00:00:01 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, and now your host, Tony Peterson. Hey, folks, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, brought to you by First Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about late September and how to avoid terrible hunting. Hey, if you're just randomly finding this Foundation's podcast, or maybe listening to this episode as your first one, I want to give you a heads up. All of the episodes up until this one and from here on out until next summer are loosely chronological. That means they're bendworthy, and it's best to do that in order, starting with Numero Uno, which we dropped way back in June. Now about this episode, I gotta love hate relationship with late September. It's one of my favorite times to be in the woods, but it's also the time when I waved goodbye to my chances of killing a buck in the field from an easy to get too set up. Of course, I know you can kill a soybean muncher all day, anytime in the season, depending on your hunting situation, but on pressured ground. This is the time of year to accept reality and understand that it's actually time to get back to work. Now, you might be listening to this and thinking, well, my season doesn't even open until October. Dude, that's okay. This show is really about the second week of the season. So even if your opener is the first or the tenth of October, whatever, this is what you do after you haven't filled your tag on opening weekend or opening week. That's really what this show is all about. When I don't kill a buck in my home state of Minnesota or across the river in Wisconsin on opening weekend, or at least during opening week, I start to feel this deep, dark sense of just dread. I know things in my life are about to get a hell of a lot more difficult. It's the same feeling I get when my wife casually starts talking about how our yard might look a little better with some new landscaping, or maybe how our garage would benefit from having just some new shelving units in it. You've probably felt this too, at least dear wise, if you've ever been super excited about your home state's opener and for whatever reason, you didn't feel your tag. Now, the question comes to most of us whether we should back off through the slow part of the season to wait out the run or keep at it and risk putting the deer down further. The easy answer is to back off if you have the option. I don't, and I don't like not hunting now. If you live in Iowa and you know the full month of November is waiting for you, Even if you're a public land hunter, then waiting might be an easy call, and it might be the right call. Everyone's situation is different, but remember this, A lot of experts telling you to wait are hunting places where the deer won't get pressured. That's where the waiting advice comes from mostly, and at least from some sources. Doesn't really make sense for the average hunter. If the rut will bring loads of hunting pressure, or you're in a state where you'll only get to hunt maybe part of the rut before a general firearm season opens, then waiting might be a really bad call. Plus, as I've mentioned earlier, don't you want to hunt? I do, so I do. This is also why I really like having backup spots, and I always encourage hunters to keep looking for more areas, private, public, whatever, the thing that keeps us out of the woods. A lot of times it's just limited options. So even if you think the public land you know half an hour away won't be as good as your private chunk closer to home, it's something that you can hunt when you feel your best stuff isn't right. That's important. Now, here's how you should look at the back half of September or the second week or your season, depending on where you hunt. It's time to acknowledge what's happening and how the deer will react. It's the first step. Once you do, you can react to their reaction and all of a sudden, possibly beyond them again. How's that for a weasel word salad tasty. Let's look at the bad news first. There's a combination of two things working against you buckwise right now. The first is that they naturally start to go vampire in their lives. As they go hard antlered, they break up from their summertime bachelor groups, and the days start to get shorter. That's reality for most deer in most places. Couple that with the added pressure of bow hunters and small game hunters in the woods, and the bucks are even more likely to avoid moving in daylight in places where they are likely to encounter hunters. This is simple stuff, but it's important to understand and acknowledge. Hell, you can also throw in the kicker the woods getting more open by the day as the leaves fall. While late September is usually pretty thick foliage wise, it might start to open up, especially if you live in the northern part of the deer's range. I can't prove this because I'm a human and not a deer, but I don't think bucks are super comfortable with that. I was going to move on from the bad news here to all this good news, but I'm not gonna yet. We might as well take all of our medicine now aside from dear behavior. We have to acknowledge our behavior up to this point. When our optimism wanes, so too does our dedication to hunting intelligently. It's easy to get sloppy when you think your best patterns have died, and to sort of go through the motions with fingers crossed, hoping a buck walks into the alfa filfield in frontier stand where you've already sat five or six times. After all, this is a safer play than getting in too close to his bed and pushing him onto the neighbors long before the whispers of the rut get him on his feet again. Right wrong. The only thing we do when we get complacent is cement our behaviors so that the deer can pretty our actions