Ep. 783: Does the Moon Impact Deer Behavior?

Summary

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

Date: October 27, 2025
Host: Steven Rinella (“Steve”)
Guests: Dr. Bronson Strickland (Mississippi State University), Mark “Yanni” Yannis, Spencer Newhart

---

Overview

This episode tackles a classic and contentious belief in hunting: does the moon—its phase, brightness, or position—impact deer movement? Steven Rinella, together with wildlife biologist Dr. Bronson Strickland, Mark Yannis, and Spencer Newhart, dissects the science, the folklore, and the psychology behind the “moon phase” debate. Pulling from decades of research at Mississippi State’s Deer Lab, Dr. Strickland presents detailed findings about deer movement, debunking common hunting wisdom and highlighting what actually drives whitetail activity.

The conversation is frank, at times humorous, and takes on sacred cows in American deer culture: lunar effects, the October Lull, big buck personalities, pressure, the rut, and what science really says versus what hunters want to believe.

---

Main Discussion Points

1. The Moon Phase Myth: Science vs. Hunting “Wisdom”

The Core Debate

• Steve opens with the enduring question: Every hunter has an opinion about whether lunar phase changes deer behavior, but is there scientific proof?
• 83% of surveyed hunters believe the moon affects deer movement—but disagree on how, when, or why. (16:46)

The Science

• Dr. Strickland’s research: Multiple years of GPS-collared buck movement, analyzed by population and on an individual basis, showing daily and hourly movement rates.
  • “It was very apparent that...from the phase of the moon from new to full in that period, there’s no variation in deer movement whatsoever." (22:12)
• Hunters often cite turtle, bird, and tidal behavior as evidence for lunar effects on wildlife—true for some species, but not whitetail deer.

The Study Details (24:06, 27:46)

• Movement measured in yards/hour, using 15-minute GPS pings.
• Over 85 different analyses looked at all angles—moon phase, position, gravitational effects.
• Difference in movement or bedding time due to moon phase: measured in seconds or, at most, a minute or two—statistically negligible.

Notable Quotes

• “The evidence is very strong: [deer are] not influenced by the moon whatsoever… They’re always out, just because you’re seeing them.” – Dr. Strickland (13:46)
• “If it makes you feel good, if this is your placebo effect… keep doing it. The evidence does not support it.” – Dr. Strickland (55:30)
• “There is a moon situation for every person and their pet hypothesis... Every single day you can pull out a scenario of what the moon is doing.” – Dr. Strickland (34:31)

Why Do Hunters Still Believe?

• Confirmation bias: “We're really good at looking for patterns even when they don't exist." (13:46)
• If someone has a good hunt on a “red moon” day, they remember that success and not all the quiet hunts.
• Belief in moon effects might help hunters be more confident, alert, and committed—an indirect way of improving success.

Placebo Effect

• Spencer recounts “saving his best stand” for a magazine-predicted “best day of the rut,” hunting harder and ultimately succeeding: “I was just more confident and I was a better hunter that day.” (55:50)

---

2. What Actually Drives Deer Movement?

Big Three: Crepuscular Pattern, The Rut, Temperature

• Crepuscular periods: Sunrise and sunset (most active, no matter what the moon is doing).
• Rut: Major peak in movement driven by does' estrus, not lunar cues.
• Temperature: Small but real effect; more daylight movement on days under 40°F, more marked in the South. (36:08)

Other Factors

• Hunting pressure: Where deer move will change quickly once hunters show up, but daily movement rates stay about the same—they just avoid hunters. (40:56)
• October Lull: Myth—no measurable decrease in movement during this supposed period; deer shift where they move, not how much.
• Lockdown: “Legit”—when many does are in heat, more bucks are “locked down,” tending does and thus decreasing general sightings, but there's no total crater in movement. (87:41)

---

3. Buck “Personality Types” and Movement

Sedentary vs. Mobile

• Most bucks have a relatively fixed home range (sedentary).
• About 30% are highly mobile: completely disjointed home ranges, sometimes miles apart. Some even cross large rivers like the Mississippi annually. (71:24)
• “Some of them move a whole bunch, some of them don’t move a lot.” (37:46)

Individual Variation

• The rut causes bucks to expand the daily area they range over and to make longer forays (“excursions”), sometimes into new places they’ve never been (though the data can’t say if it’s truly “never ever” in their lifetime). (79:58, 83:07)

---

4. Social and Ecological Theories

Theories Debunked or Supported

• Rutting Moon/Allsheimer Theory: The idea that a particular full moon after the autumn equinox triggers synchronized rutting—no support at the individual or population scale. Any observed protracted or “trickle” rut is due to skewed sex ratios, not the moon. (58:04, 59:30)
• October Lull: No evidence for a movement dip; deer just change locations as food and cover shift.
• Lockdown: Supported—peak of the rut, more bucks “locked down” with does, reducing general buck traffic.

Confirmation Bias Explained (64:53)

• “We disproportionately remember times we were successful… and start ignoring contrary evidence.” – Dr. Strickland

---

5. Hunter Application: What Should Hunters Do?

If Targeting a Specific Buck

• Best shot is pre-rut, when that buck’s routine is most predictable (“site fidelity”), typically 1+ month before local peak rut. (129:48–130:30)
• Once the rut starts, all bets are off—bucks move more and are farther from their usual haunts.

If Hunting Bucks in General

• Peak rut is best: more movement, greater chance of a big, unfamiliar buck crossing your path.

Food Plots

• Bucks prefer 3–5 acre food plots—smaller plots get over-browsed, larger ones aren't used disproportionately. Food becomes more important post-rut (they need to recover body weight).

Pressure Management

• Limit disturbance: Only hunt stands when minimizing the chance of bumping deer. Deer recognize when you’re “in the woods,” not just gunshots. (121:49–122:24)
• Minimize ATV use, noise, scent—especially in the days leading up to and during the rut.

---

Notable Quotes & Moments

[13:46] Dr. Strickland: “The evidence is very strong: [deer are] not influenced by the moon whatsoever… They’re always out, just because you’re seeing them.”

[34:31] Dr. Strickland: “There is a moon situation for every person and their pet hypothesis... Every single day you can pull out a scenario of what the moon is doing.”

[53:08] Dr. Strickland: “[In hunter surveys,] the effect size reported was that bucks are on their feet 30 minutes to 2 hours earlier, or moving 50–200 yards per hour more under certain moon conditions… they’re all in.”

[55:30] Dr. Strickland: “If it makes you feel good, man, if this is your placebo effect… The evidence does not support it.”

[64:46] Dr. Strickland: “We're really good at looking for patterns even when they don't exist.”

[87:46] Dr. Strickland: “Yeah, that’s legit.” (on “lockdown”/tending does during peak rut)

---

Key Timestamps

• 03:13 – Introduction of Dr. Bronson Strickland and setup of the “moon phase” debate
• 13:46 – Dr. Strickland’s position: strong evidence moon doesn’t influence deer movement
• 16:46 – Survey results: 83% of hunters believe in lunar effects
• 21:49 – Details of the movement study methodology
• 36:08 – What did affect movement: crepuscular periods, rut, slight effect of temperature
• 40:56 – Impact of hunting pressure: movement pattern, not distance
• 46:23 – The “October lull” myth debunked
• 52:12 – How subtle could effects be, really?
• 58:04 – The “ruttin’ moon” theory, explained and refuted
• 64:46 – Explanation of confirmation bias
• 79:05–80:00 – Rut movement: covering same area, but in different places
• 87:41–88:20 – “Lockdown” period: legit
• 121:49–124:51 – Dr. Strickland on how the science affects his hunting strategy
• 129:48–130:35 – Advice: pre-rut for specific targets, peak rut for odds

---

In-Depth Segments

How the Study Was Done (21:49–28:54)

• GPS-collared bucks, pings every 15 minutes.
• Analysis controlled for individual variation (some bucks are homebodies, some roamers).
• 85 different moon-related analyses run.
• Result: Max deviation in movement: a handful of seconds, or an extra 3 yards/hour—not measurable in any meaningful hunting application.

The Placebo Effect and Hunter Psychology (55:29–56:43)

• Confidence, preparedness, and commitment might indirectly make you a better hunter if you believe in the “moon day.”
• Dr. Strickland: “Keep doing it if it makes you happy. But the evidence does not support it.”

Buck Personalities (71:24–73:56)

• Sedentary vs. highly mobile (30%). Mobile bucks can shift home ranges by miles, crossing major rivers.
• Pre-rut = best chance to kill a “homebody” buck. Rut = best odds for a random traveler.

Effects of Hunting Pressure (40:56–42:27)

• Bucks don’t stop moving, they use cover, alter paths to avoid active areas.

Herd and Population Health Management (124:03–124:51)

• Most whitetail management issues (quality, body size) boil down to overpopulation relative to available food.

---

Wrapping Up: Hunter Takeaways

• Hunt sunup/sundown and during rut: Moon phase is not a factor.
• Chilly temps can help in the South—but it’s subtle.
• Don’t “overhunt” a stand or property; minimize human intrusion.
• Focus efforts on the pre-rut if targeting a specific buck.
• During and after rut, be opportunistic and hunt food when things wind down.
• Food plots: 3–5 acres are the sweet spot.
• Doubt what you “know”—double check against your own trail cam data.

---

Where to Find More (136:24)

• MSU Deer Lab: https://www.msudeerlab.com
• YouTube, social: Search “MSU Deer Lab” and “Deer University” podcast
• Land management consulting: wildlifeinvestments.com

---

Summary written in the spirit—and with the irreverent, practical tone—of Steve, Yanni, Spencer, and Dr. Strickland. If you still want to believe the moon moves your bucks, no one’s stopping you. But if you want to hunt deer, hunt when you can—and follow the science, not the superstition.

Transcript

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Steve]

Hey, if you're familiar with archeology or just trying to uncover the secrets of like remote jungled landscapes, you've probably heard of lidar. Well, lidar is now the newest addition to the Onyx Hunt elite membership. The best way I can explain it is it basically makes your topo map look 3D. I've been using it to eyeball some places. I'm very familiar with a man. It brings it to life. Like, you know how if you're looking at a map, you might have little old logging roads that you just, you just don't see on a map because they're grown over. Well, man, they pop on this kind of thing. Go download the Onx Hunt app today and try their new LiDAR maps. It is amazing. It is a game changer. Check engine ABS or maintenance light on. Take the guesswork out of your warning lights with O'Reilly Veriscan. The service is free and provides a report with solutions verified by ASE certified Master technicians. And if you need help, we could recommend a shop for you. Ask for O'Reilly Veriskan today.

[Spencer Newhart]

Auto parts.

[Steve]

If you spend a ton of time in the woods like I do, you know how important good equipment is. And let me tell you, man, I have been messing with the Summit Stands captain's chairman and dude, this is going to be a major improvement in my program. It's a portable seat designed with Summit's industry leading comfort. Perfect for turkey and dove season, hunting in flooded timber or any type of ground hunting. This is a classic padded seat that clamps onto a Tree. Visit Summit Stands.com and use the coupon code Me Eater for 20% off site wide. Visit Summit Stands.com. use coupon code Me Eater for 20% Off Site Wide. This is the Meat Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten and in my case, underwearless.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

The meat eater podcast.

[Steve]

You can't predict anything. Brought to you by first light. When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds no compromise gear that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light.com that's F I R S T L I T E.com free people. Oh no. The show's starting right now with this ring. Can it start with this ring?

[Mark Yannis]

Yeah, sounds good.

[Steve]

Dial a Mark Canyon. If he doesn't pick up, will we keep it, you think? Oh, Mark, you know who I'm sitting here with? I have no idea. You're on. You're On. You're not on the air, but you know what I mean. You're being recorded. Okay.

[Mark Yannis]

It's me, Mark Yannis Giannis.

[Steve]

I'm here with Dr. Bronson Strickland.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Great, great guy.

[Steve]

And I'm about ready to start telling them about the last thing you told me about deer in the moon. And I'm gonna, like, kind of make you look bad. Then I thought, I remember what that could be. That. That it was a very interesting point. I was telling you about how, you know, you and I have argued about whether deer are impacted by lunar phases. Yep. You're very. I mean, you're. You're very aware of this debate.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Very aware of it.

[Steve]

Although I'm not sure what you're going to say. My position is on it. Well, I'll tell you what you said last time we talked, Mark. It was a long time ago, and it's stuck in my head. It's stuck in my craw. You are. You were kind of hinting at that science can't detect the subtle differences that could. The subtle, subtle things that could make a difference between your success and your failure, where you're like, if that buck steps out of the woods a minute.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Earlier.

[Steve]

That could be the difference. And science can't find that. Yes. So when I say about how you think that, you still think that. Well, that has been not my position, but my. No, you didn't put it to me like a question.

[Spencer Newhart]

So I've always said that that is.

[Steve]

The question that I feel like science has yet was like. There's all these studies that show that cold fronts don't.

[Spencer Newhart]

Don't impact movement in a statistically significant.

[Steve]

Way, or the moon, in many different ways, has not shown yet to make a statistic difference. So I've always been curious, though, because we see that in all the studies. On the other hand, you have all of these other hunters with anecdotal evidence that, you know, that says that's not the case. And so my question has always been maybe. Maybe we're just not measuring in the same way or in. In quite the right way to. Plus these tiny little possible edges that you could get. So I'm still, like, very much on the fence, though, Steve. Like, I'm just curious.

[Spencer Newhart]

I'm moon curious is how I've always described myself.

[Steve]

We already talked about you being moon curious. I'm Mark. I'm Mark curious, you know, and. And Bronson has done a really good job of doing a lot of this stuff. So I'm glad you're talking to him.

[Spencer Newhart]

Because he's someone who I listen to a lot, and.

