Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about the lockdown phase of the rut and how you should probably hunt it.
It always happens, you know, just like that.
You wait for the pre rut and it hits, then the chase phase happens.
Boom, it's just gone.
Then you're stuck in the later innings of the rut where we all know the deer are going to go totally boom.
Or bust on us.
The lockdown phase it's not very well understood. It's a great reason to not hunt, and it's a lot of things. It's also maybe your best chance to kill a giant, or at least a pretty good one. That might seem like thin gruel to live on. But hear me out, because I'm going to talk about how to hunt this phase right now. I have a buddy named Scott, and he's the kind of guy who just gets stuff done. If you listened a few weeks ago, I talked about having to move a giant player piano for him.
It was not fun.
It was insanely heavy and awkward, and the kind of thing you only do for a good friend, or if it's your job and someone is paying you well for it. Now, I'm envious of Scott for many reasons. He just gets shit done. He's always doing something, rebuilding classic cars, stuff like that. He never stops. It's maddening, honestly, because I often just want to stop. I'm tired all the time, and I bet a lot of you are, especially those of you who are in the trenches with your job
and kids in life. I bet a lot of you feel the same way. It's hard to find the motivation to fix the landscaping blocks out front, even when the old blonde bombshell makes it clear she would really, really appreciate it in a wonderful, wifey kind of way. Maybe I'm just a natural procrastinator, but I don't know. I've lived under the specter of a couple hundred deadlines a year for a long time. I guess you don't do that forever in a day if you always put stuff off.
But I still feel like I'm always just procrastinating, and I feel it when I'm hunting, and there is no greater time when that weighs on me than when we go from the bonker's part of the rut to the part of the rut that just doesn't hum at the same frequency. You know what I'm talking about, the lockdown For the first timers here, the lockdown is a phase of the rut when a bulk of the does are supposed to go into estrs and then they just kind of bed down with a big fella for about forty
eight to seventy two hours. This absolutely happens. It's real. It's also, like so many things in deer hunting, not totally cut and dry. I'm gonna get to that in a second. But you know what, I believe the key to the lockdown period is, I tell you, it's rattling and grunting and decoying and snort wheezing all kind of rolled into one sit. It's super exciting. It's NonStop theater to trick a buck into running in so you can
shoot them. Just kidding, It's not even close. It's a fricking waiting game, A boring ass waiting game all deer hunting is, my friends, I know that sucks, but you have to understand that it is the secret sauce to a lot of successful hunting. Of course, you have to put yourself around deer first, but honestly, that's part of the problem. The waiting game is a hell of a lot easier when you believe you're waiting on an actual
buck to come down the trail. A lot of people don't have a very good idea how to put themselves around deer right now, and that's a problem. If you're sitting old stand by setups and you're crossing your fingers like a lot of the gun hunting crowd tends to do, it's very hard to wait a good one out. You know you're not really in the game as much as you should be, and the effort will reflect that. Now.
I'm not shitting on anyone here either. I do this all of the time.
Hence the reason I'm so jealous of my buddy Scott for his drive to just keep doing the work. But how do you remedy this and how do you get yourself into a position to sit tight and kill one eventually? Well, you got to forget the crazy days where they are running all over the landscape. The pre rut in the chase phase is like a bunch of conscripts in a war who have very little training and no combat experience.
Some hunker down, some go full Leroy Jenkins and blitz across the landscape, and generally they create ordered chaos by the lockdown, though those conscripts are gone. It's a special forces mission, It's a targeted approach. Those dear travel with intention, with efficiency. The Bucks have wasted enough extra calories chasing doze already, and now they are looking for the ones who are left, who will go for a long weekend with them to some nice thicket and just get a
little freaky. What does this mean for you, Well, it means the best pinch points and the best funnels. You know, those traps you believe in, They are where you need to be. WHI just simple, But it's not just that you need to check your notes. Bucks crews with the wind not necessarily in their face, but definitely in their favor. I doubt they think about it. They just react, but that stuff matters. So if you sat a certain funnel the first week of November during a south wind and
didn't see much, forget it. If the wind is supposed to be out of the south during the lockdown, figure out not only the high odd spots, but the best conditions to spend your time there. This is not something you can figure out by reading one of Mark's many many Instagram posts. It's something you have to learn by being there. A good way to reinforce this and figure it out better is to run trail cameras on those
terrain traps. I've talked about this a whole bunch with that Wisconsin spot where I'm hoping to kill a big one while you're listening to this, because I'm about ready to go over there and find out. But right now, I feel like that spot is just kind of not right. The wind hasn't been right there, and the deer haven't been moving through there. That's something I think we miss about cameras, and I see a lot of guys doing
this in a way that just makes sense. Beau Martonic out there in Pennsylvania, who hosts the East Meets West podcast, seems to have a real grasp on this. He's a good hunter. He has that figured out. My buddy Clint Campbell with Truth from the Stand podcast, he's a master at this strategy. It's using cameras for multi year intel on one spot.
