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 Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson. In today's episode is all about the rules we think exists for white tails and why we should be careful about sticking too tightly to them. This one's kind of a fun one for me because I'm largely a contrarian at heart. I also have a deer hunting background that started with a question everything type of attitude. You know what, Actually, that's not entirely true. It was just that my dad and I weren't very good at it, so we kind of just did things the way we wanted. And he's the kind of guy who would just try something crazy hunting wise, just to see and while it really worked out, sometimes it did. And I'm the same way and this has shaped almost everything I've thought about when it comes to deer hunting. So Buckle up because it's time to break some of the hard and fast deer behavior and hunting strategy rules and kill some bucks. Anyway, as I said, this is a fun one for me. But let me make this clear right from the start, what I mean by white tail rules throughout this podcast are not the laws and regulations you should obey those. I'm not giving you the green light to go shoot a bunch of velvet bucks over a bait pile in August, well before the actual season opens up. But instead, I just want to talk about how we make up our minds that things are a certain way when they often aren't. Let's start with a non deer hunting situation here that I've talked about a few times but I think really encapsulates this whole idea. Last year, when I was baiting bears for my daughter in Wisconsin, we had exactly two bears to work with. One was a monster boy with a belly hanging on the ground. And while everyone says this, I promise you in this case it's true. He was well over three hundred pounds. The other was much more of your typical yogi, you know, like the one hundred and fifty pound type bear. Now that big bruin. He was a nighttime visitor. He knew the game and he was good at it. The younger one wasn't, so that became our target bear. Now, if you know anything about bears, they get hunted a lot. They do a pretty good job of leaning into the nocturnal game. Now, if you don't know anything about the general rules for bear hunting, you also know that afternoons are when ninety nine point seven percent of all bear hunters sit. Of course, i'm talking about baited bear hunts here. Those hunters, they'll tell you with very much confidence that there is no reason to hunt mornings or in most cases even the lunch shift. It's afternoons and evenings. Now, while you would never confuse me for an expert bear hunter, I've always just followed that line of thinking. After all, how the whole culture around that type of bear hunting have it wrong. The trouble is, if you have a limited amount of licorice trail mix out and you have two bears competing for those calories, they'll just generally sort themselves out into some level of avoidance through their visits. Or, more specifically, if a bear is double the size of another, bear, the smaller one will do a hell of a good job of avoiding the big one. And if that big one is nocturnal, the smaller one is going to be a daylight visitor. That's it. And because the fall is the time when bears like to eat just like pigs, you know, and to bulk up for hibernation, those daylight visits might happen multiple times during those daylight hours. That's what my daughter's bear was doing. So, in a weird move to maximize one of the three days we had to hunt, we went in at sunrise and she shot that bear at noon. It was one of my top ten coolest hunting experiences ever, and it was made possible simply by breaking the general rule of when we should hunt. You're probably listening to this going, well, dumb man, you have pictures of a yogi come in in at all hours of the day to feed, You go in, you cover those hours of the day. But this is where I'll kindly steer you to the deer world and ask if it's so easy for you to go against the grain and try something that is genuinely thought of as a no go proposition. Now, what do I mean by that? Let me count the waves. How About here's a simple one, hunting mornings in the early season. How About snort wheezing two one hundred and three inch two and a half year old on Halloween. He's probably not the dominant buck, is he. How About snort wheezing to that deer in September? Pretty dumb right. How About taking a swing at your number one hit lister in your number one stand site well before he starts daylighting on your cameras. How About hunting hard during the middle of October when you know damn well that none of the bucks are moving because they are all mandated by deer latigo nocturnal during the lull. Do you know why all of those rules have kind of entered to zeitgeist and stuck right on our slightly smooth brains, Because we have to vicariously learn some of this stuff, and to do that we follow people who seem to be a hell of a lot better than us at killing deer. But their rules are not good for you. And I promise you that even though they kill two hundred inch deer frequently and you don't. The reason for this is because the deer behavior varies so much by state and county and property in region and whatever. Are there general behaviors that transcend locality. Absolutely, there's also the depths of nuance to any situation that creates scenarios here but not there, and there but not here. Let me give you an example. I have permission to hunt a large dairy farm in southeastern Minnesota that I talk about sometimes. That property borders another property that one of my buddies' leases, and it also borders a small property that is generally treated as a deer sanctuary. Now, my property is the opposite of what you'd call a deer sanctuary. A lot of people hunt it, and the landowner would like it if lots of deer were shot out of there, and he does his best to facilitate that every year, and the deer know it. So a lot of the deer that I end up with on my property at some point of the season often move to those other two properties, and as the