00:00:01 Speaker 1: 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. 00:00:20 Speaker 2: Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wired 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 understanding plant life and how it affects almost all of our non rut deer hunting strategies. I mean, what a better time to talk about a super pooring ass subject than right now. After all, you know, while our southern brothers and sisters are probably well past the green up stage in the woods where they live, even those of us Near Canadians can look outside and see a world vastly change from a month or two ago. The bloom of plant life as the top half of the earth tips closer to the sun is truly incredible, and all of that greenery out there is relevant to us as hunters, especially if we learn how to use it to our advantage, which is what I'm going to talk about right now. A lot of people believe that summer is hot because the Earth is closer to the Sun then, and winter is cold because well, it's farther away. But that's not how it works. Although the Earth's orbit around the Sun isn't a perfect circle, it's actually a bit lopsided. The reason seasons vary in temperature is due to the tilt of the Earth, or the old wobble of it all. So why does the Earth do this? Because when our planet was newly formed and things were a bit more chaotic in space, we got hit by a smaller planet. It knocked Earth off of its axis by about twenty three degrees, and that wobble puts the top half of the Earth closer to the Sun at certain points, and then the bottom half at certain points, but the whole Earth doesn't get closer farther away. Now, fun fact as well, that collision is what caused a whole bunch of planetary material to shoot off into and some of that coalesced into our Moon as it was caught up in Earth's gravity. Now, why does all of this matter at all to deer hunting? We'll get there, buddy. That wobble which creates the seasons also allows plant life to grow lush as hell when either the northern or the southern hemisphere is pointed more towards the sun. Now, the equatorial regions experience a much more muted version of this. This essentially allows the whole earth to take a big breath every year. When the plant life is flourishing in the northern hemisphere, a lot of carbon dioxide is converted to oxygen, which is good for us, since without it, we'd all be as dead as the next jake will be when he wanders into my decoys. Now, when the northern hemisphere starts to tip away and the southern starts to tip closer, the balance starts to shift with who is doing the heavy lifting as far as keeping plenty of oxygen in the atmosphere for us to breathe in. Stuff, And what we are learning about plants lately is even wilder. Take bamboo for example, you know, the favorite food source of those lovable idiot panda bears. This plant is the fastest growing plant we know of. It can grow thirty five inches a day. It's kind of like the deer antlers and their ability to generate bone at a rate that is just the usane bolt of uh bone growing. That feels wrong somehow. Anyway, Archaeologists have found evidence of grape cultivation, specifically for wine making, as far back as eight thousand years ago. In the sixteen hundreds, tulips were so valuable in Holland that their bulbs were worth more than gold. If you want a crazy lesson in how to invest in stocks, do some due diligence on the tulip mania craze. There are many, many valuable financial lessons wrapped up in that one. Sulfuric compounds are the reason we teer up when we cut onions, except for Mark, who cries when he cuts most vegetables and fruits for reasons known only to him and hopefully his therapist. Now, some plants are medicine, some are for fun and watching South Park while eating potato chips and fruit roll ups, and some are essential to the well being of herbivores, like deer. You see what I did there? I most lost you, but then bam, it reeled you back in. The thing about deer hunting in general is that we are on a constant quest to take the guesswork out of the whole process. This is no more evident than by looking at the food block craze. You want to kill a mature buck without having you know, too many big brain moments, then clear out an acre, give the soil some TLC, plant some clover, and wait, we know deer eat clover or brassicas or whatever. So the whole thing gets pretty simple. And we like simple when it comes to hunting, because well, it's better than complicated, I guess. But not everyone has the means to plant a food plot, or the desire to sit in the same spot and stare at the same view until along comes the right book. There's a world of white tails beyond that style, and anyone who is engaged in it would do well to try to understand plants better. I've talked about the number of plants deer known to eat in the past, and if I remember correctly, it's something like six hundred different kinds. That's just what we know of. There's probably a lot more, but that's a lot, and most of it doesn't matter at all to any one of us on any given season. What matters instead is to understand your local region to some extent, and to focus on what the deer should be eating and when they should be eating that plant. I look at this process in two different ways, kind of specific and then general. On the specific side, it's knowing exactly what type of plant the deer eat, or I guess part of a plant the deer eat. In my world, an easy example of this is nettles. I don't really know how they do it, but I know that they do eat them. You know, those dark green broad leaf plants that suck a lot to walk through when you're hanging stands or hunting in September often show signs of