00:00:01 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your guide to the whitetail woods, 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, Mark Kenyon. 00:00:19 Speaker 2: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. 00:00:21 Speaker 3: This week on the show, I'm joined by Bill Winky for twenty fast questions on late season whitetail hunting. All right, welcome back to the Wired tont podcast, brought to you by First Light and their Camera for Conservation initiative. And today we're playing twenty questions with the one and only Bill Winky. You know him from Midwest whitetail and bow hunting, White Tales with Bill Winki and countless articles over the years and Peterson's Bow Hunting and other places as well. He's one of the foremost authorities on whitetail huntings, excess bow hunting especially, and so today I wanted to run them through twenty questions, twenty relatively rapid fire questions about hunting the late season to get a really clear understanding of what the Winky way is for this, you know, sometimes really challenging part of the hunting season. So that's what we're gonna do. We're not gonna be there on the bush. We're not gonna take a long time telling stories. This is going to be fast. This is going to be to the point. Ideas, tactics, strategies for failing your tag in these final weeks maybe month and a half ish of the season, depending on where you live, it might be even less than that, might be two weeks, three weeks. But there's certainly some good hunts to be had. I'll reiterate something that I mentioned probably two weeks ago I guess at the end of my kind of review of late season hunting tactics, and that's that this time of year is such a great time to invite somebody out there with you, to take your kids, to go out there with your dad or your grandpa, or your spouse or a buddy that wants to learn to hunt, you know, especially if you don't have a specific buck that you're after and you're just trying to have a fun way to wrap up the year, that's a great way to do it. On the flip side, though, if you are trying to kill that one special buck, you're still trying to kill a mature buck. And you have, you know, the special set of circumstances that Bill's going to tell you about, and you have to be extra careful with how you do it, and you're really trying to be tactical. Well, what we're going to talk about today should help you do that as well. So, without much further ado, I do want to just give you a quick reminder if you're looking to do any last minute Christmas shopping meat Eater in first light, we've got a whole lot of options over on the Meat Eater store, which you can find if you go to the mediator dot com. You still have these hats are are out right now, they're all sold out, but the Wired Hunt t shirts are still available. Signed copies of my book That Wild Country is still available. The wire to Hunt buck grunt that I helped design, that still for sale over on the Phelps Calls website. So a handful of ideas there check out if you need them. You know, our new jerky needed or Jerky that's a pretty good stocking stuffer, so check it out if you're in need Otherwise. Today, what we're really focusing on though, is late season success. Let's get to my chat, my twenty questions with mister Bill Winky, the one and only legend himself. Here we go, all right with me now on the line for I couldn't tell you which number of appearances has been Bill, but it's been a lot, and I appreciate I've got Bill Winky back on the show. 00:03:35 Speaker 2: Bill, thanks for being here. 00:03:37 Speaker 4: Yeah, my pleasure, Mark, good to be here. 00:03:39 Speaker 2: I always enjoy our chats. 00:03:41 Speaker 3: I want to tell you I think I texted you this, but if not, I want to tell you in person how much I enjoyed your appearance on our back forty series that we did with Jake Hoefer. That turned out really cool. Your inputs were really helpful on that, so thank you again for that. Yeah. So today Bill, we are talking in early ish December, the late season, the core of the late season ahead of us, and my idea was to play a game sort of. 00:04:11 Speaker 2: You might remember this from. 00:04:12 Speaker 3: When you were younger. I remember when I was like in junior high, we used to do this thing called twenty questions, where you'd just be asked like twenty you know, kind of perpetually more detailed questions. I guess maybe this would be how it would be framed. And my thought was we could do this, but instead of talking about like boys and girls in junior high, We're going to talk about late season white tails the Bill Winky win. So I've got twenty twenty rapid fire whitetail questions for finding success in the late season, and I'm just going to jump right into it in the interest of time. Here, if you were stuck in an elevator with somebody today and you had like thirty seconds to sixty seconds in the elevator with them, and you had to answer one question for them before the doors open, and they asked you, what is the Bill Winkie way for late season white tail success? How would you answer that before the door has opened. 00:05:07 Speaker 4: It's pretty easy, really. I mean, you've got to have food, you got to have ideally some cold weather and a little bit of snow helps the deer that aren't heavily pressured. Bow hunting late season deer is really really tough if you don't have those pieces of the puzzle. 00:05:26 Speaker 3: Yeah, can it be done if you don't have those pieces of the puzzle. 00:05:30 Speaker 4: There are people who do it, definitely, but they're a lot tougher than me because they're sitting in tree stands in travel funnels, or maybe they're sitting next to betting areas, which is a little bit more risky. But it's cold, and that's the problem. Late season hunting is only really good when it gets cold, because if it's mild during the late season, they just feed at night and you don't see that activity. So when you combine cold with sitting in a tree with a bow in your hand, done it. You know, we probably have all done it. But gosh, I sure like those heated blinds now that makes it a lot more fun. But yeah, it can be done, Mark, It's just it's a painful process if you got to do it the hard way. 00:06:16 Speaker 2: Mm hmm. It's funny. 00:06:17 Speaker 3: I you know, have taken my two young sons out hunting with me for a lot of years now, and oftentimes the period of time that I have the most opportunity to take them historically has been in the late season, and so we go into a box blind that have a heater out there, and it was pretty comfortable for him, right. But the last two years, my oldest son, he's seven now, he's wanted to get a little bit more adventurous with it more and more, so we've started kind of doing something on the ground spot and stock tile style gun hunts. 00:06:45 Speaker 2: And this weekend we did that. 00:06:47 Speaker 3: And it was really cold, really snowy, and there's no heater. We're out in the wind, and he's like, man, I gotta miss the groundbline right now dead. Those are some pretty nice hunts with a heater. He's all of a sudden understanding the world. 