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 Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by first Sight. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about the early season and the mistakes that a lot of us are going to make and we don't have to, and how those are going to cost us deer and how we can avoid them. It's on, and if it's not, it's staying close. Some lucky folks have already hunted, or if you're a diehard like Mark, have you know fly fished for five days while pretending you were hunting. The early season is on. It's fun, and it's a time that is often full of mistakes, and it's one hell of a good opportunity for a lot of to slide right back into our old habits that will stick with us all dear season. So let's make a pack not to do that and to help us get that right. I'm going to explain some of these big mistakes, how we make them, and how we can avoid them. The other night, I took one of my daughters to the high school to play in a three on three basketball league. It's basically like a throwaway Sunday night league that is mostly a way for the girls to get ready for their actual traveling leagues and their school teams. For my fellow math challenge people, that's three basketball teams that will be running concurrently at different points for one eighth grader who has a very very low chance of making it into the WNBA. Any honkers, all stupid suburb life stuff aside. She's pretty good down low, but she lacks confidence, and the minute she does something wrong, like missing an easy layup, is the minute she suddenly retreats and will try to hide from the ball. It's maddening as a parent because I know, after years of making giant mistakes in my life, that everyone is basically a walk in and talking screw up machine. We all are, And I know that missing one layup in a three on three league with other eighth grade girls who also miss a lot of shots isn't going to be all that important. Overall, So on the drive home, I told her that she can't play in fear of making mistakes, and I punctuated my point by saying that Michael Jordan missed something like nine thousand shots in his career, to which she responded, I don't really know who that is, So anyway, I guess I might want to look into nursing homes, because I'm probably headed there any day now because I'm getting so old. Anyway, I switched gears and I said, do you know how many deer I've missed in my life, to which she answered without hesitation, a lot, which stung a little but also wasn't really wrong. I said yes, And I said that we don't stop shooting at them just because we whif once in a while you just knock another arrow and wait for another opportunity, even if you do it on film, and a whole bunch of super excellent hunters who clearly never miss reach out to tell you how you don't belong in the same woods with them because of how skilled they are and how unskilled you are. Now, by the end of our conversation, I felt like I might have had a better chance getting my lab pop to understand quantum physics, but at least I tried, and I'm going to try to shoot some deer this week, and mostly I'm going to fail. Hunting white tails, at least for most of us, on a daily basis, is a sure way to make mistakes and not get everything right. The complexity of what we do and the variables that conspire against us just make it so. But then there is the US specter, where we do things that definitely hurt our cause these mistakes are often disguised as good hunting decisions, but they aren't. Now, I'm not going to dive into this because I've covered it a whole bunch, but the idea, the general idea of not ever hunting mornings in the early season is just a prime example of one of them. Just think about the idea that someone from Iowa who has four thousand acres of least ground telling some hunter from Georgia who hunts public land that it's never a good idea to hunt mornings until the preret kicks in. Now, if you think you're making a good decision by not hunting a whole bunch when you could be, I'd say right away that not hunting when you could be is probably not a good decision. Learn to solve the problems like how to find a good early season morning set up, instead of making the mistake of just deciding that it can't be done so it won't be worth it. Now, another big mistake that a lot of hunters make is not appreciating the blank slate reality of a new season. The cumulative effects of hunters entering the woods now does a generally good job of letting the deer know that another season is on and that they had better be careful. Even if you're on public land and know a lot of other hunters are out there, you still can control your impact on the woods to some extent. Sometimes I go down weird rabbit holes on different topics, and I recently went pretty deep on reading about fighter jets. I honestly don't remember what even spurred it, but I guess that doesn't matter what I found. What was pretty interesting in reading about the aircraft that the US has that might take to the skies if some country or terrorist group kicks the old hornet nest of freedom a little too hard was the radar signatures of certain fighter jets. So imagine standing on a runway. Looking at a parked F twenty two, for example, it definitely would look small, and it definitely would look badass. You wouldn't think that it would be all that hard to see, because well, you're literally looking at it right now. Now, you got to remember it's not flying at MOK two, which is about fifteen hundred miles per hour, a speed that an F twenty two can reach. The crazy part is that the actual design of the jet is meant to fool radar, which means that the actual radar signature of them is like point zero zero zero one square meters, or to put it in another way, about the size of a single marble. Why am I telling you this is I always think about what a white tail can detect and