00:00:01 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, and now your host, Tony Peterson. Hey everyone, welcome to the wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson. In today's episode, it was all about why shed antlers are just playing cool. It's hard to believe it, my friend, but we're at the time of the year where we should probably be thinking about looking for some shed antlers. There are a lot of reasons to shed hunt, and I'll probably cover like ninety nine of them in the next few weeks with this podcast, but for now, let's focus on what causes antlers to fall off, the timing of the whole thing, and why. I don't know. Well, like shed antlers are just pretty damn neat. When I was in high school, my uncle and cousin showed up for a visit. They had driven down from the Iron Range in northeastern Minnesota, where most of our remaining wild moose population hangs out, and where most of our wolves hang out, and where the fishing is still nearly Canada level good without the hassle of having to cross the border and where very few white tails live compared to most regions of the country. They had with them a shed antler that was, to put it bluntly, a freaking giant. We measured it for the hell of it, and it went somewhere in the eighties. I can't remember exactly how much, but big, big, big. Suffice it to say that that antler fell off of a buck that was a legitimate north Woods booner, the kind of buck that makes people want to go hunt in the boundary waters or maybe waited out a fresh snow in the northeast and try to cut a set of huge dragging tracks with the hopes that they can catch up to the deer as he traverses miles of timber. That antler wasn't just fascinating due to its overall size, which included ridiculous mass. It was cool to me personally because I couldn't find an antler to save my life at that time. I mean I really couldn't. I could barely kill a live deer of any shape or size, and certainly couldn't do it with any consistency. I knew people who did that, just as I knew people who found antlers frequently, and they were both a mystery to me what I couldn't do. I was just figuring out how they were doing it. It wasn't for a lack of effort on my part either. I shed hunted quite a bit then, and aside from finding deadheads every year, which was a guarantee, I never found a shed. In fact, I didn't find one till I was in college, and that was an accidental fine. While I was turkey hunting in May, it felt like a lot of people knew something I didn't know, which was true then as it's true now. A lot of people had access to spots where dear wintered, which is something I didn't really understand or have access to back then. I also, i know now, focused a lot of my shed hunting a little bit too early. This is kind of like right after the ice goes out and you get that first really warm March or April day where the sun has just got a lot of power to it. It's like easy to believe then that the croppies will be up in the shallows because they want of the first fish to move in, But often the water temperature is just way too cold at least in my part of the world, this happens a lot. Sure, like you might catch a few specks in the shallows if the conditions are just right, but the good fishing will take a few weeks. A warm weather that really gets those temps up, gets the bugs and other potential food sources moving, and just positions the whole underwater ecosystem to be at the right spot for those croppies to be there. That might seem like a weird analogy, bear with me. Deer preyed off of photo period is um just like most game animals, game birds and fish. Hell, I can't prove this because I'm not smart enough, but probably every wild creature out there does to some extent. Humans probably do too. But we know, dear do We know that photo periods M, which is the amount of daylight and the given day, plays into the timing of the rut and has vast implications on a buck's testosterone levels. We know that fawns need to hit the ground in a relatively short window in the spring in big numbers to achieve a successful drop. We know that after the rut is over, a buck has a lot of work to do to recover, and it doesn't pay to carry around apparel weapons on his head that only cause him to burn more calories with each step. He doesn't need to fight his buddies because the competition for doze is gone, and the benefit of having some stabby things poking out of his forehead in regard to fighting off predators, it's juice that just isn't worth the old squeeze, So they fall off of his head, and then idiots like me spend weeks and weeks looking for them, and even train their dogs to look for them. It's kind of weird, but it's also cool. The thing about antlers is they dropped for a variety of reasons that all produce the same result. As testosterone decreases in the post rut phase, the tissue in the buck's pedicles begins to weaken, eventually causing the connection to break and the antlers to fall off. Most folks say this doesn't hurt the buck, and I have no reason to believe it does. But I also wonder how the hell would we know if it's stung a little. I don't think deer would give much indication that it hurt at all. This kind of reminds me of that off stated fact about domestic dogs that says something like, dogs look at us when they're pooping because they feel vulnerable and they're looking for us to protect them. I mean, that's cute, but couldn't it also be that when dogs bowl up to drop a deuce in your yard, they also just have a very few options as what to look at. And if we just happened to be there, they just happen to look at us a lot. And since we've got like five thousand years at