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. In today's episode is all about understanding the subtle and not so subtle changes in the deer woods and how this can help you kill more mature bucks. All right, all right, all right. This is a fun one for me because it taps into something I deal with in the deer woods all year long. It's probably the thing that holds me back more than anything. Change in its many, many forms. It happens throughout the season, it happens from year to year, and it happens whether we consent to it or not. It's just the reality of the world, and the best hunters I know learn how to deal with it in a positive way, which is what this episode is all about. A couple of weeks ago, I was in the gym just picking up heavy stuff and putting it down like a dozen or so other gym goers who are all really just trying to look a little better naked. I guess when I picked up my phone to choose another song to listen to. This is probably crazy, and I almost hesitate to say it, but I sort of feel that music influences my entire life now in the context of lifting weights. This is pretty easy to understand for a fellow wired like me. I probably wouldn't see those sick gains with a Z if I spent my gym time listening to Whitney Houston's greatest hits, or I don't know, some band like Coldplay or something. I need heavy music laced with lots of anger, lots of drop D guitar riffs, and just something that shakes your guts loose a little. My affinity toward music goes way beyond the obvious spots, though, to the point where I'm pretty superstitious about the music I played before a hunt and after. Sometimes the vibes are just wrong, and when you get into the woods, that sticks with you, and the dear no show so for days at a time, and you just have to switch things up. Sometimes you play something with a nice tribal drum beat, go out and arrow a deer, and then get to listen to something celebratory on the way back. My girls and I did this recently, where we drove out to Pearl Jam's song WMA and we left the woods with a dead spike and filters. Hey man, nice shot blasting away, which has become our tradition when the blood trail ends in hugs and not question marks. I freaking love music, and I know a lot of you do too, so I'm always looking for something new, which brings me back to that gym session. I went to my phone and saw that my YouTube algorithm had fed me a band called dead frog Face. I try to listen to a few new songs or a few new bands every day, and the name of that band gave me the push I needed to listen because I just like dead frog Face. It was a song called bad and boy was it good, you know, like outlaw country type of good if you're wondering the genre now. I listened to that song and a few of their other songs all day long, and I had the feeling, you know, that really really good feeling of having found another band that will make this suburb life a little more tolerable. That night, I thought about one of their songs and I decided to look up the lyrics, but there were none. There's no information on dead frog face anywhere, no wiki, not a you know a band member list, nothing. I got a weird feeling before heading to Spotify to see if they were on there, and that's where I read the band description and figured out that it's all AI. I felt well, not great about it. I'm not a great negotiator, so it kind of reminded me of having to sell something or go back and forth with my boss on a raise and then realizing that I could have done much better, like I got outwitted, outplayed or whatever. It instantly made me not want to listen to that band ever again, and I've mostly stopped. But you know what, that shit isn't going away. This thing I do here where I write these scripts and then I read them for you by the week, this is going to go away too. Probably in the not too distant future, you'll be able to dial up your own Foundation style podcasts, but they'll be customizable to your region, to your hunting style, to your sense of humor, to whatever, and what sucks is they'll probably be really good. I'm positive that most of us at a certain age view this new reality with some level of disdain and suspicion. But you know what, it doesn't matter. This change is coming and it doesn't care about our feelings or the fact that it could take our jobs in an instant. It just is the next thing, and after that there'll be something else. That whole experience got me thinking about change and what it means to us. Most humans are pretty resistant to change because we are generally pessimistic at heart. This manifests itself in the deer woods in a million different ways. One that I bitch about a lot is the talk which has weirdly died down some lately on too many people in the woods, the elkwoods, the deer woods, the whatever woods. The people complaining the most really want two things. They want easier hunting, which is really the hunting they think they can remember having before everyone else showed up and ruined it for them. In some ways, they can complain enough and get a result on that front, but it won't change the fact that more and more residents are also being pushed into the fewer spots that are left to hunt. The change that's happening in the woods right now, that's a big one, and it's one that is just like we are all collectively losing ground to development and people who have the means to tie up land financially, and that means that unless we figure out how to create more public ground, we are all kind of in the same boat here. Now, another big change that's happening right now that affects an awful lot of us is one like crossbow inclusion. Fight at