Ep. 828: Foundations - Why the Whitetail Really is the King of Big Game Animals

really is. They also know that the reason they hunt those Western critters is because they are generally a heck of a lot easier to kill that are pressured white tail, although it probably would be a little bit tough to get them to admit at that. But before I get into this, I got to do one last plug for the white Tail Weeks sale. Now I'm gonna be done with it, trust me, This thing ends the night of October fifth, so you're running out of time to do

some shopping. This sale is different than anything we've done before because if you spend two hundred bucks, you get fifty bucks taken right off the top. Spend four hundred, you save one hundred bucks. Keep on going to eight hundred dollars plus and you can save up to two hundred bucks off your order. That's on everything new, everything old, whatever. Go to first light dot com and check it out. Now,

let's get out of this episode. A couple of weeks ago, I pulled it to the driveway of a property near my house. The owner was outside by his garage getting his hunting gear ready, and it was pushing eighty degrees

out super sunny. We had already hung a couple of stands and set a few blinds out his twenty five acres, so he was off to sit a stand that his positioned just perfectly to shoot any deer that walks into an oversized apple tree to see if there's any goodies on the ground, a habit that we've seen quite a few little Bucks take on almost like with clockwork regularity, which is, you know, the kind of deer he was looking for because he's never arrowed one before, so those

predictable a little year and a half holds are definitely on his menu. I was headed into a small pond with a stand on my back. Now earlier this summer, when we were doing some setup work, I had put sticks in a life line up, but the stand I brought just wouldn't work for the tree, so I had to finish that one before I could sit. But I was excited because it was hot. The deer had only been hunted one time by the landowner, and our standards

were pretty low. And as we walked in and we're just about to split up to go our separate ways, we saw a deer go bounding off through the underbrush. It was bedded, I don't know, probably not fifteen yards from my stand tree. Now. My buddy thought that was a bad sign, but I didn't. I figured if I could get my stand up quickly and quietly enough, i'd

see that deer come ghosting back through eventually. That's not how I used to feel about bumping deer, and it doesn't always work that way, but it happens often enough to me now where I don't get super frustrated by spooking one. As long as I do it while i'm walking in, it's a different story. Getting winded from stand or having one spot you while you're trying to draw on your stand A totally different deal there. So I got that stand, hung as quietly as I could, and

I settled in. An hour later, I caught movement through the brush and realized there was a deer awful close to me. It was a lone dove on and after a few minutes of looking for acorns, she walked a little bit closer to my stand and bedded down. She couldn't have been much more than about ten yards away, but there were some grape vines in one pine tree between us. For a while, the sun was hitting the forest floor where she was just right, so I could

see her ears flicking occasionally. But the second that the sun dipped low enough to no longer shine on her spot, it was like she disappeared completely. It's always amazing not only how good their camouflage is for a variety of different environments, but how easily they can just disappear simply by not moving. Now, when she got up, she wandered off straight away from me, and I realized that even if I had wanted to shoot her, I never had a single opportunity, even though she was top pin close

for over two hours. It was a good reminder of how often we say, well, I could have killed that deer, but you never really know, and they actually have to draw, aim and execute a shot on it. It was also a good reminder of how their primary means of staying not eaten by stuff is to sit real still and let the danger pass. We think of them mostly as runners when they get close to a threat, or when a threat gets close to them, I guess, but the default

setting to survive is to sit tight and observe. This is prey behavior one oh one type of stuff, and for the white tail almost undoubtedly stems from their long history as one of the primary food sources for a litany of predators. And while we think about how you know a big threat wolves are these days, or maybe coyotes and certainly bears when it comes to fawns, we don't really understand how good they are at not getting eaten.

It's common to hear hunters say, you know, the wolves killed all the deer where I hunt, but just because you don't see them doesn't mean they aren't there. Now. Do wolves kill deer, You bet, you're happy ass they do. They're good at it. But it's also pretty easy to understand that the prevalence of wolves will drastically change deer behavior, and it's not likely to make them walk around a

lot more. It's also important to acknowledge that white tails have been avoiding predators for at least a couple of million years, or at least the white tail ancestors were, which is kind of saying the same thing. I mean, without them, there is no modern deer, and they've been on the landscape a long time. Some of the fossils that we found tell us this. They have been found in places like Florida, and they date back to at least two million years. Now, imagine what Florida look like

two million years ago. You probably can't. In fact, that's one of the problems we have with ourselves is that we live in a world of recency bias. Because how our brains are wired. We can't fathom the white tail five hundred years ago, much less back when they literally had to dodge saber toothed cats or a version of jaguars that are long gone, or the American cheetah that is also long gone, or a couple of lion and bear species that would have dwarfed the biggest specimens we

have today. Imagine that for a second, a bear so big that it would be able to kind of just swat a grizzly out of the way like you would show away a mosquito if you're paying attention. That means that all of those apex predators, they had their moment in the spotlight, and then like ninety nine percent of the species of life to ever exist on Earth, eventually dwindled down to an unsustainable number, and with that decline

collapsed into extinction. The only record of them preserved in the Earth and in the epigenetic behavior traits of game animals that made it through the extinction gauntlet to this point. The white tail lives in much of the US and much of Canada, and the little desert dwellers that don't weigh much more than a Michigan fawn in October. They inhabit the southwest deserts all the way down into Old Mexico.

