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. 00:00:19 Speaker 2: Hey everyone, 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 pre-rut and how it can be a great time to kill a big buck if you know what you're doing. It's kind of interesting now, like, how often you hear that the last week of October is the best time to hunt. It wasn't that long ago that it was the first week of November or the second week of November. But there's a reason a lot of the biggest voices in deer hunting are all kind of shouting the same refrain right now. This can be a really good part of the season, but you have to know how to use it correctly. Because it's not the rut, it's the pre-rut, and that means something. Something I'm going to talk about right now. My personal theory on rut hunting and why so many deer hunters still don't kill big bucks is this. I think most of us think that the rut is this magical eraser that undoes the mistakes we've made throughout the season and gives us a fresh chance at the same sites we've been hunting since September or early October. Now, I know that doesn't cover everyone, trust me. And there's a hell of a lot of nuance left out of the discussion with that particular take. But I feel like a lot of us kind of view the pre-rut, the chase phase, and the lockdown phase sort of just as the general rut, and we hunt it in such a way. But if it was just the general rut, we wouldn't need a different name for it. Think about it this way. You don't have to talk to too many crossbow hunters before one of them will tell you that crossbows are really no different from vertical bows. And often just to prove how cool they are, they'll say that vertical bows are actually a more effective long-range weapon. Sure, but if crossbows were basically the same, then why would we need them at all in the first place? I mean, if they're basically a vertical bow, we sure had a lot of options in that category before, and now we sure have a lot of people who have left that category to hunt with crossbows. There must be a reason. And listen, I'm not throwing shade at crossbow hunters here. My daughters hunt with them and I love them. I don't care what weapon you use. I just care about words, I guess, and how they are used. If there is a distinction between two things, let's be honest about that. You know, that's all I'm saying. And in the realm of deer hunting right now, there is certainly a difference between now and, I don't know, two weeks from now. Of course, this applies to mostly folks who don't know what grits are or ever have them for breakfast. If you live down south, you're probably still, I don't know, catching crappies and catfish and not really thinking too hard about deer yet. But your time will come too, and the deer will rut, and before that, they'll do some things that make them more vulnerable. But here's the deal. You can't hunt the pre-rut the way you'd hunt the rut. Well, you can, and most folks do, but it's not the right approach. Most folks use the pre-rut as an excuse to sit where they want to, often on a field edge or a food plot if it's available, and then they juice up those sits with calls and scents and whatever. And why not? The great eraser has swept across the land, and those testosterone-filled giants are all about covering ground and looking for ladies. Except they aren't. They are still sort of in a condensed movement situation that will loosen up with the right weather. but they're not cruising all day long yet. They are antsy, though, and they will move more in daylight. Both of those things can be used to your advantage, but might not play into a strategy where you sit the same spot you hunted a whole bunch in the early part of the season. Now, I get the gravity of going to where we all like to hunt, you know, and just hoping the seasonal timing will put a buck in our laps. I really do. But I know that if you hunt pressured deer, the odds of that aren't as great as if, you know, you own 1,200 acres in Iowa. This gravity gets harder to ignore as you start hearing the first stories of people seeing bucks chasing, or your trail cameras start showing some bucks moving in daylight. You know, you might even see a scrapper or two chasing hard in real life yourself. All that is great evidence to just lean into the rut and hunt like it's on, but it's not, and the big deer just generally aren't going bonkers and risking their lives right now. So to confound things further, we kind of know that, and we think, Well, I have airtight access to my food plots, you know, or the stand in the corner of the pick bean field, and I really don't want to go in and mess up my best pinch points and funnel spots. The risk is too high, you might reason, so you play it safe and hunt the easy stuff. But I look at it differently. This isn't a great time to sit pinch points and funnels yet, but it is a really great time to catch a buck moving in the cover later in the morning or earlier in the evening. When I'm looking for a good pre-rut spot, I almost always have to ignore the voice in my head that says just sit the edges of openings. Go where they should be visible. Because I've done that a lot. And while I've killed bucks that way and have seen some really good ones, you know, come out at last light, it's too much of a gamble for me when I know I can probably do better. My favorite sits often happen maybe 100 or 200 yards off those openings. They involve just getting a layer back off the easy stuff. And they almost always happen in areas with lots of rubs. You know, staging areas is kind of what I'm