00:00:01 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired2Hunt 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. 00:00:20 Speaker 2: Hey everyone, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and this episode is all about the rut and why it can seem like it should be so easy, but sometimes you just can't find the action. Honestly, what are you doing listening to me right now? Why aren't you in a tree? All right, maybe you're on your way to a sit, maybe you just wrapped up a sit. I can let that slide. For those of us living in the North Country who don't cancel school for a dusting of snow, it is on. 00:00:47 Speaker 1: Or is it? 00:00:48 Speaker 2: The rut is happening, of course, but it can be harder to find than a lot of hunters think. And while it should be so simple to get around chasing deer, it's often not. I'm about to tell you why and what you can do about it right now. Back in 1981, an astronomer named Robert Kirshner, along with a few of his colleagues, They were measuring galaxy redshift to map the universe in 3D. Redshift refers to what happens to light that is coming off of something that is moving away from you. The waves of light shift to red because they're getting stretched out. And if something is coming at you, those waves are getting crunched. So they blue shift. This is one of the best ways we know that we're inside of a giant explosion because everywhere we look, light is redshifting as objects grow farther and farther away from us. What Kirshner and his colleagues found during their research, though, was a huge gap in galaxy distribution. Essentially, they located an enormous region of space with very, very little in it. Now, when I say something like that, it needs some context. The Void, which looks like it's spelled Boots, is actually Boötes Void, named after the constellation Boötes, which is traditionally associated with herdsmen or ox drivers, measures roughly 330 million light years across. So what does that mean? Well, light travels at 186,000 miles per second in a vacuum, so if you were going light speed, it would take you, well, 330 million years to get across it. A light year is over 6 trillion miles. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is about 100,000 light years across, so you could line up 3,300 of our galaxies and they'd be the width of the Boötes void, which isn't truly empty, but it has a galactic density that is very low compared to much of the universe. If life evolved on a planet in one of those galaxies, and they could look up to the sky, they'd see stars just like us. But if they built telescopes, they'd see a whole lot of nothing in most directions. Tiny differences in the density of matter throughout the early universe have resulted in gravity taking over in certain spots and coagulating all the things in space that aren't, well, space. Over a long enough timeline, the distribution of planets and stars and asteroids and whatever else just clumps up through gravity's long game approach, leaving a lot of space devoid of much of anything. You can look just about everywhere and see stars in the sky from our perspective, but that's only because of our vantage point. If you were looking for somewhere else, it'd be a different story. Such is life. Sometimes you have abundance, and other times you've got a grumble in your belly and no commas in the numbers of your bank account. Sometimes when you're sitting on your stand in early November, your head's on a swivel because bucks are chasing all over and it's just a matter of time. And other sits you might just as well be sleeping peacefully because there's just no deer there. 00:03:34 Speaker 1: But why? 00:03:35 Speaker 2: Why do we think of the rut as sort of this thing that happens all at once and pretty much everywhere that the deer live, when in reality it does happen at the same time in the same places, but definitely not in the same specific locations, and definitely not everywhere that deer live? What I mean by that is, I don't know, think about a 40-acre piece of timber. That'll measure about 400 yards by 400 yards. Not huge, but I wouldn't turn it down if someone wanted to give me the deed, if you get my drift. What if that 40 has one hot doe and she's holed up in a three-acre thicket on the northeastern corner of the property? Even in a high deer density area, that one doe could soak up half of the potential bucks that might cross paths with you. If you're anywhere else on that 40, you might not see a deer. You might think it's just not happening yet, which I hear a lot from hunters. But, and this is so simple I can hardly stand it, it is happening, just not by where you're hunting. So what's the solve for that? Well, a lot of folks, myself included, might tell you to ride it out if you have faith in your spot. After all, the rut is chaotic, but also weirdly kind of predictable. If you post up long enough in a good spot, someone big and antlery should walk by. But should is the operative word here, because they often don't. This is a lesson I relearn pretty much every year during the rut, and honestly, it pisses me off. I mean, why can't it just be easy sometimes? It just mostly can't be, and that's the hard truth about the rut. It's not easy. And even when they are cruising and chasing like crazy, it doesn't mean they'll be cruising and chasing right by you. So we hedge our bets and sit, you know, banging pinch points and funnels and whatever train traps we can find. And guess what? It often still doesn't work. When this happens to me, which it does most seasons at some point during the rut, I try to remember a couple of things. The first is that when I find a really good pinch