Latest / Wired To Hunt Podcast / Ep. 548: The Truth About Whitetail Scenting and Hearing Abilities with Karl Miller

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Ep. 548: The Truth About Whitetail Scenting and Hearing Abilities with Karl Miller · Wired To Hunt Podcast

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, home of the
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: modern white tail hunter and now your host, Mark Kenyon.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wire to Hunt podcast. I'm your guest
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: host Tony Peterson, and today I'm speaking with wildlife researcher
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: and white tail expert Dr Carl Miller. All Right, folks,
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: welcome to the Wire to Hunt podcast, which is brought
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: to you by First Light. You might notice that this
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: is not the voice of the well mustachioed Mark Kenyon.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Mark actually sent me an email last week saying that
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: he was going to work on his extreme ironing skills
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: and was really going to test his limits with his
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: latest challenge. I don't I don't know anymore, you guys.
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: I don't have the energy to care. If you're wondering
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: if Marcus as strange as he sounds, trust me, it's
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: orders of magnitude worse when you get to know him. Anyway.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: I hope he cheats death with his latest hobby of
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: his And moving on today, I'm speaking with Dr Carl Miller.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: There is no one out there who has contributed more
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: to the body of white tail research than this guy.
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: He's an absolute wealth of knowledge who has given back
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: an awful lot to the white tail community. And on
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: this show we dive pretty deep into how dear here
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: and how good they are actually at hearing, which is
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: going to surprise you, and then we get into how
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: well dear can actually smell and why that's so tough
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: to study. This episode is pretty heavy into science, but
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: it will make you a better deer hunter. I promise.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: I think you're really gonna like it. Carl Miller, it
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: is an honor to get to talk to you made
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: me nervous by saying that honor. I've read your stuff
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: for a long long time, and I gotta ask you.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: Are you the most published white tail researcher on the planet.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: We're telling you. First of all, you said you regret
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: it for a long time. That makes me sound really old,
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: but which I met the last couple of years. Actually
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: I am, and I think right now I have public
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: more in the scientific literature than anybody else has on
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: white tails. After taking a look at the list of
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: of stuff that you have out there, I would believe
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: that because I've gotter viewed quite a few dear biologists
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: and wildlife researchers and you have a resume. Man, I'm
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: so I'm so glad to have you on. There's a
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: couple of things that I really want to talk to
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: you about. But first, where where did the white tail
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: obsession come from? You know, one of the things I
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: wanted to comment on what you just said earlier about,
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: you know, having such a a long list of publication
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: and stuff in my in my career and stuff. And
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: other reason for that is I've just absolutely been blessed
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: by the people I've had the opportunity to work with,
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: you know, a lot of good colleagues, with a lot
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: of good mentors, and particularly a lot of great graduate students,
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: and those of the workhorses that got a lot of
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: this stuff done. You know, I came up, come up
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: with some ideas and just turn a loose off stuff
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: and we put together a really good team at Georgia,
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: and that that that team is continuing on with the
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: people who replaced me since I retired. So, but my obsession.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: I grew up in northern Pennsylvania in the Big Woods
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: with the traditional hunting deer hunting camp up there, lived
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: and breathed whitetailed deer from probably the time I came
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: out of the womb. I guess a long tradition. It
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: may have actually come back. Um my birthdays in August,
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: so I kind of backdated nine months. And I think
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: I was a product of Hello, honey, I'm home from
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: deer camp. You know, Uh, you're the first I've interviewed
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: a lot of people. Nobody's ever traced back their conception
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: date that quite that way. Well, I shouldn't say that,
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: nobody's ever openly admitted it. So I guess my dad
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: got his buck that year. Yeah, oh man, that's awesome.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: So it was. It was a it was a family thing.
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: It was the social thing. You know. You you just
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: grew up with it, and you you just parlay it
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: into a really really long career. Huh yeah, you know.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: And I, you know, starting out in college, I wanted
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: to go into wildlife, but you know, listen to guidence
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: concerts and parents and stuff. You know, they said, well,
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: you're not going to get a job in wildlife, so
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: you gotta go into something else. So I I started
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: off in in another field, and ultimately, by the time
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: I was working on my master's degree, I thought, you
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: know what, there's somebody getting jobs in wildlife and wildlife management. Dear,
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: if you're good you'll get the jobs. So that's where
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: I made my switch, and I haven't looked back since.
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's been it's been an incredible opportunity, you know,
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: over forty years to work with the animal you love
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: to work with. So when you were when you were
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: kind of kicking around the idea of going into this field,
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: you had people in your life who said, that's there's
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: there's no money, there's there's no jobs there. You gotta
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: look somewhere else, right, Yeah, But you know, like I said,
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: you know somebody has those jobs, and you know you
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: might be a little more competition out there, but you know,
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: if you're good, you're gonna find one. Yeah. I had
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: the same thing happened to me. I always wanted to
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: be an outdoor writer, and when I went to college,
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: a lot of people were like, listen, man, you gotta
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: you gotta get get a real job. You know, there's
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: like ten guys in the world making a living doing that.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: And you know, lucky for me, I was just young
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: and dumb enough and didn't have enough holding me down
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: to not give it a shot. And it, you know,
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: changed the ark of my life. Just just pursuing that, uh, right,
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: and you've done well with it. It's been it's been fun.
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: I've been lucky. I feel lucky. Man. Uh, I want
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: to talk to you. You've studied so much different stuff
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: in the white tailed world. But there's two things I
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: got to talk to you about. And it's it's how
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: well a deer can hear, or I should probably rephrase that,
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: how how dear here compared to us, and how how
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: we kind of should be leaving behind what we know
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: about hearing because of how we hear and how we
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: should be thinking about how they have evolved here. And
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: I want to do the same thing with with their noses. Uh.
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: So let's let's start with deer hearing, because I know
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: you've you've bumped into this a lot where we just
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: as humans, we bring into this this biases of like, Okay,
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: we know what hearing is, like, we know how we hear,
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: and so we look at deer and go, well, they
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: must be way better at it because we give him
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: a lot of credit. But that's not necessarily the case
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: of your research. Yeah, and you know that this is
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: the easy one, dear hearing, because to tell you the truth,
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: dear hearing is really not that much different than ours,
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: which which really surprises a lot of people. There's been
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: two different studies that have done that that have been
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: done that looked at that. We did one at the
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: University of Georgia had a graduate student named Gino D'Angelo
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: who's now on the faculty there, and he did one
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: where we looked at auditory brain samoris wants, which actually
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: measures the signal in the deer's brain in response to
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: different sounds, you know, different frequencies and different intensities of sound.
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: And that study was done basically physiologically. And then there
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: was a study done out of the University of Toledo
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: by a father's son parents named Heffner, and they actually
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: did what it's called a behavioral behavioral that's hard word
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: to say, an audiogram where they actually trained the deer
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: to respond if they heard a sound. And interestingly, both
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: studies found essentially the same thing. The deer hearing range
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: is very similar to ours. Their best hearing is probably
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: a little bit higher frequencies than ours. We probably hear
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: in the you know, two to four killing hers range.
