Ep. 530: Foundations - Off-Season Scouting, One Last Time

and I will get there, but not this week. I've had an interesting experience recently while I was pulling some of the last year's stands and giving a property one last chance for some off season scouting, and it made me realize there's more to talk about on this topic. If you want to be a better deer hunter, this episode might very well be the one that gets you there.

I got really, really lucky about twenty years ago. At the time, I was in college, mostly a drunken idiot, barely keeping my g p A up enough to not get kicked out of one on a state and aside from my alcohol induced extracurriculars, I was mostly just obsessed with fishing. I know, people throw that word obsession around a lot, but in this case, I mean it from ice out until bow opener. I fished. I fished tournaments.

I fished for fun. I fished bass, trout, crappys, walleyes, northern as basket's catfish, everything that swims that was legal to target, I fished for it. And in one of my tournaments, which was a pro am format, meaning one pro and one amateur fishing together, I drew a fellow from Waterloo, Iowa, who traveled with a small group of other fishermen. One of those guys was an amateur just like me, and we just kind of hit it off.

Eventually we started fishing a few team tournaments together, we started hunting together, and we just became really good friends. And fast forward a couple of decades and that really good friend bought a sweet property in southwestern Wisconsin. Remember how I said, I got lucky. He lets me hunt it, which is awesome, And if you want to see it, go watch our one Week in November series from last year on YouTube, which has like five episodes where yours

truly hunts that very farm for the first time. Before that shoot, we turkey hunted the property and then all summer. We scouted the ship out of it. We walked it, we glassed it, we ran cameras, and we built a fall hunting plan. We hung stands, we put out blinds in August, and then we hunted it during the very best time of the season, the first week in November. And I'm being honest when I say that I was very,

very confident that I had that place figured out. After all, it only consists of about, I don't know, sixty acres of timber. And I had a great hunt there, which included a seven and a half minute encounter with a hundred and fifty injur that I didn't get to shoot, and I ended up arrowing a decent eight point at one o'clock in the afternoon. It was a great hunt. It was fun, But what was maybe the most enjoyable part of it was just the learning. The amount of

deer I saw that was awesome. What they did was enlightening. When I left that shoot and I dropped my cameraman off at MSP Airport, I was more confident for this year than I was going into last year. I mean by far. After all, how do you beat five and a half days of observation, well more days of observation or winter scouting. Now. I know you thought we were past this stage of the year with the turkeys out

there gobbling and the cropp he's moving up shallow. But here's the thing that I've said all times, because I just absolutely believe it. Time in the woods is everything. The time that I recently spent in the woods, which was divided between cutting down some trees and brush clearing a little kill plot and putting out blinds for turkey hunting with our kids, and shed hunting, and at last winter scouting taught me something. The deer that I thought I had dialed actually had me dialed, or I should

put it in another way. Some of the bucks had me and my hunting partner dialed, along with anyone driving the roads around the property, and certainly the locals who like to spotlight the fields and then tell us about all the bucks they see while they are three sheets through the wind at the local pub, which is the only place to grab a burger anywhere near there, and is a gathering of well i'll call them interesting hunters. Anyway,

back to my buddies farm, which borders a gravel quarry. Now, he's got a deal with the owners where they store some rock on his land and we get to access his property through theirs. They also gave us permission to hunt third ground, but that doesn't do as much good since most of it is all rock quarry. But here's the thing. When we walk the perimeter of the actual quarry, which we did mostly just take a look at it and maybe see if we could find a nailer, we

started finding rubs. And let me tell you, these weren't just your run of the mill. One rub here, one rub down the ridgeline. This was the best rub line on the property by far. It told a clear story of a big buck or maybe bucks, betting in or around the quarry and then working up through the woods to the one part of the fields on top that just aren't visible to anyone driving the roads that border

those fields. Let me put this another way, A great big buck left very clear sign that he was betting in one spot and traveling to another. He did it in such a way that he not only avoided all of the places my buddy and I like to hunt, but also in a way that kept him totally out of sight of everyone else who might be looking for him. It was a master class on big buck behavior, and the only thing that gave him away was those rubs. And honestly, it wasn't just that rub line that gave

