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Oh no, the show is starting right now with this ring.

Can it start with this ring?

Yeah?

Sounds good dyland Mark Canyon.

If he doesn't pick up where we keep it, you think, I see?

Oh, Mark, you know who I'm sitting here with.

I have no idea you're on you're on the You're not on the air, but you know what I mean, you're being recorded.

Okay, Uh it's me Mark.

I'm here with doctor Bronson Strickland.

Hm hm, great guy.

And I'm about ready to start telling him about the last thing you told me about deer in the moon and I and I'm gonna like kind of make you look bad.

Then I thought that 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 you're very aware of this debate.

Very aware of it.

I'm position is, well, I'll tell you what you said the last time we talked, Mark, and 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 science can't detect the subtle difference.

Is 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 was 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 statistics that's a difference.

So I've always been curious though, because on when we see that in all the studies.

On the other hand, you have all 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 in the same way or in quite the right way to us these tiny.

Little possible edges that you could get.

So I'm still like very much on the fence.

So Steel like, I'm just curious.

I'm Moon curious.

That's how I've always described myself.

We already talked about you being Moon curious.

I'm Mark.

I'm Mark curious.

Ye 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 listened to a lot and uh, 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 was interested ther day after the after learning at the other day where the FCC start like threatening people for say and 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 of statement.

No, I'm telling you it's true because you're not on the air.

You're not on the air, you're not 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 phase stuff, there's nothing to do about it.

Saying a lot of crazy stuff about the moon over all these years, I would hate to be brought to court almose past.

You can do this the hardware of 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.

As we just said, day goodbye to him.

Oh, I don't really do that.

Never, No, not even if it's your wife.

Definitely not.

No, that is a of Steve's is it's a it's in the name of efficiency that please, thank you, hello, goodbye.

Once you achieve a certain intimacy with Steve follow in this category as well.

That those pleasant trees are out the window.

I think, I think that happens to me too, But and then I watch it happen to someone else.

If you really want to.

If you really want to dig it, I'll take a quick break to take this for you.

I like there's people I talk to.

I like the main people in my life.

I like I talked to him.

I like to talk to him a lot, so that anytime 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 him 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 it Yanni, I don't need to get into like, oh geez, how you been?

Is the householding up?

Ye 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 you on and like hey 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 did happen?

To your cousin you know 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 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 big I love you and she says I love you, then we're cool.

If I go I love you and she just hangs up the I'm like, oh my god, now what now?

Okay, you know what I mean.

So that's how I find out if I got it, 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.

Join Today by Doctor Brownson Strickland of University of Mississippi.

Mississippi State University.

Is that a big mistake?

That's a pretty yeah.

It's not on to make up for say, hot Toddy, it's right.

Where do I see it on?

Here?

The bigger?

Doctor Brownson is the Saint John Family Professor of Wildlife Management and the Extension Wildlife Specialist for Mississippi State University.

And what do you say when you.

Say that that that's that's another mess up.

You've offended more Mississippi State folks.

Yeah, what does it mean?

Hot?

Hot like Christmas drinks?

I do think hatty toddy means anything.

It's a different school.

Yeah, that's old.

Miss we booze it up.

Mississippi State University.

Did his did his BS degree in forest resources in the University of Georgia.

Did a master's degree Texas A and m Kingsville PhD from Mississippi State University.

Bronson is the co director of the ms 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 this is We're here to make this is the most important podcast ever ever done.

I would say, because this is going to be the final answer.

This is gonna be we hope.

Yeah.

Dudes out there that are like 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 Ko'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 effect dear 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.

That's what I was told.

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 It's out, I had a conversation with Krint about it, and I'm like, it's not ridiculous, Okay, I mean, what's not ridiculous about is look at all the wildlife that that absolutely one hundred percent is driven by moonface.

Okay, Like turtle nesting, like when turtles hatch turtles, like 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 the 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 here's another one for you.

I remember they You ever hear the writer Barbara King Salver.

She had a book called High Tide and Tucson, and it was a book of like science writing.

Was it King Salver?

Was it?

They took these mollufs and brought them to Tucson to a university what what universities in Tucson?

Camera They took these clams whatever the hell it is asu.

I believe it was clams.

I'm sure it was clams.

They had these clams in an aquarium and Tucson, and 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 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, 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 tail deer?

Where has there ever been evidence that its influencing whitetail deer except for Paul Paul the stories that are passed down from grandfather today, 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, 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.

Uh, something to do with visibility.

Well, like in reading like historic texts, you'll often find people pre flashlight and stuff, people traveling by horse.

You read historic text 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 I'm 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 you can see them, and so you think in your head, maybe you wind up thinking.

Maybe people wind up thinking when there's a full moon, the deer out.

They're always out just because you 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 on that idea that that's a wild I'm like, I'm grasping at straws big, 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 Yanni and Spencer like, how if you can remember where it come from, where your idea about this came from?

And then and then and then doctor Stricklan, I'd love to hear when you guys did the survey, if you could talk about how eighty three eighty three percent of hunter of surveyed hunters, eighty three percent agree it affects moon, the moon affects deer movement.

What they don't agree on is why and how right right, They don't agree on like 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're gonna be hunting no matter what.

Those days you know.

You never got I'll take an opening day off this year.

I'm not hunting the opener because the looter phase just 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, yeah as fat Yeah, I would say that.

Uh.

Where I felt like it actually played a part in my hunting was that when I was an elkhunting guy in Colorado, usually the second rifle season would coincide with the 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.

Would still kill some olt, but man, it was always our hardest week.

So a lot a lot of factors that 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 the 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 a 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 were 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 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 think 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 like what moon, what moon phase would do to deer movement.

And it was like today and I feel like in the last twenty 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 under in the morning, Like that's a thing people will say when I was a kid that 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 you're actually going to get some movements 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 does all chasing does.

All night, he can see things so well, it's like it's not that no one even turned the lights off tonight, you know they can.

