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: What is going on? Welcome back to Wired to Hunt.
00:00:21
Speaker 3: This is Jake Hoefer and this week we have a great episode with Derek Dixon of White Tail Research and to keep the theme of July about technology and summer scouting, this breaks down some of his findings over the years with thousands of flights with a thermal drone. And I know there’s a little controversy with that, but I think the information and intel that Derek is able to provide can certainly be helpful and useful. We talk about summer bachelor groups and what actually happens before the season and what happens as all the different things shift and change as we build up to your opening day. As you know, Wired Hunt is brought to you by Multrie. So without further ado, let’s go in to kick things off with Derek from white Tail Research.
00:01:08
Speaker 2: Derek, Welcome to Wired. How you doing, Yeah, man, thanks for having me on.
00:01:12
Speaker 3: Absolutely so it’s July, and excitement is getting to be very high for all deer hunters. They have likely to point cell cameras, there’s maybe some deer that they remember from the previous year. And I want to dive into some of the different trends that maybe you’ve been able to observe with the work that you do with your thermal drone and a lot of the resources you put out there. But before we get into all of that, is there anything new or exciting that you want to share that I might not ask.
00:01:42
Speaker 2: I want to get that out of way.
00:01:44
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean I could take you down a lot of rabbit holes with that conversation, because I’ve recently started researching arrows. I’ve been researching turkeys for the last four months or so now, and there’s a lot of cool findings with that. Really the turkey thing, though, I think it it didn’t it didn’t dive down the avenues that I wanted it to. I had an idea, I had a strategy, And the more I flew, the less turkeys I see in and the less turkeys I seen, the more questions I asked, and the more questions I asked, I just started getting shoved into these like one hundred and fifty page PDFs for every single state and their conservation agency, and I’m tracking where all the money goes and all these different things. So I have a massive video related to turkeys that’s going to come out. I don’t know if it’s going to be this year, just because the timing might not be right for it anymore because of how how much work I’ve done for it. I might wait until next year to post the big video, but I’ll probably have a small stipit and get get posted out. But anything, if anything, I’m gonna have some arrow research or an arrow related video coming out before season, which will be pretty interesting, just because that’s something that I’ve always been really passionate about.
00:02:44
Speaker 2: I’m a nerd about it. And I’m going to be doing.
00:02:46
Speaker 4: Some broadhead testing and not just like testing five broadheads, and I’m going to literally buy every broadhead that’s manufactured that’s that’s labeled for penant know, highlight, high level penetration, and you like, for reference. If you just look at a mechanical broadhead company, if they have ten broad heads that they sell, then I’m going to look for that smallest diameter cut titanium, like what is what do they claim penetrates the best? And I’m going to own every single one of those and then we’re gonna go head to head. Maybe I can get a slow O camera and some other stuff, but we’ll see. So yeah, no, I but I could. Yeah, yeah, don’t ask that question. I could, We would, We will derail this conversation quickly.
00:03:23
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:03:23
Speaker 3: Well that’s uh. I look forward to to checking that out. So I do want to talk about farm Country. You recently released a video in regard to some of the different things that that you have been able to find there, and so.
00:03:36
Speaker 2: I guess getting right into it.
00:03:38
Speaker 3: You know, you mentioned that ad Country is basically a white tail feed lot in a lot of in a lot of scenarios. What surprised you most once you actually started putting, you know, numbers to buck Todough ratio general deer density in comparison to to where you fly most often in Missouri?
00:03:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I mean I knew that.
00:03:57
Speaker 4: I knew the deer numbers were going to be higher, right, So I started driving through these agriculture areas with prime Ryperian habitat and I’m looking around the entire time, and you know, from my area, if I drive through a section of habitat that looks anything like it did in the areas that I was in with agriculture, then I’m automatically looking to the back of the fields. I’m looking for deer in those areas because it’s just got hunters know, you know, the passive instinct whenever you drive through an area and it’s like, oh man, there could be a deer over there, and you’re just you’re kind of looking at the back of a field. In that setting and agriculture setting I was. I was in like like a child in a candy shop type setting. My wife was having to keep me in control looking at the highway driving because I mean everywhere, I just felt like there should be deer everywhere, and there there was. And I got the drawn up in the sky and helped verify that. And you know, the initial part of it, I think I even said on the video, is that I was going to do a population analysis, just a basic get get a herd count, and then also I wanted to know dot to buck ratio. Maybe if I get to dissect fawns from the ratio as well, which I was able to, but I just kind of lumped them in with does, and I think sixty bucks is what I what i’d rated it at. But in the end, I mean, whenever I flew up the drone, it was just immediately like, oh my gosh, this is I’m gonna be here a minute. And I actually ended up doing the main portion of the analysis right at dark and I was just flying a straight bead line and I would zoom the camera in and I would immediately pop it back off and zoom on the next year, pop it back off, zoom on the next year. And the entire time, I had a guy next to me, and normally I drop pins, I’ll drop color coded pins for that entire process, but there were so many deer I just didn’t have and have the time I needed to dough buck, dough buck, dough buck, and if it was anything that was over three and a half, then I would say, good buck, and then I would just keep going. And that guy’s sitting there next to me and he’s just tally marking its the thing that I did, and we were I think it took two days to do two different properties in this one place and then the other one. I did it for a full day and it was actually cloudy and a little rainy for that process, but I walked away with I mean, there was no way I wasn’t within the ninety plus percent i’ll of accuracy in terms of how many deer were there. There were some areas is where maybe it was a little thicker and I may have glassed it over a little bit too easy. But that kind of gets down to the point where in the video I’d said, maybe I kind of skimmed the edges of a section of habitat that you know, that right Parian habitat, that little bit thicker density habitat, and I would decide there’s got to be something in there, so I’d kind of go back and recomb over it. Even though most of the year late in the evening, early in the morning they’re out in the open, still felt like there had to be something just tucked away back in there. And oftentimes whenever I would do that, it’d be a mature buck. And really that kind of leads to the probably the coolest finding, and I just I can’t, you know, it’s impossible to say for certain that this is a common trend, but it was so consistent where you would fly up, you’d locate a handful of mature box across one of these agriculture properties, and then you would just pull up on X and look for the areas that you hadn’t flown yet, these sections of habitat that look like there should be betting there, and it’s like, okay, I’m going to go check out this section, this section, this section, and they’re all, you know, around one hundred acre blocks away from one another. You’d go check out each section and there’d be another mature buck in that in that little spot, and it’s like, oh my goodness, that’s just it was just always fascinating. Rarely did they overlap, though there were. There was a portion I think it was November fifth, whenever I was there. They think this was in Indiana as well, November fifth, and whenever I was flying, mature bucks were overlapping. And that’s because there were like three dos in estris in this one kind of core spot and they were all competing. But even in that setting, there was one buck that was beyond dominant over all the other ones he had, and he was missing his entire right side. He was like three hundred and twenty pounds, just a freak of nature and looked like he wanted to murder everybody, and I think all the other deer recognized that. They just kind of they stayed back and observed him. But he was he was highly aggressive. And there were mature bucks overlapping in that within one hundred acre blocks, of course, But for the most part though, whenever they were all bedded down, it was really interesting. They were they were very evenly spaced. I mean, you could just draw lines and connect through habitat and it’s like, yeah, there should be a mature buck there, there, there there, and if you flew and checked it, there almost always was. So that’s interesting. So it was it was fully stocked, fully stocked. Yes, there were no gaps whereas you know habitat in this area. You could attempt to do the same exact thing and say you have a thousand acres, but I mean there’s only four mature bucks across one thousand acres, So in that setting you’re you’re not going to be able to do one one mature buck per one hundred acres because they’re just it’s not fully stocked, as you just said.
