Ep. 664: Foundations - Why Optics Matter and How To Use Them Correctly

And this makes sense, like, at least to some extent, when you consider, you know, the big country that Western critters live in. Letting your eyes with the right optics do a lot of the walking saves you, while a lot of walking white tails and they're tighter confines, they just don't require the same long distance effort. Typically. The truth is glassing is a skill that will benefit all big game hunters and it's something worth understanding, which is

what this episode is all about. I'm currently reading one of Neil deGrasse Tyson's books on Well You Guessed It Space? For those who don't know, Tyson is an astrophysicist who has a knack for explaining big, complicated concepts in a way that even a knuckle dragger like me can understand. In one of the chapters of this book, Tyson explains

a concept that made me instantly think about hunting. In it, he breaks down how when you're interested in learning about space, you either need to take a really close look via a high powered saddle later a probe, or you need to back way way out and look at certain things in a zoomed out type of style. Is that confusing? Let me paraphrase a little more so I can contextualize

it better. The two examples he uses are, what if you had a guy walking in front of you on a sidewalk, and for whatever reason, you needed to see the inscription on his class ring. Even at like twenty feet You'd see a guy walking and could maybe catch a glimpse of the ring on his finger, but you sure as hell couldn't read it unless you were crossbred with a red tailed hawk or maybe an eagle. You'd need to zoom in or get closer. The closer you get,

the more details you can see. Eventually, you could even pull out a magnifying glass and study the ring to see the inscription in true detail. That level of magnification and distance would allow you to resolve all of that detail into something that makes sense. In contrast, he pointed

out this wouldn't work with a Renaissance era painting. If you started at six inches from the painting with a magnifying glass, you'd be able to see individual brushstrokes and clumps of different colors of paint, but it wouldn't make much sense to you as a scene. You'd need to back up to a reasonable distance to see what the

painting actually depicts. In space, if you want to understand these examples, you could pick any random exoplanet out there circling its respective star and zoom in with something like the James Webb telescope. Yet, if you wanted to see the shape of our galaxy the Milky Way, for example, you'd actually need to get quite a ways away from it to look back and see that it isn't just

a blob of stars and space dust. Instead is actually a spiral armed galaxy rotating around sagittarius a a big old black hole that is holding the whole thing in place. Sometimes you need to get close. Sometimes you need to be far away to understand what you're looking at. You know where. This probably matters more to you personally than

in astronomy. That's right, golf, Just kidding, Hunting now, I'm bending this idea a little to fit what I want to talk about, because really, if you're using a spotting scope or binoculars, you're getting a closer look. But there is a difference in glassing styles, and there is a difference in the benefit to watching the world with say, like I don't know, eight by forty binoculars versus eighty five millimeters spotting scope something with maybe like a sixty

power zoom. So acknowledge that, and we will just forget that I didn't start this with a imperfect analogy. Glassing is important if you hunt out west for mule deer or something. It might be the most important part of the hunt outside of planning a really good route for a stalk, and even that only happens after you find a deer to stalk. So really it's kind of the lynchpin,

and that holds the whole thing together. White tails rarely die solely because a hunter got eyes on them with binoculars, but the benefits are many, and I'm going to get into them, but first I want to talk about how most hunters glass sort of I don't know, half ass like, and I'm including myself in this assessment, so don't take it personally. Now. I did think I was pretty good on the binos until I started hunting with a buddy

of mine who lives in Colorado. The first time we really got together in a place where we could glass. We met up in North Dakota to hunt white tails and meal deer in the badlands, and during one particularly windy midday, we decided to go see if we could scan the countryside to pick up a buck. I knew wrongly, I might add, that this was going to be a lost cause, or at least I thought it was mostly

going to be a lost cause. The bucks out there get pressured pretty hard, and they aren't prone to bedding in the wide open where they're easy to see. They tuck into the wooded draws and the cedars, and they don't give themselves up too often. So when we started glassing, Tyler and I set up a spotting scope on a good tripod just below the lip of a cliff to

keep us out of the wind. I sat next to him while he was on that spotting scope and I put my binos to my eyes and I did a quick perimeter sweep so announced that I didn't see anything and he probably wouldn't either. And anyway, it took him about twenty seven seconds to find two meal their doze that I had completely missed, and they were on their feet and not all that far away. So it was kind of embarrassing for me, and in a couple of hours we scoured the distant hills for deer. He kicked

my ass all over the countryside. It was actually pretty embarrassing, and it reminded me of two things. I was not a patient and thorough glasser, and I had the wrong tool for that job. I was looking big picture with the binos while he was zooming in and digging deep with a spotter. Ever since then, I've tried to be more disciplined in my glassing and keep the right tools