They can chase them all through the hardwoods, all out in the cornfields.

So now they're tired come sunrise at seven thirty am, so they're just bedded down somewhere already got it.

But now they're getting a little restless come like eleven am, and so they're gonna be on their feet a little more from that eleven am to one pm.

Period kind of unorthodox.

It's been so long, yes, yep, and then you know, now it's really thrown off his schedule, and that that like movement, it's probably not going to be as good for like that last you know, thirty minutes of shooting light either, because his whole schedule's just off at this point.

You know, what's coming coming to my mind is like that.

We always think about how the full moon would be beneficial to these animals, right, like they can chase mortel 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.

Let's hear from the experts.

Okay, let's start out.

Tell us about your survey.

We just we just gave you three really read Yeah, we just gave you two of the things that are floating around out there.

But tell tell us about the survey he did.

Okay, So before I get tops, so we did a a buck movement project for a complete dealy different reason.

And so seven or eight years ago, I thought, uh, 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 gonna 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 months or a month plus post rut, all the variation in movement was apparent.

Is the rut, there is the right difference in daytime movement nighttime movement.

So so here we go.

I'm gonna put this on Facebook.

So on top of that movement graph, I plotted the oscillation of full moon, new moon, full moon new and had those superimposed on each other.

And so you can see that 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 on.

This is the thing, people, this is a.

Thing you will yeah, okay, they will to be like, well you didn't study the deer in Wisconsin.

Well, what the typical things you can't win.

You can't win.

They won't even say in my state it will be but my deer, yes.

And so the fact I got I got it because one thing that you got I never encountered it before.

So when you're talking about that, you're graphic movement.

Can you is this the yards per hour?

Which great?

M okay, keep explaining that to people, like when you say, like you're measuring movement, like, what what does that mean?

What's the metric?

Yeah, yeah, we typically do yards per day or yards per hour.

That that's the measurement, and that's from the sequential GPS locations, So we're getting a location from them every fifteen minutes 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.

So put that out there and a couple of people where yeah, I knew nothing was going on with this.

What's but the overwhelming response was this guy's an idiot?

Me this guy sure?

And that 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 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 eggheaded college guy about the mood.

Yeah, a lot worse than that, but yeah.

And so that data set sat there and we you know, I was holding that we got to do this, We've got to do something more sophisticated.

And I was very lucky to have a coworker, a research analyst at POSTOCU named Natasha Ellison.

She has a PhD in mathematics, so undergraduate masters PhD and 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 is the math really wasn't that challenging for physics and quantum mechanics with their master's degree.

So she's at the tip of the spear and understanding how to disentangle all this and uh, I'm sure she chuckled and rolled her eyes when I told her, it's like, Natasha.

We got a problem with Bucks.

We gotta we gotta do.

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 into this life.

But we've got a real opportunity to do, hopefully to do something special.

And so she analyzed it 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 gonna do, how we're gonna 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.

So it's really not as important as effect size.

Effect size just means the difference between the treatment and the control.

You get a one percent increase, fifty percent increase, one hundred percent increase.

That is what's the most important people.

So we did survey and got to say this, this was not a sociology sanctioned, sophisticated survey and that department.

This was the MSU dear lab us doing social media survey and just saying, hey, all you people out there, what do you think about this?

So what came back was yet eighty three percent eighty three percent 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 bedding was at a minimum, they're on their feet thirty 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 fifty yards per hour, two greater than two hundred yards per hour.

So these people that are believing the moon is stimulating movement, they're all in God, Yeah, they're different animals under a specified moon condition.

Ronson Were those respondents were they all from that general area in Mississippi or were they nationwide?

Nationwide?

Yeah?

Nationwide?

Certainly.

Was there a specific concentration among you know, was twenty five percent although nationwide twenty five percent respondents from like Texas or.

So difficult for us to tell because that was I can't remember it was Facebook or Instagram and you might be able to disentangle that.

I can't.

When they did the survey and you had eighty three percent say that it did something, was it did you find that there was a lot of 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 it a different way instead of exploring all the exceptions, what if you had to synthesize it and make it that like the general impression was what among survey people?

So during the day they betted less, meaning they're on their feet more.

They are on their feet if you're thinking about an afternoon movement, about 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 a 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 articulate.

There is a moon situation for every person and their pet hypothesis for when I want to go hunt.

Okay, 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 apogee 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 you know what I'm saying.

No, No, in their mind, yeah, and they're sold and then and then in their mind yeah, in the mind of a And I'm not trying to dog on them 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 or 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, like much less movement.

Yeah, that's the reason the deer weren't moving today.

Yeah, because of the opposite gotcha.

So it's not just it creates a spike, but it's sort of this like trend that moves in and out.

Yeah, and it has a top and bottom.

Ya, a spike and then a suppression.

Yeah, God during daylight hours.

And that's what we focused on.

What hunters are going to see?

What did your study find that did impact deer movement just the rut.

Yeah, so crepuscular periods.

So nothing supersedes this, Nothing comes even close to superseding sun up and sundown and the rut.

There is a subtle, subtle effect of temperature, and that is what Natasha, It's really complicated in this 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 Nora, uh huh, and our neck of the woods, when you start getting sub forty degrees, we will see a little bit more higher of a movement rate during daylight hours.

I feel like you're saying that is like the hottest take a dear biologist has ever had on deer temperature movement.

And yeah, yeah, deer movement based on tempera.

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, can you lay out you do the survey, and then you got to start pulling data, like the surveys just kind of a.

Side project to see where you're at.

Yeah, so to go get a definitive picture of this.

What are you doing?

Like how many deer are you monitoring?

How do you monitor the deer?

Like what is the sort of scale of the project?

Yeah, so, yeah, this is one thing 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 and buck movements.

Some of them are homebodies, 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 that buck.

Yeah, you're looking at I see like what is he?

What is it buck a or buck.

One twenty one?

What is buck one?

Twenty one's normal groove.

That's right, and then how does Buck one twenty one's groove switch at the moon?

