Art Helin gives a breakdown of the seminar he gave at Iowa Deer Classic about the seasons of deer vocalization used during all four phases of the Rut to harvest mature bucks. He talks about the different types of calls used, and why they were effective and why they weren't. He also shares insights with land management and says it’s broken down into four different parts: food, water, cover, and sanctuaries. He believes the last puzzle was food sources, and that hunters need to quit acting and thinking like farmers and become deer farmers.
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Phases of the Rut - Art Helin
On this episode, we welcome Art Helin. Art has traveled around the United States giving advice on how to grow great bucks. He also is a known author in Petersen's Hunting, North American Hunter, Wisconsin Sportsman Magazine, just to name a couple. He is also a platform speaker. I ran into him at the Iowa Deer Classic. Art has great stories, and he's got great insight on what it takes to grow mature bucks. Pay attention and get your pad and paper out because he's going to give you some insights you might not have heard before. He's going to talk about the phases of the Rut. Art, tell us what's going on at Iowa Deer Classic.
Iowa Deer Classic has been amazing. I didn't get in until recently due to some other things I had going on, but speaking here and just looking at the crowd, it's just been a steady crowd all day long and it seems to be good. Everybody seems to be in a good mood and spending money and having fun.
How many people do you think are here at Iowa Deer Classic?
I'm not good at guessing like that, but if it's average, I'm guessing they have to have 4,000 or 5,000 people or more here walking through these doors.
I was fortunate enough to listen to Art in his seminar. Why don't you just take us through a couple of snippets? We're going to talk a lot about whitetail deer hunting here in the Midwest. Run us through the high points of the seminar that you gave actually twice.
The first seminar was on deer vocalizations. I broke down the seasons of deer vocalizations, on when and when not to use different things. If you use rattling, if you use a social grunts and different calls throughout the wrong time of year, they're not going to be as effective. We tried to break down dates and seasons as far as pre-Rut, Rut, post-Rut, and as far as early season, when deer is starting to come out of velvet, and break down the different calls used anywhere from doe bleats to estrus bleats to rattling and social grunts to tending grunts and your challenge grunts. That seminar, we broke things down into different phases throughout and talked about the different types of calls used and why they were effective and why they weren't.
The second one I did was on land management the foremost at which we broke down into four different parts of food, water, cover, and sanctuaries. We talked about timber stand improvement work throughout and the difference between hinge cutting and stump cutting. We talked about stump sprouts and which ones are good for deer and which ones aren't, and how they create different cover and different bedding areas. We broke down water and why there are certain areas of water or types of water that are better than others, and why do you walk through creeks to go to certain man-made small mini ponds that are 15x15 feet or 20x20x4 feet deep. Working with different aquatic biologists and foresters, gathering all that information over years of time trying to find out why they did certain thin...
