00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired2Hunt 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.
00:00:21
Speaker 3: Welcome to the Wired2Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. I’m your host, Tony Peterson. And today’s episode is all about early season deer sign and how you can use it to fill your September buck tags. For a heck of a lot of us, deer season is finally here. For the rest, it’s coming very, very soon. What has happened and what will happen is that a lot of folks will get out there. They’ll hunt some destination food sources. and then either celebrate their success or start to throttle back until October cold fronts and the first whispers of the rut get them off the couch and back into the woods.
00:00:57
Speaker 2: In my not-so-humble opinion, that’s kind of a bad way to look at it.
00:01:01
Speaker 3: I think a better way is to try to understand what the bucks do around the opener and then use sign to clue yourself into exactly where to kill them, which is what I’m going to talk about right now. Back in October of 1980, a former security guard from Honolulu with no prior criminal convictions set out to model his life after a fictional character in the novel Catcher in the Rye. That fella who was looking to live his life like Holden Caulfield, the book’s protagonist who was obsessed with phonies and hypocrisy, was named Mark David Chapman. If that rings a vaguely familiar bell in some of your brains… It’s probably because Chapman had heard John Lennon of the Beatles say that the band was more popular than Jesus. Lennon also wrote the song Imagine, where he sings a line that goes, imagine no possessions, in a nod to how materialism shouldn’t really matter and it’s not good for us as a society. Chapman thought that line, you know, with Lennon’s actual lavish lifestyle and many, many luxury possessions, made him a phony. So he went out and bought a. 38 revolver, and hatched a plan to wait for Lennon. Not only when he actually made that happen did the two exchange pleasantries on the sidewalk, but Chapman is quoted as saying, he was very kind to me. Ironically, very kind and patient with me. But that kindness wasn’t enough, though. And later that night when Lennon returned, Chapman fired five hollow point bullets into his back. Lennon’s murder obviously altered the course of rock and roll and, you know, kind of music in general.
00:02:42
Speaker 2: And possibly the world to some extent. It was a big deal.
00:02:46
Speaker 3: This left Lennon’s wife, Yoko Ono, who is known for absolutely horrendous singing and, well, being partially responsible for breaking up the Beatles.
00:02:55
Speaker 1: A widow.
00:02:56
Speaker 3: But before her, Lennon was married to a woman named Cynthia. They had a turbulent relationship. She eventually got pregnant, and it being about 60 years ago, meant they felt like they needed to get married.
00:03:10
Speaker 2: Now, that child was.
00:03:11
Speaker 3: Born, and they named it John Charles Julian Lennon. But he was always called Julian after John’s late mother. Now, when Cynthia and John called it quits on their marriage, Beatles frontman Paul McCartney would drive out to visit Cynthia and Julian to try to comfort them during the divorce and the disillusion of their family. On one of those drives, the line, Hey Jules, don’t make it bad, take a sad song and make it better, rattled through his brain. That line, and the melody he put to it, ended up being the basis for the hit song, Hey Jude. Just 14 words or so at the start, ended up becoming one of their biggest hits, and is a song that is dang near universally loved still to this day. That songwriting process reminds me of something else that starts very minimal, and then grows to become more complex and nuanced, and which probably won’t seem like it makes much sense until I explain it, which is Dearsign. specifically early deer sign, like the rubs and scrapes you might find in the woods right now. You see, over time the woods will be full of deer sign, and the whole picture of buck usage gets a lot muddier pretty quick, especially in areas with high deer densities. Now there’s quite a bit of whitetail research out there that really contextualizes this reality. One study conducted in northern Georgia, where the deer density was estimated to be about 37 deer per square mile, revealed nearly 600 rubs per square mile, with rubbing activity occurring pretty consistently throughout the fall. Now, another study up in Pennsylvania, which was conducted in a state forest, showed far fewer rubs at only about 53 per square mile. So there’s definitely a range, and it’s highly dependent not only on the amount of deer out there in any given area, but the amount of mature bucks that are present. Another study I found showed that mature bucks make about 50% more rubs than yearlings, which means that the.
00:05:11
Speaker 2: More older deer you have, the more rubs you have to work with.
00:05:15
Speaker 3: Now, in the context of songwriting, you might have a single line of a melody, or maybe a guitar riff, you know, and eventually the verses and the chorus and the bridge get fleshed out. And somewhere along the way, the drummer sits down and starts a mental count, and then the bass line shows up, and a whole bunch of other elements form the tapestry for a finished song. Right now with Deersign, we have just that one line, a little melody. And you know what it’s saying? It says the bucks you want to shoot are right here, right now. In a month, the sign will say that the bucks are here and here and here and there and all over. But right now where you find those rubs, you’ll find those bucks. They aren’t roaming all over the countryside yet in preparation for the rut. They are just slipping from summer patterns to fall patterns. but they are mostly predictable and mostly on a fairly set schedule. Because of that, you and I as hunters have a huge advantage over them because even though the sign is pretty sparse right now, what sign is out there is very valuable. I’ve been reminded of this several times in the last 15 days or so. I spent a lot of time over in Wisconsin walking around and looking at 1 billion acorns on the ground and a lot of fresh deer tracks. But one swampy crossing on public land that I checked out where I found an ancient apple tree led me to a low bench on a bluff. You know, it’s the kind of bench that is sort of meadowy, but also features plenty of trees. It’s just the kind of place where bucks love to bed and stage.