That's right?

And then Buck one twenty eight, same thing.

And one of those bucks might be like a dude who 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?

You know?

There is a stay of home guy cruse more?

Yeah?

Yeah.

And so Natasha went through and so for every single buck, she created a fourteen day window.

So this is a moving window.

And so for every fourteen days, she looked at the seven days prior seven days and it uh behind and calculated for every single hour of the day.

So for this buck at ten am, she has a movement profile of what the average response for that buck will be at ten am, 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 ten am 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 a moving average for every single buck, you account for all the extraneous noise.

Sure that can be going on.

Huh okay, off the moon because now just you brought it up a Saturday, a lot of guys hunting.

You mentioned it crepuscular period.

So sunrise, sunset impacts, the rot 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 carrying a GPSHW and so could we could monitor where they were going on the landscape and so forth.

Then 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 changed.

Something is different.

Their the bucks movement behavior changed, not as much as total distance moved 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 associated with hunting in danger.

Oh but his yards per hour, his his yards per 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 eat They're on their feet, they're forging.

They're just going to areas where 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.

I've only heard like four or five bugles before that bull died.

But the next evening we hear like a bugle.

It's just just dead, still quiet.

And I'm remarking to my buddy's 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 run when they got that big winter codeon.

He goes, well, where I was at yesterday, We're the lasting a big herd out in a private hayfield and at four thirty they are 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 changed their behavior on where they spend time.

Now, I will say this, there have been cases at the deer conference we go to, you know every year, there have act there have been some cases with GPS or VHF collared bucks where in heavily heavily hunted places, a buckbedded all day long.

But I literally, Steve, I remember that one time.

In the thirty 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 God 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 fifteen minutes, if he's got a really high rate of speed, you're going to cover more distance in fifteen 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.

The other day, we were watching a bull moose.

Doing his like rut wander, and he was going through this big alpine area and we watched them, I mean, we watched him go a couple miles fast, and we're waiting for him to stop.

He was so far away where like, well, when he stops, we'll try to call and see if he registers the noise at all.

We watched him go a couple of 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, I'm not afraid of anything.

Yeah.

Whitetail hunters have this time period between October ten October twenty they refer to as the October Law.

And if you were to if you lived in a state where the deer season is September one to December thirty, first they would tell you that is the hardest ten 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 does not exist.

Not in any form.

Like they're 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 one to October Tenen.

I can't say they're moving more, but they're moving.

And this is just sit 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 that, 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 beanfield 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 ten 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 us really interesting to me is we we looked at So we had to have deer where we had to have two years of them being collared.

So we had a lot of deer come and go, you know, why is.

That that you had Why two years?

What's the significance.

Because the question, 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 of that 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 five pm October ninth, twenty twenty four.

Where is it at October ninth, five pm, twenty twenty five?

About a thousand yards apart?

Is that right?

About a thousand yards apart?

See, if you're hunting ten ac or 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.

God.

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 wed 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 dear biologists are hardcore hunters?

These guys who just like never fill a tag?

Good question, are.

You a big hunter?

I am?

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 seventy five percent.

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 tail side, at least the ones I'm thinking about off the top of my head, they all hunt.

Until like that twenty five percent.

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 in their things.

And do you notice anything different with like those biologies?

Yeah, the questions okay.

The questions I asked typically that type of part and this isn't good or bad, it's just different.

But I think it needs both, like the field needs both of those.

Yeah, yeah, right.

I would say they're more the theory type of stuff, which is really important ecological grounding in theory.

And then people like me is more about the application, and you know, my roles 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 you 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 of movement and other things about Like you mentioned that different deer have different personalities.

I'd love to hear more about that.

Let's close out on this moon thing for a little bit out put some numbers to us, or put some way of expressing the how much which you can rule out and how much could still be up for grabs.

Meaning Mark 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 moonface, that's a big deal to me.

Are they catching that in the research?

You know?

That was his question, right, like, when they're looking at these general things, like they generally don't change their behavior.

But he says, but let's say it's just five minutes, right, That to me matters, Like when you look at it, how like what degree of certainty are you comfortable putting on that there is there 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 because I'm seeing things at a micro scale and he's looking to macro.

And I don't ever think we can produce anything that's going to affect that person.

So when you get in got feedback from people, and this was part when we when we reached out initially doing this 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 that buck is walking out thirty seconds earlier and five more steps, I got a shot.

Yep.

So what we looked at is, of course, like we explained earlier deviation from normal.

We did eighty five different analyzes, so we we made eighty five different comparisons of all the different moon stuff you can put together.

And the the average response for bedding 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 analyzes you're gonna you're gonna hear your results are gonna follow a bell shaped curve.

You're gonna get some results that were positive.

You're gonna get some results 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, yeah, roll with it.

If it instills more confidence in you, that's such and such moon condition, and I'm gonna be more alert and I'm gonna get to the stand thirty minutes earlier, because this is a red moon day.

You know, then, by God, keep doing it if it makes you happy, but the evidence does not support it.

In college, I would get the field in Stream magazine and they would always predict the rut, the best days of the rut.

And I think it was maybe a sophomore and I had saw that, like, the best day of the rut this year was on a Saturday.

I was available, So 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 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.

And then a buck showed up and the killed him, and so I was just more confidence and I was a better hunter.

That day was going to optimistic and so that that I think that that can work for people.

That can be a thing, and keep doing it.

If it keeps working for you, keep doing it, keep taking the placebo.

Placebo 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 remember the good ones, then I was like, it was because this was the best day of the rut, as Field and Stream had deemed it.

You know, looking back now and since I've like formed my own white tail opinions, I recognized I was just very confident that day.

And Field and that was throughout the range of the white tailed deer.

Yeah, but this was going to be the day.

Yeah, yep, yeah, so that should totally.

I got one more moon question before we move on.

Charles Allsheimer he had developed like the rutting moon theory in the nineties that caught on with a lot of guys, and the running 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 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 fo Okay, bag, I want to make sure I'm tracking autumn equin second full.