00:07:01 Speaker 4: Yeah, there's you know, being tough is cool. But the older I get, the not I become less tough. Put it that way. 00:07:11 Speaker 2: He had nothing wrong with that. 00:07:14 Speaker 3: You did a video recently talking about your late season approach and you had two major cautionary notes, major points of concern that people need to watch out for as they approach late season hunting in that style you mentioned. The first of those was that you do not want to go into your good spots to hunt until the deer you want to kill is actually moving in daylight. You kind of broke down why that's so important and how to do that? Can you can you dive into that for us and explain why that's so important this time of year. 00:07:48 Speaker 4: Well, the deer this time of the year, there've had any pressure. They tend to be real skittish, real tough to kill because they just you know, they've been through it. They've been through the firearms season, whatever the case may be. They've had pressure. They're not coming out in daylight very much, so it takes time. You know, the conditions kind of have to fall into place for a little while, and they've got to get more comfortable, you know, not being pressured, and then finally they start moving daylight again. And I've seen it back in my you know years when I used to hunt on permission in a lot of places where they've been firearms, you know, hunted deer drives all that. Sometimes it takes two weeks before they get comfortable moving in daylight again. So you can see all that sign on the ground, and you can see where they've been tearing up snow if there's snow or whatever it may be. You get excited and you think I need sitting here. But you go into that spot and then at the end of legal shooting time, you've got to get out of it, and that's about when the deer maybe you're starting to move a little bit toward those places. So now when you're exiting there, they're just reinforcing this whole idea that I can't go out during the daylight. I need to wait until dark, so you may only get a couple of really good late season hunts. You don't want to waste that equity or that capital whatever you gain by being patient by going in there and hunting a spot where the deer aren't going to be moving a deal because what you do, the damage that you do on the way out, might make it impossible to ever kill one there that season. 00:09:22 Speaker 2: Yeah, this is I guess the uh. 00:09:24 Speaker 3: This is where the secret sauce comes in trying to figure out this balance, right, because to your point, you don't want to do it. You don't want to hunt thosepots too much and educate the deer and then never get the chance. But on the flip side, there's also this this challenge that I think a lot of us face at least, where we are sometimes becoming beholden to our trail cameras and waiting for that buck to show up on camera before we go hunt. And then he shows up, there he is, and then he'd go on the next day, but then he's off doing something different the next day. How do you balance this need to wait but then not wait too long? 00:09:59 Speaker 4: That's more of a something that you see the early season and during the rut, where the deer are less likely to repeat a pattern. It's almost to guarantee if you see it buck in a certain spot during the rut, that they won't be there the next day. So the trail cameras aren't super beneficial from that standpoint. They tell you that the deer is in an area, so you hunt that area. But during the late season, I find, especially once they get past that danger fear you're not coming out in daylight, they become very very predictable, very patentable, because, especially if the weather pattern stays the same and it stays cold, they almost fall into They become almost I would say dumb. They're not really dumb, but they become so hard on that pattern that they'll follow it every day. And you know, if you're hunting one buck, you know that's a little bit tough. But if you're hunting like two or three deer and they're coming to the same location, pretty good chance that once they start start showing daylight, that you're going to have at least one of them there every night until the conditions change. You can anticipate it, you can try to anticipate it, but it's so risky if you get it wrong, because once again you're going to ruin that spot. I wouldn't but if you're going to try to anticipate it, you look at that cold front coming in in a really hard cold front during the winter usually gets them going that night, not you know, maybe the next few days too, But you want to be there that night. You know, if the forecast says it's going to get down to two degrees tonight, you know in my part of the country, well that's a cold snap. You better be out there. But again the cautionary note is if he doesn't come out, you might have ruined that spot for a while. And that's the risk because they're really really good at no one when they're being hunted. You just can't over over state how important it is to keep that element of surprise. During the rut, you can get away with doing a lot of kind of I would say marginal strategies because the deer are moving so much and they're going to be on their feet more. But during the late season, they've only got two places they're going to be, where they bed and where they eat, you know, and especially if their options where they can feed is limited, then don't screw that up, because that's what you're hanging your whole season on now. 00:12:30 Speaker 3: So if all of this is predicated then on confirming that the deer I want to kill is moving in daylight now and here what is how does your scouting differ now than it maybe did in the early season or during the rut, so that you can a confirm what I just said, but then be do it in a way that doesn't educate these deer that are so much spookier than they were any other time of the year. 00:12:55 Speaker 4: Well, you know, I'm gonna elaborate a little bit more. If you're in a situation where you know they're never going to get to the food in daylight, then you may as well, you know, swing for the fence. You may as well go into the cover or find the trails between where they bed and where they feed and hope to catch them earlier. But again, you're sitting in a tree, you know, under some really rough conditions. So anyway that that is possible, that is doable. But to answer your question, obviously, a long range any long range scouting with binoculars would be useful. But the trail camera obviously makes it a lot easier, you know, and even if you run a non cell camera, you can go in there at midday and pull the cards and see what's you know, see what's going on. I used to do that during the late season, you know, before I was running any cell cams. So you don't need cell cameras to make this work. And you don't even need cams, you just need you would need time, you know, in order to be able to swing past those areas and glass them real quick, you know, in the last fifteen to twenty minutes of daylight and see what's out there, But you just don't want to. Again, my point is they're so hard to kill late season. You don't have anything going for you other than one thing. It's very easy for them to stop doing, and that's coming to a specific spot defeat. If you give them any excuse not to do it, they're not going to do it. 00:14:17 Speaker 3: With the cameras, since that's that's a big part of the possible scouting plan, how do you like to have those set up? What kinds of locations are you setting your late season cameras? And then number two, what's the concentration of cameras when you're trying to figure this that. You know, sometimes people might have one camera on a food source, you know, in the rut maybe or earlier in the year. But at this point when everything is revolving around your food source, do you really, you know, have multiple cameras around a bunch of different entries and exits to these food sources. 