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: They hear in the four to kill her range at
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: their peak. But if you relay overlay the two curves
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: they are almost identical, which you know, so they may
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: hear a little higher frequency better. We may hear low
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: frequently better, but it's not that much different. But the
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: surprising thing that people don't realize is that their ability
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: to hear is not that much better than ours, essentially
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: about the same. So how do you test that? So
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: when you say, when you guys did the study and
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: you're looking at the brain scan, I'm assuming it's that's
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: a that's a great way to not have any false
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: positives or any kind of ambiguous data, right, Like the
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: brain lights up. You know they heard it. And then
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: they do this study down in Ohio and you know
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: there it's a conditioned response thing, probably a food thing
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: or something. I'm guessing. Uh So how do you how
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: do you figure out like because I think when you
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: if you ask the average hunter, they would say, well,
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: of course a deer can hear something farther away than us,
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: and of course they can pinpoint it better like it
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: would be for most people would be a given. But
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: how do you test? How do you test to figure
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: that out? To go? You know, their hearing is not
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: that much better than ours. Okay, now you're going into
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: a place that I want to get. There are some
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: caveats for this, okay, And that's related to the external
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: ears that a deer has. You know, this is what
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: the deer is hearing capability is when the sound is
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: played into the deer's ear and um and both of
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: it has done with different frequencies and you use different intensities,
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: you know, different volumes of the sound to get their response.
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: So but the difference is the deer have these large
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: external ears called you know, they're called pena, which have
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: multiple functions um, one of which is to accentuate sound
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: is entering into the ear. So it's like when you
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: put your hand to your ear when you're trying to
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: hear something, it actually funnels more of that sound into
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: your ear. So when a deer has this ears cut
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: towards an object that's producing that sound, it actually accentuates
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: that sound. But on the flip side, when they're turned
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: to wait way from something, it decreases the sounds. So
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: when the deer's ears are pointed forward, it's not hearing
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: is well behind, or when it's ears are backwards is
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: not hearing it well forward. So when a deer's ears
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: are cup towards you, that's when it's going to have
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: the best ability to pick up that sound. That also
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: helps a lot with the ability to u localize the
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: source of the sound, define the directionality because that extends
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: the distance between the two years out further, and the
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: distance between the ears is what helps you to identify
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: where the sound came from. M So one other thing
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: to think about this is though, and I know a
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: lot of hunter will say, oh, you know what, I've
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: been sitting on deer stand and I've been watching deer
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: right under my stand, and all of a sudden it
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: you're picked up his head and looked in a different direction,
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: like it hurts something. I never heard something. So why
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: is that? Well, you know the way I kind of
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: uh explain that is deer spend their entire life twenty
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: four hours a day, seven days a week, three and
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: sixty five days in the in the woods. They know
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: what they're supposed to hear and what they're not supposed
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: to hear. You know what you're supposed to hear in
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: your house or not supposed to hear in your house.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: If you drop the nickel versus a dime on the
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: kitchen floor, you know the difference, right, or if you're
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: driving your truck and it starts to make a weird sound,
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: you know, you say, that's not normal. You know, most
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: of my wife can't do that, but most people can
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: can do that. So, uh so they know what they're
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: supposed to hear. How many times have you been on
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: a deer stand and had a deer in front of
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: you and you heard a rustle behind the behind you
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: and you turn around and it's a squirrel And the
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: deer never picked its head up. The deer knew what
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: it was supposed to hear, and knew what was natural
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: and what was unnatural. And that's what they're picking up on,
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: is the unnatural sound out in the woods. That thing
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: what this reminds me of. I think it was Steve
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: Rinella that was talking about this when he spent some
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: time down in the Amazon with with natives who you know,
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: these indigenous indigenous people, their life is condensed down to
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: like twenty square miles of jungle, and so they are
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: just tuned into that. That's you know, that's it's an
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: area that we you know, like living in the modern
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: world where we live, we don't think of things that way, right,
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: Like you think of the city, you know, and you
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: go to the grocery store or what ever. Maybe you
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: go to your farm, but their entire existence is boiled
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: down to that whatever twenty square miles it is. So
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: they know the trees, they know the plants, they know
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: the animals, they know, you know, there's new tracks coming
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: in here or whatever. And I always thinking about that
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: with deer, when you look at if you use like
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: a square mile is just like a generic home range,
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: and then you think about that's their entire existence. And
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: and and we look at time a little bit differently, right,
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: we have long lives compared to them, So they spend
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: one year there, and we think that's you know, like
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: a young whatever, a little forky or something, a year
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: and a half old out there, but he spent his
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: entire existence and maybe you know, maybe he's dispersed or something,
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: but you've got just a little piece of ground that
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: everything that's there is what they encounter every day, and
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: it's it's a different thing. So they're so in tune
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: to that environment compared to how we probably perceive it. Yeah,
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: I think you're exactly right. You can almost see it
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: in your kids. And when I was teaching at the university.
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: You could tell kids who grew up with a you know,
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: spending a lot of time out of the wood versus
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: once and one once, we didn't to spend most of
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: their time on a game boy or something. You know,
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: because the kids have spent a lot of times in
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: the woods could see things, They picked up on things.
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: They just knew what was supposed to be there, and
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: what if something unusual they picked up on it, where
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: the other kids didn't, they didn't have the appreciation for it. Yeah, well,
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: I I ran into that. I take a lot of
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: kids turkey hunting, and you know, I have twin ten
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: year old daughters. One of them is phenomenal at details
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: and paying attention in the woods, and one of them
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: is oblivious. And I mean that's partially they're wiring, but
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: I and I'm used to them. But I took one
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: of my nephews out, who's I think he's eleven or twelve,
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: his first turkey hunt. He's never done it. He had
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: deer hunted with his dad, a little bit rifle hunted,
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: and I'm telling you, every sound we heard in the woods,
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: he was like, what's that, what's that? What's that? They
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: He had no you know, it's stuff that we hear,
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: you know, you don't even acknowledge, like blue jays flying overhead,
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: or affiliated woodpecker or whatever flying by. It's just like
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: so part of the landscape. To him, he was just
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: holy cow, I don't know what any And it was
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: like kind of an eye opener for me. Yeah, And
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: we only spend a few hours a week out in
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: the woods compared with deer spending hours a day out there. Yeah, yeah,
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: I mean it's a different thing. So when you talk
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: about you know, their ears and and and pinpointing stuff.
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: When you when you say that, what it reminds me
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: of is when you deer hunt a lot, you sort
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: of intuitively learn and you probably learned just from your
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: mistakes that if if a deer is looking in your direction,
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: you don't call, if you know, like when you're bow hunting,
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: because they're gonna be on you in a second. But
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: you wait till they turn their head and there those
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: ears are are, you know, turned the other way. Then
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: you call, and it just feels like that's the right move,
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: right or even if they're looking your in your direction
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: and the ears or turned back, which they have the
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: ability here, you know, listening behind them. That's another thing
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: to think about what you're deer hunt is watching the
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: deer is the ear because you know, if you're watching
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: the deer's ear, you can tell what that deer's thinking
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: about it as well. And you know if they all
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: of a sudden they're they're cupping their ears behind them,
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: they're hearing something that they want more information on. It
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: might be another deer, might be something they're they're trying
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: to identify what that is. So it's time for you
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: to pay attention to what's going on behind the deer. Yeah, well,
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: that's that's what I was curious about with you, is
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: how much you know, like how many ideas for your
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: research do you get just from sitting in the woods
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: and hunting deer, Because like when you when you talk
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: about like that, that right there, one of the things
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: I always think is so cool. If you watch a deer,
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: you know that's that's chomping on some acorns or maybe
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: eating a corn cob in the field or something, and
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: they think they hear something, you watch them stop chewing,
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: and it's the same thing people do you know, like
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: if somebody speaks to you and you've got a mouthful
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: of cheerios or whatever, you stop chewing for a second
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: so you can hear and you see those little behaviors
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: like how often are you just have you been in
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: your life just sitting on the woods and saw like
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: a little thing like that and went, you know what?
