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, everyone, welcome to the wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Like. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about what shed antlers teach us about dear. This is probably gonna sound like total bs, my friends, but stick with me. On my journey as a deer hunter, I spent a lot of years not really paying attention to what was happening around me. Even as a youngster, I scouted a lot, and I hunted every second I could, and I still mostly zoned out when mother Nature tried to give me a helpful hint or three of them. As I've gotten older, I've realized that just about every d your sighting, in every piece of deer sign and yes, every shed antler has something to teach us. That last one is what this episode is all about, and I urge you to listen to it, even if you're not a die hard shed hunt. In the spring, I set out in the dark with my wife's cousin in Toe. Our destination was a Turkey blind I had set up in the back corner of a pick cornfield. The cousin had expressed interest in turkey hunting the previous year, probably during a holiday get together or something I don't really remember. She wasn't really the kind of first timer I usually take out, considering she is a few years older than me and it never hunted anything before. She also has a son who has mitochondrial disease, which means that almost the entirety of her life is dedicated to his care, and it's not an easy life, my friends. In fact, her son is who I think about when some grown adult man sends me an email or social media d M about how offended by something he is that I said on a podcast, I wrote in an article, it makes me think about how lucky most of us are, where we have the luxury of of letting the little things bother us, when there are people out there really struggling to get through the day, people who are dealing with real problems. Anyway, that's a sidebar. Becky and I set up in the dark that April morning, and while a few birds gobbled, it was just kind of a slow, cloudy, drizzly morning. We only saw one hen At mid morning, I made the call to relocate to a different blind, one that is situated in the best strutting zone I've ever found in a lifetime of turkey hunting. It's just a phenomenal mid day spot. And as we lug decoys and chairs and gear along the field edge, I picked up a small two point shed antler. It was cool, but it didn't really mean. After we looked at it and checked it out a little bit, we cut across an alfalfa field that was just released from a little snow a few weeks prior. That's when I spotted a much more impressive set of times sticking out of the alfalfa, and then I saw another. In total, Becky and I picked up nine sheds, including a couple of giants, in an area of the size of maybe two acres. It was just a low depression in the field, meaning the bucks could feed there and not be harassed by anyone driving by on a nearby county road. It also made me realize that the buck crop on that farm was a hell of a lot better than I thought it was. Now. I'm not done, though, because that one in a million find of more antlers in twenty minutes than I usually scoop up in an entire winter. It got me back out there to scout more than I ever had. I wanted to know why those bucks were there, and why they were there in such a high concentration. It honestly changed not only how I look at the farm, which I still hunt, but how I think about it, and how there's so much happening in the dear world that I don't understand. That day was amazing, and it only got better when we made contact with a suicidal two year old who was on the prowl at noon and who took a face full of fours at fifteen yards, making Becky's seasons short and very very sweet. While I love taking new hunters on their first successful hunts, I love getting dear lessons as well. Shed Antler's almost every one of them do that for you if you know how to read them. But not all shed Antler lessons are created equal. Take a big four point side you find in a pickcorn field on your private lease. Sure there's something to be had there, but the lesson isn't going to run too deep for starters. You probably knew that deer like to eat corn especially in the winter, and that bucks might spend all night long from December to April in a specific field, nosing their way across it while vacuuming up every colonel a waste grain they come across. That's kind of like, I don't know, putting a trail camera on the edge of a soybean field in the summer. While the picks might be cool and exciting, it probably doesn't teach you much about overall dear behavior. That winter buck dropping his head gear in the corn. He's telling you mostly what you already know. But that's okay. It's a hell of a lot better than not finding a shed. Plus, he's also telling you that, up until the moment half of his rack broke free and fell to the ground, he made it. He survived you and you're hunting buddies. He survived the neighbors who are in the if it's brown, it's down category and who put on an elaborate deer drive on their farm every day of the gun season. He survived the Sunday morning church traffic on the road that borders your property, the constant stream of grain trucks in the fall hauling the harvest to the river, or the co op in the nearest town. He survives the