heavy brows, especially at the tops. Now in my world, that might last until early October, and then that pattern will be dead. There are some things I know about nettles which helped me absolutely kill deer on them. They grow in places with moist soil, like river bottoms, which is a huge plus because I like river bottoms very much. They often stay green longer than vegetation that's nearby but not in the same little micro habitat. This helped me kill a buck last year in Iowa. It was literally the reason I sat where I did and deer after deer showed me they preferred the dark green, moist broad leaf plants there over the mostly dry brows in the rest of the woods. These kind of plants are also easy to read when they are being browsed, which can show you right where to hunt, or areas the deer are definitely passing through at any given moment. All of that is a huge benefit, and it comes from understanding one type of plant. That's it. Now, what if you don't want to dig deep and identify a bunch of different plants to hunt specifically, then you can play that generalist game that Iowa buck from last year. He and a bunch of other deer were hanging out on the river bottom because the cover was better than everywhere else, and in that cover was a whole bunch of good brows. You wouldn't have needed to know how to identify any one type of plant. You just would have had to recognize that most of the woods on the bluffs were dry and devoid of greenery, while the river valley just contained more moisture, which means more nutritious and palatable plants during drought years. Or look at it another way. A few weeks back, I walked a bunch of public land in northern Wisconsin that all kind of looks the same until you start paying closer attention. There are some hill there, which means higher drier ground, and then there's lower wetter ground, which influences plant growth. But there is also a timber industry there that creates vastly different plant growth opportunities. Those soft edges in the timber that guys like me are always spouting off about, well, they're not just places where bucks travel because they are often a bit thicker than the surrounding areas. They also happen to be where two types of habitat meet but neither dominates. This allows for fringe species to thrive, the ones that need a certain mix of shade and sunlight that the old growth and the clearcuts just don't offer. What that means is it concentrates certain plants in a kind of tight ish line, which is part of the reason deer and other animals love soft edges so much. Since they are generally concentrated, you can do a browse check pretty quickly on soft edges to see what's going on there, and you can double check your work by looking for droppings and tracks other sign That kind of thing is what separates the tadpoles from the frogs my friends, and it's a lesson I keep learning the more I keep hunting everything Helen Turkey season. This year, I hunted a property I've hunted a lot, and I kept seeing birds come out of a specific spot that just didn't make much sense to me. So I went in and I looked at it, and I found two things. One was a whole bunch of red oak acorns that hadn't been gobbled up throughout the winter. The other was just a couple of grassy hillside spots that were scratched to shit. I never figured out exactly what they were scratching up there, but it didn't matter. They were using the area big time, and that's sometimes all we can ask for. Now when it comes to deer, there are different ways to look at this and how it might play into a hunting strategy. Think about a field edge, for example. We love to sit field edges for many reasons, but where to sit on what field edge matters a lot too. Exposure to sunlight will be a factor in whether the early season bucks will come out two hours before dark or at last light. Now that west dish facing edge that gets soaked and burning sunlight for the back half of the day isn't going to be as good as the shadier sides in hot weather, but it also might not offer up as much lush brows as the field edges with a little better mix of sunlight and shadows. That stuff matters, And if you spend any amount of time looking through a spot or in the summer, you know how often deer pop out and then dive back into the cover, or how some of them will mostly feed in the field for a while but mix things up by standing on the edge and browsing away. If I'm hunting the early season, I want that main food source working for me, but I also want that secondary brows working for me, Just like I'd rather sit on on the edge of the bean where white oaks are dropping their acorns versus not or post up on the alfalfa near a couple apple trees versus sitting on the alfalfa not near any granny smiths drop into the ground. I look at understanding brows and really masked as well as the micro part of the whole thing, The macro part which a lot of us don't move past, is that the deer walk into the field and they eat, they set up there see deer and sometimes kill them. But the micro part matters because it's just more specific and being able to predict where a buck will likely walk, like exactly where he'll walk, that's pretty dang valuable. Another way to think about botany, which kind of goes back to that Iowa buck example, is this deer want the best bang for their bucks, so to speak, when it comes to spending time eating something. Maybe this isn't the same thing, but think about this scenario. You wake up and don't have time for breakfast because your dog puked on the floor and the kids have to get to school, and for whatever reason, you don't eat, and you're used to eating, what are you going to be like at lunch? Ravenous and when