[Steve]

And he certainly knows better than I. I'm simply a guy with questions. Yeah. You remember how I said, you're on the air, Mark? Yeah. Well, you know what I found? I was interested the other day after the. After learning at the other day where the FCC started, like, threatening people for saying stuff they didn't like. Yeah. I was like, the FCC has nothing to do with podcasts. But then I was like, do they? The FCC has nothing to do with podcasts. Is that a question or a statement? No, I'm telling you it's true, because you're not on the air. You're not on the air. You're not. We're not using the air so we can say, like, things, and the FCC won't threaten us and take the show off the air. So if they get mad about this lunar phase stuff, there's nothing to do about it. Thank goodness, because we've been saying a lot of crazy stuff about the moon over all these years. I would hate to be brought to court on those past. You can do this the hard way or the easy way, Mark. That's what they say. All right, man, we'll talk to you later. Thank you. When the episode comes out, why don't you listen and we'll try to find out if what you're saying is. Is a thing or not. I'm looking forward to it. As we just said, join.

[Spencer Newhart]

Say goodbye to him.

[Steve]

Oh, I don't really do that.

[Spencer Newhart]

Never?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

No.

[Spencer Newhart]

Not even if it's your wife?

[Steve]

Definitely not.

[Mark Yannis]

No. That is a rule of Steve's.

[Steve]

Is. It's a no.

[Mark Yannis]

It's in the name of efficiency that. Please. Thank you. Hello. Goodbye. Once you achieve a certain intimacy with Steve, I fall in this category as well, that those pleasantries are out the window.

[Spencer Newhart]

Yeah, I think that happens to me, too, but. And then I watched it happen to someone else, and I was like, oh, wait a minute.

[Steve]

If you really want to. If you really want to dig, I'll take a quick break to dig in on this for you. I like. There's people I talk to. I like. The main people in my life. I like. I talk to him. I like to talk to him a lot. So that anytime we talk, it's only about what we have to talk about. The minute I go too long and I haven't talked to somebody, then I dread talking to them because we got to do all the parts of talking I don't want to do. You know what I mean?

[Spencer Newhart]

How's the family.

[Steve]

So if I keep up like a cadence, like if I call Yanni, I don't need to get into like, oh, geez, how you been? Is the house holding up? Yeah, you know, I mean, you know, like wind up in something like that.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Spencer Newhart]

I come to expect no small talk.

[Steve]

So I just like, if I call Yanny, like, hey, blank, blank. And he's like blank, blank. And then we just hang up because we like kept up on it and we don't have to do like whatever did happen to your cousin, you know, I mean, or whatever. You know what I mean? Like it's just better that way. So I just like to. But I tell my wife I love her and I can always tell my how I stand with her because I'll do it because I'm just trying to find out if she's mad at me about something. So if I go, I love you and she says I love you, then we're cool. If I go I love you and she just hangs up. Then like, oh my God. Now what? Now, okay. You know, I mean, so that's how I find out if I got it. Like if I'm. That's how I find out if I'm like cool or not. When I go home, the longer I've been gone, the less likely I am to get the return. You know, things get frosty at home. Joined today by Dr. Bronson Strickland of University of Mississippi, Mississippi State University. Is that a big mistake?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

That's a pretty.

[Steve]

Yeah, well, it's not on here to.

[Spencer Newhart]

Make up for it. Say hottie toddy.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

It's right. The designer.

[Steve]

Where do I see it on here?

[Spencer Newhart]

The, the bigger.

[Steve]

Oh, I'm sorry.

[Spencer Newhart]

Letters.

[Steve]

Dr. Bronson is the St. John family professor of Wildlife Management and the extension wildlife specialist for Mississippi State University. And what do you say when you say that? Hottie Toddies.

[Spencer Newhart]

Yeah, do that.

[Steve]

Howdy toddies.

[Spencer Newhart]

No, I'm kidding. That's. That's another mess up. You've offended more Mississippi State folks.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Oh yeah.

[Steve]

What does it mean? Hot? Hot like Christmas drinks.

[Spencer Newhart]

I don't think hottie toddy means anything. It's a different school.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, that's Ole Miss. We booze it up. Hottie toddy.

[Steve]

Oh, I'm sorry.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Mississippi State University.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

There you go.

[Steve]

Did his, did his BS degree in Forest resources from the University of Georgia. Did a master's degree, Texas A and M Kingsville. Ph.D. from Mississippi State University. Bronson is the co director of the msu. Here's where things get interesting. He's a co director of the MSU Deer Lab, a certified wild wildlife biologist and professional member of the Boone and Crockett Club. We. This, we're here to make. This is the most important podcast ever. Ever done, I would say, because this is going to be the final answer. It's gonna be, we hope. Yeah. Dudes out there that are like, that are. That argue about, like, the moon phase. And if I'm talking to J. Scott, we're gonna go down to Mexico for coos deer, and he's talking about what dates to go, and he's talking about what the moon's doing on those dates. Is all of that true or not true? Every old man, young man, not even old man, every hunter has an opinion about what is the moon doing and how does it affect deer movements.

[Spencer Newhart]

Jay Scott is one of those guys.

[Steve]

I don't know where he stands now.

[Mark Yannis]

Okay.

[Steve]

Everybody changes. I used to just believe it, too, because I like. Well, I used to believe that squirrels. That red squirrels bit the nuts off gray squirrels, because that's what I was told.

[Spencer Newhart]

Yeah.

[Steve]

He.

[Mark Yannis]

He will definitely push us one way or another in January according to what the moon's going to be doing when.

[Steve]

You know, so he. I have a lot of. I have a lot of friends that are lunar guys, moon guys. And like, here's the deal. And when we started playing, I thought I had a conversation with Krin about.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

It, and I'm like.

[Steve]

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

[Mark Yannis]

Fish, tides and fish.

[Steve]

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

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

It's King Solver.

[Steve]

It is.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

They took these mollusks and brought them to Tucson to a university. What universities in Tucson? I can't remember. They took these classes, whatever the hell it is. Asu. I believe it was clams. I'm sure it was clams. They had these clams in an aquarium in Tucson, and they didn't need the ocean to tell them what the tide was doing. Their whole groove became Tied to their whole feeding groove became tied to the moon. And it's not even enough. Like it's an imperceptible. Like the effect on an aquarium is like imperceptible.

[Mark Yannis]

Right.

[Steve]

But those suckers tuned in and stayed on a lunar. They stayed on a lunar cycle without even being where there's a giant tide swing. Right. They just knew. So it stands to reason with, with all these different creatures, migratory birds. Right? It stands to reason. Like, yeah, the, the moon impacts stuff. So for someone to say that the moon impacts how bucks move, it's not crazy. It's not like dumb.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

It's not. So, yeah, there is a lot of evidence for some species, and I think the species you mentioned that does make sense. The gravitational pull affecting the tide or moonlight affecting visibility. All that stuff to me makes perfect sense. And I think there's a lot of examples in the literature for that and it being useful. But what I come back to is, but what made it that way? How did the story begin for white tailed deer? Where has there ever been evidence that is influencing white tailed deer except for paw paw? The stories that are passed down from grandfather to dad, you know, and it just becomes part of the story and it makes it fun and it makes it interesting. And humans are always looking for patterns, and we're really good at looking for patterns even when they don't exist. And so it adds, I think, this element to making it more interesting when the bottom line is, in my opinion, and I think the evidence is very strong, they're not influenced by the moon whatsoever. And then you think about the natural history of deer and you start asking your question, why would they be.

[Steve]

Something to do with visibility?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Well, like in reading, like historic texts, you'll often find people pre flashlight and stuff. People traveling by horse. If you read historic texts, you'll often find people planning trips to have their trip coincide with a full moon for better nighttime travel. So I used to think on the deer thing, I'm like, maybe just historically, when it's a full moon and you're out at night because there's more light, you become aware of deer around you.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah. So you can see deer.

[Steve]

You can see them. And so you think in your head, maybe you wind up thinking, maybe people wind up thinking, when there's a full moon, the deer are out.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

They're always out just because you're seeing them.

[Steve]

And so you're like, I'm out because I'm out traveling at night because it's a full moon, I can see, I See deer because it's a full moon and therefore, I don't know, people land on, on that idea. That's a while. I'm like, I'm grasping at straws. Be like, where did that come from? But, but I like, like probably the other guys in the room, you can like, I'd love to hear Yanni and Spencer, like, how, if you can remember where it come from, where your idea about this came from. And then Dr. Strickland, love to hear when you guys did the survey, if you could talk about how 83, 83. 83% of hunter. Of surveyed hunters, 83% agree it affects moon. The moon affects deer movement. What they don't agree on is why and how.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Right, right.

[Steve]

They don't agree on like, what it does, how it does it, but they believe it does something. But do you remember Yanni?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Sure.

[Mark Yannis]

I would say for me, it didn't really come down generationally. It wasn't because basically for me, growing up, before I came out west and started hunting professional, really, it was maybe five to 10 days of archery in Michigan, two or three days of shotgun, and then I'd get three days of, of rifle in Wisconsin. That was like my entire big game hunting year. So we were going to be hunting no matter what on those days, you.

[Steve]

Know, like, yeah, you never take an opening day off. This year I'm not hunting the opener because the lunar phase, you know, there's just no way.

[Mark Yannis]

Right, yeah, exactly. And my dad just never got into it to that level either, which is where I would have got it. So I just started learning about it once I started reading hunting magazines and doing research on my own.

[Steve]

And you would encounter it. Yeah, as fact.

[Mark Yannis]

Yeah, I would say that where I felt like it actually played a part in my hunting was that when I was an elk hunting guide in Colorado, usually the second rifle season would coincide with a pretty big moon. It would also coincide a lot of times with some warmer weather, extreme amount of hunting pressure. And it was always our hardest week of hunting. We'd still kill some elk, but man, it was always our hardest week. So a lot, a lot of factors at play there. But it always would seem like that week would also have a big moon. And in my mind it was like, of course, they're just up all night feeding, and by the time we get to the meadow, half an hour before daylight, they're long gone. They're, you know, in bed.

[Steve]

That's the version I was raised on. Yeah, I was raised on. But again, I was raised on, on the On a full moon they feed all night so they don't need to feed in, in the daylight hours. But it had zero. It was just observ. It was an observation, but it did not dictate your, dictate your habits.

[Mark Yannis]

Right.

[Steve]

It was like you had a two week gun season, you were going to hunt, you know, whatever. We weren't like going out or not going out based on it, but it was just like you'd be like, oh, it's too bad that there's a full moon on the opener. They'll be out less because they fed all night.

[Spencer Newhart]

Convenient excuse. Or if you're successful, you did it in spite of a full moon. Like damn.

[Steve]

Was that your awareness of what the moon was doing?

[Spencer Newhart]

I think when I was a kid there was a communal anti full moon take from like the deer hunters in my area. And it was just a very rudimentary understanding of like what moon, what moon phase would do to deer movement. And it was like today and I feel like in the last 20 years there will be very like hyper specific moments of the moon that are good or bad for deer movement. It's like if a new moon is rising underfoot in the morning, like that's a thing people will say. When I was a kid that was just like full moon bad. And it was, it was not that they were up feeding all night, it was that they were chasing tail all night. So they were tired, they were like exhausted come first light. And so now you're actually going to get some movement like late morning, early afternoon. And so that is like a stronger time to be in the woods or it's now as good as the morning or the evening. That's like a take.

[Steve]

Can you hit me that again?

[Spencer Newhart]

If, if the, if it's a full.

[Steve]

Moon, since he's been chasing does all.

[Spencer Newhart]

Night, chasing does all night, he can see things so well. It's like, it's not that no one even turned the lights off tonight. You know, they can, they can chase them all through the hardwoods, all out in the corn fields. So now they're tired come sunrise at 7:30am so they're just bedded down somewhere. Already got it. But now they're getting a little restless come like 11am and so they're going to be on their feet a little more from that 11am to 1pm period. Kind of unorthodox.

[Steve]

He's been in bed so long.

[Spencer Newhart]

Yes. Yep. And you know, now it's really thrown off his schedule and that, that like evening movement, it's probably not going to be as good for, like, that last, you know, 30 minutes of shooting light either, because his whole schedule's just off at this point.

[Mark Yannis]

You know, what's coming. Coming to my mind.

[Steve]

I like that.

[Mark Yannis]

We always think about how the full moon would be beneficial to these animals, right? Like, they can chase more tail or they can feed better all night long. Right. But they're prey animals. So, like, really, the wolves can see them better, the coyotes can see them better.

[Steve]

Let's hear from the expert. Okay, let's start out. Tell us about your survey. We just. We just gave you three, like, really two, really well reason. Yeah, we just gave you two of the things that are floating around out there. But tell us about the survey you did.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Okay, so before I get. Please do whatever you want, all this happens. So. So we did a buck movement project, okay. For a completely different reason. And so seven or eight years ago, I thought, oh, well, this is going to be a great opportunity. We have all these daily movement rates. And so I'm going to tinker with this real simple analysis. I'm going to take these daily movement rates averaged for the population, day by day by day, and daytime movements, nighttime movements. And it was very apparent that when you plotted that from September all the way to six weeks, two months, or a month plus post rut, all the variation in movement was apparent. Is the rut. Is the rut difference in daytime movement, nighttime movement. So here we go. I'm going to put this on Facebook. So on top of that movement graph, I plotted the oscillation of full moon, new moon, full moon, new, and had those superimposed on each other. And so you can see that from the phase of the moon from new to full in that period, there's no variation in deer movement whatsoever. And so I put it out there on Facebook. Appears to me, you know, the biology and the science is very clear that. That there's nothing going on with the moon phase.

[Spencer Newhart]

What state?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Mississippi. Yeah.

[Steve]

Come on.

[Spencer Newhart]

This is a thing.

[Steve]

People will.

[Spencer Newhart]

This is a thing.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

People would.

[Spencer Newhart]

Yeah, okay, I will.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Spencer Newhart]

They'd be like, well, you didn't study the deer in Wisconsin.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, well, what the typical thing is.

[Steve]

That's why you can't win. You can't win.

[Spencer Newhart]

Yes.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

They won't even say in my state, it'll be. But my deer do this. Do our moon.

[Steve]

Our moon deer.

[Spencer Newhart]

Yes.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

And so the.