Moon, right, 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 thirty one and November five.

You could have a classic rut, which is like November six to thirteen, or you could have a trickle rut, which is November thirteen on.

Huh.

And it's 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 third, 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 from from year to year in a place.

And so when you talk about 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.

Here it has nothing to do with the moon.

It is about the availability of dozen estres and enough box to serve them when they are in standing heat.

If your sex ratio becomes so biased that the dozen estres there is not a buck to copulate twenty eight 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 dough fawns, dough fawnts will typically the proportion of them that do come into estres are going to come in a little bit later.

So adult adult that has a faun with her and she's trying to get rid of it in the fall, she'll come into estris later than adult that did that didn't was not carrying a faun.

I'm sorry, I misspoke, though, uh not everywhere.

This varies depending on where you're at in the US.

In Mississippi, for example, ten to fifteen percent of dough faunds or do funds 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've reached physiological condition where they can come into estras.

Got it, so that we'll be part of it, and that can drive a little late rut action.

That's your trickle.

If you do believe in the rutting moon.

This year twenty twenty five, it is November fifth, so you're you're like straddling a synchronized rut and a classic rut, meaning that like November five to ten.

Period.

Wow, it's gonna be November five to ten.

All right, let's back it up like those.

To be clear, I don't believe in this either.

I just love that, but I throw out this thing because some people do.

But then he and then he, he says that's not right, and then you alert everybody what day.

To be Because 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.

Reason you have bigfoot experts on radio the other day.

Exactly, we need a new believer hat it's not just the black bucket of moon.

Yeah, exactly, that's great idea.

Oh, core full moon buck, That says believer.

What's the purpose of the timing of the ruts when the fawns will hit the ground in spring?

Yeah?

Yeah, Why would mother nature?

Why would evolution have that affected by some moon.

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 fawn 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.

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 does so 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 rutting moon.

And so every year you know that rutting moon is moving back and forth a week or fifteen days or whatever.

And so we should have seen if it was influencing when they are coming into estrus, we should have seen them moving towards that or moving back.

Zero.

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 dose 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 maybe it's just those Mississippi deer.

Would it be worth just taking five minutes to tabrons and explain what confirmation bias is and how that shows up in hunters?

Sure?

I think so?

Yeah.

My favorite analogy about this is you go, I don't know, surprise analogy, Like you go out and you fishing small mouths and you're throwing shar troops and you get a bunch, You're hitting them real good.

Then at one minute you throw on a pumpkin colored jig and you're fishing for a couple of seconds, you don't get a hit.

You put shar truce back on lo and behold throughout the day you keep catching fish.

They were coming on hartreuse.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, And like there's something to that, because you know, ain't shartruths.

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 small mouth bass are hitting on in some given day, it wouldn't be like that, you know.

Yeah.

So I think that you find part of the fun.

You find patterns and things, and and you know that works for me.

Therefore that's what that's dictated by.

Nature, right, Yeah, Well that's a that's a deeper question.

I mean, that would be 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 we're really good as human beings.

We want to find patterns, so we're trying to find the shortcut.

We're really good that that's helped us, that's helped human beings to be able to link those things together, and that's the path.

Let's capitalize on it.

But the problem that we have is we become enamored with this linkage that we have made 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 it's called the pet hypothesis.

That's why we have to get outside peer review.

That's why you 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 but I think that is always going on.

Is we we never remember the times we were unsuccessful.

We disproportionately remember the times that we were mm hm.

And I think if we if you are a moon believer, you only go hunt in those conditions where 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 days that the moon is doing something completely different.

Yeah.

And you may be a good enough hunter, and you may be hunting in a 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 gonna 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 gonna go hunt.

That's a fun study.

And or look at camera data.

Yeah, that'd be another way.

Just record camera data all the time and go back and look at it.

This is about the moon.

It's it's sort of Bloomberg had an article that bigfoot sightings have decreased in the last decade.

They peaked around like two thousand and four 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 sell cams are very available, I feel like the same thing would happen that if you pulled deer hunters in twenty years from now, it wouldn't be eighty three percent anymore.

Yeah, it would be.

Lower because they if they were trying to like really pay attention, they would maybe notice it.

Oh yeah, the moon isn't saying that that the deer movement is different based on what the moon is doing.

Yeah, I agree.

I just think it's gonna take a long time because it's really difficult to let go right with that belief, especially if within your little group, you're you're the older, wiser, you're the influencer.

The single most difficult thing for a human being to say publicly, I was wrong.

Mm hmm.

I mean, that's 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 trying to figure out.

He's just saying he wants a real concise ance.

I don't want to get into it.

I'm just curious because you're a big deer guy.

Do your hunter deer researcher, give me, give me your basic like one sentence, what's your basic take on CWD?

It's it's real, it's it's the single biggest challenge I believe to deer management and the application of science ants while simultaneously keeping hunters engaged and believing in science.

That wasn't very concise, but that's that's the way.

It's the challenge of our time.

You think it's you believe it's a legitimate threat at.

A herd level.

Yes, yes, yes I do.

Earlier you mentioned different buck personalities?

Are there?

Is it?

Is it possible to give like a handful of buck personality types?

Yeah?

And have you heard of a shirker buck?

I have not.

Okay, go on, okay, different.

Buck we'll come back to We'll come back to that.

You never heard of a shirker I'm not recalling val geist, Oh, val Geist I have heard of that word, but man, I'm drawing a blank on.

We'll come around to it.

Do give me some buck personality types.

Buck personalities, Well, it's 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 the hunter's experience.

Yeah, so that we call it a sedentary type that's gonna be your introvert, and then your mobile personality type that's gonna be your extrovert.

Uh.

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 five hundred acre home range guy, he may be a fifteen hundred acre home range guy.

But that is where he is essentially going to live and die is in that that fixed home range.

What we found is that about thirty percent 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 a 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 of 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.

