Latest / Wired To Hunt Podcast / Ep. 510: Foundations - What Shed Antlers Can Tell You

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Ep. 510: Foundations - What Shed Antlers Can Tell You · Wired To Hunt Podcast

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: to the fundamentals of better dear hunting, and now your host,
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Tony Peterson. Hey, everyone, welcome to the wire to Hunt
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Like.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: about what shed antlers teach us about dear. This is
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: probably gonna sound like total bs, my friends, but stick
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: with me. On my journey as a deer hunter, I
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: spent a lot of years not really paying attention to
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: what was happening around me. Even as a youngster, I
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: scouted a lot, and I hunted every second I could,
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: and I still mostly zoned out when mother Nature tried
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: to give me a helpful hint or three of them.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: As I've gotten older, I've realized that just about every
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: d your sighting, in every piece of deer sign and yes,
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: every shed antler has something to teach us. That last
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: one is what this episode is all about, and I
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: urge you to listen to it, even if you're not
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: a die hard shed hunt. In the spring, I set
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: out in the dark with my wife's cousin in Toe.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: Our destination was a Turkey blind I had set up
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: in the back corner of a pick cornfield. The cousin
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: had expressed interest in turkey hunting the previous year, probably
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: during a holiday get together or something I don't really remember.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: She wasn't really the kind of first timer I usually
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: take out, considering she is a few years older than
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: me and it never hunted anything before. She also has
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: a son who has mitochondrial disease, which means that almost
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: the entirety of her life is dedicated to his care,
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: and it's not an easy life, my friends. In fact,
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: her son is who I think about when some grown
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: adult man sends me an email or social media d
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: M about how offended by something he is that I
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: said on a podcast, I wrote in an article, it
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: makes me think about how lucky most of us are,
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: where we have the luxury of of letting the little
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: things bother us, when there are people out there really
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: struggling to get through the day, people who are dealing
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: with real problems. Anyway, that's a sidebar. Becky and I
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: set up in the dark that April morning, and while
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: a few birds gobbled, it was just kind of a slow, cloudy,
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: drizzly morning. We only saw one hen At mid morning,
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: I made the call to relocate to a different blind,
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: one that is situated in the best strutting zone I've
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: ever found in a lifetime of turkey hunting. It's just
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: a phenomenal mid day spot. And as we lug decoys
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: and chairs and gear along the field edge, I picked
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: up a small two point shed antler. It was cool,
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: but it didn't really mean. After we looked at it
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: and checked it out a little bit, we cut across
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: an alfalfa field that was just released from a little
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: snow a few weeks prior. That's when I spotted a
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: much more impressive set of times sticking out of the alfalfa,
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: and then I saw another. In total, Becky and I
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: picked up nine sheds, including a couple of giants, in
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: an area of the size of maybe two acres. It
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: was just a low depression in the field, meaning the
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: bucks could feed there and not be harassed by anyone
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: driving by on a nearby county road. It also made
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: me realize that the buck crop on that farm was
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: a hell of a lot better than I thought it was. Now.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: I'm not done, though, because that one in a million
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: find of more antlers in twenty minutes than I usually
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: scoop up in an entire winter. It got me back
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: out there to scout more than I ever had. I
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: wanted to know why those bucks were there, and why
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: they were there in such a high concentration. It honestly
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: changed not only how I look at the farm, which
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: I still hunt, but how I think about it, and
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: how there's so much happening in the dear world that
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: I don't understand. That day was amazing, and it only
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: got better when we made contact with a suicidal two
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: year old who was on the prowl at noon and
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: who took a face full of fours at fifteen yards,
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: making Becky's seasons short and very very sweet. While I
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: love taking new hunters on their first successful hunts, I
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: love getting dear lessons as well. Shed Antler's almost every
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: one of them do that for you if you know
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: how to read them. But not all shed Antler lessons
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: are created equal. Take a big four point side you
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: find in a pickcorn field on your private lease. Sure
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: there's something to be had there, but the lesson isn't
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: going to run too deep for starters. You probably knew
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: that deer like to eat corn especially in the winter,
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: and that bucks might spend all night long from December
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: to April in a specific field, nosing their way across
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: it while vacuuming up every colonel a waste grain they
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: come across. That's kind of like, I don't know, putting
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: a trail camera on the edge of a soybean field
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: in the summer. While the picks might be cool and exciting,
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: it probably doesn't teach you much about overall dear behavior.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: That winter buck dropping his head gear in the corn.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: He's telling you mostly what you already know. But that's okay.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: It's a hell of a lot better than not finding
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: a shed. Plus, he's also telling you that, up until
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: the moment half of his rack broke free and fell
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: to the ground, he made it. He survived you and
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: you're hunting buddies. He survived the neighbors who are in
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: the if it's brown, it's down category and who put
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: on an elaborate deer drive on their farm every day
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: of the gun season. He survived the Sunday morning church
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: traffic on the road that borders your property, the constant
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: stream of grain trucks in the fall hauling the harvest
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: to the river, or the co op in the nearest town.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: He survives the unscrupulous assholes who have no qualms about
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: driving around at two in the morning with some bush
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: latte's on their seat and a spotlight and a suppressed
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: firearm laid over their lap. He survived e H D,
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: C W D, coyotes and whatever else conspires to kill
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: deer on a daily basis. So in that way, that
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: antler is proof of more than life. It's proof that
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: when you think they must all be dead because it
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: feels that way, they aren't. They never are. In fact,
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: I read something on a hunting for him the other
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: day where a poster said no one could come to
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: his state and kill anything bigger than a two and
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: a half year old because bucks never make it past
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: that age in his state. Now I don't know this dude,
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: but I'll bet you he doesn't shed hunt very hard,
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: because if he did, he'd eventually find proof that he's wrong,
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: probably the same way if he just some are scouted
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: more or ran trail cameras more, he'd have to encounter
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: the fact that he's making up things about the age
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: of the bucks in the state. But that's not something
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: a lot of us want to find out, But it
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: could be out there laying in the grass or under
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: the snow, waiting for a march thaw. Now take that
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: same hypothetical four point side, moving a hundred yards to
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: a fence line, the spot where the top strand of
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: barbed wire droops lower than any of the other sections.