[Steve]

I got. I got it. Because one thing that you got, I never encountered it before. So when you're talking about that, you're graphing movement can you. Is this the yards per hour? Which is great. Okay, can you explain that to people? Like when you're saying like you're measuring movement, like what. What does that mean?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

What's the metric? Yeah, yeah. We typically do yards per day or yards per hour.

[Steve]

Okay.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

That's the measurement and that's from sequential GPS locations. So we're getting a location from them every 15 minutes.

[Steve]

Okay.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

And so it's just the sum of that over whatever period of time and you come up with a rate of movement from that.

[Spencer Newhart]

Got it.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

So put that out there. And a couple people were, yeah, I knew nothing was going on with this. What's. But the overwhelming response was this guy's an idiot. Me. This guy.

[Steve]

Sure.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

And that has nothing to do with the moon phase. That's what grandpa talked about was moon phase. It's moon position. It's the solunar aspect of it, that that's what's driving it. So it's what time of the day is the moon overhead underfoot setting things like that, where is the moon on the horizon and the supposed gravitational pull and how that might be impacting that is what got people interested in that. So that was all the deal. And I didn't have any data at that point to refute it, so I just tucked that away like this.

[Steve]

Just another eggheaded college guy talking about the moon.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, a lot worse than that.

[Steve]

But yeah.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

And, and so that data set sat there and, and we, you know, I was holding that we got to do this, we got to do something more sophisticated. And I was very lucky to have a co worker, a research analyst, a postdoc named Natasha Ellison. She has a PhD in mathematics, so undergraduate master's PhD in mathematics with the application to biology and movement ecology. And she actually tinkered with quantum mechanics for her master's degree. One of her famous statements was the math really wasn't that challenging for physics and quantum mechanics with her master's degree. So she's at the tip of the spear and understanding how to disentangle all this. And I'm sure she chuckled and rolled her eyes when I told her. It's like, Natasha, we got a problem with bucks. We got it.

[Steve]

We got to do.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

We've got an opportunity. And this is going to be something no other academic is going to spend this amount of time and emotion going into this life. We've got a real opportunity to hopefully do something special. And so she analyzed it at a, at a way, a level of detail that had never been done before. And so but when we were digging into that and when we were trying to figure out what we're going to do, how we're going to do it, et cetera, we thought, you know what? We need to do a survey. We need to figure out what. What people think and what are their expectations from if there is a moon effect, how big is it? And so we use the term in science called effect size. And so is something statistically significant or not? That's what people hear all the time. So it's really not as important as effect size. Effect size just means the difference between the treatment and the control. You get a 1% increase, 50% increase, 100% increase. That is what's the most important to people. So we did survey and got to say this. This was not a sociology sanctioned, sophisticated survey in that department. This was the MSU deer lab, us doing social media survey and just saying, hey, all you people out there, what do you think about this? So what came back was yet 83%, 83% of the people that responded thought the moon is affecting deer movement in some way. And then a subset of that, which was always more than half, you say, okay, if it is affecting deer movement by how much? And the. The effect size they reported or the differences they reported for something like bedding. The difference in bedding was, at a minimum, they're on their feet 30 minutes earlier, or they're on their feet up to two hours earlier. The moon is stimulating them to get up out of their bed two hours earlier. The. The distance that they were moving in terms of velocity was always at least 50 yards per hour to greater than 200 yards per hour. So these people that are believing the moon is stimulating movement, they're all in.

[Steve]

Got it.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah. They're different animals under a specified moon condition.

[Mark Yannis]

Bronson, were those respondents, were they all from that general area in Mississippi or were they nationwide?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Nationwide, okay. Yeah. Nationwide, certainly.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Is there a specific concentration among, you know, was. Was 25.

[Spencer Newhart]

Although nationwide, 25% of respondents from, like, Texas or so.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Difficult for us to tell because that was. I can't remember if it was Facebook or Instagram. And you might be able to disentangle that. I. I can't. Sure.

[Steve]

But this episode is sponsored in part by BetterHelp. October 10th is World Mental Health Day. And this year, let's focus some attention on thanking the therapists who have made an impact on people's lives. So thank you, therapists. Better help therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the US BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences and their 10 plus years of experience. An industry leading match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time. If you aren't happy with your match, you can switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored recommendations. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, Having served over 5 million people globally and it works with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. This World Mental Health Day, we're celebrating the therapists who helped millions of people take a step forward. If you're ready to find the right therapist for you, Better help can help you start that journey. Our listeners get 10% off your first [e-mail] Me Eater that's BetterHelp H lp.com Meater anywhere worth going is worth going in good boots Find your perfect pair with Toas To Cova crafts quality western boots for everyone from generational ranchers and lifelong cowboys to first time boot buyers. To Cova's boots are handcrafted with over 200 meticulous steps for broken in comfort right out of the box and their in store experience is unparalleled with expert staff and complimentary beverages and customizations. I'm telling you man, you get yourself a pair of Taco's boots and you open that box up and smell that leather and put them suckers on, you know you are wearing some quality leather goods that feel great out of the box. They make some good stuff. So whether you're in the office, out on a date night or just meeting up for a casual hang, boots are great. You can dress them up or down. Beyond Boots to Covas also offers a wide selection of men's and women's apparel, bags and other fine leather goods. Right now, grab 10 off at tocovas.commeater when you sign up for email and text. That's 10 off at to covas t-e c o v a s.commeater to covas.commeater see site for details To COVAS Point your toes west when the temperatures drop and the rut heats up, your system needs to hold up. This is where First Light's core and thermic kits come in. The core kit adds warmth without bulk, perfect for all day, sits during shifting weather and the thermic kit, it's built for the brutal cold Silent, durable and designed for hunters who don't head back to the truck when the forecast turns. Because late October isn't forgiving. Cheap gear folds, bulky layers get noisy. First light helps you stay focused when everything else is working against you. There's no shortcuts, no compromise. The long sit starts here. Head over to first light.com and get cold free front ready. That's first light. L I t e dot com when they did the survey and you had 83% say that it did something, was it did you find that there was a lot of contra, that they had contradictory opinions, meaning some people thought they moved earlier, people thought they moved later, or did you find like was. Let me put it a different way. Instead of exploring all the exceptions, what if you had to synthesize it, make it that like the general impression was. Was what among surveyed people?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yep. So during the day they bedded less. Meaning they're on their feet more. They are on their feet if you're thinking about an afternoon movement bout they're on their feet earlier. And when they are moving, they are moving at a greater rate of speed. All of that. Which would result in greater observability.

[Steve]

When there's what happening with the moon?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Name it.

[Steve]

Oh, okay. So it's an idea that there's more movement. But there's, but like the general conception is the general perception is that what depending on what the moon is doing, it drives more movement. But there's not a lot of, there's not a lot of agreement about what the moon needs to be doing to drive more movement. Yeah, it's not like a, it's not like a full moon gives more deer movement. People might disagree about the detail, but something happens and there's more movement based on the moon. I'm not doing a very good job articulating this.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

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

[Steve]

Okay.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

It's either I'm going to go with the moon overhead or, or the moon underfoot or the moon is setting or rising or it's a full moon or we're in the perigee or apogee because of the gravitation, it's closer or it's further away. Every single day you can pull out a scenario of what the moon is doing.

[Steve]

Got it. And. But whatever that is, it's driving movement.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

No, it's not.

[Steve]

No, I'm saying no.

[Spencer Newhart]

No.

[Steve]

In their mind.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, in their mind.

[Steve]

And then, and then in their mind. Yeah, in the mind of a. And I'm not trying to dog on them, but like, in the mind of. Because like I said, I used to. I used to think there was something to it. Is it fair to say that people that believe it also believe that there's like the opposite effect? Meaning, let's say you're a full moon. Like, you're a full moon guy. You're a full moon guy. Like, I see more deer movement at a full moon. Do they. Do they usually then believe that there is a opposite effect? So a new moon equals.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yes.

[Steve]

An extreme. On the other example, like much less movement.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah. That's the reason the deer weren't moving today.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Because of the opposite.

[Steve]

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

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

And it has a top and bottom to it.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

A spike and then a suppression.

[Steve]

Yeah, yeah, got it.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

During daylight hours. And that's what we focused on, what hunters are going to see.

[Steve]

Yeah. No.

[Spencer Newhart]

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

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

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

[Spencer Newhart]

I feel like you saying that is like the. The hottest take a deer biologist has ever had on deer. Temperature, movement and. Yeah, yeah. Deer movement based on temperature.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Well, this is the guy right here that said for more than a decade, it had nothing to do. We do not see any signature whatsoever of temperature. But it took more data and it took the right type of person analytically to tease apart very, very subtle differences. A skill set that I didn't have.

[Steve]

Yeah. Can you lay out, you do the survey and then you got to start pulling data. Like, the survey is just kind of a side project to see where you're at. Yeah. So to go get a definitive picture of this, what are you doing? Like, how many deer are you monitoring? How do you monitor the deer? Like, like, what is the sort of scale of the project?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

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

[Steve]

What is that buck? Yeah, you're looking at. I see. Like what is, what is buck a or Buck121? What is Buck121's normal groove?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

That's right.

[Steve]

And then how does Buck121's groove switch at the moon?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

That's right.

[Steve]

And then buck 128, same thing. And one of those bucks might be like a dude that likes to cruise. And one of those bucks might be a dude who likes to stay home.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah. So the guy that cruises, does he cruise more?

[Steve]

Does the stay at home guy cruise more?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, yeah, I gotcha. And so Natasha went through and so for every single buck, she created a 14 day window. So this is a moving window. And so for every 14 days, she looked at the seven days prior, seven days behind and calculated for every single hour of the day. So for this buck at 10am she has a movement profile of what the average response for that buck will be at 10am Calibrated for the prior seven days and the future seven days. And so when we have some moon alignment or phase or whatever, we then look at does that Buck's 10am Movement pattern deviate because of the moon? And so then you do the sum of those deviations for every single buck that is in the population to come up with a mean response. And that's how we are able to work through A Saturday occurred. Big hunting day. A Saturday. The rut occurred. It was a really warm period. We had a really a cold front. By doing that and having it a moving average for every single buck, you account for all the extraneous noise.

[Steve]

Sure.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

That can be going on, huh?

[Steve]

Okay. Off the moon. Because now you just, you brought it up a Saturday. A lot of guys hunting. You mentioned that crepuscular period. So sunrise, sunset impacts, the rut impacts, temperature impacts, pressure's got to make them not move. Right, sure. Okay.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

So that's true.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

I think it's less about. It's not that they're not moving. It is where they choose to move based on hunting pressure. And so in another study that. That we did conducted in Oklahoma, we. And that was set up differently. So that was a treatment area where there was hunting pressure and Treatment Area 2, heavy hunting pressure and a control area. And in those places, the deer were collared, the hunters were collared. They're carrying a GPS unit. And so could. We could monitor where they were going on the landscape and so forth, and were watching the bucks be able to move around them. And it literally took three to four days. And three to four days of there are hunters on the landscape, it's changed. Something is different. Their move, the bucks movement behavior changed not as much as total distance move during the day, but where they went on the landscape. And the. The academic term is called their tortuosity, meaning the complexity of their movement path changed. That we think was because they had to avoid all these different places on the landscape that they had three to four days of info was going to be associated with hunting and danger.

[Steve]

But his yards per hour, His. His yards per hour stay up, stay.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Consistent in that experiment. Yeah, yeah. Their movement behavior really didn't change other than the tortuosity and where they went. So, quote, they did not go nocturnal. They were still on their feet because they got to eat. They're on their feet, they're foraging. They're just going to areas where they determine there's not going to be hunting pressure. No evidence, no memory of human activity.

[Steve]

Yeah. Old lady Thompson's house, you know, doesn't let anybody hunt.

[Mark Yannis]

Oh, yeah. I was just telling my buddy Seth, we came out of the woods after we killed the bull I was telling you about earlier the next night. Dead. Not that it was on fire the night before because we only heard like four or five bugles before that bull died. But the next evening, we hear like a bugle. It's just. Just dead, still quiet. And I'm remarking to my buddy Seth, I'm like, yeah, it was kind of hot, no wind. You know, it's just like, you know, they don't want to rut when they got that big winter coat on. He goes, well, where I was at yesterday, we're glassing a big herd out in a private hay field. And at 4:30, they were ripping.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Mark Yannis]

You know, so it's like, yeah, they.

[Steve]

Found a good place to go.

[Mark Yannis]

Exactly. Yeah, they're gonna do their thing, huh?

[Steve]

So the going nocturnal from pressure, they just go do what they want to do somewhere else.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, yeah. They just change their behavior on where they spend time. Now I will say this. There have been cases at the deer conference we go to, you know, every year there have act, there have been some cases with GPS or VHF collared bucks where in heavily, heavily hunted places a buck bedded all day long. But I literally, Steve, I remember that one time in the 30 years I've been going and learning about deer and thinking. I've heard of one instance where objectively a buck had a mark, a radio collar on it or a GPS collar and it did not move during daylight hours because hunting pressure was all around. And all these other instances, they're up on their feet and moving. Now they may not be. You have to look at what's called the step length, the movement path. So step length is a surrogate for velocity. So if you're getting a ping from that collar every 15 minutes, if he's got a really high rate of speed, you're going to cover more distance in 15 minutes. And so what you will see is that their, their yards per hour can slow down, but they're still on their feet and they're foraging and moving.

[Steve]

The other day we were watching a bull moose doing his like rut wander and he was going through this big alpine area and we watched him, I mean we watched him go a couple.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Miles.

[Steve]

Fast and we were waiting for him to stop. He was so far away. We're like, when he stops we'll try to call and see if he registers the noise at all. We watched him go a couple miles and never, never stopped once. Just moving, just cruising. You're like, where what, you know, what is his concept of where he's going? But just moving and yeah, he's not afraid of anything. Yeah, not afraid of anything.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Spencer Newhart]

Whitetail hunters have this time period between October 10th and October 20th they refer to as the October lull. And if, if you were to, if you lived in a state where the deer season is September 1st to December 31st, they would tell you that is the hardest 10 day stretch to kill a buck because they're nocturnal. What are your movement studies say about that?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

There is no lull that, that does not exist, not in any form.

