Ep. 29: Whitetail Science with Dr. Bronson Strickland, Part 2
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For 15% off your first order, use code COUNTRY at checkout. Just visit markethouse.com. That's M-A-R-K-E-T-H-O-U-S-E dot com. And use the code COUNTRY. Welcome back to Cutting the Distance, where I continue my conversation with Dr. Bronson Strickland. He's a professor of wildlife management at Mississippi State University. He's the co-director of MSU's Deer Lab and co-host of the Deer University podcast. If you'd like to learn more about Deer University,

If you'd like to go back and listen to part one, we cover listener questions on at what age should you start making decisions on buck management? What year round food strategy should you be employing for the healthiest deer? As well as some of my own questions on genetic potential, nutrients, mother's health, and environmental factors and how those all add up to a buck's potential and how you go about managing those for better herd health. If you enjoy this conversation with Dr. Bronson Strickland, make sure to go back and check out part one if you haven't already.

All right, we're going to digress from dough management a little bit. And this will be a little more universal amongst all areas. I know the times may change, but you hear everybody with their systems. These are the phases of the rut. I'm going to ask you to kind of break down whether it's the beginning of September. Shoot, down in the south, you guys are probably going the rut.

you know, parts or portions of the rut go all the way into January, break down kind of what you feel are, you know, major milestones in, in buck behavior, you know, throughout the rut, you know, starting in September, ending in late January. Um, and I know it's going to change a little bit based on, you know, where you're at. If you don't mind, I'm going to back it up another month and include August, uh, August, September, uh,

That is when bucks are typically still within their bachelor groups. And so they are tolerant of one another. They are typically still in velvet or coming out of velvet. And biologically, what is going on there is the level of testosterone in their bloodstream. So bucks tolerate each other when they're in velvet because testosterone levels are very, very low.

So when the velvet shedding process begins, that is when testosterone begins to spike. That is when antler hardening happens. And that is also when these bachelor groups start breaking up because they don't want to look at their buddy anymore. They just want to fight. And so that is when they're going to go back and back to probably the previous fall, the area that they occupied and that home range. Typically,

Let's just say now in the southeast, if you peak your ruts end of November or December, then you have a couple months to where those bucks are again going to be setting up their social hierarchies. They're going to be re-familiarizing themselves with their territory. And then when you start getting about three weeks, two weeks, etc. before the peak of the rut, that is when you're going to see the most scraping activity.

That's when they're running their trap line and they're putting their calling card out there on the landscape. And that is typically, Jason, when most people think that the peak of the rut is. Most often, that is the pre-rut that hunters think is the peak of the rut. The peak of the rut is going to be two to three weeks later when there's going to be less visible deer activity because bucks are engaged in courting does. So they're locked up.

And then that's going to go on. If you're up north, it might be two to three weeks. If you're in the south, it might be about a month. And then after that, 80, 90% of your does have been bred and

And then bucks are going to start focusing on rebuilding their their tissue. They've lost 10, 15, 20 percent of their body weight. That's when we see them focusing back on food again. So that's a good hunter's tip right there is you always include food in the equation after the peak of the rut.

And then they'll start taking advantage of those stragglers. It might be a doe fawn that's coming into heat for the first time. It could be an adult doe that was bred during the peak of the rut, but for whatever reason, just like humans, she was bred but didn't conceive and become pregnant. 30 days later, she's going to cycle and come back into heat again. So that's when you'll see that trickle or that second rut is occurring then.

Yeah. Thanks for, thanks for breaking that down. We got to hunt Kansas kind of, I'd say right on the front end of lockdown. And it was a little bit frustrating. Those guys like to kill their, their bigger bucks. I would, you know, October 15th to 30th and maybe even earlier because they're more patternable. They, they're starting to, you know, like the, like you said, they're, they're scraping pre-rut, they're marking their territory. They're still somewhat patternable. And then when we got there, like, it's very, very fun to hunt the rut, but

But the deer that were on cams a week ago just were gone. They had found a doe, ran her off somewhere, didn't care to be out. And like I say, it's a little bit of a love-hate. Like I love being out there during the rut, but it was also like, hey, Randy, we have all these pictures of bucks on camera. Like they're around. Like we would see them maybe one of the four or five days, but then they were just, you know, off again. They'd get on a doe and...

and then take off. So no, thanks for breaking that rut down. That helps me understand kind of those phases versus, you know, some of these people out there have got 28 phases of the rut, you know, like they're going to between this day, I'm like, well, that's so hard to manage. You know, if you can break it down to like just a few phases, like you said, and what you should be focusing on makes it, makes it a little easier for a hunter to not have to think that hard. Yeah.

And that's what's fun about the rut, but can also be frustrating, is we think about the rut, and anything can happen. I think that the rut equal random. Anything can happen any time of the day.

But at the same time, you don't have that reliability and the patterns that are established. But, Jason, if you were going to see, if now you were going to be that person to shoot the neighbor's buck that they've been managing all these years, it's probably going to be during the peak of the run. Yeah, it's a one time you could, if you had a doe that crosses on, yeah, you can pull it in. And I, you know, I...

