pennsylvania or Michigan or Wisconsin or some other state with several hundred thousand firearms hunters, what really matters is what happens in the general neighborhood of your

hunting spots. Now, I know a lot of folks who live in high hunter density states who also control decent sized chunks of ground. They don't really struggle killing big bucks in any given year because their experience isn't the general experience of other hunters. It's unique to them. This is one of the reasons why I talk so much about going out and figuring this stuff out on your own.

It's also why I always caution against taking too much advice from anyone who's hunting experience is vastly different from yours. If somebody controls six thousand acres of land in the heart of the best deer country out there, and they tell you planting a certain type of brasscas will definitely help you arrow a giant in the late season, what they mean is they want you to spend money on a product they get paid to use, which also helps them shoot giants in the late season because they have

amazing hunting. But what good does that do you? What's worse? And I promise you this is true. Most of the deer hunting advice you're going to get is going to come from people who hunt where the density is really, really high. If you don't hunt a similar situation, most of the advice you're getting has very little bearing on your hunts. It will probably make things worse.

resident tag. Now, I killed the smallest of those fifteen bucks on the first night, and he ended up scoring one forty as a clean eight. At the same time, I was messing around on public land in Minnesota near

the Twin Cities. I couldn't find fifteen deer total there in an entire season, and was super lucky to see a deer on any given sit Advice or strategies on how to hunt that North Dakota spot might have been the worst thing I could have done while hunting those chunks of public land here forty five minutes from the Concrete Jungle can be broken down further because that's kind of an extreme example. Take where I hunt in southeastern Minnesota.

The farm that I've roamed around on since I was fifteen looks amazing on paper and in person, but it's owned by a dairy farmer who is not a huge fan of deer eating his crops. He doesn't really care about white tails and is very happy when a bunch of them get shot. Every year. That farm has a decent population of deer because it is, you know, in southeastern Minnesota, mildish winters, good egg, all that stuff, but it's pretty tough to find a big one on there

in any given year. There's just a lot of pressure in all the seasons, but it's really obvious during the gun season when large parties of shotgun hunters push the woods every day. Now, this property corners up to a different property that my buddy is leased for several years. It's also a place that I bought into this year. It's about a third of the size of the dairy farm next to it and doesn't have a whole lot of cover. In fact, i'd say it's probably about twenty

percent woods and the rest is just fields. But the pressure is highly controlled. The deer know this, and it's always good in there and only gets better when the neighboring properties start to really get pounded. It's one of the most fun and honestly easiest places I've ever hunted. Now. Part of that is because my buddy is a pretty good deer hunter and he has the place figured out, but it's also just a function of low pressure and

good ground. The only difference between the lease and my permission farm next to it is how many people go in there to shoot deer on any given season. This affects everything, and it highlights a key point to this podcast. Deer density is relative. It might be awesome on one farm and terrible on the neighbors. You can't draw a ton of conclusions from a thirty thousand foot view of your hunting ground. You have to be honest about what you're working with and what you find on the ground.

I think that starts with thinking about how how high or lower deer density really is. Not what your state is or your county is, but what's happening on your property, Like where are you hunting now? This is totally arbitrary, so bear with me, but a good way to understand if you're working with a truly low deer density is to think about how surprised you are to blank on

any given sit. If you're like, holy shit, I can't believe I didn't see a single deer this afternoon, you probably have a fairly high deer density or way too much confidence in yourself. If you're like, well, I thought i'd see one, but I didn't, then you're probably working with lower deer density, and if you are, you're gonna have to cater your strategy to handle this needle in

the haystack. Reality. This all begins with sign, whether your winter scouting or summer scouting or in season scouting, Any and all deer sign you can find so important. This is not the case with high deer density hunts because a lot of deer make a lot of sign, but not a lot of deer makes a not a lot of sign. If you find a crossing in the swamp that has a okay amount of tracks in it, that's a big deal. A concentration of rubs in a creek bottom that cuts its way through a huge tract of

timber also a big deal. Several beds on a slight knob and a sea of trees, big deal. A good sized scrape and a place where two old logging roads intersect, you guessed it, big deal. Now this is where a lot of hunters struggle. They might see a rub on a one inch in diameter sapling and not pay it any attention. Or they might see a small scrape and just assume it with some scrapper passing through who felt

a little excited for a little while. But the truth is, if you don't have a lot of deer to deal with, every bit of sign is a clue to how the deer used the area. For high deer density hunts, a lot of sign is the equivalent to white noise. You just need to drown it out a bit. Find the stuff that matters. In areas where you might only have a dozen deer per square mile. That little rub tells you a lot. This is because your job is to

