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 Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about why we feel the need to fill in the blanks with whitetail hunting and how that might not be the best strategy. As I get older, I kind of feel like I know less about life in some ways. Maybe that seems weird, but I think this is just because I've grown a little more comfortable with not knowing an awful. 00:00:44 Speaker 3: Lot of stuff. 00:00:45 Speaker 2: Some of it I probably should know, and some of it is about as unknowable as stuff gets. What does this have to do with whitetails Actually quite a bit more than you might think, And whether you believe that or not, we should just keep listening, because I'm going to break down right now how we often fill in the blank for whitetail behavior and strategies and all this stuff and how that actually hurts us a lot of times. Us humans are a funny lot. We don't like not knowing stuff, and we are very very good at making up stories to explain away the stuff we don't understand. Religions are often founded on this principle. And before you get your undies in a bunch over me saying that, give me a second delay something out, think about the explanations that come from religion, not just yours, because that's probably the one you believe, but from some other religion that you don't practice. You probably think their origination stories are pure silliness because they don't make any sense to you. Throughout history, we've concocted stories to explain where we came from, who's in charge, what it all means to us. There aren't a lot of Pagans or druids or whatever today, though, but we have plenty of folks who know in their heart of hearts what happened and what will happen. And I promise you that those Pagans and Drews and whatever else thought they knew too. We can look at them now and say that they didn't, but that didn't matter to them. A whole lot I bet we just need explanations to calm our minds, to keep us going, to make the whole freaking struggle seem worth it. Of course, there's this kind of thing when it comes to the big questions about life and death and the existence of a purpose or lack thereof, And well, you can just see why we want to be able to go. I don't know, this is why, and that's all there is to it now, as much comfort as we might draw from that, you know, when facing our own mortality or that of our loved ones. It's also true that we do this with all kinds of things in life. We are quick to write people off as something they may or may not be, simply because it's easier than considering a world of circumstances that conspire to create a person and drive their motivations. Take the corporate world here. You probably think your boss is unqualified for the job, and the reason he doesn't give you a giant raise or a promotion every year because he's dumber than a bag of hammers and just doesn't recognize your talents. But maybe he has a boss who has put really tight constraints on his payroll and is holding him to such stringent standards that only the top of the top performers are gonna get anything extra, and those people have to beg and plead for it. Everyone involved will justify their actions and their beliefs, but not one of them will be able to contain the full scope of their interactions and their duties and their lives with all these other people. There's just unknowable. So it's just easier to think your superiors have the intellect of algae. Sometimes our desire to just fill in the blanks is a self preservation method to not go nuts by over analyzing something. And I think somewhere in the deep recesses of our brains there's just a recognition that a lot of stuff is unknowable and there isn't a damn thing we can do about it. I believe that in no small part to the fact that there are a hell of a lot of times when I can't outsmart any deer, let alone some stupid smallmouse somewhere or I don't know, or rooster pheasant and the cattails whatever. We labor under the delusion that we have the answers to the questions when it comes to the outdoors, But how often are we really just filling in the blanks. Let me give you an example that fell into my lap recently. One of the writers for our site here at Meat Eater hit me up with a question about how to find an antler list deer on public land in Kansas, or I guess I should say, kind of just wanted to lament that for some reason, finding bucks was pretty easy, but finding a doe wasn't. Now, that would be a great problem to have for any one of us if we were looking to fill a buck tag. But in a lot of states, when you fill one of your buck tags, you filled all of your buck tags. Minnesota is like that in most areas of the state, and it sucks, but it is what it is, So you got to choose wisely. Now, when I try to talk through the Kansas antlerless situation, the first thing I heard was that the does just must not be moving in daylight. The rationale was this, The sign was everywhere, and by that I'm talking tracks and droppings. 00:04:57 Speaker 3: The bucks are there, so why not the does? 00:04:59 Speaker 2: And you know they're all kind of keying on that cut cornfield off the river bottom. 00:05:03 Speaker 3: Great. 00:05:04 Speaker 2: A lot of that adds up to an area that should hold some does, but the confounding variables take this from something knowable to something that is truly a mystery. Let's start with the public land aspect. There is no way to know who is hunting a spot when you're not there, and often when you are there, maybe the does aren't moving, or maybe they got pushed out by a quail hunter three hours before you showed up. Public Land is a wild card that way, but there's a lot more. This hunter had also actually successfully arrowed a dough in that spot not too long ago. I don't know about you, but when I kill a deer in an area, I just generally feel like I have less of a chance to kill another one in the near term. Even when it feels like that shouldn't be true, it just often seems to kind of be so so far. That's a couple of things that could be true but are largely unknowable. There's another factor here where the general firearm season was open, so you have more folks in the woods hunting at the time than any other time