Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and this week is all about hunting where the deer density is real high. Last week I covered the dismal reality of hunting where very few deer live. But this week I'm going to go the opposite way. I'm going to talk about the challenges of hunting areas that are simply full up with deer. Now, this is a good problem to have for most hunters, but it
still can be a problem. That's probably for like, I don't know, the swamp hunters and the folks who spend their fall looking at pine squirrels and thousands of acres of timber. It's probably pretty hard for them to understand. But it is true there are considerations to be made when you're dealing with lots of deer, and we often don't really think how a high deer density should affect our strategies. But it does. And now I'm gonna tell
you why. Probably about I don't know, fifteen or sixteen years ago now, my fishing partner and I were signed up to fish a tournament that was launching out of Winona, Minnesota. Since that's where I went to college. It was always a fun venue. It was always fun placed fish because there are I don't know, only a few places I fished more than the Mississippi River in those various pools of southeastern Minnesota. The tournament was a late summer deal,
which usually means a couple of things. It means you usually have to weed through a lot of bass to get big ones. And it means that the best spots often feature schooling fish. You know, certain wing dams, sand drops. There's just certain spots that will draw both large mouth and small mouths together on the river to post up and feed, you know, on what the mighty Mississippi can
funnel toward their gullets. A lot of times this is based around baitfish, but it sometimes involves fish in a shell bed for bass that are keyed into concentration of crayfish or something else. The thing about it is you want to get to a spot and milk it for all of the fish that can give you, because you know, in the middle of a bunch of fourteen to sixteen inches, there are going to be a few that weigh three four pounds or more. Those fish are the ones that
put you in the money. Which is as simple as I can kind of lay this out. Well, when my partner and I started pre fishing for that tournament, we knew it could go a lot of ways, but also that if we wanted to find bigger fish, we probably needed to flip some jigs or throw some frogs. Both are tactics that tend to produce big bites, especially in the summer, which is always the case if you go
throw swimming jigs or maybe dead stick a senko. We happened to stumble across a lily pad and duckweed covered bay just off of the main channel one day that was just loaded with big, large mouth. You know, the current sweeping past the mouth of that bay must have just funneled a ton of food in there, and the greenies were in there thick. You could toss a fake
current in any direction and get a blow up. When you find a spot like that before a tournament, it gives you a special feeling, kind of like when you go out of state to hunt white tails for the first time and you're roaming around on some public land and you walk into a piece of cover that is littered with big rubs and fresh, stinky scrapes. You know, all of a sudden, you go from wondering about the future to making real plans and playing things real carefully.
It's so fun. Well, we were in that state of nervous excitement when the tournament director waved us out in the morning, and then when we pulled up to the mouth of the bay and saw that none of our competitors had been us to the spot, we felt pretty good, because that's a big deal when you're working with only
a couple of acres of prime water. What happened over the next several hours can only be described as the worst meltdown in the history of tournament fishing that has ever happened to anyone, let alone a two man team. When I say we could not get it right, imagine I don't know, you're a young lad and you and
your buddies build a sweet BMX bike jump. You finally get the courage to ride your red Huffey off of it, but instead of sticking the landing and fist pumping toward the sky, you fly off sideways and go full scorpion. When you hit the ground, if you don't know what that is, that's when your face arrests your forward movement, but your torso and legs keep going right over the
top of you. And while you're breaking with your teeth in the gravel, a bus I don't know drives by, and it's full of all the girls from your class, and they get to see you doing your best scorp and one of the tires of the bus splashes mud up on your shorts just right, so it looks like you had a battle of wheels with yesterday's taco bell and lost. Then when you land, a stray dog pisses on your head and you get a sliver in your
eyeball or something like that. Anyway, we sucked that day on the water in a brutal, brutal way, and the problem was execution. We had so many fish to work with, we couldn't focus. We weren't paying attention to our hook sets and really trying to see the process through, which
is the kiss of death. When you frog fish in the slop, it's kind of like watching someone try to wing shoot a bob white quail when a whole covey gets up, they just kind of point shoot and don't pick out an individual bird, and you know, mostly all the birds get away.
Now.
