The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 783: Does the Moon Impact Deer Behavior?

Episode Date: October 27, 2025

Steven Rinella talks with Dr. Bronson Strickland, Mark Kenyon, Janis Putelis, Brody Henderson, Spencer Neuharth, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.  Topics discussed: In the name of efficiency and how Steve doesn't have room for pleasantries with the people he's close to; what the moon's doing and how it impacts deer behavior; the wildlife that is driven by moon phase; the buck movement study; the moon position; statistically significance and effect size; tortuosity; the powerful placebo effect; and more.  Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. For our friends north of the border, Anex Hunt just got better in Canada. Now you can get nationwide coverage for less than a box of shells. Plus, Anex has dropped big updates to Crownland layers and added parcel boundaries where available. You still get fully functional offline maps, real-time GPS tracking, precise weather conditions,

and customizable map tools you can share with your buddies. If you're hunting in Canada, this is a no-brainer. Download the on-X hunt app. Try it free for seven days. Real hunts rarely go as planned. That's where First Lights Navigator hoodie earns its place. Our crews have run it from September climbs to Cold Front Sits. It manages temps, stays quiet and close encounters,

and wicks moisture on the uphill push. One layer that adapts without hesitation no matter the pursuit, the navigator delivers versatility in any situation. Shop now at firstlight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. This is the meat eater podcast coming at you, shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the meat-eater podcast. You can't predict anything.

Brought to you by First Light. When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds. No compromise gear that keeps me in the field. longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at firstlight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. Free people. Oh, no, the show's starting right now with this ring. Can it start with this ring? Yeah, sounds good. Dialing Mark Canyon. If he doesn't pick up, will we keep it, you think? Hey, Steve.

Oh. Mark, you know who I'm saying? sitting here with? I have no idea. You're on the, you're not on the air, but you know what I mean. You're being recorded. Okay. It's me, Mark. Yonni's here.

Yonis. I'm here with Dr. Bronson Strickland. Great, great guy. And I'm about ready to start telling him about the last thing you told me about deer and the moon. And I'm going to like kind of make you look bad. Then I thought... I don't remember what that could be.

That it was a very interesting point. I was telling you about how, you know, you and I have argued about whether deer are impacted by lunar phases. Yep. You're very... I mean, you're very aware of this debate. Very aware of it. Although, I'm not sure what you're going to say my position is on it.

Well, I'll tell you what you said the last time we talked, Mark. It was a long time ago, and it's stuck in my head. It's stuck in my craw. you were you were kind of hinting at that that science can't detect the subtle differences that could the subtle subtle things that could make a difference between your success and your failure

where you're like if that buck steps out of the woods a minute earlier that could be the difference and science can't find that yes so when I say about how you think that you still think that well that has been not my

position but my no you didn't put it to me like a question so I've always said that that is the question that I feel like science has yet it's like there's all these studies that show that cold fronts don't impact movement in a statistically significant way or the moon in many different ways has not shown yet to make a statistic significant difference.

So I've always been curious, though, because on one, we see that in all the studies, on the other hand, you have all of these other hunters with anecdotal evidence that, you know, that says that's not the case. And so my question has always been, maybe, maybe we're just not measuring it in the same way, or in quite the right way to plus these tiny little possible edges that you could get. So I'm still, like, very much on the fence, so, Steve. Like, I'm just curious. I'm moon curious, is how I've always described myself.

We already talked about you being moon curious. I'm Mark, I'm Mark curious. You know, and Bronson has done a really good job of a lot of this stuff. So I'm glad you're talking to him because he's someone who I listen to a lot. And he certainly knows better than I. I'm simply a guy with questions. Yeah. Remember how I said you're on the air, Mark?

Yeah. Well, you know what I found all is interested in our day? after the after learning at the year or day where the FCC start like threatening people for saying stuff they didn't like yeah I was like the FCC has nothing to do with podcasts but then I was like do they the FCC has nothing to do with podcasts

is that a question or statement no I'm telling you it's true because you're not on the air you're not on the air we're not using the air so we can say like things and the FCC won't threaten us and take the show off the air so if they get mad about this lunar face stuff. There's nothing to do about it. Thank goodness, because we've been saying a lot of crazy stuff about the moon over all these

years. I would hate to be brought to court on those past statements. You can do this the hardware or the easy way, Mark. That's what they say. All right, man. We'll talk to you later. Thank you. When the episode comes out, why don't you listen? And we'll try to find out if what you're saying is a thing or not.

I'm looking forward to it. As we just said. You didn't say goodbye to him. I don't really do that Never? No. Not even if it's your wife? Definitely not. No, that is a rule of Steve's It's a... No, I'll tell you. It's in

the name of efficiency That please Thank you, hello, goodbye. Once you Achieve a certain intimacy with Steve I fall in this category as well That those pleasantries are out the window Yeah, I think I... That happens to me too And then I watch it happen to someone else

And I was like, oh, wait a minute. You want, if you really want to dig it. See, you're on the club. If you really want to dig out, I'll take a quick break to dig on this for you. I like, there's people I talk to. I like the main people in my life. I like, I talk to him. I like to talk to him a lot. So that any time we talk, it's only about what we have to talk about. The minute I go too long and I haven't talked to somebody, then I dread talking to them because we've got to do all the parts of talking that I don't want to do. you know what I mean how's the family so if I keep up like a cadence like if I call yani I don't need to get into like oh geez how you been is a house holding up yeah you know I mean you know and like wind up in something like that yeah I come to expect no small talk so I just

like if I call yunny and like hey blank blank blank and he's like blank blank and then we just hang up because we like kept up on it and we don't have to do like whatever it did happen to your cousin you know what I mean or whatever you know what I mean like it's just better that way so I just like to but I tell my wife I love her and I can always tell my how I stand with her because I'll do it because I'm just trying to find out if she's mad at me about something so if I go I love you and she says I love you then we're cool if I go I love you and she just hangs up then like oh my god now what now okay you know I mean so that's how I find out if I got to like if I'm that's how I find out if I'm like cool or not when I go home

the longer I've been gone the less likely I am to get the return you know Things get frosty at home. Joined today by Dr. Bronson Strickland of University of Mississippi. Mississippi State University. Damn. Is that a big mistake? That's a pretty big mistake.

Well, it's not on here. To make up for us, say hottie-toddy. It's right. It is on there. Oh, shut on you to do it again. Where do I see it on here? The bigger letters. Dr. Brown.

Johnson is the St. John family professor of wildlife management and the Extension Wildlife Specialist for Mississippi State University. And what do you say when you say that? Hotty Totties. Yeah, do that. Hottie Totties. Oh, I'm kidding. That's another mess up. You've offended more Mississippi State folks.

Oh. Yeah. What does it mean? Hot, hot like Christmas drinks? I don't think hotty toddy means anything. It's a different school in Mississippi. Yeah, that's Ole Miss. We booze it up, hoti toddy.

Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. Mississippi State University. There you go. Did his B.S. degree in Forest Resources from the University of Georgia. Did a master's degree, Texas A&M, Kingsville, Ph.D. from Mississippi State University. Bronson is a co-director of the MSU.

Here's where things get interesting. He's a co-director of the MSU deer lab, a certified wild, Wildlife Biologist and professional member of the Boone and Crockett Club. We're here to make this is the most important podcast ever, um, ever done, I would say. Because this is going to be the final answer. We hope. Yeah. Dudes out there that are like, that are, they argue about like the moon phase.

And if I'm talking to Jay Scott, we're going to go down to Mexico. for coo's deer and he's talking about what dates to go and he's talking about what the moon's doing on those dates is all of that true or not true every old man young man not even old man every hunter has an opinion about

what is the moon doing and how does it affect deer movements Jay Scott is one of those guys I don't know where he stands now everybody changes I used to just believe it too because I like well I used to believe that squirrels that red squirrels bit the nuts off gray squirrels because that's what I was told yeah

he he will definitely push us one way or another in January according to what the moon's going to be doing when you know so I have a lot of I have a lot of friends that are lunar guys moon guys and like here's the deal and when we started playing and I thought I had a conversation with crin about it and I'm like um

it's not ridiculous I mean, what's not ridiculous about it is look at all the wildlife that absolutely 100% is driven by moon phase. Okay, like turtle nesting, like when turtles hatch, turtles like shore nesting turtles that lay eggs, their eggs hatch on a new moon. Some species hatch where it's real dark. Okay. What are kind of examples we have? I mean, there's tons of things, man. Fish.

Tides and fish. Yeah, think about it's huge. Well, here's another one for you. I remember they, um, you ever hear the writer, Barbara Kingsolver? She had a book called High Tide in Tucson and it was a book of like science writing. Was it King Solver? Was it, uh, it's King Solver. It is.

Yeah. They took these mollas. Um, and brought them to Tucson to a university. What, universities in Tucson? camera they took these clams yeah whatever the hell it is ASU I believe it was clams I'm sure it was clams they had these clams in an aquarium in Tucson and um

they didn't need the ocean to tell them what the tide was doing their whole groove became tied to their whole feeding groove became tied to the moon and it's not even enough like it's an imperceptible like the effect on an aquarium is like imperceptible right but those suckers tuned in and stayed on a lunar they stayed on a lunar cycle without even being where there's a giant tide swing right they just knew so it stands the reason with with all these different creatures migratory birds right it stands the reason like yeah the

moon impacts stuff so for someone to say that the moon impacts how bucks move it's not crazy It's not like dumb. It's not. So, yeah, that there is a lot of evidence for some species. And I think the species you mentioned, that does make sense. The gravitational pull affecting the tide or moonlight affecting visibility. All that stuff to me makes perfect sense. And I think there's a lot of examples in the literature for that and it being useful.

But what I come back to is, but what. made it that way? How did the story begin for white-tailed deer? Where has there ever been evidence that is influencing white-tailed deer except for paw-paw? The stories that are passed down from grandfather to death, you know, and it just becomes part of the story, and it makes it fun, and it makes it interesting, and humans are always looking for patterns, and we're really good at looking for patterns, even when they don't exist. And so it adds, I think, this element to making it more interesting when the bottom line is, in my opinion,

and I think the evidence is very strong, they're not influenced by the moon whatsoever. And then you think about the natural history of deer and you start asking your question, why would they be? Something to do with visibility. Yeah. Well, in reading like historic texts, you'll often find people pre-flashlight and stuff, people traveling by horse. If you read historic texts, you'll often find people planning trips to have their trip coincide with a full moon for better nighttime travel.

So I used to think on the deer thing, I'm like maybe just historically, when it's a full moon and you're out at night, because there's more light, you become aware of deer around you. So you can see the deer. You can see them. And so you think in your head, maybe you wind up thinking, maybe people wound up thinking when there's a full moon, the deer are out. They're always out. Just because you're seeing them. And so you're like, I'm out, because I'm out traveling at night because it's a full moon.

I can see. I see deer because it's a full moon. And therefore, I don't know, people land on that idea. That's a wild. I'm like, I'm grasping at straws. be like where did that come from but but i like like probably the other guys in the room you can like i'd love to hear yani and spencer like how if you can remember where it come from um where your idea about this came from and then and then um dr strickland i'd love to hear

when you guys did the survey if you could talk about how 83 83% of hunter of surveyed hunters 83% agree that affects moon. The moon affects deer movement. What they don't agree on is why and how. Right. Right. They don't agree on what it does, how it does it,

but they believe it does something. But do you remember, Yanni? Sure. I would say for me, it didn't really come down generationally. It wasn't, because basically for me growing up, before I came out West

and started hunting professional, really. It was maybe five to ten days of archery in Michigan, two or three days of shotgun, and then I'd get three days of rifle in Wisconsin. That was like my entire big game hunting year. So we were going to be hunting no matter what. Yeah, on those days, you know? Like, yeah, it's like, you never get to the point. I'm taking the opening day off this year.

I'm not hunting the opener because the looter phase. You know, just there's no way, right? Yeah, exactly. And my dad just never got into it to that level either, which is where I would have got it. So I just started learning about it once I started reading hunting magazines and doing research on my own. And you would encounter it as fact.