very well. If this seems like great a bowlshit, go hunt high country mule deer if you ever have the chance. Better yet, hunt them in an area with a high concentration of mountain lions. You'll see through your glassing efforts a level of neurotic dear behavior that highlights how a buck has to behave to reach maturity when he's been shadowed by one of the best deer killers in the business his entire life. Those mule deer, they don't let themselves get patterned, and you can bet neither with alliance. Neither. Should you be honest about what stands their spot, you've burned out and move on. Even if you haven't totally burned out your spots, they might have died anyway due to a litany of factors, which brings us to the good news. First off, fully, nocturnal deer, they probably don't exist. Let's acknowledge that right away. If you don't believe that, do me a favor and go pull your trail cameras from the woods and keep hunting. Trail cameras will keep you out of the woods right now, I promise, mostly because they'll show you a skewed view of the deer's world. Those field edge and food block cameras will start to show more nocturnal movement that plays on our psyche. Fewer random bucks walking down trails does too. But the deer is still out there, and you want to keep hunting, don't you. I learned this lesson every I don't know a few years at least, and I'll never forget about I don't know. Six seven years ago, I had a free night to hunt this little property by my house in the Twin Cities. I knew from recent trail camera polls that the odds of running into a good buck were next to none, but there were a few does frequently hitting a small kill plot. I had planted. The one though, that did come in that night. She busted me immediately. She was onto that stand and it was obvious. But later I also heard something working from the swamp to the woods behind me. Which is a direction I did not expect a deer to approach from the buck. A legit hunter and thirty class deer, which was the biggest buck I ever saw in that property and five years of hunting, it came into bow range but never offered a shot. He also skirted that plot like it was hot lava, and in that move he also skirted my cameras. When you hunt when you're not supposed to, you see dear do what they're not supposed to do. The second week of the season, no matter what state you bow hunt, is a reset moment for most folks. Sitting on an unfilled tag, that means the first plan didn't work. That's okay, most of our hunting plans don't work. We fail a lot. It's just fine. But what you do now is important, and that should really involve thinking about the patterns that deer probably have on you and other hunters they've dealt with. Think about this too. From the perspective of this question, how could the deer possibly pattern us after a week? Well, for some deer it's only a week, but for others it's the second or third, or fourth or eighth season of the same stuff, And It's not just the same stuff as far as the heightened activity around the opener, and then the same mostly hairless apes climbing into trees to send sharp sticks in their direction. It's the scent trails that get investigated. After dark. It's the crunch of truck tires on gravel and the pre dawn darkness and the quiet but not all that quiet closing of truck doors or tailgates. That last one is a doozy and it factors into my hunting in a big way on some ground. Now this might not seem like a huge deal, but it is. I honestly think that on a lot of properties, both public and private, where we park kills our hunts faster than a bad wind. Our trucks make a lot of noise. We make a lot of noise driving them, getting out of them, getting into them, messing with our gear. That's just what happens. Now. This is something that is highly variable. But I'll give you a pro tip I've learned from hunting public land over the years. Where there are expected points of ingress by hunters, like public land parking areas, the deer are totally aware of them. But the good news is in most places you don't have to park in the was rutted up parking areas. Last year, when I drew a coveted Iowa tag and set out to kill a good one on public land, I paid close attention to this, mostly because every other hunter I saw seemed to park exactly where you'd expect them to. Some even seemed to go out of their way to park right in the open on a field edge where visibility was highest. I took a different approach, and the best spot I found involved pulling off of a gravel road and climbing straight up a bluff to get to my hunting area. That piece of public has two parking areas, one on each end, but the spot I parked at which is not a common access point, and it was positioned between two farms, which meant I had some cover noise. I'm speculating here, but I think the deer were used to hearing all kinds of clunks and thunks and driving from that spot because of those farms, and I really feel it worked in my favor after seeing how well I could sneak right into a Big Bucks guard in the morning. I've seen this on almost all public land I've hunted over the years, including down in Oklahoma, where the patchwork of public we hunted one year would have only one parking area per section. Right there, you know that probably the pressure is going to start it exactly one spot. Now, that might not matter on opening day, but by the second week of the season count on it. Now, it's not enough just to be a sneaky bastard with your parking strategy. Usually you've got to factor in what else is going on so you can get on top of current deer movement. Now. I tend to simplify this by assuming I know the food sources they're probably hitting at least if there's some egg ground around. This is a safe bet usually and can help distill down some of the