00:14:50 Speaker 2: How does that look? 00:14:51 Speaker 4: I mean, I don't. I'm pretty simple when it comes to that stuff. I mean, some people love to have tons and tons of cameras, and I kind of like the whole game of figuring it out like a little bit of a chess match. Still, and I don't have any. You know, I don't be grudge anybody doing it anyway, it's legal, but I would just put one on each food source and i'd point it. I probably either have it in the food source or very close to it where you can see the feeding area. Plus you can see the directions that the deer are coming from when they enter it. Unless it's in the timber where it's you know, one or three hundred and sixty degrees, you know, where they could come from. Any direction, you can usually isolate where they're going to be coming from fairly effectively that I've started using the stealth cameras that have the revolver, and those things are super cool because you could put one in the middle of your little small plot or your small corner of the field or whatever it is that you're hunting. It's got six zones and the camera actually moves inside the body and takes a picture depending upon where it picks up movement. So those are it's not the same as having six cameras, but it's probably the same as having two or three cameras. So those are pretty cool, but I don't only use those anyway. The point is if you can't figure it out with one camera, then you probably need two. But usually you can figure it out with one because you can point it more or less in the direction where they're coming from, and then you can see what time of day they're getting to the area, and you know, if it's forty five minutes after legal shooting time, you're like, dang, I'm not even in the game if I go back in the woods, you know, But if it's ten minutes, you know after, and I say after and before after after it so yeah, yeah, sorry, So but if it's ten minutes after whatever. Then you're like, Okay, I've got a chance here if I want to really push this, and you know, I could go in there a little ways and find the trails that these deer are using and try to catch them before you know they get out into the open. I just feel sorry for people who do that, to be honest with them. It's so cold, and maybe certain parts of the country it's not so bad, but for the deer to move really well in daylight during the late season, it's going to be really really cold, and to sit in a tree stand. Gosh, I've done it, and you better have good equipment because you can't last very long. Maybe you hunt the last two hours and that's it. Yeah. Yeah. 00:17:15 Speaker 3: Keeping those hands warm, that the fingers, that's so so critical, especially when you're bow hunting and you've got a buck coming in you've got a hold onto that bow and those I've had a few days where those fingers get real cool. 00:17:27 Speaker 4: My toes turn into little ice cubes. It's amazing. Literally, I'm not exaggerating now. I mean I've been through it enough that my toes right now are numb, and I haven't been hunting super cold yet, but you know, if you frostbite your toes a few times, it doesn't take very much before those things are almost perpetually numb. It'll be by the time the late season is over with they'll be numb. So it'll be probably February March before I've got full feeling back in my toes. So yeah, even just saying oh, it's cold, well it can actually be you know, almost detrimental cold. 00:18:05 Speaker 3: Yeah, yikes, a little bit more on those conditions. We've said, like, very cold is what we want. But when you say that, exactly how cold are we talking? 00:18:25 Speaker 4: Can you get? 00:18:26 Speaker 3: Can you expand a little bit more on on just the different conditions and how they impact dear. So other than cold, a little precipitation or wind, how does all that impact your late season thought process? 00:18:38 Speaker 4: I think if it's ten degrees below a seasonal norm, that's enough to call cold. You know. So if it's a norm, you can see some movement, But when it drops below then you start to see almost like a little bit more panic. And when it's above the norm, generally everything kind of halfway shuts down in daylight, unless they dear are really really undisturbed because there's no urgency. There's no stress. They don't they don't feel that sense of panic. The other thing, there's there's Laziason's kind of complicated too, because if a state's really cold for a long time, they shut down, so then they move on a warm front. So it's almost like the fronts after a sustained period of say normal, So if it's been really cold and then you get a warm front, that can trigger a lot of movement. But if it's been normal or a little bit warmer than normal, then you get a cold front that can also trigger that. And there's something in the physiology of the deer that has to change. It's almost like their thermostat readjusts. So you've only got a period of say, maybe a month when that readjustment takes place, to get into January and they're like, eh, you know, it's ten below zero. I'm not feeding, you know, and they just lay up for two or three days or whatever the case may be. It the thermostat changes, and there's some there's some research been done on that that I don't have my hands on right now, but I think you'd find it fascinating that if it stays cold for long enough, then the cold won't do it. The cold won't get them moving. 00:20:14 Speaker 3: How how how long of a period of that cold do you think we need? I'm curious about if you had to put a number on it in which you could say, oh, well, if it was two weeks of cold and then all of a sudden it bumped up twenty degrees, would that be enough for you to be like, Oh, that's a day I want to hunt because when I would see, you know, a forty five degree day in the forecast, I might be like, Oh, that's going to be lousy. But I want to make sure that if you're saying there's a certain type of day when forty five would be good, what exactly would that be? 00:20:43 Speaker 4: Well, it depends on whether you've got snow or no snow. Also, because sometimes that warmer temperature takes some of the skim off the snow. Maybe it takes a little you know, ice off the top, makes the snow softer, it makes it easier for them to dig. I would say it was two weeks of really really cold and it's forty five, I think that's that'll kay come off for sure. 00:21:07 Speaker 2: Do you find certain behaviors or food source preferences when you get a warm up like that that have been consistent. 00:21:16 Speaker 4: Yeah, they will tend to go maybe a little bit more towards greens than what they did when it's really cold. They just want carbohydrates. Yeah, and you know, they are really attracted to the carbs, and they can find them in different places. But I've got greens and corn, and they're going to the corn right now, and we've had i would say slightly below seasonal temperatures and it's supposed to get pretty fringid again here in the coming week. They're going to be on that corn really hard. It's like the rest of the year they're like, yeah, whatever, you know, all my greens, but the corn really comes into being super attractive when they get to this point now where the rut's over, it's cold, I need carbs or I might die. You know. It's sort of almost to that point with some of these bucks, and you just see them as selling out going to the corn, you know, when it gets really cold after the rut. 00:22:10 Speaker 3: What about beans? I feel like that's another carb that a lot of folks love. If you had corn beans either. 00:22:16 Speaker 4: Or no, I mean if you don't have corn beans, for sure, the beans are more of a protein food source, a little bit less on the carb side. Sorghum has got a decent amount of carbs also, but not as much you know, per pound or per whatever, you know, as as corn does. Corn is like starch. I mean, they're they're just on that. But I've definitely had some great late season hunts on beans, but that's only because I didn't have corn nearby. They were going to go to, you know whatever, it was handy. But the farm that I own now has pretty fairly low or moderate year density, and I've got tons of food. So it's kind of interesting to see what they what they prefer when they have choices, and they are definitely on corn right now, but I'd say way way more than anything else. 00:23:08 Speaker 3: How do you So here's that this is a larger, larger set of questions here, but something that I've wrestled with at all different parts of the year. But I'm curious in the late season when you have a place to hunt that has multiple food source options in different directions. So it's not that they're all stuck going to the south because that's your only food source, But on a given day in the late season, if they've got corn to their east, and they've got corn to the north, and then they've got beans to the south, and then they have you know, a recent cut cutover to the to the other direction. They've got options. How do you go about determining which one of those possible options is the best on any given night in the late season? 