I'm very curious. So I ask all kinds of questions. Randy and Chris Parrish was hunting with us there at the place at the same time. And ask those guys that have spent a lot more time in a whitetail stand these same questions. What are the chances? Have you guys killed bucks at...

and they, the numbers seem to be low. Like it can happen, but they said, you know, Randy's couple of properties are, you know, a couple hundred acres a piece scattered about. And, you know, very rarely does he say they, they end up with a buck that they didn't cut, you know, know about. It does happen, but, but not very often. You know, usually they know what's there. They, they don't, they don't have the scragglers, but you know,

I also see the advantages. I'm looking for property there. Like you can get the right 80 acres and, you know, a smaller piece with different landowners. And the probability of killing a buck that's not on your place probably goes up tremendously because you can't hold all those deer all the time. Right.

That makes sense. Yeah. And, and, you know, you getting back to the whole, uh, patterning deer, you know, the, the, the one thing that you can never account for, and that is these excursions. And it's these things that, uh, you know, as a researcher, I didn't put a lot of faith into when, when hunters were reporting this a decade or more ago, evidence they were getting from trail cameras. Uh, we've never seen this buck and he was here for a week or two weeks and then he was gone. Um,

And then a year later, at the exact same time, I mean, literally down to the week or three days, like this buck is back again. I didn't buy into any of that. I was like, there's no biological reason for that to occur. But when you put a GPS collar on a bunch of bucks, that does occur. Absolutely happens.

Yeah. I, I, I think Mark Drury had, he called a buck, you know, he had the same thing. It would disappear like almost to the date and then wouldn't come back until the fall. And it didn't even come back one year at all. And it's just, to me, that's mind boggling. And, and I'm going to ask you a question. I'm sure you're probably, maybe you'll have the answer. Like, is there any understanding on what just makes that buck say, you know, I'm going to pop up today and go a mile away on a different farm, just completely leave an area I've been for the last nine months.

That's a tough one. You know, so we think of, I guess I think of it as short-term, long-term.

You know, in the short term, could there be some kind of cue like I'm getting a whiff of an estrous dough, so I'm going to move. Man, I'm hungry. You know, I'm not getting what I need. There's a whole bunch of hunting pressure right here. So I'm going to leave. I would call those, you know, short term. But then we also, Jason, have some longer terms where why every single year on November 17th,

Does this buck get up and move five miles away? We got a buck in Mississippi that in February every year, he leaves Mississippi, swims the Mississippi River, and spends his summer in Louisiana. Now tell me why. Try to be logical about that. Why invoke all this risk moving that far and swimming the river? And then come August, that same buck moves right back to Mississippi and spends his hunting season over here.

I don't know. I think it all, I think it all be speculation unless, you know, we could somehow figure that out. You know, I,

Me wanting to have an answer, you know, as an engineer, there should be an answer to everything. So, you know, what goes through my mind is like, were they at four and a half? Was he not that, you know, they're going to definitely be in the rut, but maybe there was a pecking order issue. And then by five and a half, he's like, well, I'm mature enough. And there's another buck that's hanging around here that just won't give me the chance. And I'm going to go find my own spot where maybe there, there isn't a more, you know, it's like we could speculate all day long why he does it, but it's just always intriguing on how you could have such consistent,

you know, patterns on a deer and then just, you know, that excursion takes place. Or like you said, a deer that swims a river at a certain time and comes back. It's just, you know, I guess that's what makes it fun. They do things because they're deer and we may never understand why they do it.

We think, and we have no way to prove this, of course, but we kind of think it's, a biologist would call it kind of a vestigial trait. It's just something buried pretty deep in their genome. I just think there's a fraction of deer, just like within human beings, there's a fraction of humans hundreds of years ago that wanted to be explorers. They're risk takers. The grass is always greener. They're going for the gold, et cetera. And they're willing to risk their life to do it.

And white-tailed deer, we always say they're a colonizing species. They're always moving, expanding, looking for the better food, better cover, etc. And I think there's just always a small fraction of individuals, and in this case bucks, that are just willing to pick up and move. But I can't say it's even just bucks. This was...

Definitely exacerbated by floodwaters adjacent to the Mississippi River. We had a doe also pick up and move 20 miles away and set up camp. So it happens with both of them.

that's crazy that's starting to get comparable to the the western like winter migrations you know at the point of moving that far and yeah like i say it's all speculation another thought is like what you know when is that where he was born where his mom you know it's like and and he moved off and just is coming back well we may never know so i'm going to digress because we could probably talk in circles on that one all day um the next one is a western hunter um you know an elk hunter that's on the ground trying to get very very close you know wind is always key but

to piggyback on wind is scent. Um, you know, being a brand new whitetail hunter, one of my biggest things, what, you know, these, the whitetail hunters are, you know, they're spraying their clothes with all this stuff. They've got some sort of scent locker, scent crusher, some sort of a cabinet with ozone in it. You know, I'm like watching what seems to me as a Western hunters a little bit crazy. Cause we just like, ah, I have to breathe. I'm going to sweat to death out here in the West climbing mountains. I'm just going to keep the wind in my face at all times, but stand hunting is,