Yeah. I would say that where I felt like it actually played a part in my hunting was that when I was an elk hunting guide in Colorado, usually the second rifle season would coincide with a pretty, big moon. It would also coincide a lot of times with some warmer weather, extreme amount of hunting pressure, and it was always our hardest week of hunting. We'd still kill some out, but man, it was always our hardest week. So a lot of factors at play there, but it always would seem like that week would also have a big moon. And in my mind, it was like, of course, they're just up all night

feeding and by time we get to the meadow half an hour before daylight they're long gone they're you know in bed that's the version I was raised on yeah I was raised on but again I was raised on on the

full moon they feed all night so they don't need to feed in the daylight hours but it had zero it was just an observation it was an observation but it did not dictate your dictate your habits right it was like you had a two-week gun season you're gonna hunt you know whatever we weren't like going out or not going out based on it but it was just like you'd be like

oh it's too bad that there's a full moon on the opener they'll be out less because they fed all that convenient excuse or if you're successful you did it in spite of a full moon like damn was that your awareness of what the moon was doing i i think um when i was a kid there was a communal anti full moon take from like the deer hunters in my area and it was just a very rudimentary understanding of of uh like what moon what moon phase would do to deer movement and it was like today and i feel like in the last 20 years there will be very like hyper specific moments of the moon that are good or bad for deer movement it's like if a new moon is rising underfoot in the morning like that's a thing people will say when i was a kid though it was just like full moon

bad and it was it was not that they were up feeding all night it was that they were chasing tail all night so they were tired they were like exhausted come first light and so now uh you're actually going to get some movement like late morning early afternoon and so that is like a stronger time to be in the woods or it's now as good as the morning or the evening that's like a take can you hit me that again if if it's a full moon since he's been chasing those all night he's chasing those all night he can see things so well it's like uh it's not that no one even turned the lights off tonight you know they can they can chase them all through the hard woods all out in the cornfields so now they're tired come sunrise at 730 a.m so they're just bedded down somewhere already got it

but now they're getting a little restless come like 11 a.m. and so they're going to be on their feet a little more from that 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. period kind of unorthodox he's been in bed so long yes yep and then uh you know now it's really thrown off his schedule and that that that like he's going to make movement it's probably not going to be as good for like that last you know 30 minutes a shooting light either because his whole schedule's just off at this point

you know what's coming to my mind I like that we always think about how the full moon would be beneficial to these animals right like they can chase more tail or they can feed better all night long right but they're prey animals so like really

the wolves can see them better the coyotes can see them better even better. Let's hear from the expert. Okay, let's start out. Tell us about your survey. We just gave you three like really two really well reasoned. Yeah, we just gave you two of the things that are floating around out there, but tell us about

the survey you did. Okay, so before I get to that, let me tell you how this happens. So we did a buck movement project for a completely different reason. And so And so seven or eight years ago, I thought, oh, well, this is going to be a great opportunity. We have all these daily movement rates. And so I'm going to tinker with this real simple analyses.

I'm going to take these daily movement rates averaged for the population day by day by day. And daytime movements, nighttime movements. And it was very apparent that when you plotted that from September all the way to six weeks, two month or a month plus post rut all the variation in movement was apparent is the rut is the rut difference in daytime movement night time movement so here we go i'm going to put this on facebook so on top of that movement graph i plotted the oscillation of full moon new moon full moon and had those superimpose on each other and so you can see that from from from the phase of the moon from new to full in that period there's a little there's no variation

in deer movement whatsoever and so i put it out there on facebook appears to me you know the biology and and the science is very clear that that there's nothing going on with the moon phase what state mississippi yeah come up this is a thing people are we really got this is a thing they will would, yeah, okay. They will, yeah. They'd be like, well, you didn't study the deer in Wisconsin. Yeah. Well, the typical thing.

This is why you can't win. You can't win. Yes. They won't even say, uh, in my state, it'll be, but my deer do this. Do our moon, our moon deer. Yes. And so the. I got, I got a, because one thing that you got, I never encountered it before.

So when you're talking about that you're graphing movement, can you, uh, is this the yards per hour, which is great? Okay, can you explain that to people? Like when you say, like, you're measuring movement, what, like, what does that mean? What's the metric? Yeah, we typically do yards per day or yards per hour. Okay. That's the measurement.

And that's from the sequential GPS locations. So we're getting a location from them every 15 minutes. Okay. And so it's just the sum of that over whatever period of time and you come up with a rate of movement from that. Got it. So I put that out there and a couple people were, yeah, I knew nothing was going on with this. was but the overwhelming response was this guy's an idiot me this guy sure sure and that it has nothing to do with the moon phase that's what grandpa talked about what was moon phase it's

moon position it's the so lunar aspect of it that that's what's driving it so it's what time of the day is the moon overhead underfoot setting uh things like that Where is the moon on the horizon and the supposed gravitational pull and how that might be impacting? That is what got people interested in that. So that was all the deal. And I didn't have any data at that point to refute it. So I just tucked that away like this. Just another egg-headed college guy.

Talk about the moon. Yeah, a lot worse than that. But yeah. And so that data set sat there. And we, you know, I was holding that. We've got to do this. We've got to do something more sophisticated. And I was very lucky to have a co-worker, a research analyst of postdoc named Natasha Ellison.

She has a PhD in mathematics. So undergraduate master's PhD in mathematics with the application to biology and movement ecology. And she actually tinkered with quantum mechanics for her master's degree. One of her famous statements was the math really wasn't that challenging for physics and quantum mechanics with her master's degree. So she's at the tip of the spear and understanding how to disentangle all this. And I'm sure she chuckled and rolled her eyes when I told her it's like, Natasha. We got a problem with bucks.

We've got an opportunity. And this is going to be something. No other academic is going to spend this amount of time and emotion going to. into this life. We've got a real opportunity to do, hopefully do something special. And so she analyzed it at a, at a way, a level of detail that had never been done before. And so, but when we were digging into that and when we were trying to figure out what we're going to do, how we're going to do it, et cetera, we thought, you know what? We need to do a survey. We need to, we need to figure out what, what people think and what are their expectations from if there is a moon effect? How big is it? And so we use

the term in science called effect size. And so is something statistically significant or not? That's what people hear all the time. It's really not as important as effect size. Effect size just means the difference between the treatment and the control. You get a 1% increase, 50% increase, 100% increase, that is what's the most important to people. So we did a survey and got to say this. This was not a sociology sanctioned, sophisticated survey in that department. This was the MSU Deer Lab, us doing a social media survey and just saying, hey, all you people out there, what do you think about this? So what came back was, yeah, 83%, 83% of the people that responded thought the moon is affecting deer movement in some way.

And then a subset of that, which was always more than half, you say, okay, if it is affecting deer movement by how much. And the effect size they reported or the differences they reported for something like betting, the difference in betting, was at a minimum, they're on their feet 30 minutes earlier, or they're on their feet up to two hours earlier. The moon is stimulating them to get up out of their bed two hours earlier. The distance that they were moving in terms of velocity was always at least 50 yards per hour to greater than 200 yards per hour. So these people that are believing the moon is stimulating movement, they're all in. Got it.

They're different animals under a specified moon condition. Bronson, were those respondents, were they all from that general area in Mississippi, or were they nationwide? Nationwide. Okay. Yeah, nationwide, certainly. Was there a specific concentration among, you know, was 25%? Although nationwide, 25% of respondents from, like, Texas or something. Difficult for us to tell because that was, I can't remember if it was Facebook or Instagram.

And you might be able to disentangle that. I can't. Hunting big country isn't for the faint of heart. You got steep ground, long distances, and miles of crown land that aren't always easy to navigate. That's why Anex Hunt just got a serious upgrade for hunters in Canada. Now you can get nationwide coverage for less than the cost of a box of shells with major updates to crown land layers and new parcel boundaries where available. Scout access boundaries and terrain with confidence before you even lace up your boots. Whether you're chasing elk in the mountains, spotting mule deer in the coolies, or looking for big woods white tails,

Anex gives you the tools to plan smarter and hunt harder. You'll still get fully functional offline maps, precise weather conditions, real-time GEOD, PPS tracking and customizable markups to share with your crew. Big Country demands better intel. Download on X hunt and start your seven-day trial to get dialed before your next trip. When the temperatures drop and the rut heats up, your system needs to hold up. This is where First Lights core and thermic kits come in. The core kit adds warmth without bulk, perfect for all day sits during shifting weather.

And the thermic kit, it's built for the brutal cold. durable and designed for hunters who don't head back to the truck when the forecast turns because late October isn't forgiving. Cheap gear folds, bulky layers get noisy. First Light helps you stay focused when everything else is working against you. There's no shortcuts, no compromise. The long sit starts here. Head over to firstlight.com and get cold front ready.

That's first light, L-I-T-E dot com. when they did the survey and you had 83% say that it did something was it did you find that there was a lot of contrary that they had contradictory opinions meaning some people thought they moved earlier people thought they moved later or did you find like was let me put a different way instead of exploring all the exceptions what if you had to synthesize it make it that like the general impression was was what among surveyed people yep So during the day, they bedded less, meaning they're on their feet more. They are on their feet, if you're thinking about an afternoon movement bout. They're on their feet earlier. And when they are moving, they are moving at a greater rate of speed, all of that, which would result in greater observability. When there's what happening with the moon? Name it.

Oh, okay. So it's an idea that there's more movement, but there's, but like the general conception is, the general perception is that what, depending on what the moon is doing, it drives more movement. But there's not a lot of, there's not a lot of agreement about what the moon needs to be doing to drive more movement. Yeah. It's not like a, it's not like a full moon gives more dear movement. People might disagree about the detail, but something happens and there's more movement based on the moon. I'm not doing a very good job of articulating this. There is a moon situation for every person and their pet hypothesis for when I want to go hunt.

It's either I'm going to go with the moon overhead or the moon underfoot or the moon is setting or rising or it's a full moon or we're in the perigy or apagy because of the gravitation. It's closer or it's further away. every single day you can pull out a scenario of what the moon is doing got it and but whatever that is it's driving movement no it's not no i'm saying no no in their mind yeah and so and then and then in their mind of a and i'm not trying to dog on them yeah like in the mind of because like i said i used to i used to think there was something to it is it fair to say that that people that believe it also believe that there's like the opposite effect meaning let's say you're a full moon

like you're a full moon guy you're a full moon guy like I see more deer movement at a full moon do they do they usually then believe that there is a opposite effect so a new moon equals yes an extreme on the other

example yeah like much less movement yeah that's the reason the deer weren't moving today yeah I got you so it's not just it creates a spike but it's sort of this this like trend that moves in and out. Yeah. And it has a top and bottom to it. A spike and then a suppression.

Yeah. Yeah. During daylight hours, and that's what we focused on, what hunters are going to see. Yep. What did your study find that did impact deer movement? Just the rut? Yeah. So, um, crepuscular periods.

So nothing supersedes this. Nothing comes even close to superseding sun up and sundown down. and the rut. There is a subtle, subtle effect of temperature. And that is what Natasha, it's really complicated and it's multivariate. All these variables are interacting, but there is a subtle effect of temperature. Meaning, in our neck of the woods, it would be different up north. And our neck of the woods, when you start getting sub 40 degrees, we will see a little bit more higher of a movement rate during daylight hours.

I feel like you saying that is like the hottest take a deer biologist has ever had on deer temperature movement and, yeah, deer movement based on temperature. Well, this is the guy right here that said for more than a decade, it had nothing to do. We do not see any signature whatsoever of temperature, but it took more data and it took the right type of person analytically to tease apart very, very subtle differences, a skill set that I didn't. have yeah uh can you lay out um you do the survey and then you got to start pulling data like the survey is just kind of a side project to see where you're at yeah so to go get us definitive picture of this what are you doing like how many deer are you monitoring how do you monitor the deer like like what is the sort of scale of the project yeah so yeah this is one thing we we wanted to do different and probably one of

the issues in the past, including the stuff I did in the past, is treating the population as the population and not looking at individuals. There's a lot of individual variation in buck movements. Some of them are home bodies. Some of them have very disjointed home ranges that we call a mobile buck personality home range. Some of them move a whole bunch. Some of them don't move a lot. So we don't want to just put all of that together and come up with an average. We want to be able to look at every single buck and what is his movement profile and then look at when you evaluate all these different moon conditions is the buck's behavior movement behavior deviating from the norm is that buck yeah you're looking at i see like what is he what is

buck a or buck one 21 what is buck one 21's normal groove that's right and then how does buck 121's groove switch at the moon. That's right. And then buck 128, same thing. And one of those bucks might be like a dude that likes to cruise and one of those bucks might be a dude who likes to stay home. Yeah. So the guy that cruises, does he cruise more?