it away. It was the sheer amount of rubs, starting at the base of the quarry and working up through my buddies woods to the field edges. They were everywhere. They spoke a whole lot of words on hunter avoidance, and I feel like we listened. It also reminded me of a morning last season where I sat close to that spot and I heard a buck chasing and grunning his head off at first light. I never saw him, and I could never quite figure out where he went, But now I know he skirted me, just like he

probably did every time I sat that spot. And what was more interesting than that was that those rubs were around older rubs, multigenerational rubs. When you see a fresh rub line that follows more or less the same route as older rub lines, you know that you're looking at a spot, and specifically a travel route that multiple bucks have figured out over multiple seasons. This is the kind of knowledge that helps you absolutely figure out a property or as I learned every single year, come closer to

figuring it out. Things change, and that means the lessons of today it might not matter tomorrow, but there always worth learning anyway. Now. I don't want to sound too cocky, but I feel like it's damn near a done deal that I'm going to kill a buck in that spot this fall. I know it might not work out that way, but I promise you by midsummer I'll have a stand up in that spot to hunt it with the likeliest

prevailing winds of early November. Now, in the words of an old Atlantis Morissette song, enough about me, let's talk about you for a minute. Did you do enough offseason scouting this winner? Did you do any Is there anywhere you didn't go that you could walk before it gets too green and too full of ticks and there's too

much other exciting stuff to do. Before you answer those questions, I think, real hard, think about how I just told you that I totally, without question completely missed what could be the best big buck spot on a property I scouted for multiple days and hunted for multiple days. I mean in that sense I shot for the moon and hit the barn with that One of my friends and

I get paid to do this stuff sort of. Now, I was only off by I don't know, a hundred yards, but when your bow hunting and the cover is thick and the bucks are pressured, that might as well be a mile or two. Now, think long and hard about your winter scouting and how confident you are that you know what the dear do on your hunting ground. Are you always on big box or are there long patches of no dear sightings in your season? Are you really

really surprised when you see a good one? Or does it feel more like everything is just working out the way it's supposed to. I stress these questions and all of this self reflection because I know how easy it is to convince ourselves that we've done a good job. We grade our own white tail papers, and damn it, we give ourselves gold stars and smiley faces written in pen. It's always a job well done, But maybe it's not. If there's any nagging doubt, see what you can do

about getting back out there. On previous episodes, I talked about going where you don't normally go to see parts of your properties you don't normally scout or hunt. I'm going to refine that just a little bit by saying do that that's important, but understand by how little you have to be off to be off? X marks the spot, But the X is not very big a lot of times, and you might walk by it not realize that you're on the uphill side of a bunch of rubs. You know,

I just miss it by a little bit. And that's what we did with this spot I keep talking about, and it caused me to miss them. No, it wasn't until I went where I didn't think the deer would be that I could see the rubs in the layout of the land and realize what was actually going on there last fall. Think about this another way, how often have you been involved in a rough blood trail where you or other members of your crew walked within a few yards of a down deer and broad daylight, let

alone in the dark. It's crazy how easily this can happen. And then when you see the deer, it seems impossible that anyone would miss it. Well, this happens with signed to It might be a rub, It might be a community scrape with three licking branches, or it might just be an unbelievable fence crossing. It might be obvious, or it might just be a lone buckbed tuck into a knob halfway up a bluff that takes a trained eye to really pick out. Now here's the situation with some

of this advice. If you'll notice, I didn't figure out that quarry connection until I could actually go into that quarry to poke around. That was a gift most spots and most of us, we won't get that opportunity on any given property we might hunt. That doesn't mean that you can't take a look onto your neighbor's ground, though the window for this is rapidly closing, however, as the wood's green up, like when I'm shed hunting or just

winter scouting. In general, I always carry binoculars for obvious reasons, but I also use them to look at interesting objects in the woods that aren't antlers or rubs or whatever. This might be tree stands, or just a line of flagging tape, or maybe a brushed in ground blind a

hunter yards across the fence on the neighbor's property. All of this intel is valuable, and it tells you more of a complete picture of a hunting pressure on neighboring properties, as well as the exact spots that people might be hunting on that scouting trip I keep talking about. I happened to find myself in one corner my friend's property where a shared logging road runs down a ridge top onto someone else's ground. Last summer, we hung a stand