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: And then and it sparks some kind of idea. Yeah,
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: but I think that happens, you know, quite often. Um,
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: I don't know how if I can give you a
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: specific instance on, but you know, just just watching dear behavior,
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: I'm always asking the question why is that dear doing
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: what that dear is doing instead of just accepting the
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: fact that it is doing that, And I think that
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: makes the difference and try to answer and trying to
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: figure out you know a lot of the questions we asked. Yeah,
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: I mean I tell people, you know, we get hit
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: with questions constantly on like you know, what what scent
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: should I buy? What call should I buy? Like it's
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: always like how what what can you tell me to
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: get me closer to dead bucks? And I'm always like
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: pay attention to deer, figure out where they like to walk,
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: figure out why they like to walk there, and then
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: go shoot them. They don't want to hear it, they
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: don't want to hear. They want to buy a crush
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: instead of going out there and actually learning the animal.
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: And that's what I You know, I'm a minimalist when
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: it comes to hunting. I generally have either my bowing
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: an arrow or a gun in a couple of shells,
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: and that's about all I carry to the woods with me.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: And you know, I use my mouth to make any
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: calls that I want to make. But I don't like
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: to carry a lot of gear because it kind of
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: takes away from the hunt to me. Yeah, I'm a
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: I'm a minimalist too. I like I like simple. I
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: like I like just trying to figure out what makes
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: them tick and try to capitalize on that. Um let's
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: let's back up one second. There's something I want to
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: ask you about. So when you when you mentioned, you know,
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: the frequency in which we hear versus the frequency in
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: which we think, dear here, it's a little bit different. Yeah, why,
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: I mean, where's the evolutionary divergence there? You you know
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: what that might be. It might be the you know,
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: the deer that we tested were you know, five six
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: four or five six years old or something. You know,
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: most times humans when they're being tested, they're you know,
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: twenty years old, and you know, we lose our some
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: of our ability to hear higher frequencies. And it might
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: be just something that over time that the subjects themselves
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: have lost their ability to hear high frequencies. I can't
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: hear high pitches like I used to do any or
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: so that might be part of it, whether or not
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: there's an evolutionary thing significance to it. Um heck, I
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: don't know. You know, some of the some of the
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: calls that they dare make that like the call an alarm,
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: that that's a higher pitch, higher frequency sound, it might
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: be a little bit easier for them to hear that sound,
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: you know, to fall because but you know, I don't
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: think it's a it's not such a major difference between
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: the deer and the human that there's really that much
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: to really, I don't know, there's not that much. You're
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: really trying to put together an evolutionary picture for it.
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: It might not mean anything. Yeah, it's not that different. Yeah,
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: I mean, or it might. When I when I hear
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: stuff like that, I always wonder, you know, you mentioned
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: like a you know, a deer snorting and alarm, or
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: you know, maybe it's tied to coyote howells or some
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: some predator the pitch of some predators call or something
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: at some point, or it just could be just the
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: way things shook out. You know. Well that's a that's
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: that's a good way to say it. I wish I
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: would have said it that way. Yeah, I mean, it's
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: just it's it's interesting, it is, yeah, yeah, Um, it's interesting.
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: Has anybody so when you when you talk about how
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: a white tail you know, we we we know how
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: they use their ears. You know, we know what they're
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: doing with them. Has anybody ever studied meal deer in
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: the same capacity? Uh, not that I know of, But
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: it would make sense obviously with those larger ears, they
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: have a good you know, and it's a greater enhanced
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: ability to capture some of that sound and maybe the
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: localize that sound as well. And do you think that
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: would come from just maybe being in a more open, bigger,
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: bigger terrain or something. Yeah, you know, distances distances are
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: much greater in those situations, and sounds carries further. Uh
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: you know, you know, a closed forest situation, white till
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: lives up close and personal whereas a meal near lives,
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: you know, his his experiences as much broader of what
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: he's visualizing for hearing. Yeah, yeah, it's just a different thing. Um,
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: anything besides the obvious you know, metal on metal sounds.
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: Maybe it's like, you know, a two tight tree strap
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: on the wrong tree bar can really make a nasty sound.
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: Anything anything that Like you personally when you're you're hunting.
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: Because of your research on dear hearing, have you ever
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: are you just like I can't make that noise all right?
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: Just when you make it, you're like, oh, that's terrible.
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: You know. One of the sounds that kind of falls
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: right into the peak of the deers hearing capability is
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: kind of the Russell sound you make when you're your
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: clothing moves you move against a tree that you know
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: that that brush um and some types of fabrics make
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: an awful lot of noise. Uh. And that's one of
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: the things I worked with was Sick on a camera
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: and is developing some of this, you know, helping them
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: develop some of their camera based on deers hearing capabilities,
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: and they're trying to minimize the sounds of those camels made.
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: And you know, I think that's critically important. You know.
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: You just don't hear nylon naturally out in the woods,
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: you know, or bell crow or bell crow, you know,
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: any of any of those types of things. Any unnatural
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: sound is going to be picked up pretty quickly. Yeah. Yeah,
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: it's just it's interesting when you see. It's interesting when
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: you could like walk down the aisle of a Cabelas
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: or whatever and look at the different camo and look
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: at a you know, all the different vinyl harnesses and
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: the different class and vel crow and all the stuff.
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: And then over the years you go out and hunt
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: and you just realize, like, if I'm wearing this kind
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: of jacket, I can't turn with my back to a
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: tree when the deer close. Well, if I stand up,
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: I gotta stand up with my back away. Or you
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: have some stuff that you can kind of ride that
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: right up that bark and it's not gonna make any noise.
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: And it's little stuff like that. I think when you
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: get a lot of bow hunting experience, you just start
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: to intuitively go, you know, I'm in a green like that,
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: and I'm never gonna wear this again kind of stuff,
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: right and not you know that that fabric choice and
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: the noise of that fabric makes might be more important
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: than the actual camel that you're using. You know, picked
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: your camel up with your ears, not your eyes. Um,
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: I want to I want to ask you one more
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: thing about deer hearing before we move on. So when
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: when I asked you about the frequency in which they
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: hear and in which we hear, and we kind of
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: decided it might not mean anything at all. Um, you
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: mentioned you know as you get older. You know, we're
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: like very aware that you know, our hearing can be
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: can go downhill, right, Like we're very aware that our
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: eyesight at a certain age, like you're gonna need your
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: cheater glasses. Like we don't think about animals in terms
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: like that. They I don't. I don't ever think about
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: an old buck, you know, having any diminished sense of
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: hearing or any diminished sense of vision. Do you think
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: that happens? I mean, you know, none of the studies
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: have looked in an age relationship to that, or have
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: found an age related and shift to that. We didn't
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: notice any different, any difference in any of our study
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: animals as related to age. You know, it's it's possible,
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: but you know, think about this you're dealing with a
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: six year span between a fawn and a mature book
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: versus a seventy year span between you know, a young
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: child and a rich older man. Well, and you would
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: you would have to account for the fact that, even
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: if there was some level of diminishment there, you're also
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: they're also layering in an extra year of survival experience
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: and encounters, and so they would probably more than offset
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: anything like that. I just I've never thought about it
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: that way. Yeah. Well, I also think about you know,
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: where do we lose our hearing from listening to too
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: many chainsaws? Rock and rolls are gunshots? You're right? Yeah,
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: for our vision is based on watching computers screens, we
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: lose it. You don't do any of that stuff, right, Yeah,
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: Well that's true. And in one very specific instance, I
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: can say you can lose some hearing if your dipshit
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: buddy shoots a twelve gage right by your ear when
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: a grouse flies over, and your ears will never stop
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: ringing again. Uh So that's that's a bummer. And they
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: don't have that happened very often to them. I guess, Okay,
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: occasionally I'll have a gun shot that you know, if
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: if somebody happens to miss. But if they're lucky, they
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: got they got that gun shot, right, yep, yep. Um,
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: let's talk about so I think if you if you
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: were gonna just like rank them, if you're gonna ask
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: hunters like, okay, what's the what's the sense or you know,
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: what's the sense you want to avoid the most? You know,
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: I think you people would waffle back and forth between
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: eyesight and hearing, you know, like you don't want to
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: get spotted, you don't want dear to hear you're doing
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: something dumb. But the nose is the one you want
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: to beat, and the nose is the one that's probably
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: the hardest for us to understand, wouldn't you say? Yeah?