Yeah. There's the stay home guy cruise more. Yeah. I got you. And so Natasha went through. And so for every single buck, she created a 14-day window. So this is a moving window. And so for every 14 days, she looked at the second.

seven days prior, seven days behind, and calculated for every single hour of the day. So for this buck at 10 a.m., she has a movement profile of what the average response for that buck will be at 10 a.m., calibrated for the prior seven days and the future seven days. And so when we have some moon alignment or phase or whatever, we then look at, does that buck's 10 a.m. movement pattern deviate because of the moon. And so then you do the sum of those deviations for every single buck that is in the population to come up with a mean response. And that's how we are able to work through a Saturday occurred. Big hunting day, a Saturday, the rut occurred. It was a really warm period.

We had a really a cold front. By doing that and having it a moving average for every single buck, you account for all the extraneous noise that can be going on. Huh. Okay. Off the moon, because now you brought it up. A Saturday, a lot of guys hunting. You mentioned it.

Carpuscular period. So sunrise, sunset impacts. The rut impacts. Temperature impacts, pressure's got to make them not move, right? Sure. Okay. Yeah. So that's true.

I think it's less about it's not that they're not moving. It is where they choose to move based on hunting pressure. And so in another study that we did conducted in Oklahoma, we, and that was set up differently. So that was a treatment area where there was hunting. pressure and treatment area too heavy hunting pressure and a control area and in those places the deer were collared the hunters were collared they were carrying a GPS ship in and so we could monitor where they were going on the landscape and so forth and we're watching the bucks be able to move around them and it literally took three to four days and three to four days of there are hunters

on the landscape it's changed something is different they're moved they're moving the buck's movement behavior changed, not as much as total distance move during the day, but where they went on the landscape. And the academic term is called their tortuosity, meaning the complexity of their movement path changed that we think was because they had to avoid all these different places on the landscape, that they had three to four days of info was going to be a thing. associated with hunting and danger. But his yards per hour, his yards per hour stay up, stay consistent? In that experiment, yeah, yeah, their movement behavior really didn't change other than the

tortuosity and where they went. So, quote, they did not go nocturnal. They were still on their feet because they got to eat. They're on their feet. They're forging. They're just going to areas where they're. They determine there's not going to be hunting pressure, no evidence, no memory of human activity. Yeah, old lady Thompson's house, you know, doesn't let anybody hunt.

Oh, yeah. I was just telling my buddy, Seth, we came out of the woods after we killed the bull I was telling you about earlier. The next night, dead. Not that it was on fire the night before, because we only heard like four or five bugles before that bull died. But the next evening, we hear like a bugle. It's just dead still. quiet and I'm remarking to my buddy Seth. I'm like, yeah, it was kind of hot, no wind.

You know, it's just like, you know, they don't want to rut when I got that big winter coat on. And he goes, well, where I was at yesterday, we're glassing a big herd out in a private hayfield. And at 4.30, they were ripping. Yeah. You know, so it's like. Yeah.

They found a good place to go. Exactly. Yeah. They're going to do their thing. Huh. So the going nocturnal. from pressure, they just go do what they want to do somewhere else. Yeah, yeah.

They just change their behavior on where they spend time. Now, I will say this, there have been cases at the Deer Conference we go to every year. There have been some cases with GPS or VHF collared bucks where in heavily, heavily hunted places, a buck bedded all day long. But I literally, Steve, I remember that one time. In the 30 years I've been going and learning about deer and thinking, I've heard of one instance where objectively a buck had a mark, a radio caller on it or a GPS collar, and it did not move during daylight hours because hunting pressure was all around. And all these other instances, they're up on their feet and moving.

Now, they may not be, you have to look at what's called the step length. the movement path. So step length is a surrogate for velocity. So if you're getting a ping from that collar every 15 minutes, if he's got a really high rate of speed, you're going to cover more distance in 15 minutes. And so what you will see is that their yards per hour can slow down, but they're still on their feet and they're foraging and moving.

there a day we were watching a bull moose doing his like rut wander and he was going through this big alpine area and uh we watched him i mean we watched him go a couple miles fast and we were waiting for him to stop the he was so far away we're like when he stops we'll try to call and see if he registers the noise at all um we watched him go a couple miles and never stopped once just moving just cruising

and you're like where what you know what is his concept of where he's going but just moving

and yeah he's not afraid of anything yeah not afraid of anything yeah uh white tail hunters have this time period

between October 10 October 20 they refer to as the October law and if you were to if you lived a state where the deer season is September 1 to December 31st, they would tell you that is the hardest 10-day stretch to kill a buck because they're nocturnal. What are your movement studies

say about that? There is no lull that that does not exist. Not in any form. Like they're not, not only are they not nocturnal during that period, but they're also like they're moving more in that period than they were October 1 to October 10. I can't say they're moving more, but they're moving. And this just sitting in the Mississippi State data here. This is over and over again that there is no law. But what can be going on at that time is you have got a shuffling, so to speak. It's a little bit late in October.

So think about Bachelor groups during the summer, box low testosterone, velvet. And then we get into September, October, testosterone is surging through their body again. they start getting into hard antler, and then they start shifting and moving around and setting up their fall, winter rut home ranges. So I think what's going on a lot there is you've had a couple months or a couple weeks of seeing the deer that you're normally seeing, and then you get into that period in October where a shuffle is coming. And so they're moving in different areas or they have left your area where your trail camera is at, but they're still moving. Yeah, I think like if I was speaking to hunters in eastern South Dakota where I grew up, I bet they are seeing less movement in that period. But it's because now there's combines in the fields.

It's because there are acorns on the ground. It's because pheasant season just opened and that's kicked deer out of some beds in CRP. Like there is a lull happening that's very specific to them, but it's. not because the buck is now nocturnal, it's because he's just moving in a different way in a different place. You're in a strategic low. Yes. Where like all summer, these five bucks come into that bean field and all of a sudden,

they're not there anymore. Yeah. And I think it can be true that that's like maybe the hardest 10-day window to kill a mature buck, but it's not because he's unkillable. Yeah. He's just in a different place. Yeah. You got to go look for him.

Now, here's what's really interesting. to me is we looked at, so we had to have deer where we had to have two years of them being collared. Okay. So we had a lot of deer come and go. You know, they can kill. Why is that that you had? Why two years?

What's the significance? Because the question that like Spencer was alluding to is, do they have fidelity for a site the following year? So if you see it in a particular place this October. What are the odds you're going to see it next year? So we had to limit our data just to bucks that. So it's a subset that we had two years of data. And it was really amazing is that on the average, when you got to, after that October kind of break up and shuffling,

and when they went back and started settling into that area, the average distance on a daily scale. And so what we did is where is this buck at 5 p.m. October 9th, 2024, where is it at October 9th, 5 p.m. 2025? About a thousand yards apart. Is that right? About a thousand yards apart. See if you're hunting 10 acre parcels. That's a lot. And that could absolutely be off property and you may never see it again. But he's in the neighborhood.

if he's alive. He's in the neighborhood. Yeah. Got it. I used to work with a lot of fish biologists and I found that there were equal number of fish biologists who were hardcore anglers as there were guys who never fished a day a year. Like they just literally never wet a line. And I found that they would ask very different questions when it came to what they were studying. What do you notice for what percentage of deer biologists are hardcore hunters versus guys who just like never fill a lot? tag.

Good question. Are you a big hunter? I am. Okay. I am, which... Do you think that's normal? Yeah. Yeah, I do.

I guess hardcore is a scale, you know? I would say probably 75%. There are absolutely some that love deer and just ungulates, you know, and study that type of stuff that aren't big hunters. But I would say on the white till side, at least the ones I'm thinking about off the on my head they all hunt until like that 25% you don't think those folks hunt at all probably not okay i think they're enamored with the deer and ecology of it the system really excites them yeah but then picking up our bow or rifle just isn't their thing and do you

notice anything different with like those biologists yeah the questions okay the questions they asked uh typically that type of part and this isn't good or bad it's just different but i think it needs both like the the field needs both of those yeah yeah right i would say they're more uh the the theory type stuff which is really important ecological grounding in theory and then people people like me is more about the application and you know my role's extension so then what's the application how do i tell people about it what does it mean to you for hunting your land or managing your land yeah i want to hit with a bunch of Once we cover off on them, we sold this pretty heavy on the moon thing, but let's, let's put the moon thing to bed.

So I want to get into other things that drive. I want to get into other things that drive changes in movement and other things about, like you mentioned, that different deer have different personalities. I'd love to hear more about that. Okay. Let's close out on this moon thing for a little bit. Okay. Put some numbers to us or put some way of expressing the, the, the, how much. much you can rule out and how much could still be up for grabs meaning mark's thing is like hey

listen if a buck comes out if i'm watching a buck and i can't catch him out in the daylight and he comes out five minutes early because of the moon phase that's a big deal to me are they catching that in their research you know that was this question right like like when they're looking at these general things like they they generally don't change their behavior but he says but let's say it's just five minutes, right? That to me matters. Yeah. Like when you look at it, how, like, what degree of certainty are you comfortable putting on, um,

that there is or isn't any impact? Because you're always going to have guys that are like, he doesn't know what he's talking about. Yeah. Yeah. Or he's not detecting what I'm seeing. Yeah. Because I'm seeing things at a micro scale and he's looking to macro. And, and I don't ever think we can produce anything that's going to affect that that person.

Um, so when you get and not got feedback from people. And this was part when we, when we reached out initially doing the survey, we had, and I would call them the saddle bow hunter. I mean, they are just locked in. They, they're trying to hunt close to cover. And so if, if, if that buck is walking out 30 seconds earlier and five more steps, I got a shot. Yeah. Um, so what we looked at is, of course, like we explained earlier, deviation from normal. We did 85 different analyses. So we made 85 different comparisons of all the different moon stuff you can put together. And the average response for betting time deviations were less than a minute. A couple of them were two or three minutes. But, and not to get too deep in the stats here, when you run that many, analyses. You're going to, you're going to hear your results are going to follow a bell

shape curve. You're going to get some results that were positive. You're going to get some results that that were negative. And so when you look at the body of everything that we did, we had a couple instances where the deer were on their feet a few seconds earlier, maybe a minute earlier. We had some results where they stayed in their bed a few seconds or a minute longer. We had some results where the yard per hour. And so think about that. Put that in your terms. My pace, one of my steps is a yard. And so when you talk about, yeah, we found a big result on such and such a moon condition. They were moving three yards per hour. More. That's three steps. And one hour. Three steps. Now, if that motivates you and that does get back when I'm

given this as a seminar and people are ready to throw beer cans and rotten tomatoes and all that stuff at me, if it makes you feel good, man, if this is your placebo effect, roll with it. If it instills more confidence in you that such and such moon condition, and I'm going to be more alert. And I'm going to get to the stand 30 minutes earlier because it's a red moon day, you know, then by God, keep doing it if it makes shabby. But the evidence does not support it. in college um i i was would get the field and stream magazine and they would always predict the rut the best days of the rut and i think it was maybe a sophomore um and i had saw that like the best day of the rut this year was on a saturday i was available um so i i did what you're talking about i sat in my best stand that day that i had saved for a week leading up to it because i i knew it was the best day of the rut i got there earlier i packed lunch to be there all day i was more alert because i was like it's going to happen um and then a buck showed up and I killed him. And so I was just more confident. And I was, I was a better hunter that day. Yeah, I was going to say this is a great time to bring out. And so I think that

that can work for people. That can be a thing. And keep doing it. If it keeps working for you, keep keep doing it. Keep taking the placebo. Plesebo effect is really, really powerful. There's some cool science behind that as well. Sure. But yeah, you took the words out of my mouth, But I wonder if you had gone five additional times under those exact same conditions and you didn't have a good day. Totally. If you were remembering the good one. If you asked me then, I was like, it was because this was the best day of the rut, as Field and Stream had deemed it. Yeah.