point and decide how to hunt it and what wind would be best, I also try to think of something else. Why would the bucks go through it? It's not enough that the land should force the deer travel in a certain way, because the deer need to choose to travel through it. And what I found on this front is that I get tunnel vision when I find a good pinch point, only to sit it and often realize that the deer either don't really want to go through, or they have far more options for going from point A to B than I expected. The simple answer to this is to find a pinch point between two known doe bedding areas. Great. but this is the easiest when you don't have much cover in general to work with. If you have two woodlots and a tight strip of timber connecting them, kind of like a, I don't know, a dumbbell shape, you have a pretty clear spot to ride things out. But what if that pinch point is in 100 acres of contiguous timber or 1,000 or 10,000? What if the dough is all bed all over and there are lots of ways for bucks to travel from point to point to point? What if you have a low deer density and the odds of a single buck cruising through there any day aren't that great? What if you hunt public land and the sheer amount of hunting pressure alters the routes bucks take because they keep encountering predators hiding in trees and in camo cubes on the ground? A lot of things can mess with a rut plan, so I'm going to go through a few ways I get around this. First off, if I have a spot with airtight access that is on a high confidence pinch point, I will hunt it four days on end. That's the easiest way I've found to let the rut come to me, and is exactly what I found last year in Nebraska while hunting with Steve and Pottery Pat. In that situation, the game was just going to be won by patience. If you have a spot like that and can give it a few all-day sits, you know, in a row, you're going to probably be rewarded for your patience. I would much prefer finding a situation like that where the rut is going to come to me versus a more common reality, which is that I often have to go find out where the rut is happening. This is where it gets tricky, because it's not that hard to find a lot of reasons to hunt a lot of different locations during the rut. First off, the most amount of buck sign you're going to find all season is out there right now. Those rubs and scrapes sing a compelling tune into our ears, and it's easy to talk ourselves into hunting somewhere simply because of the buck sign. And that might pay off, it certainly can, but it also might put you where the bucks were mostly during the pre-rut. It's also generally not super hard to get pictures of bucks cruising and chasing right now. Which, you know, by now everyone's running trail cameras, so we all have that intel to weigh in on our decisions. If the bucks are obviously chasing by your camera back in the timber, why not just post up on the field edge and wait them out? Well, you know. And then you have the grip and grins on social media, the stories from your hunting buddies. And the fact that since all of the deer are covering more ground than they will be any other time of the year, you can see deer in a lot of places, often bucks, maybe bucks cruising. And well, what better evidence do you need to sit in a certain spot? Now there's some interesting research out there on buck movement during the rut, and no surprise, two-year-olds seem to cover the most ground. They're enthusiastic, but without the experience to be really efficient. Older bucks, the kind you and I really want to shoot, they're a different story. They don't do random, even though it seems random. They have routes they run depending on the wind direction and probably about 73 other factors, and they don't waste a lot of time and energy even though it looks like they don't care at all about either. So we have all of this info and this real-world experience coming our way, and our brains have to decipher it all and make the best use of however much time we have to hunt the rut. And you know what we often do? Settle. We take that information and use it to talk ourselves into sitting where we want to sit, which, if you haven't noticed, I talk about a lot and believe is one of the biggest things that holds most deer hunters back. I told the story of the buck I killed in Wisconsin last year already, so I'll just say that deer, a 132-inch 8-pointer that made me very happy, was in a little wad of rutting activity that I found after not seeing a deer for three and a half days during the heart of the rut. I had a plan that included wading out deer with all-day sits on a swamp edge. The rubs were there. My cameras had showed me plenty of cruisers, but I didn't even see a button buck. On paper, I had it right, but in reality, I just didn't. When I took a flyer on a spot I was just curious about, I saw a hundred chasing, a two-year-old looking for some love, and killed a great buck in a single afternoon hunt after just hanging a quick mobile set. When I think back to most of the bucks I've killed during the rut, it has honestly kind of gone down like that a lot. I'm almost never where I expect to be, almost always in a new set after taking in some information, and almost always hunting somewhere just because I got pushed there or I had a question and my original plan didn't pay off. This has happened to me twice in Iowa where I should have been snowed in with rutting activity and I wasn't. This has happened to me in Nebraska and Minnesota and North Dakota too. And often happens to me on public land. But it's also happened to me on some of the best deer ground I've ever hunted, which is some really good private deer