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By Beau Martonik
4.9
789789 ratings
The podcast currently has 517 episodes available.
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Beau Martonik sits back down with Dr. Karl Miller for the second half of their conversation, and this half is entirely about what a deer sees. Karl was part of the original work that got inside a whitetail’s eye to determine whether deer perceive color at all, and he later worked with Sitka on a camo pattern developed around deer vision rather than human vision. He starts with the hardware. A deer’s pupil opens about three times wider than ours, which alone is roughly nine times the light-gathering ability, and a reflective layer behind the retina called the tapetum bounces that light back across the rods and cones a second time to roughly double it again. The pupil is a horizontal slit rather than a circle, and it rotates to stay level even when the deer drops its head to feed, so a deer eating acorns is still watching the horizon. They see roughly 310 degrees, whereas we see 120. Then the tradeoff. Deer have no fovea centralis, they can’t accommodate for distance, and their visual acuity at a stationary object comes in somewhere around 20/40 to 20/60. Karl’s line is that they’d almost need corrective lenses to drive. What they do have is motion. Their eyes stay still and let the image travel across the retina engaging new cones, and they process that visual information roughly four to five times faster than a human does, which Karl suggests means your movement looks to them something like slow motion. That leads into a long back and forth on jumping the string, whether a deer is reacting to the sound at all, and whether it might be seeing the bow flex or even the arrow itself. Beau brings his axis deer footage from Hawaii into it, where the deer were on the ground before the arrow arrived at 25 yards. The back half is camo, and it’s the most useful stretch of either episode. Karl lays out the two jobs camo has to do, explains why pattern detail matters far less than most hunters think and why outline and spectral match matter far more, and gets into whiteners and brighteners in fabrics and detergents that take ultraviolet light and re-radiate it into exactly the part of the spectrum a deer sees 20 times better than we do. He explains why he stopped wearing blue jeans in the woods, why a whitetail’s tail is white in the first place, why old army camo is actually good camo, and why a shiny fabric can beat you even when the color is right. He also walks through how Sitka’s Cover pattern was developed and what it was actually designed to solve. He closes with what he calls the take home: hunt the deer’s brain first. There are only three questions in a deer’s head, and everything it does traces back to one of them. Part one of this conversation is episode 506. Topics: 00:00:00 — Part two intro 00:07:16 — A deer's eye is built for two jobs, and neither one is looking at you 00:11:32 — Pupil size, and nine times your light gathering ability 00:13:31 — Their eyes rotate to stay level when their head goes down 00:14:23 — The tapetum, and 18 times the light 00:21:21 — Blue cones across the whole retina, and 310 degrees of vision 00:24:49 — 20/40 to 20/60: they'd need corrective lenses to drive 00:27:39 — Flicker fusion, and why your movement looks like slow motion to them 00:28:40 — Jumping the string: the sound, the arrow, or the bow 00:34:29 — Drawing on a quartering deer, and why they don't look up 00:37:20 — What camo has to do, and what it doesn't 00:40:39 — Whiteners, brighteners, and camo that glows 00:42:53 — How Cover got built around deer eyes instead of ours 00:50:08 — Fabric shine, old army camo, and plastic blaze orange 00:54:03 — Hunt the deer's brain first Dr. Karl Miller’s published research: Google Scholar, search “Karl Miller deer UGA” Part one of this conversation is Ep. 506 The Wilderness Society - https://act.wilderness.org/a/26bcpledge-eastwest-1 Instagram: @eastmeetswesthunt @beau.martonik Facebook: East Meets West Outdoors Shop Hunting Gear and Apparel: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/ YouTube: Beau Martonik - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQJon93sYfu9HUMKpCMps3w Partner Discounts and Affiliate Links: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/partners Amazon Influencer Page https://www.amazon.com/shop/beau.martonik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beau Martonik sits down with Dr. Karl Miller of the University of Georgia, where he spent 40 years leading deer research and mentoring close to 100 graduate students. Karl grew up hunting the Pennsylvania big woods before he went south for his PhD, and much of what hunters take for granted about rubs and scrapes came out of his lab. The core of this conversation is signpost communication. Karl walks through why bucks make rubs in the first place, and what one of his students found when he ran a chemical analysis on forehead gland secretions: 67 different compounds, and not one of them in higher concentration in dominant bucks than in subordinate ones. No dominance signal at all. What varies is the mix, deer to deer, which means every buck is leaving something closer to a name than a rank. He also explains why the loser of a sparring match will walk up and lick the winner’s forehead. Then he gets into scrapes, and the finding he clearly loves