how they do it. The easy way for them to detect us is to bed just inside the wood edge and watch us drive down the field road, get out of our trucks, sued up, spray down like good little hunters, and then walk past them to get to our field edge stands. The easiest way for us to avoid getting detected that way is to plan entrance and exit routes that keep us generally hidden in a visual sense. A lot of hunters don't really think about this, and it costs them. If you can walk through a standing cornfield or walk along an open two track, think long and hard about why you would choose one over the other. Just like if you can walk in through a dry creek bed that's six feet below the surrounding ground, or walk on that higher ground, think about it. Your radar signature there is big, and it's going to get you caught. Little things make a big difference there in getting sighted when you're going in. 00:06:56 Speaker 1: Now. 00:06:56 Speaker 2: One final note on this is that while we tend to think about our entrance as high priority stealth missions, we might not value our exits the same way. Sneaking into a beanfield edge staying to sit opening night is going to give you an advantage that night, But if when you leave you walk right through the field, then you're going to hurt every chance you have at that stand for at least a couple of weeks. The way out matters, my friends, so be careful with that too. 00:07:23 Speaker 1: Now. 00:07:24 Speaker 2: While conditions vary a lot on this front, another way to think about detection is how noisy you might be. The early season has a lot of vegetation to soak up sound. It isn't full of dry leaves and sticks usually on the ground, and can be one of the easiest times of the year to be quiet on your way in and your way out. The easiest way to generally be quiet in the woods is to go slow, and that means you have to give yourself time. A huge mistake a lot of hunters make is not building in a decent cushion of time to go low and slow into an out of their setups. Then you have the scent aspect, which is where I think we do ourselves the most harm. I like to think about it this way. While I definitely don't want to get winded while sitting on stand or in a blind, that's only part of keeping your scent signature down. What we touch on the way in, while we are there and when we walk out all exists to tattle on us after we get back to the truck. Deer are curious, and you don't have to run trail cameras very long before you'll see them come up to your cams and give them a good sniff. They are interested in out of place items that smell like deadly predators. They are also just very interested in the comings and goings of those same predators. This is a tough one, but it's also just reality that the more that you try to reduce your scent any way possible in the woods, the longer you'll preserve that early season relaxed nature of deer. Just the difference between wearing leather boots and knee high rubber boots during your early season hunts can buy you a little leeway on this front, especially if you spray down your knee highs. Think about your overall radar signature, if you will, and try to consciously keep it down. I don't know if it's possible to keep the deer totally unaware of your presence, but you can reduce how much of an impact you have on any excursion into the woods, and that always helps. Another early season mistake that is really easy to make is the not paying attention thing. It's actually pretty scary how widespread our phone addictions are, and it certainly feels like things are only going to get worse. I also know that early season sits are often pretty boring until right before dark, and I'm definitely not immune to doom scrolling to kill time. But one thing I learn every single year during the early season is that my hunting senses just aren't as sharp. When I go out and I hear something three hours before I expect the deer to show up, I often miss it pretty quickly as a squirrel or something else. Sometimes I'm right and sometimes I'm wrong. And when I am wrong, it's usually not super fun to try to have to grab my bow when there's a deer right by me, or get caught facing the wrong way and I can't move. Try to remember that you might be a little dull from like nine months of off season, and that stick that snaps when it's three pm and not a half hour before dark could be a thirsty buck headed to the water, or an old dough making her way to the alfalf a nice and early to munch on some greenery. When you don't have the luxury of open woods in the ground covered with dry dead leaves, you have a situation in which they can move pretty quietly and get up on you in a surprising way. Pay attention to the sounds of the woods, Try to be diligent on taking a look around more often, you know, and maybe glassing when you can to pick up some movement before that movement is right beneath your stand. Now, another big mistake that is really really easy to make in the early season is trusting your trail cameras too much. This morning, before I dropped the girls off at school, I checked my Moultrie app to see who showed up last night. The answer was almost no one, which is always a little disappointing. But then when we got into my truck and we started driving to school, I realized how foggy it was out, which is a condition we get a lot up here in September. Now. Two things happen when it's foggy out. The first is that cameras don't seem to function very well. Neither do rangehinders, by the way, And the second is that the deer don't seem overly inspired to cover tons of ground, which only makes sense. Last night didn't tell me anything about deer other than if it's foggy when I go hunting, I might not be overrun with action. But it's also almost a guarantee that more deer walked by my cameras than the pictures would suggest. This isn't just a foggy condition thing