00:08:27
Speaker 2: So, m.
00:08:29
Speaker 3: Another thing that I found interesting was, you know, I think a lot of hunters assume you know and base off what you’re saying here as well as you know mature bucks. But a lot of hunters, I feel, assume that ad country just automatically equates to giant, very high end deer. What did you find and how did the match up to expectations or predictions before you did?
00:08:48
Speaker 2: Did that?
00:08:48
Speaker 4: Yeah, So I was finding deer with a lot of abnormalities in comparison. So like I found one deer he had a double main beam on the left side. We found another deers main friend tany had a double main beam on the right side, and he actually may have been a gross over one hundred and seventy inches. But in terms of just sitting down and saying you found it, you know, a straight typical one seventy plus, I didn’t find one, not one that I could confirm. There was one that was close, but even then I think he was a little younger. If he survived, maybe he’ll be in that class next year. I definitely think that. You know, I someone had shown me trailcam pictures of a property next door and there was this main frame eight and he was like one hundred and sixty five hundred and seventy inch main frame eight so it’s like, obviously they grow the big deer. But I think the biggest consensus that I walked away with is that just the overall average of total inches that these mature bucks are capping out on is significantly higher than my area. My area, you’ll find one hundred and fifteen to one hundred and twenty inches is kind of common that area. It was very uncommon to see anything under one hundred and thirty inches, and I’d say the average was in the one forties. And with that, I mean even then, it’s kind of hard to discern inches off of a drone with that type of person respective, it’s really difficult to gain time length in actual mass measurements throughout and I’ve I’ve played around with guessing on stuff like that and relocated their shed antlers, and I’ve had pretty good success with estimating. But in agriculture it’s different because those deer are so big, their bodies are so massive, and their necks are so much bigger and swaller than in my area that it’s a little bit more difficult to pin that down. Because I remember there was one deer that I had I had recorded him a couple weeks prior in early November, and I think three weeks later one of the guys had killed this buck with a bow and it wasn’t a mega target buck. I mean, they had a lot of bucks to choose from, but he ended up scoring a little over one hundred and fifty inches and I never would have thought he went over one hundred and forty five. So he was like one fifty four or something like that, So scored significantly higher than I had estimated just off of the drone.
00:10:49
Speaker 2: But yeah, no, I mean just the general.
00:10:52
Speaker 4: Consensus though, is that they’re they’re just bigger. Everything’s just a little bit bigger. And I think that a lot of that measurement actually comes from the mass just in general. No, obviously they’ll have longer time length potentially and maybe longer main beams, but they definitely have a lot more mass in that area for sure. I Mean you can tell if you ever, if you ever pick up sheds from somebody that has like an Iowa property, you pick.
00:11:12
Speaker 2: Up that Iowa shows ways.
00:11:14
Speaker 4: Yeah, it’s so heavy in comparison to something in my area, and the density is just not there.
00:11:19
Speaker 3: Were you shocked to not find as many you know, quote unquote high end deer. Was that shocking to you or was it about what you expected?
00:11:27
Speaker 2: Yeah?
00:11:27
Speaker 4: No, I felt like I would have found at least one true just undoubtedly whenever you’ve seen him. He was a Boon and Crocket deer, and the only deer that I think going into it. They had one other on trail camera that they thought potentially would have been, but I never found him, and that was on a smaller property. And then that the other buck that could have been, you know, an actual, true, typical Boon and Crockett. Was that that buck with the broken side that was just dominant as all get out in three hundred and twenty pounds, but he was missing one side and he was six by six, so you could look at his other side and kind of gauge tine length and mass and he would have came close. But ultimately, yeah, I thought that I would have found one at least one and walked away with the fact that just an undeniable Boon and Crockett. And the crazy thing is, you know, I was looking at deer like that in this area, in their area for agriculture, and then I’m looking back at my deer that I researched in southern Missouri, and I don’t have the numbers that they do in terms of total deer, but every once in a while, we always get that anomaly, like one or two anomalies every single year within a three thousand acre block in southern Missouri. And I’ve seen this across multiple areas. I’ve done tracking jobs for guys whenever I’m flying and we’ll find this random five y five or six by six and he’s just absolutely anything beyond a deer they’ve ever seen before.
00:12:46
Speaker 2: And it’s like, well, where’s that.
00:12:47
Speaker 4: It’s like, well, I’m not gonna tell you, but it’s a pretty big Deer’s it’s cool that you guys have some genetics like that in this area. But like last year, I researched this mainframe ten five by five and he was a four years old estimated, potentially even three and a half. If if you had asked someone like Bill wink or something on their property, they would automatically say, yeah, that’s three and a half year old. But from my area, I’m thinking that he’s probably in the fours. And I found one of his shed antlers. He’s one hundred and sixty inch deer all day long with an eighteen inch spread, and he may have had a wider spread than that. So we can produce deer at the same level in these other areas.
00:13:24
Speaker 2: It’s just they’re.
00:13:25
Speaker 4: Definitely more of an anomaly whenever it happens, whereas up there it’s pretty consistent to find. If you want to find a deer over one hundred and fifty inches, then if you have a thousand acres available to you’re likely going to have a deer over one hundred and fifty inches.
00:13:37
Speaker 2: We’re down here, you might not have him.
00:13:38
Speaker 4: He might fringe on you every once in a while on that thousand acres, but you’re not going to have him as a quarter buck on your property for.
00:13:45
Speaker 3: Someone that wants to tap into kind of the you mentioned you looked at some spots on the map and say, hey, there should be a mature buck here, there should be potentially a mature buck here. And when he flewed the drone you found those I mean, were those on within you mentioned you know, riparian areas, so you know river or a large creek or something like that. Were they just one hundred and fifty two hundred yards off the creek or were they ten yards off the creek, or were they on an ox bow, were they on different contours?
00:14:11
Speaker 2: Like? What, what did you see that you’re willing to share? Yeah?
00:14:13
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I mean most of them were on ox bos. And I think that that’s that’s been pretty well understood from a lot of guys. I mean, whenever you have habitat like that that’s so limited and you want to go in and scout it, it’s pretty simple to kind of discern where deer betting down, just because the habitat allows for it, and it’s such such a fragmented segment that you’re actually scouting that it’s pretty pretty easy to discern where they’re actually betting. But generally in oxpos, but there’s some areas where there’s not an ox bow and the river just kind of halfway wonders or a little creek bed that’s running through, and you know they’re just betting all along it. Oftentimes these areas the right parent areas that I was flying around, they were anywhere from thirty yards to one hundred and fifty yards wide, and I mean they were packed with deer.
