Ep. 832: Foundations - Listen Up to Kill More Bucks

I mean, I really love September hunting, probably more than a lot of folks, and in some ways more than even November hunting, which might sound crazy, but it's when it gets into October, especially mid October, where things just change in the woods. Now, I'm not talking about the lull and hunting scrapes, or the pre rut and all the anticipation that brings, talking about how different it is to sit in the woods and listen and all the little dopamine dumps you can get just by being there

and paying attention. Waves are weird now, I'm not talking about ocean waves here, although I guess in a way I kind of am. Physicists and scientists in general have figured out quite a bit about how much in the universe exists in some kind of wave form. Now, light is an easy one. Well, I guess it's easy because we kind of all know that light exists in waves, because we've all been taught that at some point or another. This was first hypothesized in sixteen seventy eight and later

proven to be right. Now, that makes me wonder if society truly collapsed and we lost all of our previous knowledge and had to start from scratch, how long would it be before we figured that out again? How did anyone figure out that to begin with? Now, I've read about it quite a bit, and I don't really understand it at all. But light does exist in waves, and we can measure those waves with the right tools and figure out how long ago that light started its journey.

We can also use that to confirm that everything in the universe is moving away from our local cluster of galaxies real fast in literally every direction we look, which indicates we are in the middle of a long explosion. Gravity gives off waves too, which is a way harder thing for my smooth brain to grasp than waves of light. Sound moves, obviously, but unlike light and gravity, sound can't travel through a vacuum. Sound needs a medium through which

to propagate itself. This was something I had to explain to my daughters recently when we watched the nineteen ninety campy horror flick called Tremors, which stars Kevin Bacon and someone who I hate as an actress, Reba McIntyre. Now I don't hate Reba's music. I don't really like it,

but I don't hate it. And maybe this is kind of a weird take, but my wife and kids are into sitcoms from like twenty twenty five years ago, and one of the shows they watch a lot is Riba, and it is so terrible that it makes me want to jump in front of a city bus. It's so cheesy it makes Full House seem like a guy a

Ritchie film. Anyway, the premise of Tremors is that there is a tiny town in Nevada called Perfection, and that's about as bleak as it gets, with just fourteen full time residents and not a whole lot of opportunity to

go around. What makes it worse is that somehow four giant sandworm creatures who really like eating sheep horses and surprise, surprise, people starts hunting the residents, as well as a smoking hot transplant who just happens to be a seismologist and who also, as was the fashion at the time with women in these kind of films, managed to get into a situation where she had to take her pants off

to avoid getting caught by one of the bad worm guys. Now, I don't want to spoil this for you, but it has been out for thirty four years, so I don't know what to say about that. I think the status limitations is out on spoiler alerts for the movie Tremors, But if you suddenly think you want to watch it for the first time, I'll maybe fast forward here for

a minute or so. Now. After finding a dude dead of exposure on a tower, and another dude dead in the sheep pen, and another two dudes dead who are working on some road construction in a very not realistic scene, the two main characters of Tremors start to piece together that something is wrong. Then they meet up with a seismologist and figure out the worms haunt by vibrations in the soil. After quite a few minor characters end up getting chomped on, they eventually use this hunting technique to

their advantage. It may be wonder if one of the writers of the film was maybe a woodcock hunter, since those little migrators have evolved a specialized beak that they poke into the ground to find worms through the worms vibrations. As if maybe some woodcock hunter was like, hmm, what if the worms started hunting the timberdoodles and then bam, a script is born and Kevin Bacon's agent is on

the phone or something like that. Sound moves pretty fast, about seven hundred and forty one miles per hour, and if you go faster than that with a bullet or a fighter jet, you can make your own sonic boom.

In the case of planes, this is created when the aircraft pushes pressure waves in front of it until the speed of the aircraft increases enough to compress the sound waves to the point where they can't get out of each other's way, and they merge into one single shock wave, which moves at the speed of sound and is very very loud. I think we take sound for granted as

people in general, but also as hunters. Sure we love music and the sounds of our kids' voices, and not so much our wife's snoring, which she said she doesn't do, but you actually sometimes record it on your phone so she can't deny it, and yet she still does anyway, And you're like, are you serious with this right now? Sound, as whitetail hunters is something we understand and something we don't.

