00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.
00:00:20
Speaker 2: Hey everyone, welcome to the Wire 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 to approach the rut with a plan and then to see that plan through. Well, if you’ve been bitching about hot weather or rainy, foggy, stupid weather, or no daytime movement or whatever, you know, when it comes to the deer, you can stop now. At least much of the country is writ smack dab in the best damn time of the year to be a white tail hunter, and that means a lot of folks are going to have amazing hunts this week, but.
00:00:52
Speaker 3: A lot of folks won’t.
00:00:53
Speaker 2: You don’t want to be in that ladder category, and to help you avoid it, I’m going to talk about developing a rut hunting plan and actually it through. So buckle up, because it’s time to get serious about the best time of the year to be a deer hunter. Here in Minnesota, we have a thing called m EA, which stands for Minnesota Educator Academy, and every year in October they hold a conference with teachers, and since they are all tied up all day, the kids get a nice little.
00:01:21
Speaker 3: Break of a couple days off of school.
00:01:23
Speaker 2: I figured that was the perfect opportunity to take one of my daughters back to that stupid wasteland with no deer that is northern Wisconsin and try to get her to arrow anything. I didn’t have a great plan, but I had a sort of plan, given that the wind was going to be out of the south for two days and then out of the north for our remaining two days. Well, we saw grouse, squirrels, a hell of a lot of songbirds, and we never saw a single deer, not in seven sits, which, if you think about it, sucks a whole lot. I realized about halfway through that I was bumping up against a couple of things. The first was that my daughter is certainly capable of hunting long hours and being patient, but she can’t hunt out of a tree stand with a crossbow. At least a stand that isn’t a ladder stand, and I’m just not much of a ladder stand guy, although I guess I probably should be now that my daughters could hunt them. That was mistake number one. Anyway, I should have put up some ladder stands. Second, because the crossbow she uses is heavy, like they generally are, she needs a solid rest, which comes in the form of a heavy bog pot. That’s a limiting factor for many reasons, but it is what it is until they are strong enough and confident enough to shoot a vertical bow.
00:02:30
Speaker 3: Anyway.
00:02:31
Speaker 2: Now, we hunted private land, and we hunted public We hunted alfalfa, we hunted acorns, we hunted the limited amount of scrapes we found, We hunted pinch points. And what we saw was that whatever decision I made was clearly the wrong one. It was frustrating, but it also reminded me of how my dad and I used to hunt. Now, instead of trying to input as many variables as possible into the old brain algorithm and then make a decision based on that plus fresh sign, I said, well, the wind is from the north, so I have these four options. I thought her extremely low standards in the reality that we’d spend probably twenty eight hours or so in those seven sits out actually hunting that it would just be a matter of time, but it wasn’t, and the highlight of the whole trip was taking the pop out for some midday ducks and then woodcock and grouse. A few wood ducks can make up for some shitty deer hunting, but didn’t quite smooth the whole thing. Over the last night of the trip, my daughter and I sat watching a beautiful small alfalfa field on a piece of private and listened to wolves howl in the distance, which was a good reminder that it might not just be my poor decision making that had the deer on edge or totally gone. I recently heard someone on a podcast say something like, when it comes to business, hope is not a strategy, and I was running off of hope out there. That last part of that statement stuck with me, and it rattled around my smooth brain on the drive home from our ill fated hunt, because it just kind of perfectly summed up a lot of life and definitely summed up deer hunting at that time and right now during the rut. This is the thing, though, there’s like no better time during the season to have that warm and fuzzy feeling that this is just going to be our sit or this is just going to be our week, because after all, when all the bucks in the neighborhood are on the move, the odds of one of them walking by at twenty yards will never be higher than right now. That’s the good news. But the bad news is that the rut doesn’t erase a lot of the things that we think it does. Let me give you an example here. During late September, my daughters and I sat over in Wisconsin and saw a big old dough multiple times one day. She was a frequent flyer on my cameras in that spot, and she had no fawns, so I figured her days were definitely numbered, and boy did she flirt with death.
00:04:43
Speaker 3: But she beat us, and.
00:04:44
Speaker 2: Eventually she got close enough to our blind where she could be down wind and figure it out.
00:04:49
Speaker 3: Now.