00:06:48
Speaker 2: But above that bench.
00:06:49
Speaker 3: I found a smaller, more subtle bench that was not only loaded with acorns, but also loaded with deer poop and several rubs. Every one of those rubs faced uphill toward the ridgetop that leads to a private hayfield. Very classic food to bed stuff. But the interesting thing is that those bucks that made those rubs showed me exactly where they are staging now. And because of that, and because I know very likely where their destination food source is and can make an educated guess on their bedding area, I can predict where they should be most killable. All of that is made possible by finding rubs right now. Of course, it’s not that easy because as soon as I walked out that ridge, I found a mulch remounted to a tree facing down the best trail leading to that private buffet. And when I walked it out to try to find a good access route, I also stumbled across a fresh trail marked with flagging tape. Meaning, I would guess, that if I were to go in there early in the season, I’d very likely have company. But I’m also guessing that whoever has that setup ready to go is going to hunt those deer very close to that fence line and that private food source, which is exactly why the bucks are staging where they are. They know where we like to try to kill them, and they structure their lives around that. That hunter might kill one.
00:08:11
Speaker 2: I hope he does.
00:08:12
Speaker 3: But I also think that it’s very likely he’s off by a couple hundred yards on that setup. I guess I’ll probably never know. But I do know that I drove from Wisconsin to southeastern Minnesota with an old-town kayak in the back of my pickup, and I met up with a videographer buddy of mine to paddle into some landlocked public land that holds a special place in my heart for a.
00:08:32
Speaker 2: Lot of reasons.
00:08:43
Speaker 3: We paddled up that river in the pouring rain, through a valley bookended by sheer bluffs, and looked into the water for smallies and into the sky for eagles.
00:08:52
Speaker 2: It’s just beautiful.
00:08:53
Speaker 3: And I’ve hunted a lot of beautiful places, but that one is way up there. And I’m hoping the eventual film I’ll make out of that hunt will show it just as I see it. And we filmed a clueless beaver for a while on the bank and then beached our kayaks, waded through a river bottom jungle, and then hiked up a large ridge that was crisscrossed with deer trails at the bottom. At one point, the ridge tightened up quite a bit, largely due to a big old limestone outcropping. which means that the bottom of the ridge splays out and allows for travel pretty much everywhere, just as the top of the ridge does, but the middle part doesn’t. It’s kind of like an hourglass shape. It necks down tight, and all trails converge into one from the top and the bottom, which, if you know anything about pinch points and buck travel, is a very nice thing to find. Now, as I stood at the top of that pinch point looking for a tree to set up in and wondering just how sketchy it would be to climb up there In the dark, on the riverside of the bluff, which is very steep, I spotted.
00:09:54
Speaker 2: A fresh rub.
00:09:55
Speaker 3: It was clearly made by a buck that had followed the main trail and then peeled off to go bed. If I were planning to hunt there opening weekend, that one rub would have probably convinced me of finding a way to set up there very early in the morning to wait for that buck to drop off those private fields on top and make his way toward the river bottom to sleep away the day. Since I’m not going back there until October… It was just an encouraging find. Now, we hiked every ridge and valley on that property and specifically catered our route to check out the farthest ridge from the private fields. It’s the kind of spot you look at on onX and think, bucks have to use that. The way it flattens out at the top and allows for different routes to get into the bedding cover below or through the nearest valley to get toward the private ag was just money. And when we got on the top of it, we walked to the very point of that ridge before it drops off and I spotted a rub. then another, and pretty soon we could stand in one spot and spin it a circle and count several rubs and see a very fresh scrape. One of the trees was actually rubbed so hard that it was broken and laying on the ground, and it wasn’t a super tiny tree either. It was clear that several bucks were using that ridgetop, and they were spending a lot of time there. In fact, we jumped three deer around there, and all three of them were bucks. Two of them were scrappers, but one was really nice, and he was bedded just below that ridge top. That concentration of sign, when I found it on September 8th, was plain as day. The bucks are there now, and they are spending a lot of time there. What’s better is that those rubs showed me the direction of travel of those bucks and made a pretty clear case that that they were bedding there or close by and just killing time in that spot in the evenings before they walk the valley out to get to that egg. This is the thing that seems to be missing from a lot of hunters in their strategy for getting on a big deer when it comes to sign. We like it when sign shows up around our favorite spots as the season progresses.
00:11:59
Speaker 2: But what does that mean?