for the job handy. Here's the thing, I think every hunter, no matter what type of big game here she targets, should have a spotter with a decent tripod and a decent pair of binos, most whitetail hunters will probably disagree. That's fine, it's my podcast. I'm gonna make the case for it anyway. When it comes to a decent spotter with a decent tripod, the buy in is a little rough, but good optics are usually backed by great warranties and they last a long long time if you take care

of them. It's a buy one's cry once situation, and it's worth it in my opinion. The same goes for binos. Cheap binos are almost a liability, while mid to high price binoculars are an asset. Again, listen, I realized this is up to an individual's personal finances, but an investment in optics will pay off much better than nickel and diming yourself every season buying bottles of dope and sent

wix and shit like that. This is true if you plan to never leave the White Toe Woods, and unquestionably true and super important if you do plan to leave the White Toe Woods to travel to the mountains or the plains. Since most hunters are probably way more open to buying binoculars than a spotter. I'm gonna start there for me, I don't want to thing less than ten power. Now, that might seem like overkill if you're a big woods

white tail hunter, I don't think it is. The difference in weight from these little six or eight power binos to a ten power is, in my opinion, kind of negligible. Doesn't really matter, but the ability to scan the woods in the fields effectively is noticeable. A common size is a ten by forty, which is ten x zoom and a forty milimeter objective lens. This also equates to a four milimeter exit pupil, which is the part that allows

light to your eyes. Now, a ten by fifty would have the same magnification, but a five millimeter exit pupil, or put it in another way just to allow more light to reach your eyes. At noon on an analope hunt, it's not going to matter fifteen minutes before dark on a white tail hunt, it will. Now, either of these specs will give you a decent field of view. Now, if you try to go beyond ten X and magnification, you'll be able to zoom in on details far far out.

But you'll also find that holding them by hand leaves you a little shaky, and you might be kind of wishing for a tripod. You'll also experience a smaller field of view. You'll notice that binoculars, or you know, binocular manufacturers, they advertise all kinds of prisms and codings that might not make much sense to you. They'll tut something like twilight factor, which is found by taking the ebjective lens and then multiplying that by the magnification, then looking for

the square root of that number. I'll save you the time in the math and say that ten by fifties are better in low light than eight by thirty twos. The truth is binoculars tend to perform commensurate to their price tag, and that kind of sucks. A two hundred dollars pair with the same specs as a one thousand dollars pair is going to be built differently. It's going to be less quality, almost guaranteed. A thousand dollars pair

compared to another thousand dollars pair. The different story. Playing with a few models in your price range will let you see which ones you like better. But I've gone off track here a little bit. This isn't a binocular buying guide, it's about how you use them. Well, scratch that for a second, because I see a hell of a lot of white tail hunters who don't use them. You don't see that out west, but in the whitetail woods it's pretty common. If you don't use them, you're

missing out. Literally. Think about it this way. What if you're on the edge of a soybean field in late September and the sun tucks below the horizon and the clock is ticking, it's ten minutes before last light, and you see in the far corner of the field the shape of a deer that's out there feeding. It's just a gray blob at that point to your naked eye. You wonder, I don't know is it a buck or a dough. If it's a buck, is it a big one?

You could know all those details and probably make a pretty good guess on where the deer came out from the woods from just with a quick glassing session. Without it, you're just getting less information to work off of. With it, you might be able to kill him the very next night because you'll know what he is and probably where he came from. Simple, right, So what if you're sitting in the woods, the big woods, let's say, and you

catch some movement in the distance. It's a deer, you're sure of that, but you can't see any details because it's too thick. Again, you don't know what kind of deer, you don't know what it's doing, and you're basically running on low info. But you throw Bino's up to your eyes and you see that it's a buck and he's nibbling away on some kind of plant, back and forth, nom nom in his heart out. How actionable is that for you? The thing is good. Binos help you become

a better decision maker out there. They aren't solely for seeing animals, and that's it. You can see animals, and then you can watch what they do, which is the important part. You can glass up the trails they take, the brush they browse on. You can use binos after you shoot and you're on the blood trail. You can use them to look for the arrow in the grass from your stands, see if it's covered in blood at all, decide if you should get down or you should wait.