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: But you know what I've thought at I've asked asked
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: that question, and had that question asked me. I think
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: that probably the most important one that I would want
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: to beat is their sense of vision, and particularly with
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: their ability to detect movement, and that is the office one.
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: The sense of smell is easier to beat. All you
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: have to be is down wind of the deer and
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: you beat it right. So that that's the trick is
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: not how do you how do you mask your oder.
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: It's just present your order into a place where you
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: expected deer to be. M hmm, well so I would
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: look at that maybe a little bit differently. So, yes,
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: if you're sitting in your tree stand and you're sent
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: blows to that deer, you're in trouble. But we're also like,
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: I'm I'm super into training bird dogs and and working
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: with dogs, and like, I'm fascinated by their ability to
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: smell stuff, right, no question, it's it's it's it's we
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: can't even fathom what they appreciate through their nose. No, not,
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: we don't. I don't think we could even in a
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: millionaire were not even anywhere near it. But so what
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: I think about is, yes, we have to we have
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: two tasks with white tails a lot of times, right
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: the immediate moment of the hunt where you're like I
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: don't want him to smell me, or it's over or whoever,
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: you know, whatever deer is going by, But we're also
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: leaving residual scent out there, and I feel like we
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: educate them that way, uh, to a level that we
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: probably can't really appreciate. That's that's conceivable. But you know,
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: there's also a pout using everything else walking through those
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: wizard are potential predators for them, that's leaving. That's you know,
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: they're sent in different places. You know, is it is
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: how important is it for a deer to know that
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: something was there versus something is there? And I think
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: the most important aspect is something is there? Right, So
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: if it's an older scent that we've left, and you know,
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: you're can very likely tell the age of sense as well.
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: And it's clearly they can tell the age of the
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: difference in the age of attracted another deer left, or
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: that the predator left very likely human as well. Well.
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: So I wonder about that because you know, the evaporation
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: level of the scent, you know, like knowing which direction
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: you were going, how long ago you were there. Like
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: they're they're really figuring out a lot of stuff with
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: dogs on that front, which is fascinating. Like everybody's like,
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: how does the dog know when I'm coming home from work?
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: And it's like it's a condition from you know, being
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: left at home every day and they know You're scent
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: smells at this strength now at five o'clock at night,
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: so you're coming home, you know, And when I hear
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: stuff like that. I always try to think about it
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: in like a deer's in a deer's world, but there's
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: just there's just so much going on there. But when
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: I when I heard you on on bows podcast, I
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: would if you would asked me before I listen to
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: you say this, I would have said, scent, you know,
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: they're their old factory abilities. That is predator detection, that's
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: that's like a major thing for him. But you actually
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: said that it's it's more about food and communication. Yeah,
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: and I would I would still say that that, you know, predators,
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: you know, the sense of smell is tremendous for predator
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: detection if the predator is in the right place, you know,
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: if the predators approaching from down wind, the sense of
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: smells is totally useless for the deer. Right. So, but
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: you know the other aspect is, you know the sense
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: of smell that people don't appreciate is you know, do
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: you have to find food? You know? Uh, you know,
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: basically that's what they're doing is all day long is forging.
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: And how do they find that food. They don't find
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: that food by looking for it. They don't pick up
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: an acorn to look and see if it's a good
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: acorn versus a bad acorn. They smell the difference. Right.
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: If you ever sat on a deer stand and you know,
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: wash meat and acorns, you don't see them looking for acorns.
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: There's snuffing, you can hear, you can actually hear them,
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: you know, snuffing in the leaves for the acorns. So
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: they're they're detecting what they're gonna pick on, what they're
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: gonna eat based on the sense of smell, you know. Rankly,
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: their their eyes for that up closed vision are not
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: that good anyways, So they probably have a harder time
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: finding an acorn with their eyes than we would, yeah,
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: because they're not there. Their eyesight's not wired for that.
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: And then and then on top of that, you know,
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: they don't go around with a with you know, a
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: dendrology book trying to identify dick plants and different leaves
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: based on the shape of their leaves and stuff like that.
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: They know what it's supposed to eat and what they're
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: not supposed to eat by the smell of those plants,
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: you know, and some plants they have different compounds. They
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: don't call it antire beervery compounds like tannins and so
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: forth that deer can pick up on with their sense
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: of smell or and or their sense of taste, and
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: they can reject those in difference to other plants. And
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: you've probably even noticed that, you know, deer can tell
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: something They typically pick the young growth, or deer can
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: even pick out something that's been fertilized versus something that's
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: not been fertilized, because there's something different about that plant,
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: and that's not by vision, that's by the sense of smell.
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: That sense of smell is incredibly important for them to
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: do for foraging. They can probably they can probably differentiate
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: like levels of ripeness and fruit. Uh. They can probably
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: differentiate like to some extent, like micronutrient levels in different stuff. Huh, certainly. Yeah,
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: I don't think there's any question about that. How do
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: you study that? Uh, I don't know that should do.
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: So we're just yeah, I'll tell you what you know.
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: I started out my career looking a lot with your
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: scent communication and do the sense of smell and stuff
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: like that. And that's why we've switched to hearing vision
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: because it's got a lot easier to do those studies
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: because the sense of smell, there's so many aspects of this,
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: so many variables that come into play without you know,
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: working with the sense of smell, and we really have
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: no appreciation for what the deer smells, you know, for
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: even a comparison studies. So you know, how how do
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: you study those things that you know you sometimes you
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: maybe you not even need to study them. Just good
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: observation can tell you some of this stuff what's going on. Right.
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: You don't have to have a controlled scientific experiment to
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: know that if you fertilize your as alius in your
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: front yard and deals end up eating your ass aliens, right,
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: which would tell you that deer can tell the difference.
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: So and you know, it's even interesting, you know, just observations,
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: like there are times of year when deer will forage
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: on different types of plants. There's a lot of plants
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: that in the fall time they dear will you know,
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: they won't use utilize those plants all summer long, and
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: then comes sometime in later August or early into September,
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: they'll start really hitting those types of plants. What's changed
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: are the deer hungrier? I don't think so. I think
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: what what has changed is something's changed about those plants,
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: and as those plants are going to go into sin escence,
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: you know, they're going to their decisionous plants. Maybe they're
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: losing their you know, those secondary compounds that are those
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: toxic compounds that you're you know, causing deer to avoid them.
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: Or maybe the sugar levels are going up because of
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: their their transporting some of those sugars you know, into
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: the root system. So there's there's differences that are occurring
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: physiologically in those plants that you are able to pick
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: up with, and they're doing that with their senses. Now
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: do you do you think because we you know, when
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: you talk about like a sugar content of you know,
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: certain plants after the first hard frost or something like that,
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: or you know, a ripe apple versus of you know,
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: an early green one, that's just not the same thing.
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: Do do you think that we because you know, we
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: eat off of taste, right, like we we just do,
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: Like we're not most of us aren't paying attention to
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: like micronutrient levels and stuff like that while we're eating
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: and trying to have like a truly balanced diet that way.