You know, looking back now and since I've like formed my own whitetail opinions, I recognize I was just very confident that day. And Field and that was throughout the range of the white tail deer. Yeah. So this is going to be the day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that should.

Totally. Hunting big country isn't for the faint of heart. You got steep ground, long distances, and miles of crown land that aren't always easy to navigate. That's why Anex Hunt just got a serious upgrade for hunters in Canada. Now you can get nationwide coverage for less than the cost of a box of shells with major updates to crown land layers and new parcel boundaries where available. Scout access boundaries and terrain with confidence before you even lace up your boots. Whether you're chasing elk in the mountains, spotting mule deer in the coolies,

or looking for big woods white tails, Anex gives you the tools to plan smarter and hunt harder. You'll still get fully functional offline maps, precise weather conditions, real-time GPS tracking, and customizable markups to share with your crew. Big country demands better intel. Download Anex hunt and start your seven-day trial to get dialed before your next trip. When the temperatures drop in the rut,

heats up your system needs to hold up this is where first lights core and thermic kits come in the core kit adds warmth without bulk perfect for all day sits during shifting weather and the thermic kit it's built for the brutal cold silent durable and design for hunters who don't head back to the truck when the forecast turns because late october isn't forgiving cheap gear folds bulky layers get noisy First Light helps you stay focused when everything else is working against you. There's no shortcuts, no compromise. The long sit starts here. Head over to firstlight.com and get cold front ready.

That's Firstlight, L-I-T-E dot com. I got one more moon question before we move on. Charles O'Sheimer, he had developed like the Rudding Moon theory in the 90s that caught on with a lot of guys. And the Rudding Moon theory is that the second, full moon after the autumn equinox is what triggers the white tail rut that's like this is the beginning of it and um in his theory he had determined there are three types of white tail ruts you could have it a given year based on when that second moon falls i'll keep back i want to make sure i'm tracking autumn equinox autumn equal not second full moon right okay not the first one the second one when

i got that part but then you said another thing that threw me off so that that second full moon could land in late october it could land in mid november okay based on when that would fall, you could have one of three ruts. You could have a synchronized rut, which is if it's between, like, October 31 and November 5, you could have a classic rut, which is like November 6 to 13, or you could have a trickle rut, which is November 13 on. And it's basically saying that, like, some years, if you have a trickle rut, for example, maybe that bell curve you're talking about is flat at the top, and it's just wider.

Whereas if you have a synchronized rut where you get that full moon on November 3rd, now the bell curve has a really tall peak in it and it's skinnier. Is that anything you've ever seen that some years the rut was longer or shorter? No. No. No, never. Even outside of the moon. Like, never mind the moon. Yeah, not not from year to year in a place. And so when you talk about a, you know, a, you know, a protracted rut or a trickle rut. All that stuff is related to sex ratio of the population. So we can manipulate that with management, but it has nothing to do with the moon.

It is about the availability of doze and estrus and enough bucks to serve them when they are in standing heat. If your sex ratio becomes so biased that the doze and estrus, there is not a buck to copulate. 28 later, days later, she's going to cycle and come into heat again. And there is your trickle or your extended rut. Or if you have do fawns, do fawns will typically, the proportion of them that do come into estrus are going to come in a little bit later. So on a dough, a dough that has a fawn with her and she's trying to get rid of it in the fall, she'll come into estrus later than a dough that did not, that was not carrying a fawn. I'm sorry. I misspoke. No, not everywhere. This varies, depending on where you're at in the U.S. In Mississippi, for example, 10 to 15 percent of dofonds will reach sufficient body size and

condition to come into heat. They're never going to come in at the peak of the rut. It'll be two, three weeks a month later by the time they have reached physiological condition where they can come into estrus. Got it. So that will be part of it. And that can drive a little late rut action. That's your trickle right there. If you do believe in the rutting moon, this year, 2025, it is November 5th. So you're like straddling a synchronized rut and a classic rut, meaning that like November 5 to 10 period. Wow.

It's going to be good. Because I'm going to be in the woods, man. November 5 to 10. All right, let's back it up like this. To be clear, I don't believe in this either. I just love that it exists. Why did you throw out this thing? Because some people do believe it.

And then he, and then he, it's. he says that's not right and then you alert everybody what day to be out there. Because I love that people do believe it. I really appreciate that those folks have taken the time to develop a theory and to spread that theory around. Same reason we had Bigfoot experts

on radio live the other day. Exactly. We need a new believer hat. It's not just the black. A buck of the moon. Yeah, exactly. Oh, that's a great idea. Ooh, correct. A full moon buck that says believer. What's the purpose of

the timing of the ruts. When the fons will hit the ground in spring. Yeah, yeah. Why would Mother Nature? Why would evolution have that affected by some moon? Yeah. So the most reliable clock, of course, is photo period. They can be calibrated so well.

And so it's so important over time of when the dough needs to be bred, seven months later, when that faun is. going to be dropped. Why would evolution fold in any of the moon stuff to tinker with that at all? I mean, biologically or ecologically, that just doesn't make sense. Sure. However, we did test this. And so we did it two ways. We did it at an individual scale, and we did it at a population scale. Individual scale, with our captive deer herd, we looked at records of estrus and copulation for all of our doze. So a population of doze over many, many, many years. And so we know when they were coming into heat and we knew when they were bred. So we have

those records. We then line that up with this rudding moon. And so every year, you know, that rudding moon is moving back and forth a week or 15 days or whatever. And so we should have seen if it was influencing when they are coming into estrus, we should have seen a moving towards that or moving back, zero. Okay. We then go to, let's go to wild populations, and we looked at wildlife management areas. And our state wildlife agency is very good at doing what is called spring health checks. What that does is they harvest doze post-deer season, typically March, and they will look at the

condition of doze and then also look at the number of fetuses that they are carrying. So along with all the general hunter harvest data, that is a way for them to look at what's the condition of this population statewide, so forth. So we know where the rut is in all these places. We know where the peak of the rut is. And so we then line that up with the rutting moon. Zero. No effect whatsoever. So individually, population-wise, logic.

Yeah. Doesn't make sense to me. Because of the Mississippi deer. That's why. It's just those Mississippi deer. Would it be worth just taking five minutes to have Bronson explain what confirmation bias is and how that shows up in hunters? Sure. I think so.

My favorite analogy about this is you go, I don't know, surprise analogy. Like you go out and you fish in small mouths and you're throwing chartreuse and you get a bunch, you're hitting them real good. and then at one minute you throw on a pumpkin-colored jig and you fish it for a couple seconds you don't get a hit you put shartreuse back on and lo and behold throughout the day you keep catching fish they were coming on a shartreuse yeah yeah yeah and like there's something to that because you know if it ain't chartrus it ain't no use but I'm saying

like you do have a way of you know like if you were going to go design a study about what color smallmouth bass are hitting on in some given day it wouldn't be like that you know yeah so i think that you find it's part of the fun you you find patterns and things and and um you know that works for me therefore that's what that's dictated by nature yeah right yeah well that's a that's a deeper question i mean that would be a a psychologist to get into all the logical fallacies and how the brain works with that but i guess the way i think about it is we're really good.

As human beings, we want to find patterns. So we're trying to find the shortcut. We're really good at that. That's helped us. That's helped human beings to be able to link those things together. And that's the pattern. Let's capitalize on it. But the problem that we have is we become enamored with this linkage that we have

between these two things. A leads to B, B leads to C. and we will start ignoring contrary evidence. So it's like we become bought in and emotionally invested in our, and hey, in science, it's called the pet hypothesis. That's why we have to get outside peer review. That's why you've got to talk to a buddy. Help me, help me think about this. I'm really locked in.

Confirmation bias could be bothering me here. But I think that is always going on as we never remember the time. we were unsuccessful. We disproportionately remember the times that we were. And I think if we, if you are a moon believer, you only go hunt in those conditions, or you mostly hunt those conditions that you think are, you know, positively affect your deer hunting.

You're not hunting the other days. And so you only have a data set from those days. Yeah. And it could be exactly the same from the day. days that the moon is doing something completely different. Yeah, and you may be a good enough hunter, and you may be hunting in enough of a target-rich environment where every day you go, you were going to see deer, if that's your metric for success. But you're only going to go on those special days, and then that just keeps reinforcing that this moon condition or weather condition or whatever

was the reason for my success. When the way to do it would be, and nobody's going to do this, I'm going to get a random number generator and I'm going to get a calendar and I'm going to pick out these particular days and I'm going to go hunt. That's a fun study. Or look at camera data. That'd be another way. Just record camera data all the time and go back and look at it. Is this about the moon? It's sort of.

Bloomberg had an article that Bigfoot sightings have decreased in the last decade. They peaked around like 2004 or so, and they've been going down ever since. If deer hunters were, like, very conscious of what their trail cameras are telling them, now that trail cameras are so effective and so cheap, and cell cams are very available, I feel like the same thing would happen that if you pulled deer hunters in 20 years from now, it wouldn't be 83% anymore. Yeah. It would be lower because if they were trying to, like, really pay attention. attention, they would maybe notice it, oh yeah, the moon isn't saying that the deer movement is different based on what the moon is doing. Yeah, I agree. I just think it's going to take a long time because it's really difficult to let go with that belief, especially if within your

little group, you're the older, wiser, you're the influencer. The single most difficult thing for a human being to say publicly, I was wrong. I mean, that's real. That's very powerful. It's so difficult to stand up and go, forgive me. I was wrong. I made a big mistake. People are very reluctant to do that.

I'm going to hit you with a real, I want to bring something up, but I don't want to dwell on it. What's your take on, how do I even ask this, man? I'm concerned. No, no, no. He's just saying he wants a real concise answer. I don't want to get into it. I'm just curious because you're a big deer guy. Deer hunter, deer researcher.

give me give me your basic like in one sentence what's your basic take on c wd it's it's real um it's it's it's the single biggest challenge i believe to deer management and the application of science while simultaneously keeping hunters engaged and believing in science that wasn't very concise No, that's good, though. But that's the way of, it's the challenge of our time. You think it's, you, you believe it's a legitimate threat at a herd level. Yes. Yes.

Yes, I do. Earlier you mentioned, um, different buck personalities. Are there, is it, is it possible to give like a handful of buck personality types? Yeah. Um, and have you heard of a shirker buck? I have not. Okay, go on. Okay.

Different buckter. We'll come back to that. You've never heard of a shirker. I'm not recalling. Valgeist? Oh, Valgeist. I have heard of that word, but man, I'm drawing a blank on what I'm going to come around to it. Yeah, please do.

Give me some buck personality types. Buck personalities. Well, it's just two. Just two. From what we categorize. This is just relative. We call it. Buck movement behavior.

Yeah, that's what I'm getting at. Yeah, I don't mean like what they're thinking about. I mean, what they're, like, personality types in a way that would impact a hunter's experience. Yeah. So that, we call it a sedentary type. That's going to be your introvert. Okay. And then your mobile personality type, that's going to be your extrovert.

The, what people thought for the longest time until we had the type of instrumentation to be able to see this was that after yearling buck dispersal, a buck is going to go set up and have his home range, and that is where it's going to be. Now, the size of that home range can vary by resources. He may be a 500-acre home-range guy. He may be a 1,500-acre home-range guy, but that is where he is essentially going to live and die, is in that fixed home range. What we found is that about 30% of our bucks have completely disconnected and, disjointed home ranges. And so they will spend six, seven, eight months and one location,

and then they will get up and move to a completely different location. Just forget about the old spot. That's right. That's right. The most sensational example, just to show you that intrinsically in some deer, this is in them, that they are going to do it. We call her to buck in Mississippi fall winter. And we started noticing really strange long-distance behavior about February.

So in Mississippi, so we're on the east side of the Mississippi River, he goes all the way to the Mississippi River miles and miles and miles. And then paces up and down the river for a few days

and then crosses the river. And then sets up camp in Louisiana for essentially all summer. Okay. August rolls around. He does the same thing on the Louisiana side. He goes, stages by the river a day or two, getting up his nerve maybe, swims the river, comes back to Mississippi to that exact same home range he was the year before.

