00:00:01 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better dear hunting, and now your host, Tony Peterson. Hey, everybody, welcome to Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, brought to you by First Light. Today's episode is about how easy it is to make poor decisions as the rut starts to ramp up. Last week's episode was a cautionary one about how easy it is to get your rut timing wrong, and if you didn't listen to it, go back and do that before you listen to this show. I'm going to dive deeper into the day by day progression of a rut. This episode is also going to be about calling decoin and some of the strategies that we all believe will help us bridge the gap from being gear watchers to being dear killers. Yeah, if there was a week in the white tail hunters world that maybe needed a hype music type of soundtrack, it's this one. In fact, since Mark is so into E d M, maybe he's got the perfect playlist for you. If not, it's okay. You can still get excited without the backdrop of glow sticks, bass drops and industrial drugs. The reason for the excitement is obvious since we're in the sweet late October early November window, and that means the freaking rut is here. But is it? Is it really? I mean, if you're getting out there in October with the idea that it's going to be on fire, you're most likely wrong. Even the first few days of November can be a snooze fest, or they can be unbelievable. The difference usually hinges on weather. Yet let me throw another qualifier in there. You can have the most perfect rut conditions ever and still be around so much hunting pressure that the daylight movement is almost non existent. Like so much of deer hunting, sometimes the private land heavily managed rules don't apply to the public land hunter. That's life, my friends. But it's gonna be okay. Let's take a step back and think about weather means this week. First, the bucks should be on their feet more no the window in which to encounter them in the morning, and then the evening grows a little bigger by the day and can open up fully if a super cold front comes in. That cold front can also bring in the other hunters. Because I'm not saying anything new here, everyone knows that pre rot plus cold fronts equals good hunting, but it isn't equal good hunting everywhere. Unless your dad owns four thousand acres of prime southern Iowa ground, You're probably not going to see a crazy amount of chasing out in the wide open all day long. You should be able to count on some cruising in the woods and a little more carelessness around daytime track level. In general. That's good, but it doesn't alleviate you of your responsibility to hunt smart during this week, which is full of so much promise. I personally do a couple of things, hunt every chance I can, and I make sure I have enough spots to make that happen without sacrificing my future odds. This means that if it's a little warmer than it should be or the wind isn't right for the spots, I really want to hunt and dig into the backups. As cautious as I'm telling you to be about hunting right now, I don't want to dissuade anyone from going. This is a great time to be in the woods period. You just might not want to go sit your best rut funnel for three days in a row yet, burning out a spot like that before it's really happening. It just doesn't do you any good. And sure, you can sit that one stand for two weeks in a row and eventually kill one, but can you really Maybe, but it gets a hell of a lot harder if you spooked every dough group in the neighborhood last week. Also, ask yourself, do you have the resolve to sit a dead spot for days on end believing that a buck will eventually come by? That's a tough one. I've volume hunted spots I truly believed in during the pre rut and the rut, and it has sometimes worked. Other times I have left the woods after days and days of trying, tired, frustrated, and totally be fuddled. There are no guarantees they're going to come by, or at least the buck you want is going to come by. The more options you have for the diverse conditions you're likely to face, the better off you'll be. Have you noticed this in what I've been telling you for weeks and weeks and weeks since this Foundation podcast dropped. Options are important. Mobility is important. Now this is tricky here, my friends, because you've got to decide on pushing a dead program, maybe on a killer funnel, or bailing on it. Confidence is one of those great intangibles that makes people good at stuff. You see it in sports, you see it in schooling with kids, and you see it in bow hunting. You've got to gauge your conviction on whether you should ride a rut, spot out or move. Why are you confident? What is the woods showing you? And don't forget. While it might feel like the rut is going to give you a whole bunch of mulligans, if you get busted by doors or scrappers or big bucks, the pre rut won't and neither will adhere even if the rut should be banging, But it's just limping along in either case. If you slip into a box comfort zone and he catches a big whiff of you or sees you up in the tree trying to take sunset picks or selfies for the Graham, you probably won't kill that buck there, no matter how out of his mind with lust he gets during the rut. This is maybe the biggest point I'd like to make with this whole episode. Even though it feels awesome to be in the woods right now, because the rut advantages are growing bigger by the day. The pre rut, even the last few days of it, will still feature cautious bucks. They won't tolerate mistakes, at least the ones that live with any kind a real hunting pressure. Pay attention to that because it leads me to something I firmly believe in, and that is that most of us