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: But we do also kind of like inherently sometimes crave
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: things that our body needs, you know, like if you
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: go into the Elk Mountains for ten days, yeah, you know,
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: on day eight you have a different like you you
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: have a different desire for food. Like even if you've
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: kept yourself well fed with whatever calorie amount you needed
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: and you weren't in a big deficit, you're still like, man,
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: I want a salad in a bacon cheeseburgers, Like there's
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: something your body or pregnant women like they yeah, those crazy,
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: Like there's a reason they're eating chalk, And it's not
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: because they're sitting here going like I really like the
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: taste of chalk. Just once in a while, they're going
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: the body is saying something. So I wonder about deer
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: because we always focus on like the the taste aspect.
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: It's like, oh, they're gonna they're gonna hit the brass
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: because now because it got to ten degrees last night,
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: and the sugar content or whatever. But I wonder how
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: much of that is just tied to them inherently or
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: instinctively knowing I need you know, I need more of this,
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: I need more of that. I need my you know,
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: like I need this to be healthy. And they're probably
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: not aware of it. Yeah, and it could be I think,
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: you know that is it either or or both? And
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: I think it's a both. And you know, you know,
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: the change in the taste probably affects them as well.
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: We'll think about one that's you know, very clear, they're
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: craving for salt, and they only create salt during certain
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: times of year. That's during the spring and early summer
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: when vegetation is very succulent. They're taking in a lot
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: of water content, which means they're urinating allots, which means
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: they're losing a lot of sodium. And that's what the
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: that's what's driving their salt uses, the sodium deficit that
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: most herbivores are running running against just just because of
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: the seasonal timing, and they're flushing out their system more right, right,
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: because you know, there there's so much they're taking in,
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: so much of that moisture in that young, succulent vegetation.
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: They're not drinking that much water. They're just they're just
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: having to get rid of a lot of water, which
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: means you're going to get rid of a lot of
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: sodium as well. So that's that's not tied to antler
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: growth or anything like that. Huh, not necessarily, yeah, m
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: you know, and it's probably you know, there's also some
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: aspect of fetal growth in there as well, you know,
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: in that springtime. So but you know, we've seen some
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: really neat movement patterns of deer in response to the
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: sodium drive as well. Where we had a study up
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: in West Virginia a number of years ago where we
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: had radio colored a bunch of radio colored does and
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: on this study or in these when for about a
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: week or two would just disappear and it generally occurs
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: sometime in May or June, and then about two weeks
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: later they'd come back. And this was before the days
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: of GPS, so we ended up having to go around,
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: you know, really dry around and find these doughs. And
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: it turned out a lot of these doughs were going
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: to some old gas wells where there was a pool
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: of water out in front of these old gas wells,
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: and we took some measurements of that water and it
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: had really high sodium levels in it. So these doughs
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: would go and sometimes they would go miles to pick
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: up you know and camp out for a week or
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: two at these sodium sources and then come back and
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: to their home range. So you know, it's kind of
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: interesting that there's two aspects of that are kind of need.
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: Is one of the deer have an ability to recycle
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: sodium in their body, so they're picking up that sodium
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: load and they're you know, and keeping it. But the
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: question is how did they find it? Well, that's what
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: I was gonna ask you, how how the hell did
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: they find that? Well? As well as interesting that that
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: some of the deer did this and some of the
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: dear dnt And you know, we don't know this for sure,
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: but it's very likely that some of the deer that
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: actually went to these sodium sources must have been deer
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: that have dispersed it sometimes or their ancestors dispersed it
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: sometime into this new area. But when these dose went
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: a lot of times in June or even into July,
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: a lot of times they took their yearlings with them,
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: and sometimes they took their phones with them. So they
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: were learning this like a migration pattern. They learned this
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: from and so it becomes a cultural knowledge in that
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: deer herd amongst some of the deer that hey, we
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: go get our sodium and at this place, So do
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: you do you think there's any way it's gonna be
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: super wool, there's any way that there's like an ancestral
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: sort of memory or something there that a deer. Let's
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: say that you take a two year old oo that's
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: never been shown one of those spots. Could she know,
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: like I mean, we we could never know, right, Yeah,
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: And I don't I don't think she could know, Yeah,
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: because they did. You know, it doesn't make that sense
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: of that sheet knew because why didn't some of the
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: other deer do it? But you know, you think about
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: back in the you know, pre Columbian days, before you know,
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: the white man got here, there are places where they
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: were kind of mass migrations of herbivores to some of
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: these sodium areas that you know, they call them salt licks.
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: And there's a number of different places you hear about
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: deer run lick or some something you know, Salt Creek
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: or something like that, you know, all times kinds of
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: place to particularly across the eastern United States, and those
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: were placed where the Indians and later the you know,
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: the early settlers set up to go kill deer because
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: they knew the deer were going to be coming to
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: these things, So it must be something that they learned
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: through time, and there were migrations to these sodium sources.
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: Well yeah, I mean we we bring sort of a
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: modern spin to that study you're talking about, where you
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: think about the source. You know, it's a man made source,
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: and you don't think about it the same way as
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: you do a natural salt lick out there somewhere where
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: generations of deer would find it or be around it,
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: or be aware of it in proximity to where their
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: home ranges or whatever. But it's really like it doesn't
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: the deer don't care that that was not natural. They
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: don't give a ship if it was. Whoever put it
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: there doesn't matter to them. They just that's like a
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: thing that there they find and they know they need
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: in a certain percentage of them past that knowledge on.
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: And that's just how it happens, right, And you know,
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: in most places we don't see that that that drive anymore,
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: or those movements in response to salt, because they're sold everywhere,
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: hundreds of putting out salt. You know, every got you know,
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: a couple of salt blocks on it, and they're sold
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: on roadsides, you know, after winter times, so you know,
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: there's just lots of salt available for deer. Now, yeah,
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: it's not. It's just not a limited resource for them anymore. Right, So,
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: how did you when you when you mentioned earlier that
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: studying how a deer you know, how good does the
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: deer's knows and how does it work? You mentioned how
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: challenging that was, and it kind of kind of motivates
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: you to go study some other senses a little bit more.
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: But one of the things we didn't study how good
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: a deer's knows is. We we studied more on the
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: different glands that deer head and how they utilize those
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: glands for communication and such, you know, and that and
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: identifying some of the chemical analysis of those glands. But
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: you know, there's been a just a couple of studies
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: that actually kind of tried to approach this idea of
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: how well a deer can smell compared to a human.
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: And one of the ways they did that by actually
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: counting the number of sensory receptors in the nose. You know,
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: you can and you can find widely different estimates on
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: this thing, basically in the in the scientific literature and
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: on you know, in the popular magazines as well, and
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: it was one. You know, one time, I believe that
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: humans only had about five million receptors, you know, and
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: now now the fostsl are that somewhere between ten and
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: ten and fifty million receptors. But you know, there was
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: a study done on white tails back in the nineties
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: that I think they came up with something like million
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: back there, but that was that's probably a low estimate,
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: and that number very likely if it's comparable to you know,
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: some of the stuff we know about dogs now, it
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: might be over a billion yea of different receptors. So
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: you know, just the structure of the nose of the
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: human compared to the structure of the nose of the deer,
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: you know, speaks to the how well they can smell. Yeah. Well,
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: one thing I don't think people really appreciate that much though,
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: is that, you know, to smell a particular smell, you
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: need a receptor site that's keyed to that scent. It's
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: not just there's just a random any set any receptor
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: site can pick up any any odor. It's gonna happen
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: a mash between the receptor side and the odor. So there,
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: you know, the receptor sides are are probably built around
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: what a deer what sense are important to dear too,
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: versus you know, a human receptors might be built around
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: what's important to human. So it's it's actually conceivable, but
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: there are there may be some odors that humans could
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: spell better than deer. It's conceivable, you know, I don't
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: know what that might be. But the you know, the
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: point is that there are so many receptors sites on
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: on deer, and very likely a lot of them are
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: keyed into some of these highly bottled compounds that are
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: dispersed by the wind that are for you know, for
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: predator avoidance as well as some of the things associated
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: with with the frous resources too. So deer very likely
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: able to pick up on some sense that we can't
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: even smell period, regardless of their concentration. Yeah, well, wouldn't
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: it be, I mean, doesn't it make sense to say
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: then that sure, like we we smell of gasoline, right,
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: you get gasoline in your hands, We smell. We know
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: that scent, we know what it means. A deer, without question,
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: could probably smell gasoline. It probably just doesn't matter to them.