most. Scraping activity peaks about two weeks before peak breeding in almost every study ever run on it. Karl’s hypothesis is that this isn’t coincidence or anticipation. It’s that buck urine deposited in scrapes may be acting as a priming hormone on the does, pulling their cycles into synchrony, and the two-week lag matches the length of a doe’s follicular wave. He and a graduate student demonstrated the same mechanism in Eld’s deer using a control group and a group exposed to male urine, and the treated group entered estrus together with enhanced hormone profiles. Then he flips it and explains flehmen, the vomeronasal organ, and how a buck taking doe urine into his mouth routes it past the smelling part of his brain entirely and straight to the part that runs his reproductive physiology. Both sides priming each other. Also covered: 3,600 rubs per square mile on an unhunted Georgia herd, roughly six per acre; the interdigital gland and the 11 compounds that actually do track with maturity; why a tarsal gland’s smell comes from bacteria and not from the gland; the staph and listeria living on it; the castrated buck that ran an entire rut in two weeks on a testosterone dose they overshot; young bucks making 15 percent as many scrapes as mature bucks; and a stretch where he and Beau land in different places on whether there’s any point in doctoring a scrape. This is part one of two. Part two is deer vision and camo, and it’s out Tuesday, September 1st. Topics: 00:00:00 — Intro 00:19:25 — What everybody had wrong about rubs in the seventies 00:25:04 — 67 compounds, and why a rub isn't a dominance display 00:26:09 — Why the loser of a sparring match licks the winner's forehead 00:38:32 — 3,600 rubs per square mile, and how many one buck makes in a year 00:49:08 — The three things a buck does at a scrape 00:52:56 — Why a tarsal gland actually stinks 01:01:45 — 39 bucks on one scrape, and 85 percent of visits after dark 01:04:30 — Scrapes peak two weeks before the rut 01:06:24 — Priming hormones, and synchronized estrus 01:10:09 — Flehmen, and the does priming the bucks right back 01:21:59 — Adding scent to a scrape, and whether it does anything 01:35:00 — What a broken age structure does to the rut you're hunting Dr. Karl Miller’s published research: Google Scholar, search “Karl Miller deer UGA” Instagram: @eastmeetswesthunt @beau.martonik Facebook: East Meets West Outdoors Shop Hunting Gear and Apparel: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/ YouTube: Beau Martonik - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQJon93sYfu9HUMKpCMps3w Partner Discounts and Affiliate Links: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/partners Amazon Influencer Page https://www.amazon.com/shop/beau.martonik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beau Martonik sits down with Lee Ellis of Seek One, who has been at this since 2015 and says roughly 90 percent of the deer on his wall are deer he had more than a year of history with before he killed them. Lee is upfront that it’s very rare for him to kill a deer he hasn’t been following, and this conversation is mostly about what that actually costs. They get into the buck he called Derp, four years of waking up every day thinking about that deer, and the night after he finally killed him when it hit him hard enough that he couldn’t sleep. Lee explains why he thinks a fresh camera picture of a buck working a scrape means you’re already behind him, and how finding one center point in a deer’s rut range beat chasing that deer across seven or eight camera locations. He also talks about a 188 inch public land buck he knew for about four hours and why he says a 140 would have gotten the exact same reaction out of him. Also covered: taking February through May completely off from deer hunting for the first time in years, patterning Pokémon card restocks with the same brain that patterns deer, what changes when your team grows and other families depend on the season going well, deer that show back up on almost the exact same date year after year, the summer reconnaissance lap he sees in the third week of August, twenty years of door knocking for 95 percent no’s, and why he doesn’t think you call a truly big deer in. This is part one of two. Part two is one long story, the buck Lee killed in a blizzard at the end of last season, and it lands September 15th, right after Seek One’s film on that deer. Topics: 00:00:00 — Intro 00:14:16 — The room, and what every mount in it represents 00:18:16 — Obsession, Pokémon, and stepping away from deer hunting 00:31:05 — Burnout, and what changes when people depend on your season 00:40:13 — Branching out, and why a 140 hits the same as a 188 00:48:36 — Derp: four years, and the night it finally hit him 00:57:08 — Why hunting one deer makes you better on every other deer 01:04:01 — Storytelling, the two and a half hour video, and putting the phone down 01:20:41 — Does Lee track any of this, or is it all in his head 01:26:45 — Deer that show up on the same date, and the third week of August lap 01:32:11 — Twenty years of door knocking for 95 percent no's 01:36:24 — Leaving a camera a full year, and the spot in the middle of a rut range 01:44:29 — Cell cameras made a lot of good hunters worse 01:47:56 — Deer personalities, communication, and why you don't call in a big one 01:55:16 — Part two is coming Lee's IG: https://www.instagram.com/the_roy/ Seek One IG: