Ep. 770: Foundations - How to Avoid Being Avoided by Whitetails

I set up a killer stand spot there, which you know, well, I don't want to get too cocky, is definitely going to net me a stud of a Big Woods buck fall or you know, possibly a two year old or whatever. I thought I was done with that whole situation. I even told you so, but I was wrong. Another weekend over there looking around made me realize something that I do in the White Toau Woods that is so dumb, and I bet you do it too, and that's what

this show is all about. Albert Einstein is famous for a lot of things, his theory of relativity and his care free, genius level haircut. He's also probably one of the most quoted fellas to hit the scene in at least a couple of hundred years. A couple of his more notable quotes on intelligence go like this. The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits. The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination, and probably the one you hear the most. Everybody as

a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it's stupid. That last one is clever. But it's also a little hard to believe that everyone is a genius. Maybe this proves his point, not mine. But if you spend a little time at the public land boat landing on some pretty popular lakes, say on July fourth, you'll witness people who are trying real hard to disprove that quote. The crazy thing is most of

us think we are pretty damn smart. This is often the folly of young folks heading out into the real world to stake their claim. This is something I dealt with recently in a situation that not only proved at least one youth didn't know a whole lot, but her mentor is a stone cold moron at times. This should come as no surprise to anyone who listens to this podcast. But I don't have a lot of friends. I have a handful of good friends, some work besties like Mark,

and then I have gym friends. When you work from home, you make friends where you find them, and for me, that's mostly at the gym. Well, one of my work friends mentioned her daughter was starting a career as a nurse and she needed to set up her benefits and most importantly, her four H three B account for retirement, and she needed to set up her HSA. I told her that I could help, since I'm kind of a geek in that realm and I've had to handle that stuff on my own for quite a while when I

was self employed. So we made a plan to meet up at the gym in the community area and get all of her stuff signed up and ready to plan for her future. In doing so, I parked in a lot behind the gym instead of in the front where I usually park. Now, as we navigated through her onboarding for her job and got her retirement contribution squared away and her HSA on the way to being funded, I was reminded of how often we don't prepare young people for the world of finance. This is such a failure

on our part. Anyway, it didn't take long and she was good to go, so I left her to go work out, which I did. When I got down to the locker room to change to go hit the steam room for a little sweat session, I did something I do a lot. I bent over to pick up my shoes and I hit the top of my head square on this stupid little metal tab you know that sticks out of the locker so you can lock it now.

I do this like once every couple of weeks, and it's one of those self inflicted injuries that hurts like a mother bleeper, as my kids might say, But you can't show it because you're at the gym in any kind of weakness might draw in the hyenas. Or I guess it's just embarrassing as hell to make a habit out of whacking your skull on a part of a locker with enough frequency that it doesn't even surprise you

anymore when you do it. After nursing my head wound in the steam room, I showered up, headed to the parking lot, and my heart fell right out of my ass as I looked around and realized that my truck was just gone, just vanished. I stood there for a minute or so thinking about how sometimes it seems the world is out to get you and it's just barely worth keeping going, and if you could hit the eject button,

how bad could it really be? And well, I worked myself into a pretty wild frenzy thinking about the ways I tortured the freaking weasels who took my truck. When it hit me that I had actually parked in the back lot and my truck was just on the other side of the building and not currently being used in a multi state crime spree. I felt as dumb then as I did in a more recent conversation I had with my wife where I mentioned that we should probably

have more quickies in our marriage. But she thought I said cookies because we had a small argument earlier in the day over a huge chocolate chip cookie. So she got real excited, and then I got real excited because I expected a much bigger fight. For at least a minute, we both lived in a world where it was like we were witnessing our first beautiful sunrise. And then I realized that there's no way this is going good, and I pretty quickly figured out we were not on the

same page at all. We are all dumb, my friends, just in fun and creative ways. That makes life a little harder to handle on a daily basis. While I might not have the spatial awareness to not repeatedly give myself a traumatic brain injury, or remember where my truck is parked, which, now that I think about it, might be related, I am a pretty smart fella in the deer woods. You guys know that, otherwise you wouldn't listen