all you want, my friends, but over a long enough timeline, the battle is already decided. What that means to us as individuals varies a lot. Some folks will jump ship instantly for an easier weapon, some will hold out for a while, and a small percentage will avoid it entirely. But over time, the change keeps going one way, and it isn't the way that it was before they really became a part of the conversation. Change is happening all the time, on a huge scale and at a subtle, almost imperceptible scale. It's always happening, and the more you can recognize it for what it is and react to it for what you think it will be the better your season will go. So what does this all mean. We'll think about it this way. If you don't know what has changed, you won't know how to react. I think this is a huge problem with hunters in general, and a huge reason why so many folks ride a dead program year after year. Let me give you an example from my life. Recently, I spent some time up in the north Woods, Wisconsin hunting public land. Some spots are brand new to me this year, while others I've hunted for almost a decade now. One spot in particular, I've killed a few of my best bucks on. It's a parcel. I took one of my daughters in for a rut hunt last year and got oh so close to a really great deer. Now. I went into that property this spring the scout and have been in there maybe parts of six days this season. Last year, it was covered in buck sign and when I say covered, I mean covered more than I've ever seen up there or almost anywhere. It felt like I was in Iowa on private land. Honestly, while my first hunt there this season, I walked into a creek bottom that I haven't hunted in a few years and was absolutely struck by how thick it was. It was like when you haven't seen someone in ten years and you think about how much they've aged, and then you quickly realize that they are thinking the same thing about you, But it doesn't register quite the same way. That property was logged right before I started hunting it. So it has gone through major changes in the last decade, and it's at the right level of thickness to soak up a whole bunch of deer who would rather hide in the thick shit than the generally far more open public land around it. The access roads have become largely blocked too, with falling trees and just overgone brush, and that has changed the game in there as well. That change might seem welcome, because now you have a high concentration of deer in a small ish spot. That's huge, But hunting it is a hell of a lot different than it used to be. It's not like I can brush hog access trails to stand trees in there, and with no trail cameras and no tree trimming for shooting lanes and whatnot, it has become a really challenging spot. But I can look at it like it's not what it used to be and be sad about that, or I can just try to figure out how to use it to my advantage. Now that's what I'm going to do this season, and I can safely say so far it's totally kicking my ass. But there is a lot of season left, and I think the bucks will keep moving in there as the rut gets closer, and I'm going to just try to use that to my advantage. In fact, I almost killed the maturre doo in there recently, which is a huge win in that part of the world for me, and the whole reason I almost killed her is because the oak trees in this tiny spot between swamps were just raining down the good stuff. She was betted in the thick shit that's almost impossible to hunt. But on the edge of that, I found some of the best here today, gone tomorrow food you can find in early October. And if I hadn't screwed it up by making just a bit too much noise when I tried to draw on her, she'd likely be in my freezer instead of well wherever she is right now, probably cleaning up the last of the acorns while I sit at the stupid desk believe you me. I'm going to file away that encounter for future hunts, and at some point that's going to be a dead program too, most likely. But for now, all of those changes, they are forcing me as a hunter to scout more and do a few more observation sits and just react to a new world in the same old place, if that makes any sense. The thing about change is that you're going to be forced to deal with it, whether you want to or not. We see this with weather all the time. I spent all last bitching about south winds and how my stand setups for north and west winds were mostly worthless for most of the season. Then you know what happened. The fricking wind just kept right on blowing from the south, and this year there has been more east in it than usual, which is kind of like a Mike Tyson upper cut. To your delegates, a simple wind change means one of a few things for us. We choose to not hunt because we have no good setup, or at least one that's not good enough for that wind, you know, probably the most common reaction there. Or we hunt a setup that we talk ourselves into because we want to go out even though we know that it'll probably be a train wreck, or we grab a mobile setup and head out to make something happen in the less than ideal conditions. You know, that cause a lot of other folks to just stay away or settle. It really is that simple, and we all know what the best approach probably is. It's so easy to not take the best approach, though. I recently had a conversation with a good buddy of mine who has a killer delease. I'm honestly super jealous of him for it. Anyway, he knows that eventually that lease is going to go away. He says as much often, but recently I also said he'll probably just mostly fezan hunt when the lease goes away, because it'll be too hard to go hunt someplace