talking about, but not totally. The bucks I see that are on their feet and killable this time of year almost always seem to be looking for something to do. They know where they're going to end up. They seem to not want to stay bedded all of the daylight hours, but they also just have sort of a cautious vibe going on. These bucks are so killable if you can get into the cover with them, and they are highly callable too. But the location is what matters most, like it always does when it comes to trying to shoot deer. Everything else will come later, but for now, it's a matter of getting into the thick stuff with them, which is something I talk about all the time, but I want to take it a step further here. Last week, which was a little too early for the pre-rut stuff, and besides, you know, the fact that it was 81 degrees, my daughter and I slipped into a big patch of timber in southeastern Minnesota. We weren't having any luck with anything else, so we went to a spot I figured might give us a chance at a staging buck. We saw many... many rubs on our way in, and we set up on a really good ravine crossing that just further proved to me the value of looking at the land through a LiDAR layer on your scouting app. Now while we were sitting there, I turkey called some because it's fall turkey season and she was pretty geeked to hunt whatever would come our way. The turkeys played along really well, just not quite well enough for her to get a shot, and as we watched them pick their way back to the roost, I couldn't help but marvel at the difference between the woods we were sitting in and the woods they were walking through. Now, mind you, it's the same spot on paper, but when you're in it, it's not. There's open woods, you know, easy to glass through old growth type of woods. And then there's gnarly thicket type stuff. We were right on this soft transition between the two, and almost everywhere I glassed, I could pick out a rub. The deer showed up too late as we were packing up, but that spot is the kind of spot that pre-rut hunting is all about. There's a subtle edge between two types of cover. It's 200 yards off of a picked bean field in two different directions, and with the right wind, they are very safe to travel through there. It's ideal. And while I haven't figured it out yet, the girls might get a day off of school to go back down there and sit that area again before it gets too late in October. I have seen this kind of setup play out in my travels a lot. Out in North Dakota, I've spent a lot of time hunting the back half of October, in places where five acres of timber would be considered a pretty big woodlot. The same rules apply, and it's really about realizing that most of the buck movement now is condensed but loosening up by the day. The extra half hour they might spend moving in the evening could put them in front of your stand, but probably won't if your stand is, well, too far away from the security cover. I don't know how to put it any other way. I know you can look at Instagram reels all day long of 170-inchers walking across pick fields and food plots right now, but you won't find many of them that were filmed on public land if you get my drift. The weather might feel like the rut. The woods might look like it's the rut. Our hearts might want it to be the rut, but it's not quite here yet, and you should hunt accordingly. Now, I've cautioned you enough, and in the vein of how I've started to try to look at deer hunting differently, I want to acknowledge the challenges of pre-rut hunting, but also the advantages. So yes, they'll move more right now. This only gets better if you can catch a nice cold front or a nice rain shower. When the weather breaks in late October, you just better get your ass out there somewhere. But there is another advantage that I found, which is important and doesn't require a 20 degree temperature drop. The bucks are actually kind of predictable right now. The reason so many deer hunting personalities have talked about the last week of October as being the best week is because the rut is not that predictable, and neither are the individual bucks during the rut. Right now, though, if you see them do something today, you can make the right play tomorrow and have a pretty decent chance. This is probably the biggest advantage of the pre-rut. When I'm looking for where the bucks are moving, and I don't have a good plan to dive in deep and set up on the X, I just kind of like to play it safe and set up where I can see where I think the X might be. If I'm right, I probably won't kill one that night. but I give myself a real chance the next night if I can hunt, which if I have any control over at all, I'm definitely going to try to hunt that night. This magical window where they'll show themselves in the cover but aren't going three counties over to chase does is a good one, but it involves calculated risk. I guess all hunting really does. I think it's risky to sit the same field edge stand over and over, even though it would be easy to argue that not going into the cover until the rut is smart i don't think so though because i think you should just hunt deer where you can when you can and every part of the season is solvable if you try enough stuff if you can lay eyes on one now though you're on to something i'm not talking just giants either One of the best spots I've ever found for late October hunting is an oak flat on a farm I have permission to hunt in southern Minnesota. If I hunt that spot for a week, with the right wind, I'll see at least one big deer if I'm in late