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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.
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Speaker 2: Hey everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I’m your host, Tony Peterson. In today’s episode is all about how our deer populations change and what that really means for us from season to season. The old ebb and flow of deer populations has been a thing for as long as there have been deer and deer hunters with enough mental horsepower to recognize the whole thing isn’t static. While a lot of the hunting industry shows us a view of deer where the populations are not only consistent, but way higher than average, the reality is that for most of us we’re going to deal with varying degrees of deer density throughout the course of our hunting careers. This means a lot of things beyond whether you might see one if you’re lucky, or see ten on average for every one of your sits. This is something I think we should all be aware of. I’m going to talk about it right now. I might get into trouble for saying this, but something occurred to me recently while I was fishing, mostly unsuccessfully, for some muskies. I honestly don’t know why I was thinking about it, but our culture, and all of humanity’s culture in various spots across the globe, is kind of tied to recent ancestry. You know, if you go back more than a couple hundred years, we really don’t know as much about our ancestors and their connections to the land and their rituals, their beliefs or whatever. Go back beyond that another couple hundred years or maybe a thousand, and whatever contributions those folks made to modern culture are mostly lost or have been folded up into more modern interpretations. Written history hasn’t been around all that long, and oral history has a tendency to die off when the folks who need to speak it die off. Art history as a species is one of lost information, amongst many other things. This is largely due to us dying off in large numbers and relatively short periods of time. Take China, from about nineteen fifty nine to nineteen sixty one, where the Great Chinese Famine caused somewhere between fifteen and thirty million people to perish in two years. That’s insane. The Irish famine back in the mid eighteen hundreds knocked their population down to about a quarter of what it was in really only about seven years, although emigration contributed to that population decline as well. When the Spaniards encountered the Aztecs, the indigenous populations in central Mexico declined by over eighty percent in just a century. Black death in Europe in the mid thirteen hundreds killed off anywhere from thirty to sixty percent of the population in many parts of Europe. I don’t want to minimize any of those events, but if you go back along our timeline deeper into the past, you run into some stuff that nearly took our whole species out. The Toba Supereruption, which happened about seventy four thousand years ago, is one of the more well known events. A volcano located in Sumatra, which is an island in western Indonesia, blew its top in such a spectacular and devastating fashion that it is believed to have dropped the human population down to a few thousand folks. Recent theories suggest it wasn’t quite that bad, but still bad enough to really really slow us down. Another event you might have heard about, called the Younger Dryas, consisted of a rapid climate shift in certain parts of the world that caused regional population declines. Essentially, the northern hemisphere got real cold about thirteen thousand years ago for several centuries, and genetic evidence today appoints to serious decreases in human populations in many regions, but not necessarily a global population collapse. Of course, it’s not just the old Homo sapiens who experience population booms and crashes. Our four legged antlered obsessions do as well. We are acutely aware of these on a regional basis, but mostly we focus on the decline, you know, partially because when a whole bunch of our bucks are suddenly no longer on the landscape, we take notice. Up Here in the North Country, the likeliest culprit is old man winter. You have to go pretty far north to experience consistent winterkill, but you don’t have to go that far north to experience a once in every decade or two type of winter that will knock your herd back back. In the mid nineties in the upper Midwest and the Northeast, we had one of those winners. From Minnesota to Maine. Mortality rates of white tail herds hit up to fifty percent, with young of the year fawnds making up the brunt of the death toll. It happens, but it’s not limited to the north. In February of twenty twenty one, a real winter storm hit Texas, and one thing that the animals of the lone Star state are not generally well prepared for is prolonged freezing temperatures, particularly in areas with limited forage. A few years before that, Hurricane Harvey hit Texas and caused severe deer losses in certain coastal areas. Look if you’re silently celebrating not having to worry about hurricane related deer population crashes, hold your horses, my little buckaroos. Many parts of the country have experienced EHD outbreaks, which can make finding a target buck about as difficult as finding a genuine social media post these days. In twenty twelve, a hell of an outbreak of EHD hit the Midwest, and many Great Plain states, causing localized deer populations to decline up to fifty percent in states like Illinois, Ohio, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa. I remember hunting the Dakota’s heavy during that timeframe, and I’ll tell you what. I found a lot of dead bucks around waterholes. It was, to put it, lightly disheartening. Sometimes the deer populations go the other way, though, and the density goes from ten