that isn't as good. Now, that's an understandable reaction, sort of, Well not really, but I see where he's coming from. The thing is that change is coming, It's plain as day now. Instead of just waiting for it to change the arc of his life as a deer hunter forever, a better bet would be to start looking to hedge that loss somehow. Now. That would be through tapping his network to find a spot looking for another small lease to get to learn scouting public land something. But he probably won't because he doesn't have to yet. And that's a very understandable thing. Most of us don't want to do extra work for any reason, and I'm not being facetious there. I had a cameraman earlier this summer mentioned to me that he feels like he was born to be retired, and I don't know if I've ever related to anything more. This is a hard thing to do, but looking at change like a negative by default is bad for all of us. When I was fourteen, my dad and I lost our two private hunting spots that were just awesome. It sucked so much. Then we picked up a farm that I still hunt to this day. And I can tell you with certainty that you wouldn't be listening to me talk about deer every week if that hadn't happened. It forced me to be a mobile hunter before that was a thing, and it put me in the woods so much. Another time when change really really sucked for me was when the company I was working for got bought out by a private equity firm. When forty percent of the company got let go, I wasn't in the lucky sixty percent, and I realized that my dream of staying in the hunting industry wasn't on nearly as firm of ground as I thought. That forced me into the freelance world, where I said screw it and put my mind toward figuring out public land deer. That changed my life professionally, but also resulted in me just finding out the exact kind of hunting that I love more than anything else. It was a horrible personal change that ended up turning positive, but that transition wasn't quick or easy. So what's changing in your world? I bet you feel like you have less free time than you ever have. I bet you feel like a lot of your time on stand isn't being used in a way that makes you feel as good as it should. I bet you're sick of the new neighbors, or tired of never having a shooter on camera, or a lot of things. The world and the deer woods are in constant flux. We are in the October low right now, which is a perceived change in deer behavior where all the bucks go nocturnal and there's no good reason to hunt right This change happens every year, and those bucks are still out there, and they're still killable, but they won't be killable if you don't hunt, or you keep hunting, maybe the same old field edge stands. You can see this change coming, just like a full moon or the weather that the ten day forecast tells you is coming. You can see the new development being built next to your deer property. You can feel the free time slipping away by the year as the kids get more into sports and other activities, and for some reason, our jobs become such an outsized part of our lives instead of just being a means for us to trade forty hours a week for a life that is tolerable enough. Some of these changes are super predictable, some aren't. What they all are are just challenges to overcome. You think you can't kill a mature buck right now, Well what are you going to do to make that happen? If you're checking your cameras a few times a day and nothing more, then you will never beat the lull. You think the rut won't be as fun this year because you have less time to hunt and there are a couple of new hunters who have permission to trump around on your favorite farm. Well that change might mean that you have to be far more efficient with the time that you do have. Maybe two or three all days sits all you can get instead of a week of you know, a morning sit here and an evening sit there. So much of life is beyond our control, so it's mostly about how we react to that stuff. It's easy to bemoan what once was, like how you remember the elk woods being devoid of other hunters while the bulls screamed their heads off two hundred yards away from the trailhead. But you don't get that world anymore unless you could write a giant check. How do you go out there and find them now that the change has happened. How do you find the deer when the woods aren't what you want them to be. That's the challenge for all of us, and it's often just a matter of perspective. The people who kill big bucks consistently, at least on ground they can't tightly control. They look at that stuff like just more variables to plug into the equation. They work through them. They scout, they hunt as much as possible, and just try to figure out what those changes mean to the deer, because in the end that's what really matters if you want to fill more tags, So think about that. Think about coming back next week because I'm going to talk about the value of buck sign and what it means in the weeks leading up to the pre rut. That's it for this episode. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast. I want to thank you all for your support. You show up for us every week, and I know you don't hear this enough, but I mean this from my heart. We would be nothing without you guys, So your support is everything, So thank you for that. If you want some more content, and I know you do, because everybody's in hunter mode right now. When we're all watching videos and listening to podcasts and consuming content, go to the meeteater dot com. We're dropping new films, new podcasts, new articles, new recipes, you name it, every single day at the medeater dot com.