Now.
I realize that it's probably too late for you to use this for this year's lockdown, but it's a really good reminder to remember that for the next seventeen seasons in a row. If I had one year of data to go off, Just to give you an example, I believe that my odds of encountering one during the lockdown on that one spot over there in Wisconsin are pretty low, but two years showed me that it's probably just a
matter of having enough days. Now, this is my third year running a trail camera all season long in that spot, and what I've seen so far pretty much reinforces my belief that this is the way to go, although it has also taught me that I need a north or west wind.
They're bad. But you know what else this trail camera strategy does for you.
It not only shows you the big old boss Bucks who go through there, but everyone else. And this is something I want to talk about. The lockdown is known for putting mature bucks down for two or three days at a time. Now, if you only have one deer you consider mature enough to be a shooter at your place, that's a problem. What are the odds that you'll catch him in between ladies?
Not good?
Not good at all. Now, what if you have three deer you'd shoot? Well, the odds are well, I don't know, three times better, I guess. Here's the thing. The advice you get from a lot of folks, and what you think you're getting from me here is that it's all about mature bucks. Now, what I look for during the run is a good enough buck, and during the lockdown that depends on who is nice enough to walk by
me a lot of times. When you start looking at it this way, you realize that while the biggest cahoona in the woods might be out of play for three whole days, it's not all the bucks that are out of play. Plenty of them won't be synced up to time periods when the biggest dear doesn't do anything but fend off some rivals while his girlfriend sits tight some thicket in a river bottom.
So what about the other bucks? There are other bucks out there, you know.
And while I do believe the lockdown is one of the better times to kill a giant, I also believe it's a great time to kill a good deer. That's one of the big reasons I like running trail cameras on these types of spots.
I want to believe.
I have a bunch of deer to work with, you know, something like that, So it'll give me the fortitude to stick it out in one of those spots. And that's the real thing about the lockdown. You're not going to have very many encounters. You just won't. The dose are sick of being run around and chased and harassed and hashtag me too, to the point where they just soon not see another buck for eleven months. Some of them are in need of boyfriends still though, And that's the
key to this whole thing. Those bucks are there, and they will go where they believe those does are and they will do that in the cover. They will do that with the wind largely in their favor, like I said, and they might only do it once every couple of days during daylight. Now, when I put it that way, it seems maybe like a better idea to go golfing than it is to sit on a stand, but it's not. That's never a better option than going deer hunting. But you want to know how I'm going to make it worse.
I think the lockdown is not a great time for tricks.
Now.
I know there are plenty of people who will rattle in a giant or grunt one inn or whatever, but I feel like the mission is to get where deer like to walk and then put in the hours.
That's it.
So forget trying to get them to you, and start thinking about how you're going to get your ass to them. At least, this is how I do it. I look at the block of time I have to work with. If that's just an evening or a morning, then you just have to go with your best option for the conditions and cross your fingers. But if you can get a couple of days at least, which is the minimum I'd probably take to try to get this job done, then it's time to make a plan. So I look
at my timeframe and then I check the weather. What is the wind going to do for all of those days? I don't really care much about sun or clouds or moon phase or rain or whatever I want to know where the wind is going to blow, so I can plan where I'll sit based on whether I'll get busted and whether I believe they'll use the spot given the wind direction that's predicted. With that information, it's a matter of going through your options.
Now.
I am a terrible second guesser when it comes to stand sites. I talk myself into circles for a long time and then just settle on something, or at least I do this often enough during the season, but not during the lockdown. This is one of the secrets here. Although it seems maybe like it won't be I think this is almost like the first few days of the season as far as how important it is to develop
a plan and stick with it. You can predict with some certainty what behavior the bucks will exhibit, and you can predict with some certainty where they'll engage in those behaviors.