get around deer first. We don't acknowledge this a whole lot, but so many people have hunting situations where they already know they're going to be around a ton of deer just by getting into the woods. They don't have to try to be around deer because they just will be. So they have the luxury of trying to get close

to big bucks and focus on that goal. Now that has bled into other hunting situations, But I promise you this, if you hunt really low deer density stuff, you won't get close to too many big deer until you figure out how to consistently get close to just deer. Think about it this way. If you don't know how to consistently catch a limit of eater sized walleyes, you're probably

not gonna want to target thirty inch plus fish. If you get my drift, all sign is important to the low deer density hunter because what little sign there is was made by the deer you have to hunt. I can't make it any more simple than that. Now. If that sounds a little depressing, sorry, it's about to get worse. I can't prove this because it's anecdotal, but when I hunt where there are not very many deer, I feel

like the deer are just generally harder to kill. They seem to be on their a game for spotting me in a tree, and they seem to be very intolerant of my mistakes. This is probably due to two reasons. The fewer prey animals there are, the more they are targeted by all predators. It's also probably because every blown

encounter represents a limited chance going bye bye. It's not like you can spook a buck in the big woods and just expect several more to come down the trail that might, you know, have been your one chance all day or all weaker all season. And it's not just the big bucks. The does that live where few deer lives seem to be real cagy. They are tasked with raising fawns in areas where they'll livin. Ain't easy, and

that puts them on red alert a lot. If you have fifty deer per square mile where you hunt, getting blown at by a dough sucks, but it's not that big of a deal. She's going to run off. Another deer will walk in eventually, if that's the only dough in the three hundred acres you like to hunt, or at least one of the only does around, that's a different story. Now. Mistakes are going to be made, but the more you make with limited amount of deer, the

harder the whole thing gets. And this can snowball pretty quickly. This is because you can't just move down the ridge and hit the reset button. Knowing that a bunch of deer are still around. You are most likely going to have to find them again and be even more careful and then try to capitalize on your scouting and your mobility and hope you don't blow it again, all while hunting a small number of deer that are trying real

hard to not die. Because I've spent a lot of my time hunting in situations like this, I'm overly cautious about trying anything extra on my sits. You know, the guy who hunts private land in Iowa can rattle all he wants because he's going to get a positive response eventually, and it doesn't matter much if he has some negative interactions. It'll all work out. If you bang those same antlers

together where the deer are few and far between. You're already creating a scenario for the deer to encounter something they just don't expect. You're also almost guaranteeing that the deer that do respond will do so in a cautious way where they'll approach downwind. It's not to say that calling or decoying or using sense can't work, certainly can. You just have to do the right due diligence on your setup and the conditions to make sure the odds are in your favor as much as they can be.

Most owners don't do that. They instead use these tactics to try to make something happen because they aren't having the encounters they want from their hunting tactics and effort. There's a huge difference between the two. There's another consideration with low deer density hunts I want to talk about, which is just randomness. It seems random to see a buck do something once every ten or twenty sits. It's probably not, though if you hunt it in I don't know,

Pike County, Illinois or Buffalo County, Wisconsin. On private ground, you might see a buck walk a certain ridge one day and not the next, but a few days later he or another buck will probably walk that ridge. The odds are good that where a buck walk today, other deer are going to walk tomorrow. The odds are good that a big woods buck that crosses a creek one morning might not repeat that pattern anytime soon, but he or other deer will likely travel the same route at

some point. This is something that is very very hard for me to acknowledge because it leads to a lot of second guessing if I observe something and then can't get it to quickly repeat. But most deer in most situations aren't as predictable day to day as we'd like them to be. They do eventually run the same routes and patterns, but it's nothing for there to be a few days in between. This means that not only is signed real important to low deer density hunts, but so

is observation. Even if it seems random, it's probably not. It just might only happen a couple of times a week or less. This is something that trail cameras show us, yet we kind of gloss over it to see what we want to see. If you do this where a few deer live, you'll miss a lot of the clues that tell you where you should volume hunt and when you should really be there. It's hard to do when you're stacking up the blanks or just not seeing many deer, but you have to try to do this in order

to understand how it works. This is how my daughter and I both killed our northern Wisconsin deer this year. It was just a matter of factoring in the odds that eventually abuq would emerge from the swamp to cruise a certain woodline, and while it took a lot of hours, two bucks did just that. We never saw any other deer, but we saw two we wanted to shoot, and we shot them. Low deer density hunts are like this, and they can be frustrating as hell, but they will make

you better and they sure are rewarding when they go right. Now. The other side of the coin are those places where the deer are thick. That situation is more fun to hunt for most folks, and it actually comes with its own set of challenges. Now, that's what I'm going to talk about next week, so come back for more if you're so inclined. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the ware to hunt Foundation's podcast. As always,

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