to this podcast. But here's the real truth. I'm pretty dumb in the woods too, and I bet you are as well. You know that sweet story I told about the slight change in elevation, those big woods bucks follow and how I'm gonna kill one right there this fall. That wasn't dumb. It's actually a pretty sweet partial mystery to solve. But I had way underestimated what was going on there to understand why you have to visualize what that property consists of and what the neighbors have on

their ground. I'll try to explain this in a short and concise way so I don't suddenly break into Mark's habit of talking about a bedding area you've never seen that features western deer movement with a northern wind, but only if he accesses it from the south during a high pressure front that also creates thermals and then draws some of the deer from the east to also visit the secondary bedding area that can only be approached from the northwest on a full moon, but only after the

neighboring farmer has picked as beans. You guys know what I mean. This property of mine is thirty acres. There is a forty to the east and a ten acre proper to the west. The southern boundary is a gravel road, which is where all the houses are and all the access is. To the north is a huge swamp that covers a couple of sections close to the road. On the south end, I have a small food plot, so does the neighbor to my east, and my neighbors on

the west have a small hay field. And the most annoying rooster I've ever seen that I would strangle with my bare hands if he walked by my bloe. I hate that freaking chicken so much so. In other words, the south end of all three of our properties contains most of the human activity, which means it contains most of the hunting activity. This wasn't planned, it's just how

it worked out. It also worked out that there's a band of higher, totally wooded and thick as hell ground between where we mostly hunt and where the huge swamp is. What I had attributed to a high level of understanding of how deer use elevation was actually far more interesting. They slipped through there to avoid me and the neighbors, all of whom hunt. Scratch that, all of whom hunt damn near the same way, in the same type of spots.

The bucks there that want to avoid us get a three for one day on those properties because we all allow ourselves to be patterned in the same way. Of course, I didn't fully grasp this until I was sitting in a Redneck blind in March with one of my daughters trying to glass up some turkeys. When three shed bucks

and two does came out. They stared at the blind, fed around, and generally treated the blind like they'd get murdered if they got too close, which you know is a pretty solid plan since so many deer have been shot from that spot even months after the last days of the season. Those deer are concerned with a spot they associate with hunting pressure in a home range of a square mile. Try to imagine how many places they

know of like that. Try to imagine how many areas a mature buck with five or six seasons under his belt believes he needs to avoid on a daily basis, or at least throughout the fall to stay safe in some areas, those regions with high hunting pressure. I bet

that's dozens and dozens of locations. I bet, just like that situation in Wisconsin where I hunt, they are also just bands of cover that the bucks use while you and your hunting competition go to other areas and tip your hand of the deer because here's the thing, we

want deer to be where we want to hunt. I firmly believe this is why so many hunters lean so heavily on the rut movement, and why so many hunters do not fill their tags during the rut It's not just that the bucks will be moving in daylight more vulnerable, it's that we believe that means the bucks will move to the places where we want to hunt them. It's like the rut makes every stand sit a first sit of the year, every day kind of thing. But it

doesn't work that way. Jaded deer that have been through a few seasons of real pressure, they don't suddenly risk at all for the biscuit. Well, if there is a hot dough, they will, but the odds of you being where the hottest doll in the woods is at the time she's most down to clown with the bucks are

pretty low. We tend to gravitate towards the easier setups, into places with a good view that just provide a comfortable, familiar hunt, and then we hope the rut convinces bucks that they should definitely go to those spots, and they sometimes do, but they oftentimes don't. So in other words, we hunt the spots where most of the deer go, and we hope that mature bucks go there too, But that's not really how it works for most of us, unfortunately.