So how is that like the early season.
Well, you know where they're feeding, where they might water, how likely they are to show up. You have a lot of inputs to work with. It can help you put together a day to day plan. This is what I do for the lockdown because it helps me hunt the way I need to if I walk out there with no real idea what I'm going to do for the day, or tomorrow or the next couple of days, it's so easy to cut things short or head out
there later than I should. It's easy to call one slow day the way things will be for the whole time, and decide not to hunt as much or not as hard, or to jump from spot to spot looking for the hot which you're probably not going to find. It has to find you in this face of the rut. Typically, a good plan, one that is built upon at least a couple of days time, which factors in the wind direction, in the likelihood of travel, is like a huge mental
benefit to the whole thing. Take some of the best hunters you know of Andy May You know why he's a scouting machine, the same reason a guy like Kobe Bryant worked his ass off during every practice, because when it's game time, those guys have a plan and the conviction to see it through because they did the physical and mental prep work. Everyone wants to be able to hunt like Andy May I do, but they can't because they won't think like him. There isn't any other way
around it. This is an important lesson for when the rut goes from haywire to you know, kind of sort of horseshit. The mental work you put in to think through your daily plan there is huge will help you stick to the plan, and that's what you need to do. I'm working on mine right now, and honestly it has changed some given the fact that I found a crazy amount of buck sign on some public land over there
in Wisconsin. Instead of going to sit that stand, I set up in April on my personal piece, which would be easy and probably would produce a buck. I'm looking at the wind direction and deciding how to give that spot and this new stuff that I found on this public land enough time. I want three days in each, although I don't know if I'll be able to get it. Ideally I will, and the truth is that it'll be simple. I'm going to hunt one or the other based on
the wind and then on the sightings. I'm not going anywhere else because I know both of those spots have plenty of bucks and eventually one of them is probably going to come through there. Now, I know there are routes out there that bucks use to feel safe and to find those in those spots, I also know that I might not see a deer in either spot all day, but I'm going to sit all day for several days anyway. The lockdown's not going to deliver a lot of bucks.
To me over there.
That's hard, but I believe in the plan. I believe it will result in one single deer that is big enough to wear my tag, so nothing else really matters to me. Now, if you believe something like that and you have a plan for it, it's not that hard to sit dark to dark for a couple of days in a row.
Now.
I know that's easy to say and not everyone can do it, But I also thought I'd never look at that as something easy to do. But something clicked for me years ago. I probably just grew up a tiny little bit or something, but it kind of became so obvious that time. Time is your friend when it comes to filling deer tags, and time and spots that you believe in is really the key. They don't have to be the best spots. Sometimes you have to stop looking
for those. Sometimes you have to pick a trail that skirts a swamp and sees just enough traffic to keep you on your toes, and you have to look at your calendar and figure out what you can give to that spot. Then you have to give yourself to the process. Oh that sounds like grade ABS, but it's not. If you commit to the plan, eventually one of those Bucks will get kicked to the curb by his lady friend and will wander by you. But only if you're out there.
And I want to tell you something else about this. The camera work I mentioned before. That's the thing that will not only help you figure out good lockdown spots, but will convince you that they might be good at sunrise and sunset, but also randomly throughout the day.
I don't know why this is, but a lot of the big.
Bucks I get pictures of or I see or occasionally kill this time of year are definitely midday movers. I see this now almost more than I see it when it's bonkers chasing time, at least with big Deer. That seems to be the case that for me is kind of the final push. I need to see this last phase of the rut through. It's not as fun as
the other phases, but it doesn't have to be. If just enough Bucks decide that they're going to go on a strategic mission during the lunch shift to see if they and find one of the last dose who might be willing to bed down for a few hours with them. Don't give up yet, forget hitting the links one last time. Understand that there is still a very good opportunity out
there to fill your tag. It's just going to take some mental fortitude in a real plan of attack, but if you see it through, you are likely to not regret it. So go do that and then come back because I'm going to switch gears here and I'm going to talk about gun hunting for deer and why I suck at it, but I'm going to try to get a lot better this year. That's it for this episode. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, brought to you by First Light. I just
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