Sometimes it can be easy to lose your focus when there's too much of a good thing to work with. Normally, a ton of big, large mouth looking to eat amphibians and who are also confined to a small area is a good thing if you're in a fishing tournament. But humans are real good at messing stuff up even when the whole situation is right for easy success. This happens to a lot of hunters who get the chance to hunt around high deer densities. Generally, the higher the density,
the more fun the hunting is. After all, seeing deer is usually the difference maker between a so so sit and something that is truly enjoyable. The bar is low there, but it is there. But even over time seeing them isn't enough. Killing a big one usually becomes the goal, and that's where a lot of deer can be an asset or a liability. We often talk about this, but I'll start with something easy. When you know you can always see deer, it's hard not to go sit somewhere
that promises just that. Oftentimes this is a field edge scenario or something that hinges on big views. You all know my thoughts on that, so I'm not going to repeat them. But the other thing that happens with high deer densities a lot is we create spots for the deer to go too. This is like the prere strategy for a lot of hunters and a dream for a lot more of them. But I think it's a double
edged sword. You know, of course, we all want a sweet place to hunt where there are a lot of deer, and we can plan a food plot and put up a box blind and never think about strategy or scouting again. You just wait for the cell camera picks to show up, go sit in a little house on stilts, and bam, done and done. That's a great way for a lot of people to struggle to kill the caliber of deer they really want, because it leads to predictable predator behavior.
In this case, if you're not paying attention, we are the predators. If you know you can always sit the ladder, stand on the edge of the beans or corn and see deer. It's hard to do something different. A lot of deer on the landscape promises that level of success with that simple strategy pretty much every time, but it's not so simple. In fact, that poll to the easy stuff complicates things quite a bit. This is because your job is to try your hardest to not let the
deer know you're there. That's a pretty giant component of this whole thing, and it's really difficult when you're dealing with a lot of deer. It's a hard thing for us to qualify or truly witness, But there seems to be a ripple effect from hunter presence. It's easiest to see when you get busted by a dough that blows like crazy and clears a field. The next night, you're probably going to see fewer deer out there if you only have a handful of deer in the neighborhood. A
mistake like this feels real heavy. It feels a bit lighter when you have a ton of deer around, but it's not. It's the opposite. The more you educate any of the deer, the more all of the deer figure you out. When non target deer are onto you, your target deer become much harder to kill. The way that non target deer figures us out is that we are either sloppy, or predictable or just plain unlucky. And you know, honestly, most of us cannot out all three of those on
every single sit. This is where some of the people you can watch on Sportsman's channel got it right. They preach about being cautious and when you're going in and timing your sits to perfect conditions. The truth is, if you're hunting low deer densities, you don't really have a choice but to be aggressive. You have to find the deer, and you don't do that sitting around. But with tons of deer to hunt, you want to minimize your impact on the herd. Playing it somewhat safe is often a
better strategy. But you can go way too far with this and take it the wrong way in a real hurry, because like for starters, too many deer to hunt means you can hunt them in a lot of different spots, but not every location will be good for giant bucks, So maybe you have to play it safe with your best stand sites, but you can still keep hunting and those fringe areas, and you know, maybe you can go out in early October and hunt one of those, you know,
not your favorite spots. You don't want to play. It's so safe. You don't ever hunt until you feel it's perfect. It's kind of what I'm trying to say. Just go hunt some of your lesser stuff and shoot some does learn something, But don't stay out of the woods when you could hunt or you want to. Because someone who manages thousands of acres of private land says that's the move. It might be for them, but it might not be for you. It's also important to note something I talked
about a lot last week, which is sign. As you can probably guess you know if your parents aren't first cousins anyway, is that a lot of deer leave a lot of sign. There were some years where I hunted in southeastern Minnesota where their deer numbers were really high, and I was just amazed by how much sign was everywhere, scrapes, rubs, tracks, beds. They weren't tough to find. And this is a problem because it often leads hunters to think they're around bucks
all the time. And so they stop scouting, they stop looking. Mostly they stick up a trail camera or three, and they call it a job well done. Well, you know how I feel about nocturnal sign, And with lots of deer in any given neighborhood, you'll have a lot of sign that was created at midnight. And this does you no good other than to tell you where the deer
spend their nights. But you probably already knew that with high deer densities, you have to get to the spots that would be most advantageous to bucks, and then use the sign in those areas to guide you. Even with lower hunting pressure and higher deer numbers, a good percentage of the actionable rubs and scrapes and tracks and beds will be in places where you'll go, Man, this looks amazing,