you're super hungry, what are you going to look for something quick in calorie dnse. That's actually evolution at work, and in modern society, it works against us because we have access to a lot of easy, calorie dense food that is mostly very very bad for us. But it's an undeniable poll that if you don't prepare for it and you find yourself suddenly very very hungry, you know what you're going to do now with deer. They probably aren't skipping breakfast and sitting in stupid deer Google meets all morning listening to their deer. Coworkers try to justify their jobs by saying dumb shit that didn't need to be said. But they do get hungry, and they do have different dietary needs depending on the time of year. A big one for bucks is the lead up to the rut, where they need to pack on the pounds like folks do when they go on that survival show called Alone. Because when the dose start going wild and the bucks are after them, those bucks aren't going to eat a lot. They need good calories and nutrients, and they are very, very familiar with their home ground. So if some plant is still green and lush and full of the good stuff that it pulled from the soil, they are going to know about that food source and they are going to find it and use it. I think about this stuff a lot, and I play this pattern a lot when I'm hunting Western critters where there are either stock tanks or just cattle ponds. A stock tank that overflows as almost like a bait pile, where the ground is generally very dry, that little swath of irrigated ground will have lush grasses and other vegetation, and it'll concentrate deer or turkeys or elk or whatever. Now there is the bonus of water, of course, but even when it's cool and the rut isn't on and the deer aren't dying of thirst at any given point in the day, they will want to eat that lush greenery because it's better for their bodies. Maybe that's the last point to talk about here when it comes to understanding plant life better in your region and why it matters to you as a hunter. We like to dumb this stuff down to make the decision making process much easier. So take a cut cornfield as an example. Without question, if there are a deer around somewhere, they're going to end up in that cut cornfield, especially if it wasn't chisel plowed. That's easy, and you can kill a hell of a lot of deer without knowing much more than that. But is that cut cornfield the same drawn October as it is in December? What about if it's eighty degrees during the rut versus thirty. What about the fact that a big cut cornfield is generally a promise to the deer that a certain type of carbs or calories is kind of static in their lives. They know they can go there at any point in the night and they can scrounge around for enough kernels to fill their bellies. That's great, but corn is only going to give them a part of what they need to be healthy enough to fade predators and pass on their janes when the time comes. Depending on the region, that part might be a big part, but it still won't be the whole thing. Those cornfield deer are going to find other sources of food to eat because their bodies literally need them, and some of those food sources will be short window heavy draw plants. This is one of the reasons I love observation stands so much. When I'm hunting new ground, watching a buck walk across a creek in a certain spot huge advantage. But watching that same buck spend an hour on the riverbank browsing away is even better. Now I have that crossing to work with, but also a browse pattern that will definitely be appealing to more than just that deer. Hell, the reality of that is that every deer you see browsing, whether it's doze with a couple of fawnds or a booner is giving you a gift because it's not accidental what they are doing. It's intentional because they needed to serve. And that's something we miss with a lot of the talk about certain food sources, but especially masked you don't think about persimmons. For example, a right per simon is a sugar retreat, and we know that deer like them very much, But why purely for the flavor? I doubt that while we are inundated with sugar in so many different foods to the point most of us consume way way too much of it, the deer don't. They aren't rolling up to the seven eleven to buy a slushian of Snickers. The sugar content is different for them, just like the moisture content of some broad leaf brassica type plant growing in the creek bottom gives them something more beneficial than nipping along on the dry brows at the top of the ridge. They can eat both, but they choose one for a very specific reason. Now. I know this is kind of daunting to a lot of folks who just want to know what deer call to use and when, But the truth is that you can't escape good old woodsmanship and understanding plant life and the importance of brows is way up there on the list of ways you can do diferentiate yourself from most other hunters. It might not be an exciting topic, but becoming an amateur botanist can help you kill more big bucks. So consider it and consider coming back next week because I'm going to talk about finding a little mystery in the deer woods. That's it. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. Thank you so much for listening and for all your support. We truly appreciate it here at meat Eater. If you want to watch some turkey hunting films, maybe mark up in Alaska looking for a white tail and maybe stumbling across a black tail. Maybe check out Brent Reeves This country Life. Go over to the meeteater dot com. Give it a listen, give it a watch, check out the articles. Tons of content dropping every week, so much good stuff. As always, thanks again, have a great week.