would be better off not calling, or decoying or using sense right now. I know that's counterintuitive and probably disappointing, but let me make my case. I know for a fact you can kill dear by calling them in, or by decoin them in, or if they catch a whiff of the good stuff that you've put out for them. I've done all of that, and I've done it on public land and it's worked. But every time has been with bucks that were in their comfort zone and seemed very confident in their travel. They were the right dear for the right trick, and it worked, but it also didn't work a lot. It works even less the further you are from the heart of the rut. So right now you might be thinking it's prime time to rattle, after all, if freaking should be. But rattling in general is low odds proposition, and it's guaranteed to draw attention to your location. If you're not seeing bucks acting tough and not really getting the real woods vibe that things are about to pop off, should you be slamming the horns together? Probably not. This also goes for throwing out some chasing or tending grunts every ten minutes. While you might think it's a no harm, no foul type of situation, it probably isn't. You're probably harming your chances, especially if the timing just isn't right. The same goes for putting out a full body decoy into a meadow on your favorite tract of public land. A buck might see it and he might come in to fight it, or the dough group living there might see it and turn absolutely inside out while snorting their way towards the horizon. What's the risk reward for your plans? Would it be better to wait a few days until the calendar and the conditions fall into lockstep and offer you a better chance. This might not seem like it's means a whole lot, but for most of these tactics, a lot of us would be better off waiting a week, we're just not using them at all. I know that sucks, but after three decades of bow hunting pressure deer, I'm a firm believer in figuring out where dear like to walk and then getting there and then shooting them. The success rates I've seen on calling, on decoy and on using sense are scary low, scary low. My friends, worse yet, they often feel damaging and occasionally show me flat out that I'm causing damage by letting me watch dear spook away right out of my life. This is important, so I'll reiterate it once again. Using any tactic to attempt to draw a deer into bow range might seem like a low risk deal, but it's probably not the deer that slipped down whet your calling session. The ones that see you moving are the ones that just booger at the sight of a wonky deer decoy, our dear that you've just educated. On the flip side, You're out there to have some fun, right. If the promise of a blind rattling session makes you all warm and fuzzy, then by all means, clang those bitches together in might work, and if it keeps you hunting, it on stand longer, then that's not all a bad thing. Just think about why you're doing what you're doing and whether you want to take the risk. The same goes for calling to deer that you actually see. I have snortweezed in bucks during the rut and killed them, and have blown good bucks completely out of the county by snort wheezing at them. The same goes for running head bucks running on public land after running at them during the rut. But we are in the rut this week, are we We're in the pre rut, and the likelihood of a mindless response is lower now than it will be in just a few days or a week. Consider also what your competition is doing. If you're a public land hunter, or maybe you hunt out east, you're hunt in the Midwest, hunt down south on smaller tracts of land private ground. Even you've got lots and lots of people hunting the same tracks around you, you can bet your ask that your competition is out there calling away. You can bet that every hunter you meet at the very lea just carrying a grunt tube, probably a bottle of dope, and likely a set of rattling antlers or rattling bag. You know they are blind calling. How many deer are they going to educate to these tactics? How effective is your calling session going to be when it's the sixth rattling sequence a buck is heard in three days. All of this is about cumulative negative association. This is why a two and a half year old on public land will bust you bigger than ship and run away without hesitation, even if he spots you from a hundred yards away, while a buck that has been raised in a tightly managed property with little pressure will often become less nocturnal at five years old. I think I'm joking. One of the most prominent white tailed experts out there told me that this is exactly what happens on his farm. He casually said to me one day that his bucks get much easier to kill when they're fully mature. I guess that's probably because they've never had a negative interaction, and every each single time they've spotted or smelled or herd a hunter, they just got to walk away scott free. That's not the case with those pressure deer you're chasing. You're not hunting deer like that, are you. I mean, if you are digging your bag tricks have a blast. If not be careful, you can't control the other hunters on your leaves, or you're chosen chunk of public land, and you know a good percentage of them are going to throw everything they can at the deer. This doesn't stop the rut, and it doesn't stop the advantages the pre rut gives you, but it does dull them, and it certainly begs of the good hunter, a realistic strategy that takes into account mostly where the deer like to be and how to get in there ninja style to stay as undetected as possible. I've mentioned this in past episodes, but it does bear repeating. I'm not anti calling or anti decoin or anti using sense. I'm an