00:14:55
Speaker 2: Every single time. They’re packed with deer.
00:14:57
Speaker 4: And oftentimes you’ll have a mature buck that was betted down and he might have three domes off, you know, pretty close by him, and then he’s going to have a handful of younger bucks that are all around him. And there’s some deer that are betted right up right up against the creek, like they could almost lean their head off of the bank and take a drink if they wanted to, they’re so close. And then sometimes they’re pulled a little bit further back fifteen twenty yards. And there were a couple times where you’d find a mature buck and he’d just be betted right out on the edge of the woods, kind of right on that transition. So it’s kind of hard to say that, yeah, they always bed the blank, but more often than not, whenever I was finding mature buck, he was either in an ox bow or he was in And this is probably the more more frequented. If I could say, like if I went and flew every ox bow on a property, there’s a chance you’re going to find a mature buck across you know, that habitat in the oxpos. But in an agriculture setting, if there’s a field that’s left into native grasses, that field will almost always whenever I was flying at least and you know, I can’t say always. It’s sign science, you can’t say always, but very very likely there’s a mature buck betted out in that native grass field, whatever it was left into, whether it was just burned and allowed to grow up and it’s waste to chest high. Very common mature bucks were out in those in comparison to an ox bow, and you know, they’re almost always on the right parian habitat, but if you if you intermix that with this native grass field, they really take a preference to being out in that native grass field versus kind of back near where all the other deer at I was seeing.
00:16:28
Speaker 3: Did you notice, and I don’t know how hard did this to tell with the with the drone, but when they were betted in the native grasses, were they typically like on a slight knoll? Were they you know, like, was there any sort of change within that terrain although maya have been a little bit subtle, But did you notice any sort of trend or was it just on the edge of the native grasses?
00:16:47
Speaker 4: Because yeah, so for the most part, what I was seeing that a lot of that habitat is pretty flat. I would say if you had terrain changes that maybe they’ll take a preference to betting a little bit higher potentially, but I think more than more often than not, whenever you get in a setting like that, it’s so dense and it’s so thick that if you human decide to ride anee bike or walk through it, and you’re walking through the edge of it, he’s just he’s not going to get up, he’s not going to move. You could walk ten yards next to him in a lot of those settings and you’re never going to see him.
00:17:15
Speaker 2: You might hear him breathing before you see him, and I’ve actually done that before.
00:17:19
Speaker 4: But where you hear dear breathing before you actually see him, then you start walking and inspecting what that is, and then a buck bounces out of it. So no, more often than not that I think they’re just kind of hanging out with twenty yards or more from the wood edge and they’re just they’re just bedded out in the middle of it because they feel very secure in that setting.
00:17:36
Speaker 2: They can hear, they can smell.
00:17:38
Speaker 4: But yeah, if you add it in a little bit of train, I know that I’ve seen there were there were some situations where you would have a field like that, or maybe just maybe it was a field of corn or soybeans or something, and then there was this random knob that came up out of it, and that knob they didn’t plant into agriculture in order did they burn for you know, their native field or anything, and it was just left into these kind of shriked be trees. I think a lot of times those guys that I was with, they were they were assuming that deer were betting out on those, and rarely did I find a buck or a dough actually betted on them. I found them betted nearby them, whether that was in the field, if it was a native field, or if it was agriculture being used for agriculture, then being betted on the opposing side of it, back near the woods. But seldom did I actually find them betted on those random obscure knobs.
00:18:24
Speaker 2: Not to say they won’t know.
00:18:25
Speaker 4: I mean, if you if you’ve walked them and you’ve seen deer betting on them, that I’m sure they will. But in my example, I didn’t see them betting on those as frequently.
00:18:32
Speaker 2: Mhm, what how would.
00:18:37
Speaker 3: How much different is the like more type of hill country terrain where there’s lower deer density h versus ag country like where you just like, man, I want to schedule a trip to go hun high country because it’s way more I mean, because I’ve talked to l different guys and I have no doubt that hunting big woods is much much, much, much more challenging than you know, the majority of the Midwest. How would you illustrate that, you know, comparing contrast of those two different habitat tites.
00:19:06
Speaker 4: Yeah, No, I mean, I think it depends on your weapon of choice, right, I mean, if you’re going out with a rifle, then I guarantee you I’m.
00:19:12
Speaker 2: Going to go to the agriculture property every time.
00:19:14
Speaker 4: I wouldn’t ever dabble in hill country or any of these other settings. I’ll go with a rifle. But if I wanted to kill something with a bow, I personally would feel more comfortable in hill country because in that setting I can utilize in my style of hill country. There’s different variations of hill countries. Some can be more subtle, some can have more timber. My style of hill country that I’m talking about is actual decent elevation changes that cut that forces travel with intermixed habitats. So you have a couple forms of habitats you have saddles, you have you know, these train driven funnels, and you can kind of piece that together and discern where these deer have to travel across to form a terrain, and then it makes you a lot more effective hunter, whereas an agriculture a lot of times you’re not going to get those trained driven features. There was one property that I did in agriculture actually that had a block of timber, and that block of timber had these really steep ditches in it that was forcing travel and that setting, I mean, that would make it kind of a bow hunter, slash rifle hunter’s heaven, and then it was it was an amazing property. But more often, more often than not, if you’re in an agriculture setting and you don’t have that train driven excluding the creek beds where maybe you have a really steep bank up along the creek bed that you can mark and say deer don’t walk up and down that, they’ll walk around it. But beyond that, if you don’t have any more train features, then bow hunting it becomes a little bit more difficult in my opinion, because you have so many deer at that point, you have so many eyes, so many noses that you’re trying to full and the only benefit you get out of that that they’re being such a high deer density is if you move into an area and you bump twenty deer, it’s not unlikely that you’re going to have twenty more deer move back through. I think I said then the video, and that’s a good feature. Whereas in hill country, if you accidentally your wind swirls or something happens and you bump the deer that are moving through your particular area out in front of you, say a group of five dos or maybe a younger buck, and they decide I had to bump out. Well, they probably just alerted all the other deer within three hundred yards of that area, and now everyone’s going to kind of halfway avoid your location a little bit more, and you’re not going to have another group of twenty bucks or twenty deer moved through that area. You might have a cruising mature buck still moved through that spot, but very unlikely in comparison to the agriculture setting. So yeah, no, they definitely have their big differences. But if I was hunting with a bow, I would want to stand hill country, and if I was hunting with a rifle, I’d want to go to agriculture.
00:21:27
Speaker 2: That’s kind of my consensus on that.
00:21:42
Speaker 3: Those farms you were flying in the Midwest rag country were you able to were those hunted or how heavily were they hunted or when? Like did you have any background information of like, oh, yeah, a guy was hunting in there yesterday, or was there any of that intel or data that people are obviously wonder like what does pressure do it? Like, well, here’s what this one example of this.
