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 Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about the rut, how we get it wrong, and what we need to do to get it right. This might be my favorite week of the year. It's probably yours two. It's here. It's in full swaying at least if you don't live way down south in the Bayou anyway, your chance to kill a big dumb one is right now, and it's going to be so easy. Accept it often isn't, and there is a disconnect between reality and what we expect. This is where the rut burns so many of us, but it doesn't have too. You just have to acknowledge what you're working with, make a good plan, and then react to what the deer give you on a day to day basis. That's what I'm going to talk about right now. 00:01:15 Speaker 1: Now. 00:01:16 Speaker 2: I'm not looking for sympathy here, but I'll take a little bit if you want to send some of my way. I recently came home after sixteen days on the road with one day in between. I don't know if you've ever left your house for half a month of work, but it's a lot to handle. Not only do you have the accumulated stress of a lot of work, but you come home to what I would generally describe as a certified shit show. I don't know what it is about my bride, but the minute I walk out the door, I envision a swarm of delivery trucks and construction workers showing up at our house. Every time I come home, something has changed. This time it was my bedroom walls, which are now purple. I didn't even have the energy to fight that one. She also decided we needed to replace the faucet in our shower. This is one of those things that should be so easy and probably is for competent people, But I'm not competent when it comes to this stuff. So the minute I saw some random plumbing tools and parts from the shower spread out on the floor, I was like, Oh, this is gonna be a thing. The thing it was, what should have been so easy just wasn't. First off, getting the old faucet off was more an active war than a simple task, like it appeared on so many of the YouTube videos I watched. At one point we gave up with that and just tried to change this little plastic part that pops up and blocks the water to send it to the shower head. Let me tell you, being crammed under that sob while laying in a wet, cold tub and trying to get a piece to fit that wasn't meant to fit. Was it the kind of thing that can nearly end a marriage right quick? I thought it would be easy, and it just wasn't. Life goes like that. What we expect to be simple gets complicated in a hurry. The only thing I can think of where that isn't the case is with the simplest game out there, golf. You just swing a stick and hit a ball into a hole. Easy peasy. Now, for those of you who wonder what my deal is with golf, it's entirely because of one of my hunting partners who is really big into it right now, and it makes him very angry that I'm so cocky about a game I've never played, but I have played it. I'm pretty good at mini golf, and the bigger version can't be that much different. Just swing the stick a little harder, right, Eric. Anyway, the one thing in my life that I always expect to be easy but almost never is, is the rut. Let me give you an example from this year. I've been talking about this stupid stand I have up in Wisconsin, where I've run cameras for several years. I put that sucker up this April, just knowing that the big bucks will be there, and if I ride it out long enough, it's all going to be over. Except the deer aren't there. They're just gone. I don't know where they are, but I can promise you that some some of them are on illegal bait piles, which is an issue I might write about someday down the road when I come to terms with it. I made my Wisconsin rut hunting plan last fall and then put it into motion during Turkey season this year. I've been very confident that all I needed to do is volume hunt that spot and it'll happen. Just give me four or five days of all day sis and just wait for those grippe grins. But now I'm not so sure such is the way with the rut. It's not nearly as easy as we make it sound. It's just a time of year with more hope than usual. But that's a double edged sword for most hunters. It makes it seem like the rut should be a low effort of fare, which is what a lot of us are looking for in deer hunting. You can see this trend in everything we use. And I'm not knocking it, because I'm right there with you. I'm just pointing out that we all kind of cross our fingers for something easy, we usually don't get it because the deers still require effort. And what's worse is that, aside from a few magical days where it really does seem like they are everywhere, it's mostly more of a ghost town than we expect. This is what always gets me. Sometimes I go out on November fifth, or seventh, or tenth, and the weather is right and my plan is solid, and then I either blank or see like one foky passing through at sixty yards. When that happens on public land, I just chalk it up to increase pressure out there, But when it happens on private land, where the expectations are higher, it's not so easy to dismiss that failure, and we ask ourselves what happened. It must be that a hot dough took all of the bucks away. Maybe it's the moon phase, the weather, the something out of your control. But it also might be for some simple reason, like we just chose a bad spot to sit, or we let the second guessing creep in, and instead of giving a spot the amount