Did that two years in a row. So we had four instances of him taking that long distance movement and crossing the Mississippi River. So that's an extreme example of mobile personality. And just the way the crow flies distance, it was just shy 20 miles. Wow. So his route was a lot, a lot more than that. Yeah, and it's like you could see him doing it once, right? And then he has a good experience or doesn't have a good experience.

But the fact that he goes back to Mississippi, then a while later, he wants to, you know what I mean? Yeah. Like repeat it. Yeah, just felt. Or we wind up thinking that it's a bigger deal, that that swim. is a bigger deal than he regards it as. Right. I was reading this thing like these,

these guys were looking at it. There used to be this thing that links, they used to think that links didn't like cross in big rivers. And they thought these big rivers were boxed in, Lynx's home ranges. So they had these links with collars. We're swimming the tan and all. Swimming the Yukon.

You know? And people always saw it. They had just figured that that's a border to the lynx's habitat. That's some bitch is, yeah, right across it. Shoots across. You don't even think about it.

And in the human mind, you're like, oh, that would be a, he can't get across that. He wouldn't want to cross that, a cat, you know. And yet we had some bucks that, and this one, the Mississippi River, we're talking about a normal river. So think a river that's 50 yards across or something. We had some bucks that would go across that every single day. Was not an impediment to them whatsoever.

We had some bucks that would never cross that river. When you look at their home range and all of their points, it is directly adjacent. to that river, they would not do it. Really? So there's just so much variation in their personality and what they're willing to accept. You can't, I guess you probably can't say this.

Is one of those strategies better for longevity? Like, do you find that like super tight, stay at home box, super small home ranges, they have a greater survival rate? Or is it that not, or is that not fair to say? Yeah. We didn't have

enough of a sample size to tease that apart because, again, only a third of them had this mobile personality. But that makes sense to me. I think that's reasonable. I also think of it, this may be a bad analogy here, but I think it's just like embedded within some species and some individuals, there's explorers, there's colonizers. There's individuals that are willing to take a risk and go somewhere else. And, you know, I think when you just go way, way, way back in time, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and you think about the landscape and that deer were always having to colonize different areas based on Buffalo going through, based on wildfire. Sure. And so I just want to think any way that that tendency is embedded within some individuals that I'm going to go look, I'm going to go explore, and I'm going to capitalize.

on some resources unbeknownst to me right here. Oh, yeah, because if not, because as, as environments and landscapes change, if everybody was a super home body, you'd have awesome pieces of habitat open up and, like, word never found. Word doesn't get out. Yeah. With the, with the idea that, like, I've heard this express two ways. Maybe it's not this clean. During the rut, bucks move more.

Okay. I remember I remember someone pointing out, like, they move more, but they don't move to new places more. They just move more in the places that they already move anyways. Is that fair? I don't think that's fair. That's not fair. That's not fair. Okay. So what we were able to do is, of course, we did all the annual home range stuff, but we also looked at two-week home ranges. daily home ranges and a term called net distance or net displacement. And the bottom line is you will see the greatest home range, if you look at it in two-week periods, during the peak of the rut and during the late rut or immediately after the peak of the rut. But the amount of area that a buck is spending each day, it did not matter if it was pre-rut, no rut, way after the rut, 200 acres.

per day. I'm not following what you're saying. Okay. On a daily scale, independent on the time of year, rut phase or not, peak of the rut, post-rut, pre-rut, et cetera, did not matter. Even though their daily ground they were covering could be greater during the rut, the amount of area that they recovered was 200 acres per day.

but when you look at the very next day where they're at, it will be further apart, meaning a buck is spending covering ground, about 200 acres of ground per day, but during the peak of the rut and late rut, those daily areas or places are further apart. Really? Maybe I should say to different way. Does he make like a single move and then do the 200-yard circuit and then makes a single move into another 200-yard circuit? Is that what you're saying?

Yeah. So maybe think of it like this. When you get into a non-rut and early pre-rut, every single day, there is a great deal of overlap in the area of Buck is covering. He might have an overlap of 80% of the area. He covered the day before. He's in this area. But when you get to later in the rut, because now they're seeking, they're chasing,

they're looking. Now we're spending 200 acres away over here, 1,500 yards away. He's in a completely different area. He's covering the same amount of area in a 24-hour time frame, but the distance away from the dates. He's exploring new spots. Yeah. Really? So do you feel as a hunter then, are we trying to capitalize on that move between the two spots? If you can. I mean, if If you can find out where that is, sure. I mean, that's why a rut funnel would be a good place to sit, right? Okay, I think you've got to frame it like this. If you've got a lot of intel on a buck, I mean, I know from camera data observation,

I know kind of where he's going to be, the best chance for that is pre-rut. But if you want to go out, I'm going to go to the woods, and what are my greatest odds of seeing a buck, a good buck? then because of that movement behavior, that is absolutely. So the one that hides out at Old Lady Thompson's might be off on your spot. That's right. That's right. He's going to shift.

He's going to move. Yeah. No, really? I can show you the data, yeah. Okay, let me, I'll hit you no one. Then these guys can hit you with whatever they want. Do you, this might not be something you can tell from your data. Do you think it's true that bucks,

play the wind and cruise for doze by coming on the downwind side of bedding cover uh i think probably 50% of the time they do okay so they're not visually looking for them i think or they do but they they in addition to visually looking they're cruising to smell them yeah the what we generally think of right now and this could have a lot to do with those 200 acre daily areas being so far apart and disjointed, what we think is that bucks are cruising to find what are called doe focal areas. So think about the social behavior of your dough population, those matrilineal groups. And so here's a group of does here. Here's a group of does over here. We think of it as a circuit. And so a buck is going to go into this area. He knows who.

Who all's there, you know, via signposts, sent, so forth. He's going to check it. Sent check it. Who's good or bad? Anybody close coming into heat? Maybe she's already into heat, but occupied. He's going to go to another area part of that circuit and look for Addoin Estrus there. Okay.

I lied. I got one more question. Then these guys can hit something. I asked this early about kind of screwed it up. During peak rut. is there like a high is there a strong likelihood or however you want to put it is there a strong likelihood that a buck will go somewhere during peak rut that he has never before been in his life or is he usually at some point in his life been to all the places he's going to go so he's visiting

places he knows about or is he legit like going spots he's never seen before um i think the answer is yes but i don't think that is just during the rut. So the way we would define that would be called an excursion. And so that would be different from a mobile personality like we talked about earlier, because that is where you set up a new home range and you have affinity for that area. And excursion is, I'm in my existing home range and I'm going to take a trip. A two to three day. I'm going to cut a loop and go here and go here. We see those start to occur during the pre-rut, and it really escalates during the rut. But with our data during our study, we saw the greatest amount of excursions in the post rut. So after the

rut. But excursions being that he, again, like, he's going to, it might be hard to do is because he can't track him his whole life. He's going to places he's never been. I can't answer that. Because you don't know where he's, because you can't, you don't know his whole life history. I don't have his whole life history. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. But we, we definitely saw the the bucks going to novel areas within the limited time frame we had them studied we did in other words we didn't see the exact same excursion loop every time they would go different areas yeah and so yeah we think they are looking prospecting whether it be those food resources whatever because that's when you get like really vulnerable man like you get really vulnerable to something bad happened to you

when you're in places you've never been like you're on like you're on some do you mean you have no idea what's going on and like that to me feels like a that to me feels like a buck would get like dude i'm not doing that yeah do you know i mean like i'm not like i've never been there i have no idea what's happening it just seems like they'd feel so vulnerable and from a dear management perspective i mean if you do the kind of stuff we work on with you know you're you're managing for antlers and older bucks and so forth that is where even with a large area so you may have a five 10 000 acre tract and you were primarily controlling the harvest within that population, except for the excursion. Yep.

And so that is where you will see some of those target bucks are going to go off property. And man, they get hammered. Yeah. Yeah, you go over to the place for the, you know, Brown, it's down property. They get shot. And that is so frustrating because you've done everything all year long for years and years and years. And you have that weekend where he decides to take a trip. It was funny is, uh, I know these guys.

and they have a big no fence operation in Texas but they they want up doing one fence they fenced one property line because they have some brown it's down neighbors and so they just tried to like control it a little bit by blocking that spot right you know the other three sides are do whatever they want yeah I got a couple places like that too it's that pinch point that corridor of where they're going to go onto that other property and we're going to block that off. Yeah, these dudes' stands. It's so funny is these dudes' stands are all,

we're all along that property line. Oh, yeah. Just waiting, you know. Yeah. All right, I'm done. Hunting big country isn't for the faint of heart. You got steep ground, long distances, and miles of crown land that aren't always easy to navigate.

That's why Anex Hunt just got a serious upgrade for hunters in Canada. Now you can get nationwide coverage for less than the cost of a box. of shells with major updates to crown land layers and new parcel boundaries where available. Scout access boundaries and terrain with confidence before you even lace up your boots. Whether you're chasing elk in the mountains, spotting mule deer in the coolies, or looking for big woods white tails, Anex gives you the tools to plan smarter and hunt harder. You'll still get fully functional offline maps, precise weather conditions, real-time GPS tracking, and customizable markups to share with your crew.

True. Big Country demands better intel. Download on X hunt and start your seven-day trial to get dialed before your next trip. Big news, folks. The third volume in our Meat Eaters American History audiobook series is available right now wherever you get your audio books. That's right. It's available now. It's called Meat Eaters American History, the hide hunters, 1865 to 1883. It tells the story of the commercial buffalo hunters who drove. North America's most iconic large land mammal to the brink of extinction in the years after the Civil War. You'll learn all about how these guys, with nicknames like Dirty Face Jones, Skunk Johnson, and Squirrel Eye Emery did what they did, how they organized their hunting expeditions, what they took with them, what guns they shot, how they hunted, how they processed their

kills, why they did it in the first place, and how they died. You'll also learn about the economic factors that made this a viable profession and what happened to those millions of buffalo skins once they were shipped east. And like we do in all of our Meat Eaters American History projects, we included wild stories and bizarre details from this era, and we didn't leave out any of the gory bits. check out meat eaters American history the hide hunters 1865 to 1883 wherever you get your audio books The October boogeyman

is the October lull for hunters The November version of that Is lockdown Where there's an idea That there is a phase of the rut For like two to four days Where a buck Gets a hot dough around like November 16th

And they bed down And they breed And they just become less visible and they just become very dedicated to that spot and like rutting with each other. I don't care what he says. This is true. Is that a thing?

Do the deer movement studies show that that's a thing? Yeah, they just stand there. Yeah. Like the doze are feeding and he just stands there. He doesn't lay down. He doesn't eat. He just stands there. Yeah. That's legit. That's legit. I don't know. I thought you're going to tell us. Because everything else you're like, no, that's not true.

That's legit. So you get like in the peak of the rut, This is going to occur all the time when there is a dough in estrus. It becomes a population, a level effect, or it becomes noticeable when a greater proportion of the doves are in standing heat and bucks are tending them. So you're going to have less bucks available roaming the landscape because they're locked in to an estrus stove. If there are too many doves, if there are too many does that happens, you're saying. No, I'm saying that if you had an appropriate. number of doze. Okay.

That's going to happen. Like in some magical world, every dough, like you have some thing where it was, every dough in a population all came into heat on November 7th. It would be reasonable to assume that on November 7th, no bucks are running around doing crazy stuff. Right. Because they're standing there with all these doughs that are. Exactly.

And then 28 days later, you're going to have the leftovers because the sex ratio, there's always more doves than bucks. And so some of them may not get bred. And so then that would follow again 28 days later. How impactful, though, do you think lockdown is? Is it a thing where, like, hunters are going to have a worse experience in the woods? I would still go because it's the rut. I would look at it as the frequency of just seeing more box during that time frame is going to be less because some of them are locked in with doze.

But you also have the obvious. man out or the odd buck out, and he's going to be going around looking for another dough and estrus. And so there's still going to be general buck movement, you're just going to have a greater number of them that is occupying a dough. And there's no crater, though, in the bell curve when that happens. Don't see it. Okay.