advocate for careful usage. If you've got a good bucket fifty yards in the brush and he's fat and happy and making a rub but definitely doesn't look like he'll come your way, give him a grunt, provided you think he won't bust you. If there are a couple of bucks locking times across the river from you and the sun is set, give your own antler as a tickle to see if they can get them across. There are situations. Even with pressure deer we're making a little contact is the right choice. It's all dependent on the moment and your personal read on the body language of the deer. This is something I should probably expand on, So let me talk about puppies. I love training dogs, and there is nothing more satisfying than working with a good little lab pub and showing it something that I wanted to do better yet is getting a positive response, and then daisy chaining multiple behaviors together to really start to craft an awesome dog. This is satisfying stuff, but also can be tremendously frustrating. Because a puppy has the same attention span as my two year old child or your average outdoor television host. One distraction for a puppy in a training session can tank, which means you've got to be reading the dog in every interaction, every moment of your interaction, really really reading the dog. If it's ready to work, you'll see it in the eye contact, the crispness of its actions. You'll just know. With bucks. Weirdly enough, the same rules kind of apply. A buck that is slinking around and just looks nervous is a deer You should not call to ever. A buck that is slowly walking through and just has some swagger to his step, that's a different story. If he's confident he's collable. If he isn't, he might not be collable and might be worse than that. Scarable. That's not a word I don't think, but I'm gonna use it anyway. This is one of the things that you can learn through experience only, and one of the reasons why I begged you way back in the summer to go out and spend some time glassing deer, glassing those bachelor bucks. You don't learn to read buck body language with trail camera photos, but you do by watching them through a spotting scope. You also do by watching them interact with their environment through your binos when you're saddled up on November first. To pay attention to their demeanor and use that to inform your decisions to call. Also pay attention closely to your response rates. Where you hunt, there is a specific buck to do ratio, There is a specific amount of hunting pressure, There is a specific age structure. All of this is individualized to your hunting spots. If the deer in your woods love a good rattling session, keep at it, but be honest about the responses and the reactions to your tactics. This will tell you an awful lot about whether you should just keep trying them, try them only in highly specific conditions, or force yourself to go old school and wait for natural movement to bring the dear past you. I know that doesn't sound as much fun, but planting your butt in a good spot waiting for the here to come to you is about as rock solid of a deer hunting plan as there is, regardless of your individual hunting situation. That's the real key in the pre rut time in the woods. This might seem too early for all days, sis, but it's not. It's not the time when I'd burn all my PTO to sit dark to dark. But if you've got a day or two or three to work with, you're a hell of a lot better sitting seventeen feet up in a good spot than sitting at homeless and your kids fight over who has to go downstairs to get the laundry. It's also a good time to shut off your social media and forget about what others are saying. You'll hear about an earlier rut or the rut isn't gonna happen until such and such date. You'll see gripping grins of giants and read about the hot dough that had six pop and young bucks on her tail. None of that matters. The rut has been happening at the same time for thousands of years. It will happen at the same time for thousands more. You know that the last week October is good, and that the first couple of days in November or even better unless your way down south, then you gotta bump this stuff back a little bit to coincide with the rut in your area. You someone three states away bragging about a great rod hunt on October does nothing for you. It doesn't matter one way or the other. Work with what you actually know about dear behavior. Now, operate under the correct assumption that the hunting is only going to get better by the day, and then a safe strategy is the right one. For now. There will be time very very very very soon to go nuts and lay it all on the line. For now, it's a matter of being more patient and more discipline than most hunters in the woods. If you do, you'll have a better chance of having prolonged, exciting hunts and you keep yourself in the game better. You'll be able to sand beg it when the conditions say so, or dive in when they dictate. You'll also have the option for when the ruts should be firing on all cylinders but seems to be sputtering along, and what you thought were your best spots. Options Options, options hunt now enjoy it. Just understand that every move you make today might affect your chances tomorrow if you still got a tag left, and if you do, please keep listening because next week's episode is all about the single best seven days of the year for all deer hunters. That's it for this week, my dear obsessed brothers and sisters. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast. Check in next week for more deer hunting advice, and be sure to go to the mediator dot com slash wired to see the full host of articles, podcasts, and videos we put up weekly to answer all of your deer hunting questions.