of time it needs, we bailed early with the idea that one of the usual reasons was exactly why we had a bad sit. This leaves more tags unfilled than anything else. I've talked about this a lot, but time is your best friend during the rut. I've hunted low deer density places where I see maybe one deer a day during the rut, but I have to be there all day to see that deer. There's no other good way around it. We recently released a film of mine from a public land bohunt in North Dakota that I produced last year. Now spoiler alert, but the second day I have to hunt is an all day deal during a super cold front late October and it took me all day to see a single deer. This happened to me a few times last season. Are you willing to sit all day to see one deer or the one right deer? That? It's often what it takes, and it might not be one day, it might be three or five. Do you know anyone who has gone dark to dark? You know, for three or four days in a row. It's not that common, but it is extremely effective for killing a buck during the rut. This is due to two reasons. The first is what I just said, and we all know they are real hard to kill from the couch. But more importantly, if you don't give yourself an out and you buy into the plan, it's best to just see it through. This is so much harder than it sounds, but it's the truth. If you want to kill during the rut, you have to choose your spots well, and you have to give them a lot of time. You can get lucky and make up for that by running into the right deer that just wants to be rattled in or maybe decoy or whatever, but mostly the best bet is to put yourself where they are eventually going to be and then give them the time to get there. So how do you set up this rut plan and make it happen? First off, try to forget about the stands that you have up in the usual spots that you like to hunt, at least for now. I think starting frush during the rut is a good move. The reason for that is it gets you in the mindset to either try spots that should work or go find them right now. Now. You might sit on a picked cornfield and see a lot of deer in the evening, or you might slip into a creek bottom off a destination food source and play the morning movement. Both can be great. But what I look for when I have the time is the spot where a big buck can show up at any time. Now. In Iowa on primo ground, that might be that cut cornfield. In Pennsylvania on public land not so likely. If you hunt a place where you don't have a bunch of six and a half year old bucks named, you might want to think about where where would a big one feels safe to move during the rut during lunchtime. That's the question you want to ask yourself, and the question to which you absolutely want to have confidence in your answer. Now, you won't have one hundred percent confidence, probably, but let's say you're better than a coin toss that something will show up on a certain pinch point or whatever. Now, what's the wind going to do there? What kind of setup can you put in there? Is this a groundblind situation or a mobile stand setup? How much time are you going to give it? And what will you do if in two days the wind switches from the south to the north and that spot is suddenly out where to next? I find myself thinking about this a lot and trying to sort out what my next couple of days will entail, and then about half the time, it all goes to shit because as much as I can think about what they should be doing and how I'm going to get close to them, I mostly get it wrong. And so do you. I bet that's the game we play, and we mostly lose, but once in a while we don't. Oftentimes those winds come from another source if they don't come from our original plan. What I mean by that is I often feel like I have a pinch point or a funnel totally figured out, so I give it a full day or two, and the bucks keeps skirting me halfway up a hillside. For some dumb reason. This happened to me the first time I drew an Iowa tag, and it messed with me. Actually, it didn't mess with me. It just reminded me that what I think I know isn't as important as what the deer actually do. Now, I had been posting up for a few days in this valley with a stream meandering through it, so essentially dreamy Iowa deer country. But what kept happening was that bucks kept going through above me, and I couldn't figure out why. Now I ended up snort wheezing in a good one, eventually in a different spot, and then all I had left was a dough tag. So I went back to that creek bottom to try to figure something out for a buddy of mine who was still hunting. Now. That morning, I saw some good deer, including a really cool one hundred and forty inch type of buck that followed the same path as the rest of them. When I talk to my buddy about it, we both struggled and realized that we don't really need to know the reason. We just needed to know that's what they do there, And instead of trying to call them downhill to us, which is often a disaster. We just needed to move our setup up hill to where they like to walk. It wasn't a matter of really outsmarting the deer or employing a new stealthy tactic. It was simply that we just had things wrong and what the deer showed us was right. I don't know how often this happens to me, but it's every single season, and it always stings a little. You can try to outthink them and sometimes that works, but mostly they just show you what they're doing and what you're doing wrong, and it's up to you to