ground. I almost always have to go to them if the patience game in a high confidence spot doesn't pay off. And you know why that often doesn't pay off? Well, there are a lot of reasons, but one is that wind is a huge factor in where bucks cruise. When I plan on north or west winds and I get south or east winds, I always struggle. The deer still cruise. They have to cruise, but they don't follow the plan the way I want them to. I don't know how many of you dealt with a lot of east wind this fall, but if you did, you probably know what I mean. What all of this does is just muddy the waters. And then we talk ourselves into hunting a certain way because we don't know what else to do about it. We think eventually it just has to work out. And hey, it's the rut, so it certainly can. But if you're struggling to get on the kind of action you want with the kind of bucks you want to shoot, you might just need to face that reality. They are somewhere else doing their thing. That's it. They're somewhere out there. The bucks, they're highly killable, and it might just be because of the wind direction, or it might be because they've just gotten into the habit of voiding your stand sites, or the does they want to find have gotten into the habit of avoiding your stand sites. It might be because they are more comfortable in the thick stuff on the creek bottom than they are in the nice open ridge that is full of nighttime buck sign. It might be a lot of things. But the main point is to make the call on a dead program and then do something about it. This is really, really hard for a lot of hunters. How do you find the balance between giving a spot some real time, but not so much time that you burn up your PTO on a dud of a spot? I wish I had the answer for that, but I'll say this. If I have a high confidence spot in blank or don't see what I expect to, I usually won't give it more than about two days. The rutting action just happens where it happens, and sometimes that's right in the middle of your food plot, and sometimes it's on the side hill you never hunt because, well, why would you? How I find new spots to sit usually involves something you might not expect either, tracks. I like rubs and scrapes and all that plenty, but I want to know where the deer are chasing and cruising right now. And the easiest way to do that, if the ground is conducive to leaving some tracks, is to go into areas I suspect might have some activity, and then I just track check trails. If I'm walking a field edge or a logging road in the big woods or whatever, I want to see big, deep tracks from bucks that are looking deep. or actively chasing. A buck that goes a quarter of a mile down a logging road and then suddenly peels off on a trail is a buck that has shown you something super important, and his tracks can tell you that. He's shown you not only what he did, but what other bucks are very likely to do. Just like when you see a buck cruise downwind of a little thicket before shooting straight up and over a ridge, what they show you matters, and it often flies in the face of what we expect to happen. Now, I know this seems simple, but we are constantly fighting our desire to do what we want to do and not necessarily what we should do. This reality is easiest to see during tougher times of the season when the activity is really slow. But even during the rut, it pays to be self-aware about why we make the decisions we do. You don't want to be so impatient that you never really give a spot to, you know, a chance to play out for you. But you don't want to be so stubborn that you never move all week. And in the end, you just throw your hands up and say that it must not be happening yet. as if the rut got delayed a week despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. That's a nice warm blanket to wrap ourselves in. It protects our egos. But it's not the best way to kill a mature buck during the rut. A better bet is to really think about why bucks would pass through your chosen spot, and then recognize after a reasonable amount of time whether you're right or you're missing something. And if it's the latter, you're going to want to go find the action. There's really no other way around it. And while it sucks to daydream about cruising bucks underneath your favorite ladder stand, The deer will show you whether you're right or not, and for some stupid reason, it's much easier to get the rut wrong than many of us think. You often have to go find it, even if you hunt small properties or public land or have a dreamy spot that no one else can legally step foot on. Remember that as we get into the thick of it here. And remember to come back next week because I'm going to talk about the lockdown phase and deer breeding research and how we can still make some November magic happen, even when the action goes from one huge, massive fireworks display to one sad sparkler just fizzling out in the dark. That's it. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast. I can't tell you how much I appreciate all your support, but it is truly incredible. Thank you so much. You guys have been watching our Nebraska film like crazy. That's super cool. You've been watching the sled dog grouse hunt film that I put out, which was a super cool experience on many different levels. If you want to check those out, if you want to read about conservation news, how-to articles, or you want to listen to some other podcasts, we have so much content that goes up at TheMeatEater.com every week. All kinds of good stuff. Entertainment, education, a mix of both. Go check it out at TheMeatEater.com. Good luck out there during the rut. Stay safe. Use your harnesses. Come back next week.