It was very obvious that you can't get into your stand. You can't protect the wind at all times. You got deer on the ground. You're letting them come to you. So wind and scent becomes a little bit, you're, I don't want to say you're giving them the wind, but you were, you had to risk the wind a little bit more than I can elk hunting. Cause elk hunting, I can hear a bull beagling. I'm just going to walk a 90 degree, you know, uh,

I'm going to walk 90 degrees to my left and get the wind better so I can play it right where I'm not worried about what's behind me or what may be in the adjacent bedding area or whatnot. So with that all said, my understanding or just from what I've read, maybe even research that you've done is that a deer sense of smell can be anywhere from 250 to 100 times more acute than human smells. So right off the bat, you're not going to get away with much, but

I'm going to have multiple questions here, but like what smells matter was always, you know, I'm curious about, is it human odor? Is it, you know, the laundry detergent I wash my clothes with? Is it the breakfast burrito I may have spilled on my hunting pants that morning on the way to the stand? In your opinion, do the types of smells matter? And is there any research to support, you know, what smells matter?

That, that, that, that last little part you said there is, is tough. I would say there is, there's research to support that absolutely smell is going to matter, but it, but it's really difficult for us to disentangle exactly what that smell is. What, you know, why is this particular molecule going to elicit a response in a deer that another scent molecule won't? And, and,

One example that I can give you that for me opened my eyes into how complicated this is, is Steve and I did an experiment here at Mississippi State where we worked with a chemist with all the sophisticated equipment where they could detect the acronym they use are VOCs, volatile organic compounds that we emit.

And we would put on this suit and they would extract the air that came off of us. And it was literally over 100 different compounds. And it could vary from individual to individual as well. And I just remembered something I saw on the news a couple weeks ago regarding this new research program.

That is showing something humans have noticed for a long time. You know, Jason, why is it whenever you and I are together, why are mosquitoes all over you, but they're not as much on me? Exactly. Well, in this same kind of study, they actually were able to isolate it down to a particular compound.

And this particular genome, this expression of this gene and this person, they manufacture more of this compound and the mosquitoes queued in on it. Now that kind of got off track a little bit, but the bottom line is that

It's hard to define what is human scent because it's a whole bunch of different compounds. And is there any way to truly and effectively suppress or eliminate all those different scents that a deer can detect? I can't say from a research perspective, yes or no, but I find it very, very unlikely that you can do that. And another example, Jason, this seems to resonate with people very well when I talk to them.

is if we want to compare a deer's nose to a dog's nose, which I think is a really good comparison. We all know a bloodhound and how good they are. But we have dogs now like cadaver dogs. We have dogs that can, at least there's a lot of research showing, they can tell if someone has Parkinson's disease or not.

We have, and I know this intimately in my family, there are service dogs, Jason, that could be in the room with you right now. And if you were type 1 diabetic, they could tell if your blood glucose level was above or below a threshold. Now, to me, how do you completely cover that up?

I just don't think you can. But what I think you can do are the odds. You put the odds in your favor. Of course you don't want to be eating a bacon and sausage biscuit and smoking a cigar and have diesel fuel on your boots and all that kind of stuff. But it's really hard to manage for that. Yeah, and so it's just to be over... And that's where I kind of got to is just being overcritical on sense. Like just...

I may never know, you know, in, in the, you know, heat of the moment, what matters or what doesn't, but if I control and take care of as much of that, you know, so when you, you get back to the house, you take all your hunting clothes off before you cook breakfast, you know, and, and just try to manage it to the highest level possible. I figure that's the best bet because you're always gonna have to breathe. And if that's what they're picking up, you're, you're going to be, you know, you're going to get picked off. And, um, you know, and that kind of leads on to the better or not the better, the, the, the,

the safer play is just make sure that the wind's always in the right, the right place and your stands in the right place. Um, and make sure that they don't have a chance to smell you. Um, for sure. That's the, that's the proactive thing that you can control is positioning yourself in the wind. Yeah. Um, one last question on, on scent. And, and I know, um,

This is a very nuanced question because a 1-2 mile an hour wind is different than a 7-10 versus an 18-20. We talked about this a little bit before we got started.

hit the record button um you know out West as I'm approaching elk I'm always wondering like if I need to cheat the wind or or give them the wind completely is a 500 yard Loop good enough as a 750 yard Loop good enough like when can they smell me is there any data that kind of supports that and I know it's going to be variable on the wind you know the concentration of the smell so it's like yeah everything I'm asking an answer for gets very very complex because there's so many variables and you know each one has its own

I guess it's probably weighted differently as well in that answer. There's no research that I'm aware of that can answer that question definitively. But I'll give you my opinion the way I think about it. I think about it as...

Even though it's microscopic and we can't see it and it's hard for even for us to comprehend it. But I look at it as for that deer, you know, stimulus and response. There is probably has to be a threshold number of particles to elicit a deer saying, I got to get out of here. This is very, very dangerous for me.