The white tails kind of like the coyote in that where it started as interesting but not nearly as interesting as where it has gone as a species and where it might be going. You can find white tails in Cuba, Finland, Peru, and even in New Zealand, where there is a decent

population in a couple of places. Thanks to Teddy Roosevelt, who at one point loaded up a boat with almost two dozen and shipped them some twelve thousand miles, most of those deers survived, and today they can be found in pretty good numbers there, not to mention that they run in the spring and give birth in the fall. A lot of species of plants, insects, and animals have names that are derivative of some feature they have. Take the housefly, for example, it's an insect that likes to

come into your house and fly around. Didn't take much to name that one, I guess. Or take the butterfly, which is an insect that Mark Kenyon thinks about us he's going to sleep. You know, it's also one that flies around. But where did the butter part come from? Well, maybe from a Dutch word I can't pronounce that means

butter shit because butterflies have colorful extrement. Or it could be because some of those crazy Germans back in the day thought butterflies stole milk and butter so who really knows. The white tail gets its name in a similar fashion, where the interdigital glands on their back hoofs have a small white groove on them that is visible only in the infrared. Just kidding, it's because their tails are white, duh.

Their tails are bigger than the tails on a lot of the deer species, and this is because they are signaling device. The white tail likes to live in thick habitat, and it's a somewhat social critter. A deer fleeing in one direction can signal to other deer that you better get your asses in gear and head this way. But they also use their tails to caution others if they

suspect some ch connery as a foot. This is kind of like if you were sneaking through an abandoned insane asylum with your friends, and you round it a corner in a dark and dusty hallway, and at the far end you saw someone cloaked in black just standing there. You might put your hand up in such a way that says, we better stop for a second and evaluate

this development. This would most likely be followed by a Scooby Doo and Shaggy moment where you get the hell out of there, and get the hell out of there deer can. They can clock in at thirty miles per hour for short periods of time, which is all the time you really need if you can run that fast. And they can and jump too. The dough one of my daughters shot in September cleared a hedgerow with ease

right after the shot. And that's a hedgerow that I can't see over, and I stand six feet two inches tall. They've been known to clear fences much taller than that, which is pretty incredible. The white tail as a communication machine too, and this goes way beyond their oversized bright white tail lights. They can secrete sense from a pile of different glands in their bodies, and the amount of information that they can disseminate and absorb from those scents

would probably blow our minds. It's probably not unlike a fairly extensive vocabulary that a lot of humans have, where we can stream together words in a litany of ways to convey pretty much anything we want to convey. They do that, and just like us, they mix in some vocal communication while we generally think of deer as mostly quiet, because if you can communicate with body language and scent, you don't really need to make much noise and draw

some predators attention. But they do make some noise, and it's cool as hell to hear a dough bleat to her fawn, or a buck grunt with every step in November, or if you're really lucky, hear a hyped up bucks Norway's at a rival. White tails live in so many different environments that is pretty amazing when you think about it. They are big woods dwellers who don't need an ounce of agriculture babysitting to survive just fine, although they do

thrive where egg is heavy, as we all know. They can live in the suburbs while dodging cars and coyotes, or they can live whereas about as remote as it gets. They love river bottoms, but will spend time in the foothills of the mountains in certain spots. There is no shortage of them in the swamps some of the deserts, and there also seems to be no holding them back.

But we did hold them back to the point where about the time we were trying a failed experiment called prohibition, the deer population had sunk to around thirty thousand animals. Through a lot of effort and game management, we have a lot more deer than that today. In fact, I was thinking about this while hunting with my daughters recently.

