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.
00:00:24
Speaker 3: I’m your host, Tony Peterson.
00:00:25
Speaker 2: In today’s episode is all about how I’m taking a fresh look at my late season hunt and why you might want to as well.
00:00:34
Speaker 3: Look, I know that a lot of people.
00:00:36
Speaker 2: Who listen to this show are about ready to hang up their deer gear and think about something else. As much as the late season gets a lot of love from some folks, it’s mostly just a slog for a lot of us. The weather usually kind of sucks. The hunting is as difficult as it will be all season, and once the rut has come and gone, it’s just a little tougher to keep the fire lit and burning. But there’s still some season love, and that means it’s at least worth a shit filling a tag before it’s too late.
00:01:02
Speaker 3: That’s what I’m going to talk about. Right now.
00:01:09
Speaker 2: There is a concept called learned helplessness in psychology that can be applied pretty well to hunting deer in many different situations, but really well when it comes to late season hunting. You see, you’ve been fed mostly horseshit about the late season from folks who have much much better hunting than you. Back in my magazine editing and writing days, we ran a lot of late season stories from folks who would be so bold as to make the claim that the late season is the best time to kill a big buck. And look, we all know why. Those old mature deer have run themselves right into a state of disrepair and they need calories to get back on track before real winter sets in. So they have no choice but to hit the food sources well before dark, and that’s when you can kill them, easy peasy. But anyone who has hunted the late season knows that the mature bucks aren’t always willing to go on, you know, full suicidal mode with their movements just because they’re pretty hungry after the rut. It doesn’t work that way. A hungry deer is still a deer that doesn’t want to die from an arrow or a bullet, and they will generally prioritize that over everything else. Maybe the good part about getting bad deer hunting advice is that it can talk us into huntingmore, and that’s not so bad. But if you do hunt December and January deer a lot, you’re likely to get your butt kicked. Mostly that can lead to the earlier mentioned learned helplessness. This tends to solidify in our dumb brains after we repeatedly face tough situations that feel kind of like no matter what we do, we can’t change the outcome for the better. Does that mean the situations are beyond hope and we truly can’t do.
00:02:42
Speaker 3: Anything to affect our trajectory inside of them.
00:02:44
Speaker 2: Nope, No, it just means that we stop believing we can do just that, so we stop trying. We might still do that thing, but we will do it with minimal effort, and then when the results show up as predicted, we get that warm and fuzzy feeling of absolutely being right. It’s a nice blanket to wrap ourselves in, and it’s a great way to not achieve what are likely to be achievable goals. For most of my deer hunting life, I did this in the late season, and you know what, it worked, which is not as cool as it sounds, because the times that I did put in some real effort in the last few weeks of the season are the times where I usually ended up with some close encounters or some actual, honest to God filled tags. Now keep in mind those tags were not filled one hundred and seventy inch deer, but I was never hunting them to begin with. They were does in small box and sometimes ok bucks and that was really good considering what I expected. But mostly I had a little pity party about the late season, went out, froze my ass off and didn’t shoot anything. But you know what, I knew that I was phoning it in. Instead of hanging a set over a fresh trail, I’d sit on the ground and mostly get busted, just because sitting on the ground was easier. Or instead of hanging a fresh stand, I’d go sit some ladder, standard box, blind or whatever that had been up all season, and the deer were very wise to but it was easier than going in and doing what I should have done in the last couple years with my daughters having you know, buck tags in Minnesota and Wisconsin and enough dough tags to keep us in the woods pretty much anytime we wanted to go. I’ve started to pay way more attention to the late season, partially because they have big Christmas breaks where they could usually hunt with me without conflicts.
00:04:15
Speaker 3: Of sports and other activities.