We think of the sounds we make, you know, walking in setting our stands and accidentally banging a climbing stick on a metal carabiner, you know, stepping on a dry stick and making the cracking sound that only indicates there is a big animal on the move. We think about how to make a grunt or tickle the rattle bag a little. We think about the sound of a buck walking through the october leaves, which might be the best

sound of all. But there is a soundscape to the whole thing that we should pay attention to and enjoy. There was a somewhat controversial book published in nineteen sixty two by Rachel Carson called Silent Spring. In it, she makes the case that our indiscriminate use of DDT as a pesticide, then was going to kill off the songbirds and frogs and other creatures we definitely don't want to kill off. To highlight what this would be like, she named her book what she did, and it helped usher

in a better era for the environment. The idea of a silent spring is wildly abstract, but subtly terrifying. I'm old enough to remember the scare around form frogs, which was a big concern when I was in high school. Frogs, like they're cooler and harder to find little cousins. Salamanders are keynote species to pay attention to for the first

signs that an ecosystem might be collapsing. They are also such a part of the soundscape through the spring and the fall that it would be hard to imagine life without that auditory gift. One of my buddies listens for frogs when he scouts the mountains because they will betray a small water hole or an elk wallow in a way that nothing else will. Ever since he told me that trick, I think about it when I'm spring or

summer scouting too. The frogs in the deer woods can tell you a lot about where an october buck might get a drink. There's also the reality of songbirds out there and squirrels. I sat a spot recently here in Minnesota that was squirrel central, and what made it just a bit worse but also a hell of a lot more exciting, was that a late summer storm up here knocked a bunch of trees over. Its killed some trees that are still kind of standing, and from the pond at the stand I was on is one of those

dying trees with dried leaves on it. For whatever reason, the squirrels in the blue jays love that tree, and they sound an awful lot like a deer shuffling around for acorns when they're screwing around in there. The problem is that they make that sound all day long in that tree, and after a while it's sort of a boy who Cried buck scenario where you just ignore it. That's what I did, and it nearly cost me a

dough one night. We are good at blocking out noise, and if you don't believe that, go get yourself married and have some kids. Children make noise to make noise, and somehow it conditions us to eventually just tune some stuff out. It's not that we don't want to listen, it's that if we do, we will never have a coherent thought again and could possibly go postal after a while. There's also nothing quite like you know when you're in the woods. It just starts to get late and the

animals start moving. Hearing the chickadees start to fly through, or a rough grouse start to drum away in the distance. You know, the squirrels and the chipmunks playing grab ass as they scuffle around for breakfast. Hearing woodpeckers, especially the gangly oversized pilliated woodpeckers with their sweet red mohawks that my daughters loved to see when we're in Wisconsin. We call them pecilated pilliwookers, a habit that I picked up from my dad when I was their age, and for

some reason it just stuck. I also can't see one or hear one without thinking about. A woman in a kayak I had a previous conversation with maybe twenty five years ago, while I was flipping some flooded trees for large mouth as she paddled by. When I asked her how it was going, she explained to me all of the birds she had seen, and she punctuated it by saying she had seen a pilated woodpecker. And she seemed much more educated than me. So I remember thinking, have

we been saying it wrong all this time? Am I still saying it wrong? The sounds of the woods aren't nice just because they provide an auditory landscape in the places we love to be. They can tell us when a deer is coming. Now by this, I don't just mean the hoofs and the leaves either, that stick snap that we hate making. Is there a better sound to hear when you're settled in and it's twenty minutes before dark? What about the sounds other animals make when they encounter

a deer. It doesn't happen too often in my experience, but every once in a while, a deer will just piss off a squirrel with its presence. Maybe this is surprised the bushy tails a little bit, and then they

get scolded. I don't know, but there are so many times when squirrels and deers seem to live in a totally harmonious way, but once in a while they get sideways with each other, and a squirrel will bark rapidly out of nowhere, just telling you that a deer is on its way, and it's not just a red tailed hawk up in a tree or a coyote or something that got their alarm. Deer sound different than most animals,

but most animals also can sound like a deer. If you haven't had a skunk or a possum or a porcupine or some other critter trick you into grabbing your bow and attaching your release to your d loop, you haven't hunted very long. The Venn diagram of deer noises and other animal noises overlaps, maybe only by like twenty percent, but that twenty percent makes hunting way more fun. If you hear something coming and you believe it's a deer and it is, you get a huge surprise to the upside.

If you hear something coming and you believe it might be a deer but it's not a deer and it turns out to be a trash bandit or whatever, you still got the anticipation of thinking a deer might be coming, and you got to watch a raccoon chirp his way through the woods while checking stuff out bandit style. The sounds we actually hear in the woods are often different from the sounds we imagine. I think about this with

buck fights a lot. I've only seen a handful of good, real buckfights, and I can say that every one of them was way louder than I expected. You know, not from the perspective of antlers smashing and crashing together because they aren't big horned sheep, but from the perspective of two big animals pushing each other around and essentially trying to kill each other. There is a whole soundtrack to a buck fight that we almost never actually make when