00:22:03
Speaker 4: Yeah, So I tried to do a couple of studies where I actually had guys just that we’re going to be hunting that day anyways that didn’t even know that I was out out here with the drone and I was with the landowner, and me and the landowner were kind of together, and then this guy was off doing his own thing and he would go out and hunt, and I would observe him and the deer moving around him and the effects that he was having. And I had a point to go off of that. And now my brain completely blamed. I started going down that I had a really good point to go off of that. But that’s okay, But yeah, I mean, ultimately it just kind of seed seemed similar as to what you what you would normally think that the deer are going to be bouncing around you. One guy actually did hunt a out of a tree stand, and that guy, I don’t think he had a single deer come within fifty yards of him. So, and he was in a pretty flat area. He was nearby creek bed. I think he was attempting to utilize the wind to shove his scent into the creek bed. But at the same time, I think that that wind was a little bit swirly, it was kind of low. It was you know, five mile prior wins, so it wasn’t benefiting him much. And then a lot of the other hunters they were just climbing up into box blinds and sitting and you know, in a lot of those settings, once the guy made it into the box blind, then he was invisibled all the deer around him. And oftentimes they were utilizing a UTV or a tractor or something to get into that box blind, and whenever the UTV would pull up to the box blind, all the deer around. You know, say you’ve got a deer one hundred and fifty yards away on an ox bow beted down a mature back. He’ll just kind of halfway lift his head, won’t even pay attention, He’ll just keep looking forward. He might kind of halfway address that he heard something. But as long as that UTV stayed running and it pulled up, the guy got out, climbed up into his box blind, UTV turned around, drove away. Deer didn’t even budget muscle, And then you know, forty five minutes later, deer stands up, moves out into the field, and he may have not walked into range. In fact, I don’t think I ever recorded where a mature buck had moved into range of any of these hunters. You know, he’s eighty to one hundred and fifty yards away. And that’s kind of the big problem with agriculture. If you’re wanting to hunt those box blinds and big open fields, is you’re probably gonna see a lot of mature box and you can take pictures with your phone oftentimes, but unless you’re able to really find, you know, finite your setup and get honed in on where those bucks are actually moving out into the field, it becomes pretty difficult to actually get on one with a bow. So and that that was pretty common is what I see. But uh, you know, oftentimes by utilizing those box lines and kind of a scent proof ish setup, they they weren’t getting detected hardly at all, and it kind of benefited them, I think, but it also is kind of to the detriment and they were sitting and watching deer lot mm hmm.
00:24:33
Speaker 3: What in terms of for summer scouting too, Let’s say, do you have any examples of where you were following a bachelor group or following a specific buck throughout the summer And you know, everyone there’s a lot of theories and ideas about you know, summer shift and that there is a lot of changes that happen from summer to November in terms of habitat change. But for someone that is one of uh, you know, I got this awesome bachelor group, I’d kill I God, killed two out of the three bucks, and I’d be thrilled to do you know that to happen. What trends or relocations have you potentially been able to identify that would be helpful for someone to have in the back of their mind.
00:25:09
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean the number one trend for summer scouting in early season for my area, which would be southern Missouri is if you can find a bachelor group or in particular target buck that you’re wanting to actually target and attempt to pattern. I think that that early season is the only time that you can truly potentially pattern a deer in his habits because he has limited cover sources that he’s using. He’s grown very accustomed to them over the summertime, and he has a handful selected and those are the ones that he utilizes very consistently. And then he kind of has a pretty stable food selection of food source that he’s wanting to go out to, and it’s about to change in the early season because you might have acorns drop and things that are happening. But that first week of season from my area, which would start on September fifteenth, that first week is almost always a section of timeframe where you can potentially pattern one of those bucks off of the summer if you go out and you’re able to visually observe them where he’s moving from his betting area, what he has as a food preference potentially, and his consistency in those areas, then yeah, I mean, you can sit around and delve up a plan as to how you want to get up on him and hunt that first week very aggressively, in my opinion, and I think that’s part. Sometimes you’ll see people and I have a friend that does this almost every year, where he’ll enter the season a little bit cautiously because he doesn’t want to mess anything up or shove those deer off of his property, and he wants to retain them deeper into the fall. But oftentimes a lot of those summer bachelor groups, they’re gonna be dispersing anyways.
00:26:38
Speaker 2: You might keep a couple of them, but for the most.
00:26:40
Speaker 4: Part, a lot of them they’re gonna move out into ranges, and their range might consist of you a little bit, but for the most part, a lot of those deer are going to move away. And he plays it really cautiously for that first week versus playing really aggressively. And because of that, oftentimes he sees those bucks pretty consistently because he knows where they’re coming out at, he knows where he needs needs to be set up on. But he he just kind of feathers the edges and slowly moves in and tries to just not miss anything up but also potentially get a shot. And once a week passes, week and a half passes, then all those deer just you know, acorns start dropping, testosterone starts rising, and they start splitting, and he misses out on getting a shot on one that on.
00:27:18
Speaker 2: That first week.
00:27:19
Speaker 4: So, you know, I think the first week is everything as it pertains to summer patterning. And after that first week week and a half, then everything starts splitting up, and it does become pretty hectic and chaotic, even from a drum perspective, where you know, I was tracking a group of four bucks, you know, for a month and a half straight and leading up to season, and then all of a sudden, now I only have one of them remaining that I’m able to track. So now deer number fifty seven, you know, fifty eight and fifty nine are all gone, and I have to sit around and watch deer number sixty and continue to track him and still see if I can find those other three, but more often than not, they leave the area and I’m not able to relocate them.
00:27:58
Speaker 3: So in that that example, you know, fifty seven through sixty, the one that stayed, was that the most mature one or was that a subord in a buck?
00:28:08
Speaker 4: Yes, that was an example, but yeah, I have some real examples off of that. We’re battery groups.
00:28:14
Speaker 2: Yeah I don’t. I don’t know the exact numbers of those year whenever I.
00:28:17
Speaker 4: Was doing it, but Press is like, dang man, you got it right off the top of my head, And if I pulled up my notes, I can give you real numbers. I guess, but no. One example that I would have is I guess it was a group of five Bucks in that one and really oftentimes in my area, even a bachelor group, it’s not going to be a bachelor group of five mature Bucks. It’ll be a bacheler group of maybe like two or three and then a little bit younger bucks. And yeah, you might, you just kind of have to roll the dice. But if you end up having the better habitat and that group of five Bucks are already in that core area, you’re your area, and you’re able to see them visually and you’re getting trail cam pictures of them whatever, and yeah, I mean more often than not, if that’s their home area they already have, then one of those mature Bucks is going to claim that spot, because all five of these Bucks have been claiming this spot all summer long, so more often than not, a mature buck will take that location, and he’ll kind of not that they’re territorial, because they’re not, but they more so just just start having a lack of care for one another and they don’t really want to be near each other. But yeah, more often than not, a mature buck will claim that spot though in the end, and he’ll start kind of ruling that roost, and the younger bucks will kind of feather away, and really, the younger bucks, those are the ones they kind of stay around anyways. You know, the mature buck kind of claims it and that becomes his mature buck home range, and there might be other mature buck home ranges that overlap with his. But the younger bucks, they’re just intermixed all over the place. So you might keep both of the younger bucks and then the other two mature bucks they’ll they’ll go ahead and move away. So you had three mature bucks and two young bucks. Now you have one mature buck. Very likely you’ll still hang onto those two younger bucks and they’ll just kind of they’ll have a really wide range because they don’t know what the heck is going on. Their testosterones out of whack. They see doze and they have feelings and they don’t know they don’t know what they’re doing, so they’re just walking all over the place aimlessly trying to figure it out. While the mature bucks they kind of they have everything dialed in, they know where they want to be for that fault range.