unscrupulous assholes who have no qualms about driving around at two in the morning with some bush latte's on their seat and a spotlight and a suppressed firearm laid over their lap. He survived e H D, C W D, coyotes and whatever else conspires to kill deer on a daily basis. So in that way, that antler is proof of more than life. It's proof that when you think they must all be dead because it feels that way, they aren't. They never are. In fact, I read something on a hunting for him the other day where a poster said no one could come to his state and kill anything bigger than a two and a half year old because bucks never make it past that age in his state. Now I don't know this dude, but I'll bet you he doesn't shed hunt very hard, because if he did, he'd eventually find proof that he's wrong, probably the same way if he just some are scouted more or ran trail cameras more, he'd have to encounter the fact that he's making up things about the age of the bucks in the state. But that's not something a lot of us want to find out, But it could be out there laying in the grass or under the snow, waiting for a march thaw. Now take that same hypothetical four point side, moving a hundred yards to a fence line, the spot where the top strand of barbed wire droops lower than any of the other sections. Drop it there. What do we know now, Well, for starters that leap across the fence, probably jarred the antler loose. Big deal. You might think I would too, But there's more to it. Now. He's telling you where he crossed to get into the food, which tells you, to some extent, where he probably came from. This may or may not be super valuable, depending on when the antler dropped and to what extent the deer in your neighborhood yard up. If he came from ten miles away to hold up with dozens of other deer in a river bottom filled with egg, that isn't really isn't worth that much. But if he's a resident and he didn't follow a centuries old migration path to get to an advantageous chunk of real estate to ride out the winter months, now you're onto something certainly that but could have crossed that fence anywhere, because after all, they are pretty good jumpers. But he chose that spot because it's easier, and very likely it's along as chosen travel route or one of his chosen travel roads. Even if he had to loop a little bit out of his way to get to that easy crossing, it's valuable into you knew where he was going to eat at this time of year, but did you know exactly how he'd get there? Better? Yet, is that something he'd do during the hunting season? Deer travel routes are often just that deer travel roads. They may be totally independent of season or weather, and they are often the lynchpin that holds your whole hunting plan together. So is that antler at that crossing teaching you something about that? If so, pay attention. Now take that same antler, that hypothetical antler we've got, move it twos into the best cover off of the food. That might be along a trail, or it might be smacked aub in the middle of a bed. It might just seem to be laying in the middle of the woods, not related to any type of sign. It might mean that the buck staged there in the waning minutes of daylight as another winter night settled over the land. Do you think that's not valuable? It certainly is, my friends. I've had the good fortune to spend a lot of winter afternoon sitting in various ground blinds while trying to photograph deer. It's a hobby of mine. I just absolutely love it. What I've watched happened over and over and over again is what we all kind of understand but often don't witness firsthand a whole lot, and that is the doze coming out to feed first and the bucks hanging back in the cover. We know this happens because of the order they show up on our cameras or the order in which we see them when we were hunting in the fall, but it's not always easy to witness, so we have to fill in the blank. With a camera on a tripod and the open viewing of winter woods, you can often watch the deer approach the food and see how the big bucks, even when their antlers are long gone stage, even a month or two beyond when they were last hunted by humans, those bucks will stage they set up to watch the first arrivals in the food to see if they set off any alarm. They use the wind, they use their ears, and they definitely use their eyes. You'll see them mill around, nibble on some brows and they just kind of wait. They're just kind of killing time. Sometimes when they do that, they're antlers fall off. If you find an antler in that cover, you might be onto something that bucks do not only in the winter, but we'll do all fall. Whether you can see it in person or not. That's not nothing, and it means there's a lot more to that antler find than just having something cool to put in your man cave or your she shed. Now, of course, you might find an antler in alone and patch a willow brush or maybe sumac or something which might seem kind of out of place or random. One of my daughters found a really big shed last spring in just such a spot near my house in central Minnesota. It was close to a highway, close to a lot of people activity, and as far as he could get from the biggest concentration of hunters on that specific property. That dude had it figured out, and I'd have never known about it until my nine year