00:04:49
Speaker 2: When I heard her spook, I wondered how long it would take for her to get back to normal. Well, as of the last week of October, I never had another daylight pick of her, but I had plenty of nighttime picks. We never saw her again either, and we hunted specifically for that deer a few times. That dough an old, no bullshit kind of dough. She’s still around, but I can promise you the odds of her running by that blind in daylight at some point or way less than they would have been if we didn’t spook her there. She knows where we like to hide, and she’s not the kind of deer to take those chances. Does that sound like I’m putting too much mental horsepower in between her ears? Maybe, but I don’t think so. Does that mean a buck won’t go by that blind? Absolutely not. But I also think that dough in particular, even if she was getting chased like crazy, would be more likely to head off somewhere else where she feels a little safer. I think it’s often that simple, and that stuff doesn’t work in our favor. Now I can somewhat confidently say that because I can keep tabs on individual deer in that place where there just aren’t very many deer. But you might think, well, I always have lots of does and fawns around my old favorite stand site or my favorite box blind, and that’s great off. And do those dos go by and range? Are they onto you at all. What if, for some reason, you go out for a couple of days of your rut cation and they don’t come by, at least they don’t drag a buck by you. I remember Randy Nuberg telling me one time about once in a lifetime tags or at least super premium, you know, tags that you might never draw, and if you do, you got real lucky.
00:06:21
Speaker 3: He said.
00:06:22
Speaker 2: People draw them and they think the hunt is going to be easy, but you still have to put in the effort commensurate to the tag and the animal. This is where people get the rut wrong. A lot of times, we like it for a lot of reasons, but the main one we don’t talk about is that the rut is an excuse to be kind of lazy. And I’m just going to say this and take the heat if I have to. Lazy saves more bucks than anything else. My dad just recently texted me that he put up a blind on a farm in southeastern Minnesota for deer, where you know there’s a lot of deer in general. But he went in there and sat a couple of times, and that blind wasn’t giving him good vibes. He knew he needed to move it, and he was almost willing to do that, but then he said he would just open up a different window on the blind where there are more trails on that side than the spot he’d originally faced that. Now I had many thoughts there, none of which I shared with him because he won’t follow my advice anyway, But I’ll share them with you. That decision was based purely on not wanting to do the work to find new deer and set up something different. Worse yet, I’m sure he believes his reasoning.
00:07:25
Speaker 3: Now.
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Speaker 2: I don’t want to pick on Papa too hard, because we all do shit like that. It’s in our nature to figure out ways to shortcut every process and to try to put in as little effort as possible for the highest reward. If the deer have taught me anything, it’s that if you don’t have an unbelievable spot to hunt, you aren’t going to get away with little effort. They’re too good at not getting killed for that kind of approach. So I guess this leads me to the point where I have to tell you how to make a plan. I’m going to tell you what I do, and then tell you why that’s wrong, and then go in circles for a while until I wrap this thing up. The weather forecast is your friend, first and foremost. Wind direction is what I care about the most because it will tell me an awful lot about what I can and can’t do on any given day. So if I have, let’s say five days to hunt the rut, I want to pull up the forecast for each day and make no to the predicted wind direction. Now, I know that this isn’t an exact science, but it’s a hell of a lot more reliable than it used to be. So start there where you can reasonably expect whatever wind directions are predicted. Then you have to use that infotocross reference it with the best weather conditions you have, because that’s when you want to hunt your best stuff. So let’s say you have one pinch point you scout of the spring and you believe with your heart that it’s going to be on fire during the rut. Now you need a west or a north wind for it, and that isn’t going to come until day three of your five day hunt. Do you talk yourself into sitting there because you think it’s your best spot, or do you stay out and hunt backups to until the weather gets right, especially if the weather is going to get cold and maybe a little rainy and oh so special for the rut. Here’s what probably half of the hunters will do. They’ll say, well, it’s a southwest wind, but it won’t be blowing very hard, and I think I can get away with it, so they’ll hunt that pinch anyway. This is especially true if they have a camera there, which they will, and that camera will show them some daylight movement with big ones. That siren song is loud, it’s beautiful, and it’ll talk you into crashing your ship right into the rocks. My friends, I feel like at least half of the time I haunt, especially during the rut, I find myself sitting somewhere that’s good enough, but not where I really want to beat. But if you can’t cheat the wind in any meaningful way when you’re bowhunting, you just have to live by this. You need backups that you believe in. Let’s say you decide I’m not going to that sweet pinch point till the wind and the weather break my way. But you also don’t want to sandbag the first couple days of your rut hunt. Where can you put in some time and not mess up the deer that should be going through that pinch. That’s what you need to answer. So again, take into account to wind in the conditions. Maybe it’s going to be ten or fifteen degrees warmer than it should be during the rut. So on that first day you know you’re going to have the wind out of the south. Probably do you have water to hunt or a funnel that allows you to sit over it where maybe they might pass through on their way to the drinking fountain somewhere. What if you think your water spot is just a nursery of little bucks and you don’t want to waste your time there. Again, probably because what your cameras show. I look at this different and I try to ignore my trail camera data when it comes to the rut. If I am where I believe the general deer population might want to go, I’m not without confidence, even if I haven’t had tons of pictures of one to fifties in that spot. Plus, it’s better than blowing out your best stuff by a long shot. Now, maybe that’s not it, and maybe the south wind will allow for a hanging hunt in an area that usually has a whole bunch of bucks sign anything is better than settling for good enough. And the more you lay out your plan and your brain before you start hunting, the more you can see it through until at least the deer show you something different. This is where things get squirrely. The best plans just generally meet our deer realities, and if we force them too hard, when the bucks show us something else, we lose again. You want that rough plan in place, that day by day plan, so you can follow through something with confidence. But if at any point the deer really show you something but where they want to be, you know, somewhere else, then you’ve got to factor that in. But here’s where it gets a little worse. The way deer usually show us that is through trail cameras. Look, that’s good intel and might talk you into calling an audible, But in person rut observations are much more valuable. If you see a buck doing something anything, pay attention. I don’t care if it’s a spiker at two hundred injury. If you see two bucks do something, you have an answer to an important question. Where should I be sitting right now? Uh?