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: Drop it there. What do we know now, Well, for
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: starters that leap across the fence, probably jarred the antler loose.
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: Big deal. You might think I would too, But there's
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: more to it. Now. He's telling you where he crossed
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: to get into the food, which tells you, to some extent,
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: where he probably came from. This may or may not
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: be super valuable, depending on when the antler dropped and
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: to what extent the deer in your neighborhood yard up.
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: If he came from ten miles away to hold up
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: with dozens of other deer in a river bottom filled
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: with egg, that isn't really isn't worth that much. But
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: if he's a resident and he didn't follow a centuries
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: old migration path to get to an advantageous chunk of
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: real estate to ride out the winter months, now you're
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: onto something certainly that but could have crossed that fence anywhere,
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: because after all, they are pretty good jumpers. But he
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: chose that spot because it's easier, and very likely it's
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: along as chosen travel route or one of his chosen
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: travel roads. Even if he had to loop a little
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: bit out of his way to get to that easy crossing,
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: it's valuable into you knew where he was going to
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: eat at this time of year, but did you know
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: exactly how he'd get there? Better? Yet, is that something
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: he'd do during the hunting season? Deer travel routes are
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: often just that deer travel roads. They may be totally
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: independent of season or weather, and they are often the
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: lynchpin that holds your whole hunting plan together. So is
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: that antler at that crossing teaching you something about that?
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: If so, pay attention. Now take that same antler, that
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: hypothetical antler we've got, move it twos into the best
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: cover off of the food. That might be along a trail,
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: or it might be smacked aub in the middle of
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: a bed. It might just seem to be laying in
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: the middle of the woods, not related to any type
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: of sign. It might mean that the buck staged there
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: in the waning minutes of daylight as another winter night
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: settled over the land. Do you think that's not valuable?
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: It certainly is, my friends. I've had the good fortune
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: to spend a lot of winter afternoon sitting in various
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: ground blinds while trying to photograph deer. It's a hobby
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: of mine. I just absolutely love it. What I've watched
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: happened over and over and over again is what we
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: all kind of understand but often don't witness firsthand a
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: whole lot, and that is the doze coming out to
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: feed first and the bucks hanging back in the cover.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: We know this happens because of the order they show
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: up on our cameras or the order in which we
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: see them when we were hunting in the fall, but
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: it's not always easy to witness, so we have to
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: fill in the blank. With a camera on a tripod
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: and the open viewing of winter woods, you can often
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: watch the deer approach the food and see how the
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: big bucks, even when their antlers are long gone stage,
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: even a month or two beyond when they were last
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: hunted by humans, those bucks will stage they set up
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: to watch the first arrivals in the food to see
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: if they set off any alarm. They use the wind,
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: they use their ears, and they definitely use their eyes.
