Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals better dear hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel through the stand Saddler Blind, First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson. Hey, everybody, welcome to the wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about how to figure out where bucks live and more importantly,
where they like to travel. Listen, it doesn't matter if you run a thousand trail cameras and you scout, you know every day of your life. There's just going to be aspects of a buck's life that are just not available to you. This is true even for the deer that are raised on sweet properties that are designed to keep bucks around. And granted, in that scenario, there are quite a few less secrets than there are. Say on I don't know public land in Georgia or Wisconsin or wherever.
The truth is, bucks do what they do, so we won't know what they do, and our best bet to figure out what they do is to scout them with an eye toward what we are missing. How's that for a word salad tasty? Anyway, this whole episode is about how to figure out where bucks spend most of their time so you can be there this fall when they slip up and move in the daylight. If you head on over to northern Africa Egypt, to be more precise, you'd see that the Pyramids of Giza are the premier
tourist attraction. These structures, built like forty five hundred years ago, have been a source of awe for humans for a long long time. We still don't really know how they built them, and theories range from thousands and thousands of workers building massive ramps and pulley systems to cut and move the giant stones, to help from other worldly visitors insert crazy hair guy. I'm not saying it was aliens,
but it was definitely aliens meme here. While some of the construction aspects are a tantalizing mystery, it's safe to say that the pyramids are just freaking cool. They've also been studied for a long long time. We know that they were built as tombs, which makes sense since Egypt's pharaohs fully expected that once they'd reached the afterlife, they'd become gods. The pyramids are also a treasure trove of
art and explanations for a life at that time. There's scenes of farming and religious rituals, and livestock tending and even fishing can be found in the walls and pictographs and hieroglyphics. These stone structures provide an amazing glimpse into past. They also keep revealing their secrets. In early March, it was revealed that the discovery of a hidden, unfinished corridor
had been made through the use of non invasive scanning technology. Essentially, scientists use infrared thermography, cosmic ray imaging, and three D simulations to look through the pyramids. What they found in early March was that they'd previously missed a thirty foot long corridor that is located not far from the main
interests of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Now, while the Great Pyramid of Giza isn't small, it measures about four hundred and sixty feet tall with a base of about seven hundred and fifty six square feet, it's not so big that, after a couple hundred years of serious scientific scrutiny, you'd expect there to be too many secret chambers left uncovered. This isn't Harry Potter here, but they are still finding them.
And that, my friends, is a good lesson for all of us deer hunters, because you can look, use the best newest technology, and you're still going to miss things. What's worse is you think you might have the whole thing dialed. I promise you. Over there in that hot African sun, there were some archaeologists who said with conviction that there were no chambers left to be discovered in the Great Pyramid, and they were obviously wrong. We often think like that as deer hunters. We say, well, I
don't know. They feed here, they sleep the day away there, and the space between is where they travel. And it can be that simple on paper, but it rarely plays out that way in real life. Conditions change, hunting, pressure influences movement, and deer have enough free will to walk one way to day in a different way tomorrow, and they might not even know why. But there are patterns to their behavior, just like there are patterns to our behavior.
And I don't mean them as individuals, although that also certainly holds true. What a buck does today very well might do tomorrow. I think this is one of those things in deer hunting that we often get wrong, though, which is that we think of behavior in terms of the individual. This probably has a lot to do with the one buck hunt mentality that is all the rage
right now and listen. As much as I personally feel that the hit list name every buck something stupid type of hunting is a little bit cringey, I also think there's a lot of value in learning an individual bucks behavior, but I think to get better as a hunter, learning what bucks plural do is way way better. I want to give you two examples of this to kind of frame my whole thought process up here. I've talked a few times about bucks I've bumped that have come back
through within a pretty short period of time. The first time this happened to me, it was two bucks better than a ridge as far back on a property in southeastern Minnesota as I could go, and still beyond that landowner's property. I was headed in to hang and hunt over a natural seep on a bluff side that I
had found while spring scouting. The two deer I jump both look like pretty good bucks, and after I set up, the first two deer I saw were those bucks coming back, and they were indeed pretty good, like one twenty and a one forty type of buck, which you know, at
that time was huge to me. A fast forward a whole lot of years, and the last time I drew an Iowa tag, I bumped a couple of doughs in a good buck looking for a place to set up, And not long after I did set up, the first year to come back was the buck, and he was big enough to burn an Iowa tag on. Dear, behavior transcends the individual, just as human behavior transcends the individual. Now you know, we all know the bump and dump thing that people talk about with bucks, but that's a