Yeah. Man, I wonder if you go into a good. Dang, I was really wishing you could tell me what days not to hunt in November. What I'm thinking is this, man, picture you got like some kind of weird deal where you can it's illegal like you put out some kind of birth control thing

or something where none of the do's ever come in oh bucks just crazy everywhere it's a short-term play um yeah it's not a good

that'd be some some evil science there it's a bad long-term play you're gonna see a plummeting deer population we're in Wisconsin you know CWD's big there big deer herd a lot of our neighbors have started

shooting more doze. Since they've started doing that, they claim to have a better rut because less doze mean more bucks moving around, more bucks reacting to calls. Does that make sense?

It makes perfect sense. I do not know of a study that is specifically evaluated that, but I think that is entirely logical because you've increased competition. You know, there are less dose per mail, and so they have to compete more, look more, search more, et cetera.

It's my turn. We're just going to circle. You said you were done. I was for my turn. This turn is going to be a one-question turn. We have a buddy who has a really great property in Texas. Whereabouts? Way, South Texas.

Brownsville. Oh, Brownsville. Way South Texas. Like, when you're cruising around. around, you see, I mean, you see way more bucks than those. Anyhow, we go down there a couple of times. We've gone on our to rattle bucks, which is the funest thing in the world because it's very effective there. I developed this little theory that the most effective time to rattle them is during the middle of the day.

In my thinking, the doze are all laying down on their board. And they're just more inclined to wonder what's up. When the doze are up on their feet, they're like, yeah, yeah, I hear it, but I'm like following my dough around. then midday he gets bored he hears the rattle he's got nothing else going on and so he runs over yeah what do you think about that there's a merit to that steve

okay but it's wrong oh we did a study on that now I was a I was a participant as a buddy of mine so again my master's degree was in south Texas so spent a lot of time down there

and so we did a rattling experiment. To my knowledge, it is the only peer-reviewed experiment ever done on rattle and antlers and dough response. And what we found very generally was we varied the how loud the rattling was the duration of rattling, the time of day of rattling, and then the time of year relative to the rut for the rattling. And so the clear winter for time of day was crepuscular. No. Here's why.

Because the real winner on the rattling technique. And remember back then, so this would have been mid-90s. And so this is, you're reading the magazine and how do you set up your rattling sequence? And so you've got to get there and you got to get crouch and you got to scrape the brush and you got to kick and you got to rattle. and you got to, you remember that? Remember all that? Yeah, but we don't do any of that. No, but anyways, go on.

Okay. Well, it was a thing back in the day. And what we found. You're painting the whole picture, like the deer. You're kind of like, you're sort of creating the entire encounter between two bucks. You're trying to mimic reality. Yeah, where they're bumping into the brush and all that sort of. Making it more realistic.

Yeah. But the bottom, it was just very, very clear how loud you are, number one, The louder you make it, you increase the probability that more bucks will hear it. More bucks will hear it when more bucks are circulating during the crepuscular period. More bucks are going to be up and about circulating during the pre-rut. So make it as loud as you can. And the sequence that we were doing, we had four different sequences. But the one that always worked the best was called Long and Loud.

I still remember it. It's still etched in here. Long and loud was, you got to go for three minutes, three minutes. That doesn't sound like a lot. With those things as hard as you can possibly go. Your arms will be tired. They're spaghetti. I mean, you're just done by that.

But that was the clear winner. And so just the obvious thing is they could hear it better. And so I even had chances where we had somebody on the ground. This was that, do you all know where the welder wildlife refuge is that? Did you go past it going south? Unhunted population, tens of thousands of acres. They have all these observation towers. So we got an observer is up top, 15, 20 foot above the brush and somebody down below.

And you could literally even see, I saw this to where the guy below starts rattling. He's doing a long and loud or something like that. And the buck is 400 yards away, and he hears it. And he starts coming, coming, coming. He's not running, but he's coming. He's obviously moving that way. Stopped rattling. He was back to browsing around.

Oh. And then it was over a 30-minute period. And so then we had an elapsed time and you do another rattle and another rattle. And do you rattle him? Bring him in. Keep coming. Stopped rattling. He stopped.

Rattled him again. Finally, close the distance and brought him in. Hmm. The volume and increasing the probability that a buck is within distance of hearing you. That was the secret sauce. I like your strategy though, Steve, because if I'm thinking about rattling, if it's dawn or dusk, in my head, deer movement is already like a nine out of ten. I don't need to help the deer movement anymore right now. At midday, though, maybe it's like a four out of ten.

And so I could rattle and bring it up to a seven out of ten. And so I'm just like, I'm raising the floor of my hunt at that point. Yeah. We were not viewing it as making, we were not viewing it as, hey, there's nothing else to do. We were viewing it as going out in the morning. There's like deer around and you do a few rattle sessions. Nothing happened. Get to be 11 a.m.

And all of a sudden, buck, buck. So I had this whole boredom. There you go. Hypothesis. But it could be other factors in there. Go ahead. Ask a question. What are your movement still?

say about age? I assume it's just real simple that like a one and a half year old moves more and he's more reckless than a five and a half year old. Is that what you've seen? Yeah. It's very subtle. You know, there's a lot of people will say, and maybe we did not have enough really, really old bucks. We had several five and six year olds, but we saw a general decline, a general contraction in home range, but it was not overwhelming. Okay. But yes, it did. You know, after the yearling dispersal event, they're typically going to have a larger one. And then it's like they keep figuring out, you know, year after year, it gets a little bit smaller.

I feel like Hardo White Tail Hunters will also say that you talked about how there's more movement after the peak of the rut. And usually those are the mature bucks. They're the wise ones who know that not every dough has been bred yet. So they're playing the long game. That's when they're going to get up and be a little more reckless. If you think the peak of the rut is like November 14, those old mature bucks, five, six-year-olds, they are really participating in the rut more in that like 15th to 25th time period than a two-and-a-half-year-old is. Is that like putting too much stock in those ideas? I think a buck is going to participate whenever he can.

And whenever he detects there is a dough and estrus, he's going to participate. okay if that answers your question yeah like I said a white tail hunter would say that is the time period of the rot for the old bucks that's like when they are vulnerable well yeah they would be exposed more

during that time but not more than a two and a half year old is I wouldn't think so okay yeah I'm gonna go out of order and ask my next question then Yanni and then Spencer we have a couple left time why and ask your question

I was afraid I'm gonna forget my we ask you no go ahead I won't forget mine because it's sitting right in front of me. How far away do you think of, how far away do you think of buck can smell a dough that's an asterisk? Great question. I would say, I haven't said it depends yet. But I think it's going to depend so much on wind condition, you know, and so forth. Just don't be a wild-ass, like, like perfect conditions.

Hundreds of yards. Okay. But are you asking about the dough herself or just the scent that maybe she left behind? Just detect the presence of a dough that's in heat. Yeah. In perfect conditions, it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be crazy to say hundreds of yards. I don't think so. Not at all.

Yeah. Like there's sense of smells that good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I don't know if it's 500 yards. To me, I think about diffusion. And so, you know, the further and further you're getting away,

the more those molecules are, you know, being distributed within the air and can they pick up enough of a concentration to cause a response, but certainly hundreds yards. Go ahead, Yon. Bronson, why did you bring that antler all the way from Mississippi up here? Yeah. And if you're just listening, you're just later going to have to go to YouTube and watch to see what we're going to talk about.

Well, he's got a big old, he's got a big old, Buck Antler. It's a Michigan 10 with the browtine saw it off. He's got an aluminum contraption. He's got an aluminum contraption glued to the end of it. Squirrels have been chewing on the tines.

That was actually damaged during velvet. Oh. Oh, I just thought of another question. This is a this is an example from, or this is a specimen from an experiment we did about 10 years.

years ago now. And the question was, let me back up. We always at Mississippi State with the deer lab, we try to do every single thing we do has a purpose for the end user. It's going to affect hunting. It's going to affect management, help you manage your property, except this. It has nothing to do at all with man. This is straight up deer biology. Me and Steve Demaris, the other co-director of the deer lab, we had this debate going on for years and years about female choice. Oh. Do female white-tailed deer,

can they, do they have any type of choice whatsoever? Now, behaviorally, we don't know if she does because when she comes into standing heat, she's going to breed. You know,

if there is a, if she's in standing heat and a buck is behind her, she's going to breed. Doesn't matter if it's a spikey or a no. Big old rope dragger. So I think she has to assume whom,

I guess, That's the right word, assume that that's going to sort itself out, that hopefully through a dominance hierarchy, she's getting the better buck. But during the peak of the rut, that may not always be the case because the, quote, dominant older buck, he may be occupied on a, you know, way over here with another doe. And, you know, and we see multiple paternity. And so in 25% of those, the twin fawns, 25% of those will have two different fathers. Got it. So it's going on, multiple bucks are breeding. So I had just always thought that she has to care.

She has to care. Now, whether she can do anything about it or not, it's a different question. But she has to care that if what is behind me and about to breed me, is it a year-old spy? or would it be a three, four, or five-year-old with larger antlers in a big body who has clearly demonstrated, I'm a survivor. Yeah. I can make it. You know, she's got all the investment.

She's going to have the gestation for seven months. It's all her resources. She ought to care who's behind her. It's like, well, how do we do this? So we ended up, we had another project going on, and we had a way we could set this up. So we took all of our bucks, and we standardized them. We came up with pairs. We paired them by age.

We paired them by body size. So a doe looking at a buck couldn't say, well, that buck is clearly four years old. That one is clearly a yearling and choose one of them. So we standardized by body size and age. And then we got with our ag engineering people and we developed a contraption to where we could manipulate antlers. Could make them look like a toad even when he wasn't. That's exactly right. So we challenge these doves with...

Well, hold on. You're going to explain how you did that. Take a little spike and put that antler on his ass. While he's alive? Well, we sedate him. Yeah. We sedate them. Yeah.

So they all have the base part somehow attached to their pedicle. Yeah. So all the bucks that are in the study, they're going to be sedated. and then we're going to cut their antlers off. We're going to affix that part, the coupling affix to the antler, and then the pedicle, they're going to get a receiver coupling there. This is incredible. And so then we will challenge your dough.

So then we had someone from the vet school, reproductive physiologist, they can induce estrus, you know, with a progesterone treatment or something. Sure, yeah. So now we know where that dough is coming into heat. And so now she's behavior. she's demonstrating she's an estrus so we send her down an alleyway and she's got a pen and then to her left and to her right are two equally aged or equally body-sized bucks one of them's carrying a 160 one of them's carrying a 90 and then we monitored her behavior to see which one she would prefer now we could not allow them to breathe just the way it was set up the logistics but then we looked at all the the behavioral signs of if we pulled the fence up, which one would she go to? And it was over 80% of the time, she always went for the antlers.

Wow. Even a younger buck. Superficial, dude. Good for her. Superficial, man. Hey, man, but there's that 20%. She's not interested in personality. It's like totally superficial.

But it wasn't 100%. It was, you know, 20% didn't fall for the, for the big antlers. So there's some selection going on. Well, but like you're saying, whether or not it, I get what you're saying, like in that environment, there's selection going on, but however that's occurring in the real world scenario is hard to determine. Exactly right. Yeah. Can that even happen? You know, the only thing we can say in the wild of does she have any choice at all is when she's sensing she's coming into Estrus, might she go to an area where she knows this, knows this guy.

occupies and just make herself available. Yeah. But yeah, she can't be very proactive in this thing. But when you standardize all that and controlled for it, that's what she preferred. So it does follow the ecological theory about antlers or an honest signal of quality. Yeah, yeah. I think I've wondered, I'm especially thinking about this as you're explaining this, is when you're watching a buck work a group of does and you see like he's particularly interested, like he's sort of singled out

of dough. He's very interested in this dough he's singled out. But you see her every time he approaches, she runs. Every time he approaches, she runs. And you wonder, like, well, if it was a different buck, would she run every time? Like, is she running because she's just not ready, or is she running because she doesn't like, she doesn't want

that buck buyer? Because from whatever, in his perspective, there's something very particular about that dough. He's like hounding that dough. So he knows something's going on, but she's not receptive. I just don't think she's ready She's just not in standing heat

He can tell she's close Yeah he knows she's close But she's not that ready yet Right Yeah got it So she might not be making like a not you Not you I'm waiting for Dave or whatever

Yeah I think she's just Waiting to be receptive physiologically Yeah There's a theory among White Tail hunters That if you have an old dominant buck Like a six and a half year old When he gets killed you've now created a vacuum where there's an opportunity for another big mature buck to come in

and take that home range and own that food source, own that bedding area, own those doves? Do you ever see that with your movement studies, that a big buck disappears until a new big buck moves in? No. I'm really interested in that. I do think that has a lot of logic and appeal, and I want that to happen because I think that's something as managers we can make. manipulate doing that, removing particular bucks and creating space for others to move in. We did not have enough data. Well, first of all, we didn't want to shoot all of our mature bucks. But to my knowledge, there's been no good experiment to demonstrate that.