but how the hell do I hunt it? If you find a concentration of good sign in the cover and can't immediately decide what tree you'd sit, you know, or what route you'd access it by, you're probably onto something. And that last one is doozy when it comes to hunting around a lot of deer. If you can't get in and out somewhat stealthy, You're in real trouble. I've got permission to hunt a property in southwestern Wisconsin that
is pretty incredible. The downside is that the woods are real open, and the deer are likely to bed right on the edges of the fields because that's where the best brush is. The landowner often hunts the top, which is easy to access, but not easy to access undetected. The deer sightings on that farm drop by the night until it's a blank city there as soon as there's
just a little too much pressure up on top. Now this seems straightforward, but the thing is he has food plots and fields and box blinds and cameras all set up on top. Even when the deer tell him they are done showing their faces in broad daylight, there's a lot of gravity pulling him in to hunt those spots. This is the real danger of high deer numbers. They
convince us the hunting should be easy. Now, it certainly can, but if you don't have much land to work with, or you hunt a place with a decent amount of pressure, a lot of deer doesn't mean it's going to be easy, you know, Even though the science says it should be and the trail cameras show there are plenty around, you still have a difficult task. It's also pretty easy to get fooled into thinking that everywhere is just as good
as anywhere when it comes to higher deer numbers. You drive in and out during the summer and you see deer everywhere, everybody's farm, everybody's field. It's easy to think that one would lot is as good as the next, and that the pick beanfield should be teeming with deer every night. But high deer numbers often mean a few things, like the carrying capacity is way up due to quality food and a lack of predators and often a lack
of deer killing winners. If they don't need something specific on your property to survive, they won't be there a whole lot of the times. If the pressure is too high, they can hop across the fence and live the good life on the neighbors and get everything they need without getting harassed. This becomes even more true when you're not hunting huge properties. Fifty or one hundred acres is great, but that's maybe one twelve to one six of a bucks home range. That means he has a lot of
other places to be, and so do his girlfriends. The way to combat all of this with high deer numbers is to give yourself a lot of options. I know I've covered that a lot, but there's no situation where it's more important than when you're on limited land with lots of deer around. Sure, you could hunt the up of Michigan and set up fifty stands in a section and that might help you, but probably not as much as having a few mobile setups and you know, going
to where the deer are right now. But with high deer numbers, being able to rotate spots and keep things somewhat fresh is a huge deal. You're probably gonna spook deer no matter what. Going in coming out questionable wins, whatever it happens. But the more your presence is known in very specific spots, the more those specific sp become dead zones when you can hunt. Now Here is where I'm going to diverge greatly from a lot of conventional advice.
It might seem like low impact trail camera usage is the way to dial in the right deer when there are a lot of them, But being around a lot of deer gives you a really, really good opportunity to observe. This is a benefit I can't overstate. When you're on stand and you see dose or scrappers do something, they are telling you what big deer will do when they
go through. Pay attention to them, pay attention to where they cross fences and how they approach water holes, and what they do when they're in the field and a truck goes by on the road. And while it's fun to hunt and sea lots of deer, it's also important to recognize that as an excellent education on what deer liked to do. When you're in the big woods and you watch a deer go by, it's the same lesson. You just don't see very many of them, so it's
a rare treat. High deer densities that are different. You can watch how they travel the land, how their ears perk up when they hear another deer coming out of the woods, and who gets to claim what spots when they are feeding. That's just something a big woods hunter just won't get much of, and that's one of the main reasons why hunting lower deer densities is so much more difficult. There are far more surprises than anything, which isn't the case in places where the herd is add
or near full capacity. And there's one more thing I want to talk about when it comes to hunting these types of areas. Movement. When I was growing up, we believed you could hardly move on stand. I mean we'd scan left to right or right to left and move our heads crazy slow. We didn't stand up, stretch, or stare at our phones. It was dreadfully boring a lot of times. But I'm sure I saw more deer then than I do now with so many distractions right at
my fingertips. If you know there is a good chance for deer to be moving around, you pay attention to your movements, not just theirs, last a lot, keep looking because it's easy for a deer to catch you off guard, especially if there's lots of deer that might catch you off guard. This only increases in possibility when there's more deer close. It's got to make sense, right, So pay attention to that. We think it's kind of licensed to go the opposite way and not pay attention as much
because you're going to be covered in them. But that's not the way to go about this. Okay, that's enough, talking about deer densities. Next week, I'm going to talk about the reality of going for a buzzer beater deer and how it's not that much fun. It's usually not very easy, but it's always worth it to keep hunting until the closing bell rings. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. It's been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast,
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