season progresses, the differential in pressure has a major effect on a lot of things, including the dispersal of big bucks. Now, when the pre rut kicks in, my buddy hunts his lease and is generally covered in good deer chasing and doing their thing, and it's literally right across the fence, literally in a place where I can see from some of my stands, and yet on my property I struggle to see good bucks and sometimes any bucks. It's not even close to the same experience, even though the properties are very close. So what does that mean? Well, for starters, the rules he should follow wouldn't make much sense for me, would they. I'm dealing with just a vastly different scenario. And what's worse, if I didn't know any better and he were to tell me what he was doing to get on deer, and then I were to try those things, they probably wouldn't work for me. Now, imagine someone who owns a thousand acres in southern Iowa telling the masses that the deer rules are this and not that according to his experience. Do you think that makes a whole lot of sense for the hunter in Georgia who has to fight the crowds on public land. Academically, it just doesn't work. Yet we all kind of fall into this trap often. And do you know why? At least this is my thought anyway, I think the rules we think deer follow scare us, And really, why wouldn't they rules are meant to encourage specific behavior, and without consequences for not doing those behaviors, then they don't matter. So we believe if we don't follow the rules, we will not kill deer, and worse, we will actually make it harder on ourselves in the future. Most of these rules come from the line of thinking that you'll do more harm than good. So don't hunt, don't scout, don't go in and blow those bucks up before they get carryless and start to move a lot during daylight. It's a calculation, you know, that makes sense for maybe five percent of the deer hunters out there. The further you are from a really good property that is well managed, the less likely those general deer rules are worth following. Part of this is simply because you can predict the behavior of your fellow hunters, because they are going to more or less follow the general rules. The big one, of course, is you know when to hunt. Most hunters won't hunt the lull. Most hunters will hunt the rut. Simple right now, Imagine what the deer do in response to that. Most hunters won't hunt when it's super hot, but they will when a cold front hits. What do you think deer do in response to that? And how many hunters are we talking about in your neck of the woods, because that's what really matters. Now, think about this another way. Some of the general deer rules are probably pretty good ones to follow, but we often don't take the all day sits during the rut. For example, here, you want to kill more big bucks, that's one of your answers. You won't shoot one at noon every year, But if you're in the habit of all day sits, you'll get a few really good midday opportunities every decade of your deer hunting life. Now, maybe that means only one or two more mounts on your wall, but that's enough to get a guy like minis it all day. The best way to look at this might simply be to ask yourself, how do I know this rule is a good one? Did I hear it over and over from people who seem to have a real handle on deer hunting? Okay? But have I witnessed it firsthand? Have I tried this thing or not? Take the snort wheeze deal that I talk about all the time. Last year I snort weezed in a really good North Dakota buck on public land and missed him, which you can watch over at the mediater dot com. My cameraman for that hunt is a really good deer hunter, but since our timing was outside the rut, he thought it was nuts that I was snort wheezing at that buck. After the whole encounter, he told me that flat out, he thought there was no way that was going to work. But it took like four storm wheezes and that buck came right in. Now, my camera guy, he's a really good deer hunter, really good. But in his head, he had a rule about snort wheezing, and you only do it during the rut and only on really big deer. When you believe that, Will you ever snort wheeze at a deer outside of the rut? Probably not. Well, you ever snort weeze at a small buck? Probably not? So what does that mean? It means that you'll follow that rule even if you don't actually know it's a good one. Let's think about something else. On that dairy farm I mentioned earlier, there is one hundred acre field on one part of it. Now that field is split by a waterway and it's a crapshoot on any of given year. What'll be planted in there? Sometimes, like this year, the whole thing is corn, sometimes half of its corn and half of its alfalfa, sometimes half as beans. You get my drift. Now, On some years, I can access the woods that that field borders via standing corn, and I can kill decent bucks in the morning in September as they work their way back to bed. Sometimes I can't get anywhere near that field in the mornings, or I'll blow the whole thing out because of what's planted in there. So on some years on that farm, the rule about not hunting early season mornings is pretty solid. On other years, following that rule would cost me real opportunities at good bucks. The only thing that changes those rules is the crop rotation and my willingness to hunt when the rules seem wrong. For the scenario where I'm going with all of this is that we find comfort in guardrails. If you believe you shouldn't hunt early season mornings and you don't hunt them, you're going to feel like you are being a good hunter. But what might have been a good decision last year could be a dumb one this year. Or what might be a good one on that property that you used to hunt might not be a good one on the least that you have this year. Another example, if you believe you can't hunt bottoms of valleys because the wind will swirl and you'll get busted, for sure, you're not going to try to hunt bottoms of valleys, and I promise you there are conditions where you can get away with it, and if you do, you're probably