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: It might just be like like a curious scent. But
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: in their worldview, they probably really don't like it, probably
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: doesn't register as much of like, probably doesn't matter. Yeah,
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: that that kind of brings up the the idea. You know,
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: if if you smell something, do you have an innate
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: response to it or is it a learned response to it?
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: And most smells, you know, you you you respond to
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: that based on a learned behavior. So deer learns what's
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: what smells maybe bad or what smells are good. They
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: must learn the smell of a predator from their mother.
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: Do they inherently fear a predator? You know, there might
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: be some aspect of that, but I think you know
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: how many times you can train a deer to walk
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: up to a human. We train them all the time.
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: You know, they're not afraid of the smell of a human.
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: Inherently they learn that, and you look at it, you know,
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: suburban urban deer, they're not afraid of the smell of
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: a human. You know. So it's it's much more of
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: a learned behavior which which things are important, in which
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: things are not important to them? Yeah, um, you know,
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: I mean you think about that from the perspective of
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: a you know, if a fawn out there when mom
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: bumps into the scent of you know, a coyote just
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: went through her, a wolf or something just went through
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: her reaction that. You know, we don't think about communication
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: in body language nearly as much as we probably should.
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: You do a lot when you train dogs, but you know,
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: there's an entire lesson with every encounter that they're just
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: throughout osmosis. Man, they're just taking that in and we
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: we don't think about it that way. We think of
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: it as something inherent. But you're right, I mean it
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: probably all of that stuff is learned right right, And
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: I think a lot of it, like you said, is
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: learned through body language. How the how the damn responds
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: to something that the phone learner responded that way as well.
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: And there are just so many subtle things that, dear
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: dude that you know, most humans, if you don't train,
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: your eyes are not trained to it. You don't see
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: that you're actually doing that. You know, I learned a
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: lot from my wife who she's trained horses all her life,
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: and she can tell what horses thinking. Just buy what
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: that horses. It's posture, ear posture and stuff like that.
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: So you know, I translate a lot of that and
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: deer as well. Yeah, that that world. It's so fascinating.
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: I mean when you when you talk about you know,
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: dog training. I hate to keep going back to this,
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: but you know, we have years of coevolution and we
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: haven't been able to speak to each other, and yet
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: we can do a lot of really cool stuff, you know,
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: I mean, we we can speak to a dog, right,
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: but it's not it's not you and I having a conversation.
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: And yet they can figure out a hell of a
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: lot about what we want just by how we move
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: and how we look and I you know, eye contact
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: and all that stuff. And then you think about these
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: animals out there, and you know, you know, social animals
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: like deer living together. There's there's so much going on
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: and and so much behavior that we really don't get
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: to observe like we we think we do as hunters.
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: We're like, oh, we're pretty clued into this scrape behavior
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: or fighting, you know, And then you think, well, how
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: often do you actually watch two bucks really fight or
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: two does you know, get up on their hind legs
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: and squat each other. It's pretty rare, and when when
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: you do, you're getting a lesson in body language every time. Right,
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: But a lot of times what you see there's precursors
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: to that in all types of body language that's being used,
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: and many times it's avoiding because of those precursors. Yeah,
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: you see him, You see him kind of bump up
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: a little bit, But they don't. You know, some somebody
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: wins without having to win, win, right because you know
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: that if you're going to get into a fight that
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: that becomes risky for you. Why take that risk if
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: you can just use and you know, and an ear
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: drop or something like that that avoid Yeah, and that
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: I mean this kind of goes back to what we
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: talked about earlier about you know, calling to a deer
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: that's looking away versus calling towards you, and and just
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: paying attention to dear behavior. I mean, every time every
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: time you have two bucks square up around you, or
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: you know, kind of bump up against one another, and
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: don't they're not gonna fight, but they're doing something. They're
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: you know, like they're they're working on each other a
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: little bit. Or you watch that dominant dough in the
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: little Kill plot and that year and a half old
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: dough tries to come in and you see just the
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: just to suttle a hunch you know, like she's saying something.
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: It teaches you so much about how you need to
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: interact with them, like if you like to call or
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: like what you know, like what level of interaction you're
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: gonna have with that specific deer that morning as he's
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: walking by, like it, does he look like a deer
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: who's gonna be callable? Like is he going to be
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: susceptible to the snort wheel er? Is he going to
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: be gonzo? Yeah? Or even you know, attending grunt is
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: you know, I've had I've had bucks that I knew
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: were there. I learned this a long time ago that
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: there are time to use attending grunt and tome not
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: to And the peak of the right is not the
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: time to use attending grunt because most of the bucks
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: out there have a dough with them. So if they're
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: just if they're already on on a hot no, you
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: use it, you know, an aggressive grunt or attending grunt
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: or something like that. They're they're not going to come
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: to fight. They're going to take that do and turn
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: her away and go the other direction. Right, So you know,
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: I use a grunt before and after the peak of
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: the rep but not actually during the peak of the Red.
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah me too. I Actually I really like early season
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: when you when you see the right situation. Like I
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: killed a buck in Minnesota, I don't know, five or
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: six years ago, and he came out and there was
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: already two little bucks out in the field and just
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: kind of the way he was around him. I was like,
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna grunt this dude and kill him. And it
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: took like five contact grunts and you could just see
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: him just he was just like I don't want to
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: be I'm not gonna let anybody who's in this field
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: talk to me that way, like you could just see.
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: And part of it was the way he was interacting
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: with those other bucks. And he came in and I
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: shot him, and it was like almost it was just
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: one of those moments where you just look at it
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: and you go, this is the guy. Like it's like
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: that hot two year old turkey that you run into
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: that hits your you know, as soon as you yell
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: pee gobbles, you're like, oh, y, yeah, this one's coming. Man. Uh.
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: Let's let's switch gears here a little bit and talk
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: about deer management. What what what's going on? What do
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: you what's what's the future of of the white tail.
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna give you a really hard question, because there's
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: a million things we could go But how do you
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: feel about the future of white tails? Uh? Well, that's
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: that's that's a well, that's a thousand dollar questions. Oh hey,
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: let me rephrase that. Are we gonna be hunting white
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: tales in fifty years? Yeah? Here here? You know, I've
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: I've often thought of this, this question, you know, and
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: if I how I respond if I was asked this question.
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: You know, the white tail, from the time we started
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: restoring white tailed deer over a hundreds some years ago,
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: has always had issues that biologists and hunters have had
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: to get go get through to get us to where
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: we are. So, you know, at one time there weren't
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: any here. Then we went through the restoration phase, and
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: then we ended up with in many places, we went
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: in through the popular overpopulation phase, you know, in Pennsylvania,
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: West Virginia, Michigan, all throughout the New England states. And
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: you know, there's always been a different phase that we've
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: gone through. Someone been easier to surmountain some of them.
