Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better dear hunting. Present it by First Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or 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. Today's episode is kind of a continuation of last week's episode, but now we're going to cover just how to glasp most efficiently no matter what type of environment you plan to scout or hunt. Glassing is an art, but art exists
on a spectrum. Your kid's finger paintings might end up on a fridge, you know, in an overzealous display of their burgeoning abilities, but they aren't likely to fetch a couple hundred thousand gees at a fancy New York auction house just like that. Glassing can be a simil as looking out your picture window with binos to check out the deer in the neighbor's field, or it can involve a real strategy for getting into an advantageous spot and trying to watch as much game friendly terrain as possible.
The latter is a better bet mostly, and that's what I plan to talk about right freaking now. We're lucky to have a destination trailer on a little plot of land in northern Minnesota that allows us to live the lake cabin kind of lifestyle without the price tag of actually having a real cabin on a lake. It's pretty sweet. But one of the downsides is that I have all of my in laws right there with me as well. I mean, and by that I honestly mean at any given point there might be ten to fifty of them
swarming around and living the vacation life too. Now, I'm actually pretty lucky with my in laws, so I'm not going plain about them too much, but I'll just say this that sometimes it can be a little overwhelming. Anyway, back in early May, while I was off trying to shoot a turkey somewhere, my wife brought the girls up to the lake. At that time, the water was really high, like flood stage high, and it was minutes out of ice out, which put our water temperatures at hypothermia level.
It's the worst time of the year to be there, in my opinion, because the lake looks somewhat fishable and the water is open. But the truth is you can't even use the landing to get your boat in, and if you did, the only thing you'd catch as a cold or maybe you'd catch a few pale crappies in one of the wintering holes, but overall it would mostly
just be a lost cause. That was during that kind of weather, on that kind of weekend when my wife happened to talk to a few of her relatives, and apparently one of them, who has a young toddler aged child, had one of her young toddler aged children playing along the edge the lake. He was out of her site and in the spot where if he fell in you might not know it for a while. So really not a great situation. And when my wife mentioned this to the mom, she was pretty dismissive of the whole thing,
which fired my bride right up. Now, just like art, parenting exists on a spectrum. You have fairal free range types like my wife's in laws, who have far more faith in the general survivability of their kids than most folks. Then you have the helicopter parents who breastfeed their kids until they are preteens and don't require them to move out of the house and grow up until they're in
their thirties. My wife is pretty centered between those two extremes, and in defense of calling out a relative, she said, I think when you're around a cold lake with a three year old, you should have line of sight on them at all times. I hate to admit it, but that's pretty reasonable for the mom to get line of sight on her kid in that situation. Anyway, she would have had to leave the patio furniture I'm through a small ditch, and watch your kid from a less comfortable spot.
She opted to stay put, and now her and my wife have to mean mug each other when they are together, and I have to pretend like I don't want to put rocks in my pockets and jump over her toddler into the lake, so I don't have to hear about this kind of dumb shit anymore. Anyway, I'll get to my point. When we glass, we often take the easy way out. We don't think of our line a site a whole lot. We don't think about what will spook.
We just kind of do the easy thing, and we figure if we get eyes on something that's good enough, there's a net positive. Now, There is an obvious difference between trying to glass up a meal deer to stalk versus trying to lay eyes on a couple of potential hitlisters in the summer as they munch on some alfalf our soybeans. The purpose of the glassing session might be different, but the strategy for glassing correctly probably shouldn't be kind
of want to treat it like you're a sniper. Get in, get the job done, and get out, all while not getting detected. This requires planning and the idea that you shouldn't be glassing like most people. Take something that drives me a little nuts but also works in my favor, which is glassing from a vehicle. Now, listen, there are
some situations where this just makes sense. If you hunt where there's a fair amount of traffic near where the animals are visible, you're probably not going to disturb anything by using a window mounted spotting scope. But this can go south in a hurry if the animals aren't real accustomed to close proximity vehicles. They're an awful lot of places where you can see deer from your truck, but the deer do not trust a vehicle that is stopped or slowed down on a nearby road, and they're going
to bolt. This is true a Western game too, even though this seems like the primary method of a lot of Western hunters to scout. I also believe, through about seven thousand different hunting experiences in my life, that most of the bigger animals you might want to take a look at and eventually shoot aren't all that comfortable being visible from the road. Pressured critters tend to find comfort and seclusion, and that might be as simple as feeding
one ridge beyond the road. It might be as simple as feeding in a low spot or a tucked away corner of a field. Whatever the case, unless your quary has proven to you that they are just fine with close vehicle traffic, assume they aren't, and then make a plan to glass from a better spot. Let me give you an example of this that kind of changed my
entire thinking around using optics in the field. When I first started hunting in western North Dakota, I picked an area of river bottom I thought might hold some white tails to prove that my spidy senses were solid. I also looked at on X until I found the highest point possible that looked like it would give me a good view of an awful lot of that river bottom.