co evolution, some of those looks happened to produce eye contact. Maybe they aren't thinking, Man, I could be attacked here any second. I sure my owner, who's also my hero, protects me. I better make serious eye contact with him to make sure that he knows I might need him. It could just be damn, he's watching me again. What's the deal with this guy? Does he like watching me poop? I love him, but he's kind of a creep sometimes anyway. I don't know. Maybe it hurts the dealer when the antlers fall off, or maybe it doesn't. It does scare them. We know, because there's a few really cool trill camera videos out there of that. It's also something that's not really easy to pin down time wise. Of course, we know stressors like an injury during the fall or an early super harsh bad winner seemed to contribute to deer dropping their antlers early. The bulk of the drop happens every year between January and March. This isn't based on anything but personal experience, but I kind of feel like where I tend to shed hunt the most. The third week of February is when I need to get really serious about pounding the snowy trails in search of antlers. From that week until it's time to think turkeys, I tend to find most of my antlers, but I also find some of my biggest antlers. In January. Before Wisconsin shut it down, their grouse season in the North Country used to run all the way through January. This was awesome for me and my buddies because it mostly felt like we were the only people out there during that month. I mean, honestly, in like ten years of hitting the January grouse pretty hard, I never saw a single hunter on public land who wasn't a part of my hunting party. That's like probably sixty or seventy days total, not another person out there hunting, but they shut it down to save the birds, which as far as I can tell, didn't really do a thing. But I'm also bitter because I don't like losing hunting opportunities, especially when I get the impression they're being taken away for emotional reasons, not biological, and and I know when they take away our hunting opportunities don't give them back very easily. Anyway, That's a sore subject with me and not germane to this podcast. Except for the fact that the January grouse season put an awful lot of really big sheds in my trophy room and extended my personal bird season by a month, I don't recall ever finding a small shed during those hunts, which probably has something to do with what dear really drop in January and the reality that finding a spike shed in the snow is a hell of a lot harder than finding the side off of a mature buck. Every single year, while we followed our dogs through the north Woods looking for roughs, we found big antlers. We find a ton of them, because after all, we weren't in the kind of place where there are a ton of big bucks, but we found them very consistently from every year now. I often go back and shed hunt there in March if the snow allows, and rarely do I find big ones then, although I do tend to get luckier when it comes to smaller antlers, the exact hall for each trip doesn't really matter. Although finding antlers is fun, what does matter, at least to me is getting into the woods to walk around and just look at places I either currently hunt or might hunt in the future. There will be plenty of this on future episodes of this podcast, and I should also this should come as no surprise say that I just love finding antlers as well. I remember a former magazine editor who lives near me. He hit me up in February to go shed hunting several years ago. I suggested a spot of mine that is usually pretty productive, but he said he doesn't like to shed hunt where he can't deer hunt, so we went into Carlos Avery, a gigantic tract of public land near where I live in the Twin Cities. It was a lost cause, mostly because the deer population there's pretty low, the shed pressure is really high, and it's mostly a game of getting super lucky in those conditions. But those miles were a good way to look around on some ground that we actually could hunt, so it wasn't all bad even if the miles per shed found ratio is skewed in a not so fun direction. Now here's where I'm going to say something that I often say when it comes to outdoor opportunities. Shed hunting is actually a lot more difficult than it looks. Just like with actually killing big bucks or catching thirty inch walleyes or whatever outdoor space you pay a close attention to and count as one of your addictions, shed hunting for most of us is a really low return endeavor, at least in the interest of finding actual antlers. It is, but that's not the sole reason to shed hunt. Just like we don't bow hunt all fall solely for the purpose of killing a big buck. That result is a powerful motivator, but it sells the pursuit way short. The same goes for shed hunting. After all, what else do you gotta do in the winter. Granted, there's plenty of white tail work to get accomplished, but we've got time for that for now. Looking for antlers is a great reason to spend time in the woods and time in the woods. Lots and lots of time in the woods is one of the best ways to become a better deer hunter. It puts you where deer eat, obviously, but also where they walk, where they bed, where they stage. It puts you where they live. And that's not nothing, my friends, and yes, I get the argument for spending time in the woods where you can hunt. After all, what good does it do you to find a whole bunch of rubs or pick up a side in a park that you won't ever be able to hunt, or at least until I don't know, the zombie apocalypse rages through and re arranges us into small tribes of gritty survivors, and we don't