Um, and so, you know, I'm not a mule deer hunter. I'm, I'm a white tail hunter. If, if you hunt a deer down here long enough, you've definitely seen those situations where, like you're saying, the wind is swirling and a deer comes in, whether they're 50 yards away or 150, but they caught a whiff.

They know it's swirled by. And I look at that, Jason, as there was a particle or two or 100 or however you would enumerate that. But there was enough to say, you know, I need to be careful here. Something's going on. And then they get that next width and it exceeded that threshold where they said, I got to get out of here. Yep.

Yeah, or the number. I've smelt it once, now I've smelt it twice. I'm out. Yeah, yeah. That makes 10 cents. So I'm going to ask... I lied there a little bit. I'm going to ask you one more question on scent, which...

If you were, you know, Dr. Bronson Strickland's heading to a stand and you've got, you're going to hunt target buck number A, but target buck B might be downwind of how you have to get into your stand. What would be the safe distance? I'm going to put it this way, just like, what are you going to do? How far away are you going to stay? But in order to hunt buck A, you're going to have to let your wind go to B on your approach. In your mind, what could you get away with, you know, for that scent hitting, you know, that bedding area or where you think that buck's holed up at?

I don't think it would be a couple hundred yards. I would want it to be a thousand or more away. Yeah.

just once again, just play it on that conservative side, a little extra effort, a little farther walk. And just to make sure that, that when, so yeah, not, I'm not putting you on record, but over a thousand yards away, you feel like you may be safe. Um, you know, and it sounds like I wouldn't even put a number on it as far as possible. You're going to stay away as far as possible as you can. Yeah. Yeah. As long as it doesn't, you know, turn your, your half mile hike into the stand, into a five mile hike, you know, within reason, you're going to stay as far away as possible. Exactly. Yeah. Okay.

And make as little noise as possible. The list goes on and on. Yeah. We talked about the rut a little bit. We mentioned some 900 yards versus 1,500 yards. We know that deer move... October, November, they're moving 33%. I think some of your research says 33% of the time during the day. During lockdown, they're moving 40% of their movements during the day. But we noticed...

and I come back to my people are probably getting tired of me of my whitetail hunt in Kansas, but it's what I know. It's, it's, it's, it's my experience. So I'm going, I'm going to dive back into it. Um, you know, he's got cameras spread out all over his, you know, thousand acres, a couple of different farms. And, you know, he may have one camera that only gets a picture of one buck.

That buck doesn't leave his core area of, I don't know, 100, 200, 300 acres, I'm assuming. Or even tighter than that because the farm is bigger than that. He's got cameras more closely spaced out than that. But then there may be a buck that is on all 10 of his cameras and all of his neighbor's 20 cameras and the next neighbor's over his cameras. What leads...

to that, that I guess, you know, habit or what leads to that deer's movement patterns for one buck to sit still and one buck to travel all over. And I've got some follow up questions on that as well.

Well, I don't think we know the answer, but we know that it exists. We know that there's a lot of variation in how they move and the area they cover and how often. And we kind of call it personality. We call it, you know, bucks have different personalities. And some of it, Jason, can be some are just very aggressive, right?

Some of them are always out. They're always looking for a fight. They're always looking for a breeding opportunity. Some of them, and this can be mature bucks as well, some of them just are not programmed that way. Some of them are just going to, we call them norm. I'm showing my age here, but cheers, norm. I mean, every Friday night, you know where norm's going to be. And there are some bucks like that. And

To me, we got to think back into the currency for an animal is an evolutionary term we called fitness. Fitness is basically for you to win in Mother Nature, you got to live longer or you got to have more offspring. And so I think you have this diversity of buck personalities where...

where some of them are going to be very aggressive about breeding opportunities and some of them are going to be more conservative and are going to stay at home and stay close to cover and just try to live longer. Their game is the long game of, I may have less breeding opportunities per year, but I'm going to live till I'm eight years old.

This other little whippersnapper, you know, he's going to maximize as many breeding opportunities as he can, but he dies at three and a half. So both of those are acceptable solutions.

And so, you know, without really knowing why, you know, maybe it's just intrinsic and genetic a little bit and it's just who they are. Is there any data or, you know, from your own experience, have you seen that change with maturity? Like, well, you mentioned whippersnapper in the last example. Does that deer settle down as he moves up the pecking order and maybe knows he'll be able to breed those does close? Or is there any correlation between maturity and how far a deer wants to go?

Um, we don't have a good data to, to assess that simply because we, we don't have enough, the, the longevity of a deer retaining a collar, at least the way we do studies is you get about a year, sometimes a year and a half out of a collar and the battery's exhausted and we drop it off. The, I think the best explanation I can give is like in our deer pens and our research facility is,

We will see some of the aggressiveness change over time. We will see sometimes that a buck at middle age that was just really, really aggressive, by the time he becomes mature, it's almost like he settles down. It's almost like he realizes that the risk I am taking, and every time a buck locks up for a fight, for example, they're taking a risk with their life.