00:30:14
Speaker 3: What do you think is a misconception or something that people don’t fully understand that you’ve been able to maybe slightly uncover of just summer habits transitioned into hunting season habits for because I mean you every year there’s like there’s two camps of deer hunters in the summer, guys that are drastically overconfident about how their season is gonna go based off of summer intel. And then there’s other guys that when it’s September fifteenth, they’re like, Oh, I’m bummed about this year. And then you know, usually there is a flip flop, there’s a pendulum at some point. Is that something that that you’ve you’ve observed, But that’s just something I’ve just noticed behaviorally from friends and talking to people like, Oh, this is gonna be the best year ever. And they check in and they’re like, oh, this is gonna be the worst here ever. And then this is the inverse of that.
00:31:02
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think it depends on the friend and how they’re getting their intel to build their confidence. Right, So if they’re if they’re building all of their their theories and confidence based, you know, ideas off of purely trail cameras versus actual infield scouting and in coordinate with it, then I think, yeah, you might run into a little more failure there because you’re you’re chasing some ideas that might drive you a little bit mad. Whereas if you’ve already done the infield scouting in tandem with your trail camera information, you’re piecing together a much greater story and that confidence might roll over in success. But yeah, no, probably the number one thing that I tell a lot of people to look out for. And I see this all over the place, and I already mentioned it with agriculture, same thing down here in hill country is and it doesn’t have to be a true early secessional, you know, rolling into the fall native habitat field. It can just be a fescue field that that was going to be cut for hay and it’s still tall and they didn’t get to it and it’s going to stay stay that height deep in the fall. Those fields tend to hold a lot of deer. They just enjoy them. They enjoy sitting out in them and bedding in them during the daytime whenever they’re sun or I don’t know what it is that’s actually driving them there, but in particular, if you can find a field that is invisible but close close to humans but invisible to humans, and it’s grown up waist high at least, then deer will flock to those fields and they’ll be all out on the edges of them. They’ll stand up in them, and they’ll just kind of browse around and mill around and hang out, or maybe move if there’s no actual native forge in there, they might just move out to the wood edge and browse around and nip on stuff. But they really have a preference for hanging out in those fields that are specifically invisible to humans, and that could be terrain driven invisible. It could be blocked by trees and just environmental things that are causing it to be broken up by our ice the line of eyesight. But it could be one hundred and fifty yards away from a house, it could be twenty years yards off of a dirt road. I mean, they really take a purference to that stuff. And in agriculture, I seen it a lot. And this wasn’t this was an early season. This was during you know, actual season. But there were a lot of fields that were grown up and they would go but up to all these these roads that were going through and a lot of the roads in these areas they kind of seem to make like a square or rectangle shape. A lot of straight line roads with these perfectly cut fields in them, and those those grass fields native fields, they would run right up to the edge of the road and you would have like a five yard span of the ditch that’s being managed by the state, and then beyond that you would start getting into that native grass habitat three to four yards off the native grass habit which I think I included a video clip of it in that video. I didn’t make a big deal of it, but I did include a clip of it where there’s a mature buck and he’s bedded like five yards away from the road, you know, or you know in the native grass yea from that berth. So and that’s very common where they’ll just bed right up against human presence. And if they have, if they have the habitat for it, then they’ll just lay down right there and that way they can sit there and hear everything that they want to, and if they need to, just kind of pop up and utilize their line of sight. But more often than not, I think they’re just going to stay hunkered down and listen. I think they’re very comfortable in that environment because they just know they know that nobody walks through this field and this is kind of my home, and they’re very comfortable in it. So definitely, just keep an eye. I wouldn’t go walking through those fields. I would just keep an eye on those fields and acknowledge their presence, and then maybe start thinking about finding ways to scout the edges of them and find ways to look into them late in the evening early in the morning and.
00:34:34
Speaker 2: See if there’s activity.
00:34:35
Speaker 4: The other thing, actually, and that I said early in the morning, is that early season lack of early morning hunting. There’s a lot of people that I know, at least if we’re talking about people that we know that purely hunt the evenings come early season, they’re always whining about how warm, you know, how hot it is, and to get destroyed by mosquitoes and these types of things, and oftentimes in the morning it’s sixty degrees and in the evening, yeah, it might be ninety five degrees that evening, but in the morning it was sixty degrees right at sun up, And if you get out in the morning, deer also kind of acknowledged that it was sixty degree sixty degrees in the morning. And I know that oftentimes we like to think that, you know, they’re purely going to be feeding in the evening and they’re doing a lot of their morning activity and banging out routes and trying to figure out stuff in that timeframe. But I see a lot of browsing take place in the morning, especially in the early season. Whenever you have those massive heat strokes where it’s ninety five degrees until the last ten to fifteen minutes of light, then a lot of morning activity takes place on those days because the temperature just allows for them to in fact over eighty five ninety degrees. It’s kind of dangerous for them to be up on their feet. Esp It kind of depends upon where you’re deer at, you know, right, so if you’re in southern Florida, then those deer, they probably don’t give a crap. But if you’re in Iowa and it’s ninety five degrees, then those deer are going to be freaking dying because they’re not built for ninety five degrees in October fifth, So you kind of have to play your terrain and know you’re deer. But from my area, particularly if it’s ninety plus degrees, then those deer are going to be pretty hard shut down. And as soon as it starts to below that in the last fifteen minutes of light, they’ll get up and they’ll start moving. But if you look, if you just look back towards the morning timeframe, when it was fifty five to sixty five degrees, and then it stays that way, you know, all the way up to eighty degrees until around eight to eight thirty PM or am. Then there’s a lot of morning activity happening in that first hour hour and a half of light.
00:36:27
Speaker 2: That’s interesting.
00:36:28
Speaker 3: So with that being said, do you feel that hunters could effectively get in in the morning without busting the er off like beating food sources, or would you suggest to kind of hunt and the transitional phase of anticipating where they may go to bed is that I assume potentially the play.
00:36:42
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, it obviously depends on all the variables that are in play for you. There there’s so many that especially that can take place in early season. The number one thing being what that feeding source is. You know, if you know where that oak tree is, that this oak tree that’s hanging out in the middle or not in the middle of the field, but thirty yards off of wood edge and it’s kind of in a little bit of a depression and it always puts on this crazy mast and it’s it’s a white oak as well, and you know where that’s at, then yeah, maybe honing in on that a little bit and you might be able to hunt the fringes that Another strategy that I’ve had success with and I know people have had in this area is going and utilizing your past history of knowing where their betting areas are and then also kind of acknowledging when they’re going and feeding in the morning time and then trying to get back into their beds. And it plays back into that role of just being highly aggressive like that guy that I had mentioned earlier where he only he kind of hunts the fringes for that first week. There are times where there are strategies if he could just sneak in the backside and lump up into the top of the hill where we know that they like to bed, and just hunt that betting area. Oftentimes the mature buck is going to be the first dear back to that betting area. So if you can just slip in, there’s a good chance, I mean, there’s a great chance you’re gonna bump deer, but there’s a decent chance involved that you’re going to actually be able to get a shot off on that group of Bauchler buck bucks moving back into that bed first, And that’s a that’s a potential strategy. I mean, ultimately, it’s there’s so many variables though, just to be able to carve out a strategy for people on early season hunting, it’s it is pretty difficult, but yeah, that’s the.