Think about it this way. How often do you see mature bucks outside of the rut, or even during the rut. What's the real frequency? Now, how often do you hunt spots and see some deer? Probably hopefully somewhat frequently. We often assume the disconnect here is that there are a lot more dos and four ky's out there than there are one hundred and fifty inches, which is true, But we also forget that the deer that most want to survive are the older ones who have dealt with us

and other hunters for a long long time. They know what we do and they go where we don't. They do this to you and your neighbors and the folks you've never met who bohunt three properties away from you. They are masters at avoiding the spots you like during the hours when you can see your site pins without using a light. We encourage this during the season by hunting our usual spots, but we also reinforce this with our presence during the off season because we tend to

go to those areas more than anywhere else. We literally give them a year round education, and they are very good students. Now, the real rub here is that we think we don't do this, and even if we know we do this, we think we can overcome it by using a better scent control or putting out some cent wix, or waiting for the new moon in a cold Front's sure, you know you can tip the odds in your favor

and you might get lucky during the rut. But a better way to look at it is to get out there and try to understand how the deer avoid you. And you're a competition. Where are the locations of buck might travel in late September or mid October. You find those spots and you have a fighting chance of being in the game all season long, and guess what, having a hell of a lot better chance to kill one during the rut as well. The best way to do this is to combine boots on the ground scouting with

ET scouting. Honestly, that's actually the answer to most of our deer problems. But it's a hell of a lot easier to bang those rattling antlers together and hope a nearby buck wants to throw hands or I guess hoofs. The reason you need the eat scouting aspect is because you can scout the neighboring properties. If you looked at my property on satellite imagery, you'd see my food plot and the neighbor's food plot, and the other neighbors small field.

You'd see the giant swamp to the north. It would on a macro level look kind of like the hunting pressure and human activity is all sort of centered in the same line, and the best cover is to the north. It's kind of simple, but also kind of not. In a different scenario, you might have small patches of timbers brought out like islands in a sea of agg or you might be down south and trying to figure out swamp books where most of the land offers the same

kind of stuff. The et scouting aspect allows you to see these areas in a way where you can come up with a rough idea of how deer might move through on their way to the stuff they like, but also how people might get into or move through it. You know, the same cover, then you got to get in there, and you got to get that micro look. Now. I know this sounds like generic scouting advice, because it is.

We aren't inventing the wheel here. But the goal isn't to go out and find some rubs and decide that's good enough. The goal is to try to figure out where the hunting concentration is and how deer avoid it. If you have a food plot with a box blind on it, this is a pretty simple task because the deer will probably show you just how easily they avoid your presence. The next closest cover to your setup, it's

going to have some sign. The next closest thick cover will probably have more sign and more trails that allow the deer to pass by without getting spot. We often use those findings to validate our strategy to sit where we want to sit, because, after all, look at that huge community scrape and all those rubs just one hundred

and twenty five yards downhill from the kill plot. That's not necessarily evidence of deer that will visit the plot when you're hunting there, though, it's very likely it's evidence of deer doing things to avoid you while waiting for you to get out of there. I hope that makes sense, because I believe it's true. I believe we often win our scout to confirm what we want to believe, But those findings might not jive with our hunts and our sightings,

and the deer we killer don't kill. In those cases, we have to ask ourselves why the answer is almost always because we are doing what we like to do. The deer figure that out, and so they do what they have to in order to avoid us and anyone else who might be staged up in the area trying to kill them. In reality, what I'm saying is that there is a window of time right now to try to gain some insight into how the deer might avoid.

This is really just scouting with a different mindset while trying to piece together a plan for next season that allows you to break out of your traditional setups and try something new. Here's the last thing I'll say about that. Go actually do this if you want to have a better season. I know it's easy to get distracted and decide that scouting can happen later, but it won't be the same thing. You're not going to go into the woods in July and figure this out. By then, It's

way too late. It'll be too easy to default to your usual setups during the hunting season. Instead, make an effort to understand this now. Because the deer don't expect you to change your habits, and the other hunters you share the woods with you know they're not likely to change either. It's up to you to be different, acknowledge the stupid choices we all make when it comes to our setups, and try something that might surprise the bucks.

Do it and come back next week because I'm going to talk about recognizing patterns in the whitetail world in a way that might not be totally obvious at first. That's it. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for listening and for all your support. Means the world to us at Mediator here, so thank you for that. If you want some more white tail content, articles, videos, episodes, head

over to the mediat dot com. While you're there, you're going to see a bunch of turkey hunting content. You'll see all kinds of podcasts, videos, articles, you name it. Maybe you just need a new recipe for how to cook up that gobbler you just killed. Whatever, The mediator dot com is where it's at. Again, thank you so much for all your support.