October, oftentimes more than one. But most of the time it's spikes and forkeys and two-year-olds, and not an overabundance of them. When I'm in there, though, I see those scrappers doing the same thing that I see the big ones do. which is laying down sign and visiting scrapes and browsing here and there and just kind of not moving with a lot of purpose. When I'm anywhere hunting right now and I see a buck in the cover with those vibes, I take it seriously because there is a reason he's there acting that way. And in my experience, it's very likely that a different buck or multiple bucks might do the same thing on consecutive nights or mornings. It doesn't really matter. What matters is the location, what the bucks show me with their behavior, and whether I can get in and hunt them effectively. Now, there's another advantage to pre-rut hunting that I want to talk about, calling. You guys know I don't blind call hardly ever because I have no faith in it, and I'm going to get into this pretty heavy in a podcast here in the near future, but I will call my heart out if I'm on a soft edge in the timber and I can catch a glimpse of a rack moving through the brush. Pre-rut bucks that are in areas where they feel safe are confident, and confident bucks are callable bucks. They also expect other bucks to be there, Because when the crops are out and the leaves are falling, they just don't have as much cover to work with. So they have less elbow room. A buck that wants to be on his feet in a place he knows he's relatively safe and who expects to be in close proximity to other bucks that are doing the same thing is a buck that is very callable. The catch here is that you generally have to understand the terrain and whether he can assess the situation from a distance or whether he'll need to swing in close. If you're in the thick stuff, deer are callable because they can't easily tell whether there's actually another deer there or not. Now, if you're out in the wide open or, you know, in an open wooded pasture, it's a different story. If you have some elevation to work with that could hide a deer or maybe funnel a deer into your lap if he decides he likes your calling, then you have something going on. This is a totally different game from sitting in a box blind on a picked cornfield and grunting at a buck a half a mile away. This is getting into where they want to be and then calling to them in a spot they expect bucks to be and where they would, you know, not necessarily be super visible Pre-rut bucks are also fairly likely to respond to a snort wheeze in my experience. In fact, most of the time I'll do that over a grunt, you know, in this situation that I'm describing. I think they are tolerant of one another this time of year, but it's a tenuous kind of piece that can be broken easily. I actually love that about this time of year. Now I want to throw out one more thing that I do a lot during the pre-rut that I don't really know if anyone believes me or not, but I always have a turkey call with me. If I'm walking through the woods right now, I'm always making noise. If I yelp my way in and stop to scratch in the leaves, I feel like I jump fewer deer. I think a lot of hunters don't really want to walk through 300 yards of crunchy oak leaves to get to a brushy creek bottom to set up because they feel like they're going to blow everything out. Well, go listen to a flock of turkeys this time of year. They make a ton of noise, and so I just try to sound like them. I keep that mouth call in while I'm walking in and while I'm setting up, so if I make some metallic clunk or something with my stand or my saddle platform, I can instantly yelp loudly. Look, this might be over-the-top stuff. I just know that I have more confidence when I do that, and it helps me go where I need to go without worrying that I'm making a huge mistake. Also, as a side note, I end up calling in a lot of turkeys when I do this, and I mean a lot. I've never had a situation where having a flock of birds feeding around me was bad for deer hunting. They are such a signal to the other woodland creatures that all is good, and I believe the deer fully know that. So go out and sit that field edge stand if you need to, but if it doesn't pan out, consider diving into the timber to look around. And if all you have is timber to hunt, which is a big woods reality, then it's best to get to where those soft edges are, especially the soft edges that are all rubbed up. The same rules apply there, even though the deer density is probably low enough where you won't find as much sign or see as many bucks. You just kind of have to calibrate to that reality around you. But either way, the pre-rut is a lot of fun and it's obviously worth hunting. Just remember where they are most likely to be, what calls they are most likely to respond to, and how long you have to hunt this phase before all hell breaks loose. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast. Thank you so much for all of your support. If you want to see some big old bucks get shot, head on over to TheMeatEater.com and check out the film that Steve and I made in Nebraska last year where we had some really good rut hunting. Of course, while you're at TheMeatEater.com, you can find tons of articles. tons of podcasts, other films, whatever you need to stoke that fire this time of year. Maybe learn something about how to gut a deer or maybe learn something about conservation. It's all there. Go check it out. And once again, thank you so much for all your support.

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