[Spencer Newhart]

Like they're not, not only are they not nocturnal during that period, but they're also like they're moving more in that period than they were Oct to Oct 10.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

I can't say they're moving more but, but they're moving and this just sitting Mississippi State data here, this is over and over again that there is no law. But what can be going on at that time is you have got a shuffling, so to speak. It's a little bit late in October. So think about bachelor groups during the summer box low. Testosterone, velvet. And then we get into September, October testosterone is surging through their body again. They start getting into hard antler and then they start shifting and moving around and setting up their fall winter rut home ranges. So I think what's going on a lot there is you've had a couple months or a couple weeks of seeing the deer that you're normally seeing. And then you get into that period in October where a shuffle is coming. And so they're moving in different areas or they have left your area where your trail camera is at, but they're still moving.

[Spencer Newhart]

Yeah. I think like if I was speaking to hunters in eastern South Dakota, where I grew up, I bet they are seeing less movement in that period. But it's because now there's combines in the fields. It's because there are acorns on the ground. It's because pheasant season just opened and that's kicked deer out of some beds in crp. Like there is a lull happening that's very specific to them. But it's not because the buck is now nocturnal. It's because he's just moving in a different way, in a different place.

[Steve]

You're in a. You're in a strategic low.

[Spencer Newhart]

Yes.

[Steve]

Where like all summer these five bucks come into that bean field and all of a sudden they're not there anymore.

[Spencer Newhart]

Yeah. And I think it can be true that that's like maybe the hardest 10 day window to kill a mature buck. But it's not because he's unkillable.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah. He's just in a different place. Yeah. You got to go look for him. Now. Here's what's really interesting to me is we looked at. So we had to have deer where we had to have two years of them being collared.

[Steve]

Okay.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

So we had a lot of deer come and go. You know, they could kill.

[Steve]

Why is that? That you had why two years? What's the significance?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Because the question that like Spencer was alluding to is do they have fidelity for a site the following year? So if you see it in a particular place this October, what are the odds you're going to see it next year? So. So we had to limit our data just to bucks that. So it's a subset of that. We had two Years of data, and it was really amazing. Is that on the average, when you got to. After that October kind of breakup and shuffling, and when they went back and started settling in to that area, the. The average distance on a daily scale. And so what we did is, where is this buck at 5pm October 9, 2024? Where is it at October 9, 5pm 2025? About a thousand yards apart.

[Steve]

Is that right?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

About a thousand yards apart.

[Steve]

See, if you're hunting 10 acre parcels, that's a lot.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

And that could absolutely be off property and you may never see it again.

[Steve]

But.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

But he's in the neighborhood. If. If he's alive, he's in the neighborhood. Yeah.

[Steve]

Got it.

[Spencer Newhart]

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

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Good question.

[Spencer Newhart]

Are you a big hunter?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

I am.

[Steve]

Okay.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

I am. Which.

[Spencer Newhart]

Do you think that's normal?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, yeah, I do. I. I guess hardcore is a scale. You know, I would say probably 75%.

[Spencer Newhart]

Okay.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

There are absolutely some that love deer and just ungulates, you know, and study that type of stuff that aren't big hunters. But I would say on the whitetail side, at least the ones I'm thinking about off the top of my head.

[Spencer Newhart]

They all hunt until like that 25. You don't think those folks hunt at all?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Probably not.

[Spencer Newhart]

Okay.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

I think they're enamored with the deer and ecology of it. The system really excites them.

[Spencer Newhart]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

But then picking up our bow or rifle just in their thing and do.

[Spencer Newhart]

You notice anything different with like, those biologists?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, the questions.

[Spencer Newhart]

Okay.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

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

[Spencer Newhart]

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

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, yeah. Right. I would say they're more the theory type stuff, which is really important. Ecological grounding in theory. And then people like me is more about the application. And, you know, my role is extension. So then what's the application? How do I tell people about it? What does it mean to you for hunting your land or managing your land?

[Spencer Newhart]

Yeah.

[Steve]

I want to hit you with a bunch of. Once we cover off on them, we Sold this pretty heavy on the moon thing. But let's put the moon thing to bed because I want to get into other things that drive I want to get into other things that drive changes in movement and other things about. Like you mentioned that different deer have different personalities. I'd love to hear more about that. Let's close out on this moon thing.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

For a little bit. Okay.

[Steve]

Put some numbers to us or put some way of expressing the, the how much you can rule out and how much could still be up for grabs. Meaning Mark's thing is like, hey, listen, if a buck comes out, if I'm watching a buck and I can't catch him out in the daylight and he comes out five minutes early because of the moon phase, that's a big deal to me. Are they catching that in their research? You know, that was his question, right? Like, like when they're looking at these general things, like they, they generally don't change their behavior. But he says, but let's say it's just five minutes. Right. That to me matters. Yeah. Like, like when you look at it, how, like, what degree of certainty are you comfortable putting on that there is or isn't any impact? Because you're always going to have guys that are like, he doesn't know what he's talking about.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steve]

Or he's not detecting what I'm seeing because I'm seeing things at a micro scale and he's looking too macro.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

And I don't ever think we can produce anything that's going to affect that person. So when you get. And I got feedback from people and this was part when we reached out initially doing the survey we had, and I would call them the saddle bow hunter, I mean, they are just locked in, they're trying to hunt close to cover. And so if that buck is walking out 30 seconds earlier and five more steps, I got a shot.

[Steve]

Yep.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

So what we looked at is, of course, like we explained earlier, deviation from normal. We did 85 different analyses. So we made 85 different comparisons of all the different moon stuff you can put together. And the average response for betting time deviations were less than a minute. A couple of them were two or three minutes. But and not to get too deep in the stats here, when you run that many analyses, you're going to, you're going to hear your results are going to follow a bell shaped curve. You're going to get some results that were positive, you're going to get some results that, that were negative. And so when you look at the body of Everything that we did, we had a couple instances where the deer were on their feet a few seconds earlier, maybe a minute earlier. We had some results where they stayed in their bed a few seconds or a minute longer. We had some results where the yard per hour. And so think about that. Put that in your terms, my pace, one of my steps is a yard. And so when you talk about, yeah, we found a. A big result on such and such moon condition, they were moving three yards per hour more. That's three steps and one hour, three steps. Now, if that motivates you and that does get back when I'm given this as a seminar and people are ready to throw beer cans and rotten tomatoes and all that stuff at me. If it makes you feel good, man, if this is your placebo effect.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Roll with it. If it instills more confidence in you that such and such moon condition. And I'm going to be more alert and I'm going to get to the stand 30 minutes earlier because it's a red moon day, you know, then by God, keep, keep doing it if it makes you happy. But the evidence does not support it.

[Spencer Newhart]

In college, I was. Would get the field and Stream magazine and they would always predict the rut, the best days of the rut. And I think it was maybe a sophomore and I had saw that like the best day of the rut this year was on a Saturday. I was available. So I, I did what you're talking about. I sat in my best stand that day that I had saved for a week leading up to it because I, I knew it was the best day of the rut. I got there earlier, I packed lunch to be there all day. I was more alert because I was like, it's going to happen. And then a buck showed up and I killed him. And so I was just more confident and I was a better hunter that day.

[Mark Yannis]

Yeah, I was gonna say this is a great. I was optimistic that.

[Spencer Newhart]

And so that I think that that can work for people.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

That can be a thing and keep doing it. If it keeps working for you, keep doing it. Keep taking the placebo. Placebo effect is really, really powerful. There's some cool science behind that as well.

[Steve]

Sure.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

But yeah, you took the words out of my mouth. But I wonder if you had gone five additional times under those exact same conditions and you didn't have day.

[Spencer Newhart]

Totally.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

If you remember that good one.

[Spencer Newhart]

Then I was like, it was because this was the best day of the run as field and Stream had deemed it.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Spencer Newhart]

You know, looking back now and Since I've, like, formed my own whitetail opinions, I. I recognize. I was just very confident that day and field.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

And that was throughout the range of the whitetail deer.

[Spencer Newhart]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

So this was going to be the day. Yeah. Yep. Yeah.

[Spencer Newhart]

So that should totally.

[Steve]

When the temperatures drop and the rut heats up, your system needs to hold up. This is where first lights, core, and thermic kits come in. The core kit adds warmth without bulk. Perfect for all day. Sits during shifting weather. And the thermic kit, it's built for the brutal, cold, silent, durable. And designed for hunters who don't head back to the truck when the forecast turns. Because late October isn't forgiving. Cheap gear folds, bulky layers get noisy. First light helps you stay focused when everything else is working against you. There's no shortcuts, no compromise. The long sit starts here. Head over to first light.com and get cold front ready. That's first light. L I t e dot com I.

[Spencer Newhart]

Got one more moon question before we move on. Charles Allsheimer. He had developed, like, the running moon theory in the 90s. That caught on with a lot of guys. And the running moon theory is that the second full moon after the autumn equinox is what triggers the whitetail. Ruth. That's like, this is the beginning of it. And in his theory, he had determined there are three types of whitetail ruts you could have at a given year based on when that second moon falls.

[Steve]

Keep back. I want to make sure I'm tracking autumn equinox, autumn, second full moon.

[Spencer Newhart]

Right. Not the first one. The second one when I got that part.

[Steve]

But then you said another thing that threw me off.

[Spencer Newhart]

So that that second full moon could land in late October. It could land in mid November.

[Steve]

Okay.

[Spencer Newhart]

Based on when that would fall, you could have one of three ruts. You could have a synchronized rut, which is if it's between, like, October 31 and November 5, you could have a classic rut, which is like November 6 to 13. Or you could have a trickle rut, which is November 13 on. And it's basically saying that, like, some years, if you have a trickle rut, for example, maybe that bell curve you're talking about is flat at the top and it's just wider. Whereas if you have a synchronized rut, where you get that full moon on November 3, now the bell curve has a really tall peak in it, and it's skinnier. Is that anything you've ever seen, that some years the rut was longer or shorter?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

No, no, no. Never.

[Steve]

Even outside of the moon. Like never mind the moon.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah. Not, not. Not from. From year to year in a place. And so when you talk about a, you know, a protracted rut or a trickle retina, all that stuff is related to sex ratio of the population. So we can manipulate that with management.

[Spencer Newhart]

Sure.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

It has nothing to do with the moon. It is about the availability of does and estrus and enough box to serve them when they are in standing heat. If your sex ratio becomes so biased that the does and estrus, there is not a buck to copulate, 28 days later, she's going to cycle and come into heat again. And there is your trickle or your extended rut or if you have dofons. Dofons will. Typically the proportion of them that do come into estrus are going to come in a little bit later.

[Steve]

So a doe that has a fawn with her and she's trying to get rid of it in the fall, she'll come into estrus later than a doe that did not.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

That didn't.

[Steve]

Was not carrying a fawn.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

I'm sorry, I misspoke. No, not everywhere. This varies depending on where you're at in the U.S. in Mississippi, for example, 10 to 15% of do fawns. Do fawns will reach sufficient body size and condition to come into heat. They're never going to come in at the peak of the ruts. It'll be two, three weeks, a month later by the time they have reached physiological condition where they can come into asterisk. Got it. So that will be part of it.

[Steve]

And that can drive a little late rut action.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

That's your trickle.

[Spencer Newhart]

If you do believe in the rutting moon, this year, 2025, it is November 5th. So you're like straddling a synchronized rut and a classic rut, meaning that like November 5 to 10, period.

[Steve]

Wow. Excited, dude. Because I'm going to be in the.

[Spencer Newhart]

Woods November five to ten.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

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

[Spencer Newhart]

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

[Steve]

But I throw out this thing because some people do. And then he. And then he. He says, that's not right. And then you alert everybody. What data?

[Spencer Newhart]

Because. Because I love that people do believe it. I really appreciate that those folks have taken the time to develop a theory and to spread that theory around. Same reason we had.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

We had Bigfoot experts on radio live the other day. We need a new believer hat. It's not just the black.

[Steve]

The buck of the moon. Yeah, exactly. Oh, that's a great idea.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Ooh.

[Mark Yannis]

Correct.

[Steve]

Full moon buck that says believer.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

What's the purpose of the timing of the rut?

[Spencer Newhart]

When the fawns will hit the ground in spring?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, yeah. Why would mother Nature, why would evolution have that affected by some moon?

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

So the most reliable clock, of course, is photoperiod. They can be calibrated so well. And so it's so important over time of when the dough needs to be bred seven months later when that fawn is going to be dropped. Why would evolution fold in any of the moon stuff to tinker with that at all? I mean, biologically or ecologically, that just doesn't make sense. However, we did test this and so we did it two ways. We did it at an individual scale and we did it at a population scale. Individual scale. With our captive deer herd, we looked at records of estrus and copulation for all of our does. So a population of does over many, many, many years. And so we know when they were coming into heat and we knew when they were bred. So we have those records. We then line that up with this rudding moon. And so every year, you know, that rudding moon is moving back and forth a week or 15 days or whatever. And so we should have seen if it was influencing when they are coming into estrus. We should have seen them moving towards that or moving back. Zero. Okay, we then go to, let's go to wild populations and we looked at wildlife management areas and our state wildlife agency is very good at doing what is called spring health checks. What that does is they harvest does post deer season, typically March, and they will look at the condition of does and then also look at the number of fetuses that they are carrying. So along with all the general hunter harvest data, that is a way for them to look at what's the condition of this population statewide, so forth. So we know where the rut is in all these places, we know where the peak of the rut is. And so we then line that up with the rutting moon. Zero. No effect whatsoever. So individually, population wise logic.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Doesn't make sense to me because the.

[Spencer Newhart]

Mississippi deer, that's why.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Maybe it's just those Mississippi deer.

[Mark Yannis]

Would it be worth just taking five minutes to tab Bronson explain what confirmation bias is and how that shows up in hunters? Sure, I think so, yeah.