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 a mobile personality.

And just the way the crow flies distance it was just shy twenty miles wow, so his route was 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 he goes back to Mississippi.

Then a while later he wants to you know what I mean, yeah, like repeat it where 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 guys were looking at it.

There used to be this thing that links.

They used to think that links didn't like cross big rivers, and they thought these big rivers were boxed in links home ranges.

So they had these links with collars were swimming the tan and awe swimming the Yukon, you know, mm hmm.

And people always saw it just they had just figured that that's a border to a lynx's habitat.

That's some bit just yeah, right across it, shoot 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, uh in this one in the Mississippi River.

We're talking about a normal river, so think think a river that's fifty 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 were 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 rip 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.

We're always having to colonize different areas based on buffalo going through, based on wildfire, 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.

Yeah right here.

Oh yeah, because if not you 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 we're 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 that during the rut bucks move more.

Okay.

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.

That's not think that's fair.

That's not fair.

Yeah, 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, after the rut.

Two hundred acres per day independent 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 there they're daily ground they were covering could be greater.

During the rut, the amount of area that they were covered was two hundred 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 two hundred acres of ground per day, but during the peak of the rut in late rut, those daily areas or places are further apart.

Really, maybe you make.

A single move and then do the two hundred yard circuit and then makes a single move into another two hundred 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 buckets covering.

He might have an overlap of eighty percent 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 two hundred acres away over here, fifteen hundred yards away, he's in a completely different area.

He's covering the same amount of area in a twenty four hour time frame, but the distance away from the dates he's exploring new spots.

Yeah.

Really, so do you really 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.

I rut funnel, it would be a good place to sit, right, Okay.

I think you got to frame it like this.

If 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 of old Lady Thompson's might be off on your spot.

That's right, that's right, he's gonna shift, he's gonna move.

Yeah.

Really mm hmm.

I can show you the show the data.

Yeah, oh, let me, I'll hit you know, and 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 does by coming on the down wind side of betting cover?

I think probably fifty percent of the time they do.

Okay, so they're not visually looking for them.

They do, but they in addition to visually looking, they're cruising to smell them.

Yeah, what we generally think of right now, and this could have a lot to do with those two hundred acre daily areas being so far apart and disjointed.

What we think is that bucks are cruising to find what are called dough focal areas.

So think about the social behavior of your dough population, those matrilineal groups.

And so here's a group of dose here, here's a group of dose over here.

We think of it as a circuit.

And so a buck is going to go into this area.

He knows who all's there, you know, via signposts sent so forth.

He's gonna check it.

Since check it, who's good or bad?

Anybody close coming into heat?

Maybe she's already into heat but occupied.

He's gonna go to another area, part of that circuit and look for adoin estris there.

Okay, I light, I got one more question than he's Guys can hit some.

I asked this earlier, but I 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 gonna go.

So he's visiting places he knows about, or is he legit like going spots he's never seen before.

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 gonna take a trip yep, a two to three day I'm will 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 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 it because you 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.

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.

That's when you get like really vulnerable.

Man, Like you get really vulnerable to something bad happen to you when you're in places you've never been, Like you're on some do you know what I 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 light.

Dude, I'm not doing that.

Yeah, do you know what I mean?

Like, I'm not like, I've never been there, I have no idea what's happening.

It seems like they'd feel so vulnerable.

And from a deer management perspective, I mean, if you do the kind of stuff we were gone with, you know your 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 to ten thousand acre tract and you were primarily controlling the harvest within that population except for the excursion, and so that is where you will see some of those target bucks are gonna go off and man, they get hammered.

Yeah.

Yeah, you go over to the place where the you know, brown it's down property.

I 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.

Do What's funny is uh?

I know these guys and they have a big no fence operation in Texas, but they wound 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 or do whatever they want.

Yeah.

I got a couple of places like that too.

It's that pinch point, that corridor of where they're going to go on to that other property and we're gonna block.

That up, and these dudes stands.

It's so funny is these dudes stands are all we're all that property life.

Oh yeah, oh just waiting, you know, Yeah, all right, I'm done.

The October Boogeyman is the October law 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 sixteenth, and they bed down and they breed and they just become less visible and they just become very dedicated to that spot and like running with each other.

I don't care what he says, this is true?

Is that a thing?

Do the deer movement studies show thing.

Yeah, they just stand there like the does are feeding, and he just stands there.

He doesn't lay down, he doesn't eat, he just stands there.

Yeah, that's legit.

Oh it is okay, Yeah, 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 all the time.

When there is a dough an estras it becomes a population a level of fact, or it becomes noticeable when a greater proportion of the does are in standing heat and bucks are tending them.

So you're gonna have less bucks available roaming the landscape because they're locked in.

If there are too many dos, that happens.

You're saying no, I'm saying that if you had an appropriate number of doughs.

Okay, that's kind of like some magical world every dough, like you have some thing where it lists every dough in a population all came into heat on November seventh.

It would be reasonable to assume that on November seventh, no bucks are running around doing crazy stuff, right because they're standing there with all these doughs.

That are exactly And then twenty eight days later you're gonna have the leftovers because the sex ratio, there's always more doughs than bucks, and so some of them may not get bred, and so then that would follow again twenty eight 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 it's the rut.

I would look at it as the frequency of just seeing more bucks during that time frame is gonna be less because some of them are locked in with does, but you also have the odd man out or the odd buck out, and he's gonna be going around looking for another dough and estress, so that there's still gonna be general buck movement.

You're just gonna 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 do, you could tell me what days not to hunt.

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 a birth control thing or something where none of the dos ever come in.

Oh, Bucks, just crazy everywhere.

It's a short term play.

Yeah, it's not a good lie.

That'd be some some evil science there.

It's a bad long term play.

You're going to see a plumbing deer population.

We're in Wisconsin.

Uh you know, cwd's big there, big deer.

Heard a lot of our neighbors have started shooting more does.