luck of the draw type of encounter. Honestly, most of the time, where bucks walk and where they live is far more reliable if you can figure it out. So let me give you another example. Growing up and after I got into the hunting industry, I noticed an awful lot of bucks getting shot after walking or running right out into open fields and food plots. On the videos
I watched, the articles I read netted in whatever. It was like the big deer couldn't help themselves, and they had no qualms about sprinting into the wide open to
chase dos or grab a mouthful of clover. But in my own life that never happened, or if it did, and that was rare, it was always tied to a major front passing through and conditions that were often windy or rainy and not great for the casual hunter who might prefer a little more fair weather type of sit I also realized, on those perfect nights, like in late October early November, I still wouldn't see bucks come out into the open stuff in broad daylight, but I would
sometimes see them staging and cutting corners off the food. After enough of those encounters, you start to put together some thoughts, like, geez, those bucks never sprint out here into the wide open, but once in a while, when the wind is right, they seem to cut the corners of the field while staying in the cover or I don't know. In other words, they're just taking the safest
route possible to scent check a field. They use their nose to tell them everything they need to know about danger and the potential for a one night stand, and they stay in the cover where they are far less likely to encounter a hunter. Since most hunters can't help themselves, but sit right on the field edge. Simple survival behavior, and if you hunt pressure deer, you can count on some of the bucks figuring this trick out. I've seen this in multiple states, always well, not always, but often
on public land, and it's often pretty apparent. If you go out and winter scout, which you should, you'll see rubs leading out to the food sources, which tells you what you already knew. You'll see rubs leading away from the food sources, which tells you again what you already knew. Bucks leave the cover to go feed, and then they
leave the food to go to bed. But you'll also see rub lines paralleling the open stuff, but far enough back in the cover to be interesting, and you'll often see a concentration of rubs off the back corners of fields. This is two things, and both are worth understanding. The simple explanation is they stage there waiting on darkness to go out do their thing, or when they leave the food in the morning, kill a little bit of time
before they go back to bed. But they're also cutting those corners and taking in the whole scene from the safety of the cover so they don't encounter you. The parallel to the open trail stuff. That tells you a lot too a pressure buck is rarely, and I mean rarely, going to spend time in the open when he doesn't have to. Sure, he could get to the bedding area on some knob by walking right across the cut cornfield in the morning, but he's not going to do that
most of the time. Most of the time he's going to slip into the timber and work his way back through the The good thing is he's killable there when he does that, just like he's killable when he cuts corners while sent checking doze. But you need to get in there ahead of him and hunt him like your competition won't. If you go out winter scouting, look for
those rubs to tell you what I'm telling you. You'll get bonus points on some of your inside corner scouting if you find a community to scrape back off the open stuff, because you probably will. Now some of you listeners are thinking, well, I don't hunt where the dirt is black and productive and grows corn ten feet tall, and the bucks are dumb. Listen, I hear your cluck in their big chicken, So think about buck travel in another way, like I don't know you hunt the big woods,
and they could go any damn where they please. Fine, look for rubs, then look for soft edges or hard edges. Then when you find both, which you will because bucks are suckers for edges, you have something to work with. The deal here, whether you're up north in the swamps or down south somewhere in the swamps, is finding some spot where the randomness of big woods travel suddenly isn't random. I'll give you an example. I spent a lot of years trying to figure out a property in northern Wisconsin.
In fact, I'm still trying to figure it out, and this place is section after section of timber and swamps. One year I killed a decent eight pointer who was playing a stupid game of skirting the parking area to go from some bedding knobs to some flats to feed. When I went back the following spring to winter scout the area, I found a massive bed on a ridgetop.
Standing in that bed, I could see rubs leading up and down the ridge and a rub line heading straight down to the creek bottom, where I killed a buck on an old, long abandoned logging road that happened to pass between two swamps. It's a classic funnel. Now that randomness of deer travel in the Big Woods isn't quite as random. It also led to a spot where I killed a different buck a few years earlier along that
creek bottom, but that he wasn't following the creek. He was following the edge of a clear cut, a soft edge. He was heading up the ridge to bed on it somewhere after a morning and doing his thing in mid October. Now, there were three years between those two Bigwoods buck kills,
and I'm still figuring out their travel there. But the lesson is the bucks betting there now and using that huge tract of public are probably still relating to the same spots where I was killing deer quite a few years ago, and a hell of a lot of that sign is out there waiting to be discovered by some hunter. But let me break it down a little bit further. If you hunt big timber, you will see from year to year a lot of what looks like randomness in movement.