00:38:18
Speaker 2: Way it goes.
00:38:19
Speaker 4: That’s the way it goes. It’s always the situation with the deer hunting with a bow. Yeah, it’s just not easy.
00:38:25
Speaker 3: Let me ask you this, so, based off of flying the drone of the summer, what is a non obvious trail camera location that could be beneficial for someone you know, putting together a game plan to locate or learn more or pull data sets for a deal that they’re really excited about hunting this fall. And so obviously some of the obvious one would be edge of an alfile field, edge of a soybean field. That’s great, you know, But what’s a non obvious location that might be worth the point of camera that maybe a lot of people think about.
00:38:55
Speaker 4: Yeah, So, I mean, it’s great if you know where that dear is going to be at whenever it’s feeding. If you’ve planted a summer food plot and maybe you’ve got an acre of cowpees and you know for a fact that it’s just piled with tender every single evening, then you’re going to be attempting to hunt that. But more often than not, I don’t really care about where that end destination is as much as I do how they got there. So, you know, if we’re in hill country, then I’m trying to figure out how in the world are they traveling this train and making it to their destination because oftentimes, like I just said, if you know, let’s say you work early in the mornings and you just can’t hunt mornings, and you have to hunt in the evenings, that last fifteen minutes of light is where a lot of that movement is going to take place. If you’re purely hunting food sources in the late evening for mature box in the early season, you’re probably not going to have a lot of success because they’re not going to be there at the time that you can see them and make a shot off legally in light. So you have to find a way to get deeper into their form of habitat and intersect them whenever they’re moving to you. And so with that, in terms of the trail camera location, I would advise a lot of people to start paying attention to light are in ONYX and utilizing the slope aspect.
00:40:05
Speaker 2: There’s a tab that you can click.
00:40:06
Speaker 4: On it just made a video on it, or going in and using train X and just honing in on where terrain drives deer movement. And it’s a new kind of a different way of looking for funnels. There’s kind of the general way of just looking at a hybrid map with top topo lines and hashing out where general very obvious funnels are, but this is taking that where there’s these very obvious funnels and then intermixing with all of the other forms of terrain, and also marking every pond, every house, I mean, anything that can force travel, I would want to know about it.
00:40:38
Speaker 2: And then whenever you.
00:40:39
Speaker 4: Find these areas where it’s a little bit more honed in where their route is and it’s creating what I refer to as an invisible funnel, that I would be trying. Potentially it depends to put a trail camera in there. But you know, right now, there’s one study that I’m doing as it relates to human objects in the woods and actually me and I think Zach Fernbau started getting me on that a lot. I got him obsessed with funnels and he’s got me obsessed with this topic. And it’s the idea that deer kind of create these berths around human objects that are placed in the woods, whether it be trail cameras or in particular ladder stands. And I think we’ve all experienced that as well, where we go and sit in our light and you know, say you have a long time ladder stand that’s just been there forever, and you go and sit in it, and it feels like a lot of the deer that day are just moving with fifty yards away from you, and further just this, Yeah, this beautiful bubble that’s been created around you. We have all experienced that. So I’m researching that and I feel like there’s something to it. So in that essence, I would maybe be a little careful and a little cautious as to where I would put that trail camera. And if I knew that it was creating a funnel, and if I knew that it was honing down that travel, then maybe just keep the trail camera out on the food where they’re kind of used to that human presence. Anyways, they already know they’re entering a risky area by walking into the open, So introducing the trail camera in that sitting might not be that bad. But then combine that with your knowledge of preseason scouting and scouting an on X and try to merge together a plan to get up and you just you just move in and hunt that. Become a mobile hunter, slide up in there and hunt that versus setting a trail camera up on it.
00:42:14
Speaker 2: I don’t know that.
00:42:15
Speaker 4: I’m not saying, you know, if somebody wants to go in and put a trail camera on that funnel that you find, But at the moment.
00:42:22
Speaker 2: Personally, I would be cautious with it. I’d be I’d be careful.
00:42:38
Speaker 3: I have I have one request if you will for that research. I think you should have one where it’s how ninety nine percent of people hang their cameras, you know, Billy Betton, hide just right on the end of the tree, and then hang another one in a different control area where you you try to make an effort to it. May be already doing this and may you hide, you hide one, or you hang it up a little bit higher to see if there is any difference that you could quantify with that.
00:43:01
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:43:01
Speaker 4: So the first, the first trail camera study that I ever did was on a ridge that I called Big Ridge and that was the season that I was researching the deer named Winter and I never got a trail camp picture of him. And in that project, I mounted every trail camera in a very obvious, you know, waste to stomach high location on a tree. And I was intentionally doing that just to kind of be the standard run of the mill guy that walks out and just slaps a camera on a tree.
00:43:25
Speaker 2: That was that was the idea. But I am I am doing one.
00:43:28
Speaker 4: I didn’t I wasn’t able to get to it last year, but I’m doing one this year where where it’s going to be in that same area, and you know, I’ve had a whole year for it to kind of die off, so maybe it’s a good thing that I’m going to be moving back in again in this area. But all those cameras are going to be solar powered, so I’m gonna be able to go in pre season. And they’re also going to be powered off of nine volt batteries I think, but or twelvel batteries, but I’m gonna be able to go in pre season. Hang these cameras, put them in very inconspicuous areas up high, aiming down, and I’m going to try to scent proof myself as much as I can. And I’m going to have the same amount of cameras as I did on the first study, and we’re going to see if there’s any difference from study one to study two. But even then, I mean, even the trail cameras definitely have their use. But the biggest takeaway I think that I had from that study whenever I did it, was that even when I was getting trail camp pictures, I was getting pictures of like two, three, four deer, and you have to think that that’s the amount of gear that walked within that direct vicinity and right in front of the camera. But there were situations where they were fifteen to twenty five deer they were walking through that location, and I was only getting pictures of four of them. So just just be aware of things like that. Whenever you’re utilizing trail cameras. There’s no harm in utilizing them, and they can definitely be beneficial if used correctly. But if they become your insay all, you know, it’s everything that you believe in, then it can become a little bit destructive to your strategies and you definitely combine your actual experience and everything else. Because if you’re getting that trail camp picture in my setting, if I would have got that picture and I was wanting to go the next day and there were only four year in front of my camera, then my brain automatically would have thought, well, it was kind of it was a decent day, but you know, doose are moving through but didn’t miss ay? Yeah, I just didn’t miss anything crazy. But if I had been in the woods, it would have seen twenty plus year and an awesome hunt. Yeah, they’d been stinking amazing. And also the mature buck walked thirty yards away from the trail camera as well, he was just on the back side of it. So yeah, I know it had been an amazing hunt. But just just keep that in mind. Everybody for sure is that yeah that don’t don’t let it control all of your thoughts. But they can definitely be used as a tool. It’s all tool.