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: You'll see them mill around, nibble on some brows and
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: they just kind of wait. They're just kind of killing time.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: Sometimes when they do that, they're antlers fall off. If
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: you find an antler in that cover, you might be
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: onto something that bucks do not only in the winter,
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: but we'll do all fall. Whether you can see it
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: in person or not. That's not nothing, and it means
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: there's a lot more to that antler find than just
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: having something cool to put in your man cave or
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: your she shed. Now, of course, you might find an
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: antler in alone and patch a willow brush or maybe
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: sumac or something which might seem kind of out of
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: place or random. One of my daughters found a really
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: big shed last spring in just such a spot near
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: my house in central Minnesota. It was close to a highway,
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: close to a lot of people activity, and as far
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: as he could get from the biggest concentration of hunters
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: on that specific property. That dude had it figured out,
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: and I'd have never known about it until my nine
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: year old's eyes bugged out of her head at the
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: sight of that big antler land there. In fact, even
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: though I can only do hunt that farm, I sat
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: there one night in October this past season just to
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: see and I saw several deer, but the biggest buck,
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: a really solid eight pointer, but not the previous owner
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: of that shed, got up out of that same little
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: patch and worked his way through a cattail slew. This lesson,
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: and it's an important one, is that big bucks used
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: terrain in a specific way. They use cover in a
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: certain way. If you find a good shed somewhere, that
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: buck is shouting something at you about where he likes
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: to be. Your job is to figure out why. It's
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: also your job to try to suss out who else
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: might use that spot and how it can be advantageous
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: to you as a hunter for the rest of your
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: life in the woods. Now, I know you're thinking, well,
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: this is all well and good. If you have a
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: spot to shed hunt that you also hunt. But what
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: if you don't. What if you only hunt twenty acres
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: of ground and you shed hunt a bunch of parks
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: in your county. I'd say two things to that. First,
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: why are you limiting yourself to that small parcel and
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: only one of them find more ground to hunt private public.
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: It doesn't matter. Open up your aperture a little bit.
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: And secondly, those antlers on the ground that you can't
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: hunt can still tell you plenty For starters, the same
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: rules apply as far as reading the situation and trying
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: to hypothesize why the buck was there when he dropped
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: and how he used the terrain around him. I'll give
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: you a real world example of this. I fully admit
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: that I'm not a buck bed hunter. I'm slowly creeping
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: in that direction, or at least trying to figure out
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: how buck beds can make me a better hunter in
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: a variety situations. It's just not my style like it
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: is for a lot of folks out there. I'm still
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: very interested in buck beds, and probably ten years ago
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: I was shed hunting a piece of ground that I
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: can't hunt. As I'll get into in the next episode
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: in much greater detail, I was just trying to follow
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: a new route through that ground so that I wasn't
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: looking at the same trails as I already had on
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: earlier shed hunts. This took me up a hillside that
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: was covered in wrist thick saplings and randomly led me
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: to a little bench, and on that bench was a
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: perfect oval in the grass. And in that oval was
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: my first match set. Even though the buck wasn't a
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: giant and it wasn't on land that I'd ever actually
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: get the bow hunt, that lessons stuck with me. As
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: I admired those antlers, I looked around. The bed was
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: positioned in such a way that undetected approach was nearly
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: impossible with the right wind. A buck betted right there
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: had all of the advantages and multiple escape routes. There
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: was no accident that a buck was using that spot
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: to bed. Years later, I almost caught up to a
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: giant on public land in northern Wisconsin in land that
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: couldn't have looked more different. But that hundred and sixty
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: inchers bed that I found when I went back there
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: and scouted was almost a carbon copy of the one
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: I found while shed hunting that had too perfectly placed
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: antlers in it two miles away. If you think back
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: to last week and about thirty seven other episodes of
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: this show, I've preached the message of time in the
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: woods being one of the biggest, if not the biggest,
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: contributors to success on pressure deer. I cannot stress this enough,
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: and yes, if you're paying attention, this goes for shed hunting.
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: To get out there and cover ground, whether you think
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: you'll find an antler or not. If you don't, you
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: still got some exercise, and you still spend time in
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: the woods looking around, following your instincts, and not sitting
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: at home watching TV or mindlessly scrolling through social media posts.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: If you do find an antler, and you will, if
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: you shed hunt enough, then you've got a gift, not
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: only in its physical form, but in the sense that
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: the antler got there by one way and one way only.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: A buck walked to that very spot and dropped it.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: Why he went there, what he was doing there, and
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: what it all means is up to you to figure out.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: But what you come up with, not only for that
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: individual deer, but what it means to the dear you'll
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: encounter in the next three decades matters to you as
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: a hunter. That's one of the main reasons I shed
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: hunt a lot on ground that I can hunt and
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: on ground that I'll never hunt. It's also one of
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: the reasons why I'm always on the lookout for shed antlers,
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: even if my goal is just the winter scout or
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: maybe hell, I'm rolling through a new state with a
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: nonresident turkey tag in my pocket. Antler's teach us many things,
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: and they do help us actually kill deer. In the
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: next episode of this podcast, that is the path I
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: plan to take, because while it hasn't happened a ton
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: of times in my life, there have been a few
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: times where I found an antler in a specific spot
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: which has led me to scout and hunt that specific spot,
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: and a few times doing that has put big public
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: land bucks on my wall, which tells me all I
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: need to know about the value of shed antlers. So
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: if you want to use sheds to become a better hunter,
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: be sure to tune in next week. That's it for
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: this show, My white tail loving brothers and sisters. I'm
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: Tony Peterson and this has been the Wired to Hunt
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light.
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: As I always, thank you so much for listening, and
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: if you more white tail advice, head on over to
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: the metator dot com slash wired and check out our
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: Wired Hunt YouTube channel as well.