You can take them out west and scan the sagebrush for a group analope, or a meadow in the high country while you try to see if there's a wallow in there somewhere that an elk might visit. It's a shortcut to walking and a shortcut to guessing on what you're actually seeing. The key is getting used to them. So I'm going to offer a shameless plug here. Whatever binos you have or plan to buy, buy a good bino harness to go with them. We've been using the

FHF gear fob the last year. And this isn't just because Mediator owns the company. I'm being honest. It's the best bino harness I've used. I freaking love that thing and it goes with me just about anytime in the woods, from shed hunting season all the way through the last days of the deer season. I keep it in my truck when I'm pheasant hunting and when I'm scouting turkeys. A good bino harness is important because you won't maximize your bino usage if your optics aren't convenient to get

to trust me on this, it's important now. Of course, it's not all about just binoculars. I have sort of a weird thing with spotting scopes and that I try to find all kinds of uses for them naturally. If I'm working on a mule deer tag or an antelope tag, I have a spotter with me for white tails all summer long. You guessed it. Sometimes during the season too, if I'm trying to figure out exactly where they are feeding or watering right now so I can try to

kill them tonight or tomorrow. I even started using a spotter to scout turkeys, and while that might seem like overkill, it's amazing watching birds from long range as they navigate the terrain. It allows me to set blinds for my little girls right where they need to be, and it almost feels unfair to the longbard's kind of like running trail cameras. For them, a good spotter is worth it. And for me, I like to go big. I like magnification from like twenty to sixty x with a big

old eighty five millimeter objective lens. I look at it like it's my own James Webb telescope. I want to see things in great detail that are far away. Binoculars are great for scanning for close range work, but a spotter changes the game on long range work. If you're going out west, you really don't have much of a choice, except maybe for elk because you're not gonna want to carry a spot up a mountain in a lot of situations,

but also for white tails. It's something to consider. While long range glassing has largely been replaced by trail camera usage, it's not the same thing, and it never will be. Watching with your own eyes what a buck or a bachelor group of bucks does when they get into a field is a vastly different beast than a series of trail camera images. Zooming in tight to a buck and watching how he browses along a row of soybeans or approaches a distant pond to drink. That's an education you're

not going to get with a trail camera. It's a front row seat to deer behavior, and that is a show worth attending. It's also a lost cause without a decent tripod. You're not a pirate there glassing other ships. You're dealing with serious magnification. Steadiness is everything. If you're not steady, you're going to be frustrated and likely feel like you're wasting your time. It would kind of be like buying an eighty five thousand dollars bass boat and

filling it with snoopy poles. As it is with binoculars, Spotter usage gets better the more comfortable you are find reasons to use a spotting scope. That turkey hunting example I just gave you might seem dumb and like overkill, like I said, but learning to use your optics in

a low stress situation is not. If you spend March and maybe the beginning of April glassing long beards in the cut cornfield, you'll be a hell of a lot better off when you have an expensive non resident meal der tag in your pocket and you're perched on some high country hogs back looking for something to stalk. If you do find something to stalk, having binoculars snugged up to your chest so you can glass for velvet tips

as you close the distance is equally as important. This is maybe the best lesson of this podcast, which is to learn to use your optics in real time in high pressure and low pressure situations. Glassing up a shed antler in February out of a pit cornfield might not seem like it'll help you as a deer hunter a whole lot, but it will. Certain tools like optics need to be used and understood in a variety of situations.

You want to know how to set up your ee cups, how to dial in quickly to focus on a moving animal in the distance. You want to use optics to your advantage in a real way, and not just take them for granted that they might be a part of your hunt as a person who loves the outdoors. Put them to use in real situations in the off season, and then rely on them to figure out the whole

thing once the season opens. Don't assume that you don't need binoculars or a spotter or the skills to use them correctly just because your hunting situation isn't the same as some Western dude trying to find a seventy five

inch antelope out on the open prairie. Being a good successful hunter requires that you understand how and when to take that really close look or when it's better to sit back and take a bigger picture look at the animals and the land they inhabit, so that you can put together a plan for tomorrow or next month, or next season or whenever. At the very least, ask yourself what your optics game is like. Maybe you have a dialed or maybe you could level up if it's the

latter work toward that goal. However you have to, however you can. Glassing is a skill that transcends in season efforts and off season efforts. It's valuable in the thickest woods and the widest open scenarios in which you might hunt. It's necessary, even if it doesn't always feel like it. It's also something I'm going to talk about next week.

I want to break down how to figure out how to glass more efficiently in a variety of different environments, and how even e scouting can put you in the right position to use your spotting scope or your binoculars. That's it for this we my friends, as always, thank you so much for listening. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast. If you want more hunting content, and I'm talking videos of hunts,

how to videos on how to use gear. You want articles on all kinds of stuff, from obviously hunting, to fishing, to foraging to whatever. Thum meat eater dot com is your place. Head on over there and you'll have all the information you need and probably a lot more that you don't need.