Ep. 818: Foundations - Hard and Soft Mast Patterns that Might Not be on Every Hunter's Radar

a picnic basket, but for the deer. There's no shortage of food, and a lot of that exists in two forms, soft mast and hard mast. We all know what fits into those two categories, but what we don't all knows how to hunt either pattern in the early season really well, which is what I'm going to talk about right now. I know this is a first world problem. I get it, I totally do, but I struggle more and more with the transition from fishing to hunting as I get older,

the fall fishing is just so good. And while it might seem like a deer hunting sin to not go hunting on the bow opener, I'm seriously considering skipping the tree stand thing to go bang away on some schooled up smallmouth you see. For some reason this year, I just stumbled across some schools of fish that are out on structure, way off ashore, way far away from the easy to identify rock piles and rock points. You know. One of those schools I found is just full of giants.

And when I say that, I mean we caught fish that actually measured twenty two inches, which is pretty good size for a small mouth anywhere. That school is BAUSI on an old river channel in a lake that I like a lot. There, maybe I don't know, one hundred and fifty yards from the nearest shore line, kind of

out in the middle of nothing now down south. I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one on those fish, because in a lot of those reservoirs and big water down there, they're pretty good at finding fish off offshore on structure. But up here in near Canada Land, it feels like I'm kind of the only one who has found them. And when you get false small mouth all schooled up, and then you add in the cold nights and the bait fish concentrations, you get fishing that is Baananas.

I threw a zara spook on those fish a couple of weeks ago and had a legit five pound dish type fish hit it, and I got him about halfway to the boat before he tossed my lure and it went end over end who straight up and came back down. And the second it landed, a different five pounder hit it, and I managed to keep him buttoned up and landed him. A few casts later, I had a three pounder hit and when I was fighting that fish, a different three

pounder tried to steal the lure from his mouth. So briefly I had two three pounds small mouth with different ideas on how to get away, both attached to the same lure. There are so many fish there, you know, the competition for food is intense. There are a lot of minos in that spot. And you know how I know, well, I saw them. I saw the smallies puke them up when we fought them, and I caught several walleyes chason

minnows there on top waters. Now I've spent maybe I don't know, seven hundred and fifty thousand hours of my life, which is a rough estimate, throwing top waters around in the hope so that some big bass or big northern or musky will hit. What has never, not once happened

to me is catching a walleye on a top water. Now, when it happened on that smallie school the first time, I chalked it up to a confused walter who was raised by a family a small mouth and didn't know any better, kind of like the stories about kids who've been abandoned in the wild to only be taken in by a friendly pack of wolves or a group of gorillas. So they aren't acting like wolves or gorillas. But when the second wall I surfaced and ate my top water,

I realized I was dealing with something different. There were so many predatory fish in that one little spot that's really only about the size of a pickup truck, that they are all just going full send on any potential meal they can get. It was wild, and it happened during two different weekends, and I can only imagine how much more they are going right now. But I'm going to go sit in a tree stand instead, I think.

But that school of fish and some of the others I found, they can teach us some lessons on deer in a few simple forms. And the first, it's just resource scarcity. The hunters who get good at finding high value resources in limited quantities are the hunters who can fill their tags any damn where they please. The second is that that kind of action will happen when the

time is right, and not before and not after. It's a moment thing, and if you can get on it when it's going, you're in for the type of fishing or hunting that generates stories you'll tell for a long long time. It's just special. The third thing that school of big old bronze backs and walters can teach us about hunting is that old adage and selling real estate. Location, location, location. Those fish are positioned in a place that just isn't

obvious to a lot of fishermen. They get left alone to work schools as shiners and do their fall feeding thing, while fishermen cast to empty rock piles and sand drops that aren't even all that close to them. For some reason, we like to rank things in the order of importance, perhaps because we have a long evolutionary history of hierarchy arrangement.