accept it and to do something right. And speaking of doing something right, I want to go back to that time thing for a second, because there's another mistake I see a lot of people make. If the weather doesn't line up with what you think is perfect deer weather or some other condition makes it seem like it's not worth hunting, you need to tell those voices to shut up. The rut is going to happen whether you're out there or not, whether it's eighty degrees or twenty five south wind or north rain or shine. The deer don't have a choice. Only we do, and that choice is whether we want to go sit when we believe the odds are lower or not. The answer to that is to always hunt. Don't kid yourself that you're preserving your best stuff for a later cold front. Use those conditions to figure out where to sit during the rut, not why you should sit out hot weather, get low, find some water, rain, buckle up with some decent gear, and wait out a big one because he will move. Do what others won't do, and get out there when others say it isn't good enough, then adapt. If you sit the field edge and it's twenty degrees warmer than it should be and you don't see much, you'll be like those dumb ass podcast hosts who don't know anything about deer. That's not where you should be hunting. The rut requires a good plan and then execution on that plan. It's not enough to get married to the idea of sitting a specific spot until one comes by, because Mother nature might not give you what you need to have one come by. That's a hard truth to deal with. I don't know how many times I've watched the sun set on a day during the rut that has just left me totally flummixed by what I didn't see. It's happened to me a lot. It honestly probably happens to me at least half of the time I hunt the rut. That's a lot of time too, But the other half I feel like I have a fighting chance. And when you have the willingness to give it absolutely you're all or at least all the time you can muster. You put yourself in the running to have one of those rut sits where things are just going bonkers. If you've never had one of those, just wait. Some days it's just electric out there, and for whatever reason, they're just cruising and chasing and putting on a show, and you're on pins and needles the whole time because you know another one is going to come down the trail before too. I get maybe one of those a year, maybe a couple if I'm real lucky. But I'll tell you what, they can erase a lot of bad decisions or bad luck or whatever. The dark to dark snooze fests are gonna happen, but the sting wears off pretty quickly when the whole thing just busts loose around you. And the best part about those days is that while you might kill one, they are real amazing even if you don't. They also do something else for us. They serve as a constant reminder that at some point, that kind of hunting is waiting for us in some spot of our choosing, during a small window in the fall, when it's even possible, when you witness it and you believe that, it's so much easier to dedicate yourself to sitting all day in a spot where you believe the action could show up again When it doesn't. You did a lot to try to make that happen, and you know that today just wasn't your day, but tomorrow could be, or the next day. And that's the thing about the rut. It's always sort of a grind, but it's always worth it if you put in the effort. It can be frustrating, it can be a mess on any given day, or it can give you an eleven hour stretch of daylight in the woods where you would not want to be anywhere else. And I hope you all get to experience some days like that this week or next week, or whenever you get out there, because the closing bell is coming and another season will be behind us before we know it. Just remember that if you do build a plan and it doesn't work out right away, it might just mean that the timing wasn't right, but it'll get there. It might mean that another day is all that matters. Or you might just see a few scrappers cut across a ridge in a way that makes you think maybe there's something to that, and instead of sitting there and hoping the deer or wrong and you're right, you just need to pull a stealth operation and get yourself where they want to be. It can, honestly be that simple to just allow the rut to be what it promises to be instead of what it mostly is. Do that, my friends, and come back next week, because I'm going to talk about a frustrating part of the rut where you know those mature bucks they go into that lockdown phase and a lot of people kind of spin their wheels. I'm going to talk you through that phase of the rut. Next. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for your support. If you need more White Tail content like you're not just getting your fix. There's tons of articles at the medeater dot com, recipes for those backstraps if you are lucky out there and if you know you just need some something to fill the void while you're sitting in your cubicle or you're making that drive out to hunt or driving across the country to go hunt something way cool out of state. So many podcasts on our network. There. You got you know, Clay's Bear Grease, which is awesome. We've got Cutting the Distance. We've got a whole bunch of different mediater podcasts now, including trivia and radio which are awesome. The content is there if you need it at the media dot com go check it out. As a always, thank you so much for listening. 00:17:07 Speaker 1: M