00:23:51 Speaker 2: Do you do you play wind into that at all? 00:23:53 Speaker 3: Is there anything else that helps you pick which one, which you know, spot on the dial they might go when there's a bunch of different ways they could. 00:24:01 Speaker 4: Yeah, I think they'll use the wind more than you know. I think that it's a little bit tougher to uh put yourself in front of them, because of all the options that they have. But still they can. They can get after a certain point, so entrenched in a certain feeding area that they might give up a little wind advantage because now they've got so comfortable going there. But that's a pretty rare situation where most people hunt. The deer are still skittish. They're they're not going to walk into a cornfield and broad daylight with the wind at they're back. You know, it's pretty rare. I mean, they might on my farm, you know, another week or two, because you know, excuse me, I'm not going to be in there. There's no honey pressure. The deer might get so comfortable that they'll come into the feeding areas with the wind at the back, but normally you're going to need a cross wind or something like that. You got to figure out. And you can even tell that a little bit on your truck camp photos if you got cameras on each one of those locations, because you can play the wind direction versus what direction the deer come from and what time the day they get there, and you can kind of figure it out. But when they have options, they do what's best for them. Yeah, and so they're going to play the wind. 00:25:23 Speaker 3: What about situations where there's a lot of in the timber food, whether it be natural brows or masts, and maybe maybe it's just a year where there's just tons of acorns and so that's still out there a lot. 00:25:36 Speaker 2: How's that factor into things for you? 00:25:38 Speaker 4: Well, and that's that's the strength and the weakness of my farm. It's the strength from the standpoint, is the deer get as much nutrition as they could possibly want, But it's the weakness that they don't have any urgency to feed because there's food everywhere, so they're not to move. And everybody thinks, oh, the deer move. You know, you go to food every night. Well, what if the food is right there where they're bedded, you think they're gonna move. No, the rut will make them move, but they're not coming out. They don't come out, so that means you, you know, for the part of the year when it makes sense to go in after them, that's your only option is you can't wait for them to come out because there's no urgency. There's so much food available to them everywhere they go. And that's good, I mean, you want that, but again, the deer are only very let's say, killable when they're stressed. The more stress they have, the more killable they are. So without any stress, there's no urgency, they don't have to do anything. So anyway, to answer your question, snow, excuse me. Snow is kind of your friend at that point because it covers everything and it's a lot easier to go into a cornfield and smell, you know, a deer a corn under six inches of snow that it is to find two acorns, you know that are you know, underneath one of the oak trees that every been eat yet. Yes, so I think that snow definitely is a big equalizer at that point, but it can be really tough. I knew a fellow one time, a good friend that did a bunch of timber stand improvement, then fertilized the timber. I don't know how he did it, but he fertilized it. And he said that there never came out. So it's the worst idea because they never they never moved, they never came out. He hardly killed anything for two years. So that that kind of goes to your point on that if there's a lot of food in the timber, you're going to expect, you know, pretty low return on your investment of time sitting in the open. Yeah. 00:27:48 Speaker 3: So I know you mentioned that it would be not necessarily fun because he's had to be cold and be in a tree. But let's say that for some reason, all of your crop's gone next year. Yeah, the only food source you had were those acorns on your ridges. If I told you next year, all right, billy, you've got to kill a buck during the late season next year, and you're not gonna have your cornfields, and you just have to take advantage of the natural food sources. How do you think you would if you were forcing that situation? How do you think you go about doing it? 00:28:19 Speaker 4: Well? I think that I I don't think they see danger the same when they're in the timber. I think you can hunt them on warmer days, So I would just hunt the warm days, Okay, I don't think that would slow them down for feeding, you know, twenty or thirty yards from their bedding area, you know, or fifty yards or one hundred. I mean, you've got to get some you know, comfort zone between you and them. It's just really hard because if there's snow on the ground in particular, you're not going to sneak in there, right, you know, It's like it's either squeaks underfoot or it crunches underfoot and they can see it from a mile away. I mean, we wear snow camo now for almost all of our entry at the exit. And that's even when we're hunting in the open all right, just by the chance that some deers that is close enough to see us passing through and still use cover, still sneaking through behind you know, standing corn if there's some or a fence row or whatever. But wearing snow cameo. Yeah, the late season is tough. 00:29:19 Speaker 3: It is, so speaking of I've got to kind of condition two more condition related questions, and you mentioned one of them, which is warm weather, and maybe that helps you in a big woods type situation. But we talked about how maybe a warm up can help. But what if it's just consistently warm, Like we've had some late seasons where we've all been just waiting and praying and hoping for the big coal from and we never get it, and we've got it's Christmas or it's New Year's and it's t shirt weather. What do you do when your only time off and is stuck with that kind of set of conditions. 00:29:50 Speaker 4: Well, you would have to go in after them for sure, because they're just not going to come out, even in areas without much hunting pressure where they're not feeling you know, that that vulnerability like they might in areas that have gotten pressure. Uh, they still don't move well in the late season, right when it's warm, and we've seen it, like again, my farm is a little bit different because there's not tons of deers and they don't have to feed in the open. They do if it gets really, really bad like it's been. But otherwise they just stay back in the timber. I've seen years where we could sit, you know, four or five six nights in a row in late December in spots for the deer and never seen a hunter that season and not see it deer. So the only way you're going to kill those deer is going after almost like to do during the rut. Okay, which it's I don't know how to do it exactly because I've never I've never really wanted one that ba that late in the year. But if that's your thing, you'd have to. You have to figure out where they're bedded and then find you know, something as close to that as you can get where you're playing the wind and hope the best. 00:31:00 Speaker 3: Yeah, Okay, I had one more follow up prior to warm weather on the cold side of things. So back to the cold fronts. There's a lot of discussion and you mentioned this a little bit around the best moments around a cold front, and you mentioned, you know, the night of being great and maybe those couple of days after, But what about when you have these fronts pushed through that come with a bunch of wind, like those blizzards that come in, you've got all this snow and it's happening tonight. You've got it's way colder tonight. The snow is happening right now, but there's also a fifteen twenty mile an hour winds. Some people like, man, I don't want to miss that because this is you know, yesterday was forty five and today it's seventeen. So should you be out there on that kind of night or do you want to wait till it settles down and the bluebird skies show up and it's a little bit more relaxed. 