[Steve]

My favorite analogy about this is you go, I don't know, surprise analogy. Like you go out and you're fishing smallmouths and you're throwing chartreuse and you get a bunch you're hitting them real good. Then at one minute, you throw on a pumpkin colored jig and you fish it for a couple seconds. You don't get a hit. You put chartreuse back on. Lo and behold, throughout the day, you keep catching fish. They were coming on chartreuse.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Steve]

And like, there's something to that because, you know, if it ain't chartreuse, it ain't no use. But I'm saying, like, you do have a way of, you know, like, if you were gonna go design a study about what color smallmouth bass are hitting on in some given day, it wouldn't be like that, you know?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

So I think that you find. It's part of the fun. You find patterns and things and, you know, that works for me. Therefore, that's what. That's dictated by nature.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, right. Yeah. Well, that's a, that's a deeper question. I mean, that would be a psychologist to get into all the logical fallacies and how the brain works with that. But I guess the way I think about it is we're, we're really good as human beings. We want to find patterns, so we're trying to find the shortcut. We're really good at that. That's helped us, that's helped human beings to be able to link those things together. And that's the pattern. Let's capitalize on it. But the problem that we have is we become enamored with this linkage that we have made between these two things. A leads to B, B leads to C, and we will start ignoring contrary evidence. So it's like we become bought in and emotionally invested in our. And hey, in science it's called the pet hypothesis. That's why we have to get outside peer review. That's why you got to talk to a buddy like, help me, help me think about this. I'm really locked in. Confirmation bias could be bothering me here. But I think that is always going on is we never remember the times we were unsuccessful. We disproportionately remember the times that we were.

[Steve]

Mm.

[Mark Yannis]

And I think if we. If you are a moon believer, you only go hunt in those conditions or you mostly hunt those conditions that you think are, you know, positively affect your deer hunting. You're not hunting the other days. And so you only have a data set from, from those days.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Mark Yannis]

And it could be exactly the same from the days that the moon is doing something completely different.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah. And you may be a good enough hunter and you may be hunting in enough of a target Rich environment where every day you go, you were going to see deer, if that's your metric for success. But you're only going to go on those special days, and then that just keeps reinforcing that. This moon condition or weather condition or whatever was the reason for my success when the way to do it would be. And nobody's going to do this. I'm going to get a random number generator, and I'm going to get a calendar, and I'm going to pick out these particular days, and I'm going to go hunt.

[Spencer Newhart]

That's a fun study.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

And. Or look at camera data. Yeah, that'd be another way. Just record camera data all the time and go back and look at it.

[Steve]

Is this about the moon?

[Spencer Newhart]

It's. It's sort of.

[Steve]

Okay, go ahead.

[Spencer Newhart]

Bloomberg had an article that bigfoot sightings have decreased in the last decade. They peaked around, like, 2004 or so, and they've been going down ever since. If deer hunters were, like, very conscious of. Of what their trail cameras are telling them now that trail cameras are so effective and so cheap and cell cams are. Are very available, I feel like the same thing would happen that if you pulled deer hunters, in 20 years from now, it wouldn't be 83 anymore.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Spencer Newhart]

It would be lower because they. They. If they were trying to, like, really pay attention, they would maybe notice that. Oh, yeah. The moon isn't saying that. That the deer movement is different based on what the moon is doing.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, I agree. I just think it's going to take a long time because it's really difficult to. To let go.

[Spencer Newhart]

Right.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

With that belief, Especially if within your little group, you're. You're the. The older, wiser, you're the influencer.

[Spencer Newhart]

The.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

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

[Steve]

I'm going to hit you with a real. I want to bring something up, but I don't want to dwell on it. What's your take on. How do I even ask this man? I'm trying to figure out. No, no, no.

[Mark Yannis]

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

[Steve]

I don't want to get into it. I'm just. Because you're a big deer guy. Deer hunter, deer researcher. Give me. Give me your basic, like, in one sentence. What's your basic take on cwd It's.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

It's real. It's. It. It's the single biggest challenge, I believe, to deer management and the application of science while simultaneously keeping hunters engaged and believing in science. That wasn't very concise.

[Steve]

No, it's good, though.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

But that's. That's the way of. It's the challenge of our time.

[Steve]

You think it's.

[Spencer Newhart]

You.

[Steve]

You believe it's a legitimate threat at a herd level?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yes, yes. Yes, I do.

[Steve]

Earlier you mentioned different buck personalities. Are there. Is it. Is it possible to give like a handful of buck personality types?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

And have you heard of a shirker buck?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

I have not.

[Steve]

Okay, go on.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Okay.

[Steve]

Different buckter.

[Mark Yannis]

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

[Steve]

You've never heard of a shirker?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

I'm not recalling Val Geist. Oh, Val Geist. I have heard of that word, but, man, I'm drawing a blank on.

[Steve]

We'll come back. We'll come around.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah. Please do.

[Steve]

Give me some buck personality types.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Buck personalities. Well, it's just two. From what we categorize, this is just relative. We call it buck movement behavior.

[Steve]

Yeah, that's what I'm getting at.

[Spencer Newhart]

Yeah.

[Steve]

I don't mean like what they're thinking about. I mean what they're like personality types in a way that would impact a hunter's experience.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, yeah. So that the. We call it a sedentary type. That's gonna be your introvert and. And then your mobile personality type. That's gonna be your extrovert. The what people thought for the longest time, until we had the type of instrumentation to be able to see this, was that after yearling buck dispersal, a buck is going to go set up and have his home range, and that is where it's going to be. Now, the size of that home range can vary by resources. He may be a 500 acre home range guy, he may be a 1500 acre home range guy, but that is where he is essentially going to live and die, is in that. That fixed home range. What, what we found is that about 30% of our bucks have completely disconnected and disjointed home ranges. And so they will spend six, seven, eight months in one location, and then they will get up and move to a completely different location.

[Steve]

Just forget about the old spot.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

That's right. That's right. The most sensational example, just to show you that intrinsically in some deer, this is in them that they are going to do it. We collared a buck in Mississippi fall, winter, and we started noticing really strange long distance behavior about February. So in Mississippi. So we're on the east side of the Mississippi River. He goes all the way to the Mississippi river, miles and miles and miles and then paces up and down the river for a few days and then crosses the river and then sets up camp in Louisiana for essentially all summer. August rolls around, he does the same thing on the Louisiana side. He goes stages by the river a day or two, getting up his nerve, maybe swims the river, comes back to Mississippi to that exact same home range he was the year before. Did that two years in a row. So we had four instances of him taking that long distance movement and crossing the Mississippi River. So that's an extreme example of a mobile personality. And just the way the crow flies distance, it was just shy 20 miles. Wow. So his route was a lot, a lot more than that. Yeah.

[Steve]

And it's like you could see him doing it once. Right. And then he has a good experience or doesn't have a good experience. But the fact that he, he goes back to Mississippi then a while later he wants to. You know what I mean?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Like repeat it where it. Yeah. Just felt. Or we wind up thinking that it's a bigger deal that that swim is a bigger deal than he regards it as.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Right.

[Steve]

I was reading this thing like these, these guys were looking at. There used to be this thing that links. They used to think that lynx didn't like crossing big rivers and they thought these big rivers were boxed in lynx home ranges. So they had these links with collars. They're swimming the tanana, swimming the Yukon, you know. And people always saw just, they had just figured that that's a, a border to a lynx's habitat. That's some.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Right across it shoots across. You don't even think about it. And, and in the human mind you're like, oh, that would be a. He can't get across that. He wouldn't want to cross that a cat, you know.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

And yet we, we had some bucks that in this wasn't the Mississippi River. We're talking about a normal river. So think, think a River that's 50 yards across or something. We had some bucks that would go across that every single day was not an impediment to them whatsoever. We had some bucks that would never cross that river. When you look at, at their home range and all of their points, it is directly adjacent to that river. They would not do it really. So there's just so much variation in, in their personality and what they're willing.

[Steve]

To accept you can't, I guess you probably can't say this is one of those strategies better for longevity. Like do you find that like, like super tight stay at home box, super small home ranges, they have a greater survival rate. Or is it that not? Or is it, or is that not fair to say?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, we didn't have enough of a sample size to tease that apart because again, only a third of them were. Had this mobile personality. But that, that makes sense to me. I think that's reasonable. I also think of it, this may be a bad analogy here, but I think it's just like embedded within some species and some individuals. There's explorers, there's colonizers, there's individuals that are willing to take a risk and go somewhere else. And you know, I think when you just go way, way, way back in time, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and you think about the, the landscape and that deer were always having to colonize different areas based on buffalo going through, based on wildfire.

[Steve]

Sure.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah. And so I just want to think anyway that that tendency is embedded within some individuals that I'm going to go look, I'm going to go explore and I'm going to capitalize on some resources. Unbeknownst to me. Yeah, right here.

[Steve]

Oh yeah. Because if not because as, as environments and landscapes change, if everybody was a super homebody, you'd have awesome pieces of habitat open up and like were never found. Where it doesn't get out.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

With the, with the idea that like I've heard this expressed two ways. Maybe it's not this clean that like during the rut, bucks move more. Okay. I remember someone pointing out like they move more but they don't move to new places more, they just move more in the places that they already move anyways. Is that fair?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

I don't think that's fair.

[Steve]

That's not fair.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Okay.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

So what we were able to do is of course we did all the annual home range stuff, but we also looked at two week home ranges, daily home ranges and a term called net distance or net displacement. And the bottom line is you will see the, the greatest home range if you look at it in two week periods during the peak of the rut and during the late rut or immediately after the peak of the rut. But the amount of area that a buck is spending each day, it did not matter if it was pre rut, no rut way after the rut. 200 acres per day, independent. Okay. On a daily scale independent on the time of year rut phase or not, peak of the rut, post rut, pre rut, et cetera, did not matter. Even though their, their daily ground they were covering could be greater. During the rut, the amount of area that they recovered was 200 acres per day. But when you look at the very next day where they're at, it will be further apart. Meaning a buck is spending covering ground, about 200 acres of ground per day. But during the peak of the rut, in late rut, those daily areas or places are further apart.

[Steve]

Really?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Maybe I should say, does he make.

[Mark Yannis]

Like a single move and then do the 200 yard circuit and then makes a single move into another 200 yard circuit? Is that what you're saying?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah. So maybe think of it like this. When you get into non rut and early pre rut, every single day there is a great deal of overlap in the area a buck is covering. He might have an overlap of 80% of the area he covered the day before he's in this area. But when you get to later in the rut, because now they're seeking, they're chasing, they're looking. Now he's spending 200 acres way over here, 1500 yards away, he's in a completely different area. He's covering the same amount of area in the 24 hour time frame, but the distance away from the dates, he's exploring new spots.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Spencer Newhart]

Really?

[Mark Yannis]

So do you really as a hunter then are we trying to capital capitalize on that move between the two spots?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

If you can, I mean if, if you can find out.

[Mark Yannis]

I mean, that's why a rut funnel would be a good place to sit. Right.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Okay. I think you got to frame it like this. If, if you've got a lot of intel on a buck. I mean, I know from camera data, observation, I know kind of where he's going to be. The best chance for that is pre rut. But if you want to go out, I'm going to go to the woods. And what are my greatest odds of seeing a buck, A good buck then because of that movement behavior? That is absolutely.

[Steve]

So the one that hides out at old lady Thompson's might be off on your spot.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

That's right. That's right. He's going to shift, he's going to move. Yeah.

[Steve]

No kid, really.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

I can show you the data. Yeah.

[Steve]

Okay, let me, I'll hit, you know, and then these guys can hit you with whatever they want. Do you. This might not be something you could tell from your data. Do you think it's true that Bucks play the wind and cruise for does by coming on the downwind side of betting cover.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

I think probably 50% of the time they do.

[Steve]

Okay, so they're not visually looking for.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Him, I think, or they do, but.

[Steve]

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

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah. What we generally think of right now, and this could have a lot to do with those 200 acre daily areas being so far apart and disjointed. What we think is that bucks are cruising to find what are called doe focal areas. So think about the social behavior of your doe population, those matrilineal groups. And so here's a group of does here. Here's a group of does over here. We, we think of it as a circuit. And so a buck is going to go into this area. He, he knows who all's there, you know, via signposts sent so forth. He's going to check it, scent check it. Who's good or bad? Anybody close coming into heat? Maybe she's already into heat, but occupied. He's going to go to another area, part of that circuit, and look for ado and estrus there.

[Steve]

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

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

I think the answer is yes, but I don't think that is just during the rut. So the way we would define that would be called an excursion. And so that would be different from a mobile personality like we talked about earlier, because that is where you set up a new home range and you have a feature affinity for that area. An excursion is, I'm in my existing home range and I'm gonna take a trip.

[Steve]

Yep.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

A two to three day, I'm gonna cut a loop and go here and go here. We see those start to occur during the pre rut and it really escalates during the rut. But with our data, during our study, we saw the greatest amount of excursions in the, in the post rut. So after the rut, but excursions being.

[Steve]

That he, again, like he's going to. It Might be hard to do this because you can't track him his whole life. He's going to places he's never been.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

I can't answer that.

[Steve]

Because you don't know where he's. Because you can't. You don't know his whole life history.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

I don't have his whole life history.

[Steve]

Got it.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah. Yeah. But we definitely saw the bucks going to novel areas within the limited time frame we had them studied. In other words, we didn't see the exact same excursion loop every time they would go different areas.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

And so, yeah, we think they are looking prospecting, whether it be doves, food resources, whatever.

[Steve]

Because that's when you get like really vulnerable, man. Like you get really vulnerable to something bad happen to you when you're in places you've never been. Like you're on. Like you're on some geo. I mean, you have no idea what's going on. And like that to me feels like a. That to me feels like a buck would get like, dude, I'm not doing that.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Do you know what I mean? Like I'm not like I've never been there. I have no idea what's happening. It just seems like they'd feel so vulnerable.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

And from a deer management perspective, I mean if you do the kind of stuff we work on with, you know, you're. You're managing for antlers and older bucks and so forth. That is where even with a large area. So you may have a 5, 10,000 acre tract and you were primarily controlling the harvest within that population, except for the excursion.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

And so that is where you will see some of those target bucks are going to go off properly and man, they get hammered. Yeah.