This is especially true the flatter the country is, because there are a fewer pinch points and terrain traps. The oak that's dropping this week might draw deer from one direction while some kind of soft mast next week might draw them from another direction. In my opinion, if that matters at all, if you hunt flat big woods and you consistently kill decent bucks, you could probably just about go anywhere and get it done. It's tough shit, but
there are always edges somewhere to work with. There's always something they're going to give you a little clue into. And this might be a swamp edge, which is kind of always a buck magnet. Or it might be the edge of some meadow or some type of wetland that is soggy but not swimmable. It might be a seven year old clear cut next to a one year old clear cut, or an old growth forest that hasn't heard
the wine of chainsaws for forty years. Whatever the edge, if you find it, you probably have found a spot where bucks like to travel throughout the season. But you know, this is painting with broadbrush type of thinking too. What many deer do, many more will do kind of thinking. I guess. It also seems like individual properties also seem to have their own quirkiness, where bucks almost always take this trail but not that one. This is where trail
cameras and in person observation really shine. I have a spot like this in northern Wisconsin that I'm going to put my daughters on this fall. It's going to take some work and be a different kind of hunt than what they're used to, but I can't ignore the trail camera intel anymore. For a few years, I've left cameras soaking to cover that spot. And it's a spot where not only the bucks cut through to avoid the neighbor's small hayfield where they keep their horses, but they move
at all hours of the day through there. It's a patch of timber that is connected to several sections of swampy big woods cover. I'm confident by looking at the aerial photos and talking to the neighbors randomly that even though the hunting pressure is pretty intense in the area, there aren't too many people hunting that big timber. And a benefit here is because baiting is legal there, and so my neighbors are sitting over cornpiles in places they can drive their four wheel or two, and this place
is just not that easy to access. So bucks know it, and they know they walk through there and rarely encounter hunters. But they're gonna this year. Those guys you know around there. They're all sitting in the edges of openings. And you know who knows that. Like I said, it's the bucks. While they could just but walk anywhere through that cover and be relatively safe from bow hunters, they lean real
heavy on one trail. I can speculate why, but it doesn't matter because the evidence is clearly visible when I check my trail cameras every year. This, in my humble opinion, is important. If I know one trail on a property that is more likely to host some buck travel than any other, I can plan my entire fall around it. I can go in when the conditions should put bucks on their feet and it gives me a wind advantage.
I can avoid it when the odds of an encounter are lower because I don't have that wind advantage or the bucks shouldn't be on their feet. I can force myself to pay extra special attention when I do hunt it because I want to know exactly how they approached the spot and how they'll leave it. Because the buck I'm hunting today he might not be around tomorrow, but eventually another buck will be. So maybe the best question to ask when you're trying to figure out where bucks
travel on your hunting ground. Is why when you see the rubs, or you get a trail camera pick, or you make an in person observation, ask yourself what he's doing there. It wasn't random. It wasn't random when the forky walk through, and it won't be random when one hundred and sixty five inchro walks through. What convinced a buck to do what he did, because it'll convince other bucks to do the same thing. What can you learn
about buck travel in general? And what can you learn about buck travel that is specific to the ground you hunt. Take another example here, cattail sluse talk him out all the time. I love them. I love them for what they offer pheasants and deer, and as a hunter, I'm pretty interested in both those critters. And there are some universal truths about cattail slows. As long as they aren't too wet, bucks are gonna bed in them. And even if they are pretty wet, those deer often find some
high spot and use it to their advantage. This is like universal behavior because the cover is that good. They'll also travel from point A to B, often at the narrowest point of the slough pretty consistently. Again, it's a pretty universal behavior. It lets them get to where they need to go while working as little as possible and staying in the most protective cover. That's pretty smart behavior
for a prey animal. But if you break down individual properties, you'll see that while buck's behavior transcends specific ground, it also caters itself too specific ground. If there is a cattail slu that has a finger that extends up into a draw the main slough, you can bet your ass that a buck will bed there at some point because he knows he now has an extra escape route that allows him to get him away if he needs it.
He also probably has some kind of thermal hub or at least some type of wind advantage there as well, which is going to be tied directly to the terrain. So you can know that bucks bed in and travel through cattiles flows in a specific way. But then you can look at an individual property and probably call your shots for exactly or at least approximately where they'll bed. That's powerful stuff and you can use it to your advantage.
You should too, And I know you're sick of me saying this, but the window for figuring out the winter scouting. Part of this stuff is closing hell. You might still have some snow like we do and are looking at a couple of weeks left of it, you know, but you're going to have a real melt at some point and before the onslaught of ticks, you need to get out there. You need to use that time figure out
where bucks like to travel. And you need to tune in next week because I'm going to talk about paying attention and how easily we get distracted and how hard staying on the mission is for most of us. That's it. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which has brought to you by First Light.
As I always, thank you so much for listening, And if you want some more whitetail content, you can of course check out the regular Wire to Hunt podcast, or you can head on over to thumbetter dot com slash wired and see a pile of hunting articles from guys like Dylan Tramp and Any May and Alex Gilstrom and Beaumartonic and Mark Kennan and myself. Head on over there. Tons of info