Ep. 753: Foundations - Toothy Competition in the Whitetail Woods

away at something. And something that kind of fell into my lap recently is just a topic of predator control, which brings up a bigger topic in my mind of just hunting around different predators who aren't humans. This is something that might not even be an issue for you, or it might be constantly top of mind depending on where you hunt. So buckle up because it's time to

get toothy. Last week, in a desperate bid to get my boss to pick up the phone and let me know that I'm still employed here at meat Eater, I sent a Slack message his way, saying I needed exactly one minute of his time. Twenty four hours later, I sent another one with roughly the same message, but a little more urgent in a little less PC than the first one. He messaged me right back then, saying he was wrapping up a coyote calling set and would give

me a shout in a little bit. When he called me on his way to the office, which was well after normal business hours had started for everyone else, he told me all about his morning exploits while trying to call in and decoy a few song dogs. You know how it is when you're talking to someone about something they are really passionate about, and you can hear the intensity creeping into their voice by the word. That's what

this was like. By the time the coyotes were responding to him and his story, he sounded a little like a heavy set eight year old who had had to run upstairs and steal two dollars from his dad's wallet because he heard the ice cream truck round the corner and start to drive down his street and come hell or high water. It was a rocket pop time, so he pushed himself to the limit, taking the stairs two at a time on the way up and the way down, and burst through the screen door like a kool aid man.

Well that's, you know, kind of what my boss sounded like, but honestly like he's in a little bit worse shape and also had forgotten to take his ADHD meds with his ego waffles for breakfast. In some ways, his excitement over predator hunting is totally related to me, and in other ways it's not relatable at all. I don't personally care to kill predators, and even though I know that's not all that popular in hunting circles, it just does nothing for me. So I'm not interested in it. And

I don't know why. But when I see a coyote while I'm deer hunting, my instinct is not to shoot it. I have in the past, but that's kind of why I don't today. I'm just not interested in killing a wild dog because he hunts the same critics that I hunt. I'm also totally fo anyone who wants to predator hunt or trap their happy asses off all winter. It's just not for me, I guess. And I don't know if this is true or not, but I think it might

be because it's just rare to see most predators. Most hunters talk a big game about some of the apex predators out there without ever actually laying eyes on one. Mountain lions are a great example here. I don't know how much time I've spent in the heart of lion country, but in total, I've seen two and had a wild

encounter with a third that I saw. That kitty must have been patrolling the highest reaches of the Black Hills out there in South Dakota while I was looking to call in a long beard while keeping my eye to the sky as a monster storm rolled in. In order to not get soaked and then have to spend the night sleeping in the back of my buddy's truck while freezing my giblets off, I decided to cut down a

cliff and then book it to camp. But as soon as I started, I found a spike shed antler, and then a four point side, so instead of heading right to camp, I shed hunted until dark and then booked it as the rain really started to fall. It was a miserable night that got real cold, real fast. In the morning. When I went to take a leak, I looked at my bootprints frozen solid in the mud and saw that there were lion tracks on top of my

tracks all the way to the edge of camp. I'm sure that lion was hunting the deer that were dropping the antlers I was looking for, and he seemed interested enough in me to follow me all the way down that hill in the dark. And let me tell you something. As skilled as I like to think I am as a hunter, I had no clue he was there, and judging by how quickly it got cold that night, I have to assume he shadowed me down that hill while

he was wondering how tasty I might be. A few years later, I went back to the Black Hills to see if I could remove another long beard from the landscape. When I bumped into a cat crossing a road at dawn while I walked down and listening for a gobble, that cat went straight up a limestone cliff on a dead run, which was like watching a super athlete do something you didn't even realize was possible. It was incredible, and I'm not joking. I've never seen anything like it

before or since. I did, while cow calling next to a small pond in Colorado like eight years ago, call in another cat that seemed to think it was going to have some elk meat for dinner. When that cat slow stepped over a log not twenty yards from me, my partner and I both looked directly at it and realized how easy it was for something that has built to be sneaky to sneak up on a couple of

dudes who aren't as sneaky as they think. I've always heard that high country meal deer are so neurotic because of the presence of lions, and I kind of believe it. I can't imagine having that kind of threat living in the same place where you live, and knowing that it's a terminator level eating machine with a whole lot of

patients and nothing else to do but pursue its next meal. Fortunately, for most white tail hunters, despite widespread rumors that they are everywhere, mountain lions aren't much of an issue for most of us. Coyotes, wolves, bobcats, and bears. Different story. If you hunt anywhere with a prevalence of these critters. You know it because the fawn recruitment will be pretty dismal, which tends to result in low deer densities. That feels

awful real during the season. We all know about coyotes and what they're capable of, but bobcats are apparently a sneaky predator too, that will take down a deer sometimes. I've never seen one mess with it, but I have seen quite a few of them in northern Wisconsin, and