[Steve]

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

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

And that is so frustrating because you've done everything all year long for years and years and years. And you have that weekend where he decides to take a trip do.

[Steve]

What's funny is I know these guys and they have a big no fence operation in Texas. But they. They wound up doing one fence. They fenced one property line because they have some browne. It's down neighbors. And so they just. They tried to like control it a little bit by blocking that spot.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Right.

[Steve]

You know, the other three sides are. Do whatever they want.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, I got a couple places like that too. It's that pinch point, that corridor of where they're going to go onto that other property and we're going to block that.

[Steve]

Yeah. These dudes stands. What's so funny Is these dudes stands are all. We're all along that property line, right?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Steve]

Just waiting, you know?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

All right, I'm done. When the temperatures drop and the rut heats up, your system needs to hold up. This is where first light's core and thermic kits come in. The core kit adds warmth without bulk. Perfect for all day. Sits during shifting weather. And the thermic kit, it's built for the brutal, cold, silent, durable. And designed for hunters who don't head back to the truck when the forecast turns. Because late October isn't forgiving. Cheap gear folds, bulky layers get noisy. First light helps you stay focused when everything else is working against you. There's no shortcuts, no compromise. The long sit starts here. Head over to firstlight.com and get cold front ready. That's first light. L I t e.com the October Boogeyman.

[Spencer Newhart]

Is the October lull for hunters. The November version of that is lockdown, where there's an idea that there is a phase of the rut for like two to four days where a buck gets a hot dough around, like November 16th, and they bed down and they breed and they just become less visible and they just become very dedicated to that spot and like, rutting with each other.

[Steve]

I don't care what he says. This is true.

[Spencer Newhart]

Is that a thing? Do the. Do the deer movement studies show.

[Steve]

Yeah, they just stand there.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Like the dose are feeding. He just stands there. He doesn't lay down. He doesn't eat. He just stands there.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, yeah. That's legit.

[Steve]

Oh, it is. Oh, okay. Yeah. I thought you could tell us. Because everything else, you're like, no, that's not true.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

That's legit. So you get like, in the peak of the rut, this is. This is going to occur all the time. When there is a doe in estrus, okay. It becomes a population, a level effect. Or it becomes noticeable when a greater proportion of the does are in standing heat and bucks are tending them. So you're going to have less bucks available roaming the landscape because they're locked in if they're doing any dough.

[Spencer Newhart]

If there are too many does, that happens, you're saying.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

No, I'm saying that if you had an appropriate number of does, okay, that's gonna.

[Steve]

Like if in some magical world, every dough, like you have something where every dough in a population all came into heat on November 7th, it would be reasonable to assume that on November 7th, no Bucks are running around doing crazy stuff.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Right.

[Steve]

Because they're standing there with all these doughs that are.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Exactly. And. And then 28 days later, you're going to have the leftover. The sex ratio. There's always more does than bucks. And so some of them may not get bred. And so then that would follow again 28 days later.

[Spencer Newhart]

How impactful though, do you think lockdown is? Is it a thing where like hunters are going to have a worse experience in the woods?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

I would still go because it's. It's the rut. I would look at it as the frequency of just seeing more bucks during that time frame is going to be less because some of them are locked in with does. But you also have the odd man out or the odd buck out, and he's going to be going around looking for another doe in estrous. So there's still going to be general buck movement. You're just going to have a greater number of them that is occupying a doe.

[Spencer Newhart]

And there's no crater though, in the bell curve when that happens.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Don't see it.

[Spencer Newhart]

Okay.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, man.

[Steve]

I wonder if you're really wishing you.

[Mark Yannis]

Could tell me what days not to hunt in November.

[Steve]

What I'm thinking is this man picture. You got like some kind of weird deal where you can. It's illegal. Like you put out some kind of birth control thing or something where none of the does ever come in. Oh, bucks just crazy everywhere. It's a short term play. Yeah. It's not a good.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

That'd be some. Some evil science there.

[Steve]

It's a. It's a bad long term play. You're going to see a plummeting deer population.

[Mark Yannis]

We're in Wisconsin. You know, CWD is big there, big deer herd. A lot of our neighbors have started shooting more does since they've started doing that. They claim to have a better rut because less does mean more bucks moving around, more bucks reacting to calls. Does that make sense?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

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

[Steve]

It's my turn. We're just going circle.

[Mark Yannis]

You said you were done.

[Steve]

I was for my turn on this turn. This turn's gonna be a one question turn.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Okay.

[Steve]

We have a buddy who has a really great property in Texas.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Whereabouts?

[Steve]

Way south Texas.

[Mark Yannis]

Brownsville.

[Steve]

Brownsville Way South Texas. Like when you're cruising around, you see. I mean, you see way more bucks and does. Anyhow, we go down there a Couple times we've gone down to rattle box, which is the funnest thing in the world because it's very effective there. I developed this little theory that the most effective time to rattle them is during the middle of the day. In my thinking, the dose are all laying down and they're bored and they're just more inclined to wonder what's up. When the dose are up on their feet, they're like, yeah, yeah, I hear it. But I'm like following my doe around. Then midday, he gets bored, he hears the rattle, he's got nothing else going on and so he runs over.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

What do you think about that?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

There's merit to that, Steve.

[Steve]

Okay.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

But it's wrong.

[Mark Yannis]

Oh.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

We did a study on that. Now I was a tech, I was a participant as a buddy of mine. So again, my master's degree was in South Texas, so spent a lot, a lot of time down there. And so we did a rattling experiment. To my knowledge, it is the only peer reviewed experiment ever done on rattling antlers and, and, and doe response. And what we found very generally was we, we varied the, how loud the rattling was.

[Steve]

Okay.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

The duration of rattling, the time of day of rattling and then the time of year relative to the rut for the rattling. And so the clear winner for time of day was crepuscular. No, here's why. Because the real winner on the rattling technique and, and remember back then, so this would have been, this had been mid-90s. And so this is, you're reading the magazine and how do you set up your rattling sequence? And so you got to get there and you got to get crouch and you got to scrape the, the brush and you got a kick and you got to rattle and you got to, you remember that, all that?

[Steve]

Yeah. No, but anyways, go on.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Okay. Well it was a thing back in the day. And what we found, you're, you're painting.

[Steve]

The whole picture like the deer. You're kind of like, you're sort of creating the entire encounter.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

You're trying to mimic reality.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

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

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

But the bottom, it was just very, very clear how loud you are. Number one, the louder you make it, you increase the probability that more bucks will hear it. More bucks will hear it. When more bucks are circulating during the crepuscular period, more bucks are going to be up and about circulating during the pre rut. So make it as loud as you can. And the sequence that we were doing, we had a We had four different sequences, but the one that always worked the best was called long and loud. I still remember it. It's still etched in here. Long and loud was. You gotta go for three minutes, three minutes. That doesn't sound like a lot. With those things as hard as you can possibly go, your arms will be tired, they're spaghetti. I mean, you're just done by that. But that was the clear winner. And so just the obvious thing is they could hear it better. And so I'm, and I even had chances where. So we had somebody on the ground. This was at. Do you all know where the welder wildlife refuge is at? Did you go past it? Going south. Unhunted population, tens of thousands of acres. They have all these observation towers. So we got an observer as up top, 15, 20 foot above the brush and somebody down below. And you could literally even see, I saw this to where the guy below starts rattling. He's doing a long and loud or something like that. And the buck is 400 yards away and he hears it and he starts coming, coming, coming. He's not running, but he's coming. He's obviously moving that way. Stopped rattling. He was back to browsing around. And then it was over a 30 minute period. And so then we had an elapsed time. And you do another rattle and then another rattle and you rattle him, bring him in, keep coming, stopped rattling. He stopped, rattled him again. Finally closed the distance and brought him in though volume and increasing the probability that a buck is within distance of hearing you. Yep, that was the secret sauce.

[Steve]

Okay.

[Spencer Newhart]

I like your strategy though, Steve, because if I'm thinking about rattling, if it's dawn or dusk in my head, deer movement is already like a 9 out of 10. I don't need to help the deer movement anymore. Right now at midday though, maybe it's like a four out of 10 and so I could rattle and bring it up to a 7 out of 10. And so I'm, I'm just like, I'm raising the floor of my hunt.

[Steve]

Yeah, at that point, yeah, we, we were not viewing it as making. We were not viewing it as, hey, there's nothing else to do. We were viewing it as going out in the morning, there's like deer around and you do a few rattle sessions, nothing happened. Get to be 11am and all of a sudden, buck, buck, buck. So I had this whole boredom, there you go hypothesis. But it could be other factors in there. Ask a question.

[Spencer Newhart]

What do your movement studies say about age? I assume it's just real simple. That like a one and a half year old moves more and he's more reckless than a five and a half year old. Is that what you've seen?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, it's very subtle. You know, there's a lot of people will say and maybe we did not have enough really, really old bucks. We had several five and six year olds, but we saw a general decline, a general contraction in home range. But it was not overwhelming.

[Spencer Newhart]

Okay.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

But yes it did. You know, after the yearling dispersal event, they're typically going to have a larger one. And then it's like they keep figuring out, you know, year after year it gets a little bit smaller.

[Spencer Newhart]

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

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

I think a buck is gonna participate whenever he can and whenever he detects there is a doe in estrus, he's gonna participate. Okay, if that answers your question.

[Spencer Newhart]

Yeah, like I said, a whitetail hunter would say that is the time period of the rot for the old bucks. That's like when they are vulnerable.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Well, yeah, they would be exposed more during that time.

[Spencer Newhart]

But not more than a two and a half year old is.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

I wouldn't think so.

[Spencer Newhart]

Okay.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

I'm gonna go out of order and ask my next question then Yanni and then Spencer.

[Mark Yannis]

We only have a couple left time wise.

[Steve]

Go ahead and ask your question. I was afraid I'm gonna forget mine. We ask yours.

[Mark Yannis]

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

[Steve]

How far away you think, how far away you think a buck can smell a doe that's an estrus.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

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

[Steve]

So it's gonna be a wild ass.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Like, like perfect conditions, hundreds of yards.

[Mark Yannis]

Okay, but are you asking about the dough herself or just the scent that maybe she left behind just detect the.

[Steve]

Presence of a dough that's in heat.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

In perfect conditions, it wouldn't be. It wouldn't be crazy to say hundreds of yards?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

I don't think so. Not. Not at all.

[Steve]

Yeah, like there's their sense of smells. That good?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, Yeah, I think so. I don't know if it's 500 yards. To me, I think about diffusion. And so, you know, the further and further you're getting away, the more those molecules are, you know, being distributed within the air and can they pick up enough of a concentration to cause a response? But certainly hundreds of yards.

[Steve]

Go ahead.

[Mark Yannis]

Yanni Bronson, Why'd you bring that antler all the way from missing what's good on there?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Mark Yannis]

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

[Steve]

Well, he's got a big old. He's got a big old buck antler. It's a Michigan 10 with the brow tie and sawed off.

[Mark Yannis]

Might be 150.

[Spencer Newhart]

50.

[Steve]

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

[Spencer Newhart]

Squirrels have been chewing on the tines.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

That was actually damaged during velvet.

[Spencer Newhart]

Oh.

[Steve]

Oh. I just thought.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

This is a. This is an example from. Or this is a specimen from an experiment we did about 10 years ago now. And the question was. Let me back up. We always. At Mississippi State with the deer lab, we try to do. Every single thing we do has a purpose for the end user. It's going to affect hunting, it's going to affect management, help you manage your property. Except this. It has nothing to do at all with man. This is straight up deer biology. Me and Steve Demaris, the other co director of the deer lab, we had this debate going on for years and years about female choice. Oh, do female whitetail deer. Can they. Do they have any type of choice whatsoever now? Yeah, behaviorally, we don't know if she does because when she comes into standing heat, she's. She's going to breed. You know, if there is a. If she's in standing heat and a buck is behind her, she's going to breed.

[Steve]

Doesn't matter if it's a spiky or a.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

No big old rope dragger. So I think she has to assume, I guess that's the right word, assume that that's going to sort itself out. That hopefully through a dominance hierarchy, she's getting the better buck. But during the peak of the rut, that may not always be the case because the quote, dominant older buck, he may be occupied on a, you know, way over here with another doe, you know, and we see multiple paternities. And so in 25% of does the twin fawns, 25% of those will have two different fathers.

[Steve]

Got it.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

So. So it's going on. Multiple bucks are breeding. So I had just always thought that she has to care. She has to care. Now, whether she can do anything about it or not is a different question, but she has to care that if what is behind me and about to breed me, is it a year old spike or would it be a 3, 4 or 5 year old with larger antlers and a big body who has clearly demonstrated I'm a survivor. Yeah, I can make it. You know, she's got all the investment. She's going to have the gestation for seven months. It's all her resources. She ought to care who's behind her. It's like, well, how do we do this? So we ended up, we had another project going on and we had a way we could set this up. So we took all of our bucks and we standardized them. We came up with pairs. We paired them by age, we paired them by body size. So a doe looking at a buck couldn't say, well, that buck is clearly four year, four years old, that one is clearly a yearling, and choose one of them. So we standardized by body size and age. And then we got with our ag engineering people and we developed a contraption to where we could manipulate antlers, could.

[Steve]

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

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

That's exactly right. So we challenged these does with.

[Mark Yannis]

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

[Steve]

Yeah, Take a little spike and put that antler on his ass while he's alive.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah. Well, we sedate him. Yeah, we sedate him. Yeah.

[Steve]

With this looking.