It was maybe a one mile hike in with a pretty decent North Dakota level climb to the glassing spot, so all in all about as much effort as it takes to make oatmeal and coffee and elk camp on an average DIY hunt. When I first climbed up to the point I had marked, I realized the view was better than I expected. I could see most of like two miles of river bottom. I could see a private field that was teeming with critters, and I could see a big brushy flat that had mixed in sage and
small patches of timber. It was probably the most fun I've ever had behind a spotter. There were white tails everywhere, but there were also elk, meal, deer, and antelope. It was also nearly impossible to get busted where I set up.
In other words, it was the ideal glassing location. It let me watch deer cross the river and marked specific trees for stands, and it allowed me to see deer head back in the morning, all while staying undetected and gleaning so much actionable information that one spot and the things I've learned from glassing there over multiple seasons, has helped me fill probably like eight white tail taggs and at least one meal deer tag. It's also just one
of my favorite places to be in the world. Now that example involves a couple of things that make glassing easier. The terrain is ideal for hauling a spot her up to a point. Open country is like that. It was also, at least before EHD burned through in every single hunter in the country figured out that program full of animals, which certainly helps your glassing efforts. But what do you do if your glassing situation isn't like that? Well, figure
it out. Let's say, for example, you only want to watch white tails, but you hunt an area that is a mix of big woods with a few random hayfields or other egg fields mixed in. Where are the openings where you can watch? It's first step, just find them if you can hunt one of the fields. The job of figuring out how to glass it involves just planning to get in and out and not getting winded or spotted. It's usually not that hard, but it might take a
little trial and error. But what if you hunt a wooded patch that has no openings, but maybe border some fields. We'll talk into the woods and glass the openings. The deer you're hunting, at least some of them will come from your woods. And if they aren't visible on yours, but you can stay on the right side of the fence and watch them, then you need to plan for that. Again, though, this involves access and involves playing the wind, which might mean you can only glass in certain types of weather.
The reason that you want to be so careful about your glassing, whether we're talking summertime white tails or game time Western critters, is because you actually want to observe what they do. This is not a game where the sole goal is to just lay eyes on some critter. That's great, but it doesn't mean that much. You want to lay eyes on critters, but then watch what they do. I talked about this last week, and I believe it. Your goal isn't just to verify they exist, but to
find them and learn what they like to do. I know I've said this a lot, but when a deer, elk, or whatever shows you what they like to do, they're not lying. If they are acting naturally, they're not spooked. You're witnessing their truth. You're looking at so many things that could help you close the distance and get into their guard. So much value there, but it involves being smart and often more effort than we want to give. I've seen this a lot with people who go out
west for the first time. Often they just bring binoculars and that's it. They scan over several thousand acres aground and declare after a few minutes that all the meal there are better not a sight, or they aren't there at all. A good glasser will be there for hours, picking apart the cover. They'll divide the deeper shadows into quadrants and slowly pick them apart. They'll look at all the shadows for a bit of antler or a throat patch. They'll find something where most folks won't. And this is
a skill that feeds itself. It's a self perpetuating machine. Think of it this way. If you hunt pheasants with someone who is pretty good with dogs and happens to have some pretty good dogs, they'll kill more birds than the average non dog owner, even if that non dog owner is a world class wingshooter. And you might be thinking, well, yeah, this is because the dogs will kick up more birds
for the owner, which is one hundred percent true. But it's also a reality that someone who can easily and readily read dogs is going to know when the birds are close. There's more to it than seeing an excited bird dog and saying, old Hank is birdy? Better get ready to take that safety off. They know the young dog will give false positives but show off a lot while doing it, just as they know the old dog, who isn't flashy anymore, will only tell the truth with
its body language. Even in cover where the dogs are barely visible, a glimpse of them tells you so much, just as the sound of a tail whacking the cattails can tell you the right person all he needs to know about the prospect of a rooster getting up that lead time. That awareness, even if it's only a second,