I don't know. What I do know is that if you were to try to think about white tails the way you might think about finding an unbelievable small mouth or walleye spot, you'd probably want to decide what is the most important, what criteria matters the most. Now, obviously, without the oak tree dropping acorns, or the apple tree throwing down some apples, or the persimmon tree littering the ground with fruity goodness, you don't have much of a

masked pattern. There has to be some mask to get a masked pattern, which is the most obvious thing you could probably say, even though that doesn't make it less true. But we know there is masked out there where you hunt, where I hunt, just about anywhere the white tail lives, and honestly, probably everywhere the white tail lives, there is some kind of mast, and a hell of a lot

of it gets ripe during September and early October. A lot of the white tail hunting advice out there will tell you to go find that white oak, and basically your job is done. The thing is when one white oak is dropping, often many many white oaks are dropping. When the percimons are ripe in your region, they are ripe everywhere. It's not enough to know that some mass type event is happening because that's the lowest hanging fruit here.

Get it. But we like to rank that as maybe the number one factor in arrowing a bit buck on a mass pattern. But the best mass pattern is the one that plays off a resource scarcity in real cover. Let me give you a real world example. I have a little spot over there in Wisconsin that has about six acres of oak trees and what you could describe as just a beautiful little chunk of woods. It looks perfect,

and there are several giant oak trees in there. When the oak trees are dropping heavy like they were last year, the deer in there pretty thick. But you know what they weren't in there in daylight, a whole lot because that patch of oaks is within a long arrow shot distance of a neighbor's destination food plot. As far as I can tell, those neighbors only hunt that food plot,

and they hunt it a lot. It's too busy in there, and so those giant oaks that rain down those acorns, you know, they also shade out the understory, and they look like they should be the draw. It should be easy, and you might make the mistake of walking through there and seeing all those giant acorns on the ground and tons of deer poop scared ed it around and assume that it's done, it's all figured out. But when you

sit there on stand you might very well blank. It's almost the right setup, but it's missing the good cover. This is mistake hunters make a lot, and it has plenty to do with the fact that we just like setting up where we can see far and wide. Even though you could hunt those oaks that still very much be in the woods, you're not really in the kind of woods that a lot of pressure deer are going

to use during daylight. And it would be a big ask to the deer gods to see a really good buck there during the hours when you can legally shoot him. What I figured out last year, way too late, i might add, is that some of the oak trees in

that spot grow right next to the swamp. In fact, it was a group of tom turkeys that clued me into this pattern, if I'm being totally honest, they were scratching away in there when I went in to figure out what I was missing, and I realized that where the swamp edge butts up to the high ground, you know where the oaks are, you kind of have a special situation. You have a soft edge that deer naturally love.

But that soft edge is also a buffer between woods that is awful open and an alder and willow choke swamp that is a nightmare to get through. It's perfect bedding cover, security cover, ideal escape cover. So the deer they want to eat acorns in daylight, but don't want to put themselves in a position to get killed by the very predictable hunters in the area. They feed those

edges a lot. Now I have to say this. I set up some cameras this summer to try to dial in this pattern and just get a better idea when the big boys will start using those spots, and I literally cannot buy a deer picture in there. Once in a while, when a storm rolls through, I'll get some doze munching along there, But the bucks are nowhere to be found. But neither are most of the acorns. That I was counting on those trees dropped heavy, heavy last year,

and they are being awful, stingy this year. This is a point that matters a lot, and I want to talk about it. Masked patterns, they're like a moving target. They might be amazing this year in a certain spot and terrible the next, and the tree you killed on a year ago might not draw a single visitor this fall. There's a little bit of hunting on memories that can happen with masts, but mostly you better forget that and

figure out what's going on now. Now. There are two ways to looking at how to find the right mass pattern and how to hunt it. The first is if it's an individual tree thing. This seems to happen more with soft mass in my experience, but certainly can with hard masks too. It's just that most of us aren't hunting an apple orchard or a whole section of percymon trees. Those types of trees often exist as a solo option

or in a small cluster. Oak trees and other hard mass trees are often different, not always, but often When you're looking to get on a single tree, particularly one deep in the cover where the deer will visit in daylight. You're pretty much going to have to go in and scout. There's no way around it. If you don't see it in person, and by that I mean the sign under the tree, then you probably won't find it unless you

get lucky. Now, before I talk about this other style, I'll say this, it's not just enough to find that perfect apple tree that's back in the cover and littered with deer droppings underneath it. You have to look and see how much food is left. Most of the apples are on the ground or have already been carried away into digestive tracks of deer. You might catch the tail end of the activity on that tree, or it might already be over. Now, if it's absolutely loaded with fruit,

that's a different story. It's probably time to call it and stick to work and make it happen. There. A good way to understand this is to drop a camera in a spot with a single, soft mass producing tree. When I do this, I'm often amazed at how predictable some of the deer are. They'll swing through in the morning or the evening and try to see if anything has fallen overnight or throughout the day, and they can be like clockwork, and I'll tell you something else here.