Uh, they're taking a risk with getting an antler. You see it all the time, an antler in the eyeball, a wound in the neck. And so it's like some of these bucks just learn over time that the rut's not here. There's not an estrus dough right in front of me. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna run all over the place and pick fights with everybody like some of these other bucks do. That makes a ton of, ton of sense there. Um, moving on to my, my final question before we get into the vocalizations a little bit, um, you know,

Looking at a piece of property, aside from seclusion and absence of human pressure, which in my quick research is maybe the number one factor to keeping bigger, more mature deer on your property, what do bucks need to get big and stay big and stay on your property? For elk out west, we always talk about when we're looking to find elk, we're looking, they need to have food, they need to have security, and usually north-facing benches and timber or brush, and they need to have access to water every day.

How do you relate that to like the whitetails and where you know, not where what you need to keep them on your place? The essentials? Food, of course, food is really, really important until you get to the rut and food is less important.

I would say during that time of the year, it's kind of like what we talked about earlier. It's something you can't really manage for, but they're roaming the landscape looking for breeding opportunities. But one thing that we neglect a lot is cover.

it's having a really good cover. And so, you know, I'll get an email or a call and I'll get the question of what do I have to do on my property? You know, my small acreage, my 50, 250 to keep an, you know, hold more deer on my property. And, and the way I always end up is you need to go to Google earth or some program like that. And you need to zoom out and

And you need to figure out what is the most limiting factor on the landscape, not on your property, adjacent. What is limiting? Is food limiting? If so, then you can be the destination food property around you. But just as easily, think of the Midwest, it could be cover.

So if you just have this wide open landscape and you have all this food, well, you need some cover adjacent to it to hold deer on your property. And then once you address those, don't mess it up by disturbing the deer all the time. Be sensible about how you hunt and how often you hunt. Don't just go in there and blow them up every afternoon or they're going to leave your property or certainly not move around during daylight hours.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And coming from out West, you know, we've got, it's brushy. We've logged everything, you know, three times now you got stumps, you've got brush, you got Blackberry brush, you get into the creek bottoms, we got devil's clubs, you know, whatever it may be. There's just, we have brush and everything for days. And so heading out, uh,

you know, to the Midwest, you know, to, to realize that a little cedar thicket that created some sort of like thermal barrier for those deer. And we hunted very close to, to a cedar thicket there. And, you know, coming from out West, it's like, why would these deer want to be in there? But you realize really quick that, you know, when it was eight to 15 degrees, those bucks were moving some of those deer into that. And they wanted to be in there during the middle of the day when they were going to bed down so they could,

have an extra tenor and we walked the farm and walked through a couple of them just looking at new properties and and just kind of doing the walk around getting the whole you know first white tail experience and um you know just seeing the amount of trails and the activity on the property going in and out of there at different times of the day what was eye-opening and then i can remember walking through we walked from you know one i guess would be ag section to another but there was a we were in bluff country and we had to maybe drop a couple hundred feet down through a creek and

you know, out West, we clear cut everything. We cut it off with a stump. We either turn it into lumber or we send it overseas as export logs. And I looked in and on this property, Randy had cut everything at eye height and just let it lay. And it just created this tangled mess. And, you know, he explained hinge cutting to me, which coming from out West made zero sense at all. Like, well, that tree was worth money, you know, and he's like, well, that tree's worth more to the big bucks than it is, you know, in a sawmill. And so you quickly start to look at, you know,

all right, don't go in here. But then this is like that big buck, you know, bedding area. They can be secluded. There's no reason for anybody outside of hunting season to ever go into here. Um, you know, it's literally set aside for, for bucks. Um, you know, and then fast forwarding to a different piece we hunted, uh, you know, he left a 20 acre circle between his thick timber, his open Oaks, his food plot of CRP. And, um,

I was amazed at how many deer would pop up at three 30 in the afternoon out of that stuff. Like they didn't want to go bed in the thick brush. They didn't want to go bed, you know, up in the timber. Um, they were just going out in the middle of CRP. And so it quickly started to like, there's no right answer. Um, you know, aside from maybe leaving these things alone and not bother them all year or bothering them, you know, pre hunting season during hunting season. Um, you know, there's a, there's a security. They, they, they want, you know,

like you said, thermal breaks from seeders and it kind of opened up my eyes. You have to think a little bit more about what those deer need. And I guess as an aggregate, they don't just need one thing. It seems to be a combination, to me at least, that they want a little bit of everything.

Yeah, and think about the adjacency as well. You know, where can I put this cover relative to where food is going to be? Think about your hunting strategy. Am I going to be able to get in and out of being in between food and cover? Can I get in and out undetected? I mean, you can be a lot more intentional about

and successful with where you put cover than I think a lot of people give credit for. I think we give so much attention to the food plot, where we're putting the food plot, etc. I think you need to put just as much of where you are intentionally putting cover and it's just going to increase your success hunting.