You know, we were in north central Wisconsin. In the course of three days, we saw three deer, two of which are now in our freezer thanks to a pair of good shots from a couple of twelve year old girls. I told my daughters that when I started hunting, it was a big goal of mine and my dad's to just get one deer a season, just one in the whole season. And there were a hell of a lot of seasons where we didn't do that. I didn't start hunting when, you know, seeing a deer was a newsworthy

event like it was back in the sixties. But I did start when there weren't nearly as many deer to see as there are now. It's amazing how available white tails are to this day. They can live a long time too. While we tend to cap our thoughts on white tail age right around that maybe I don't know, six and a half to eight and a half year old timeframe. They can live a hell of a lot longer than that. In fact, I think a lot of

them do. We just don't know it. The oldest deer a doe who made it to an age where she could illegally drink in the US, although just barely reach twenty two years, imagine the survival instincts it takes to be a wild deer with over two decades under your belt. Part of the reason they can get this old is that they are, unlike one of my daughters who drives me absolutely crazy, not picky eaters. There is no version of deer that only eats plain spaghetti and chicken tenders

for ninety percent of its meals. It is often reported that whitetails willingly numb on at least six hundred different plants, and they also eat fruit, mushrooms, and if you could actually figure out the truth, probably a hell of a lot more stuff than we give them credit for. They have a four chambered stomach, which allows them to have such a diverse diet. It also allows them to eat a lot pretty quickly and then lay down in safety

to hork up their meal and chew on it again. Sometimes, like in the case of that fond that betted by me in September, you can hear them coughing, and while that might just be from getting a little bit of dandelion fuzz caught in their throats, sometimes it's them working on their next stage of digestion. While we think of them as cute herbivores that live solely off of plants,

that's just not entirely the case. There are videos out there of deer walking down baby birds and gnomming on them, and videos of them eating eggs right out of a bird's nest. In twenty seventeen, a white tail was observed eating a human corpse on a Texas body farm, which is a sentence you don't think you'll get to write or say, ever, but here we are. Their coats change with the seasons. This is one of the reasons deer looks so mangy and disheveled when you see them in

the spring. They are going from heavy winter coats to light summer coats. In late August and early September throughout much of their range, they put away the light windbreaker and they don their heavy park is again. Now, while it seems simple enough, the reason their winter coats are

heavier is not solely because longer hair is warmer. It also allows more air to be trapped next to the skin, which creates an insulating layer, kind of like how when you're duck hunting and you get water in your waiters. It's super duper cold at first, but after a while it's kind of nice and warm. If you ever see a deer in truly cold temperatures and by that I mean like twenty below for extended periods of time, you'll

see something else. They look kind of like puffballs. The first time I saw this, I was sitting behind a tree in late December in Minnesota, overlooking a drainage that was not only covered with scouring rush horsetail, you know, a reedy plant that stays green all winter long, but also a pile of deer trails. It was a little honey hole I found in the late season on some public land down by Lanesboro, Minnesota, and I thought I was going to get my chance, and then I did.

The only deer that walked in then was a fawn, and she looked like a threatned porcupine. Her coat was all puffed out against the cold, and it was cold, and it's also with great shame, uh, a little bit shame anyway, that I'll admit that teenage Tony whiffed on that buzzer beater deer at a distance of really really close. That strategy for surviving the cold is rad because we have the same thing going on with our goosebumps that

show up and we get chilly. Although most of us aren't covered with a ton of hair these days, except for my old college roommate Nolan, who definitely looks like he got some strong Neanderthal jens. It's an evolutionary holdover from a time when we lived a life closer to wild whitetails than modern humans, and you know, back when we couldn't just throw on a coat or turn up

a thermostat. There's a lot to love about the white tail, and there's a lot to understand about why when they get a little hunting pressure from us, they get real hard to kill in a hurry. Perhaps that's the coolest thing about them. We have Selkam ground blinds, tower blinds, ozonics units on X real time weather information clothing to keep us warm and dry in every condition. We can leave food out for them in some places and create

food sources for them and others. We can manipulate the land to influence their travel, We can create a water source, we can give them a utopia, and we have so many advantages it's almost unreal. And yet most of us can't kill them. With a high level of consistency. They are still beating the best predators in the game, at least to the point where their numbers are still pretty

much going north. That's absolutely unbelievable, especially when you consider that they can thrive in the face of not only our attempts to put them in the freezer, but EHD and CWD and horrible winners and wolf packs and millions of cars traveling down roads that bisect their home ranges and hit them with enough frequency where it kind of sucks. They're just cool as hell, and we are so dang lucky to have them to hunt. We truly are, And

I want every listener to think about that. The whitetail is the most available and awesome game animal out there, and if we behave ourselves, we can keep it that way and make sure our kids and grandkids have a chance to hunt them too. So let's do that, and let's all come back next week. Because I'm going to talk about thermal hubs, weird wins, and how you need to learn individual stand sites through experience so you know

when to hunt them. 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 I mentioned in the intro here, the white Tail Week sale is about to end in a couple of days here on October fifth, the night of October fifth, so go over to first Light dot com if you want to get some new gear and save a bunch of money. And as always,

thank you so much for listening. We truly appreciate it here at meet eat, or whether you're checking out an article at the Mediator dot com, or you're listening to Clay's Bear Grease podcast or watching a video, whatever, we truly appreciate it. So thank you for that