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: Having the white tale is facing a number of challenges
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: right now, and one of the bigest challenges, of course
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: the c w D, which I know you've done a
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: podcast on, but that one is a major, a major issue,
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: because there's no right now, there's nothing in the course
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: sitable future that's going to stop. So it's gonna be
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: ubiquitous across the white tails range someday, very likely it
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: will be, and it's not it's going to affect dear populations,
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: and it's gonna affect deer hunters and the number of hunters.
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: And I think that the number of hunters is a
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: very important aspect of this. We've already had seen over
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: the last couple of decades of decline in the numbers
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: of hunters. The recruitment and retention of hunters has gone
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: down pretty dramatically over the last couple of decades, which
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: that supports the funding free agencies and so forth. So
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: you know, when the money starts to dry up, then
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: the management starts to decrease, and you know, you get
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: a vicious cycle here. So that's a tough one to
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: deal with. You know, although you know that if there
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: was a bright spot to COVID, you know that COVID
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: actually put a bunch of people in the woods. When
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: you couldn't do you know, anything else. So there was
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: a bump up. And then you know this idea with
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: the local order, you know, the hunters, you recruiting new hunters.
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: You know, that's a it's a good movement in the
• 50:10
  Speaker 1: right direction, you know. So I think we're you know,
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: that one is being addressed. The c w D issue.
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: That's also gonna have affect populations. Um, you know, areas
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: where you have high productivity, like where it is in
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: Wisconsin and stuff like that. In places like that high productivity,
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: you can manage around it, although we unite might not
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: be managed for the mature buses because those are the
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: ones that have the highest prevalence rates. Right. But in
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: some areas where um you got inherently low productivity deer
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: hers throwing c w ding on top of that, could
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: could be you know, pretty strong population influence driving those
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: populations down. Yeah. So that's that's that's one major living much.
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: One other major issue is well that I see, particularly
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: in the East United States, is the changing predator context
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: that the white tail losing. Now, uh, you know, we
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: didn't have coyotes, we do have kiots. Beer populations where
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: bears occur are at an all time higher or a
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: stort high UH. And both of those are tremendous predators
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: on pawns, and in some areas, like the Southern Appalachians,
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: they're driving deer populations down to the point where right
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: now we just are finishing up a study in North
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: Georgia where the survival rate is incredibly lower fawds UH,
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: and it's most mostly due to predation by bears and coyotes,
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: to the point where even uh, even eliminating antler harvest
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: antler list harvest completely, those populations aren't going to recover
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: unless there's something that can be done to increase bonding recruitment.
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: You know, in most areas where we have a good productivity,
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: we can deal with fond you know, faw predation aspects
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: by predators by reducing ant lost harvest. But there are
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: some areas where we're not gonna be able to do that,
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: and those deer populations are going to be no, They're
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: will be difficult to deal with. Places in Georgia North
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: Groorgan Mountains where we historically have you know, some more
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: earliest deer hunting was done up there. Well, the number
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: of hunters is incredibly old and now be just because
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: the deer are gone, and so this this is probably
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: I'm guessing there's some people listening to this who are
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: young enough or they don't really understand that what you're
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: talking about here is their deer herds that haven't historically
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: had coyotes uh to deal with like this, this is
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: a new thing. Like if you look at the history
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: of coyotes where they came from in the Southwest and
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: have been pushed farther out into the country and they've
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: expanded and they're there. You know, we talked about the
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: adaptability of white tails, which is incredible in the diverse
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: environments they can take hold of and and and be
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: pretty facund in there. When you look at the story
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: of the coyote, that's incredible. That's that's like, think of
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: them what you will. They are an incredible survival machine.
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: And you know that you look at their die had
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: they eat everything from scorpions on up, you know, and
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: and you'll see them eating apples and stuff sometimes off
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: your stand like there crazy. And now you've got these
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: populations of deer you know, did have been there for
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: generations and generations and they're dealing with a predator that
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: they don't have that ancestral kind of uh, you know
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: knowledge or you know, survivors survival skills to deal with.
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: And then you throw in bear. You know, bear populations
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: on the rise, and how good they are at chomping
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: fonds for the first you know, x amount of weeks
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: that they're dropped. And it's a sort of a rough picture. Yeah,
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: when you when you think about I don't think until
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: some of the last decade or two when the research
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: was done in Pennsylvania, here a Georgia in the number
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: of places across you know, across the country, how effective
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: both bears and kyles are when it comes to take
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: a fawns. But when you think about it, for seven
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: or fourteen days or more, you got these little protein
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: package laying out all over the woods. Just all they
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: have to do is pick them up. I remember what
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: one time a few years ago up in Pennsylvania, I
• 54:03
  Speaker 1: was up there during right during the pick of the fawning,
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: and in some of the fourth there's a lot of
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: hasten and fern, a lot of fern cover on the
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: on the ground, and I saw a place where a
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: bear had gone through and had were actually worked a
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: grid pattern back and forth back and forth, back and forth,
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: you know, looking for fawns at that time, you know,
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: and that bear could do that all day long. How
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: many funds is he going to encounter? Certainly is going
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: to be start below you know. Yeah, well that's why
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: I think that I've talked about this on here a
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: few times. They studied uh fawn mortality in the in
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: the county I hunt over in northern Wisconsin, and it
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: was pretty dismal. It was nine of the funds were
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: killed in the first eleven months, and like two thirds
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: of those were predation and the bears were the number
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: one predator. And you're talking a place with a high
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: prevalence of you've got bears, coyotes, you've got some wolves
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: they're not a not a ton, but you've got bob cats.
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: You you've got things that can chomp on fawns, and
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: bears are so good at it. When you said that
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: of the fonds that were born died or the mortality
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: of fawnds based on predators, they were dead. So no, no,
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: So of the funds they studied were dead within the
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: first eleven months, and two thirds of those were predator, right, yeah, So,
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: and I mean it's one County. It's you know it.
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: But to me it was an eye opener because we
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: you know, it's the only place I ever hunt where
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: I just incidentally see bears quite often, Like there's there's
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: a lot of them there, and you know, we've always
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: had trouble with deer, like you just don't have very
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: many of them, and you start seeing that connection and
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: then you think about, you know, it's something I want
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: to ask you about. Is like you take that just
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: for what it is. If you're hunt in the big
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: woods up north, you're like, Okay, I'm around these predators
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: that have just kind of always been here, right Like,
• 55:52
  Speaker 1: I mean, you know, the wolf populations have changed and
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: we know that story, but generally they've had a rough
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: the deer have a rough go of it up there.
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: But now you talk about you know, you're talking about
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: Georgia and you're talking about the southeast, and you're talking
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: about places where you know, like these predators haven't been
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: you know, the counties haven't been there. The bears probably
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: been there, but not to the extent they are so
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: and now you know, you know how people like to
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: talk about, well, there's bobcats everywhere, or there's mountain lions
• 56:19
  Speaker 1: making it into this spot. Why why are the predators
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: doing so well in these places we go? Bear populations
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: are doing well because the bear harvest has been restricted
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: enough to allow the bear populaces to recover. To the
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: point is, you know, actually in some place like North
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: Rodian Mountains you can take multiple bears. Now the point
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: it was after you shoot one bear, particularly in those mountains,
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: and you have to get it out of the humming
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: bears you need to to kill in your lifetime. It's
• 56:45
  Speaker 1: not like you're going out and killing deer for the freezer.