00:31:50 Speaker 4: I think you can hunt them both, because I think that wind and that stormfront going through is going to cover a lot of the coming and going. You know that you're you know the damage that you might be doing that way, So I would hunt I would hunt them both. I would ideally have somebody that can come with a vehicle or something and get me out of there at the legal shooting time on the first evening. But even then, if it's windy and snowing, you just if you've got deer right there, non target deer, you're not getting out of there without somebody coming and running them off. So you almost have to have that in the plant, and then the next evening might be the better one of two. I would say, if you had to pick between when the front is going through and it's windy with a lot of snow or the next day when you got high pressured it's cold, I would take the second day if you have to pick one of the two. But there's no downside to hunting that blizzard or that really and that when the front comes through, because you'll see some movement then, but generally you can get out of there easy because of that, you know that whatever you call it, the version or whatever the weather's creating. 00:33:01 Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I do love those windy nights when you can slip out and it feels like you're a little bit you're not quite invincible, but you definitely have a little bit more of a margin for safety versus the perfectly still, perfectly quiet, crunchy where they hear you a mile away. 00:33:17 Speaker 4: That's those are deadly I hate. 00:33:18 Speaker 3: So yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. So on that note in this video that I referenced earlier, you had two cautionary notes. The second one was that you must have some way to get out of your hunting locations in the evening because of the scenario you just mentioned there, there's all these deer out there. How do you get out without spooking them? Can you walk me through you know, your best options that you currently use or have used to be able to exit a late season evening hunt without ruining it for the next time. 00:33:52 Speaker 4: Well, I think if you have somebody that can come in there to spook the deer, that's ideal. And if you're in farm country, it's even better. Yet if they're on a tractor, because for some reason, that rumble of attractor and that, you know, just that type of activity the deer they don't pay an attention to it. I mean, we started using tractors to access some of our more sensitive spots, driving right through the middle of farm and you know, I look at the trail cameras and you know we drive through maybe at you know, one o'clock in the afternoon to go to the location and then you come back out after darker course, and the deer are just minutes behind you when you travel through there on a tractor, but when you travel through there on a four wheelder, you know, it's hours behind you. And if you travel through there on foot, it can be a day or more, you know, before they're back to normal. So the comparison really leads me to the tractor is the ideal way to get in and out of sensitive spots in any kind of ad country, just because of the comfort that deer have with tractors for whatever reason. So that's that would be the very best thing. If you had somebody that could jump on a track or drive out there, drive right up to the blind or the tree stand or whatever, and you just climb down and get into it and keep right on going, don't even turn it off. That that would be the perfect solution. The second, if you're like, Okay, it's just me though, you know, like I don't have this this other person. I've never done it, but I've had a number of people say that if you take like a take a paint can and you put rocks in it, and you you know, run a string across the field and you hang it over a tree branch, and then you know, the paint can is sitting on the ground and at the end of legal shooting time, you jerk on that string a few times and you rattle the rocks around, you know, like on the other side of the food plod other side of the field. Then you know, at least they're looking in that direction, you know, and they're not like you could say, well I could do that at my blind. Well yeah you can, but then they associate risk with your blind or your tree stand. You want that spooking to come from somewhere else. Like I can give you a perfect example that one night we hunted a spot and a rabbit came running out of the cover and it blew the field. And you're like, well, that rabbit just blew this field. But how bad was that? When we came back the next night, all the same deer came out at the same time again, and you know, I end up shooting one of them. So yeah, you blew the field, but it's way different than if you blow the field by coump climbing down out of your tree stand or or you know, out of your ground blind. So I just thought, well, what if you get a monster truck, like a little remote control monster truck and you have and I haven't seen one yet it has like a remote start, or I'd have one and just leave it in the blind or whatever, you know, and you get there and you just run it out to the other side of the food plot and it just sits there, you know, idling or whatever it does. You know, fire it up and have it come tearing out in there. I guarantee you they'd they'd be back out an hour and a half trying to figure out, you know, what was that rabbit or what was that crazy thing that came flying out of the brush. Right, So, anyway, the bottom line is you've got to be creative somehow if it's just you, or you've got to have a spot that's so easy, so well screened, where you climb out of your stand and you're in a ditch. And I've had spots like that, you know where if it's just you, you're not you and a cameraman and all your gear, you just climb down the back of the tree, you get right in behind a row of cedars, or you get into a ditch or whatever it is and you're out of there. Maybe it's a creek, you know, something where you just go slow and quiet and use the back of the tree and you can get out. That will work too, but those those setups are pretty rare. Yeah. So anyway, the point is if they know they're being hunted, that's the whole game. If they know they're being hunted, you can't kill them during the late season. Sometimes you can during the rut because of what's going on, but you can't do it during the late season, and they just aren't going to tolerate it. 00:38:03 Speaker 3: What about bikes, e bikes, regular bikes, anything like that. I know that doesn't solve your problem of getting out of the tree, But what if you can get out of the tree without deer spooking you, but then you know you're going to have to get past some fields eventually they have deer would take in a bike through, there still be a better option. 