have to follow the laws anymore. Well, for starters, these kind of finds in places you can't hunt tend to dispel or at least nullify, the notion of quote unquote our dear. We love to say things like my dear, do this or my dear never do that, which refers, of course, to the deer that live on the places we hunt, and more importantly, what we believe about them. Those statements are shortcuts to thinking, which is why we love them so much. If we know one are harder. Hearts that are dear, do not visit scrapes in daylight, or never travel through a certain swamp. We can dilute the whole process of hunt planning down, but exposure to new ground other dear and exactly what they do, tends to reinforce the opposite mindset that dear dear no matter where you live or where you hunt them. A lot of folks don't like that thought, because they believe that their dear are smarter and their dear are harder to hunt than the other guys. Dear, And of course that may be true in a micro level, but it's not as true generally as we love to believe. And if you get over that, you start to understand that it will make you a better hunter everywhere. I promise you, when you're shed hunting a tract of public land to get some exercise in a late January day, you might get rewarded with a shed, or you might find some buck beds in a swamp that show you an overlooked tidy hole, or maybe just gets you thinking a little bit more about where the bucks actually bet on the farm that you actually hunt. I've said it a million times but I believe this so much woodsmanship doesn't come solely from the single minded pursuit of big bucks. It comes from time in the woods, learning about all critters and often not really caring about what you're doing. I can't tell you how many times grouse or pheasant hunting, or squirrel hunting, or rabbit hunting, or turkey hunting, or just during a cabin fever induced February shed hunt with my little girls that something has clued me in to something about deer. It happens all the time, and the benefit is partially that shed hunting and all of those other pursuits take me into the wild places that I wouldn't go if I was just hunting deer or just solely scouting for deer. Shed hunting specifically also ties into something else that will make you a better deer hunter. Work effort, physical effort. If you're shed hunting in the real world, we're finding a bunch of cast antlers is far from a guarantee. Then you're going to have to put on the miles. In my world, in years where I shed hunted a ton, and in years where I shed hunted not a ton, but a decent amount I'd average one antler every couple of weeks. That's piss pour from a specific results standpoint, but that also might mean thirty or forty hours spent walking through the places dear live. The learning curve from time spending woods doesn't only bend in your favor with dear habits and behaviors either. I shed hunt mostly on public land, just like I hunt all critters mostly on public land. There's nothing more obvious during winter shed hunts than spots where people like to hunt. There's still going to be stands in the woods, whether they are supposed to be there or not. You're gonna find cameras that are left up. You're gonna see tax trails that are super obvious. Flagging on trails that's real obvious. The spots hunters frequent, they're easy to find. They just like the places deer frequent, start to become obvious. Pattern wise, If you think that filling your brains database with the most likely spots for your competition to set up in isn't valuable, I've got some news for you. If you hunt pressure deer, that is a huge component of being successful and a constant reminder to do things differently. Which not coincidentally contributes to success. This is one of the things that justifies the work and the miles walked. You become a better woodsman because of it, and it will condition you to think about where the deer live, where the other hunters usually try to kill them, and how much work you're going to have to do to be successful from season to season and year to year. Now, while you're doing that, you might just spot a wall of times poking out of a snowpack or the yellows all grass. That's pretty damn sweet, and it's kind of like muskie fishing, and that one bit of success in a long day and mostly failing can carry you a long ways. It lifts your spirits, keeps the fire burning. It prompts you to make another ten thousand casts or put on another thirty miles of shed walks next month. So to wrap a nice bow around this, I'll say what we all know, shed antlers are cool. Shed antler hunting can be a hell of a lot of fun, and even if it's not, it can be a great way to go from a white belt to a purple belt and deer knowledge or something like that. Of course, it's not all about walking through the woods like a Disney princess while bluebirds land on your shoulder and all is right with the world. There are tucked into those shed hunts, and better yet, those sheds you actually find plenty of lessons on how to kill the bucks that live out there in the woods where you'll hunt them in about nine months. What shed antlers teach us is what next week show is all about. And you're gonna want to give it a listen because every antler you find tells you a story that you want to hear, even if you've got to fill in a few of the details through just sheer imagination. That's it for this show, My white tail loving brothers and sisters. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As I always, thank you so so so much for listening, and if you want more white tail advice, head on over to them Eat eater dot com, slash wired and check out our Wired to Hunt YouTube chat.