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: So so you know, the harvest has not matched the
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: population growth, and the population growth, based on what our
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: research has shown over the last several decades, it's continuing
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: to increase in the bear population. So the kyots, you know,
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: Kyle has been extremely successful, particularly here in the southeast,
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: because you know, we have such varied habitats from urban,
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: suburban and agricultural. You know, different types of forest types
• 57:13
  Speaker 1: all interspersed together. There's plenty for a kyote because I'll
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: eat just about anything, and we probably have higher kyoud
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: densities here than you know then most places you would
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: ever expect to find Kyos maybe maybe similar to South Texas.
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: You know. Um, so when you got that high density
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: to Kyle's out there, and then just for a few
• 57:36
  Speaker 1: brief time you have all these sponsor at the ground,
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: they're going to key in on those things because it's
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: a very easy, easy thing for them to find, and
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: particularly it's easy for them to catch some of that
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: stuff and carry it back to the the pups in
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: the den. Because those things are happening at the same
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: time they're raising pups. They can carry the little protein
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: package back. You know, it's not picture of that versus
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: going out and trying to catch a bunch of mice
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: and carrying them back. Do your puffs. You know, they're
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: going to key on those fawnds. Yeah, you're when you're
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: you know, when we're really hungry, we've we've gravitate towards
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: calorie dense food, which is why we eat a lot
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: of junk food. But we don't think about that the
• 58:13
  Speaker 1: same way. If you're a coyote out there and you
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: can work all day to catch a bunch of grasshoppers,
• 58:17
  Speaker 1: or you can work all day and find one fawn,
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: you know what you're gonna do. Yeah, Yeah, If there
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: was a market for kyotes or if there's a you
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: know right now, you know the highest mortality of kyles
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: in Georgia and most of the southeast or hunter harps
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: to kylets. It's a lot of people hunting kylets. Uh.
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: And then the road kills are the other major influence.
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: But you think of one kyle producing you know plast six, seven, eight,
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: eight pubs, persons of fawn are dope producing one and
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: maybe two fawns. Uh. It's kind of disproportionate there. Yeah,
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: And you know, we don't have we don't have the
• 58:56
  Speaker 1: trapping that we used to, you know, I mean it's
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: just yet we just generally don't. That's that's such a
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: such an effective way to control coyotes and some of
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: the other predators. And I think, you know, I don't know,
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: I don't know about where you live it. So I
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: live in the I live in the suburbs of the
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: Twin Cities, and these people around me, like my wife's friends,
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: they have no clue about nature, like they just they
• 59:21
  Speaker 1: just don't. So when everybody started getting like ring doorbell
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: cameras and you know, like the surveillance cameras, that a
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: lot of people have or you know a lot of
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: people will put out a trail camera on their bird
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: feeder or whatever now, you know, so it's like they're seeing,
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: oh my god, there's coyotes everywhere. I'm like, yeah, you
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: can freaking hear them. I hear coyotes all the time
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: right at my front door. And now the bear thing,
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: you know, it's like, oh my god, we we now
• 59:45
  Speaker 1: we have bears. And I'm like, now you see bears.
• 59:50
  Speaker 1: You didn't. You didn't understand how, you know, like we
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: we think of these animals as sort of being out
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: in the wild, you know, like a bear. It bears
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: the prime example, right, Like, when the average person thinks
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: of a bear, they think of it in the big woods,
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: out in the wild, and you know, he's see it
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: in this beautiful place or whatever. And they're living in
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: your backyard, eating in your bird feeder, and you know,
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: digging up like bees nests and stuff in on the
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: soccer field. You know, like they they're living there right
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: there with us, with these deer and they're just their
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: populations are doing really well, and we kind of don't.
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: We don't seem to really recognize how detrimental that can
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: be until it catches up to our dear populations and
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: by then you're in a really reactive state. It's rough. Yeah.
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: And you know, the other thing is the dear populations
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: have done the same thing that they were the first
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: ones to move into the suburbs, you know, and in
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: the urban suburban areas, and now these other things are
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: following them in there because frankly, there's nothing for them
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: to fear, you know, And that that's the whole concept
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 1: in ecology called the ecology of fear, and fear is
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: a very important driver on animals behavior, you know, fear
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: of being predated on you know, you know, what does
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: the kyot have to fear in the suburbs, Maybe the
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: front end of a ford or something, but that's about it.
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: You know, Uh, deer and suburbs don't have anything to fear. Now,
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: bears are getting into the same situation. They're not hunted
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: in these situations, so they have no fear of humans.
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: And with having no fear of humans, are going to
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: co exist with humans. Yeah, and it and I think
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: that we really underestimate how good they are at not
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: showing themselves to us, you know, they are they are
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: masters of of staying hidden up, Carl. We are just
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: about out of time. So I got one question I
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: want to ask you. In all the research you've done,
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: and it's been a ton, you've learned, a ton, You've
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: you've contributed so much to this space, what's the question
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: that you just that keeps you up at night that
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: you want to learn about? Dear? Like, what's one thing
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: that you're like, I wish if you could wave a
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: magic one and you could study it and and probably
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: come to an answer, what would it be? Well, I'll
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 1: tell you what. It comes back to what we were
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: talking about. If I could do like spot with a
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: Bulkan mind meld, you know, get de side of your brain,
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: you know, I'll think there there's just really getting a
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: field for what their experience and when their experiences sensory
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: inputs from there, either their eyes or their nose, you know,
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: because we've done a lot of that stuff with the
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: deer vision and stuff like that, and we've got a
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: good feel for what they see. But you know, we
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 1: can say it's say it's something, but we can't experience that,
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 1: you know, So that'd be the neatest thing and be
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: able to experience what they actually you know, experienced when
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: they're visualizing something or you know, either whether a deer
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: or a dog, Like you said, I've trained dog all
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: my life as well scent dogs, and just the world
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: that they live in in this world of aromas, world
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: of chemicals, is just fascinating. We have absolutely no appreciation
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: for it. I know. That's that drives me nuts too.
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: I just wish. I mean when you think about if
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: you just like if you're standing in a cattail slow
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: and you just look around and you like all the
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: details you see, like if you're pheasant hunting, you know,
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: like just just visually what you can pick up, and
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: then think about how if you could do that with
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: your nose. You close your eyes and and perceive that
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: much different stuff going on, but do it with your nose,
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: and it's so crazy. Yeah. So you know you asked
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: me earlier a question. I don't know if you got
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: a second or not, but you know, which set would
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: the deer most likely want not want to lose? You know,
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 1: that idea about the sense of smells, if it's related
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 1: to predation, that's that's one aspect. But you know, I
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: think a deer without a sense of smell would have
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: a hard time survival. I think a blind deer could
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: survive better than a deal without a sense of smell
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: because it's a communication or because of the predator and food. Oh,
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: a blind deer can find something to eat, but a
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: deer without a nose is going to have a hard time. Yeah, yeah,
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: you don't think about that. Um, Carl, this has been
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: so much fun. Man, I'm so glad I got to
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: talk to you and have you on here. Um. I
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: really appreciate it. It has been a quick hour. I'll
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 1: tell you, well, we'll do we'll do it again more more.
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: Welcome to awesome. Thank you so much, and that's it
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: for this week, folks, be sure to tune in next
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: week for some more white tailed goodness. This has been
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 1: Wired to Hunt and I'm your guest host, Tony Peterson.
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: As always, I just want to thank you so much
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: for listening and so much for your support. And if
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: you're in the market for a little bit more white
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: tail content, you can head on over to the meat
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: eater dot com slash wired again, that's the meat eater
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: dot com slash wired and you'll see a pile of
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: new articles by guys like Bo Martonic and Andy May
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: and myself and Mark whole bunch of them, and if
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: you want more, you can head over to our YouTube
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: channel as well. If if those articles aren't enough, we
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: have a Wired to Hunt YouTube channel and we dropped
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: weekly how to videos there as well.