00:38:21 Speaker 4: Yeah, I think so. And you want the lights on, I think, you know, I think it's almost like, I don't know what it is. It's just kind of weird. They just stand there and watch them go by. You know. I've I don't have one. I've got a like an electric four wheeled buggy that we use sometimes and we generally don't run the lights because we're not going past deer. You know, we're usually taking you know, like a backtrail back to the h back to the buildings. But I think if you got to go past the deer, I think you just you just go as fast as you can with the lights on, and I think they would just watch you go by, like what the heck was that? Yeah, ideally they can't smell you. I think if they could smell you, I think that that would be bad. But they don't really know what that is. No, it's not like that's something that they see every day. I don't think they're going to hold it. They're not going to see it as Oh, I understand that danger. You know that's a risk. I'm not going back there again. I think it's more like that was weird. I just ran away from something. But what the heck was? 00:39:19 Speaker 3: Yeah, it's gotta be gotta be less bad than two legged human form that they know is the most yeah way way. 00:39:29 Speaker 5: Yeah. 00:39:40 Speaker 3: So, I know you've done some creative sleepover type situations in the past. I know you did that in the timber. I know you've done that in some blinds in the past, like during the rut. 00:39:51 Speaker 2: Maybe is there ever a situation. 00:39:53 Speaker 3: In the late season where you have or you would consider sleeping overnight and waiting till they clear out in the morning and then going note. 00:40:00 Speaker 4: Well, you could, but you better have a really effective way to sleep comfortable. And you know that bunker that we put in and if you ever saw that one, but it was a well insulated camper shell that Carson and I put back in the woods, and we hunted there one time this season. I figured we'd hunt there a bunch, but I would say it was in the twenties that night, and it was so warm in that bunker that we almost didn't need sleeping bags. Wow. So I think that would be the key if you're going to do that makes sense. Ground lines are super cold to sleep in because let's say it's ten degrees out. The air going underneath the blind is ten degrees, So you're sleeping on something that's maybe a couple inches away. You know, if you've got some insulation, it's ten degrees. But if you're on the ground, and let's say you're in a little building, or maybe you're even just in a bibi sack for Heaven's sake to scrape all the snow away, now the ground's probably thirty degrees, you know, and then as you lay on and it kind of warms up a little bit, maybe gets up to forty by the time you get up in the morning. Right underneath where you're sleeping. That's way better than sleeping in the blind itself. Sleeping in blinds is really really cold. I've done it a few times, and if it's cold at all, that's a miserable time. But the ground is way better. 00:41:24 Speaker 2: So if you were. 00:41:27 Speaker 3: Is there any situation where you could get away with running a little like buddy heater or something for periods of time to toast you up if you were going to do the blind thing? Or would would just having that kind of I guess that's no different than humans. I'm trying to think they're like the implication. 00:41:43 Speaker 4: Floor the floor is just too cold. Yeah, it's just miserable. It's sort of like when I started sleeping out. People always say, why don't you get in those portal ledges like the rock climbers use, you know, and just stay right in your tree. You'll pull it out of your pack, set it up, stay right there, climb into and climb back out before daylight and you're in your tree. Well, two things, two reasons against that. One is just spreading a lot of scent because now the wind is blowing through there and carrying your scent a long ways down wind. The other one is you're always going to be whatever the temperature of the air is, that's always going to be what you're sleeping against. So if you climb down and you got a little babysack in a you know, minus thirty degree sleeping bag or whatever, and you scrape the leaves away and you're sleeping right at the base of the tree, it's warm and cozy, you know, and bivysack is going to you know, if it's nylon, you know, it's pretty much scent containing. The wind blows over the top of it, the dude don't really pick up much older down wind of view. You kind of get away with you know, almost like cheating. It's think about me. I know, you do some elkhunting. Everybody thinks about Spike camping out and they think, oh, yeah, Spike camping out. That's cool. Yeah, But all of a sudden you try that with white tails and they think you're crazy. It's no different. Yeah. The good point. 00:43:01 Speaker 3: What you know, here's the flip side of this whole conversation. This side of the conversation. How to get out in the evening. That's what all the attention gets put on, right for late seasons. 00:43:09 Speaker 2: How do you get out? How do you get out? How do you get out? 00:43:12 Speaker 3: A lot of times folks forget that it's not easy to get in sometimes for evening hunts, you know, deer are betting much closer to the food sources more often this time of year. There's not as much visual cover as there used to be. Everything seems to be louder. How do you especially like where you hunt now, where you have these great big bluffs and hills over top of all your fields, How how do you think about getting in for those evening hunts without spooking deer? 00:43:38 Speaker 4: Ideally you have top access where you're only hunting stuff on top, and you can come in from the top when you have to. When it's all bottom access, that's really tough because especially if there's snow, because the deer can hear it a lot better. Because of the snow, you don't get that muffling effect like you do with a bunch of vegetation and leaves and stuff. But the other thing is they can, in theory see you better. And I did a quick study on that and just went around one winter when we were doing TSI and just went to every deer bet I can find and just dropped down into it, you know, put my head out about the height where a deer's head would be. There's only about ten to twenty percent of them that can see anything. They don't just bed where they can see. I think they bed where they have a wind advantage coming in from behind them. But it's not like I'm sitting here where I can see everything below me. But there are a percentage of them that are bedded in those spots, you know. So it's just it's not easy. I mean, like I said, the snow camo is better for that. Ideally, you would have some kind of away like a ditch or you know, some cedar trees or standing crop, or to sneak through. I mean, if you can sneak through you know, standing cornfield and get to the tree stand on the other end of it, I mean, that's that's pretty fool proof. But when you're just wide open walking across a cattle pasture, it's like good luck. You better hope that the deer that you're hunting isn't near or isn't bettered where it can see, because when the first one jumps up and runs off, the rest of them go too. It's it's a Yeah, access is huge, you know in those situations. 00:45:20 Speaker 3: Yeah, And sometimes in those scenarios, I know, people like to get a ride in, right, someone drives them in on the tractor or the truck and drops you off, and then they drive back out, and then the ideas that the deer feel okay, the same the danger left. I've had sometimes where I've tried that in the late season and it just they're they're just even spookier because it's laceys and so open. I've seen like just herds of deer just go tearing off even when a truck or something this drives back there. Would you ever do something that late season or have you seen the same thing? 00:45:54 Speaker 4: I think again, a tractor might be okay, but you need to do it early. You can't like two hours before, you know, you'd you'd have to go in late morning or mid morning even and give the deer plenty of time to readjust and come back because they aren't definitely afraid of tractors. They're definitely afraid of four wheelers sometimes, and they can be definitely afraid of trucks, but they aren't definitely afraid of tractors. So in theory, you could pull it off because they would start drifting back again if they don't have any other options. If they've got to the places the feed, they're probably not going to come back. They'll just you know, shift their attention to a different spot regardless because now they run in a different direction. And you know why bothered even come back. But I've definitely seen it when it gets really cold and the deer get really in that panic state where they're going to come back. So yeah, we know that they they aren't going to come if they know you're if something's messed up. So anyway, the point is it's just late season. You've got to be really really good at your game, or you've got to have a really really good setup because everything's in the deer's advantage by the late season. 