going to be on deer. The danger to all of this is that you have to try things that you've been conditioned to believe just won't work. That sucks, but it's also why I love heading out on the road to hunt public land in random states. My willingness to be cavalier and try riskier strategies goes way up when I'm a strict timeline and have little to know history with a property. When you do that, it sort of crumbles the foundation ever so slightly that we've built on our home ground where we just know we can do this, but not that. I also believe that the rules we like to follow keep us from figuring out how to hunt as if they don't exist. Let me give you an example about seven or eight years ago, I killed one hundred and forty six inch ten pointer on public land in South Dakota. The buck, along with his little buddy, came through in the morning in late September, when you're not supposed to hunt mornings. But I'd watched some deer use that spot, and I knew they were passing through there in the mornings. I just didn't have a great idea how to approach the whole thing. So I stuck a blind into a bunch of dead cedars, and I went in way early and parked down the road in a place that meant I had to walk in from the opposite direction the deer were likely to approach from, and it worked. If that had been a home ground situation, I doubt I would have tried. That would have been too risky. It's honestly as simple as that. Though now I have to say this because if I didn't, I wouldn't feel great about myself. A lot of the things that I try to make work, which might be outside of general deer hunting rules that people like to follow, they just don't work. I don't know how many times I've tried to access the spot that I thought i'd get away with sneaking in and not letting the bucks know I was there, and it just didn't happen. This happens a lot. What it does for me is helped me set up my own rules for certain properties in certain times of the year. Take this little chunk of land I own in Wisconsin. It's three hundred yards from my east to west boundary, and if I park anywhere but the farthest southwest corner, my daughters and I generally won't see deer when we sit, at least if we hunt in the evenings. Anyway. Now, I learned this because I thought I needed to park on the other side due to where I figured the deer would be betted. But they knew when we went in, no matter how careful I was. Now we park as close so as you could to where they bed, just because it also puts us close to two neighbors we have on that property, and our noise sort of blends into the general noise of those other two people, or the other two households, I should say, they hear human noise there in that corner all the time. On the other side of the property, there's no houses or driveways, and a truck crunching along the gravel and stopping there seems to be just enough to keep them from doing what they need to do. The lesson there is that I had a rule in my head when I started hunting that property, but the deer showed me it was a bad one. Then I had to go through some trial and error to figure out that specific property and how to make it work. That rule about where to park and how to access it is literally property specific. I wouldn't park as close as I could to a known bedding area anywhere else. In almost any situation, I go the opposite way, and you know what, I might be totally right in doing that, even if on my land that's the wrong move. Here's the thing that makes all of this even tougher. That might not be the case this season or in five seasons from now. Maybe they won't bed there as much in the future, and my access will have to change. I don't know. What I do know is that I have a rule for where I park now and how I get into that piece, and it's a good one. If we stop seeing deer, it'll be time to rewrite the rules and figure out what to do to get things working in my direction again. So what does all of this mean for you? For starters, I'll give you a simple one which plays off that summer scouting episode I did last week. One of the summertime rules a lot of us follow is to run cameras and mostly stay out of the woods. How about don't do that. Run cameras and go into the woods. Take a good look around. Try to envision what you should do now to kill one the first week of the season. Go check some of your rut funnels for tracks now, walk field edges and fence rows. Go into the woods. Pay attention to the heat and the bugs and how bad they are while you're standing up on top of the hill looking at your on X and how bad they are when you drop into the bottom of the valley to look around. Pay attention to the water sources and the browsing evidence. The more we learn about the deer we are hunting, the more we realize that the general rules don't matter much. It's far more important to figure out exactly what's going on in your spot, not what someone else is doing seven states away on a property that is nothing like yours. So don't break the laws and the regulations, but think about the general deer hunting rules that you follow. Do they seem to be working out for you? Or do you still struggle to fill tags even though you're diligent about them. If the latter is true, go figure out how to do things differently, break some of those rules and forget about what you're supposed to do and try to learn what you should do. I want you to do that. I want you to come back next week because I'm going to talk about some more summertime, your concerns and get into some strategies that I have right now to set myself up for hunts all fall, including rut hunts, even though it's hot, miserable out and I'm not really that excited to do it. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for listening. We really appreciate it. Here at Meat Eater, I firmly believe we have the best audience out there. You guys are so loyal, you check in all the time. It's just great. Your support means the world to us. If you need more, Dear Hunting content, Maybe you need some good storytelling on a podcast. 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