https://www.instagram.com/seek1productions/ Seek One YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SeekOneProductions Seek One Website: https://seek-one.com/ Instagram: @eastmeetswesthunt @beau.martonik Facebook: East Meets West Outdoors Shop Hunting Gear and Apparel: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/ YouTube: Beau Martonik - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQJon93sYfu9HUMKpCMps3w Partner Discounts and Affiliate Links: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/partners Amazon Influencer Page https://www.amazon.com/shop/beau.martonik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beau Martonik sits down with Ryan Leary, a PA hunter who has been grinding big woods public land for six years and put together back-to-back mature buck kills including a 7.5 year old eight point in 2025. Ryan breaks down both hunts — the 2025 buck he killed at 10 yards after trusting his gut on fresh sign mid-morning, and the 2024 deer he killed the same evening he bumped on foot while hunting with a broken shoulder he probably shouldn't have been in the woods on. They also get into how he reads finger ridges and micro terrain, why getting into the nasty stuff changed his success rate, how the gypsy moth acorn wipeout forced him to rethink his whole approach, and what he's learned about mature bucks in the Pennsylvania mountains. Topics: 00:00:00 – Intro 00:04:34 – Background and How Ryan Got Into Big Woods Hunting 00:14:29 – The 2025 Buck — Setup, Sign, and the Kill 00:23:41 – Breaking Down the Terrain and Why the Tree Made the Difference 00:29:48 – Trusting Your Gut in the Big Woods 00:39:13 – Reading Mature Buck Bodies vs. Antlers 00:49:52 – The 2024 Season — Broken Shoulder, Big Encounters, and the Kill 01:00:22 – How Late October 2024 Was Unlike Any Season Recently 01:02:33 – Time in the Woods — Why It Changes Everything 01:13:40 – Micro Points, Buck Beds, and Reading Terrain 01:23:54 – Advice for Guys Getting Into Big Woods Public Land Hunting 01:28:50 – Closing Instagram: @eastmeetswesthunt @beau.martonik Facebook: East Meets West Outdoors Shop Hunting Gear and Apparel: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/ YouTube: Beau Martonik - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQJon93sYfu9HUMKpCMps3w Partner Discounts and Affiliate Links: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/partners Poncho Outdoors - Poncho Outdoors makes tough, sharp-looking, no-BS apparel for hardworking outdoorsmen who put in the time year-round. Go to ponchooutdoors.com/EASTMEETSWEST to save $10 and free shipping Amazon Influencer Page https://www.amazon.com/shop/beau.martonik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beau Martonik sits down with his dad, Joe Martonik, for episode 500, a milestone, listener-requested conversation that’s been a long time coming. Joe’s been hunting Pennsylvania whitetails for almost 50 years, watched deer densities crash and slowly rebuild, and built a lifetime of lessons most hunters never get from a single season. They walk through three deer that define Joe’s 50 years: an 11-point he shot off the ground long before digital trail cameras, an eight-point that Beau and Joe hunted, but Joe ended up shooting a couple of miles away, and a buck named Stickers that took five years to close the deal on. Along the way: the giveaway announcement, a gift for Joe, and what almost 50 years in the woods actually teaches you about patience. 00:00:00 — Intro 00:08:00 — Joe’s Reaction to the Podcast and Why Passing Down Hunting Knowledge Matters 00:13:00 — The "Right to Hunt" Fight and How the Podcast Started 00:21:19 — Bringing Dad on for Episode 500, the Giveaway, and a Custom Case Knife 00:26:21 — Almost 50 Years of Hunting: Joe’s Start and Early Hunting Days 00:32:06 — PA Deer History: Clear-Cuts, Restocking, and Chasing a Bigger Rack 00:34:51 — Getting Back Into Bow Hunting and How Deer Patterns Changed 00:42:39 — The Homemade Trail Camera Era 00:45:10 — The 11-Point Buck and the One-Roll-of-Film Scrape 00:52:24 — Beau’s Early Deer and the Lowest Deer Density Years 01:00:28 — Learning to Trust Your Gut and Beau’s First Trail Cameras 01:04:19 — Handing Off a Buck: The 2010 Eight-Point 01:07:32 — GPS Nostalgia and Beau’s First Heartbreak Deer 01:11:20 — Beau’s First Archery Buck and the Shot That Hooked Him on Bowhunting 01:19:44 — "Stickers": The Five-Year Hunt and Strategy 01:28:16 — "It’s the Only Place You Haven’t Been" 01:35:45 — Recapping Joe’s 2025 Season 01:43:36 — Broadhead Talk and a Saddle Platform Scare 01:56:01 — Joe’s Biggest Lessons from 50 Years in the Woods Enter the Deer Camp Giveway! - https://eastmeetswesthunt.com/pages/deer-camp-giveaway Instagram: @eastmeetswesthunt @beau.martonik Facebook: East Meets West Outdoors Shop Hunting Gear and Apparel: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/ YouTube: Beau Martonik - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQJon93sYfu9HUMKpCMps3w Partner Discounts and Affiliate Links: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/partners Poncho Outdoors - Poncho Outdoors makes tough, sharp-looking, no-BS apparel for hardworking outdoorsmen who put in the time year-round. Go to ponchooutdoors.com/EASTMEETSWEST to save $10 and free shipping Amazon Influencer Page https://www.amazon.com/shop/beau.martonik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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