00:47:09 Speaker 3: So I've got just a handful more specific questions about kind of those little details, those little things you need to have dialed or be creative with. And one of those is just when you're actually in the blind or in your stand again, everything seems elevated. It seems like stuff's louder, it seems like your movements are easier to catch. Those deer are just in general so much more wired than they were three months ago. 00:47:34 Speaker 2: Real quick. 00:47:35 Speaker 3: Are there any little tricks of the trade you've picked up over the years to help deal with either the sound or site issues that we have this time of year? 00:47:44 Speaker 4: Start hunting with a muzzleoder? Yeah? No, And seriously, that's what you see a lot of people do. They switch over to the gun, but there aren't any shortcuts. It's just a brutally hard time to kill the deer with the bow unless you've got to really, really good setup. And you know, I don't say that lightly because I've been doing it for so long and I've tried to hunt late season for I think the past thirty six seasons, and the amount of successes that I've had are pretty small. I've had a lot of close calls, and I've had some fun hunts, but you're gonna get a lot of you know, seventy yard encounters and then you think, oh, man, tomorrow, I got it. Well, when you leave, he spooked three dos on the fringe of the plot that you didn't know were there. And then you come back the next night and you know, four fawns and a spike buck come out. It's just unforgiving, very unforgiving, and that's why that first hunt has to be so bulletproof. And they generally if it's a concentrated area where you feel like, okay, I can get the deer tight, I got them bottled, those spots generally don't last until the late season the food's gone. Ters you're hunting bigger areas, like maybe it was a four acre cornfield or a two acre you know whatever, where you're hunting in the back corner of a commercial agg field. And now the deer don't have excuse me, they don't have any motivation to use the same exact trail. They might come to the same spot in the end, out in the middle and whatever it is, but they come from different directions every night. So yeah, you can be in the game and feel pretty good about it, you know, but it's really hard to be right there on that spot. Does that make sense? 00:49:33 Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I've lived that way too many times. 00:49:37 Speaker 4: That's where that's why the gun is a great equalizer, you know, for the people who have got their butt kicked all both seasons. It's like, give me the muzzle, oder I'm going to go, you know, get a little revenge here. And you see that a lot and I don't blame those people one bit. 00:49:50 Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I'm one of them most deers. 00:49:55 Speaker 3: Is there any late season scenario in which you would try a morning hunt, and if so, how do you pull that off? 00:50:02 Speaker 4: Well, I think it could have been good still, because like on my cameras right now, there's a lot of running activities still on my cameras, and the bucks are still fighting almost every night. Now, I'd say they're more more focused on just interacting and jacking around than they are on feeding. They feed, but then they go chase a dough off, and then they come back and feed, and then they fight with another buck for ten minutes and then they leave. Then you maybe pick them up on another camera quarter of a mile away doing the same exact thing on another plot. So I think they're still pretending like it's the rut, you know, whether there's some funds that are still coming into estros, so whatever the case may be, I don't think the rut finishes up as early as people think it does, you know, I think it rolls clear into the early part of December, you know, up until now. Still, I mean, these bucks on my cameras are still acting running and I'm not saying that all the same funnels that you hunted during the rut when they were going from the doughbating area to doughbating area, But those are still going to be good. But I think there's more random movement going on back in the timber than what people think. Still, so that that's the one thing that has surprised me over the past few years is really that understanding that the run their behavior, they're running type behavior lasts longer than what we think it does. 00:51:22 Speaker 3: So you're saying, like, if you have a spot that you could get into safely for morning hunts in those types of transition morning zones, it could be worth it, at least for the first half. 00:51:32 Speaker 4: I think. I think if you've got any kind of an evening pattern that's working out or makes sense, you stay away from where those deer might be betted. But there's nothing that says that a morning hunt won't work. Morning hunts step morning hunts definitely will work. It's just usually so cold, and you're so focused on those evening feeding areas that you don't really think too much about it, and you're you don't want to take that risk of saying, well, I know that the deer better here, and they're feeding over here, maybe I can snuggle in next to where in they're bedded and catch them in the morning. Like you're almost like, you know, whatever you say cheating Peter to pay Paul or whatever, you know, where you're pulling away from one or the other. But if you've got options where you can say, Okay, i could get my money unts over here, but I've got my potential evening pattern that I'm waiting on for those pieces to click over here, then then it probably makes sense. 00:52:26 Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, calling in the late season, especially when you're bow hunting, is there ever a scenario you would try calling? 00:52:34 Speaker 4: I can't. It's shocking. I wish I could just send you. I looked at all my photos this morning, and I'll bet you on every single place where I had a camera, the bucks were fighting, wow, fighting, and it just went it was like they I don't know if they were technically fighting. I think they were probably still and just jacking around, you know, but it'd be like this buck was over here messing around with this buck, and then you know, five minutes later he was messing around with a different buck, and then a couple of minutes later, get two other Bucks in there. You know. It's almost like if two bucks get together anywhere, they feel like they got to, you know, see who's the man. So I think rattling would work, you know, and they it does. Even on camera, you can see it does attract some attention because you'll see two bucks fighting in one corner of the plot, and then a couple of frames later, you'll see the other bucks from the other corner coming over, you know, to see like, hey, what's going on over here. So I don't think it's the same as during the rut when the bucks are fighting over does and they understand that, hey, there's a dough there. Because these two bucks are fighting, it's more like, yeah, maybe I'm the man. You know. These guys are over here acting like tough guys, but hey, I better go over there and show them that, you know, I'm the man in this area. So it's almost like a little dominance thing because all of a sudden, you mash them all back together again, you know in the big mixer, where during the rut they were kind of scattered around, and but now they're like more concentrated and they're just trying to figure it out again. It's almost comical to watch what they do on these plans. So I think you could battle, you know, I really do. 00:54:03 Speaker 3: How late do you think you would consider that? Is there an expiration date or do you think you could clear on through the late season? 