00:45:33
Speaker 3: This is anyone that has ran trail cameras have fallen into the trap that you just perfectly described. Anyone, anyone that runs one camera has had that same enter dialogue of like, well I didn’t miss much, and obviously they’re a great tool, great resource and can be very beneficial and helpful. But yeah, you know with the hard data that there’s a lot that you do miss. Let me let me ask you this, what have you noticed any sort of impact from summer chores. Like during the summer, people people who usually like if they have a free weekend or a free day, they’ll go out, they’ll taker, they’ll you know, they’ll do a little trimming checking on their food plot, even though they might have a camera on it. But just I’m gonna put it in the tinker category. They’re not going in there with a mission, They’re just going there to go there. Have you noticed any sort of long lasting or short or short short sighted.
00:46:22
Speaker 2: Impact of that behavior?
00:46:26
Speaker 4: None that I can just speak super firmly on, but I can say my beliefs on it, my beliefs or that it doesn’t have much of an impact, and if anything, it’s actually beneficial. I think that introducing AD you either need to do one extreme or the other extreme, and falling in the middle is where I think it becomes kind of a little worse. Like, say you only get out there once a month, then I think once a month is worth worse than once a week. And you know, I think once a month is also worse than if you don’t go there all season, because if you don’t go all their season, then it allows you to kind of attempt to sneak into their habitat a little bit more, and the deer just aren’t used to human pressure, so they might be a little more curious about it, whereas if you’re in there once a month, they kind of have a little bit of a no how on you. But if you’re there once a week and you’re there all the time, then all the deer just grow accustomed to you, and I think that that can definitely become beneficial. I mean, we see that clearly with agriculture settings where it’s farmed consistently and they’re always on the property. There’s human activity, UTVs, tractors, you name it, people talking, people sit around fire, drinking, you name it.
00:47:29
Speaker 2: They’re always there.
00:47:30
Speaker 4: And in that setting, like I explained earlier, they could be drove into their tower with a UTV every single time and they’re going to have zero effect on those deer.
00:47:38
Speaker 2: Whereas if maybe you have a property.
00:47:40
Speaker 4: Where you’ve only been on there once a year, and then now rifle season comes and you’re going to go drive back out to that stand on opening morning of rifle season with a UTV and maybe you just park your UTV at the base of your stand and you don’t even get dropped off at it, then that’s going to have a dramatic effect in comparison. You know, I’ve seen that a lot with just kind of the history of my main research property growing up. We all recognized very early on that it was the best if you could just get dropped off at your stand, whereas if you were the last person in that train, say it was three guys and you dropped off two, and then you had to drive up near your stand and park a couple hundred yards away from it and walk into your stand. More often than not you would have the worst hunt out of those three. We all started picking that up, so we would try to like pin Grandpa at the last bit, so it’s like Grandpa has to drive it, because who cares grand black kills a dear, So that way we could still be successful. Let him drop us off along the line. We recognized that very early on, way before traill cameras and drones. So no, there’s there’s definitely effect. And the benefit to that property is you know what I was saying, is that property it’s kind of driven. Like there’s a ranch down here in southern Missouri called Cloud nine Ranch. It’s just a UTV a TV rants. So we joke that that that property is kind of like Cloud nine Ranch because people go out there and they drive four wheelers on it and UTVs, And for a long time a lot of guys felt that maybe it was having a really bad impact on the property. But in the end, I think that it’s actually having a beneficial property, you know, act on property. If you’re going to be utilizing four where THEIRS UTVs. Things like that to access your stand, and you have the people available to be able to drop you off and leave. But if you’re just driving to a location and you shut the key off and you stop in that area, then that’s where and I’ve documented that a couple of times, that’s where it has an effect. Deer deer immediately, you know, in the in the in the setting where I explain in agriculture, where they drive in, drop the guy for the tower, leave it running the whole time, and then turn around and drive out where that deer is just kind of sitting there and he’s not paying attention. The moment the key shuts off, their heads up and they’re kind of they’re checking out, why why did why did you stop the UTV?
00:49:37
Speaker 2: Why do you turn the key off? What are you doing?
00:49:40
Speaker 4: And the moment your foot hits the woods and you start crunching leaves and you’re allowed human because you sound like an elephant walking through the woods in comparison to anything else, then yeah, I mean, you just you screwed everything up, so it can become pretty difficult, Uh to give it an all say answer.
00:49:55
Speaker 2: But those are kind of my opinions. I have a lot of opinions, but.
00:49:58
Speaker 3: Yeah, what’s your what’s your spicy his opinion, my spiciest opinion. That’s one that you’re like, Man, I don’t really want to share this opinion because I think people call me nuts.
00:50:06
Speaker 2: I’ll spot here. Yeah, no, it is.
00:50:09
Speaker 4: It’s actually one of my favorite subjects to talk about in private. I don’t talk about it much, but yeah, it’s it’s a weird one. Well, the other day I got asked a great question on a podcast and it was it’s all reframe its that way I can answer your question. But he’d asked me if I could research any deer in the world ever, from from all of history, which year would you research. I think it’s probably one of the greatest questions everybody. That is awesome, an amazing question. It was a Pat Pat I don’t know, I can’t pou last name, but from hunt Stock. He’s the guy that I started hunt Stock and event I’m going to.
00:50:41
Speaker 2: Be at in July.
00:50:42
Speaker 4: And you know, it was a great question and I thought I sat around and it was like, well, you got the ron Paula Buck, and you have all these really heavy conspiracy theory bucks and there’s yeah, there’s a lot of really good ones that you could do. The world record typical. I’d love to see how how old he is if I could have researched him from the time that he was born. But if I could, who was any deer in the world, it would be the non typical buck that was found dead in Missouri in the nineteen eighties and the world record. And my reasoning for that is because I’m really curious about his origin story, whether he was just a high fence deer that escaped and it was all accidental, whether he was truly a wild animal, which I would love to believe, and I think that would be amazing if he really was, or there was a lot of research that was going in in the seventies you started reading it. I started seeing it a lot in books because I read all books from early nineteen hundreds all the way till now, and you can piece together stories over a period of time. And there were a lot of hunters in that seventies eighties that were faking kills with high fence stuff. We’d go down all those weird topics. But in the seventies there was this large push that started occurring for creating genetically modified white tailed deer and attempting to create Boone Crockett white tailed You’re in a high fence setting in particular typical animals, and they were working on all these different types of flasks and things that can transport semen from white tailed buck and then different ways to inject a dough And there’s a lot of things that were documented and talked about throughout this time frame with universities in Texas and Penn State and places like that, and later into the seventies and in the eighties, a lot of those conversations that were in tandem with conservation agencies started disappearing, and a lot of those talks of all of these amazing things they were trying to discover that there’s not as many things that are readable anymore for the public eye. And then all of a sudden, world record non typical was just found dead randomly in Saint Louis, Missouri, in kind of a suburbish area, and.
00:52:51
Speaker 2: It just didn’t make a lot of sense.