in the season. So just going out trying to arrow a deer is a big challenge. You know, an old dough hearing a pile of rifle shots or listening to hunter's ride four wheelers through the pasture an hour before first light is an old dough that isn't above heading into the thick stuff to lay around for the daylight hours. It gets worse, though, because in a state like Kansas, those same rifle hunters that are out on private land close to that public are statistically very very likely to be hunting over a big old pile of corn. If you want to influence the travel of deer in December, a great way to do it is to dump a pile of corn out and then wait. There's also the reality of bucks being in a spot and the does who have been chased by them for a month or so not really being keen on being chased any longer. Now, while the bucks and does eventually will all kind of settle into similar bed to food patterns, there is a time when the doughs have had just about enough of the bucks. And now here's where things get really squarely. In this particular situation, there are a pile of very that could be standing between this hunter and a dead dough, and most of them are kind of impossible to know, So this leaves that hunter with just a few options. The first is to decide that the circumstances are too great to overcome and it's time to go do something else. That's an option, even if it kind of sucks. The second is to fill in the blanks and keep riding a dead program, hoping that it comes back to life. If there is anything we are really good at as hunters, it's talking ourselves into hunting the way we want to, even if it isn't all that productive. Or you can accept what you don't know and try to learn about what you can by doing something different, even if it's only slightly different. One of the things that I've learned in a lot of unsuccessful late season hunts, in fact, just a lot of unsuccessful hunting in general, is that I'm often off by just a little bit, but it makes it feel like a lot. The deer are very good at working around me and you, And if I make that job easy and I offer and do, the whole thing gets a lot harder. So the things that we decide are unknowable, you know, we just decide they must all be nocturnal due to the moon phase or something else. Actually is just our way of wrapping our egos in a warm blanket and not letting ourselves consider that we just don't have a clue right now, or that some style or way we've been hunting is hurting us. So to get that clue on what to do, you usually have to decide that, instead of declaring the deer unkillable for some reason, that they are indeed actually killable, just not on your current program. This is a hard pill for a lot of us to swallow for a lot of reasons. But if you want to become a better deer hunter, you have to figure out how to solve the problem that the woods and the critters present to you. You won't be inclined to do that if you just fill in the blanks with a perfectly logical to you excuse for why you can't get it done. 00:09:01 Speaker 3: And this happens a lot. I think that it. 00:09:03 Speaker 2: Happens because we hear a lot of people talk like they know everything about deer, and since there's no way to check their work, the statements just stand. 00:09:12 Speaker 3: Let me give you a couple examples. 00:09:14 Speaker 2: You know how I feel about the deer aging thing, where everyone just confidently declares deer a certain age by body characteristics or rack size or both. But they don't have to check their work, so it just stands. I think that's bananas. But there are a lot of ways we do this. Think about how often you or someone you know has said that, you know, you just have to hunt dough betting areas during the run, done and done, just get down, win and the bucks will come. But what dough betting areas? I've hunted so many places? Where does bed in? A lot of areas throughout the season, and they change depending on whether hunting pressure, the wind, and probably about a thousand factors I don't know about. We like to say definitive stuff like this. Hell, a lot of people talk about bucks they are hunting as if they know their day to day routines and that never changes. But if that were true, so the success rate would be a hell of a lot higher than it is because those bucks that always do this or never do that don't actually operate like that. Our dear beliefs can be dangerous this way. Think about the folks who are die hard moon phase believers, even if you present them with studies that show collor deer seem to be totally unaffected by the moon phase. Those folks won't believe it, and they'll cater their hunting strategy around the moon phase. And what does that do for them, Well, it's going to lead them to believe they are right because it's the only way they hunt. But if they ignored the moon phase and started hunting, they'd realize, you know, that what they know about deer actually isn't something gained from broad experience, but something else that was influenced heavily by an explanation for deer behavior that they just adopted and held tight. 00:10:43 Speaker 3: We can wait broader with this stuff too. 00:10:45 Speaker 2: We might believe that the only thing you have to do to kill a buck is to rattle on late October mornings, right after sunrise. For some folks this is probably very true. But for a lot of folks, you know, like some person hunting public land in Georgia or something, it would be a great one to not shoot any bucks, you know, to muddy the waters further. You might think that rattling will never work because you were only a public land hunter in Georgia. But is that belief rooted in reality. It's hard to say. When we use our beliefs to keep us from trying new things, we get into trouble. That's really where I wanted to go with the show. I can think back to so many things that I just knew to be true in hunting and that guided me along certain parts of my journey in a way that for one reason or a nothing, were eventually exposed. 00:11:29 Speaker 3: To be total bullshit. 