00:54:10 Speaker 4: Yeah? 00:54:10 Speaker 2: All the way through. 00:54:11 Speaker 4: I think. I think as long as they're carrying antlers, I think you could rattle. I really do. And I don't do it because I don't like rattling to begin with. I just don't like messing with antlers. But I think if I don't see any downside to that because of what I'm seeing on my cameras and the way these deer behave. 00:54:27 Speaker 3: So in the same kind of vein, then have you ever thought or tried a decoy for late season? 00:54:38 Speaker 4: You know? And there's again, I'm a very like simple hunter. I don't use sense. I don't do a lot of calling. I've ever used decoys. I just like the whole game of like being almost like getting the deer on his turn. You know, it may not be the most effective way to do it. But the thing I had two things I don't like about decoying. One, I don't like carrying them because now you got to get them in. You got to get them out. So at the end of legal shooting time, how am I going to go get that decoy out of this field because there's probably deer there are going to be coming in or whatever. The other thing is. If the does come out first, then you know, I've had some bad experiences with you does not really liking the decoy. So I think in a really specific situation where maybe the only deer you're going to see is a couple of bucks that you're hunting and then you cut the decoy out there, it might be just fine. But on a really large scale, late season set up, excuse me, where you've got multiple deer coming into an area to feed, I don't think it would be good. I just think there's too many eyes and there's too many things working against the decoy not spooking deer, and you also have to get it out of there at the end of legal shooting time. And you know, if you have that person that drives up to the you know, the edge of the plot or the edge of the field or wherever you're sitting, and they spook the deer off, then yeah, you can run out there and grab it. I don't know, they probably work it's sort of like sense people ask me secon questions and I don't know the answer because I just don't use them. 00:56:07 Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a tough one. I feel like the same way. It's really intriguing. I'd be interested. I think maybe it could work. But do I really want to take the risk to blow my. 00:56:17 Speaker 2: Thing out to try it? I don't know. 00:56:20 Speaker 3: Yeah, all right, last question? What if we are just trying to kill does and a bunch of them. It's late season. We need to do our dough management. We know we need to take some of these antler list deer off the landscape. What's your advice for most effectively having late season dough hunting success and not ruining it all the first night? 00:56:40 Speaker 4: Oh, for sure, you got to have a gun and you got to stay back, because we've had some unbelievable evenings of killing does in feeding areas when it's really cold. It's, like I said, they're almost suicideal because they don't know where that comes from. You shoot the first one, you don't running out there and grab her and drag her off. You just reload your gun and you don't move, and you don't you know the ones that were out there with her. They ran about fifty yards and now their standard back trying to figure out what happened. It's like thunder, you know, it's just a sound, you know, And then they start working their way back again because I really want that, you know, whatever it is that they're going to feed on. I killed five one night on one food plot with a muzzleloader. Yeah. And it's unique because these dere aren't getting a lot of pressure, so it's not like there's a bunch of people running around out there but guns all the time, So it's kind of situational. But if you can stay back, all they hear is this rumble and a deer either falls or runs the little ways and then falls. They don't really know for sure what that was. It's it's uh, that's the way to do it, you know, you got to shoot him with guns. 00:57:54 Speaker 2: Yeah, it's certainly a. 00:57:57 Speaker 3: Fun way if you don't have a mature buck to go after the late season. Once I switched to Domode, it instantly makes the hunts so much more fun, all of a sudden, high target environment. I love that shift in headspace. 00:58:10 Speaker 4: Well it's easy too, because now you can stay back. All of these issues we're talking about kind of go away when you're one hundred and fifty yards away. Yeah, you know you're not sitting right on the edge of the bow range of everything. 00:58:22 Speaker 3: It's a it's a pretty great way to end the year, So you can't complain about that. Well, Bill, last thing, where can folks catch your latest videos connect with you? If there's anything else people should be checking out right now, where can they find it? 00:58:37 Speaker 4: The only thing that I'm really doing consistently is the Bill Winki YouTube channel, and we're uploading to that quite a bit, so that's h and I try to be as responsive as I can. People have questions, you know, in the comments section. Sometimes you get the stupid stuff like you're aware of, but you know, ninety plus percent of our viewers are there for the right reasons, so you get some pretty interesting dialogues going on. It's almost like a little mini forum where people can, you know, ask questions and either other viewers can try to answer them, I can try to answer them. So that's the best way right now to catch up with me. 00:59:13 Speaker 3: Perfect Well, thank you Bill for this. Thanks for decades now of helpful articles and videos and help. As I've told you before, you've been a huge influence on me and my hunting over the years, and so many other people. 00:59:28 Speaker 2: So thank you, thank you, thank you. 00:59:30 Speaker 4: Yeah, no, I appreciate that. The only thing I didn't like about that was the decades. 00:59:35 Speaker 2: Yeah, sorry, Bill. 00:59:38 Speaker 4: Much, you be like a handful of years. We could go back thirty years. 00:59:42 Speaker 3: Well, it's getting it's getting scary. I'm approaching almost two decades of doing this stuff too. The time is just going by crazy fast. 00:59:49 Speaker 2: So I guess what we're stilling. 00:59:50 Speaker 4: And I appreciate all that you do too. You're a great spokesman for the hunting industry and for the sport. So thank you very much for the work that you do. I'm sure that you don't get many things. It's pretty unheralded the efforts that you're putting forward, but you're doing a lot more than most people give you credit for. 01:00:05 Speaker 3: Well, I appreciate you saying that, Bill, thank you. Let's do it against so let's chest check again soon. 01:00:11 Speaker 4: Sounds good. 01:00:12 Speaker 3: You have a good day, all right, And that is going to do it for another late season episode of the Wired to Hunt podcast. I appreciate you tuning in all this season. It's been a fun ride. As I mentioned, on Rock Fresh Radio. If you haven't listened to that one yet this week, go back and listen to that. 01:00:32 Speaker 2: I detailed some of the fun. 01:00:33 Speaker 3: Hunts I've been having with my son, and hopefully my second SOL will be coming out hear of me soon. We've got some good late season weather that we're. 01:00:39 Speaker 2: Hoping to take advantage of as well, so enjoy. 01:00:42 Speaker 3: We've got pretty great conditions the coming days, so take advantage of those. 01:00:46 Speaker 2: Enjoy these remaining 01:00:47 Speaker 3: Days and weeks at the season, and until next time, stay wired to hunt.