00:04:17
Speaker 2: So last year we did just that in Minnesota, and I managed to put my daughter on one of the biggest late season bucks I’ve ever seen, and it was a total heartbreaker to watch her shoulder shooting. It was a bit of a relief to bump into him later in the season and see that, you know, while you had a pronounced limp, he at least had a shot of surviving. He looked like he was doing pretty well that year, probably would have gone right around one hundred and thirty inches, which to us at the time and on that property, was like seeing a two hundred inchro walk in in some places. This year, both my daughters and I are tagged out in Minnesota hunt bucks. We are almost all tagged out in Wisconsin on bucks too, but one of my daughters is sitting on an archery buck tag. Now keep in mind, we don’t need a buck tag to go hunt in December. It just helps We will definitely do some dough only sits, but for now we’re working on that last stubborn buck tag. So I’m doing things differently. I know that the December year where we hunt are not likely to should their hands too much with extra movement. I also know that my December is bonkers busy, and I can’t really get out and scout as much as I’d like, so I’m leaning pretty heavy on trail cameras to start with. This is the first year in a long time I went all in on trail cameras, mostly because of how my hunt schedules shook out. I just had two really good opportunities this year to try to figure things out with cameras, and to be honest, it’s the first time that trail cameras for sure help me kill a big buck, and maybe even can be attributed pretty well to killing two big ones. Now, we’re not looking for big bucks over there in or central Wisconsin. We’re looking for bucks, any bucks, and I’m hoping to dial in a few, even if they are spikes, so that when we go over there to hunt, we have an outside chance of running into one. How I’m doing that is by running cameras in the cover. Now, I know this isn’t available for everyone, and it’s not the only thing I’m going to do, but this year I ran a handful of cameras in the swamps over there, you know swamps I’ve hunted quite a bit, and the interesting thing about it was how often cruising bucks walked by all of the cameras I had in one specific swamp, while also noting that a lot of the does didn’t do that. And it was also interesting how after the rut and the main gun season was over, nearly all of the deer I got on camera walked by some of the swamp cameras, but almost none of those deer seemed to walk out in front of my cameras that are anywhere near fields or openings. The movement just appeared to tighten way up, and I doubt it’ll loosen up much in the next month or so. So the goal is to draw a bead on a few bucks in the thick stuff, try to make some connections on you know, just when they should move, and then thread the needle while hunting with a fourteen year old girl in late season, cold ass conditions. It won’t be easy, but the camera data will help a lot with the confidence aspect, which is important when you’ve gone pretty deep on the learned helplessness side of these things. The thing about this is that I’m going to have to make sure I stay on top of the trail camera data for a few weeks before we go. This is going to involve a couple long drives over to Wolf Country to change batteries and move cameras around. That already seems like a little bit more effort than it’ll probably be worth. But I also really want to get my daughter out because she’s dying to go and the clock is ticking. I also selfishly just want to see if we can get it done. In the past, I’ve had a defeated attitude about this late season stuff, and it’s one of those deep rooted beliefs about myself that isn’t so easy to ferret out and send on its way. I don’t want my daughters to learn this, because it’s a lie, and they’ve already had some really good late season success, including my daughter who hit that big buck last year and lost it. Toward the end of the season, she kept hunting and she managed to shoot a big old loan dough in late December, which is some kind of trophy for sure, even if it doesn’t have antlers. So that’s the first step towards trying to not really screw up the last few weeks of this season. Now, keep in mind, I have permission on a couple of properties where the girls can shoot does and they are, by all accounts, candy land hunts. It’s really not a challenge at all on either one most of the time, and that’s great in some ways. But I’m also terrified that my daughters will learn only how to go where deer can easily be shot, but not really ever learn how to hunt for deer, if that makes any sense at all. I’m going to take them on some dough missions where the chances of success are very high, but I want them to also understand that the deer hurdles we face can’t all be cleared by calling in a favor from someone who has a really good property and is looking to thin the hurt a little bit. I’m going to look at our setups differently as well. Normally I leave some ground blinds up all season, and if the snow doesn’t crush them, then that’s kind of usually what we sit for our late season hunts. Sometimes it works, but I’ve noticed that if we have a blind up, we will almost always hunt it, unless the cameras are the observations, or you know, just the instinct says it’s time to go somewhere else. The girls are competent enough now with their crossbows and their ability to sit pretty tight, that we are going to hunt some ladder stands and some natural ground blinds. I like natural ground blinds when we have a lot of snow, because I can use some snow cameo, you know, either with us wearing it or just draping it in front of us and then brushing in, and it’s pretty dang effective. I have a few spots in mind for this, but I’m waiting to see exactly where we need to set up to get things really going. The good news is they don’t need to be within twenty yards anymore. The girls are very comfortable with like thirty yard shots, which with a crossbow and a good rest is so doable for them. Now, that’s an extra ten yard cushion we might need because the late season is often so dang quiet, and the deer are often very very cagy. So far, I’m guessing my strategy sounds a hell of a lot like any old deer hunting strategy, where you have to put in the effort and try to find the reward, which I guess is totally true. But I also know something else about the late season. It’s just like early season hunting that no one will tell you to go hunt in the mornings. The usual advice is that it’s just a lost cause and you’ll do more harm than good. You guys know how I feel about that. I have quite a few early season bucks on the wall that were killed during morning sits, but for some reason, I’ve mostly not hunted mornings in the late season. My goal this year is to find a few spots where I can make that happen with the girls, so that when we do have time to hunt, we can wring the most out of each and every day. The wild card is just getting to those spots without getting busted. But the truth is, as long as the snow isn’t overly crunchy, it’s usually doable, and even if it is, there are some ways to get around it with access. Either way, I’m going to push away the notion that hunting mornings is just universally dumb this time year, and try to fit figure out a way to hunt them when they head back to bed without screwing up our evening chances. This is going to be mostly a travel route thing in the cover, and it’s not going to be easy. But again, cameras can really help with this, and so can just looking at trails, tracks and just general deer sign The good news about late season dear is that they are usually pretty predictable, even if the movement we can accurately predict isn’t all that likely to happen in daylight. Nature isn’t all about wasting calories when it doesn’t have to, and at least here in Canada South, they aren’t going to burn precious energy for no reason. I would guess that’s a different thing for a lot of Southern hunters, but maybe there is some truth to it down there too. Up here and in a lot of the white Tail range, they’re just not going to do a lot of movement that doesn’t directly put calories in their bellies. This is a long winded way of saying that I’m working on a couple of different private and public properties so that i have options for both morning and evening hunts, no matter what direction the wind will be blowing.