old's eyes bugged out of her head at the sight of that big antler land there. In fact, even though I can only do hunt that farm, I sat there one night in October this past season just to see and I saw several deer, but the biggest buck, a really solid eight pointer, but not the previous owner of that shed, got up out of that same little patch and worked his way through a cattail slew. This lesson, and it's an important one, is that big bucks used terrain in a specific way. They use cover in a certain way. If you find a good shed somewhere, that buck is shouting something at you about where he likes to be. Your job is to figure out why. It's also your job to try to suss out who else might use that spot and how it can be advantageous to you as a hunter for the rest of your life in the woods. Now, I know you're thinking, well, this is all well and good. If you have a spot to shed hunt that you also hunt. But what if you don't. What if you only hunt twenty acres of ground and you shed hunt a bunch of parks in your county. I'd say two things to that. First, why are you limiting yourself to that small parcel and only one of them find more ground to hunt private public. It doesn't matter. Open up your aperture a little bit. And secondly, those antlers on the ground that you can't hunt can still tell you plenty For starters, the same rules apply as far as reading the situation and trying to hypothesize why the buck was there when he dropped and how he used the terrain around him. I'll give you a real world example of this. I fully admit that I'm not a buck bed hunter. I'm slowly creeping in that direction, or at least trying to figure out how buck beds can make me a better hunter in a variety situations. It's just not my style like it is for a lot of folks out there. I'm still very interested in buck beds, and probably ten years ago I was shed hunting a piece of ground that I can't hunt. As I'll get into in the next episode in much greater detail, I was just trying to follow a new route through that ground so that I wasn't looking at the same trails as I already had on earlier shed hunts. This took me up a hillside that was covered in wrist thick saplings and randomly led me to a little bench, and on that bench was a perfect oval in the grass. And in that oval was my first match set. Even though the buck wasn't a giant and it wasn't on land that I'd ever actually get the bow hunt, that lessons stuck with me. As I admired those antlers, I looked around. The bed was positioned in such a way that undetected approach was nearly impossible with the right wind. A buck betted right there had all of the advantages and multiple escape routes. There was no accident that a buck was using that spot to bed. Years later, I almost caught up to a giant on public land in northern Wisconsin in land that couldn't have looked more different. But that hundred and sixty inchers bed that I found when I went back there and scouted was almost a carbon copy of the one I found while shed hunting that had too perfectly placed antlers in it two miles away. If you think back to last week and about thirty seven other episodes of this show, I've preached the message of time in the woods being one of the biggest, if not the biggest, contributors to success on pressure deer. I cannot stress this enough, and yes, if you're paying attention, this goes for shed hunting. To get out there and cover ground, whether you think you'll find an antler or not. If you don't, you still got some exercise, and you still spend time in the woods looking around, following your instincts, and not sitting at home watching TV or mindlessly scrolling through social media posts. If you do find an antler, and you will, if you shed hunt enough, then you've got a gift, not only in its physical form, but in the sense that the antler got there by one way and one way only. A buck walked to that very spot and dropped it. Why he went there, what he was doing there, and what it all means is up to you to figure out. But what you come up with, not only for that individual deer, but what it means to the dear you'll encounter in the next three decades matters to you as a hunter. That's one of the main reasons I shed hunt a lot on ground that I can hunt and on ground that I'll never hunt. It's also one of the reasons why I'm always on the lookout for shed antlers, even if my goal is just the winter scout or maybe hell, I'm rolling through a new state with a nonresident turkey tag in my pocket. Antler's teach us many things, and they do help us actually kill deer. In the next episode of this podcast, that is the path I plan to take, because while it hasn't happened a ton of times in my life, there have been a few times where I found an antler in a specific spot which has led me to scout and hunt that specific spot, and a few times doing that has put big public land bucks on my wall, which tells me all I need to know about the value of shed antlers. So if you want to use sheds to become a better hunter, be sure to tune in next week. That's it for this show, My white tail loving brothers and sisters. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As I always, thank you so much for listening, and if you more white tail advice, head on over to the metator dot com slash wired and check out our Wired Hunt YouTube channel as well.