If you are the kind of hunter who likes shooting does or little bucks, this is a tough situation to beat. But ture box are a different story because they just don't seem to be as predictable on situations where you might have one soft mass tree somewhere, but some of the other deer can be real predictable on that and

that could be pretty dang fun. But what if you're not in a position to throw a camera up and pattern some soft mass munchers, and instead you have ridges and ridges of oak trees to work with, any of which could be the right tree for the week. Scouting sign is good, but not as good as hunting and watching. Here's what I like to do. Sneak in, set up on the fringe of the mass trees with the wind in my favor, even if there are ten or fifteen

acres or more stretched out along the same ridge. I'll start out cautious on the outside where the access is easier. This is generally an evening situation first, but I really really like to hunt mast in the morning, especially in the first couple weeks of the season. I feel like this is just something that gets ignored over easier to identify food sources, and the reality is that fewer hunters go into the woods for morning sits in the early

season than they do in the evenings. Some of my better bucks in the last ten years that I've killed and more that I've just seen, have been really late in the morning on a mass pattern in the woods. So what I like to do is slip in and play it relatively safe. First, I set up maybe fifty percent to kill and fifty percent to watch. A spot really gets my attention if I think I can get back in there for a morning sit the following morning

after I do my evening sit. I use the tracker feature on on X a lot for this, and it's kind of been a game changer for me because it allows me to walk right back to whatever tree I picked in the daylight the day before. A lot of hunters won't do that because they think they'll make too much noise or too much disturbance to that. I say, try to find a way to go in slow, make yourself sound like a deer, and give yourself a lot of time to get the way early. Then pay attention.

One thing that I've come to realize about watching deer is that if I see some dose or little bucks enter in alfalfa field or some other destination food source, it doesn't really give me much confidence that a much bigger deer will do that the following night or sometime within the week. That's different than observing a mass pattern where there are plenty of options for the deer. Every sighting is important, and I mean that I glass a lot in these situations and try to see exactly what

the deer are doing. Are they swinging through quickly and moving off? Do they circle the tree a few times? Do they bounce around the ridge multiple times? Or just hone in on one spot below one tree and sit there. Is there maybe a gully or something below the ridge that might funnel tons of dropped acorns to the same spot. It's not enough to just see deer visit a tree, watch them, even the spikes you don't care to shoot, because they'll tell you how other deer will use that

exactly situation. My general rule, if I think I have enough info from an evening and morning sit is to move in and go for broke. I don't know why this is, but I just often enough will observe some deer feeding on a mass pattern, and when I hunt it, I'll encounter a variety of deer feeding the same way, and sometimes they are just good bucks. The inclination here for a lot of hunters might be to drop a camera to find the big ones and pattern them, but

you really don't have that much time. In at least many of these situations. You also might be off by a single tree, and that might change the entire direction of your recon and usually not for the better. Now, I'm not saying a camera or three can't help you get dialed in here, especially if you're a weekend hunter who has to leave the woods for five days to do stupid work stuff. That's better than not using a camera by far. But don't not hunt because of what

your camera shows. If that makes sense. If it shows good movement, you're onto them. If it doesn't, assume they are close and you just aren't getting the full picture of what's going on there. Scout and hunt and observe. If you have no faith this will produce a big buck. Because you're not confident of this style, go try to

kill a dough. While you're doing it. You'll learn a lot and might put some meat in the freezer, or you might just see a good one on the move well into daylight when he's supposed to be tucked deep in a swamp, betting away the hours when the sun is shining. The key is just to be cautious, but get on it now and actively try to figure out how to make masts work for you within the next week or two or three, because if you miss the window, it'll close for good and it'll be time to start over.

Think about that as we get into the season here, and think about coming back next week because I'm going to talk about the shots we should take and the ones we probably shouldn't. That's it for this episode. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wirre to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. I know you're all geeked up and ready to go out there, but maybe you need a little more content to get

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