we rattle. I honestly think this is why rattling is such a low odds deal for most of us. Even if a buck isn't smart enough to say that the buck fight he's hearing doesn't have enough other sounds to go with it, so you know he's not going to check it out. Intuitively, they seem to know what sounds natural and what doesn't. The first buck I ever witnessed involved two two year olds going at it in mid October and southeastern Minnesota. They met up in a valley

below me, and they settled a feisty dispute. They made so much noise that I watched seven other deer approach from different directions. Some of them ran in to watch it all go down. That was one of those lessons that the deer taught me that no amount of magazine articles or hunting shows could Another time, I watched two bucks fight in the Little Missouri River out in North Dakota, and the amount of splashing and river rocks crashing against one another was wild. It was like twenty times louder

than I've ever rattled in my life. But that was the real thing. And when I do it, it's not I like to sit water a lot. And you know what else betrays approaching deer. You know, pretty often morning doves in the mornings. In the evenings, doves are big fans and landing on the edges of ponds and rivers where they like to hang out right at water level, where almost always anything that approaches the pond or the

river will be above them. And they are skittish. And there's a difference between one or two doves flying off on their own volition, or however many doves are there, all spooking at one time from a perceived threat. The difference in those two sounds is probably very minimal, But if you spend a lot of time sitting over water holes, you learn real quickly to pay attention when you hear one and not the other. There are other sounds that can make a whole season or deflate you in an

instant on a sit. In the latter category, an old dough snorting away will do it pretty handily, especially if you didn't know she was there. I mean, is there anything worse than stretching in your stand or reaching into your pack and hearing the thump of hoofs and then ten seconds later a dough snorting her head off. Now, the opposite sound of that is a buck grunt. When you're sitting quietly on stand and not much is happening and you hear a grunt, it's an adrenaline rush that

just can't quite be explained. The only thing that tops it is a buck roar, which I've only heard once, but it was incredible and it got my attention the way very few sounds in the woods ever have. I cannot look at that deer's rack on my wall and not think about hearing that roar crash through the woods before I caught sight of him, and he did it again. If Bucks had a bigger tendency to do that, we'd pay non resident ELK prices for deer all day long.

Most of us would lose our private spots to hunt if we didn't own them. Those deer would be in such high demand or higher demand, I should say, which is really saying something. There's the sound of a deer crashing after you shoot it kind of like the death moon from a bear. You know what happened, and you believe what happened, but until you walk up on it,

you just don't know. You know, there's the reality that it always sounds like whoever you're hunting with walks much louder than you, You know, with all the grace of a drunken elephant and a potato chip factory. They don't. But hunting partners are kind of like spouses. It can get real easy to spot the flaws, even if they are a minor and exactly the same flaws we have. I think about sound a lot, because I think about

being addicted to my phone a lot. And while it's easy to sit and stare at a screen until a deer shows up, I sometimes find myself realizing that I don't hear what's going on when I'm looking at another one of Mark's fly fishing posts, or going down a rabbit hole on Reddit about UFO disclosure, or something you can be in the moment in the environment you're in, or pay attention to the NonStop boredom fighter machines we

carry around. But it's hard to do both. But to be a good hunter, generally, it's to be an astute listener. And that's not some bullshit a terrible poet might say. It's true, and it's something you should think about when you're out there. Listen to the woods, not just for the sound of a deer walking in, but for what the woods sound like when the deer aren't walking in too.

If you pay attention, you'll notice that there are critters that can tell you what's going on and what's coming down the trail, and when it's just time for everybody to get a snack before the lights go out and the day shift gives way to night shift and a

whole different soundscape emerges. It's honestly one of the best parts about being a hunter, because there is something you'll hear, or a lot of things you'll hear that most folks just won't, and it's something that humans have been listening to for a long long time, and for all we know, might be something we absolutely need to hear here, even if the reasons for that are abstract and impossible to put in words. Now, do you know what else you

should try to listen to this podcast next week? Because I'm going to talk about how to hunt the pre rut and why it might be the best time for you to kill a buck, even though most folks will say that it's definitely not. That's it for the show. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast. We know you're in the heart of deer season here, you're driving all over, you're you know, putting in a little time in the office when you can,

and you're probably consuming some hunting content. If you want to consume hunting content, you want to see more of it. Read some articles, find some recipes, maybe watch some you know, some films to get you pumped up. Whatever the meat eater dot Com has you covered. We have so much content, not only whitetail stuff, but fishing, hunting, Western big game, upland stuff, caliber battles, whatever you name it. You can go find it there, and you can kill a lot

of time on your boss's dime doing that. As always, thank you so much for listening and for all your support here. Truly appreciate it. We would be nothing without the audience, so thank you so much for checking in and being loyal to us and giving us your support. We appreciate it so much