00:12:01
Speaker 3: Well, in some ways it means that the bucks are laying down a lot of sign and some of that happens to be around our stands. To me, that’s more of a measure of just increased buck activity in general, but it’s not being used to get on buck movement right now, if that makes any sense. Another way we use sign is by going in, finding some rubs or a big old community scrape, and hunting over either. And this can work, but it doesn’t take into account not only why the sign is there, but what that sign means to current buck movement.
00:12:33
Speaker 2: Now, don’t get me wrong.
00:12:34
Speaker 3: I’d rather always hunt around buck sign than not, but it’s just not so simple. There are times of the season, especially when you get closer to the pre-rut and the rut, where you can almost always find yourself hunting around fresh sign because it’s everywhere. This is true in high deer density areas and in areas where there isn’t a whole lot of meaningful cover. I’ve seen this in the plain states a lot, where every patch of timber or piece of brush is ringed by scrapes or rubs, but because every patch is… None of them are like obviously special. It would kind of be like if you just ate awesome pizza and your favorite apple pie every day. At some point, the treat aspect is just meaningless because you’ve done it too much. Maybe that’s a bad example. But the main point here is that there is a window in the early season where sign really matters a lot because it’s rare. And because it’s rare, where it shows up matters a lot. Now, most people will never engage in this type of hunting I’m talking about, though. because it involves scouting right before you plan to hunt or during the first week or two of the season. When we generally try to be super cautious about our presence, the risk-reward ratio feels out of whack for a lot of us. And that’s partially because we’ve been conditioned to play things a little too safely with the deer by, you know, listening to people who have the luxury of waiting out perfect conditions and perfect seasonal timing. A better bet is to scout now for fresh sign and then hunt it as soon as you possibly can. Now maybe you need to wait for a rainstorm to go poking around to minimize your impact on the deer. It’s a good idea and something I do intentionally a lot in the early season. Or maybe your season is already open and you can grab your saddle and some sticks and go sneak around until you find a couple fresh rubs. The key is to try to make an educated guess on where the bucks are likely to feed and then backtrack those travel routes. Like I said earlier, right now really the name of the game is bed to food and.
00:14:27
Speaker 2: Food to bed.
00:14:28
Speaker 3: Even in areas where browse largely dominates, because there will be highly preferred browsing areas, often low areas with lush, moisture-filled vegetation this time of year. Now, I know this won’t help everyone, but if you do hunt an area that’s pretty dry, and you can get around some dark, green vegetation, you’re usually on to something.
00:14:48
Speaker 2: Either way, if you can make.
00:14:49
Speaker 3: An educated guess on where your summer-turned-early-fall bucks are likely to feed overnight, you can probably figure out how they get there.
00:14:57
Speaker 2: And roughly where they might bed.
00:14:59
Speaker 3: This travel will often be somewhat condensed because the woods are thick and cover is everywhere. But somewhere on those routes, if you guess right, the bucks will tell you far more precisely where they are traveling. They’ll show you rubs leading to the food or away from the food, which can tell you whether you need to get in super early in the pre-dawn darkness or pretty dang early in the afternoon for an evening sit. This is not a situation where you want to find a few rubs and then drop a camera on them, because that will have you in reactive mode instead of a proactive mode. The rubs that are out there right now, and the scrapes if you can find them, show you where the bucks are right now, and that means you know where they are killable. I don’t mean to make this sound easy, because it generally isn’t, but I can say that I have quite a few September bucks mounted in my basement, and a heck of a lot of them are there, because of me finding a few rubs right before the season opened or during the first week or two. Now it’s also important to note that I don’t care at all right now about the size of the rubs. A big one’s great, because that usually means you’re not dealing with a forky, but small rubs are important too. I’ve watched a couple of really big deer make really small rubs in my life, and I have found that they just don’t seem to make too many giant rubs early. A lot of the rubs I find now are on saplings that might be, I don’t know, like an inch in diameter. But that doesn’t tell me how big the bucks are that made them. What I do know is that if I find and hunt rubs right now, regardless of the size of the rubs, I find I’m often in the running to shoot a mature buck. I think big bucks rub early and more often than little ones. And some of the research seems to back that up. Either way, what I do know now is that you can play the only hunt field edge evening game Or you can go burn some boot leather and find some fresh buck sign and then figure out if they should be hunted in the morning or the evening or both. And if you do that, you’ll be doing something most hunters won’t. And that is often the biggest difference between killing mature bucks and just watching squirrels. It’s also a hell of a lot of fun to play that chess game with them right now. So give it a shot and come back next week because I’m going to drop another episode about how I look at my setups as being killer setups. versus just setups that maybe won’t produce close shots. That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for all your support. All of us here at MeatEater, it means the world to us to have such a great audience.
00:17:37
Speaker 2: So thank you for that.
00:17:39
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00:17:56
Speaker 2: On how to kill a buck, how to catch a trout.
00:17:58
Speaker 3: Conservation news, a whole slate of podcasts.
00:18:02
Speaker 2: It’s all there.
00:18:04
Speaker 3: More than enough content to keep you busy for a long, long, long time. Go check it out and thank you once again for your support.
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