[Mark Yannis]

So they all had the base part somehow attached to their pedicle.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yep. So, yeah. So all the, all the bucks that are, they're in the study, they're going to be sedated and then we're going to cut their antlers off. We're going to affix that part. The coupling affixed to the antler and then the pedicle, they're going to get a receiver coupling there. And so this is incredible. And so then we will challenge a doe. So then we had someone from the vet school reproductive physiologist. They can induce estrus, you know, with a progesterone treatment or something. So now we know where that Doe is coming into heat and so now she's behaviorally, she's demonstrating she's an estrus. So we send her down an alleyway and she's got a pen. And then to her left and to her right are two equally aged or equally body sized bucks. One of them is carrying a 161, I'm carrying a 90. And then we monitored her behavior to see which one she would prefer. Now we could not allow them to breed just the way it was set up, the logistics. But then we looked at all the behavioral signs of if we pull the fence up, which, which one would she go to? And it was over 80% of the time she always went for the antlers. Wow. Even a younger superficial dude.

[Spencer Newhart]

Good for her.

[Steve]

Superficial man.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Hey man.

[Steve]

But there's that 20 interesting personality. It's like totally superficial.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

But it wasn't 100. It was, you know, 20 didn't fall for the, for the big antlers.

[Steve]

So there's some selection going on. Well but, but like you're saying whether or not it's. I get what you're saying, like in that environment there's selection going on. But however that's occurring in the real world scenario is hard to determine.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Exactly. Right. Yeah. Can that even happen? You know the only, the only thing we can say in the wild of does she have any choice at all is when she sensing she's coming into estrus, might she go to an area where she know this nose the sky occupies and just make herself available? Yeah, but yeah, she can't be very proactive in this thing. But when you standardize all that and controlled for it, that's what she preferred. So it does follow the ecological theory about antlers are an honest signal of quality.

[Steve]

Yeah, yeah, I think I wondered. I'm especially thinking about this as you're explaining. This is when you're watching a buck work a group of does and you see like he's particularly interested, like he sort of singled out a dough. He's very interested in this dough he's singled out. But you see her. Every time he approaches, she runs. Every time he approaches, she runs. And you wonder like, well, if it was a different buck, would she run every time? Like is she running because she's just not ready or is she running because she doesn't like she doesn't want that buck buyer? Because from whatever in his perspective there's something very particular about that dough. He's like hounding that dough so he knows something's going on. But she's not Receptive.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

I just don't think she's ready. She's just not.

[Steve]

He can tell she's close.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, he.

[Steve]

He knows she's close, but she's not that ready yet.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Right.

[Steve]

Yep. Got it. So she might not be making like a. Not you. Not you. I'm waiting for Dave or whatever.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

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

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Spencer Newhart]

There's a theory among whitetail hunters that if you have an old dominant buck, like a six and a half year old, when he gets killed, you've now created a vacuum where there's an opportunity for another big mature buck to come in and take that home range and own that food source, own that bedding area, own those does. Do you ever see that with your movement studies, that a big buck disappears and so a new buck, big buck moves in?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

No, I'm really interested in that. I do think that has a lot of logic and appeal, and I want that to happen because I think that's something as managers, we can manipulate. Doing that, removing particular bucks and creating space for others to move in. We did not have enough data. Well, first of all, we didn't want to shoot all of our mature bucks, but to my knowledge, there's been no good experiment to demonstrate that. But. But I would love to try it if we could. I. I do think it's logical. Yeah.

[Steve]

Yeah. Some little bucks, like, now's my time to shine.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Spencer Newhart]

I could have this.

[Steve]

Things get exciting. Yeah.

[Spencer Newhart]

This is the best cornfield in the neighborhood. Does love bed in here.

[Steve]

Have you ever heard that bucks avoid certain kinds of COVID when they're in velvet, and then they're more comfortable going into that cover once their antlers are hard? No, you never heard that with elk and stuff like that too.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Well, I don't think a lot about elk, but I'm biased with my time in South Texas. And so, man, thorny up in that helicopter. I see a lot of bucks and velvet going through. Yeah. The pear and the mesquite. And that's really test.

[Steve]

That's a good testing ground.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

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

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

And the awareness that they have, you know, when you're pushing them with the helicopter and there's a big mesquite branch coming up and they know how to tilt their head just enough to get their antlers under it, and it's. It's a thing of beauty to watch.

[Steve]

Kaiski moose question.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

I mean, you can ask.

[Steve]

Maybe there's a deer parallel. You're calling. You're calling to a moose. You're making cow calls to a moose. And then he comes from a mile away. And he gets up, he comes just beeline stops. His head's pointing toward you. You call, he comes. You call, he comes. He gets 500 yards away and lays down. Lays down for an hour, Gets up, walks the other direction. The hell's in his head?

[Mark Yannis]

You were supposed to come to him.

[Steve]

In Excel.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Was there was the wind in his face. There's no wind.

[Steve]

It wasn't a human thing. It wasn't a human thing. Wind's totally wrong. He didn't see nothing.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, my. My only guess was there was no. There was no visual cue to stimulate him coming any further.

[Steve]

That would make sense because he's like, I'm looking at the whole hill, dude.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

There's nothing there.

[Steve]

I don't see a cow standing there. Yeah, yeah. You know that. Yeah. He's like, at some point, he's like, at some point, I need to see the cow.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

So you need a cow decoy.

[Steve]

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

[Mark Yannis]

Sounds like you gotta be able to shoot at 500 yards next time.

[Steve]

We did one time. Got him. But it's thick and, yeah, it's hard.

[Mark Yannis]

Yeah.

[Steve]

When the temperatures drop and the rut heats up, your system needs to hold up. This is where First Light starts. Its core and thermic kits come in. The core kit adds warmth without bulk. Perfect for all day, sits during shifting weather. And the thermic kit, it's built for the brutal, cold. Silent, durable, and designed for hunters who don't head back to the truck when the forecast turns. Because late October isn't forgiving. Cheap gear folds, bulky layers get noisy. First light helps you stay focused when everything else is working against you. There's no shortcuts, no compromise. The long sit starts here. Head over to firstlight.com and get cold front ready. That's First Light. L I t e.com if we have.

[Mark Yannis]

Time, I could lay out the shirker buck. But I know we're running short buck.

[Steve]

Yanni's big believer in this.

[Mark Yannis]

That's not true. But I did read Val Geist couple of his books, and he observed watching mule deer.

[Steve]

He felt. He observed. Yep.

[Mark Yannis]

That there were bucks that he would watch that would shirk the responsibility of breeding for many seasons in a row. And then all of a sudden, year five, year six, come in there and because they had reserved all those resources for that many years and built up an extra whatever amount of body weight, bigger antlers or whatever, then they could come in and rule the roost.

[Steve]

Just lay waste.

[Mark Yannis]

That's one way to put it.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Mark Yannis]

Did you ever see that in your captive herd where bucks would shirk the rut?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Not at that scale, but. So Valerius guys is talking about a multi year, right. What we would see, which we attributed to, but we don't know, this buck personality, this, in this case, hormonally higher testosterone levels or something. But there were definitely some bucks that at the beginning of the rut, they were absolute mad men. I mean, they wanted to fight. Everybody hated them. The does hated them. Other bucks hated them. They just want to fight, fight, fight. And their breeding success was always greater the first path and maybe even longer into the breeding season. So, you know, we were able to enumerate how many fawns, you know, that they sire.

[Steve]

He's a fighter.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

He's a fighter and he does good.

[Steve]

In the beginning of the breeding season. Yeah, okay.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then his body condition, all of that fighting begins to take its toll on him. Now keep in mind too, these are captive deer, they got ad lib food. So I mean, he's avoiding eating. He is so consumed and obsessed with fighting and breeding. But when you get a month, six weeks, whatever into it, his body condition begins to suffer. And now he starts getting his butt kicked by the more passive deer who now weigh, even though they're the same age, even though they weigh 20 pounds more. Those guys, maybe the sugars, then they have higher breeding success later in the year. So we kind of saw that, but compressed within year and.

[Mark Yannis]

Interesting.

[Steve]

That's super interesting. But it's different than the idea that.

[Mark Yannis]

Yeah.

[Steve]

We told this to one deer biologist I'm sure you're familiar with, Jim Heffelfinger.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Steve]

So we told this, the one deer biologist, and he felt that it was just like, he felt it was a very questionable approach from an evolutionary standpoint to be that like you're alive now, you're sexually mature now, to put off breeding opportunity after breeding opportunity after breeding opportunity in order to really kick ass some year down the road. Just didn't make sense.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Risky.

[Steve]

Yeah. Like, you know, it just didn't make sense as a way to really to, to. To put more progeny on the landscape that you're banking on. Well, I'm gonna have a hell of a year when I'm five.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

And I'm taking Off two, three and four.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah. And I agree with that.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

What are the, the guest reasons for this? I mean it's, it's not, I don't believe it's like a buck makes a conscious choice to do this. So like what would be the biological underpinnings if this were a thing? Yeah, my. Well, I don't remember what Valerius Geist, all of his reasoning, but I'm trying to think about of a mechanism of how that could work. Is it like onset of hormones and things are happening. Mine would be differing testosterone levels and whereas the example I was giving with our data, I think it's within season, different timing in the surging of testosterone. But there's some great research out of Auburn University showing that there's a lot of variation by age class. And so it could be that those younger bucks and then there's going to be variation within an age class where some have born, some have less. And so some of them, they just don't have a lot of testosterone when they're two or three years of age. They're looking at this particular older dominant, bigger antlered, bigger bodied buck and maybe it's a survival strategy. Man, I'm not going to risk it against that guy. But then later in life, greater surge in testosterone and they risk it and go for it.

[Steve]

What do you wind up seeing? Like if you think of an old buck that gets a reputation with hunters as being like he's so stealthy, he's shy, he's sly. Right. That's got to be real. Right. Like, like, but what is that? What is, what do you think he's doing? What is he not doing? You know, when he gets to be that, they just seem like they vanish.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Right.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

And, and to me that, that's a really good question of ways you have to think about it. So is it that that buck has always been that way and the ones that were dumber were killed. So selection.

[Steve]

That's great question. Yeah.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

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

[Steve]

I like, I love, I love what you're saying. I would have, when I approached the question I was approaching that he learned it.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Not that he's just always been paranoid.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

It's probably a little bit of both.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

As well would be my guess. Yeah. So what, what are they doing different? I think it's probably just being more perceptive and maybe being more slow and how they process what's going on. They're not as much of a risk, risk taker and so they're playing for the long game of like I might not breed as many does within a year, but lifetime reproductive success, I may win. Yeah, things like that.

[Steve]

Yeah. There, there seems like there's some learned stuff like looking up in trees, you know, I mean like learning like in certain areas. He's just like looking up, looking up, looking up like, because he's seen before. Yeah, dude, trees. Yeah. And like come. They're coming out of the box. Like a year and a half old buck probably hasn't figured out yet to like. Yeah, look up.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

You know.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah. And so does that yearling buck have to live through a bad experience and then he's able to. He's going to be looking from this point forward.

[Steve]

Yeah. Or are there other yearling bucks that are just so paranoid they're looking all around and.

[Mark Yannis]

Or do they learn it from their five year old mother?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

I think they do.

[Steve]

Oh, that's a good point too. Yeah. She's like the big cherry tree at the point, the point that juts out between the fields. Don't go by that cherry tree. You know, the other thing is speaking of a specific cherry tree I grew up by, where the deer decided to sort of do like the rinellas are always in that tree.

[Mark Yannis]

There's less of those bucks on the landscape too. So we just, we have this perception that we see them less. So they're sneakier. But it's just like a numbers game where you're just going to see less of those bucks even if they're moving just as much as the 2 year olds. Because there's, I don't know where the percentage is in most populations, but yeah, much less.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah. All depend on hunting rate and mortality. But, but yeah, that's going to be. Yeah. I mean even in a well managed population, less than 25% of the bucks are going to be something like that. And that's just based on age. And then when you start adding in antler size, it's going to be less than 10% are going to resemble something like that. So they're very rare.

[Spencer Newhart]

In, in 2015, I tried very hard to kill a cactus buck. And if you're listening, you don't know what that is. It's a cactus buck. It's a buck who does not shed his velvet. And sometimes he, he will grow a unique rack as a result of that. It could be a testosterone problem that his testicles never dropped. It could be that he was crossing a fence and, and ripped his sack open one time. And that cactus buck Was very hard to kill because it seemed as though he didn't participate in the rut. He just, like, didn't loosen up and. And become reckless like the other bucks would. Have you ever looked at the movement of a cactus buck?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Have not. Have not. We. We've never, I guess, been lucky enough to have a collar on one. But a property that I hunt has one right now. And I just got pictures from my hunting buddy about a week ago that. That the cactus buck is back.

[Spencer Newhart]

Was he there last year?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

He was there last year.

[Spencer Newhart]

What did you notice him do last year?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

He. He hung out with the does.

[Steve]

Yeah, yeah.

[Spencer Newhart]

They just, like, don't participate in the road.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Nope, not at all.

[Steve]

The deer writer, Pat Durkin.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Oh, yeah.

[Steve]

He had an observation where he. When he was the editor of Deer and Deer Hunting magazine, he profiled a great many big buck killers. Okay. And he had come to this kind of realization after a while. There's a lot of amazing big buck killers. They couldn't tell you what kind of tree their tree stands hanging in. Meaning it's just like. It's not like a wood. There's a point at which it's not like a woodsmanship thing. It's like they're just good at killing bucks. They're not generalist woodsmen. You know, do you ever feel like your research, like in real on the ground application, as a deer hunter, does your research guide your activities or is like deer hunting is just deer hunting and it doesn't matter what you know to be true from all your projects?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah. Yes, it does.