either. With the abundance of soft and hard mass out there, and the fact that this is the high water mark for foliage in the woods, which means they have a lot of easy places to hide and lots of security cover to work with. They aren't necessarily going to follow the best trails all the time. A few years ago I filmed a show in northern Wisconsin with one of my daughters, and since I knew we wouldn't see tons of deer or bears while we were actually hunting, I set up several cameras on my property to capture video footage. What blew my mind was how often one of my cameras, which was set up on a trail I cut that leads into a little kill plot of mine, showed deer not going down the trail, but cutting it crosswise where there's just no defined trail. Trust me on that, because I checked about six times. They were just browsing and feeding their way through in a way that didn't create a concentration of sign but they were pretty consistent, and that lesson has stuck with me now. While cameras in certain spots, like really good train traps will tell you a lot about who passes through on a daily basis, they're not going to show you everything. Again, just like the advice to not hunt mornings, if you aren't going out to sit right now because your cameras are slow, could be making a big mistake. The deer aren't all that likely to be nocturnal right now, but they do have a lot of food options, and in some places, a lot of water options, and in almost all places, the most betting options they'll have for the entire season. You might not have the camera intel that gets you stoked to go out, but sitting in spots where the food is good enough, or the water is good enough, or they might sneak back through to bed in the morning can be a hell of a lot better than staying out of the woods because your hit lister hasn't walked by one of your three cameras in the last two weeks. I think on that last point, which was also kind of my first point in this, I want to say something else to try to drive this home. It's easy to be hyped up and feel like you're on the verge of shooting a giant this season and you have your mission set and all of that, but be careful about going into the season that way. This stuff is supposed to be fun and a nice escape from the bullshit that has infested our lives and made our lives a lot less enjoyable by the day. This idea kind of walks hand in hand with the false reed we often give ourselves in the early season that we can play it safe because we have tons of time. Most of us actually don't, and if you factor in how many sits you actually get in a season, you might realize that skipping a day in September when you could hunt might be the equivalent of giving up three or five or even ten percent of your actual hunting time for the rut. That's a big gamble, and it's one of the reasons I preached the message of trying to find a reason to hunt. One of the things that really helped me on this front a long time ago was when I bought into the lull idea. I thought you wouldn't shoot a big buck in earlier mid October, But I really wanted to hunt, because being in the woods in October is better than being literally anywhere else. So I went out and hunted, mostly for doz. I like to shoot deer, I like to eat deer, and I don't like not hunting deer when I can, so it just made sense. I'm sure you know where this is going. But it wasn't just the dose that showed up to eat acorns. When I started doing that, I had inadvertently taken most to the pressure off of myself to kill a buck, and it just gone out more relaxed to hang and hunt on fresh sign, which was often tied to mast or some other mid season food source, and I ended up finding a hell of a lot of bucks that way. In fact, it was one of the biggest revelations I had as a public land bow hunter, because it not only gave me a reason to go, I figured out that most other hunters weren't going, and because of that, the bucks seemed far more likely to move. So that was two times or two conditions where they shouldn't move, and they were moving more. In so many cases to this day, I'd rather hunt public on October tenth than on November seventh, which probably sounds nuts, but it really isn't a joke. So let's tie a bow on this thing. It's Christmas morning for us whitetail junkies, and it's time to finally hunt again. The thing we've waited for for about nine months is here, and the deer as dumb as they are going to be all season. Try your best to keep them that way, and try your best to find a good reason to go as much as you can, because it won't be that long, and the rut will come and go, and the late season will show up with all of its challenges, and then suddenly we will all be sadly mourning the loss of another deer season. Don't let this get away from you, at least without a fight, which starts right now. So good luck, and don't forget to come back next week because I'm going to talk about Judgment Light and how we should just watch our own bobbers this dear season and we will all be much happier. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. I just want to say thank you so much for your support. You guys show up for us in a major way. We really really appreciate it, all of us on the med Eater crew, everybody here at Meat Eater. We'd be nothing without the audience. That's you. Guys, so thank you so much for that. I know you're consuming podcasts because you're listening to this. You know where to find our podcast We have a whole bunch of them at the medeater dot com. But when you're there, you might also see that there's a bunch of articles by a whole bunch of really good hunters and a whole bunch of really good outdoor journalists, a lot of really good news stories going up on the site right now, interesting stuff. There's also a ton of videos. Essentially, if you like content content, and I know you do, go to the medeater dot com and check it out.