mystery of current deer travel. Big woods hunts are different, but they also don't allow for easy spot burnout quite the same way, at least quite the same way as that egg ground does. This is, in my opinion, evidence that a lot of this hunting stuff balances out in weird ways. Now, is that clear as mud? Probably right? What I mean is that hunting egg ground is orders of magnitude easier than hunting bigwood stuff. But egg ground also allows us to hunt easy patterns and get patterned easily. Big woods without the cushy bean field edge type of stands aren't as easy to hunt and are obviously not as easy to find destination food source, and that by itself is enough to often keep the burnout factor lower and leveled off. So now that you're thoroughly confused, I'll get back on track if you've got the easy food factor it in. But think about the snacks they can eat along the way to and from that food. If you don't have that, think about the brows. Think about the hard and soft mass that might play into their daily lives. Way back in the summer, you built a grocery list, Now is the time to revisit it. You're working with deer that are wise to lazy hunters, but not so jaded they won't move in daylight. They are also listening to their stomachs, but not usually laying down enough sign to really clue you into the hot spot of the week. In the areas I tend to hunt, I find a strong gravity toward oak trees if they're avail bowl. We all know white oaks are the best, and they are, but in places where lower quality food is the rule. Red Oaks and other varieties will do in a pinch. Where are they and are they dropping? Do you have a deep woods meadow to watch that might have some tasty stuff growing in it or around the edge? How about some apples. One thing I find in the big woods in northern Wisconsin, where I consistently get my ass kicked by the deer is that there are random, old, long abandoned homesteads tucked into the forest, usually deep into the forest. I tend to find these while grouse hunting, after stumbling across a random pile of rocks where there definitely shouldn't be. A random pile of rocks that, along with a thicker vegetation and usually some baily visible remains of the remnants of a homestead, make everything click. That's when I start looking for apples and I forget about the rough grouse for a second. But it really doesn't matter how you find these spots. What matters is those long ago folks planted fruit trees, usually apple trees. The grouse know it, The deer know it too. As a kicker, they also tend to get some solid betting areas out of the deal, provided they don't fall into an old root seller. I know finding these areas sounds easy when some random dude talks about it on a podcast, but it's not, at least not always. These spots would be easiest to find through extensive scouting, but that's not all that appealing right now. So there is another way to keep at it and keep your way to hunting knowledge base expanding hunt for meat. If you don't have this strategy where you can go in and quickly find some cool spot to sit in the big woods or the staging area, type of thing that you don't think you can rely on, just hunt for meat, go look for dose, and forget about the buck quest for now. This is one of my favorite strategies for finding deer concentrations once the easy hunts have died away. Not only does this keep me hunting even if the plan doesn't involve a lot of big buck strategies, it's more enjoyable. Low standard hunts are fun and often put you on deer that don't necessitate a low bar. The very first buck I ever arrowed that I put on the wall ended up dying from this exact approach. It was the second week of the season in Minnesota, and my goal was simply to find some acorns that some doughs might be eating. I slipped into a flat situated a couple hundred yards from the field edge and picked my tree. Three quarters of the way up. A dough feder way passed as I did my best fright and squirrel impression while hugging the trunk. Later that evening I saw other dos but never got a shot, and well before last light, a good buck walked in and bedded down at thirty yards. I fed the gnats and the mosquitoes whilst white knuckle gripping my bow like it was a rubber chicken neck. He stood up. I shot him square in the liver, and the next morning prayed to whatever gods would give me some blood to work with, and I actually found him. It was revelatory for me on so many levels. But what is stuck all these years later is that I went out to find the hot food so I could just have a chance at a doll and I killed my biggest buck ever. Happy accidents happened in the woods. My friends. Don't let the doubt creep in because opening week didn't account keep hunting, but work off a new strategy. If you're not seeing deer like you were just a few days ago, think about where they've probably relocated to and what they're eating. Think about who is hunting them besides you, and where that pressure is coming from. How can you do things differently. The more ways you can answer that, the more ways you can stay in the game, and the worst case scenario is to keep hunting, which isn't a bad thing now. Next week we'll start to fine tune this whole thing and dive a little deeper into why staging areas matters so much right now and how good hunting can be had when most hunters think it should be bad out there. That's it for this week, my dear loving friends. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been the Wired Hunt Foundations podcast. Visit the meat Eater dot com slash wired to check out our latest deer articles, or head on over to the wire to Hunt YouTube channel to subscribe to all of our videos, and, as always, thank you so much for your support.

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