[Steve]

It guides your behavior.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah. And a lot of that is about hunting pressure and thinking about. And, you know, this doesn't work everywhere in the U.S. in the southeast. You know, a lot of stand hunting, a lot of permanent stand hunting and so forth, and just recognizing that deer know when you're on the property and it's not gunshots, it's you being there, you being on an atv. It's the smells, the sounds, all that they know when you're there. And one thing that has really changed and we try to really advise now is when you hunt, if you're going to hunt a particular stand, particular area, only go on the days where you're going to minimize the opportunity of bumping deer. Because we know the research I talked about earlier, after a couple days and deer know you're on the property, they're going to start behaving differently. So doing whatever you can to minimize your footprint, so to speak, on the property. That's. That's probably one of the biggest things, and then some really boring stuff that, that people roll their eyes about. But in terms of antler quality, herd condition, things like that, density, deer density, doe harvest, stuff like that, I know how critically important that is. And people are trying to figure out what the heck's going on with our deer. The quality of the deer is down. We're doing all this, that and the other. You just got too many deer. You just have too many mouths relative to the amount of range that you have in the food supply. So pretty mundane, but stuff like that.

[Steve]

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

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, what, what I do all the time. So, yeah, what we talked about, approach, try to minimize your disturbance to the deer. I think about during the rut, I think about where are those doe focal groups on the landscape, what are going to be the movement or cover corridors that might link those areas up. And so it won't be hunting on food, that's going to be hunting on a corridor. And then finally, when you get to the post rut, I'm focusing on food. So the evidence is really, really clear with that. When you get a month past the peak of the rut, they got to recover that 20% of their body weight. They're hungry. And food plots in my neck of the woods, that's a great place to hunt.

[Steve]

Think about that. Spencer Newhart.

[Spencer Newhart]

Can I make two study requests?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Absolutely.

[Spencer Newhart]

Okay. One of them, I. I hunt a lot of places in the west where whitetail habitat and mule deer habitat overlap, but I never see them interact with each other. I'm always, like, pretty shocked that I could. I could, in the same hunt, see a couple of whitetails and a couple of mule deers, but they, like, don't have any social interaction, anything to do with them. I would be very interested in. Like, if you took that same study and you put a doe down a corral and she got to choose between a muley buck and a whitetail buck, I imagine would be very high, highly skewed for the whitetail buck, like 90 plus percent just based on what I've seen. But I don't know that I'm interested in anything like what a whitetail buck and a mule deer buck would do if they encountered each other.

[Steve]

That's a great thing. Or if you just took like, if you just took like odor arrays, like, odor from a mule deer doe and estrus and odor from a whitetail doe and estrus and like, put it in front of both boxes. He like, oh, that's the whitetail, you know. Yeah, that's a great.

[Spencer Newhart]

In my observations, they interact as though like an elk and a whitetail would interact. They just show no interest in each other. But I. I can't imagine it's that simple.

[Steve]

You know how you get funding for this? Remember how a few years ago you couldn't get funding for anything if it didn't have to do with climate?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Okay, so pitch it like this. More and more whitetails moving into more and more mule deer country. Mule deer are in a tough spot. Mule deer are probably going to be in a tougher spot with increased competition from whitetails, increased competition for elk. So go to the mule deer foundation and be like, we need to understand more about. As these. As these whitetails are colonizing more and more mule deer country, how do they interact?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

We did.

[Steve]

There's all your funding.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, there you go.

[Steve]

Got that problem.

[Spencer Newhart]

What do you think, like, how they interact with each other in the wild?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Don't know a lot about that because that's out of my. That's out of my home range over there. But I did think it would be interesting to challenge a whitetail doe with a fully mature large antlered mule deer and then a smaller, younger white tail. Really is at the time, same species, straw or the. The phenotype of this is a good father, a good sire.

[Spencer Newhart]

And biology would tell us that she would be making a poor decision by going with the muley. Right. Because their offspring really fail with their escape mechanism. Like they can't start or something like that.

[Steve]

Is not reproductively viable.

[Spencer Newhart]

I don't know if that's. Is that true?

[Steve]

I think that. I think it's like. I think it's like a horse and a donkey throwing a mule.

[Spencer Newhart]

I thought their failure was.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

So I don't think.

[Steve]

I don't think they're viable. Okay. I don't think they're sexually viable.

[Spencer Newhart]

We're gonna learn when he does the study.

[Steve]

You know what I'd throw into that study, man, if you got, like, time to burn, man. If there's any, like. If symmetry matters to does, you know, I mean, is there any, like, disadvantage to being atypical? Probably gets hard after a while to tease out all these little differences, though.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Donut. Yeah, but you. You could manipulate. It wouldn't be obvious. Yeah, yeah.

[Spencer Newhart]

You kind.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, yeah. You could attach stuff to where it's really obvious.

[Steve]

He's got a club on one side.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can do that.

[Spencer Newhart]

The other study I'd be interested in is a deer's response to yellow soybeans. I've been told all my life, and I feel like I've maybe witnessed it some, but I don't know if I'm witnessing it because I'm supposed to witness it. But a deer given the choice in a. In a big old soybean field, if there's some green beans, some yellow beans, and some brown beans, which. The yellow is the ripening stage, going from green to brown, they won't pick the yellow ones. They just taste worst, taste worse. Is that something you've heard? Seen?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

No, I haven't, but that. I think that's logical. So turning yellow from the desiccation that they're growing.

[Mark Yannis]

That's a Craig Harper study, sounds like to me.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, Craig would like that.

[Steve]

You know, I got some friends that are songwriters, and over the years I've learned that they just do not want to hear our song ideas. But they don't. Even when you try to do it like a joke and give them a song idea, but you're serious, but you're trying to act like it's a joke, they don't want to hear it.

[Mark Yannis]

I like how you use the word our.

[Spencer Newhart]

But.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

But do they give you the obligatory. That's a good one.

[Steve]

They don't even. Just nothing to it. Do you like hearing study ideas?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

I do now.

[Steve]

Now I got a pile of.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Some of them. Some of them can be really cuckoo. Yeah. So you're, you know, you're given a seminar and you always. What you ought to do is.

[Steve]

Sure, yeah, that.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

That can get old.

[Steve]

What else, man? I could go on all day.

[Spencer Newhart]

I think just like to cap it off. If hunters want to take what you've seen in your movement studies and apply it to the rut this year. What does that look like?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, yeah.

[Spencer Newhart]

How can they be more successful?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

So if you. Again, if you're going after a target buck, a particular buck, your greater opportunity for him to demonstrate sight fidelity. So if you know where he's hanging out, you. You need to do that in the pre. Rut. If on the other hand, you are just going to. There's a lot of big bucks in the area. I just want to increase my odds for intercepting one that's going to be during the peak of the rut.

[Spencer Newhart]

A pre rut window being like late October?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Well, it depends on when your rut is.

[Spencer Newhart]

Okay, let's say it's like a November 15th rut. That's the peak rut.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah. So let's go one month or greater before the peak of the rut.

[Spencer Newhart]

Okay.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Spencer Newhart]

So like October 15th then in, in.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Your neck of the woods. Yeah.

[Spencer Newhart]

Okay.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, that'd be about right.

[Steve]

Okay, so just make sure I'm track what you're saying. Like when we, when you pick the November 15th, we would agree that peak rudd is sort of like the day when you have the highest relative number of does in estrus. That's what, is that fair to define peak route that way?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yep. But, but rather than day, we might say over a two week, Over a two week period, about half of the does have been into estrus. So. Okay. Yes, that is going to be the, the, the series of days where the greatest number or greatest proportion.

[Steve]

So there's a, there's a two week window. Like if you take a, like just generally with whitetail deer, there's a two week window in which 50% of the does come into estrus. And we're going to declare that two week window to peak rut.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah. You know, if it's a synchronized rut and so forth. Yeah, generally speaking.

[Steve]

So that's kind of funny because then when you hear a guy's killing some giant that no one has ever seen, never showed up on their cameras like, that's that dude. It's cruising Excursion. He's an excursion bug. He excurged it off your place.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

And excursion.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Some other guy, somebody else, and they got him. Exactly right. And then if you didn't get them pre rut, if you didn't get them during the rut hunt. Food in the post rut.

[Spencer Newhart]

Okay.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah. And during the rut, you might want to. Here's an interesting finding. We actually looked at food plot use, two different types of food plot use and so on. Our study area, by the way, our study area was 50 to 60,000 acres. So pretty big. Pretty big footprint. And we had every make and model of food plot you could have. We had quarter acre food plots, acre all the way up to 20 acre food plots. And so we wanted to look at. Is there any food plot size that deer would come to that disproportionately.

[Mark Yannis]

And so just size, you weren't varying what you were growing?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

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

[Steve]

That feels secure to them.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

So, so why, why, why would they do that? And so we think it's because. What do small food plots not provide over the course of the hunting season? What happens to them?

[Mark Yannis]

They get eaten up, they get over.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Browsed, they get overwhelmed. So not only because of the size of it and the number of deer on it, you don't have as many hours of photosynthesis going on because they're smaller in the shade and all that. Then you get to this 3, 4, 5 acre. Now you've got a big enough area, you're now producing more forage per acre. And now we've got a social aspect of it too, which I'll get to in a second. But then after that it was diminishing returns. So we didn't see anything greater of a 10 acre plot versus a 3 acre plot.

[Steve]

Oh, okay. They didn't prefer 5 over 20?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

They did.

[Steve]

Oh, I'm sorry.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

They did, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we saw a big drop off in relative to their availability on the landscape. Deer were disproportionately choosing those plots over the ones smaller and the ones larger.

[Steve]

What's the argument against the bigger plot, do you think? In his head?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

I think you reach a particular size and there's just only so many deer in the area are going to use it.

[Spencer Newhart]

And I would say they're vulnerable.

[Steve]

Like there's, it's like a security cat. Like, like why do you feel a buck avoids. Like, why is he avoiding a big food plot?

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

I see what you mean now. Yes. He doesn't want to go into the middle of a big old 10 or 20 acre.

[Steve]

Because that's security.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Possibly. So, yes. Exposure to exposed. Yeah, got it. So when you look at during the year, if you look at the number of visits per day, you will see that they are visiting more during the rut. So you think about how we analyze the data. It's just ding. Did he visit the plot or not? Yes. And you tally those up so they're visiting those food plots more during the day. So some of that is food. Some of it is also socially. I mean, they're cruising, looking, looking for does. When you get to the end of the year during the post, Ruth, they will have just as many or less visits, but their duration is longer. So now they are visiting for the purpose of forage and not socially looking for a female.

[Steve]

Yep. No, It's a lot of great information. I got such a good study idea. So hard to explain, dude.

[Mark Yannis]

I'm like a post rut buck right now and all I can think about is some food and we got to do this trivia in like 30 minutes.

[Steve]

Dude. Thanks for coming out.

[Mark Yannis]

Wrap it up.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, man, I love your.

[Steve]

The extension. Like tell people go. How to go find your work and to see. Because, I mean, you got. You have your academic publications, but you're also producing stuff for just guys like us.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

So tell people how to go. How to go kind of find some of your infographics and.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah, a couple places. So you can go to the MSU, dear lab.com that's our website that has all of these publications on there. We also do a lot of this on social media. So we're on Facebook, Instagram. We have a YouTube channel with a lot of different videos, podcasts, where we talk about this type of stuff. Podcast is Dear University. So MSU, Deer Lab, the website, social media, YouTube, you ought to be able to get us if it's on the private side outside of the university. If you're looking for help with. With land management, go to wildlifeinvestments.com and there's a lot of us there that'll.

[Steve]

Help you manage your consulting work.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

That's for consulting work? Yeah.

[Steve]

That's great, man.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

All right.

[Steve]

And on that consulting work, you kind of. You probably do you go survey the property, talk about what's going on, what could be better.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Right?

[Steve]

What, what strategies could be habitat.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Habitat management, Deer, ducks, turkey, quail, whatever you want with the wildlife management.

[Steve]

All right.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

We got an expert to help you.

[Steve]

All right. Again, Dr. Bronson Strickland from University of Mississippi.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Hail State. Mississippi State University.

[Steve]

Mississippi State University. We have that same problem in Michigan because we got U of M&MSU. Well, it's the same way here. There's a lot of states. No, no, we're the. With the M specifically.

[Mark Yannis]

Oh, with the M specific.

[Steve]

Specifically. Specifically. And then the, the extension material is like the, the extension piece I was talking about that shows like that kind of puts your study on the lunar stuff.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Right.

[Steve]

That's, that's, that's a Michigan State University extension piece. A Mississippi State University extension piece.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Right.

[Steve]

That puts down. It's a great graphic.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Because it, it puts down what people think, the idiosyncrasies of what people think, what's found and then it puts it into all these like percentages. And then whatever kind of guy you are, moon underfoot, moon overhead, full moon rising, full moon setting, you can go and track every possible variation and find out yards per hour, all that. And you can go put your mind at ease about what's going on.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

That's right.

[Steve]

I mean it's very, is a. When you look through it. I spent 30 minutes staring at it today. It is a very convincing portrayal of like looking at something quite thoroughly. Yeah. Yeah. It's a great piece.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Appreciate that. Thank you.

[Steve]

In poster form, it would take up a lot of walls.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

It sure would. It sure would. Yeah.

[Steve]

But you might think about a small poster.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

We will. Yeah.

[Steve]

With the real salient points in the next.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Yeah.

[Mark Yannis]

Okay.

[Steve]

Thank you very much for coming on. We're all going to be, if not better deer hunters, better deer observers now. Thank you.

[Mark Yannis]

Thanks. Bronson.

[Dr. Bronson Strickland]

Foreign.

[Steve]

Tell you about a new game changing product. It's called Zbiotics pre alcohol probiotic drink. It's the world's first genetically engineered probiotic invented by PhD scientists. Here's what happens when you drink. A toxic byproduct builds up in your gut that's to blame for those rough mornings. Zbiotics is designed to break this byproduct down. Just drink it. Before your first drink of the night, head to ZBiotics.com Meeater and use code MEEATER to get 15% off and a 100% money back guarantee. That's ZBiotics.com Meater Real Hunts rarely go as planned. That's where First Lights Navigator hoodie earns its place. Our crews have run it from September climbs to cold front sits. It manages temps, stays quiet and close encounters and wicks moisture on the uphill push. One layer that adapts without hesitation. No matter the pursuit, the navigator delivers versatility in any situation. Shop now@first light.com that's F I R S T L I T E.com this is an I heart podcast.