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Okay, now we're going to kind of close this out with what I'm interested in and my job, design deer calls, is just vocalizations. And you're...

your opinion, what you know about deer vocalizations, all, um, all add in bits and pieces from what I seen in the stand. Um, but go through like a deer's vocabulary at a, at a high level, and then we'll break it down into, you know, grunts, rattling bleeds in your opinion, what those means and how we can, you know, what they mean to the deer and then how we can maybe use those, um, in hunting situations.

From a hunting situation, you know, there are a lot of vocalizations and I didn't do my homework to rattle off all 12 of them or whatever. The ones that are, you know, most meaningful, of course, distress. Yeah.

You know, there's a problem there. They blow, you know, really hard. And that's just to alert everybody something's wrong and get, you know, get the heck out of town. Grunting or the tending grunt is the one we think most commonly. And that is just communication. A buck is tending a doe. He's on the chase or the pursuit.

And then more of a territoriality part of that is in the grunt snore wheeze. And that is more of a, you know, hey, buddy, we're about to tangle here. And I'm just I'm letting you know, you better back off real quick. I've had so so so there's no doubt, Jason, that grunting can work.

We wouldn't have this industry producing grunt calls if it never worked. But everybody that has used them enough has also noticed it works sometimes and it doesn't work others. And the way I think about it anyway is it's going to depend on, number one, and this seems really silly to say this, but did the buck even hear it?

So the buck has to hear the grunt before it can respond to the grunt. And then number two, it's probably going to depend on its mood or physiological state as to whether it's going to respond. So everybody that's grunted a deer has grunted and you're like, why in the world? It didn't even pay me any attention. And you can have that exact same scenario two days later with a different buck and they come charging in. Yeah.

it it's really hard to determine exactly what was going on there but we see the same thing with rattling as well it can be um i was very i'm sorry i'm kind of going down a side road here no no we're good we're good i was very lucky to work with uh

a buddy of mine named Mick Hellickson years ago. This would have been in the golly, mid nineties. And to, to my knowledge, it has been the only kind of scientifically studied rattling experiment. And we went to this, this wildlife refuge that has these observation towers and an even buck age structure. And that's very important. It,

It was a classic South Texas deer herd where you had just as many bucks were mature as or immature. And we looked at pre-rut, rut, post-rut, etc. and different rattling sequences and so forth. And Jason, the single most important thing about a buck coming in and responding to you was did the buck hear you or not.

So within where you're at, there is a certain radius around you that there has to, number one, be a buck to hear you rattling. And then number two, are they in the mood to respond? Yeah, and that was one of the things I sat in the stand. What I would consider similar age class deer, similar level of dominance or same level on the pecking order on the same trail. So whatever they think they're smelling as they go by, I could grunt at one,

And he, he heard me, he'd pick his head up. You know, I always, I always, that's, I guess my indicator is he snaps his head up and looks at your direction. If not, I assume he didn't hear me. And then he would put, pick his head up and go right back down to sniff. And the next year, three and a half years old, same age deer gets to the same spot. I grant, he picks his head up and turns and walk six yards under the stand. And I'm like, gosh, dang it. I don't know why. And maybe we never will know why it's just that first buck didn't have a

you know, enough want to come back and, and, you know, pick up the trail that I was on. You know, you got to assume that's what they're thinking that I was on, you know, a dough or grunting, um, you know, that didn't work. And then there were also times where, um,

mature deer, we got some mature deer to stop and look, and they would kind of angle our way. And then it seemed to work better on those three and a half to four and a half year old deer. If we were dealing with a five or six and a half, they weren't near as interested in coming. Now I know that might just be a coincidence on this hunt, but it seemed like it was easier to, to grunt in those three and a half to four and a half year old bucks. Um, and yeah,

I don't know. I always just wonder why and how come, but similar to a lot of our discussion today, it may just be that deer and what that deer wants to do. And if he's that bully buck that wants to come try to whoop my butt to take my doe versus the other one didn't have that much interest in a lockup or a fight or anything like that. I thought.

I think it depended on that buck's personality. You know, is he a lover or a fighter or a dancer or whatever? And then did you catch him in the right mood? You know, is he ready to jump up and come fight? And some are and some aren't. And

You and I have been in the exact same experiences, whether it be a grunt call or rattling antlers, where you are simultaneously looking at two different bucks and they're about the same distance away. So it's not because they didn't hear. And one of them lifts his head or just twitches his ear. And for the most part, ignores you. And another one picks his head up and comes running in and, uh,

I don't know. That's what makes it fun. I don't know. We got to hunt out of a ground blind a couple days, and we do the let's get up, make sure there's no deer around before we grunt or rattle, and we do our little sequence. And there would be times where you would grunt and you would have a buck just come in real slow. You could see him out maybe your blind side window. You'd come in real slow. There were other times, and I'm using these simultaneously, grunts or rattling. There were other times we'd smash the horns together or grunt, and you would have a deer grunt.

come fly into the woods. And once again, you were trying to figure out like, does it matter how hot of does are in the area? If he's just completely looking for one, I'll probably go to my grave, never knowing the answer, but it, it,

isn't it you know whether it's an engineer me just wanting to know so i can be a more educated hunter it's like well why did one deer you know take his time very cautiously come in and then why that other deer like charge the blind you know come flying by at five yards and run past us and um yeah i don't know um if if you know we'll ever have the answer it sounds like

Probably no. We'll probably never zip that up 99% knowing the reason why. But here's a cool little story. It's very similar to what you're describing, but again, with rattling. In that experiment, Jason, we had, of course, we did this for days and days and weeks and weeks and replicated what we were doing over and over. And just what you're describing, we have some bucks that completely ignore what you're doing.