00:52:53
Speaker 4: So I would I would love to know if there’s a conspiracy theory behind that to the fact that maybe there was a push with conservation agencies to begin introducing genetically modified deer into public lands or just land, you know, potentially even private lands just to wild settings at the behest, to enhance tag sales in those states and in increase hunter interest, to promote the sport. And you know, it may seem like a far fetched, you know idea that I have, but if you just look at our brother fishing and you want to go fishing, happens all the time. They take genetically modified fish. We’ll just look at Lake taney Como. I just talked about this in my last video. Like tany Como, they have infertile brown trout that are introduced into the waters. It’s not even a controversial subject hardly. It is a little bit if you start getting into the we we caught the world record brown trout because people are like, well, it’s it’s an infertile brown trout, so it doesn’t really count.
00:53:48
Speaker 2: But in terms of just for the sport going and catching the.
00:53:51
Speaker 4: Brown trout, I mean, everybody enjoys if you can catch a twenty plus pound brown trout, then that’s pretty stinking awesome. But the Conservation Agency you know, we we publicly put these brown trout that are infertile, these males that no longer go into testosterone cycles, so that way they can fatten up and become these trophy sized brown trout. They publicly put them in the waters. So who’s to think that, you know, it’s too far of an idea that they’d taken genetically modified deer and implanted them into public land or private land settings to potentially increase public interest and sell more tags. And the more tags you sell, the more the more of a chance that you have to be higher in the Pittman Robertson Act. And also the more hunter interests that you have, the more items that you’re selling to people, whether that’s guns, ammo, hunting equipment, the more of those forms of equipment that you sell, the more money that gets put into the federal pool at the Pittman Robertson Act. The more money that’s in the Pittman Robertson Act, the more incentive that there is to sell more tags to get the federal money from the federal government. So it kind of kind of all works out to be a pretty big fancy story. And call me a conspiracy theorist, But I you know, I don’t know if it’s one hundred percent fact that you or or actually even an idea that you can go down that it that it truly potentially happened. But I’m really fascinated at how how cleanly all of those dots start to connect once you connect them and you place them all out on a document in front of you, and it’s kind of like, oh wow, there actually might be an incentive there.
00:55:20
Speaker 2: So that’s pretty hot. That’s a hot take. What’s your thought on it.
00:55:25
Speaker 3: I don’t think it’s overly far fetched, Honestly. I just crossed my mind too that there’s some there’s some rewritten history in the world of white tails.
00:55:34
Speaker 2: I feel, you know, that’s that’s fairy. I mean, look at the General.
00:55:38
Speaker 3: I interviewed Josh who bought the General antlers, and at some point in time those got trimmed up. So I think there’s a lot more of white tail history that we all take as fact that may have some blurred lines or skewed truth for whatever reason, whether it was monetary or I mean, hard to say what the motivation would have been. But we’ll both be picked with tin hats here. But I don’t think it’s completely far fetched.
00:56:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, no.
00:56:07
Speaker 4: I only another topic that I’ve gone down recently is like the introduction of crossbows. While I was doing I’m doing working on a video related to archery and the detriment of single lung and liver hits and what causes all of these single lung, single lung and liver hits is somebody that’s tracked deer a lot with the drone. I’ve also just shot some deer, and then I’ve also partaken in a lot of just tracks pre drone, and then I know a lot of guys that have thermal drones that are tracking deer. It’s pretty general consensus that there’s a lot of single lung and liver hits that take place. So I’ve delved down this deep avenue of archery history, and in the avenue of archery history, I came across crossbows. And obviously, crossbows are a cool tool, and they introduced new hunters to the sport, and I love that.
00:56:48
Speaker 2: It’s awesome.
00:56:49
Speaker 4: But the one thing that I was noticing was this mass push for passing them. Kind of in two thousand and six it started, and then in that twenty ten twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, seventeen eighteen, rain and a lot of crossbows started becoming legalized in all these states. And if you think about it, the same story that I just told you also can potentially connect the dots with crossbows, where if more crossbows start being sold, that’s good for the manufacturers that are selling crossbows, but it also all of that funding goes into the federal pool for the Pittman Robertson Act. And the more hunters that you can introduce into the sport of archery to become dual season hunters, then the more tags that are being sold at the state level, the more tags that are being sold at the state level, the higher spot on the totem pole that you can potentially get. So it incentivized states to legalize crossbows, to have more hunters, to potentially get more money that’s being put into the pool of the Pittman Robertson Act. It’s just a fancy little connection point that’s very similar to the one that I just stated related to introducing genetically modified deer.
00:57:51
Speaker 2: I don’t know, yeah, yeah, that’s I think you’re right.
00:57:56
Speaker 3: I’m just thinking of people that only gun hunted in the past. And now they buy an archery tag and a gun tag, and that’s you to sell two tags to one guy.
00:58:04
Speaker 4: I look forward. You do all the hard work and I’ll just listen. So, I mean, I overthink a lot of things. Well, guys, remember I sit with a drone controller and I just I stare at this stinking thing, watching dear bed for hours of a day. So there’s a lot of a lot of time for me to kind of spool around in my brain and go a little crazy on ideas. And but that’s I mean, these are kind of just some of the connections that I’m not I mean, I’m trying not to cast out a ton of conspiracy theories, but these are just little connected making and I would love, I would love to ask some some people with more power than than I have on some of these subjects and just see their opinions on them.
00:58:41
Speaker 3: Then well, no, that’s that’s great. Well where can people fall along with with everything you have going on? Really enjoy your videos and I appreciate you hopping on here today, but where can people track you down?
00:58:54
Speaker 2: Yeah?
00:58:55
Speaker 4: White tail research just across the board. You can google it. I post pretty much everything to YouTube. I also have a Patreon, which is White Tool Research, and I post kind of behind the scenes content on that, but most of my mainstream stuff that I’m that I’m posting I post to I post strictly to YouTube. I’m trying to get to the point where I post things more on Instagram and other stuff like that, but it just it’s kind of a big workload to manage the YouTube channel on its own as the content creator and the person that gathers all the video and then I also have to make the videos, and then I have a wife and three kids. So I’m trying to work up my capabilities and post more frequently frequently, but it is it is difficult at the current workload that I have, so but I am trying.
00:59:35
Speaker 2: But Moral Story YouTube that’s where most of my videos are.
00:59:38
Speaker 4: And then I do have Instagram and Patreon and stuff like that, but I don’t post to those as frequently as I do my YouTube channel.
00:59:46
Speaker 3: Well, I love it, well, Derek, thank you once again. Really enjoyed the conversation and thanks for having me on as you unfold these conspiracies.
00:59:52
Speaker 2: We can do an episode on that too. Yeah, I appreciate it.
00:59:58
Speaker 3: All right, there, you guys, have you guys enjoyed this week’s episode of wired Hunt. If you did, be sure to leave a written review or leave a comment in Spotify. And additionally, it’s July and trail camera season is officially here. As you know, Wired Hunt is brought to you by Moultrie. Hopefully you have an opportunity to sneak out in the summer heat and put up some cell cameras or trail cameras in general to get some intel for this upcoming year.
01:00:22
Speaker 2: I hope you guys have a great rush for a week and weekend. We’ll see you next time.
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