00:11:31 Speaker 2: While those revelations are super important to growth as a hunter, we have to hunt in a way that allows them to happen, because they mostly just won't happen by accident. Now, sure, you might just go out to sit in the woods to shoot a dough on October eighth, and I have one hundred and fifty inch or walk in where you don't expect him, and if you do pay attention, that buck could alter the course of your deer hunting life in a big way if you don't write off the encounter as a total fluke. But in other ways, we have to make something happen to see if something will happen, if that makes any sense. If you don't believe that you can kill big bucks in the early season in the morning, you won't hunt mornings and guess what you're gonna be right, or at least you'll never learn how wrong you really are. This is where it gets tricky, though, because, like I said way back in the beginning of the show, there are just unknowable things, a whole shitload of them, and because they exist and always will, we will always be faced with the impulse to explain them away as best we can. But what your brain comes up with while sitting on the couch and just pondering your deerless life is a different thing than what your brain can do when it's tasked with going and doing the thing. Anyway, it's hard to get comfortable with not knowing the important. 00:12:41 Speaker 3: Stuff, but it's also a part of this deer game. 00:12:44 Speaker 2: Instead of saying that the bucks are all nocturnal because of the moon phase or seasonal timing, it's okay to be like, I have no idea why I can't find a buck right now, but I'm gonna keep looking. This is so important I can barely figure out a way to emphasize it enough. It's okay to hunt a new spot, and hell, seven new spots in a week and blank every time. You'll never truly know why you didn't see any deer on most of the CITs, but you can know, you know that you didn't do this or you did do that. You know you can say, well, with this access and this wind and the seasonal timing, I didn't see a deer in that spot. You might not know why the deer didn't show up, but you have enough to try it again, or tweak the plan, to move down the ridge and give it another shot. I think one of the best things that ever happened to me as a hunter was deciding that when it was possible, I'd hunt new spots for an evening and then a morning, as long as it made just enough sense. Now, of course you wouldn't sit I don't know, like a beanfield edge in the morning most likely, But for a lot of travel route setups, there's a chance morning and evening. And while you might have to access the same spot from different ways, it's worth it because sometimes I believe a spot will be an amazing morning spot and it's a dud, but the deer go through there like crazy in the afternoon. I might be able to figure out why, or I might have just an unknowable thing on my hands, But that's okay. I don't need an explanation for everything. Sometimes I just like finding a spot where, for whatever reasons, it's known to them, they use it at a certain time in a certain way. We are caught in this world, this weird world of white tails right now, where it feels like you can know so much about them, and if you have enough cameras and enough time and enough land, you can know a lot about them. They can be pretty predictable, but they mostly aren't that predictable because we mostly can't know most of what they have going on during any given day. If you can find a way to take comfort in that and accept it, you can find a way to just tease out enough knowledge on their lives to maybe not always kill them at will, but to always be in the game and always on a path toward the next encounter. So, if this was super muddy and incoherent, let me break it down before we all move on with our lives. There's a lot of the deer's world that we just aren't privy to, but that's totally okay. We can try to explain away certain behaviors or certain results from our sits, and we might get some of them right or not. That doesn't really matter. What does matter is that it's okay. To admit that we don't know, and to try to learn as much as we can about them. This only happens one way, and it'll never happen if we decide that we know about them something that we actually don't or can't and then use that to try something that just won't work or to keep us out of the woods. 00:15:27 Speaker 3: You know what, Scratch that. 00:15:28 Speaker 2: Trying something that might work is everything to solve the equation, even when we don't believe that we can solve it. This is a good time of year to just fold our brains into a mental pretzel over this stuff, because we can look back on the bulk of our season and see what we did and didn't do, what worked, and what didn't. In fact, that's what I'm going to talk about next week, and we should use all of that stuff and just feed the machine for the offseason and at least help us try to think through new plans and strategies and hopefully just kind of alter our dear mindset so it helps us more than it hurts us, which is always a good thing when it comes to not only a life in general, but deer hunting. I'm a big fan of just trying to reflect on what I got wrong, what I got right, and how I can do things differently. I think that's so important, and I think it helps us to just not fill in the blanks all the time, which is super dangerous to our deer hunting success. So think about that. I think about coming back next week because I'm going to just talk about sort of my fall and review and some of the bigger lessons that I took away from the deer hunts that I had this year, because I think that'll help you to do the same thing, which is just going to set you and I up for this long off season we're going to be facing before we can start really shed hunting and scouting, getting into a whole bunch of stuff. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, which has brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for listening. If you want more deer content, you know where to find it. Maybe you need pheasant content content, maybe you need a new recipe, maybe you just want to listen to some podcasts and veg out. 00:17:05 Speaker 3: Whatever. Go to the medieater dot com. 00:17:08 Speaker 2: We drop new hunting and fishing and outdoors related content literally every single day. There's so much stuff there. Check it out and thanks again for all of your support.