But I would love to try it if we could. I do think it's logical. Yeah. Some little bucks, like, now's my time to shine. Yeah. I could have this whole area. It's exciting. Yeah, this is the best cornfield in the neighborhood.

Doze is all bed in here. Have you ever heard that bucks avoid certain kinds of cover when they're in velvet and then they're more comfortable going into that cover once their antlers are hard? No. You never heard that with elk and stuff like that, too? Well, I don't think a lot about elk, but I'm biased with my time in South Texas. And so, man. Thorny.

Up in that helicopter, I see a lot of bucks. and velvet going through, yeah, the payer and the mesquite and never really saw. That's a good testing ground. Yeah. Yeah. There's a price to pay for going through that mesquite. Yeah. And the awareness that they have, you know, when you're pushing them with the helicopter,

and there's a big mesquite branch coming up, and they know how to tilt their head just enough to get their antlers under it, and it's a thing of beauty to watch. Can I ask you a moose question? I mean, you can ask, it's your shot? There's a to your pair of it. Maybe there's a deer parallel. You're calling to a moose. You're making cow calls to a moose.

And then he comes from a mile away. And he gets up, he comes just beeline. Stops, his head's pointing toward you. You call, he comes, you call he comes. He gets 500 yards away and lays down. Lays down for an hour, gets up, walks the other direction. The hell is in his head? You were supposed to come to him.

you think so was there um was the wind in his face no there's no wind it wasn't a human thing it wasn't a human thing wind's totally wrong he didn't see nothing yeah my my only guess was there was no there was no visual cue to stimulate him coming any further that would make sense because he's like i'm looking at the whole hill dude there's nothing there. I'll see a cow standing there. Yeah.

You know, that, yeah, he's like at some point, he's like, at some point I need to see the cow. So you need a cow decoy. Mm-hmm.

I've seen this happen two times in the same place. It comes all that way and just lays down, staring, it gets up and leaves. Hmm. Hmm.

Sounds like you've got to be able to shoot at 500 yards next time. We did one time. Got them, but it's, it's thick and, yeah, it's hard.

Yeah. Hunting big country isn't for the faint of heart. You got steep ground, long distances, and miles of crown land that aren't always easy to navigate. That's why Anex Hunt just got a serious upgrade for hunters in Canada. Now you can get nationwide coverage for less than the cost of a box of shells with major updates to crown land layers and new parcel boundaries where available. Scout access boundaries and terrain with confidence before you even lace up your boots. Whether you're chasing elk in the mountains, spotting mule deer in the

or looking for big woods white tails, Anex gives you the tools to plan smarter and hunt harder. You'll still get fully functional offline maps, precise weather conditions, real-time GPS tracking, and customizable markups to share with your crew. Big Country demands better intel. Download Anex hunt and start your seven-day trial

to get dialed before your next trip. Big news, folks, the third volume in our Meat Eaters American History audiobook series, is available right now wherever you get your audio books. That's right, it's available now. It's called Meat Eater's American History, the Hide Hunters, 1865 to 1883. It tells the story of the commercial buffalo hunters who drove North America's most iconic large land mammal to the brink of extinction in the years after the Civil War.

You'll learn all about how these guys, with nicknames like Dirty Face Jones, skunk Johnson, Squirrel Eye, Emery, did what they did, how they organized their hunting expeditions, what they took with them, what guns they shot, how they hunted, how they processed their kills, why they did it in the first place, and how they died. You'll also learn about the economic factors that made this a viable profession and what happened to those millions of buffalo skins once they were shipped east. And like we do in all of our Meat Eaters American History projects, we included wild stories and bizarre details from this era, and we didn't leave out any of the gory bits. Check out Meat Eaters American History, the hide hunters, 1865 to 1883, wherever you get your audiobooks.

If we have time, I could lay out the Shirk or Buck, but I know we're running shirk or Buck. Yonnie's big believer in this. That's not true. but I did read Valgeist a couple of his books and he observed watching mule deer he felt he observed yeah that there were bucks that he would watch that would shirk the responsibility of breeding for many seasons in a row and then all of a sudden year five year six come in there and because they had reserved all those resources for that many years and

built up an extra whatever amount of body weight bigger antlers or whatever then they could come in and rule the roost just lay waste that's one way to put it yeah did you ever see that and you're captive heard no or bucks would shirk the rut not at that that scale but so he Valerius Geis is talking about a multi-year, right? What we would see, which we attributed to, but we don't know this. You know, buck personality, in this case, hormonally, higher testosterone levels or something. But there were definitely some bucks that at the beginning of the rut, they were absolute madmen. I mean, they wanted to fight.

Everybody hated them. The does hated them. Other bucks hated them. They just wanted to fight, fight, fight. And their breeding success was always greater the first path and maybe even longer into the breeding season. So, you know, we're able to enumerate how many fauns, you know, that they sire. Paul, me, he's a fighter. He's a fighter.

And he does good in the beginning of the breeding season. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then his body condition, all of that fighting begins to take its toll on him. Now, keep in mind, too, these are captive deer. They got ad-lib food. See, I mean, he's avoiding eating.

He is so consumed and obsessed with fighting and breeding. But when you get a month, six weeks, whatever into it, his body condition begins to suffer. And now he starts getting his butt kicked by the more passive deer who now weigh, even though they're the same age, even though they weigh 20 pounds more. Those guys, maybe the shirkers, then they have higher breeding success later in the year. So we kind of saw that, but compressed within year. Hmm. Interesting. It's super interesting, but it's different than the idea that...

Yeah. What we told us to one deer biologist, I'm sure you're familiar with Jim Hefflefinger. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So we told us the one deer biologist, and he felt that it was just like... He felt it was a very questionable approach from an evolutionary standpoint. To be that, like, you're alive now. You're sexually mature now.

to put off breeding opportunity after breeding opportunity after breeding opportunity in order to really kick ass some year down the road just didn't make sense. Risky. Yeah, like, you know, it just didn't make sense as a way to really to put more progeny on the landscape. That you're banking on, well, I'm going to have a hell of a year when I'm five. Yeah.

And I'm taking off two, three, and four. Yeah. And I agree with that. What are the guest reasons for this? I mean, it's not, I don't believe it's like a buck makes a conscious choice to do this. So like what would be the biological underpinnings if this were a thing? Yeah, my, well, I don't remember what Valerius Geist, all of his reasoning, what I'm trying to think about of a mechanism of how. how that could work.

So like onset of hormones and things are happening. Mine would be differing testosterone levels. And whereas the example I was giving with our data, I think it's within season, different timing in the surging of testosterone. But there's some great research out of Auburn University showing that there's a lot of variation by age class. And so it could be that those younger bucks, and then there's a good. going to be variation within an age class where some have borne, some have less.

And so some of them, they just don't have a lot of testosterone when they're two or three years of age. They're looking at this particular older, dominant, bigger antlered, bigger-bodied buck, and maybe it's a survival strategy. Man, man, I'm not going to risk it against that guy. But then later in life, greater surge in testosterone, and they risk it and go for it. What do you wind up seeing, like if you think of an old, buck that gets a reputation with hunters

as being like he's so stealthy he's shy he's sly right um that's got to be real right like but what is that what do you think he's doing what is he not doing

you know when he gets to be that they just seem like they vanish yeah right and and to me that that's a really good question of ways you have to think about it So is it that that buck has always been that way, and the ones that were dumber were killed? So selection is going on.

Or are they literally learning and modifying their behavior over time? Like, I love what you're saying. I would have, when I approached the question, I was approaching that he learned it. Yeah. Not that he's just always been paranoid. Yeah. It's probably a little bit of both. as well would be my guess um yeah so what what are they doing different i think it's probably just

being more perceptive and maybe being more slow and how they process what's going on they're not as much of a risk taker and so they're playing for the long game of like uh i may not breed as many doves within a year but lifetime reproductive success i may win yeah things like that yeah there seems like there's some learned stuff like looking up in trees you know i mean like learning like in certain areas he's just like looking up looking up looking up like because he's seen before yeah dude's and trees yeah and like coming out of the box like a year and a half old buck probably hasn't figured out yet to like yeah look up yeah you know yeah and so does that yearling buck have to

live through a bad experience and then he's able to he's going to be looking from this point forward. Yeah, or are there yearling bucks that are just so paranoid they're looking all around? Or do they learn it from their five year old mother? I think they do.

Oh, that's a good point too. Yeah, she's like the big cherry tree at the point, the point that juts out between the fields, don't go by that cherry tree. The other thing is to... Speaking of a specific cherry tree I grew up by with the deer to start to sort of do. Like the Ronellas are always in that tree.

There's less of those bucks on the landscape too. So we just we have this perception that we see them less. So they're sneakier, but it's just like a numbers game where you're just going to see less of those bucks, even if they're moving just as much as the two-year-olds, because there's, I don't know what the percentage is in most populations, but much less. Yeah, it all depend on punting rate and mortality, but yeah, that's going to be, I mean, even in a well-managed population, less than 25% of the bucks are going to be something like that.

And that's just based on age. And then when you start adding in antler size, it's going to be less than 10% are going to resemble something like that. So they're very rare. In 2015, I tried very hard to kill a cactus buck. And if you're listening, you don't know what that is. It's a cactus buck. It's a buck who does not shed his velvet. And sometimes he will grow a unique rack as a result of that.

It could be a testosterone problem that his testicles never dropped. It could be that he was crossing a fence and ripped his sack open one time. And that cactus buck was very hard to kill because it seemed as though he didn't participate in the rut. He just like didn't loosen up and become reckless like the other bucks would. Have you ever looked at the movement of a cactus buck? have not have not we we've never uh i guess been lucky enough to have a collar on one but uh a property that a hunt has one right now and i just got pictures from my hunting buddy about a week ago that that the cactus buck is back so was he there last year it was there last year what did you

notice him do last year he uh he hung out with the doves yeah yeah they just like don't participate in the run nope not at all uh the deer writer pat durkin oh yeah he had an observation where he when he was the editor of deer and deer hunting magazine he profiled a great many big buck killers okay and he had come to this kind of uh realization after a while there's a lot of amazing big buck killers they couldn't tell you what kind of tree their tree stands hanging in meaning it's just like it's not like a wood there's a point at which it's not like a woodsmanship thing

that's like they're just good at killing bucks they're not generalist woodsman you know um do you ever feel like your research like in real on the ground application as a deer hunter does your research guide your activities or is like deer hunting

is just deer hunting and it doesn't matter what you know to be true from all your projects. Yeah. Yes, it does. It guides your behavior. Yeah. And a lot of that is about hunting pressure.

Okay. And thinking about, and you know, this doesn't work everywhere in the U.S. in the southeast, you know, a lot of stand hunting, a lot of permanent stand hunting and so forth. And just recognizing that deer know when you're on the property. And it's not gunshots. it's it's it's you being there you being on an at tv it's the smells the sounds all that they they know when you're there and one thing that has really changed and we try to really advise now is when when you hunt if you're going to hunt a particular stay in particular area only go on the

days where you're going to minimize the opportunity of bump and deer because we know the research I talked about earlier, after a couple days, and dear, know you're on the property, they're going to start behaving differently. So doing whatever you can to minimize your footprint, so to speak, on the property. That's probably one of the biggest things. And then some really boring stuff that people roll their eyes about. But in terms of antler quality, herd condition, things like that, density, deer density, do-hard. harvest stuff like that. I know how critically important that is, and people are trying to figure out what the

heck's going on with our deer. The quality of the deer is down. We're doing all this, that, and the other. You just got too many deer. You just have too many miles relative to the amount of range that you have in the food supply. So pretty mundane, but stuff like that. Yeah.