I'll tell you what, they're pretty damn cool. I had one walk right up to me a few years ago while I was sitting on the ground waiting on a deer, and my first indication that it was close was that I heard soft purring, and I thought, why can I hear a cat purring right now? Do I smell burnt toast? Turns out I wasn't having a stroke. There was a bobcat maybe six feet away from me, who was as surprised as I was when he figured out I was there. Wolves are a different story. There isn't a critter out

there that more quickly divides hunters. Most of them fall on the side of the fewer the wolves out there. The better. Hunting in wolf country is tough, and while the blame often falls solely on those wild canines, the truth is that it's almost always due to a variety of factors. Wolves happen to live where winter is real and real winters tend to knock back deer number often, even if it's only once every five or seven years, a real bad winner will set the herd back a

long ways. Wolves also tend to live where there's woods everywhere, but not a ton of destination food sources. Logging helps, of course, but it's just a fact of life that if you're in wolf territory, you're also kind of just in an environment where the deer aren't going to spend all winter eating in a pitcornfield to survive. There's plenty of food up there. Don't get me wrong, but life is tough in the north country, and of course the

wolves don't help if you hunt around them. At least in my experience, they can make it seem like there are literally no deer left for very long stretches of time. It's not fun, and it's really not fun to see. How many non hunters and anti hunters have a weird wolf fetish as if they are something more than wild dogs and are deserving of as much range as possible. I'm not going to get into it, but I'll say this only. I think there are enough wolves out there,

and I think they should be managed. I also don't think we need to drop wolves off in places they aren't currently at because of the feel good idea that we can suddenly turn parts of the country back two hundred years and return nature to whatever natural state we have romanticized in our heads. It doesn't work like that, and it's frustrating to hear from people who have zero connection to nature advocate for such things, or worse, weaponize

the court systems to make it happen. Now, aside from the woofies, you have the Black Bears, which is the undisputed champion of the Toothy Critters League when it comes to turning adorable little spotted fawns into breakfast Yogi doesn't get enough credit for this, But when the fawns drop, or you know, out west, the elk or moose, calves, whatever, bears of all varieties tend to shift gears heavily towards scouring meadows and other fawn friendly areas to see what

they can turn up. It's really a short wind of time where they are hell on the youngsters. But they are good at it, really really good at it. Does any of this have any bearing on how you should hunt? I'd say yes, but maybe that's because I think about this a lot. Let me give you a couple examples on how predators shape my strategy when I'm hunting in specific locations. Let's take western North Dakota for example. The bad lands are maybe my favorite environment to hunt for

so many reasons. It's one of the places I've traveled to the most to hunt, and I don't know how many days I've spent living in a tent out there while trying to arrow meal deer and white tails and sometimes antelope at least back when you could get a tag. It's also a coyote heavy region, or at least it seems that way. It might not have a higher density of song dogs than a lot of other places, but they are highly visible in that terrain and they are really easy to hear out there, so maybe it just

seems like they are everywhere. I honestly don't know. There are also quite a few lions living in that area, and while I've never seen one. I sure have found a lot of their tracks. I've also spent a stupid amount of time trying to stalk animals out there and just kill them from the ground in natural blinds. Those deer in that territory are masters of spotting movement or something out of place on the ground, but it's like they are blind when you get into a tree, even

if you only get like eight feet into a tree. Now, part of this is influenced by a hunter tactics. We all know that the deer that don't get hunted from tree stands a lot don't understand how dirty of a trick it is. That's a huge contributor. But I also think the reason they are so good at figuring out who is on the ground waiting for them is because they are so keyed into predators stalking them all the time.