Since they've started doing that, they claim to have a better rut because less does 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 has specifically evaluated that, but I think that is entirely logical because you've increased competition.

You know, they're less does per male and so they have to compete more, look more, search more, et cetera.

It's my turn.

We're just going said you were done.

I was for my turn when this turn, This turn is gonna be one question turned.

Uh.

We have a buddy who has a really great property in Texas whereabouts Way South Texas, Brownsville, Way South Texas.

Like when you're cruising around, you see I mean, you see way more Bucks and does anyhow, we go down there a couple times.

We've gone down to Rattle Bucks, which is the funnest 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 dolls are all laying down on their board and they're just more inclined to wonder what's up when the doors 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, but it's wrong.

We did a study on that.

Now I was a tech, I was a participant as a buddy of mine.

So again my master's degree was in South Texas, so I 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 rattling antlers and and dough response.

And what we found, very generally was we 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 winner 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 this has been mid nineties, and so this is your You're reading the magazine and how do you set up your rattling sequence?

And so you got to get there, and you gotta get crouch and you got to scrape the brush and you gotta kick and you gotta rattle, and you got to remember that, remember all that.

But anyways, gone, okay, Well.

It was a thing back in the day.

And what we found, you're you're painting the whole picture, like the deer.

You're kind of like you're you're sort of creating the entire encounter.

You're trying to mimic reality.

Yeah, where they're bumping into the brush and all that, sort of making it more realistic.

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 a 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.

Yeah, I mean you're you're just done by that.

But that was the clear winter, and so just the obvious thing is they could hear it better.

And so I and I even had chances where a sweat somebody on the ground.

This was that.

Do youn't know where the Welder Wildlife Refuge is?

Aid?

Did you go past it?

Going south?

Unhunted population tens of thousands of They have all these observation towers.

So we got an observers up top fifteen twenty 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 four hundred 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.

And then it was over a thirty minute period, and so then we had an elapsed time and you do another rattle, and then another rattle, and do you rattle bring him in, keep coming, stop rattling.

He stopped rattled him again, finally closed the distance and brought him in 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 as if I'm thinking about rattling, if it's donn 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're viewing it as going out in the morning.

There's like deer round and you do a few rattle sessions, nothing happened, gets to be eleven am, and all of a sudden, buck buck buck.

So I had this whole boredom.

There you go, hypothesis, But it could be other factors in there.

Well.

Ask a question, what do your movement studies 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 Is that what you've seen?

Yeah, it's very subtle.

You know.

There's a lot of people will say, and maybe we didn't 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 small.

Huh, I feel like hard oh Whitetail 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.

Is if you think the peak of the rut is like November fourteen, those old mature bucks, five six year olds, they are really participating in the rut more in that like fifteenth to twenty fifth time period than a two and a half year old?

Is that?

Is that like putting too much stock in those ideas.

I think a buck is gonna participate whenever he can, huh, and whenever he detects there is a dough an estress, he's gonna participate.

Okay, if that answers your question.

Yeah, Like I said, a white tail hunter would say, that is the time period of the rut 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 ask your question?

I was afraid I don't forget you.

No, go ahead, I won't forget mine because it's sitting right in front of me.

How far away you think?

How far away you think a buck can smell it a dough?

That's an astress?

Great question, I would say, Uh, I haven't said it depends yet, but I think it's going to depend so much on wind condition, you know, and.

So wild ass like, like perfect conditions.

Hundreds of yards?

Are you asking about the doe herself or just the scent that maybe she left behind?

Just detect the presence of a doe 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, their sense of smells that good.

Yeah, yeah, I think so.

I don't know if it's five hundred 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.

Of yards.

Bronson, why did you bring that antler all the way from here?

Yeah?

And if you're just listening, you're just later gonna have to go to YouTube and watch to see what we're gonna tell you.

He's got a big old he's got a big old buck antler.

It's a Michigan tan with the browtie and saw it off's got one.

He's got an a luinum contraption.

He's got an a lunum contraption glued to the end of it.

Squirrels have been chewing on the times.

That was actually damage during velvet.

Oh, I just thought.

This is a this is an example from or this is a specimen from an experiment we did about ten years ago now.

And the question was, let me, let me back up.

We always at Mississippi State with the Deer Lab, we tried to do every single thing we do has a purpose for the end user.

It's gonna affect hunting, it's going to affect management, help you manage your property.

Except this.

This has nothing to do at all with man.

This is straight up deer biology.

Me and Steve Demris, the other co director of the Deer Lab, we have this debate going on for years and years about female choice.

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 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 gonna breed.

Doesn't matter if it's a spiky or 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 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 though, you know, And we see multi paternity, and so in twenty five percent of doze, the twin faunds, twenty five percent of those will have two different fathers, got it, So it's going on multiple bucks of 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 spike or would it be a three, four or five year old with larger antlers and a big body who has clearly demonstrated I'm a survivor.

I can make it.

You know, she's got all the investment, she's going to have the gestation for seven months, is all her resources.

She ought to care who's behind hers?

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 p 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 year four years old, that one is clearly a yearling and choose one of them.

Yep.

So we standardized by body size and age.

And then we got with our egg engineering people and we developed a contraption to where we could manipulate antlers.

Could make him look like a toad even when he wasn't.

That's exactly right.

So we challenged these does with.

Well, hold on, you gotta explain how you did that.

Take a little spike and put that antler on his ass.

Yeah he's alive.

Yeah, Well we sedate him.

Yeah we sedatum.

Yeah.

Looking so they all had the base part somehow attached to their.

Pedical Yeah yeah, So all the all the bucks that are they're in the study.

They're going to be sedated and then we're gonna cut their antlers off.

We're gonna fix that part, the coupling, a fix to the antler and then the pedicle.

They're going to get a receiver coupling there, and so this is incredible, and so then we will challenge a dough.

So then we had someone from that school reproductive physiologist.

They can induce estress, you know, with the progesterone treatment or something.

So now we know where that dough is coming into heat.