00:11:58
Speaker 3: From when we get to go.
00:12:00
Speaker 2: This is something that has plagued me in the past and has gotten me into trouble. Instead of working different pockets of deer, I’d find a food source that was good enough, backtrack it, and burn it right to the ground because that was all I had going on. You know, there’s like sort of a gopher broke mentality that comes into play when you think your odds are very low, and that’s what I have mostly done with my late season hunts. This is bad for a lot of reasons, but being too cavalier with your setups on deer that have clearly had enough of Hunter’s bullshit for a couple of months is such a great way to take a spot that could deliver some good hunts and totally set fire to it as quickly as possible. I’m going to try to take the same care with these last ditch efforts as I do with the rest of my season on public Land, which is where I just try to hammer down on the little details to see if everything will work in my favor. I don’t know if it will, but I know a couple of things. When we put in some real time and effort into something something I don’t know, like hunting jaded late season deer, we usually learn something valuable about the deer, and we almost always learn something valuable about ourselves. I’m sure that sounds like woo woo stuff, but I believe it. I’ve hunted a lot of different ways, in a lot of different states, and with a lot of different expectations, and the hardest haunts just generally provide the best opportunity to level up and really learn. They are often not as successful in the measurement of dead critters as some other hunts, but you can kill a lot of deer, even big mature deer, and never really learn a whole lot. I don’t think that’s how this will go, and I like the thought of putting in some real effort in a way that has generally been totally unappealing to me in the past. I also know, at the very least then, I have one daughter who’s really itching to get back in the woods, and if I do the work I plan on, it’ll be a far better experience for both of us, not only because we have a better chance to actually have a fork.
00:13:52
Speaker 3: You walk in.
00:13:53
Speaker 2: But also because she and I can talk through what’s going on, we can look at the trail camera images every morning and then decide on what setups we should have in place, how we are going to hunt them all that Jazz, I think that will be important for her, and I know it’ll be important for me. I don’t know why it is, but just workshopping ideas with your hunting partner, even if you do ninety three percent of the work, is a good way to visualize what needs to happen and how things should go, and to just bond over the process.
00:14:21
Speaker 3: I like the thought of that because.
00:14:23
Speaker 2: In some ways my daughters live vicariously through me as a hunting guide, and in some ways I live vicariously through them as young hunter is looking to get better at something that’s truly difficult. So the upshot of all this is this, think about how you approach the late season. What’s your effort level like and would it be beneficial to put in some more effort, even if you’re only working on filling an antalylyst tag. What could you do to put yourself in a better late season position. The answer might go way beyond just finding a good destination food source and posting up on it. When the temperatures begin to truly dip, there might be more you can do, and if so, oh you should consider it. The worst thing that happens is that you eat a tiger.
00:15:03
Speaker 3: Two.
00:15:04
Speaker 2: The best thing that happens is well you don’t, or if you do, you learn a hell of a lot about how to approach things next season. It could be worse, even if it definitely won’t be all that easy. That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson and this has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for all your support. Mark and I here at Wired to Hunt truly appreciated. All of us at meat Eater really appreciate it. Without you, guys, we’re nothing, So thank you for that support. If you’re bored, maybe on Christmas break and you’re sick of listening to your family argue about politics or whatever, you can go to the medeater dot com and find a hell of a lot of content to educate yourself a little bit and entertain yourself a lot and just have some fun podcasts, films, articles, recipes, You name it, Go to the medeater dot com check it out.
00:15:54
Speaker 3: Thanks again,
Read the full article here