00:11:58
Speaker 3: Right there?
00:12:00
Speaker 2: So develop a good plan and then toss it into the garbage. The minute the deer show you anything outside of that plan, right, kind of, without the original plan in place, you’re going to probably settle without taking into account what the deer actually show you. You won’t be taking full advantage of the rut. Instead, you’ll be far more likely to sit in a place you want to hunt and try to call or decoy one in. Look, this is supposed to be fun if that’s how you want to play it, so go ahead.
00:12:30
Speaker 3: That’s okay.
00:12:30
Speaker 2: But if you generally don’t kill big ones in November and you want to and that’s your go to strategy, maybe hope alone isn’t going to cut it. But you’re not done with your plan yet. I didn’t know this until I actually did it. But do you know why alcoholics and addicts often tell their friends and family that they are quitting for good. It’s called a social contract, and it’s weirdly helpful because we don’t want to look like failures, so we try to see our promises through. We do this with ourselves as well in the deer world. Where I found this to be the most helpful is that I don’t just decide on where I’m most likely to sit on any given day of the rut, but I also make a pact with myself to sit either until a certain time and then move or just sit all day. It’s not like I couldn’t break that pack you know in my head and go in for some pancakes at ten in the morning, but for some reason I usually don’t anymore. It’s kind of like when you work out a lot, you say tonight, I’m gonna go run the seven miles instead of just lacing up your old on clouds and heading out for a run without any distance or route in mind. Because the minute you do that, you give yourself an out, because your brain will decide that three miles is good enough. When it comes to killing a buck during the rut, you can’t do better than putting in as much time as possible. In high confidence locations, it’s the way to kill deer. And if you don’t hold yourself accountable to sit until noon or to go dark to dark, the second guessing can talk you into heading out for a midday nap. Not only does that take you out of the game because you can’t shoot them. When you’re dreaming, you know that Margot Robbie is your new coworker, or I guess in Mark’s case, a new butterfly species was just discovered in southern Michigan. But also it puts more disturbance in the woods just by your comings and going. This is also the way that most of your competition’s going to hunt. And if you tend to hunt pressure ground and you do not sit during the midday hours during the rut, you’re just missing out. I promise you that pressure deer are tuned into us in major ways, and that timeframe when most hunters can’t hack it because they don’t believe, you know, in any real midday deer movement and they don’t have a plan, is some of the most important time you can spend in the woods. But it takes a strategy, takes a plan. It takes a willingness to look at every opportunity you have to be out there and decide how to play it against the predicted wind and weather and all of the variables that you might bump into. As the bucks get a little silly with lust and they start to cover some serious ground, you know, pair that with a willingness to go mobile or accept that what you thought was going to happen didn’t and that you’re going to have to let the deer decide what to do if their movements are just persuasive enough. And now you have the framework for a successful rut hunt. The last piece of that puzzle is just putting in the time, which, when you do and have a few years show you that it was the right call, gets a hell of a lot easier to do over time. So remember this when it comes to rut hunting. Hope is not a strategy. It’s just a nice little boost that will help you stick out a well thought out plant. So get out there and get your buck and come back next week because I’m going to talk about certain situations during the rut where I will dig into my bag of get rich quick products and really try to make something happen.
00:15:35
Speaker 3: That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson.
00:15:38
Speaker 2: This has been the Wirre to Hunt Foundation’s episode, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for listening for all your support. I know you’re spending a lot of time in tree stands right now, but you might also be driving somewhere to go do an over the road trip. You might kill a buck and want to know I don’t know how to do a ural amount with it, or maybe cook it up.
00:15:57
Speaker 3: So it’s super tasty.
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Speaker 2: Whatever, you can probably find the answers to a lot of your questions, and I know you can find a hell of a lot of entertainment at the medeater dot com, where we drop new content every single day.
00:16:08
Speaker 3: Go check it out.
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