We have some bucks that come charging in, and it's kind of like some of these old videos where the guy's on the ground rattling, and the next thing he knows, he's getting knocked over by a buck, you know, just on top of him. But then you also, on the exact same rattling sequence where, you know, to your left, this buck came charging in,

Over to your right when you're done rattling you look and there one had tiptoed You know one wasn't gonna come charging in they come circling around They're just very cautious and then I had one example I still vividly remember and again, this was in Texas you could see a long ways But I see a buck about three maybe four hundred yards away and I'm wearing these antlers out, you know breaking a sweat going as hard as I can and while I was rattling I

You had to be making the sound while you were rattling that buck was coming towards you. But part of our protocol, our experimental protocol, was you rattled for X amount, you didn't for X amount. You pick it up. And when you would put the antlers down on your lap, that buck instantaneously would stop coming.

There was no memory in his head like, I'm going to keep going there. As long as the stimulus of the rattling antlers was taken away, he quit. And in three rattling sequences, I brought him from that far away three different times. He would stop and just go back to feeding. Pick him up, rattle again, here he comes again. But because he had to close the distance of 400 yards, you know, it took that long.

Yeah, that's very similar to predator calling bears. They get uninterested very quickly, so you have to stay on the call forever. So it sounds real similar. Like they would move when you were rattling, but not. So one last thing on calling, and then we'll wrap this up and put a bow on it. Grunting. So...

in your opinion i'll just maybe you can either agree with me or disagree with me when we got there you know parish and randy like we're not ever going to grant at a buck that's on lockdown or that's chasing they're like we don't call to that deer um they don't like to call first thing in the morning so we were doing morning and and evening sits you know some people don't like to hunt mornings at certain times or only hunt ag at night but we were we only had a certain amount of time from out of state we had to be in the tree at all times so

Um, you know, we tried not to grant on a buck that was locked down or chasing or chasing hard. And then, um, we didn't typically grunt in the morning. Would you say grunting every 30 minutes is, is about right. If nothing's around, my only concern is when I looked at the pace that these bucks were running, if I didn't say anything,

if i just observed that deer would be out of earshot like you said the most important thing is he hears me so then my mind triggers to i should be calling maybe every 10 minutes because that buck's going to leave leave my you know radius that you can hear me what in your opinion what would be the and i know this may may be more of your hunting opinion and not necessarily research based but what's the right the you know cold calling cold grunting i guess um

Yeah, and you're right. Yeah, the sitting research base, this is just biologists that hunts opinion. But I think the single most important thing is, as you mentioned, is, you know, a buck's got to hear it. And I'm not going to sit up there and just wear a grunt call out the whole, you know, every minute. You know, I think that's just disturbance. And I think everything's getting alerted to your presence. But I would want to think of, like the example you mentioned earlier, is that,

every 15 to at the most 30 minutes. I want the opportunity to

That however, whatever that distance is based on the configuration of the land, the wind noise, et cetera. I want to be sure that if there is a deer within say 200 yards of me is that, and I, maybe I don't see him that he can hear me. So I'm thinking probably every 15 to 20 minutes, I'm going to do that a couple of times and just see if I get a response. Yeah. That's kind of what we did. And we kind of rotated our grunting versus rattling, like, you know, maybe a buck's more interested in rattling versus grunting. So, uh,

Whether now you're only rattling every 30 to 45 minutes and grinding every 30 to 45, mixing them in, it seemed to be a good mix and it kept...

you know, enough action or enough deer coming to the, to the location to keep us interested in and not get, get bored. Right. Rattling the type time of year. Are you rattling from, you know, start a pre-rut all the way through, you know, even post-rut? Is that, is that the ideal time you're going to get deer to respond to that then? Pre-rut number one, post-rut number two. P,

Peak of the rut is all about being lucky that a buck tending a doe has finished breeding and he's on the search. And the probability of you catching him then is just less versus in the pre-rut when all the bucks are roaming and looking and searching. You just have greater odds.