And so now she's behaviorally, she's demonstrating that she's an estress.

So we send her down an alleyway and she's got a pen, and then to her left and her to her right are too equally aged or equally body sized bucks.

One of them is carrying a one sixty, one of them is carrying a ninety, and then we monitored her behavior to see which one she would prefer.

Now, we could not allow them to breed just the way it was set up the logistics, but then we looked at all the behavioral signs of if we pull the fence up, which which one would she go to?

And it was over eighty percent of the time she always went for the antlers.

Wow, even a younger official.

Dude, good for her, superficial man, hey man, But there's that twenty interest in personality, it's like totally suficial.

But it wasn't one hundred percent.

It was you know, twenty percent didn't fall for the for the big antlers.

So there's some selection going on.

Well, but 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, it.

Is hard to determine exactly right, Yeah, can that even happen?

You know?

The only the only thing we can say in the wild of does she have any choice at all?

Is when she since the sensing she's coming into estras, 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 sort of singled out a dough.

He's very interested in his 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 She's close.

Yeah, he knows she's close, but she's not that ready yet, right, yeh, got it?

So she might not be making like a not you not you wait, I'm waiting for Dave or whatever.

Yeah, I think she's just waiting to be receptive.

Physiologically, yeah.

Uh.

There's a theory among whitetail 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 betting area, own those doughs.

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 manipulate doing that, removing particular bucks and creating space for others to move in.

Uh, 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 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?

Yeah, Yeah, that's the best cornfield in the neighborhood.

Does all beding here?

Have you ever heard that bucks avoid certain kinds of cover when they're in velvet and they're more comfortable going into that cover once their antlers are hard?

No?

You 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 say, a lot of bucks and velvet going through.

Yeah, the pair and the mesquite and got it.

That's really a good testing ground.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's a price to pay for going through that mesquite.

And the awareness that they have, you know, when you're you're pushing them with the helicopter and 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 moose question.

I mean, you can ask.

If you're maybe there's a deer parallel.

You're calling.

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 b line stops, his head's pointing towards you.

You call, he comes, you call, he comes.

He gets five hundred yards away and lays down, lays down for an hour, gets up, walks the other direction.

Dawn's in his head.

You were supposed to come to him.

You think so?

Was there.

Was the wind in his face?

No, there's no wind.

Isn't a human thing it wasn't a human thing.

Wind's totally wrong.

He hadn't seen nothing.

Yeah.

My My only guess was there was no there was no visual queue 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 cow standing there.

Yeah you know that.

Yeah.

He's like at some points, like at some point I need to see.

The cow, so you need a cow decoy.

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

Sounds like you've gotta be able to shoot at five hundred yards next time.

We did one time got him, but it's it's thick and yeah, it's hard.

If we have time, I could lay out the shirt or buck, but I know.

We're a shirt.

Yeah.

He's big believer in us.

That's not true.

But I did re 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 in your captive heard where the bucks would shirk.

Not at that that scale.

But so he valarious guys 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 mad men.

I mean, they wanted to fight.

Everybody hated them.

The dos hated them, other bucks hated them.

They just want 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 were able to enumerate how many fawns you know that they sired.

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, So 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 weighed even though they're the same age, even though they weigh twenty pounds more.

Those guys may be the shirkers.

Then they have higher breeding success later in the year.

So we kind of saw that, but compressed within year.

It's super interesting.

But it's different than the idea that well, we told this the one deer biologist.

I'm sure you're familiar with Jim half a finger.

Oh yeah, yeah, So we told this 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 to put more progeny on the landscape that your banking that.

Well, I'm gonna have a hell of a year when I'm five.

Yeah, and I'm taking off two, three and four.

Yeah, I agree with that.

Yeah, what are the the guest reasons for this?

I mean, it's 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 hilarious geist all of his reasoning, But I'm I'm trying to think about a mechanism of how that could work.

And like onset of hormones and things.

Are happening 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 gonna be variation within an age class where some have born, 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, I'm not gonna risk it.

But then later in life greater surgeon testosterone and they risk it and go for it.

What do you wind up seeing?

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.

That that's got to be real, right, But what is that?

What is it?

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 that's great going on?

Yeah?

Or are they literally learning and modifying their behavior over time?

Like I love, 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.

Yeah, so what what are they doing different?

I think it's probably just being more perceptive and maybe being more slow in 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 I might 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 learn stuff like looking up in trees, you know what 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, trees.

Yeah, and like the 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 a yearling bucks that are just so paranoid they're looking all around, And.

It's good 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.

You know.

The other thing is specific cherry tree I grew up by with the deer dude, like the Ranella's 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 there's sneakier though, but it's just like a numbers game where you're just gonna 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 where percentage is in most populations, but yeah, much less.

Yeah, all depends on punting rate and mortality.

But but yeah, that's gonna be uh yeah.

I mean even in a well managed population, less than twenty five percent 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 gonna be less than ten percent are gonna resemble something like that.

So they're very rare.

In twenty fifteen, 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 is a buck who does not shut 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've never, I guess been lucky enough to have a collar on one, but a property that a hunt has one.

Right now, He just got pictures from a puny buddy about a week ago that the cactus buck is back.

So see there last year, It was there last year.

What did you notice him due last year?

He?

Uh, he hung out with the doze.

Yeah.

Yeah, they just like don't participate in the room.

Nope, not at all.

Uh.

The deer writer Pat Durkin, he had an observation where he when he was the editor Deer and Deer Hunting magazine, he profiled a great many big buck killers okay, and he had come to this kind of 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's there's a point at which it's not like a woodsmanship thing.

It's like they're just good at killing box.

They're not generalist woodsmen.

You know, 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 guides.

Yeah, And a lot of that is about hunting pressure and thinking about and you know, this doesn't work everywhere in the US.

In the southeast, you know a lot a lot of stand hunting, a lot of permanent stand hunting and so forth, and and just recognizing that deer know when you're on the property and it's and it's not gunshots, it's it's you being there, you being on an ATV.