deer per square mile up to around one hundred and fifty or two hundred. This is most often a suburban problem where traditional management practices can’t keep up with a very highly adaptable species like the white tail. Combining the lack of modern management options with a lack of predators, and the deer will breed and breed and breed and become so numerous you could probably kill them with a cinderblock if you could spend enough time in a tree. Deer populations change, and that should affect our entire approach to hunting them. I’ve been thinking about this a lot while fishing in northern Wisconsin, staying on the water until right around dark and then driving back to the shack at prime deer movement time. Is a good way to get a grasp on the local herd. And when you combine that with data that mymultares have been sent in my way, I’m more optimistic than I have been in a long long time for my hunts over there. When I first started hunting there in about two thousand and eight, the deer population was good enough to be somewhat selective on bucks. Then it got really bad four years, to the point where if you saw a deer two off stand you felt pretty good. Now, it seems after three truly mild winners in a row, the deer are kind of back. So are the turkeys too, which is a nice bonus to see. But what does this mean, Well, it should mean that my daughters, who have standards so low they are resting on the floor, should have lots of options for deer to shoot. They might get to learn what it’s like to be a little picky and why that can change the flavor of a hunting season and make it just a bit sweeter. But that’s an easy way to look at it, because who doesn’t want more deer on the landscape to hunt, especially in areas that often have pretty low deer densities. Well, no one really, except maybe someone who works for an insurance company and whose bonus is tied directly to not paying out too many claims on vehicle deer collisions. Otherwise, we are generally all four more deer in the woods. But that comes with a different hunting style. When the density is low, your biggest job is to find them first and then hunt them in a way that preserves the natural movement as long as possible. Hunting low density white tails sucks, but it does come with some advantages. Look, this is purely anecdotal and might not be true for you at all, but I’m pretty convinced that there isn’t a buck out there who is more likely to go to a dough decoy than a buck that lives in an area where he has to work real hard to find any real dos. In two seasons, I’ve watched three different bucks come directly to my Dave Smith doe in Wisconsin and all died shortly after. And nowhere else have I had that good of a success rate decoying. It stands to reason, right, I mean, think about you know, something like when the oil boom happened and they started fracking out in western North Dakota about fifteen years ago, and all those young roughnecks showed up in an area not known to be flush with women. I bet you good money that the average single woman of that region at that time had pretty much her pick of the litter, if you get my drift. If you think that kind of setup doesn’t exist in nature, you’re probably wrong. A low deer density situation offers another advantage, which is that if you do get on some deer, you don’t usually have to worry too much about a lot of other deer getting downwind of view and screwing up the whole thing. Look, that might be thin gruel to live on, But if you’ve ever hunted a high density situation, you know how often a deer you didn’t expect to be around suddenly stomped and blue and generally tanked your chances. It happens all the time. This might mean that you need to be extra diligent with your setups when the population is high, because the likelihood of non target deer getting a whiff of you, or spotting you in the tree or smelling your entrance route it’s just way higher. It’s an odds game. This also has ramifications for entering and exiting your stands. One of the things I love to do, you know, more than about anything, is summer scouting, particularly long range glassing. When I do that in southeast US for Minnesota, I’m always planning my escape as the evening progresses, because the odds of a deer getting close to my glassing setup grow with each passing minute. I often end up slipping out through a cornfield or inside a wood edge well before dark to not spoil the whole scene with my presence. On the other hand, in an area like northern Wisconsin, where if I can find a place to glass that is somewhat open, I rarely worry about the deer picking me off because there are so many fewer noses and eyeballs to worry about. A swing in density can mess with us in other ways too. Think about a high density situation where you run a camera on a field edge all summer long. It’s a great way to get some intel, but also a great way to get a false read on how to kill a big one. In the first week of the season. The more deer we get on camera, dough, small bucks, monster bucks, the more we get convinced that the spot the camera is on, is the one we will kill on. But how many of those deer are ones that we wouldn’t shoot? And what happened when they come out first and feed past our stand while we wait for that bachelor group to show up. Instead of drilling down on the best spot to kill the biggest dude in that bachelor group, which might mean getting off that field edge into the timber on a specific trail, we use an active camera to tell us that it’s a good enough spot. The flip side of that is hunting a lower density than we expect and not being blown away by our camera data. A deer or two a day on a camera might indicate a loss cause spot in southern Iowa, but it might be the best location for a stand in northern Michigan. The reason I think this stuff is important to think