bleats, where do they have their place in calls or should we just leave our bleat calls at home all the time or is there a place where they can be effective and how a doe would naturally use that sound? It definitely works and I've used it and gotten a response like a lot of people have in terms of a doe coming in and charging in. It's just difficult at least for me and maybe I'm not a good enough hunter to

um, where I could manage that and try to get a shot undetected. But to me, it's just that the, the dough is coming in on high, high alert and is focused in where that sound is coming from. So trying to get a bow drawn back is difficult. Yeah. Uh, it can be effective. Sure. I had about an hour lull on the day I actually killed my buck. Um,

and just bleed it. I had grinded a couple of times with nothing. So I'm just going to switch it up. I got the call in my pocket. And whether it was that or not, or whether they were already coming, that's the hard part. You don't know if they were already on their way. Two does showed up five, seven minutes later, and they had two bucks each on them. And it's like, well, I don't know if it worked or not, but I'm not going to not do it. We'll have to test it more in the future. But those does did show up. They did turn, and it took about a half hour for the bucks to finally come back. But

Um, you know, bleeds, we, we don't use them a whole lot. We didn't use them a whole lot, but we did use them, you know, just a few times to see how, um, and when we were trying to get, you know, does to come to come to our location. And then that last sound that we're, we're going to use in hunting, um, that snort wheeze, are you going to load that up more in the pre-rut, um, and avoid it during lockdown and, and are you going to come back to it in the post-rut?

You know, that's one I've never used before. I've seen it used before and it can be effective. And I would think I would, I think that might be more of a post-rut for me doing that.

I probably have to put more thought into that than I am now, but I guess my logic is that during the pre-rut, bucks are just moving around more often, and if they get challenged at that time, maybe they're just going to move on and keep looking, versus in the peak of the rut or post-rut, they might be more willing to accept the challenge and fight, but...

I don't know, Jason. That's a good question. Yeah. I know, you know, just like I say, you can read anything on the internet. So whether you've proofed it or not, but people that, you know, I know they use it more pre-rut and I know, you know, the guys that I was hunting with in the Midwest, they were like, ah, we don't snort weeds during the middle of the rut. And,

Um, you know, which it sounds like you don't do a whole lot in the middle of it. Like you said, besides get lucky and hope you just put your stand in the right place where, um, you know, either he's chasing a doe around or he's returning from chasing a doe around and passing through trying to find a new one. All right. Well, I really appreciate having you on and in closing, um, Dr. Strickland, I'm going to, I'm going to leave you with this one. If, if you could give advice to hunters by using, you know, a deer's biology or their instinct against them to find success, what would that one tip be?

Wow, that's a good one. Probably a pretty boring answer here. I would probably just go back to my fundamentals of...

Don't disturb. Don't constantly disturb where deer are bedded. Think strategically about where cover is at. Think strategically about where food is at. Use the wind. Try to get in and out. So I guess in terms of the biology against them, it would be their stomach. That makes a ton of sense. So I was going to have you close on that, but now I've got another question that popped up.

Would you say just as far as like even checking cell cameras, like that deer may not see you, may not hear you on that day, but he may pick up, you know, as you said, one or two or 10 molecules, whatever that number is, that's a low amount. And it just puts him on alert. Are you saying just completely, you know, we should be using cell cameras, like unless it's some farmer ag that has to happen, you know, harvest, we should just kind of leave those things alone as much as possible. Well, I guess I would say that, um,

Disturbance isn't just a gunshot. Disturbance is your present, your scent, the sound of your ATV, the truck door. I think it's all the collection of those events over time alert deer at a population scale to something's changed, something's different. And so I'm still going to run a trail camera and check it throughout the year, but I think you just have to treat those as almost like a hunt.

I don't think everybody can run 20 cellular activated cameras, you know, but I think it's not going in there and checking it every third day. It might be every couple weeks looking at it and even treating the wind approaching your camera setup, much like a hunting stand.

Yeah, you don't go in the middle of the morning when he might be on that plotter and that you go in the middle of the day where you think he's moved off. And yeah, just taking all of those precautions, like you said, make sure you got the right wind to even check your camera. All that stuff seems to just add up. And just like everything we've talked about, I think...

it's a decision on, you know, you have to weigh the benefit versus the detriment, right? You know, I looked at like the hinge cutting of one of these areas, like you're going to go into a buck's area that he's probably already using, but does hinge cutting make it that much better? Is it worth the week or two of hinge cutting, you know, all of these oaks and, you know, some of that stuff is what I'm still trying to get my, you know, my head around, like what's worth it, what's not, what,

you know, what could push that buck out of there versus what may, you know, bring two more bucks into the area is, is I think that's that game that everybody plays trying to keep big bucks, grow big bucks. Um,

Yeah. And I think like the example you gave, a buck may be using it, but you want him to use it differently. So the buck may be using that woodlot by just passing through, but you want him to bed right there or you want multiple deer to bed right there. That's where being manipulative like that and hinge cutting or just cutting trees could help a lot. Yeah. Yeah.

And there could be a short-term negative effect. There could be a short-term negative effect, but years later, it's going to be positive. Yeah, play the long game and you'll get the benefit out of it. So...

So I really appreciate having you here, Dr. Bronson Strickland, a wealth of knowledge. I probably could have talked to you all day about whitetails, but I appreciate the time you gave us and good luck now that your season's just getting going down there. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Time to get out and hunt some more. Thanks so much for the opportunity. Enjoy talking to you.

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