It's the smells, the sounds, all that they they know when you're there.

And one thing that has really changed when we try to really advise now is when when you hunt, if you're going to hunt a particular stand, particular area, only go on the days where you're going to minimize the opportunity of bumping deer, because we know the research I talked about earlier.

After a couple days and deer 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, dough 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 mouths 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 gonna 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 dough 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 twenty percent of their body weight.

They're hungry, and food plots in my neck of the woods us a great place to haunt.

M think, well, that spencer Newhart.

Can I make two study requests?

Absolutely well, okay one of them.

I haunt a lot of places in the West where whitetail habitat and mule deer habitat overlap, but I never see them interact with each other.

I'm always like pretty shocked that I could.

I could, in the same hunt see a couple of white tails and a couple of mule deers, 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 would be very high highly skewed for the white tail buck, like ninety plus percent, just based on what I've seen.

But I don't know that I'm interested in anything like 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 if you just took like older arrays hmm, like order from a mild deer dough and estriss and odor from a white tail dough and estrus and like put it in front of both boxes.

He like, oh, that's the white tail, you know, Yeah, that's a great.

And in my observations, they interact as though like an elk in 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 mildier country, mild deer are in a tough spot.

Milder are probably going to be in a tougher spot with increased competition from white tails increase competition for elk.

So go to the Mild Deer Foundation and be like, we need to understand more about as these as these white tails are colonizing more and more mildier country, how do they interact?

We did, and here's all you're 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's out of my that's side of my home range over there, But I do think it would be interesting to challenge a white tailed dough with a fully mature, large antlered mule deer and then a smaller, younger whitetail.

Really, is it the species straw 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 start or something like that is viable.

I don't know if that's is that true?

I think that I think it's like I think it's like a horse.

And a donkey throwing a mule.

I thought.

They're viable.

Okay, they're sexually viable.

We're gonna learn when he does the study.

You know what I'd throw into that study?

Man, if you got like time to burn, man, if there's any like h if symmetry matters to dose joan, is there any like disadvantage to being atypical?

It probably gets hard after a while to tease out all these little differences, though, don't it.

Yeah, but you could manipulate it.

It would be obvious.

Yeah, yeah, nine, yeah, yeah, you could attach stuff to where it's really.

He's got a club on one side.

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 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, they won't pick the yellow ones.

They just taste worse, taste worse.

Is that something you've heard seen?

No, I haven't, but I think that's logical.

So turning yellow from the desiccation that they're growing.

Sounds like yeah, good?

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 hour.

But but do they give you the obligatory that's a good.

Just nothing to it.

Do you like hearing study ideas?

I do.

Snow, you got a pile of.

Some of them.

Some of them can be really cuckoo.

So you're you know, you're given a seminar and you always have what you ought to do?

Is sure that can get old?

What else?

Man?

I could go on all day.

They just like to cap it off.

If if hunters want to take what you've seen in your movement still but he's an 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 gonna 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 when you is, say it's like a.

November fifteen 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 fifteen 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 we when you pick the November fifteenth, we would agree that peak rut is sort of like the day when you have the highest relative number of doughs in estres.

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 does have been into estres.

So yes, that is going to be the series of days where the greatest number and greatest proportion.

So there's a there's a two week window, like if you take a like just generally with white tail deer, there's a two week window in which fifty percent of the does come into estres.

And we're going to declare that two week window peak rut.

Yeah, you know, if it's a synchronized rut and so forth.

Yeah, generally speaking, So that that's kind of funny because then when you hear guys killing some giant that no one has ever seen, never showed up on their cameras, like, that's that, dude, it's cruise, an excursion, he's an excursion book.

Yeah, he excurreted off your place.

Yeah, and excirted on some other goal.

Somebody else and they got him.

Yeah, exactly right.

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 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 fifty to sixty thousand 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 twenty 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 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, doubt that the actual plantings within it.

But yes, it was just size and what we found.

Even though two times the amount of like the 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 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 out.

They get over brows, 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 the smaller in the shade all that.

Then you get to this three four five acre.

Now you've got a big 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 returns.

So we didn't see anything greater of a ten acre plot versus a three acre plot.

Oh okay, they didn't prefer five over twenty.

They did.

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 or are gonna use it.

And I would say they're vulnerable.

There's it's like a like like why do you feel a 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 ten or twenty acres.

Yeah, because that's security possibly, so yes, exposure.

It's exposed.

Yeah.

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 data, it's just ding, did he visit the plot or not?

Yes, 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 dose.

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.

Yep, cow man.

No, it's a lot of great information.

I got such a good study.

I had to say so hard to explain.

I'm like a post book right now, and all I can think about is some food.

And we got to do this trivia in like thirty minutes.

Dude, thanks for coming on and wrap it up.

Yeah, man, I love your the extension, like, tell people go how to go find your work and to see exauce.

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 you can go to the Msudar lab dot 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 Facebook, Instagram, we have a YouTube channel with a lot of different videos, podcasts where we talk about this type of stuff.

Podcast is Deer University, so MSU Deer Lab, the website, social media, uh 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 dot com and there's a lot of us there.

A little company consulting work that's for consulting work.

Yeah, 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, habitat habitat management, deer ducks, turkey, quail, whatever you want with wildlife management.

All right, we've got an expert.

To help you.

Right again, doctor Bronson Strickland from University of Mississippi.

Hale State, Mississippi State.

University, Mississippi State University.

We have that same problem in Michigan because we've got U of M and M s U well.

With the M specific with them specifically specifically.

And then the 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.

That's that's uh, that's a Michigan State University Extension pieced a Mississippi State University Extension piece that puts down it's a great graphic because it puts down what people think, the idiosyncrasies of what people think, what's found, and then it puts it into 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.

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 thirty minutes staring at it today.

It is a very convincing portrayal of like looking at something quite thoroughly.

Yeah.

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.

Okay, 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 Ronson,