This means that if you're heading into an area with lots of coyotes and enough lions where they are a consideration, your best bet might be to leave the stalking to the flat brimmers out west and get up in a tree Eastern bow hunter style. Now, I'll give you a life pro tip here, just because I'm on the topic.

If you are a white tail hunter who primarily sits stands or saddles, and you go out west with the idea you're going to spot in stock, do yourself a favor and bring one mobile tree stand setup, just some sticks in a stand or your saddle. Then if you find yourself not being good at stocking, which is pretty likely, you have the chance to get a leg up on the deer and the other hunters by using a tactic

that is absolutely deadly on Western critters. Now, what if you're nowhere near the west and you're hunting around predators. I think the best way to look at this is lump all of the hunters into the same category. I know that doesn't really make sense, So let me explain. Hunting pressure is hunting pressure, and it doesn't seem to matter much if it comes from two legged or four legged predators. The more things that are trying to kill the deer, the fewer deer there will be, and the

harder those deer will be to kill. That's it. It's not revolutionary, it's not something that you don't inherently know. What that means is that Southern Iowa idea that you can rattle all morning, or put a bunch of cent out and just wait on bucks to come in. As some grade A level bullshit. The more you announce your presence, generally, the worse you'll be off as a hunter in a

high predator area. This is something that hunters in wolf territory often get wrong, and it's part of the reason they genuinely believe that all of the deer are gone. They aren't. But what we do to compensate for low confidence in our hunts is to try to make something happen in spots where we always hunt. So we go back to the same stance and we increase the level of our presence in those spots, spots where we undoubtedly run cameras, which causes us to increase our general presence there.

It's a bad spiral to get into, but it's really really common. We take a situation where we should be as stealthy as possible, and we should be open to trying to find current deer concentrations, and instead we default to the spots that we are comfortable hunting while trying more and more tactics that only work Sometimes in really good areas, it's easy to compartmentalize the presence of predators.

When we think about hunting, we know there are coyotes out there, or wolves or bobcats or bears, whatever, but we don't think of them as competition. We think of them as something tangential to the experience of being in the woods. But the deer don't see it that way. You wouldn't either, if you were being hunted every single day of your life. You'd be neurotic anxious, while more anxious than usual, and you'd have a low tolerance for threats of any type. The deer do too, and that's

something to remember. I know that when I hunt northern Wisconsin, I'm more cautious about the scent I leave around and the noise I make and the ways I access spots that I am just about anywhere else I hunt. When you're dealing with very few deer that are just fed up with being on the menu, just feels like the only way, at least that I've ever found to keep finding deer and give myself that feeling like I'm someone

in the game. Still, I also tend to set up as high as I can, often like eighteen to twenty feet up, which is kind of my personal limit for reasons I can't explain other than I don't have a fear of heights when I'm below that arbitrary mark, and when I get above it, I'm suddenly not comfortable at all with how much gravity there is and how if it could that invisible force it all matter has would bring me from being in a tree to being a twisted,

first light covered pretzel of a human on the forest floor. The height generally feels necessary unless there's a way to get into a big, old pine tree or some clump of trees that provides real c I pay attention more, I move less too. Some deer are pretty tolerant a poor hunting behavior while you're on STAN, but that deal with a lot of predators genuinely are not fun. Fact

about this too. But other than maybe a few random bears I've seen off Stan, I've had very few encounters with bobcats and coyotes where they didn't pick me out of the tree almost instantly. You know, this obviously depends on a lot of factors, but it sure seems like they are just good at noticing anything that's a little unnatural. I don't know if that's the case for wolves, because I've only seen a few and they were all on

the ground and I was not hiding. I guess the gist of it is it's worth thinking about the prevalence of predators where you hunt or where you are thinking about hunting, which might even be more important. You know, they might not affect your strategies much, or they might factor into your plan in a major way. This will depend on a lot of things. But it's not something that is this abstract idea that doesn't influence your hunt, because that's just not how it works. They are out

there pressuring the deer too. Use that however, you need to, but at the very least acknowledge that it's true and consider what it might do to your hunts, and at least come back next week to keep listening because I'm going to talk about water access and how it can be a white tail hunter's best friend. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. I say this every week and I

absolutely truly mean it. Thank you so much for your support everybody here at Meat Eater. We truly appreciate it. We would not be anywhere. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without you, so thank you for your support. If you want some more white tail content,

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