where that logging road enters my buddy's food plot. It's honestly about a no brainer of a stand site, as they get. I never sat it, but he did several times, and early in the season he saw a pile of deer enter his plot from that logging road, so it seemed pretty cut and dry. It was working, but as the pre rut kicked in and then the rut, the

deer activity on that logging road just died. I didn't think anything of it because I wasn't hunting there anyway, And it wasn't until I was standing there looking for an antler when I looked down that logging road and saw what I thought was a ladder on one of the neighbor's trees. Through my binos, I could see bits and pieces of what looked like a new ladder stand and it was positioned, damn are right on top of

that logging road. Now, why the hunter didn't move it ten or fifteen yards off one side of that ridge or the other to take advantage of the wind blowing out over two huge valleys and cutting down on the chances of getting picked off. I don't know, but what I do know is that that hunter was most likely in there intercepting many of those deer while my buddy hunted his own land just down the ridge. They wouldn't have been able to see each other, but the impact

on the deer would have been felt by both of them. Now, it's worth noting that my buddy had a camera on the spot where the logging road dumped out into his food plot. I remember many conversations last fall where we talked about the deer activity just drying up there at least in the daylight. The bucks would be there at night, but that didn't do us any good. Now, I have a bad memory, so don't quote me on this, but I'll bet we talked a lot about the usual suspects

for the sudden lack of daylight deer usage there. I'll bet we talked about the low the acorn drop, probably iotes and bobcats, the weather, and I'll bet we settled on some explanations that may or may not have been true. We've filled into blanks. It simply could have been that he was walking in one way and sitting there with certain winds, and someone else was coming in from the

opposite direction, playing the win to his advantage. It was probably a great lesson in not falling in love with any stand spot despite how good it should be, because how actually is is what really matters. Now, let me say this that hunter picked a good spot, and so did my buddy. They were both totally legal and just

doing their things as hunters. But that good spot with pressure coming in from both sides, it's not really good spot anymore, or at least by mid season, when they've both presumably hunted there enough, it isn't as good as it should or could be. Now that's a weird benefit to offseason scouting that we rarely talk about. You See, we always think it's just us working against the deer, and in a lot of ways it is, especially depending on the kind of properties you get to hunt. But

it's also the deer working against us. Like that quarry dweller with a penchant for making rubs that I'm going to catch up to on about November five this year. But it's also us working against us and us working against other hunters. And I don't mean this in an adversarial way either. I mean that for us to have a successful season as far as lots of deer encounters and hopefully a few filled tags are concerned, the more we know about what's going on in and around our

hunting spots, the better decisions we can make. Honestly, this is the key to all scouting. Really. We are looking at filling up our database over the years, with new information coming in whenever and however we can get it. That info layers itself on older info, and depending on whether things stayed the same from year to year or things have changed for some reason, like a new hunter on a neighboring property sitting close to the fence line, we can plug in that intel and use it to

our advantage. This is a process, my friends, It's ongoing, and it changes every season, and if you do it enough, really makes the case that you should take advantage of the various windows of opportunity that open up and then close in the white tilt woods. And one of those windows is closing right now, and I get it. It's easy to write off this part of the year, dear wise to do other things, but the opportunity to learn

it's still out there. There's intel waiting to be discovered, and there are plenty of reasons to spend a few more days looking at every piece of property that you can. This goes for private land hunters as well as public land hunters. It goes for folks with a thousand acres to hunt and folks with twenty. The work is never finished, but that's okay. That work is what makes this thing so special and makes the rare times when it all comes together so worth it. Get out there, look around

and keep listening. Is next week. I'm kicking off a two parter on setting up hunting bows, but mostly about accessories and white hunters would choose one site over another, or why one hunter might opt for a drop away rest versus some kind of static whisker biscuit style. And I know that's not as exciting as scouting and glassing and running trail cameras and things like that, but this is the detail heavy stuff that will help you kill more.

Dear that's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson that spend the wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you for listening. We appreciate it so much. And if you need more white tail info, head on over to the meat eator dot com, slash wired or visit our Wired to Hunt YouTube channel. In both spots you'll find tons of relevant white tail information created by Mark myself and a whole host of really talented white tail hunters.