is a huge advantage. That person is just at a different level, just like someone who is patient at glassing will almost always be more successful than someone who views it as a way to pass time and not a way to find an animal worth hunting. The discipline person learns to look for pieces of game, pieces of a game animal anyway, and not a whole critter, and they learn to go back and forth between binoculars and spotting scope so they don't miss anything and they learn as
much as possible. This is because even when they have a good buck or bull to watch, they know there is going to be other actors on the stage somewhere. A velvet meal that you're browsing in the stage should demand some of your attention. But if you want to stalk him, you might want to do a real thorough sweep with your binos to see who else is around who might blow up the whole thing if you try
to stalk. Or maybe you're watching a bachelor group of white tails and they are all feeding contentedly in the beans, so you ignore the lone buck who is a scraper anyway, and you miss the time he drops in and do a draw and comes back out with wet feet. Sure he's not the buck you want to kill. You're watching the other deer. They're bigger, But did he just give you something actionable to think about? With the rest of the deer? Those other bucks, the bigger ones, they're going
to get thirsty too. Do you even know where he was? Do you know where he went? Do you know why there was water in there? There's so many actionable things out there if you're watching and paying attention. And the thing about it is, the more you do this, the better you get. It's just like hunting from a tree saddle or setting up ground blinds for turkeys, calling ducks. Hell, it's just like every outdoor skill, but this one is real important and it doesn't get that much love anymore.
We kind of take it for granted that everyone knows how to use optics to look at stuff, but it's just not true. I mean, maybe the easiest way to frame this up is to think about someone who is not very comfortable with the spotting scope. Now ask that person to find a small object that is seven hundred yards away by pointing out terrain features. This happens in hunting a lot, and it usually goes something like this found one where look at that dip on the second ridge.
See it? Yep. Now follow the left side down until you see that light colored bush or tree. From there, he's like one hundred yards downhill by that seater that looks like it's half burnt, but it's actually just brown or something. You got him? Uh nope, Okay, do you see the seater? Yep? Follow that little blaze of sunlight straight up into the right. He's off behind that slight rise, so you can only see the tips of his antlers.
Now I still don't have him, Holy frog, smackers man, Just look at the freaking spot of sunlight and then you know, and it just keeps going. That kind of conversation whispered screaming fighting conversation happens between hunting partners a lot when there's a lot of glassing. It always devolves into this frustrating whisper fight that might make the casual passerby if there was one out there, think they are
listening to a marital spat. The last thing isn't actually as easy as it looks, And what's worse is that it's a skill you have to work to develop. The best way to do this is to find reasons to glass, and then to do it around an actual strategy where you solve for ahead of time at least a few of the problems you're likely to run into. This results in better, more productive glassing sessions, of course, but it also helps you in the grand scheme of things, because
you know what your problem solving. In an effort to be more efficient in the field. The more you work that muscle, my friends, the stronger it gets. You can do this if you're outfitted with the best optics money can buy, and of course all the sweet accessories that go along with that, or you're running a basement pair of hand me down binoculars that probably saw a little combat time in the Last Great War. While the right optics are important for a lot of what we do,
they aren't totally necessary. What is is using whatever optics you can get your hands on, and hopefully they're decent, to figure out as much as possible from a good safe distance while not spooking anything, and just vacuuming up as much intel as the critters will throw your way. Think about that. Think about the last two weeks I've talked about glassing and how you could increase your optics game and figure out how to scout better. Think about that.
As we get deeper this summer and the white tail scouting starts to ramp up and itch to head west, this season hits a fever pitch, think about tuning in next week because I'm going to talk about how much I love antelope and why I think every single person should hunt them at least once just to see what
it's like. And I urge you to listen to it even if you have no interest in antelope hunting, because I'm going to make my best country lawyer case for why you should at least think about antelope as a potential reason to point your truck west. That's it for this week, my friends. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for listening and for all your support. I really appreciate it.
Mark really appreciates it. Everybody at Mediator really appreciates your support. And if you want a little bit more white tail content or hunting content in general, you can head on over to the meediater dot com and you can find all kinds of video series. You can find all kinds of articles by myself and Mark and Alex Gilstrom and Beaumartonic and a whole bunch of really good writers.