about is because it’s an opportunity to be proactive with our strategies, which is the opposite of how most people hunt. Think about it this way. If you live in a state with a real deer camp style tradition, you have a lot of folks who only go into their deer woods maybe one or two times each year, with one always being the first couple days of the season. I know a lot of hunters like this, and their first window into how many deer they have to hunt opens the very first time they go hunting. By then, it’s just too late to even react to anything, because the knowledge of how many deer are out there just trickles in by the hour and through conversations back at deer camp. By then, at least for a lot of folks in that crowd, it’s just too late to do anything about it. Trail camera usage can certainly nullify some of that, and does for some folks, but it’s just hard to truly understand where your deer population is at until you get out there with the deer in the places they live and experience the whole thing. I run into a form of this population shock when I travel to hunt. I don’t spend time with deer in Oklahoma or North Dakota or wherever until I drive out to actually hunt them, and then it’s a crash course in determining not only where they live and like to walk, but how many of them are really living there in North Dakota. This has bit me in the ass a few times when I’ve driven out with the expectation that the numbers will be high and the hunting will not be super tough. But the winners can mess with that, and so do you know a multitude of other factors. It stings to realize during the first couple of days on a trip that the deer aren’t there in the numbers I expected, But at this point I probably should just expect it. I won’t, but I should. This is an easy lesson to understand. If you travel enough to hunt white tails, you know, to experience a far flung destination through its various population cycles. It’s often a little harder for us to grasp at home, though, which might seem counterintuitive. But when we are home, we hunt largely based on memories, and our memories are really good at filtering out suffering and negative experiences over a long enough timeline. I’m not saying that we forget when we miss giant bucks or go multiple seasons without killing anything, but instead that our brains are pretty good at creating sizzle reels of the highlights while trying, you know, not too hard to focus on the low lights. So we go into this season expecting something, and it’s not like on opening day actually get the whole thing sauced out. It doesn’t work like that. We try the stands and the blinds that worked in the past, and when they don’t, we look for reasons to explain away the failures. Deer density is a moving target and highly localized, so it’s easy to believe that the whole thing doesn’t move much. But it certainly might on your farm or your lease or wherever you hunt. I’ve seen that with wolves on some of my North Country hunts, and boy does that make things feel real tough in a hurry. Now, as I said, it goes the other way too, and you can see this in the poverty mindset of some hunters, yours truly included here. If you’ve hunted long enough in enough places, you’ve probably been through the lean years and the good years. And when you are conditioned to those lean years, it can be hard to adjust your standards up when the times of plenty finally show. I have a good buddy like that who hunts northern Wisconsin, and he’d probably you know about, have to be trampled by deer on his waist to the stand to even believe that it was anything other than a near hopeless day. Ever, to go hunt for any buck let alone, one that might be outpasses ears. Honestly, this is sort of a litmus test for not only how hard you’ll have to work to kill a buck that would make you happy, but how likely that kind of buck is to even be in the woods with you at any given moment. This is sort of like a whole herd type of inventory versus just trying to figure out the year’s buck crops so that you can start filling out your hit list. But it’s also a way to get better at deer hunting, because the more you understand about herd dynamics and population fluctuations, the more prepared you are for the inevitable out there, which is change. The thing that kills most hunters chances of success on any given season is that any given season is not going to be a carbon copy of any other given season, as much as we want it to be, it’s just not the nature of nature. It’s not the nature of white tails. You might have five years of great populations, you know, good buck to dough ratios and plenty of mature deer to target, and then some dry summer wear a stupid little midge that carries a stupid disease that kills off bucks in large numbers in the late summer and early fall just does its thing. And now your one forty or bust attitude might as well be a two point fifty in bust attitude because both are about as likely to happen, and that might echo through the herd for three or four years or more, which is a long time to hunt the way you used to. Instead, it’s better to just try to be more in tune with what you’re dealing with on a year to year basis and understand that whether you’re in a feast or famine year, you have plenty of options for staying in the game. And the more you try, no matter how EASi or hopeless it seems, the better you’ll become as a deer hunter. For just that effort alone, at the very least, you’ll separate yourself from the pack sum which is a huge advantage for us modern hunters. So think about that. I think about coming back next week for some more white tail wisdom. That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation podcast. Thank you so much for all of your support. We truly appreciate it here at meat Eater. 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