Well, I could definitely picture management information, but just like how you go about. where you're putting your stand, when you're out there, what you're doing with the wind. But I could see with the stuff with the research you've done around how they handle pressure. You might look at a place, look what everybody's up to. And then based on what you've seen, be like, I think when the pressure hits, I think you're going to see more of this. You're going to see less of that. And that might guide your movements. Yeah, what I do all the time.

So, yeah, what we talked about approach, try to minimize your disturbance of the deer. I think about during the rut, I think about where are those do focal groups on the landscape. What are going to be the movement or cover corridors that might link those areas up? And so it won't be hunting on food. It's going to be hunting on a corridor. And then finally, when you get to the post rut, I'm focusing on food. So the evidence is really, really clear with that. when you get a month past the peak of the rut,

they got to recover that 20% of their body weight. They're hungry and food plots in my neck of the woods. That's a great place to hunt. Think about that, Spencer Newhart. Can I make two study requests? Absolutely. Okay, one of them, I hunt a lot of places in the West where white tail habitat and mule deer habitat overlap.

But I never see them interact with each other. always like pretty shocked that I could I could in the same hunt see a couple of white tails and a couple of mule deer's but they like don't have any social interaction anything to do with them I would be very interested in like if if you took that same study and you put a dough down a corral and she got to choose between a muley buck and a white tail buck I imagine it would be very high highly skewed for the white tail buck like 90 plus percent just based on what I've seen but I don't know that I'm interested in anything like a a a what a white tail buck and a mule deer buck would do if they encountered each other That's a great thing Or if you just took like Um

If you just took like odor arrays Like odor from a mule deer dough and estrus And odor from a white tail dough and estrus And like put it in front of both boxes Is he like oh that's the white tail You know

Yeah, that's a great idea In my observations they interact As though like an elk And a white tail would interact They just show no interest in each other But I can't imagine it's that simple You know how you get funding for this? Remember how a few years ago you couldn't get funding for anything if it didn't

have to do with climate? Yeah. Okay. So pitch it like this. More and more white tails moving into more and more mule deer are in a tough spot. Meal deer are probably going to be in a tougher spot with increased competition from white tails, increased competition for elk. So go to the Mieldier Foundation and be like, we need to understand more about as these white tails are colonizing more and more mule deer country, how do they interact? We did it. And there's all your your funding now there you go got that problem what do you think on like how they interact with each other in the wild don't know a lot about that because that that's out of my that's out of my home range over there but i did think it would be interesting to to challenge a white tail dough

with a fully mature large antlered mule deer and then a smaller younger white tail not really is it the species draw or the the phenotype of this is a good father, a good sire. And biology would tell us that she would be making a poor decision by going with the muley, right? Because their offspring really fail with their escape mechanism. Like they can't stot or something like that. Is that correct?

Well, they're not reproductly viable. I don't know if that's, is that true? I think it's like, I think it's like a horse and a donkey throwing a meal. I thought their failure was so. I don't think they're viable. Okay. I don't think they're sexually viable. We're going to learn when he does the study.

you know what I'd throw into that study man if you got like time to burn man man if there's any like uh if symmetry matters to those do you know mean is there any like disadvantage to being atypical yeah probably gets hard after a while to tease out all these little differences though don't it yeah but you you could manipulate it would be obvious like extremes yeah yeah you could Yeah. Yeah, you could attach stuff to where it's really... He's got a club on one side. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you can do that. The other study I'd be interested in is a deer's response to yellow soybeans.

I've been told all my life, and I feel like I've maybe witnessed it some, but I don't know if I'm witnessing it because I'm supposed to witness it. But a deer given the choice in a big old soybean field, if there's some green beans, some yellow beans and some brown beans, which the yellow is the ripening stage going from green to brown, won't pick the yellow ones. They just taste worse. Taste worse. Is that something you've heard, seen? No. I haven't, but that, I think that's logical. So turning yellow from the desiccation that they're growing

That's a Craig Harper study sounds like to me. Yeah. Craig I'd like that. You know, I got some friends that are songwriters, and over the years I've learned that they just do not want to hear our song ideas, but they don't. Even when you try to do it like a joke and give them a song idea, but you're

serious, but you're trying to act like it's a joke. They don't want to hear it. I like how you use the word our. My. But do they give you the obligatory? That's a good one. They don't even like. There's nothing to it.

Do you like hearing study ideas? I do. I got a pile of them. Some of them can be really cuckoo. So you're, you know, you've given a seminar and you always get what you ought to do with. Sure. That can get old. What else, man?

I could go on all day. I think just like to cap it off, if hunters want to take what you've seen in your movement studies and apply it to the rut this year, what does that look like? Yeah, yeah. How can they be more successful? So if you, again, if you're going after a target buck, a particular buck, your greater opportunity for him to demonstrate site fidelity. So if you know where he's hanging out, you need to do that in the pre-rut. If on the other hand, you are just going to, there's a lot of big bucks in the area. I just want to increase my odds for intercepting one.

That's going to be during the peak of the rut. A pre-rut window being like late October? Well, it depends on when your rut is. Say it's like a November 15 rut. That's the peak rut. Yeah. So let's go one month or greater before the peak of the rut. Okay.

Yeah. So like October 15 then. In your neck of the woods, yeah. Okay. Yeah, that'd be about right. Okay, so just make sure I'm track what you're saying. Like, when you pick the November 15th, we would agree that peak rut is sort of like the day when you have the highest relative number of doze in estrus. That's what, is that fair to define peak rut that way?

Yeah, but rather than day, we might say over a two week, over a two week period about half of the doves have been into estrus. So, yes, that is going to be the, the. the series of days were the greatest number or greatest proportion. So there's a two-week window, like if you take a, like, just generally with white-tailed deer, there's a two-week window in which 50% of the doze come into estrus, and we're going to declare that two-week window would peak rut. Yeah. You know, if it's a synchronized rut and so forth, yeah, generally speaking.

So that's kind of funny because then when you hear a guy is killing some giant that no one has ever seen, never showed up on their cameras. like that's that dude that's cruising excursion he's an excursion buck yeah he excurred it off your place yeah and excurred it on some other guys somebody else and they got him exactly right oh and then if you didn't get them pre rut if you didn't get them during the rut hunt food in the post rut okay yeah and uh during the rut you might want to here's an interesting finding we actually looked at food plot use, two different types of food plot use. And so on our study area, by the way, our study area was 50 to 60,000 acres.

So pretty big, pretty big footprint. And we had every making model of food plot you could have. We had quarter acre food plots, acre all the way up to 20 acre food plots. And so we wanted to look at is there any food plot size that deer would come to that disproportionately. And so the just size. You weren't varying what you were growing. Good, good question.

We had so many food plots that we had to assume that some of them had wheat and clover, some of them had brassicas. We had to assume all that kind of smoothed out, the actual plantings within it. But yes, it was just size. And what we found, even though two times the amount of like, smaller one acre food plots, the sweet spot was three, four, five acres. Really? They disproportionately selected that size of plot.

That feels secure to them. So, so why? Why would they do that? And so we think it's because what do small food plots not provide over the course of the hunting season? What happens to them? they get eaten up they get overbrows they get overwhelmed so not only because of the size of it and the number of deer on it you don't have as many hours of photosynthesis going on because they're smaller in the shade and all that then you get to this three four five acre now you've got a big enough

area you're now producing more forage per acre and now we've got a social aspect of it too which i'll get to in a second but then after that it was diminishing return So we didn't see anything greater of a 10-acre plot versus a three-acre plot. Oh, okay. They didn't prefer five over 20. They did. Oh, I'm sorry. They did.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we saw a big drop-off in relative to their availability on the landscape, deer were disproportionately choosing those plots over the ones smaller and the ones larger. What's the argument against a bigger plot, do you think? In his head. I think you reach a particular size, and there's just only so many deer in the area are going to use it. And I would say they're vulnerable. But it's like a security thing. Like, like, why do you feel a buck avoids?

Like, why is he avoiding a big food plot? I see what you mean now. Yeah. He doesn't want to go into the middle of a big old tanner. 20 acre yeah because that's security possibly so yes exposure exposed yeah so um so when you look at during the year if you look at the number of visits per day you will see that they are visiting more during the rut so you think about how we analyze the date it's just ding did he visit the plot or not yes and you and you tally those up so they're visiting those food plots more during the day

So some of that is food. Some of it is also socially. I mean, they're cruising looking for those. When you get to the end of the year during the post rut, they will have just as many or less visits, but their duration is longer. So now they are visiting for the purpose of forage and not socially looking for a female. Yeah. God, man. Lots of stuff.

No, it's a lot of great information. I got such a good starty idea so hard to explain I'm like a post rut buck right now and all I can think about is some food and we got to do this trivia in like 30 minutes dude thanks for coming on you wrap it up yeah man I love your

the extension like tell people how to go find your work and deceased because I mean you got you have your academic publications but you're also producing stuff for just guys like us yeah so tell people how to go how to go kind of find some of your infographics and yeah a couple places so uh you can go to the ms udeer lab.com that's our website that has all of these publications on there we also do a lot of this on social media so we're on uh facebook instagram we have a youtube channel with a lot of different videos

podcast where we talk about this type of stuff podcast is deer university so msu deer lab uh the website social media, YouTube, you ought to be able to get us. If it's on the private side, outside of the university, if you're looking for help with land management, go to wildlife investments.com, and there's a lot of us there that'll help you manage your land. That's for consulting work. That's great, man. And on that consulting work, you kind of, you probably do, you go survey the property, talk about what's going on, what could be better. Right. What strategies could be used?

Habitat management, deer, ducks, turkey, quail, whatever you want with wildlife management. All right. We've got an expert to help you. All right. Again, Dr. Bronson Strickland from University of Mississippi. Hale State, Mississippi State University. Mississippi State University. We have that same problem in Michigan because we got U.O.M. and MSU.

Well, it's the same way here. There's a lot of states, Steve. No, no, no, we're the with the L. Oh, with the M specifically. With the M specifically. And then the extension material is like the extension piece I was talking about that shows like that kind of puts your study on the lunar stuff. Right.

That's that's a Michigan State University extension piece. A Mississippi State University extension piece. Right. That puts down, it's a great graphic. Yeah. Because it puts down what people think. um the idiosyncrasies of what people think what's found um and then it puts it in all these like percentages and then whatever kind of guy you are moon underfoot moon overhead full moon rising full

moon setting you can go and track every possible variation and find out um yards per hour all that and you can go put your mind at ease about what's going on that's right i mean it's very it is a when you look through it, I spent 30 minutes staring at it today. It is a very convincing portrayal of like looking at something quite thoroughly. Yeah. It's a great piece.

Appreciate that. Thank you. In poster form, it would take up a lot of walls. It sure would. It sure would. Yeah. But you might think about a small poster. We will. Yeah. With the real salient points in it. Next time. Thank you very much for coming on. We're all going to be, if not better, deer hunters,

better dear observers now. Thank you. Thanks, Bronson. In the heat of battle, your squad relies on you. Don't let them down. Unlock elite gaming tech at Lenovo.com. Dominate every match with next level speed, seamless streaming, and performance that won't quit.

Push your gameplay beyond performance with Intel Core Ultra processors. For the next era of gaming, upgrade to smooth high-quality streaming with Intel Wi-Fi 6E and maximize game performance with enhanced overclocking. Win the tech search. Power up at Lenovo.com. Real hunts rarely go as planned. That's where First Light's Navigator hoodie earns its place.

Our crews have run it from September climbs to cold front sits. It manages temps, stays quiet and close encounters, and wicks moisture on the uphill push. One layer that adapts without hesitation no matter the pursuit, the navigator delivers versatility in any situation. Shop now at Firstlight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. This is an I-Hart Podcast.